—Samuel Johnson Hell and damnation! Brent had called her name until he was hoarse. He couldn’t find the dog. And to top that off, he’d come home to find a tersely scribbled note from the duke, ordering him to appear at the man’s house before dark. He would have liked to have responded with a terse note of his own, by saying, “When hell freezes over,” but he knew better than to be that disrespectful to a powerful duke. When Brent woke that morning, there was no way he could have imagined the hellish day he’d have. He wiped the last traces of shaving soap off his face and neck with a cloth and looked at himself in the small mirror on his shaving bureau. No doubt the Duke of Windergreen would smile when he saw the angry-looking scratch beneath Brent’s eye, and his swollen bottom lip. Thankfully, the scratch didn’t look deep enough to leave a bad scar. He dried beads of water from his chest, then walked over and grabbed his trousers off the bed, where Raymond had neatly laid out his clothing, and stepped into them.
