Meeting the parents is nerve-wracking even under normal circumstances. Colin’s family could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called normal.

I couldn’t really complain, given that I would never have met Colin if his ancestors had been, well, sane. As a fifth-year graduate student in pursuit of footnotes to eke out my dissertation, my reasons for being in London had been academic rather than amorous. Well, that isn’t entirely true. When I came to London, I was in the throes of a doomed love affair with my dissertation topic. Some people are handed their dissertation topics by their advisors; others choose theirs for practical reasons, such as current trends on the academic job market or easy availability of sources. Not me. I had fallen madly in love with my topic: “Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France, 1792-1815.” The Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation—what wasn’t to love about dashing rogues in knee breeches racing back and forth across the Channel, outwitting the dastardly schemes of the French?

Ha. If my relationship with my dissertation was a love affair, we’re talking one of those gloomy, nineteenth-century ones where everyone dies of consumption at the end and there’s supposed to be a moral, but you can’t quite figure out what it is, other than to make sure to insulate your garret and stay away from large bottles of laudanum. In short, it didn’t love me back. The topic was dashing, it was glamorous, it was [insert your own adjective here], but like so many objects of affection, it had proved elusive.

Until Colin.

Colin’s great-great et cetera grandfather had been one of those masked men. Under his chosen fleur de guerre, the Purple Gentian, Lord Richard Selwick had dashed around Europe in tights, rescuing aristocrats from the clutches of the guillotine. Colin liked to point out that at the time they had been called pantaloons, not tights, but a man in tights is a man in tights, call it what you will. Nothing says buckle and swash like a pair of skintight leg coverings.