What a Lady Needs

From USA TODAY bestselling author Kasey Michaels comes the second book in her captivating series about the Redgraves—four siblings celebrated for their legacy of scandal and seduction…

Lady Katherine Redgrave has one mission—to find her deceased father’s journals, which may hold the key to a traitorous conspiracy that puts Kate’s family in danger. Kate vows to let no obstacle stand in her way…but when she meets Simon Ravenbill, Marquis of Singleton, her attention is diverted as the sinfully handsome nobleman tempts her beyond reason.

Simon has a mission of his own: to uncover the truth about the secret society he believes murdered his brother. All he needs is to get to the Redgrave journals before Kate does. The solution is simple—he’ll romance the fiery beauty in hopes of distracting her from her quest, all while covertly searching for the diaries himself. Yet what begins as a charade soon becomes an all-consuming desire…one that could lead them down the most dangerous path of all.

Praise for USA TODAY bestselling author

“Kasey Michaels aims for the heart and never misses.”

—New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts

“Mistress of her craft Michaels uses her signature wit to introduce…[an] intricate story, engaging characters and wonderful writing.”

—RT Book Reviews on What an Earl Wants, 4 1/2 stars, Top Pick

“The historical elements…imbue the novel with powerful realism that will keep readers coming back.”

—Publishers Weekly on A Midsummer Night’s Sin

“A poignant and highly satisfying read…filled with simmering sensuality, subtle touches of repartee, a hero out for revenge and a heroine ripe for adventure. You’ll enjoy the ride.”

—RT Book Reviews on How to Tame a Lady

“Michaels’ new Regency miniseries is a joy.… You will laugh and even shed a tear over this touching romance.”

—RT Book Reviews on How to Tempt a Duke

“Michaels has done it again….Witty dialogue peppers a plot full of delectable details exposing the foibles and follies of the age.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Butler Did It (starred review)

“[A] hilarious spoof of society wedding rituals wrapped around a sensual romance filled with crackling dialogue reminiscent of The Philadelphia Story.”

—Publishers Weekly on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

KASEY MICHAELS

What a Lady Needs

Kasey Michaels

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my readers.

Thanks for all the hours of pleasure you’ve given me!

Dear Reader,

In the first book of this series, What an Earl Wants, I introduced the Redgrave family—those scandalous Redgraves—whose family history includes whispers of hosting a salacious hellfire club known only as the Society.

Now the whispers are back, and it’s up to the Redgraves to find and destroy this new, treasonous incarnation of the Society before it not only destroys the family, but England as well.

The earl himself, Lord Gideon Redgrave, located the first clues. Now, to keep his sister, Lady Katherine, safe, he’s advised her to search for evidence of the original Society at Redgrave Manor. Evidence he’s certain isn’t there.

But never underestimate the determination of a beautiful, headstrong young lady, or the mischief that can unfold when an unsuspecting Simon Ravenbill, Marquis of Singleton, is sent to ride herd on her.

I think you’ll enjoy Kate and admire her courage, even as we all shake our heads at her methods. When Simon gives up on any notion of controlling her and realizes the inevitability of loving her, they set off for the adventure, and discovery, of a lifetime.

Enjoy! And please visit me online on Facebook or my website, to catch up on all my news.

Kasey

www.KaseyMichaels.com

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

when first we practice to deceive.

—Sir Walter Scott

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR NOTE

PROLOGUE

1810

THE HISTORY OF the Redgraves could be traced to the days before the beheading of the House of Stuart’s Charles I in 1649. Meandering through the years, the family managed to stay on the good side of the Cromwell Roundheads. They then lightly danced through the return and second exit of the Stuarts, before managing to be favored with quite good seats for the Westminster Abbey coronation of the first monarch of the House of Hanover. All accomplished without ever forfeiting any of their lands or fortune and, more important, any of the family’s heads to the chopping block in the Tower of London.

There was one hanging, but that was the twelfth earl, and really didn’t count. He’d accomplished the deed himself in his study as the consequence of steep gambling debts and a genuine horror of his lady wife learning of them while he was still able to hear her screeching. After all, it was a matter of honor that before he kicked the chair out from beneath him, he had first settled said gambling debts by prying the major stones out of his wife’s jewelry and replacing them with paste. Not that women, who had no real notion of honor, understood such things.

But the thirteenth earl backed faster horses and could count trumps with the best of them, so that the Redgrave holdings once more increased. Their social status never wavered, and the paste gems were replaced thanks to the earl’s brilliant marriage to a lovely young thing whose father’s enormous fortune was a full generation away from the smell of the shop.

So much for the history of the Redgraves and the many earls of Saltwood.

The scandal of the Redgraves began in 1789, thanks to Barry Redgrave, the handsome, fashionable seventeenth Earl of Saltwood, who unexpectedly found himself quite dead one winter’s morning, facedown in an icy puddle on a makeshift dueling ground. How he came to this ignominious end, when even as he’d aimed his pistol he’d been planning his order for breakfast once his wife’s French lover was disposed of, has a simple answer. His lady wife, the fiery Spanish beauty, Lady Maribel, had shot Barry in the back. As noted earlier, women have no real notion of honor.

After all, not only did the countess coldly dispatch her own husband, but she and her lover had then fled to the Continent, leaving her four young and now fatherless children behind, motherless, as well.

Oh, the scandal! This was no nine-days wonder soon forgotten, especially when coupled with rumors Barry Redgrave had been the leader of some sort of debauched hellfire club, the group known only to its members, and then only as the Society.

Everyone knew such clubs were only excuses for otherwise respectable gentlemen to don cloaks and masks and behave badly with women from the lower orders, indulge in drunken orgies and dabble in other disgusting yet titillating experiments, such as opium eating. And, of course, it goes without saying there was also this business of sacrificing the odd billy goat here and there, just to keep their end up on the satanic-chanting, ritual-ridden hellfire side of things.

Except the rumors surrounding the late earl’s hellfire club after his death went deeper than that, all the way to political conspiracy and admiration of the French citizens bent on taking down their king. One side of the Channel or the other, the chopping off of heads still registered the ultimate in displeasure by both the masses and monarchies. So, naturally, having managed to outwit the headsman thus far in their history, the Redgraves were quick to deny Barry’s possible seditious leanings to George III—who had just come out of a year in a straight waistcoat, no longer foamed at the mouth and had been declared fit to rule once more—so it is anybody’s guess whether or not he understood.

But a titillated society was mostly certain Barry’s little hellfire club was all about the orgies; if nothing else, they were much more delicious to contemplate. Perhaps his wife’s affair with the Froggie had been merely to register her dissatisfaction with her spouse’s licentious activities outside the marital bed? Had she only known about them, or had the round-heeled beauty been a willing participant? You never knew about those foreign types. Hot-blooded and volatile, the lot of them. Oh, how delicious to speculate!

Nothing could be proved, of course, as the so-called Society was made up of people whose names were not known, and none of them thought it would be jolly fun to publish his memoirs recounting something like: The Society: a Chronicle of Great Times and Lascivious Pleasures with Barry Redgrave, the Other Lads, a Cast of Willing Trollops and the Occasional Billy Goat. No, definitely not.

There was also the dowager countess to add into the mix of conjecture; Lady Beatrix Redgrave, who was herself a scamp of the first water. She took lovers by the dozen, helping to keep alive all those rumors about her late husband, Charles, who’d had all the circumspection of a satyr, even decorating his Mayfair mansion in a way the majority of the world would term salacious. That Trixie hadn’t had the decency to have fig leaves plastered to the larger-than-life marble statues lining the curving staircase after the man’s death only proved the woman was no fit guardian for her grandchildren.

Still, the years passed, and the four Redgrave siblings somehow managed to reach adulthood without growing horns or bursting into flames when passing by a churchyard. The current eighteenth Earl of Saltwood, Gideon Redgrave, had entered society with his head held high and an unspoken challenge to anyone who might dare speak ill of his late parents or attempt to rake up that old scandal.

A few did try him on, to see how far they could go. That was their mistake, and the beginning of the belief the Redgraves were not only scandalous, they could be downright dangerous. Intelligent, yes, smoothly sophisticated, yes...but there was just something about them that warned the wise that to scratch a civilized Redgrave was to reveal the barbarian beneath.

Gideon’s brother Maxmillien went off to sail with the British Royal Navy at a ridiculously young age, and he managed to be on the deck of the Victory to witness the heroic death of the illustrious Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar.

The youngest Redgrave son, Valentine, traveled about the Continent in the way of younger sons, cleverly avoiding areas of increasingly hostile action as that upstart Bonaparte randomly flexed his muscles.

And their sister, Lady Katherine, had made her curiously belated come-out a scant year ago, in 1809. A true beauty, it appeared she would take London by storm. She very well might have, except for That Unfortunate Business at Almacks.

After all, it wasn’t every day London got to see a debutante fracture her dancing partner’s nose with a brilliantly executed right cross. Lord Hilton, the fool, had dared to say something amusing to Kate about her family tree as they came together in one of the movements of the dance. The abused gentleman had bled copiously all over his waistcoat while pressing both hands to his abused proboscis, screaming, “My node! My node! She broke my node!”

With all eyes in the room wide with shock, all ears open for what would happen next, Kate had told him to stop being such a baby, then serenely strolled off the dance floor, declaring London society to be a sad waste of her time, just as she had predicted. It may not have helped that the dowager countess followed behind her, laughing so hard she had to walk nearly bent double.

No overt gossip resulted from this shocking event, no barely veiled references to the incident were reported in the daily newspapers, no limericks were composed by young wits. This was not amazing. Gideon, Earl of Saltwood, made the rounds of all the gentlemen clubs the next day, seemingly ignorant of the scandal his sister had caused, and everyone took their cue from him, then breathed a collective sigh of relief when he moved on to the next club. A message had been delivered, and they’d all heard it, loud and clear.

Not that the Redgraves weren’t by nature an affable bunch. The line was pure—if somewhat clouded by the Spanish wife-murderess—the pockets were deep, the progeny tall, strikingly good-looking, very nearly exotic thanks to that touch of foreign blood.

There was just something about each and every one of them, some nebulous something that whispered rather than shouted a warning: they’re being affable only because it suits them, even the old lady.

The Redgraves were lions, one surprisingly insightful gentleman had whispered. Seemingly indolent, they could lie in the sun for hours, secure in themselves and seemingly indifferent to the world about them. But the more they relaxed—and nobody could relax with quite the magnificent sangfroid of a Redgrave—the more everyone else knew to stay on their toes and keep their wits about them.

Because if you did catch their notice they might look, blink and turn away, or they might pounce. Not that any of them had—with only a few notable exceptions no one ever spoke of—but the possibility was there, very clearly. After all, it was in the blood. Nobody knew what would happen if they took on a Redgrave because, thanks to those few notable exceptions in the past, nobody was foolish enough take on a Redgrave.

Except now, something indirectly has. The Society, the legacy of Barry Redgrave, and that of his father before him, has been resurrected by a new, even more deadly dangerous brand of hellfire members. Its unknown leader, building on the surviving members of the supposedly defunct Society, is employing every vice possible to lure both members and victims, the ultimate aim destroying England from the inside out and then handing the empire to a grateful Bonaparte.

With the help of the earl’s new bride, Jessica, whose recently deceased father had been a member, and the information all but bullied out of the dowager duchess, the Redgrave siblings set out to swiftly and quietly find and destroy this deadly reincarnation of the Society, from its members to its leader, relying on Trixie’s memories, and in hopes of locating the journals detailing the sordid, even treasonous history of the hellfire club.

It’s imperative this rejuvenated Society be identified and stopped, with the Redgrave name not connected to its actions in any way. Otherwise, this time, the resulting scandal could destroy them, and possibly the monarchy itself, forever.

CHAPTER ONE

“EXPLAIN TO ME again why you get to perch there chomping on an apple—and I do mean chomping—while I’ve been put to crawl around on my hands and knees, tapping at the woodwork while Tubby keeps insisting on licking my face. Not that I mind, do I, Tubby?” Valentine Redgrave put down the small hammer so he could tug on the spaniel’s ears. “There’s a good old dog. Fat, decrepit and with the fetid breath of a mongoose, but I love you, truly I do. You’re a good old dog.”

Lady Katherine Redgrave employed her tongue to push her most recent bite of apple against the inside of her cheek, looking much like a squirrel gathering up nuts for the winter. She was sitting on the back of one of the enormous leather couches in their brother Gideon’s study at Redgrave Manor, her bare feet pressed onto the cool cushions, her long, lithe body still clad in her simple cotton night rail and dressing gown, although it had already gone noon.

“He knows when you’re being facetious,” Kate pointed out to the sibling closest to her in age of her three brothers, which had made him both the best friend and chief tormentor of their youth. “You could have said good dog, good dog all day last year, when you were so careless as to trip over dearest old Tubby and tumble down the stairs, taking Duke and Major along with you, poor animals. Tubby still knew you were angry. Everybody did. After all, you howled worse than the hounds.”

Valentine sat back on his haunches, wiping at his damp face with his handkerchief as the spaniel watched, tail wagging in ecstasy and ready to launch himself, tongue first, at his master again. “I broke my damn leg and all three insanely concerned mutts kept leaping on it until you could pull them off, or has that part of the incident escaped your memory?” he grumbled, and then went back to crawling and tapping, tapping and crawling.

“It still aches, you know, when the weather’s about to change, although I suppose you’d think that a good thing. So you can make sure you have your umbrella handy, except you like getting soaked to the skin, don’t you? In any event, being a weather soothsayer was only amusing the first time I bet Jeremy it would rain by dusk before he figured it out, and then blabbed my secret to everyone. I still want to know who left the gate open at the bottom of the stairs so the dogs could get up them in the first place. Because I could swear I’d closed it.”

Kate examined her half-eaten apple, as if looking for the next logical area to bite, which was safer than looking at Valentine, and much safer than having him look at her. “It’s a petty man who holds a grudge. I’m certain the person is most exceedingly sorry.”

“And you damn well should be, instead of talking me into crawling around Gideon’s inner sanctum looking for secret passages.”

Kate slid down the back of the couch, her night skirt billowing out around her as she plopped onto the cushions. “I never said it was me. I?” She waved the apple about in frustration. “I never could get the straight of that one, no matter how Miss Pettibone tried to drum it into my head. I know—I never said I forgot to latch the gate.”

“You never said you didn’t,” Valentine responded reasonably. “You don’t lie, Kate. You just don’t tell the truth if you can find a way around it.”

“Well, that’s true enough. You’ve gone beyond the length of the couch now. You want me to help you push it back against the wall?”

“I told you nobody puts a secret passage behind a hulking great piece of furniture. Scrape marks would show on the floor every time it was moved, and be a dead giveaway. There’s probably some sort of switch somewhere that operates a lever that opens some cleverly disguised door. Maybe hidden in all that carving around the fireplace—not that I’m saying there is a lever, or a door.”

“No. I checked there. I checked all the obvious places before you arrived to bear me company. Now I’m working on the unobvious places, obviously. But if you’re so certain I’m wrong, why did you volunteer to help me?”

“Again,” Valentine corrected, unnecessarily dusting at his clean breeches, for Redgrave Manor was run by Dearborn, the butler, and Mrs. Justis, the housekeeper, who oversaw a multitude of well-trained servants. No bit of dust or dirt had dared to even think of being caught out lingering anywhere on the premises for at least thirty years, not even beneath the couches in the eighteenth Earl of Saltwood’s study. “That’s why I am helping you again, since you’ve been getting into scrapes all your life, left to your own devices. But the answer to that rephrased question is both obvious and simple. I’m not helping you. I’m keeping you out of trouble.”

“How so? Why would I be getting into trouble? Gideon asked me to do this.”

“Really? The way I was told the thing, our clever new sister-in-law asked you not to go hunting the journals, at the request of our big brother, which meant you immediately made plans to return here and do it. But that got you to leave London, which is what Gideon wanted Jessica to get you to do any way she could, since you were demanding to remain after the wedding and things could have turned dicey. It was only when he realized you might actually find something that big brother began to panic like an old woman.”

Kate didn’t know if she should be amused, surprised or angry. She quickly decided on amused, knowing Gideon’s bride had truly tricked her. A person could admire that. “And that’s why you’re really here, instead of London? To make me stop?”

“Clearly not, or I wouldn’t have spent these last miserable minutes crawling around on the floor. We’re still to look, but you aren’t going to be searching alone. Those were my marching orders from Gideon—don’t let that idiot girl out of your sight. My God, Kate, what would you do if you found those infernal journals our father and his cohorts kept?”

She moved her shoulders a time or two, trying to act nonchalant, as if she hadn’t yet contemplated that possibility. “I don’t know. Read them? Write to Gideon at Yearlings and announce I’ve found them?”

“Exactly. You’d do both, and in that order.”

Kate grinned. She never could fool Valentine. “Are they really that naughty?”

“They don’t describe the Society’s lawn parties, I’ll tell you that much. I’ve read the single one we found, and one was enough, more than enough, even for me. Now, let’s get this couch back into place.”

Sticking the apple between her fine white teeth once more, Kate pushed with all her might, helping to slide the couch against the wall. It wasn’t easy to do, which was why she hadn’t yet searched the area, and in the end, Valentine had to do the majority of the pushing. “You’re right. Nobody would hide a door or secret panel behind that monstrosity. That really cuts down on my list of possible hidey-holes, doesn’t it? And in a house with seventy rooms, I can’t tell you how that cheers me. Where shall we search next?”

Valentine glanced at the mantel clock. “No more today, Kate. I’ve got a friend arriving from London in less than two hours.”

“Please say it’s not Jeremy. He keeps looking at me with his mouth hanging open. I can nearly see his tonsils.”

Valentine chuckled as they left the study, arm in arm. “He can’t help it. He’s mad for you. Except when he’s afraid of you, which is most of the time.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would he be afraid of me?”

“I don’t know. Probably because I said you’d eat him for lunch.” Valentine grabbed Kate’s elbow and turned her toward the large pier glass in the hallway. “Look at you.”

“I don’t have to look at me—I know what I look like, Val, for pity’s sake.”

“Do you? Just because it amuses me, let me tell you what Jeremy sees. Jeremy, and any man with two eyes in his head and not dead below the waist—and don’t try to be coy and tell me you don’t know what that means, because Trixie gave you the same talking-to she gave all of us, God help us.”

Kate was checking out her reflection in the glass, pushing a lock of hair back behind her ear. “Oh? So she told you if a man misbehaves you’re to kick him hard in the fork and then run away while he’s on his knees, whimpering and calling for his mama?”

“My God. It’s even worse than we’d imagined she say.” Valentine rubbed at the slight twitch that had started up beneath his left eye. “Thank you for not doing that last year, at Almacks. Really, I mean that sincerely. Now, shall we continue?”

“I’m not continuing anything,” Kate said, trying not to grin at her brother’s embarrassment. “You started this, remember?”

“Yes, for my sins, I do.”

“We make quite the handsome couple, don’t we, Val? Same dark hair, same amber eyes. Why, your eyelashes are nearly as long as mine. Does that bother you?”