Nicola Cornick’s novels have received acclaim the world over

‘Cornick is first-class, Queen of her game.’

—Romance Junkies

‘A rising star of the Regency arena’

—Publishers Weekly

Praise for the SCANDALOUS WOMEN OF THE TON series

‘A riveting read’

—New York Times bestselling author Mary Jo Putney on Whisper of Scandal

‘One of the finest voices in historical romance’

—SingleTitles.com

‘Ethan Ryder (is) a bad boy to die for! A memorable story

of intense emotions, scandals, trust, betrayal and all-

encompassing love. A fresh and engrossing tale.’

—Romantic Times on One Wicked Sin

‘Historical romance at its very best is

written by Nicola Cornick.’

—Mary Gramlich, The Reading Reviewer

Acclaim for Nicola’s previous books

‘Witty banter, lively action and sizzling passion’

—Library Journal on Undoing of a Lady

‘RITA® Award-nominated Cornick deftly steeps her latest intriguingly complex Regency historical in a beguiling blend of danger and desire.’ —Booklist on Unmasked

Author Note

Welcome to Desired, book five in the SCANDALOUS WOMEN OF THE TON series! Desired is Tess Darent’s story. The outrageous dowager lady Darent has already been widowed three times and is looking for her fourth husband—but she is determined on a marriage in name only. Step forward Owen Purchase, Viscount Rothbury, who has desired the much-married marchioness for a long time. He is the protector Tess needs, but can he seduce her into realising that a true marriage is what she really wants?

Like the other books in this series, Desired is inspired by real-life events. Tess is a philanthropist and a reformer, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the reforming movement was pressing for political change in Britain. The government, however, was afraid of a revolution and sought to repress any opposition by throwing the reform’s leaders into prison. Tess, as a secret leader of the reform movement, is in the gravest danger.

I have loved writing all the books in this series! Be sure to visit my website at www.nicolacornick.co.uk and don’t miss the final book in the series, Forbidden!

Nicola Cornick

Don’t miss the rest of the latest Scandalous Women of the Ton trilogy, available now!

WHISPER OF SCANDAL

ONE WICKED SIN

MISTRESS BY MIDNIGHT

DESIRED

Also available from Nicola Cornick

DECEIVED

LORD OF SCANDAL

UNMASKED

THE CONFESSIONS OF A DUCHESS

THE SCANDALS OF AN INNOCENT

THE UNDOING OF A LADY

DAUNTSEY PARK: THE LAST RAKE IN LONDON

Browse www.mirabooks.co.uk or www.nicolacornick.co.uk for Nicola’s full backlist

Coming soon, the next SCANDALOUS WOMEN OF THE TON series:

FORBIDDEN

Desired

Nicola Cornick

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Kimberley Young with much gratitude

for all the years we worked together.

CHAPTER ONE

London, October 1816

Covent Garden: “Artful ways beguile the implicit rake.”

—Taken from

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies.

IT WAS THE NIGHT HER LUCK finally ran out.

Tess Darent knew that the net was closing and that someone was coming to hunt her down. Tonight she could feel him very close behind her. Tonight, she knew instinctively, was the night she was going to get caught.

“Hurry!” Mrs. Tong, owner of the Temple of Venus bawdy house held out the borrowed gown to her with shaking hands and Tess grabbed it and slipped it over her head, feeling the sensuous slide of lavender silk against her skin. It was not a bad fit. She was surprised that Mrs. Tong had anything so tasteful in the wardrobe. Fortunate, because she would not be seen dead in any of the harlot’s gowns Mrs. Tong’s girls habitually wore. Even if she was currently hiding from the law, Tess had standards to maintain.

The bawd’s face was pale beneath her paint and powder, her eyes terrified. Out in the corridor the sounds of pursuit were getting louder—voices snapping orders, the tramp of booted feet, the crash as Mrs. Tong’s pieces of erotic statuary were knocked to the marble floor.

“Redcoats!” the bawd said. “Searching the house. If they find you here—”

“They won’t,” Tess snapped. She spun around, lifting the heavy fall of her red-gold hair so that Mrs. Tong could lace the gown. She could feel the bawd’s fingers trembling on the fastenings. Mrs. Tong’s fear was feeding her own. The panic filled her chest, stealing her breath. Her pursuer was so close now. He was nipping at her heels.

“Even if they do find me here,” she added over her shoulder, marvelling at the calm of her own voice, “what of it? My reputation is so bad no one will think it odd to find me in a whorehouse.”

“But the papers?” Mrs. Tong’s voice quavered.

“Hidden.” Tess patted the lavender reticule that matched the gown. “Never fear, Mrs. T. No one will suspect you of being anything worse than an avaricious old madam.”

“There’s gratitude.” Mrs. Tong sounded irritable. “Sometimes I wonder why I help you.”

“You do it because you owe me,” Tess said. Some months before she had helped Mrs. Tong’s son when he had been arrested at a political rally. Now she was calling in the debt.

“I’m no friend to the radical cause,” Mrs. Tong grumbled. She pulled the laces of the gown tight in a small gesture of revenge.

“The gown’s too big,” Tess wheezed, as the breath was pummelled out of her.

“Which is why you need the laces tight.” The madam gave them another sharp tug. She threw Tess a matching cloak of lavender-blue edged with peacock feathers and tiptoed across to the door, opening it a crack, finger to her lips.

Tess raised a brow. Mrs. Tong shook her head, closed the door softly and turned the key. “No chance,” she said. “They are all over the house like the pox. You’ll have to hide.”

“They’ll find me.” Fear clawed at Tess again. For all her defiant words she knew that it would be disastrous if she were to be caught now in possession of the papers. She would be thrown in prison. Everything she had worked for would be lost. The cold sweat trickled down her spine, prickling her skin.

“Buy me some time, Mrs. Tong,” she said. “They are a company of soldiers and this is a bawdy house. Distract them.”

She grabbed the jacket of the mannish suit she had been wearing on her arrival, extracted the little silver pistol from the pocket, forced it into the reticule along with the papers and pulled the drawstring tight. She tried on the exquisite pair of lavender slippers that matched the gown and winced. They were made for smaller feet than hers. She would have blisters by the time she reached home.

“There’s no way of distracting their captain,” Mrs. Tong said. “He don’t care for women.”

“Send him one of your boys then.”

“He doesn’t like boys either. War wound, they say. No lead in his pencil. Precious little pencil either, if it comes to that.”

“Poor man,” Tess said. “That’s quite a sacrifice to make for your country. Still, if sex fails, money usually talks. Make him an offer he cannot afford to refuse.”

She could hear the voices of the soldiers coming ever closer along the landing and the doors slamming back as they searched the rooms with about as much finesse as a herd of cows in a china shop. Mrs. Tong’s girls were screaming. Aristocratic male voices were raised in plaintive protest. A lot of people, Tess thought, were going to have their most private vices exposed tonight. The redcoats’ raid on Mrs. Tong’s brothel would be all over the scandal sheets by the morning. It would be the talk of the ton.

“Time to make a swift exit,” she said. She moved across to the window. “How far is the drop to the street, Mrs. T?”

Mrs. Tong stared. “You’ll never be able to make this climb.”

“Why not?” Tess said. “There is a balcony, is there not? I don’t want to risk them searching me.” She grabbed the sheets from the bed and started to fashion a makeshift rope.

“That’s my best linen!” Mrs. Tong said. “You’ll ruin it!”

“Stick it on my bill,” Tess said. “Have I forgotten anything?”

Mrs. Tong shook her head. There was a gleam of appreciation in her eyes. “You’re a cool one, and no mistake, madam,” she said. “How about we go into business together?”

Tess shook her head. Only the direst emergency had driven her to take refuge in a brothel in the first place. “Forget it, Mrs. T. Selling sex is not my thing. I don’t even want it when it is offered for free.” She waved. “Thank you for your help.”

She pulled back the curtains and slipped the catch on the long window. There was a decorative little stone balcony outside with a carved balustrade. Tess knotted the sheet around one of the stone uprights and pulled it hard. The sheet held, though whether it would do so under her not-inconsiderable weight was quite another thing. But she had no option other than to take the risk. Lavender slippers and reticule in one hand, she climbed over the balcony, gripped the sheet in her other hand and slid down the chute to the ground, the wide skirts of the gown filling out like a bell around her.

When she was still some distance from the ground she ran out of her impromptu rope and swung gently backwards and forwards in the autumn breeze. She could see Mrs. Tong peering over the balcony above her, still grumbling about the damage to her sheets. Below, there was a drop of at least four feet to the darkened street. For a moment Tess hung there, trying to decide whether to shin back up the rope or risk the jump to the ground. The sheet creaked and slipped a notch. The laces of the gown groaned as well, cutting into Tess’s back as the seams strained.

Then, abruptly, the reticule and slippers were plucked from her hand and a moment later she was seized about the waist and placed gently on her feet.

“Splendid as the view was,” a lazy masculine voice murmured in her ear, “I thought you might appreciate some help.”

Caught.

Panic fluttered in her throat. So she had been right all along. There was no escape.

Stay calm. Give nothing away.

She tried to steady her breath. Something in the man’s touch unsettled her, but deeper than that, deeper and more disturbing still, was the sense of recognition. He had come for her and she could not escape. She knew it and it made her tremble.

She did not even know who he was. She could not see his face.

The gas lamps in the square were out and although the shutters had been pulled back again and faint golden light spilled from the brothel windows it was not sufficient to pierce the autumn darkness. Tess had a confused impression of height and breadth—she was a tall woman but this man was taller, a shade over six feet, perhaps. There was something of resilience and strength about him, of hard chiselled edges and cool calculation. It was in his stillness and the way he was watching her. The impressions confused her; she did not know how she could tell so much whilst knowing so little about him. But her awareness of him was shockingly sharp, intensified in some way by the intimate dark. He still held her, not by the waist but lower, his grip firm and strong on her hips. His touch sent an odd shiver rippling through her. He drew her into the pool of light thrown by the window and released her with meticulous courtesy, standing back, sketching a bow.

The laces of the perfidious gown chose that precise moment to snap. It slid from Tess’s shoulders and crumpled artistically about her waist before sighing down to the ground like a swooning maiden. As she was left shivering in her bodice and drawers, her companion laughed.

“What a perfect gown,” he said.

“It’s a little premature,” Tess said coldly. “We have only just met.”

She knew him now, recognising him with another ripple of disquiet. It was his voice that gave him away, so low and mellow. It was very different from the clipped British accents she was accustomed to hearing every day. Only one man had that languid drawl, as dark and smooth as treacle. Only one man in the ton was an American by birth; a man who was as dangerous and exotic and seductive as he sounded.

Rothbury.

Viscount Rothbury was the man sent to capture her.

Tess knew him a little. He was an old friend of Alex, Lord Grant, her sister Joanna’s husband, and of Garrick, Duke of Farne, her other brother-in-law. Until earlier in the year, Rothbury had been plain Owen Purchase, an American sea captain, who had most unexpectedly come into a title. Now that he was a viscount the ton fawned upon him but he seemed as indifferent to society’s favour as he had been to their previous disregard. He had visited Alex and Joanna in Bedford Square on several occasions, but Tess had always kept out of his way. She met many handsome men on a daily basis. Almost all of them evoked no emotion in her whatsoever. Occasionally she would feel a faint interest in a man who was witty and intelligent, but the sensation was gone almost as soon as she had felt it. She had long ago assumed that any natural desires she might once have felt had been crushed out of her by the vile experiences of her second marriage. She had assumed she would never feel a physical attraction towards any man. She had grown not to expect it and she did not want it.

Rothbury challenged those assumptions and she did not like it.

It was not merely his physique—tall, broad shouldered, durable, strong. Tess supposed that he was handsome—no, she was obliged to admit that he was handsome—in a rugged manner that was far too physical for her comfort. She preferred men who were no physical threat, men who had spent their morning in company with their barber and their tailor rather than in riding or in swordplay; men who were brushed, pomaded and as au fait with fashion as she was. Rothbury had fought for the British against the French at Trafalgar and later for the Americans against the British at North Point. He had been a sailor, an explorer and an adventurer. Tess preferred men who had never travelled farther than their country estates.

And then there was his manner, incisiveness cloaked in those deceptively silken tones. She was not fooled for a moment. Rothbury pretended to be indolent when he was in fact one of the most intelligent and perceptive men of her acquaintance.

Her awareness of him was as sharp as a whetted blade. It disturbed her.

He was still watching her. Assessing. Unsmiling. Evidently he had recognised her too, for he gave her another immaculate bow.

“Good evening, Lady Darent,” he said. “What an original way to exit a brothel.”

“Lord Rothbury,” Tess said coolly. “Thank you—I never follow the crowd.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Mrs. Tong gesturing wildly at her. The bawd seemed to be trying to indicate that this—this—was the man responsible for the raid on the brothel, the man she had been talking about as lacking the wherewithal to sow any oats, wild or otherwise. Rothbury had certainly kept that quiet from his friends, Tess thought, but then no doubt he would. She sensed he was a proud man and it was unlikely he would wish to speak of his incapacity, or for it to become common knowledge. It was not the sort of piece of information one simply dropped into polite conversation.

She tried not to stare at his pantaloons. She had far more pressing matters on her mind other than whether Rothbury was capable of continuing his family line. Such as the fact that she was in a state of déshabillée and Rothbury was still holding her shoes in the one hand and her reticule in the other, with the incriminating papers only a rustle away. She was within an inch of being unmasked as well as undressed.

“You might wish to put your gown back on,” Rothbury said. “It’s optional—” an ironic smile tilted his lips “—but both of us might be more comfortable.”

His narrowed gaze had started at her bare toes and was now travelling upwards with unhurried thoroughness, considering the nimbus of red-and-gold hair that fanned about her bare shoulders and finally coming to rest on her face. His green eyes, as cool as a shower of ice, met her blue ones and there was an expression in them that made the breath catch in her chest.

Tess gave a shiver and grabbed the slippery lavender silk and made the best job she could of wriggling back into it. The night air was cold and nipped at her skin and she was grateful when Rothbury wrapped the soft fur-lined cloak about her, its luxurious folds blocking out the autumn chill. But her feet were still bare. She had had no time to put on stockings and now her toes were very cold.

“If I might have my slippers, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “I doubt they are your size.”

She looked down at his feet, handsome in gleaming Hessians that shone in the faint flicker of light from the only street lamp left burning. She found she was trying to remember the scurrilous gossip she had heard about the correlation between the size of a man’s feet and the size of his cock. Was it that men with big feet were well endowed in other regions of their anatomy as well, or that small men had disproportionately large cocks? Lady Farr was having an affair with her jockey, who was extremely short. And Napoleon Bonaparte was also a short man but rumoured to be a prodigious lover…. And why was she thinking about sex when she tried never to think about it at all, and why was she thinking about it now, at this most inappropriate moment when she should be concentrating on nothing more than escape? And in conjunction with Rothbury, whose own proportions had, presumably, been utterly ruined by a mortar shell or bullet.

To her surprise Rothbury went down on one knee and presented the shoe to her with a grin that was pure wickedness, his teeth a flash of white in a face tanned by a climate somewhat more tropical than London in winter. He slid one slipper onto her foot, his palm warm for a moment against the arch of her instep, and she felt a strange and disconcerting flicker of response deep within her.

“Thank you,” she said, forcing the tiny slippers onto her feet where they pinched like malicious crabs. “Just like Prince Charming.”

“I missed the bit of the fairy tale where Cinderella visited the brothel,” Rothbury said. He straightened up. “What were you doing there, Lady Darent?” His tone was still as courteous as before but that courtesy cloaked an edge of steel. Tess’s instinct for self-preservation snapped another warning. Rothbury was the government’s man here, the man sent to hunt her down. She was tiptoeing across a tightrope. One false step and she would fall. The only advantage she had was that he did not know the identity of the person he was hunting.

He was still holding her reticule. Behind him, Tess could see a posse of dragoons rounding up a few ragged protesters. There had been a riot that night and the street was littered with rubble and broken spars of wood. The gas lamps were smashed and someone had overturned a carriage. One of the shutters on the Temple of Venus hung off its hinge. Torn newspapers flapped in the wind. It was quiet now. Once the soldiers arrived the mob had faded away as quickly as they had come, and only the faint smell of burning hung on the cold tide of London air.

Tess shrugged, bringing her gaze back to Rothbury’s impassive face.

“Why does anyone visit a brothel, Lord Rothbury?” she said lightly. “If you have an imagination, now would be the time to use it.” She arched an ironic brow. “I assume you are questioning me on some authority and not simply because you are impertinently curious about my sex life?”

Rothbury shifted. “I am here on the authority of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,” he said. “There was an illegal political meeting at The Feathers Inn tonight. Do you know anything about it?”

Tess’s heart bumped erratically. “Do I look like the sort of woman who would know anything about politics, Lord Rothbury?” she said. “I have absolutely no interest in it at all.”

She saw Rothbury’s teeth gleam as he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “Then you will have equally little interest in the fact that I am hunting for a number of dangerous criminals including the radical caricaturist known as Jupiter.”

Fear breathed gooseflesh along Tess’s skin. She was no dangerous criminal. She was a philanthropist and all she wanted was reform. All she had ever worked for was to alleviate the appalling poverty and misery of the poor. But the Home Secretary did not see it that way. He saw the reformers as a threat to public order and a danger that he was set on obliterating forever.

She swallowed the sawdust in her throat. Not by a flicker of an eyelash could she betray any knowledge of the reformers’ cause, still less that she was intimately involved with it. But under the perceptive gaze of this man she felt her defences stripped naked.

Pretend. Playact. You have done it before….

“You are hunting criminals in a brothel?” she said, affecting boredom. “What a singular way to combine business with pleasure, my lord. Have you found any?”

“Not yet,” Rothbury said. The tone of his voice sent another warning shiver down her spine. She looked at the reticule with its incriminating papers still sitting snugly in the palm of his hand. If he opened that and saw the cartoons …

“You mentioned Lord Sidmouth,” she said. “I do not recall him. Would I have met him at a ball or a party, perhaps?”

“I doubt it,” Rothbury said. “Lord Sidmouth is not a man much given to parties.”

Tess shrugged, as though the conversation was now thoroughly boring her. She glanced towards the door of the brothel, standing open now with light shimmering across the cobbles of Covent Garden Square. “Well, Lord Rothbury,” she said. “Delightful as it is to stand out here in the cold chatting to you, I really am quite exhausted. Worn out, in fact, by my excesses tonight. And I am sure that you have work to do.” She smothered a delicate little yawn, improving on the point. “So if you will hand my reticule over and excuse me, I shall take a carriage home.”

Rothbury weighed the little bag in one palm and Tess’s breath caught in her throat. She knew that at all costs she had to keep her expression blank. If she grabbed the reticule off him or made it clear in any way that she was protective of the contents, Rothbury would look inside and she would be clapped up in the Tower of London as a political prisoner faster than one could say seditious cartoon.

“What do you have in here?” Rothbury said.

“The contents of a lady’s reticule are private only to her,” Tess said. Her mouth dried. “Surely you are gentleman enough to respect a lady’s discretion?” she pressed.

“I wouldn’t depend on it,” Rothbury said. “It feels like a pistol,” he added. “You must like playing dangerous games with your lovers.” His tone was dry.

“I only shoot the ones who fail to satisfy me,” Tess said, smiling sweetly.

She saw Rothbury smile in response, the warmth spilling into those green eyes like sunlight, a long crease denting his cheek. The smile did strange things to Tess’s equilibrium. Rothbury placed the reticule gently in her outstretched hand. Tess’s fingers closed about the silk and brocade and she felt the relief flood through her, so powerful that her knees almost weakened. Then she realised that there was no rustle of paper, no folded sheets beneath her touch. She gripped a little tighter, desperately trying to make out the outline of the papers. Her stomach hollowed with shock.

They were not there.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE HAD THE PRETTIEST FEET he had ever seen.

It might not have been the first thing about Teresa Darent that most men would have noticed, but Owen Purchase, Viscount Rothbury, was never attracted to the obvious.

He handed Tess up into a hackney carriage and watched as she kicked off the lavender silk slippers and tucked her feet up under the gauzy skirts of the gown. The slippers were far too small for her—Owen had noticed that fact when he had held one of them for her to put on earlier. The gown also could not belong to her. Owen was no expert on feminine attire other than in the removal of it but he had a certain amount of experience of the female form and he knew that a woman with Tess Darent’s opulent curves—and Tess Darent’s flamboyant reputation—would not wear a gown that was two sizes too large. So the outfit was borrowed, which raised the intriguing question of what Lady Darent had been wearing when first she had arrived at the Temple of Venus and why she had needed to change her clothes.

Tess Darent interested Owen. She had from the first time they had met. It was not merely that she had the face of an angel and the reputation of a sinner. Public opinion held that she was as shallow as a puddle, mercenary, amoral, extravagant. She was an arbiter of fashion who had turned spending money into an art form. She simultaneously outraged and fascinated the ton with her profligate marriages and her decadent behaviour, and she was generally considered an utter featherbrain. There was no reason on earth he would find her interesting. Except that some stubborn instinct told him that she was not at all what she seemed….

“Thank you, Lord Rothbury.” Tess smiled at him prettily from the depths of the darkened carriage. The lavender silk gown shone ethereally in the faint light. Taken with the cloud of bright hair tumbling over her shoulders, it made her look impossibly alluring. Owen’s body reacted with an unexpected stab of desire. He wanted to peel that gown from her shoulders, to see it tumble to the floor as it had done before, to reveal the impossible curves and luscious, sensual plumpness of the body beneath. He remembered the pure line of her throat and collarbone when the gown had slid off her, so true and pale and tempting. He wanted to press his mouth to the hollow of her throat and taste her skin.

Which was not the matter on which he was supposed to be concentrating his attention.

“We’re hunting dangerous criminals here, Rothbury,” Lord Sidmouth had warned him when he had offered Owen the role of special investigator for the Home Office. “No bloody respect for law and order.” He had tapped a rather fine caricature that was lying on his desk, a drawing that had evidently been crumpled by Sidmouth’s angry and impatient hand. “Treason,” the Home Secretary had grumbled. “Sedition. Stirring up trouble, inciting the masses to riot. I’ll see them all hang.” His brows had snapped down. “You’re a British peer now, Rothbury, even if we had to pass an Act of Parliament to make you so.” He drummed his fingers on the cartoon. “Need your help against these traitors.”

“Yes, my lord,” Owen had said, a little grimly. The irony was not lost on him. Once, not so long ago, Sidmouth would have had no hesitation in branding him a renegade and a criminal. As an American he had been an enemy of the British state when the two countries were at war. That was before he had inherited a British peerage and turned into a slightly unlikely pillar of the establishment. He owed it to his family to uphold their honour now. Once before he had disgraced the family name under the most appalling circumstances. He would never do it again. Accepting his responsibilities now was his chance to atone.

Tess Darent shifted within the depths of the carriage, drawing his attention back to her as she pulled the peacock feather cloak more closely about her. Owen could smell her perfume, a crisp light scent, tart but sweet, rather like Tess herself. It was perfect for her, pretty and provocative, another element of her charming and flirtatious facade. Owen wondered what it was that she was hiding. Her wide-eyed pretence would fool nine out of ten men into believing her to be every inch as superficial as she appeared. It was a pity for her that he was the tenth and did not believe a word.

He had no grounds on which to arrest her, however. Visiting a brothel was not illegal and nor was carrying a pistol, and if she was a secret radical then he was the Queen of Sheba. The idea was absurd.

“Good night, Lady Darent.” He kept one hand on the carriage door. “I wish you a safe journey home.”

“And I wish you good luck in catching your miscreants.” Tess’s eyes were very wide and innocent. “What did you call them—madrigals?”

“Radicals,” Owen said gently.

“Whichever.” She made a little fluttering gesture with her hands. Her expression was blank. She even yawned. Owen wondered if she could possibly be as vacant as she seemed. If not, she was certainly an extremely good actress.

“Pray give my best wishes to Lord … Sidmouth, was it?” She paused. “Is he rich? Married?”

“Not at the moment,” Owen said.

Tess smiled. “Rich or married?” she queried.

“Yes, Sidmouth is rich and, no, he is not currently married,” Owen clarified.

Tess’s smile deepened. “Then I should like to make his acquaintance.”

“You’re looking for another husband for your collection?” Owen said ironically.

“Marriage is my natural state,” Tess said. “Is Sidmouth old?”

Owen laughed. “Probably not old enough to be relied on to die anytime soon.”

“A pity,” Tess said. “I always find that a useful attribute in a husband.” Her blue eyes mocked him, sweeping over him from head to foot in knowing appraisal. “What about you, Lord Rothbury?” she asked. “Are you seeking a rich wife to go with your pretty title? I hear that your coffers hold nothing but moths.”

“The gossip mongers have been busy,” Owen said shortly.

“It is their function,” Tess said. “Just as it is the job of every matron with an eligible daughter to parade her under your nose.”

“I don’t seek a wife at present,” Owen said. His feelings felt raw. Odd that Tess Darent’s clear blue gaze should, for a moment, strip away his defences. It was common knowledge that he had no fortune to go with his title. Only that morning he had had an awkward interview with his great-aunt by marriage, one of a host of elderly relatives his inheritance had also blessed him with. Lady Martindale was obscenely rich, eccentric and fearsomely opinionated. She had told Owen that if he wed, she would give him sufficient money to put his estates in order and would make him her heir. Owen knew he had reacted to her commands like a small, obstinate child; he had no wish to take a wife simply because Lady Martindale demanded it, and the alternative, to seek a rich heiress, was equally abhorrent to him. He had never yet met an eligible woman who did not bore him.

Except for Tess Darent. She was not precisely eligible but she certainly did not bore him.

The thought caught him by surprise.

Tess was watching him. Owen observed that she had the same lavender-blue eyes as her sister Joanna and the same heart-shaped face. Her hair was a few tones lighter than Joanna’s, red-gold instead of golden-brown, but the darkness of the carriage smoothed out all subtleties of shading. Years before, Owen had had something of a passion for Joanna Grant, before she had had the bad taste to prefer his best friend, Alex, to him. Now he felt something move and shift in his chest, a pang of sensation as though his emotions were playing games with him. His rational mind knew that Tess and Joanna were very different women, but gut instinct and desire were not so logical, nor so biddable. He could remember when he had first seen Tess and had been winded by the physical likeness between the two sisters. But Tess Darent was not her sister. He needed to remember that. He could not have the one and he did not want the other, except in the most fundamental physical sense because she was a very desirable woman.

He released the door and gave the driver the word to move off, watching the hackney carriage as it disappeared into the dark. He had the strangest instinct that he had missed something important but he could not put his finger on what it might have been. Shaking off the sensation, Owen strolled back up the white stone steps and into the chequered hallway of the brothel. The last few dragoons were leaving; their captain, a sour-looking man with a permanently pained expression saluted Owen grimly. Owen knew the regular troops disliked having to work with Sidmouth’s special investigators.

“Don’t mind Captain Smart,” his friend Garrick Farne said in his ear. “He took shrapnel in the groin at Salamanca so a raid on a brothel is a particular type of torture for him.”

“Poor fellow,” Owen said feelingly. “Did you find anything useful?” he added.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Garrick said. “If any of the leaders of the Jupiter Club fled this way they are already gone.”

Owen shrugged. “It was always going to be a long shot.”

He was accustomed to playing a long game. This sort of work was different from anything he had done before, but it required some of the same qualities of patience and resourcefulness and cool-headedness. It was not the same as exploring or sailing or fighting for his country, or any of the other things that Owen had done since he was old enough to make his way in the world, but it was still a challenge. The only thing Owen knew was that without a challenge, without action, he would fossilise. He might have accepted the responsibilities of his role but he could not see himself becoming the classic English aristocrat, wedded to his club and his country estates, settling into a life of luxurious emptiness. He had too much of his American heritage in his blood, the desire to carve his own future, the need to achieve.

“No sign of Tom either, presumably,” he added.

Garrick shook his head. “I’ll keep looking.”

Garrick had accompanied him that night because there were rumours that his errant half-brother, Tom Bradshaw, had been heard of back in London, and with connections to the radical movement. Tom, Duke’s bastard son and master criminal, had wed an heiress the year before and then promptly abandoned her, absconding with her fortune and leaving her ruined. This on top of Tom’s attempt to ruin Garrick and murder his wife, Merryn, the year before had been enough to send Lord Sidmouth into near apoplexy. The Home Secretary had decreed that noblemen who had the misfortune to have such disreputable relatives should hunt them down and see them stand trial. Garrick had agreed, although his motives were more straightforward, Owen suspected. Tom had tried to kill the woman Garrick loved and he would move heaven and earth to capture him.

“Was there anything else of interest?” Owen queried.

“This isn’t the place for a happily married man,” Garrick said, smiling. “I had to avert my gaze on more than one occasion but despite my impaired vision I did find these.” He held up a shirt, a jacket and pair of trousers.

“No one is claiming them though, particularly as there was this in the jacket pocket.” On the palm of his hand he held a wicked-looking knife with a carved ivory grip and a thistle design on the blade.

Owen’s brows shot up. “Very nice,” he murmured. He picked up the dagger and felt the worn handle slip smoothly into his palm. The knife was light but deadly sharp, with beautiful balance. “We might be able to trace this,” he said, “if we ask around.”

Garrick nodded. “And even nicer …” He put his hand in his pocket and extracted a set of crumpled papers, unfolding them and passing them to Owen. “I found these in one of the chambers upstairs, hidden beneath a pile of underwear in a dresser. The old bawd swears blind she had no idea they were there and there’s no budging her from her story. She says one of her guests must have left them.”

Owen looked at the cartoons. They were stunningly executed, conjuring a vivid image in only a few stark lines. One was a particularly cruel but accurate caricature of Lord Sidmouth as a hot-air balloon. The other showed a posse of dragoons trampling men, women and children beneath the hooves of their horses. The banner overhead read Freedom is Not Free. Owen grimaced at the sheer visceral shock and power of the picture. Something in it seemed to grab him by the throat. In the corner of each drawing was the signature of the cartoonist, a loopy black scrawl that simply read Jupiter. He let his breath out on a soundless whistle. “So Jupiter was hiding here,” he said slowly.

Garrick nodded. “It would seem so. Powerful propaganda, these cartoons,” he added. “It is no wonder that Sidmouth hates them.”

Owen nodded. “They are dangerous,” he said. “An incitement to violence.”

He pushed the cartoons into his pocket. The pile of clothes on the floor caught his attention and he stirred it with one booted foot. An evocative scent hung for a moment on the air, crisp and fresh, with a perfume he recognised. He squatted down and picked up the shirt, feeling the fine quality of the linen against his fingers.

So now he knew what Tess had been wearing when she arrived at the brothel. Had she come there incognito because she did not want the ton to hear that she disported herself in a bawdy house? Or was her choice of clothing all part of a sensual game? Did she enjoy having a lover peel off those layers of masculine attire before he made love to her?

Owen thought of Tess Darent’s body beneath his hands as he had lifted her down from the rope, the flare of her hips and the delicate curve of her waist. He thought of the heat of her skin through the slippery silk of the lavender gown, then he thought of what she might look like with those curves confined within the stark lines of the jacket and trousers, the thin cotton of the shirt pressing against her breasts. He raised the shirt to his nose, inhaled a long, deep breath and felt his senses fill with Tess, with her scent and her essence. Once again he was impaled by a jolt of lust that was hot and fierce and utterly uncomplicated.

“If you have an imagination, Lord Rothbury, now would be the time to use it….”

Owen, who had had no notion before tonight that he was such an imaginative man, found that imagination positively running riot.

“I met your sister-in-law just now,” he said abruptly to Garrick.

Garrick, unsurprisingly, looked completely floored for a moment by the apparent non sequitur. “Joanna—Lady Grant—is here?”

“Is that likely?” Owen said. “No. I was referring to Lady Darent. I found her out in the street, shinning down a makeshift rope from one of the bedrooms upstairs.”

Garrick’s face spilt into a grin. “Oh, I see. Yes, that sounds exactly the sort of thing Tess would do. She is thoroughly scandalous. She had probably been enjoying an orgy.”

Owen grimaced. He had only just managed to force his imagination away from the vision of Tess naked beneath the thin cotton shirt and now he found his mind had filled with an entirely new and darker set of imagery representing the way she might have disported herself here in the brothel tonight. Tess, pale limbs spread in abandoned wantonness, her cloud of red-gold hair fanning over her shoulders, Tess tied naked across a bed … He swallowed hard and fixed his gaze on the middle distance in an attempt to distract his mind. Unfortunately the middle distance consisted of a painting of a nude nymph and a group of lavishly endowed gentlemen indulging in a riotous orgy. Owen raised a hand to ease the constriction of his neckcloth. Evidently the lewd atmosphere of the bawdy house was turning his mind.

He wrenched his thoughts away from wayward visions of Tess and turned to find Garrick watching him closely, his gaze narrowed, perceptive. “Do you have an interest there?” Garrick asked.

Owen ran a distracted hand through his hair. “In Lady Darent? I’d be a fool if I had.”

“Which,” Garrick said, smiling faintly, “doesn’t quite answer the question, does it? Those Fenner girls,” he added, shaking his head, “could make a fool of any man.”

“I know,” Owen said. “Born to drive a man to perdition.” He cast a last glance around the hallway. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “It’s doing strange things to my mind.”

“Or you could stay,” Garrick said, with an expressive lift of the brows.

Owen gestured towards where Mrs. Tong was leaning over the wrought-iron balcony on the first floor and watching them with a great deal of venom in her dark, disillusioned eyes.

“I think we have already outstayed our welcome,” he murmured. “That basilisk stare would be sufficient to wither the most ardent man.”

“White’s, then,” Garrick said, “and the brandy bottle?”

“Capital,” Owen said. He bent to pick up the pile of clothing from the floor. Tess’s scent was growing fainter now. He remembered Garrick saying that the knife had been found in the jacket pocket. So Tess carried both a knife and a pistol. That was interesting. He wondered why she carried them and what she was afraid of. He wondered if she knew how to use them.

Then there were the cartoons, found hidden in a chamber on the second floor, Garrick had said. Tess’s resourceful escape down the sheet rope had been from just such a room….

Owen felt the strange prickle of sensation again, an instinct, stronger this time, that he had missed something obvious, something that had been right beneath his nose. A thought slid into his mind, a thought that was so outrageous, so unbelievable, that it stole his breath. It told him that he had been played by a master hand, that he had been misdirected and fooled. He had believed what was before his eyes. He had not questioned it. He had met a notorious widow climbing out of a brothel window and he had believed her when she had pretended to be running away to avoid scandal.

Owen recalled Tess Darent claiming not to know who Lord Sidmouth was and professing pretty ignorance of the radical movement. She had claimed to be in a hurry to get home and sleep off her sexual excesses.

In truth she had been in a hurry to escape.

He let the clothes slip through his fingers and instead took the cartoons from his pocket once more and scanned them. There was nothing, he thought, to say that Jupiter, the witty and dangerous caricaturist, had to be a man. Sidmouth had simply made that assumption, assumed also that the members of the Jupiter Club were exclusively male. But Jupiter could well be a pseudonym for a woman, the type of woman who carried a pistol in her reticule and attended radical meetings dressed in masculine attire. A woman who hid behind her reputation for scandal and pretended to be as light and superficial as a butterfly….

It seemed impossible. And yet …

Owen let out a long breath. No one would believe him, of course. Lord Sidmouth would laugh him out of town if he suggested that Jupiter was the infamous Dowager Marchioness of Darent. The evidence was no more than circumstantial. Even so, Owen was sure that his instinct was right. He had wondered what it was that Teresa Darent was hiding. Now he knew. All he had to do was to prove it.

LADY EMMA BRADSHAW HAD just returned from the meeting of the Jupiter Club and was standing with one hand on the latch of her tiny cottage, listening to the fading sound of her brother’s carriage as it rumbled away down the hill towards the city, when a man materialised out of the darkness beside her, flung open the door and bundled her over the threshold. He had one arm locked tight about her waist and his hand over her mouth. It was so sudden and so shocking that Emma had no time to cry out. She struggled and fought, necessarily in silence, kicked him and bit him, and then equally suddenly, she stopped fighting because she had recognised his scent and his touch. Vicious shock flared through her; her knees buckled, she sagged in his arms and he let her go.

“Tom,” Emma said. Her voice was hoarse. Tom Bradshaw, her husband, here, six months after he had deserted her and left her alone, penniless and with no word….

The shock faded and she waited to feel something else in its place, anger perhaps, or disbelief or even love. Anything. Anything but this cold chill that seemed to encase her heart.

The cocky smile that she remembered was gone from Tom’s lips. He looked older, not merely because of the pallor of his face and the deep lines that scored it, but because there was something different about him, some knowledge in his eyes that had not been there before, something of pain and suffering. He was emaciated, as though he had been ill. He did not try to touch her again or even to draw any closer to her. He stood just inside the door, watching her with wariness and a longing that did make Emma’s heart contract. She had never expected to see Tom look so vulnerable.

She found that she was wondering what on earth to say. Strange, when so many times before she had rehearsed exactly what she would say to the no-good, deceitful, swindling scoundrel should she ever have the misfortune to see him again.

“What happened?” she croaked. “Where have you been?” She immediately hated herself for the banality of the words, as though Tom had merely been gone a few hours enjoying a pint or two at the local tavern.

She saw a faint smile touch his lips as though he too recognised the inadequacy of anything either of them could say. In that moment Emma’s feelings came alive, and she hated him with so vivid and bitter a hatred that she could almost taste it. She put her hands behind her back to prevent her from pummelling him with the force of her rage. She could feel the rough plaster of the wall cold against her palms. The rest of her body felt hot, tight and furious.

“I’ve been on board a ship.”

Tom took a couple of steps away from her, down the passage. His steps sounded loud on the flagstone floor. Emma wondered if the maid would wake and think she was entertaining a lover in the depths of the night. She caught Tom’s arm and pulled him into the kitchen, closing the door silently behind them.

“On a ship?” She knew she was repeating his words like a parrot. Nothing was making much sense to her.

“Someone didn’t like me very much.” Tom gave a half shrug. “They paid to have me knocked on the head and thrown into the hold of a ship going to the Indies, no questions asked.”

Emma’s stomach swooped. She felt a little sick. So this was Tom’s excuse for deserting her and running off with her fortune. She did not believe him. She could not. Tom had always been a consummate liar. Of course he would not admit that he had abandoned her of his own free will, not if he wanted her back.

“I’m surprised it took so long,” she said sweetly, even though the bitterness was sharp in her throat. “There must be a hundred people willing to pay to get rid of you.” She turned away from him, staring fixedly at the little watercolour of a country scene on the wall. The soft pastel colours swam in the candlelight. Tess Darent had painted it as a present for her when first Emma had moved to Hampstead Wells. She had said that it would soften the austereness of the whitewashed walls. Tess had been her staunchest friend when Tom had left her.

“Why did you trouble to come back?” she said. “You are the sort of man who could have made a fortune in the Indies.” Despite her attempts to sound indifferent, her voice cracked a little. “I hear that there are opportunities in those places for men of your stamp.”

“I came back for you,” Tom said. Emma was not looking at him but even so she could feel his gaze on her and knew that its intensity did not waver. “You were all I thought about when I was imprisoned in that hell-hole of a ship,” Tom said. “It was only the thought of seeing you again that kept me alive—”

He broke off as Emma brought her hand down hard on the kitchen table, sending the bread knife skittering away across the surface.

“Tom, stop!” She took a breath, lowered her tone. “It’s too late,” she said. A void of hopelessness opened up beneath her heart. “I don’t know if I believe anything you say anymore. You always were such a liar.”

“I love you,” Tom said. “I swear it’s true.”

Emma shook her head. “Don’t, Tom,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Tom was very pale now. He swayed a little. Emma made an instinctive move towards him but stopped herself and dropped her hand to her side. She could never trust him now. He had abandoned her with no word, leaving her facing a life alone with no money, no home and no reputation left. She had known he was a scoundrel when she wed him. It was that very air of danger about him that she had found so fatally attractive. Now, though, the young girl who had fallen for Tom Bradshaw’s charm was like a stranger to her, someone from another life.

“It was your half-brother who helped me,” she said, holding his gaze with eyes that burned hot with unshed tears. “You remember your half-brother, Garrick Farne—the man you wanted to ruin, the man whose wife you tried to kill?”

Tom was white to the lips. “I admit I have done some terrible things,” he said, “but that is all at an end. I’ve changed. I’ll prove it to you. I promise you….”

“Oh, Tom,” Emma said. “It’s too late to do that.” She turned away. “If you do love me,” she said, with difficulty, “the best thing you can do for me is never to see me again.”

“No,” Tom said. “Emma—”

“Go,” Emma said.

When she turned back Tom had gone and the kitchen was empty and cold. The door swung closed softly with a click of the latch. Moving very slowly, feeling cold all the way through to her bones, Emma locked the door and went back down the passage to the little parlour. The fire had been banked down in the grate; she tried to warm her shaking hands before it. There was a plate of cold ham and bread and cheese for her supper and a glass of wine on the table, but she could not touch it now. Her mouth felt as dry as dust, her throat blocked.

I don’t need him, she told herself fiercely, blinking past the tears. I don’t need Tom. He’ll only hurt me again.

The parlour was comfortingly warm but Emma found that the fire could not stave off the cold that was inside her rather than out. With a sigh, she picked up the tray and carried it through to the kitchen, replacing the food untouched in the cold larder and making her way upstairs to bed. It was only once she was beneath the covers, curled around the stone hot-water bottle, seeking a comfort she could not find, that she permitted herself to cry, because she had wanted to believe that there was an ounce of goodness in Tom, that he could reform, but to trust him would have been the most foolish thing she could have done. She had already been hurt far too much.

She wished that Tess Darent were there to advise her. Emma often thought that she would do just about anything for Tess, who had shown her kindness and generosity when everyone else had turned their backs on her. She did not know Tess well and she understood her even less, for there was beneath Tess’s outward manner an impenetrable reserve, but she loved Tess all the same with a fierce loyalty she had never felt for anyone else in her life. She had often wondered if Tess, too, had suffered at the hands of men and if that was why she had helped her. Perhaps she would never know of Tess’s experiences. But she would always be grateful to her.

CHAPTER THREE

TESS LOOKED FROM THE LETTER in her hand to the flushed, fatuous face of the man standing on her sister’s hearthrug, hands clasped behind his back, substantial paunch jutting. He was warming his posterior before the blazing fire. His smug stance said that he held all the cards and Tess, a skilful gambler herself, was rather afraid that he was correct. She was in a bind. There was no doubt.

Play for time.

“Let me understand you properly, Lord Corwen,” she said.

You noxious toad …

“You are proposing that I should give permission, as guardian to my twin stepchildren, for you to wed Lady Sybil Darent and if I do not—” her tone dropped by several degrees from cold to frozen “—you will foreclose on a private loan you apparently advanced to my late husband and oblige my stepson, Lord Darent, to sell off all unentailed parts of his estate. To you, of course.”

You vile, grasping beast …

Corwen smiled, a lupine smile that left his small eyes cold. “You have it precisely, Lady Darent.”

Tess tapped the lawyer’s letter against the palm of her hand. News of the loan had come as a shock to her but she could not afford the scandal of challenging Corwen in the law courts and he knew it. She wanted to take him to court because she knew he was a charlatan who had tricked the elderly Marquis of Darent into signing away half his estate in exchange for the loan. Towards the end of his life Darent had been almost insensible from excess laudanum and would have signed almost anything put in front of him. There were plenty of scandalmongers who said that was precisely how Tess had persuaded Darent to marry her in the first place.

“I’ll pay the loan off myself.” Her heart thumped in her chest and the words stuck in her throat but she forced them out. Forty-eight thousand pounds was no small sum and she hardly wanted to throw it away on Lord Corwen, but three widow’s portions, a successful gambling career and some careful investment had made her a rich woman and she could easily afford it. It was also the least painful option for her stepchildren. She would die before she saw either of them fall into the power of this man.

But Corwen was shaking his head, smiling a dissolute smile that made her skin crawl. “I will not accept your money, Lady Darent. The debt is against the Darent estate. And as I say—” he cleared his throat but it did nothing to disguise the thickness of lechery in his voice “—I wish for marriage to Lady Sybil and then I will cancel the debt entirely.”

“Lady Sybil is fifteen years old.” Tess could not keep the distaste from her voice. “She is a schoolgirl.”

And you are disgusting.

“I am prepared to wait a year provided that we may come to terms now.” Lord Corwen rocked back on his heels. “Sixteen would be a charming age for Lady Sybil to wed. I saw her on her most recent visit from Bath. She is a delightful young woman. Fresh, biddable, innocent …” His voice caressed the final word.

Tess set her teeth. Not long ago, a mere ten years, she had been a bride herself when not yet out of her teens. Twice. And Corwen, predatory, hiding his dissolution under that unpleasantly avuncular manner, reminded her all too forcibly of Charles Brokeby, her second husband. A tremor shook her deep inside. Sybil must never, never, be subjected to what she had endured.

“And you are …” She looked at Corwen, at his fat jowls and the lines of dissipation scored deep around his eyes. “Forty-five, forty-six?”

Corwen frowned. “I will be seven and forty next year. It is a good age to remarry.”

“Not to my stepdaughter,” Tess said. “She is far too young. I cannot permit it and, anyway, I share the responsibility for her upbringing with Lady Sybil’s aunt and uncle. They would agree with me that such a marriage is out of the question.”

Disconcertingly, Corwen did not appear taken aback. Perhaps he thought her protests only token. Since he was threatening to foreclose on a loan of approaching fifty thousand pounds, Tess imagined he thought he could dictate his terms at will.

“Perhaps you are jealous.” Corwen’s tone dropped to intimacy. Shockingly his hand had come out to brush away the curls that had escaped Tess’s blue bandeau. He was running a finger down the curve of her cheek.

“It cannot be pleasant to be eclipsed by a child only fourteen years younger,” he murmured. “And my dear Lady Darent—”

Tess knocked his hand away. “I am not your Lady Darent, dear or otherwise.”

Corwen laughed. “Is that what rankles? A few years younger and I might have suggested you become my mistress in payment instead.”

“And,” Tess said, “I would have been as little flattered then as I am now.” She could feel the panic fluttering in her chest. Corwen was standing far too close to her. He was a big man, fleshy and broad, and his proximity was threatening. She felt the breath flatten in her lungs. For a second she could see Brokeby standing there, reaching for her, smiling that horrible smile. The shudders rippled through her body. Then the vision was gone and she was standing once again in her sister’s drawing room with the autumn sunshine warming the bright yellow walls and creating a spurious sense of cheer.

She moved sharply away from Corwen, although the length of the Thames would be insufficient distance from so repellent a man.

Corwen’s face suffused with colour. “I offer your stepdaughter marriage, madam. You should be grateful for that. And if you think her relatives will object, then I rely on you to persuade them.”

“You want to wed a girl who is still in the schoolroom,” Tess said coldly. “Do not dress it up as something respectable when it is not.” She looked at him. “Let us be quite clear, my lord,” she said carefully, her fingers tightening on the lawyer’s letter until her grip threatened to crumple it. “I am in receipt of your request for Lady Sybil’s hand in marriage. I refuse it. I also refuse to sell any part of the Darent estate on behalf of my stepson, in order to meet this debt. I have offered to pay the full amount myself. You have refused. So you will have to take this matter up with my lawyers. I shall tell them to expect to hear from you.”

Corwen did not move. For a moment Tess thought he had not understood her. Then he took a step closer again.

“I believe you have not heard what I am saying, madam,” he said. “I will wed Lady Sybil.” His lips curled. “In a couple of years her aunt will be launching her in society. It would be a great pity for Lady Sybil’s debut to be marred by the sort of rumours and scandal that cling to your character.” He paused. “You had the upbringing of her for five years before her father died. A word here and a whisper there—” he shrugged “—and Lady Sybil is tarred with your brush. Her moral character is questioned, her reputation placed in doubt. Suddenly …” he said, smiling with evident relish, “no respectable man will have her, and Lady Sybil’s future is ruined.” He inclined his head, eyes bright now. “Do you take my meaning, Lady Darent?”

The blood chilled to ice in Tess’s veins. Corwen stood, legs splayed, chest thrust out as though he commanded the room. Commanded her to give him her stepdaughter in marriage or he would besmirch Sybil’s reputation out of revenge.

And she had given him the means by which he could do it—she, with her tarnished character and her name for scandal. She should have realised how that might be used against her, but then she had never anticipated the cold calculation of a lecher like Lord Corwen.

Despair slid along Tess’s veins. It was her marriage to Brokeby that had done the damage. It had been ten years before but the shadow of it had never lifted. Brokeby had tainted her with his vile reputation for perversion. Then, a year ago, an exhibition of nude paintings of her had dealt her reputation its final blow. Brokeby’s wretched paintings … A tremor shook Tess deep inside. She could never reveal the truth about those. Her throat closed with revulsion and she swallowed hard. It was best not to remember that night. It was best to lock those hideous memories away. Except that she had found over the years that she could not forget them. She carried them everywhere with her. They were imprinted on her mind just as she felt they were indelibly written on her body in all their lurid detail. Hateful images she would scrub away if only she could. But they never faded. She was haunted.

The breath hitched in her throat and she blinked to dispel the sting of tears in her eyes. Brokeby was dead and gone to the hell he deserved. She was free. Only, she never quite felt free. Somehow the shame and the horror were etched too deep on her soul to be forgotten.

And now here was Corwen, a man of a similar stamp, waiting for her to succumb to his blackmail. Very slowly Tess raised her gaze to his face. There was a gleam of amusement in his small eyes, the pleasure of a man who enjoyed enforcing his will and making others squirm. So very like Brokeby … But she was not a frightened girl anymore.

“Lord Corwen,” Tess said, “if you ever go near Lady Sybil or threaten her reputation, I will personally ensure that you are maimed sufficiently never to approach a woman again with your vile proposals.” She gave him a smile that dripped ice. “Now—at last—are we clear?”

Corwen made a sudden involuntary movement full of violence, and Tess’s mind splintered into terrifying images of Brokeby, brutal, vicious, utterly merciless. She closed her eyes for a second to banish the vile, vivid memories and when she opened them, Corwen was gone, slamming out of the room with a force that shook the mantelpiece and sent the invitation cards fluttering down to the floor.

Tess heaved a sigh and sank down rather heavily onto Joanna’s gold brocade sofa. The port decanter beckoned to her but she had had a bad night and her head was already aching, and she knew from bitter experience that trying to lose her memory in drink was a fool’s game. She had tried it after Brokeby’s death, tried to drown the past. These days she could not look a gin bottle in the eye without feeling sick. She had tried everything, including laudanum, from which she had sometimes thought she would never wake. Nothing helped, not sweetmeats, not even spending excessive amounts of money on clothes, shoes and accessories. In the end she had dragged herself out of the despair through sheer force of will, but by then it had been too late. The ton had seen the drinking and the gambling and the spending to excess, and now there were those hideous paintings. It was no wonder that her reputation was so damaged.

Tess drove her fist so hard into one of Joanna’s gold brocade cushions that the seams split. She hastily shoved the stuffing back inside and turned the cushion over so that the rent would not show. Her headache stabbed her temples. She had not been able to sleep after she had got back from the brothel the previous night. Lying in her bed, staring up at the canopy, she had come to the inevitable conclusion that the Jupiter Club was finished. It was too dangerous for them to meet again when government saboteurs had surely infiltrated the membership and were fomenting violence. Whoever was stirring up the rioters would be acting as an informer as well. It would only be a matter of time before the spy would unmask them all, not just her but her young political protégé Justin Brooke and his sister, Emma, too.

And now there was this, Corwen’s revolting attempt to blackmail her into serving up her stepdaughter, Sybil, like some virginal sacrifice to his jaded palate. The thought made the bile rise in Tess’s throat. She adored Sybil and her twin brother, Julius, and had done so from the moment she had first met them. It was intolerable to see both of them at the mercy of Lord Corwen.

Tess reached absent-mindedly for the chocolate-flavoured bonbons that Joanna kept in a silver box on the table nearby. The box was empty. With a sigh Tess replaced it. She had dismissed Corwen for the time being but she knew that he would be back, in one shape or form or another, with his greedy eyes and his repellent demands. He wanted Sybil and he would be determined to have her. And Tess understood all about the driving need a man like Corwen felt to take something so fresh and sweet as Sybil Darent and despoil it.

She could keep Sybil physically safe but she could not protect her reputation. Tess had no doubt that if Corwen could not have Sybil, then he would ruin her another way. And the hateful truth was that Corwen was right—a whisper of scandal could kill any debutante’s good name and future prospects regardless of whether or not it was based on truth. Sybil’s aunt was the most irreproachably respectable chaperone in the whole of London, but Tess was still the girl’s stepmother, and her own blemished reputation could do her stepdaughter nothing but damage. She wondered that she had not thought of it before. Corwen would drop a subtle word here and there, poisoning the ton against Sybil for no better reason than that he lusted after her and could not have her.

Tess shivered, her fingers digging into the richly embroidered arm of the sofa. Damn Corwen to hell and back for his callous determination to indulge his most base vices on the body of her stepdaughter. It was unbearable. And damn him to the next level of hell for threatening to foreclose on the loan as well, thereby forcing her to decimate Julius’s inheritance in order to pay him off.

She could stall him, but it was only a matter of time.

With a muffled cry of frustration she leapt to her feet and walked over to the window, where a grey cloud stretched from horizon to horizon now, spilling inky darkness over the city. The faint autumn sunlight had been banished and it was a cold, wintry scene.

There was no escape for Julius or Sybil, and yet she had to do something to help them. Their father had entrusted them to her care. She could not fail them.

There was no way out.

Unless …

Unless she married again….

The thought slid into her mind with all the sinuous temptation of the snake in Eden. Tess screwed her eyes up tightly. She had been widowed for two years and she had promised her sister Joanna that she would make no more marriages. Joanna, Tess suspected, was embarrassed to have a much-married marchioness as a sister. But Joanna had also forgotten quite how vulnerable a widow could be.

What she needed was a marriage in name only to a man who had sufficient power and authority to tell Corwen to go hang and to provide the protection of his name for both herself and her stepchildren. Then, once she was irreproachably wed, she would need to transform herself into a reputable matron. No more climbing out of brothel windows. No more gambling. No more Jupiter Club.

No more satirical cartoons.

It would undo all her good work to be clapped in gaol. That was a position from which there really was no return.

Tess pulled a face. The thought of denying her talent for art, of deliberately turning away from the cartoons, the one thing that gave her life such passionate meaning, was almost unbearable. She had been drawing since she was a child, pouring her feelings into her sketches as a means of expression and escape. Sorrow, joy, fear and frustration had all been expressed through her pen.

Yet she could see that now she had no choice. She would have to abandon political satire and choose something blameless like watercolours or sketching, perhaps. Ladies were forever setting up their easels and capturing some idyllic rural scene. She would do the same. Drawing and painting were amongst the few feminine accomplishments she possessed.

A respectable marriage would also offer her the camouflage she needed should Lord Sidmouth’s investigators prove efficient enough as to suspect her of sedition. She needed a smoke screen, an elderly, impotent smoke screen. She needed to find a fourth husband and she needed to find him fast.

She crossed the room to the rosewood desk, took out a thick volume, settled herself again on the gold brocade sofa and started to read.

A half hour later she was still engrossed when Joanna came in accompanied by a footman with the tea tray.

“What is that you are reading?” Joanna asked, seating herself beside Tess. “The Lady’s Magazine?”

“No.” Tess felt a little shiver of apprehension. Joanna’s disapproval was not something she sought. She tilted the cover of her book towards her sister so that Joanna could see the title. “It is the new edition of The Gazetteer.”

As Tess had anticipated, vivid disappointment registered on Joanna’s face. “Oh, Tess, no!” Joanna exclaimed. “Tell me you are not planning on marrying again! When you came to stay here you promised—” Joanna broke off, biting her lip. Her tone changed. It was cool now, though still indicative of her feelings. “It is your decision, I suppose,” she said.

“I have a natural affinity with marriage,” Tess said. She could hear the apology in her tone. She did not want to remind Joanna just how insecure her situation was. Her sister knew nothing of her life, least of all her secret political affiliation to the reformers. Nor did she want to tell Joanna of Lord Corwen’s threats. Such a discussion would hold too many painful parallels with her marriage to Brokeby. She set her lips stubbornly and tried to ride down Joanna’s disapproval.

“On the contrary,” her elder sister corrected her sharply, clearly unable to keep quiet for more than a couple of seconds. “There is nothing natural about it. Your marriages have all without exception been most unnatural.”

Tess could not really dispute that. She knew that Joanna was one of the few people who had realised that she was afraid—terrified—of true intimacy, though her sister did not know the reason. Joanna had tried to discuss it with her in the past, but Tess had always refused to talk. Clothes, shoes, hats, gloves, scarves … They could chat about fashion for hours and it gave their relationship a veneer of closeness, but when Joanna tried to get Tess to talk about her marriages, Tess would feel the familiar cold horror spread through her veins like poison and she would turn Joanna’s questions away with trivial answers. She knew Joanna was asking not out of prurient curiosity but out of a real concern, and that made her feel even sadder. But there was nothing Joanna could do to help her. The damage wrought by Charles Brokeby had been done years ago and could not be undone now.

“Not everyone has the sort of marriage that you share with Alex,” she said. The words came out more harshly than she had intended, perhaps because whilst she was terrified by any thought of intimacy herself, she did at times feel a fierce jealousy of both the physical and emotional bond that Joanna and Alex shared. In public she might scorn such an unfashionable concept as a happy marriage but in reality the warmth and intimacy and shared experience was something she craved.

“Most people,” she added, “want no more than a position in society, enough money to sustain it and the promise that they will not need to see their spouse above half a dozen times a year and, if they do, that they need not speak with them above once.”

Joanna’s pretty face wrinkled into a grimace of distaste. She put down her teacup with a crack that made the delicate china shiver. “Very amusing, Tess. You forget you are talking to your sister and not to one of your casual acquaintances.” She flicked The Gazetteer with a contemptuous finger. “You hope to find such a husband in here?”

“It is the most marvellous book,” Tess said, pressing on although she could feel Joanna’s fearsome disapproval. “It gives the rank, fortune and address of every bachelor and widower in the country. It is the perfect husband-hunting guide.”

“It does not record whether or not the men are impotent,” Joanna said very drily. “That, surely, is your most important criteria.”

There was a painful silence. “It gives their ages,” Tess said at last, almost managing to conceal the crack in her voice. “That should be a fair guide.”

“But not an infallible one.” Joanna’s voice had softened into pity. She put a hand on Tess’s tensely clasped ones and Tess tried not to shudder, not from Joanna’s offered comfort but from the cold pain she felt inside.

“Tess,” Joanna said. “What happened to you? What is it that you are afraid of?”

“Nothing!” Tess said. The word seemed to come out slightly too loud. The pain twisted within her like the turn of a screw.

“Then why do you only marry sickly boys and old men?” Joanna persisted. “Robert Barstow, James Darent—”

“There was only one of each,” Tess protested, “and to be fair I did not know that Robert was going to die so young.”

“With Robert you married your best friend,” Joanna said. “There was as little passion there as in your last marriage.”

Once again the silence was taut and painful. Neither of them had mentioned her marriage to Brokeby but Tess could see the question in Joanna’s eyes. Her sister had guessed that Brokeby had hurt her; she wanted Tess to confide. Tess knew Joanna’s concern was only to help her but she did not want that help. There was nothing Joanna could do to set right the past or undo the horrific experiences she had suffered at Brokeby’s hands. There was nothing that she could do except blot out those memories and make sure that such horrors never happened again.

“If you have a fear of physical intimacy,” Joanna said suddenly, “I do not understand this obsession you have with marrying.”

“You refine too much upon it,” Tess snapped, her patience breaking under the strain. “I find myself short of funds, that is all. Marriage is the easiest way to address the deficit.” She spread her hands wide in a gesture of exasperation. “For me, marriage is a business option only, preferable to a trip to the moneylenders.”

“So you are in debt?” Joanna’s exquisitely plucked brows rose disbelievingly. “I don’t believe you. You have a fortune to eclipse every other widow in society.”

“Clothes,” Tess said vaguely. “They are so monstrously expensive.”

“That is one matter on which you cannot gammon me,” Joanna said robustly. “I know all there is to know about the cost of fashion and not even you could spend all your substance on it!”

They stared at one another defiantly. Tess wondered what on earth Joanna would say if she confessed that her money was in fact mainly spent on charitable causes and radical politics. No doubt she would be more shocked than if Tess had confessed to spending it all on sex with handsome young men. There were political hostesses, of course, formidable matrons who supported the Whig or the Tory cause and gave smart dinners to promote their husbands’ careers. Reforming politics was a different matter, too extreme, dangerous and inappropriate, with its emphasis on improving the conditions of the working classes. No one in society should concern themselves with such matters. Charity was one thing; political reform quite another.

“My gambling debts are enormous,” Tess said, reaching for an excuse that never failed, “and perhaps I may catch myself a rich duke this time. I have no wish to go down the social scale rather than up.”

“Then you truly are limiting your options,” Joanna said sarcastically. To Tess’s relief she seemed to have swallowed this explanation. “Let me see,” her sister continued. “We need to find you a duke or a prince, old enough to die within a year or two so that his continued existence does not inconvenience you, sickly enough not to be interested in his marital rights and rich enough to increase your fortune! How very romantic!”

“I do not require romance from marriage,” Tess said.

“So I have observed.” Her sister sprang to her feet. “I do not believe that even The Gazetteer will be able to furnish you with the direction of such a nobleman.”

“I have whittled it down to a list of a few possibilities,” Tess said. “There is one duke, Feversham—”

“He died two weeks ago,” Joanna said.

“Oh. Well, what about the Marquis of Raymond?”

“Also very nearly dead.”

“Then there might still be time to catch him—”

Joanna glared. “Tess, no!”

“Lord Grace?”

“He is in the Fleet.” Joanna smiled sweetly. “You could have adjoining cells.”

Tess pulled a face. “Lord Pettifer?”

Joanna shook her head. “He is in Bedlam.”

Tess deflated. “Then there is no one,” she said.

“I told you so,” Joanna said, not unkindly.

After Joanna had gone, closing the door with exaggerated quiet behind her, Tess finished her cold tea and picked up The Gazetteer once again, flicking listlessly through the pages. Joanna was correct, unfortunately. The list, whilst giving the details of many eligible gentlemen, did not also come with a guarantee that they would see marriage in the same idiosyncratic light that she did. Not many men, when it came down to it, wanted a marriage of no more than convenience. Many wanted an heir, of course. Some wanted to sleep with their wives occasionally if they could not get a better offer. Many thought that a marriage should suit their convenience—that that was what the phrase meant. Tess had no intention of being available to service the needs of her husband. That would not suit her convenience. And so her choice was limited to the ancient, the infirm, the impotent or those who were attracted to their own sex rather than hers.

With a sigh, she put the book back in the drawer, retrieved one by Voltaire instead and wandered out into the hall.

Tess liked living with Joanna’s family in Bedford Square. The house was elegantly appointed and filled with the warmth and laughter of a happy family. It gave Tess a spurious sense of belonging to stay there. She had never had a home of her own, or at least not one she chose to live in. Her various marriage portions had given her a scattering of houses on estates across the country, but any of these would have been under the disapproving eye of her relatives by marriage, not a tempting option. Besides, she hated the country. It was dull and intensified her sense of loneliness. Only in London was there diversion enough to keep solitude at bay.

Tess knew that Joanna would never evict her but she had from time to time thought that she should purchase her own London house. It was embarrassing to be hanging on her family coattails at her age. The idea of living alone did not appeal, however. It made the cold chill in her heart solidify further.

In a sudden fit of irritation, Tess tweaked the bud off the stem of one of the hothouse roses displayed in a wide shallow bowl on the hall table. There. She had completely spoiled Joanna’s beautiful arrangement.

The door of the library opened abruptly. Two men came out, deep in conversation: Tess’s brother-in-law Alex and Viscount Rothbury. Tess jumped out of sheer surprise. Rothbury was, if not a frequent visitor to Bedford Square, then a regular one. He had even dined here on several occasions. It was no great surprise to see him here. Tess realised that it was simply that he had been in her mind, lurking behind her preoccupation with finding a new husband, the memory of the previous night catching at her heels.

In the daylight Rothbury looked every inch the viscount, elegant in buff pantaloons and a jacket cut with supreme skill, his boots with a mirror polish, his cravat tied in a complicated waterfall of pristine white. Then Tess met his eyes and saw behind the man of fashion the same dangerous challenge she had recognised the night before. This was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an adventurer dressed as a dandy. She had made a good decision in the past to steer clear of him. A pity then that now she had come to his notice, for he showed every sign of paying her a great deal of attention.

Tess realised that she was staring, like a schoolroom miss transfixed by the sight of a handsome gentleman. She saw Rothbury raise his brows in faint quizzical amusement, and she blushed. That was even worse. No man had the power to make her blush. It was not something she did.

Rothbury exchanged a quick word with Alex, who shook him by the hand and went back into the library. The door closed behind him with a soft click. The house was suddenly quiet, the hallway temporarily devoid of servants. Rothbury started walking towards Tess across the broad expanse of chequered tile. She felt a curious urge to turn tail and run away. She shoved the book by Voltaire behind the flower arrangement. It really would not do to be caught reading philosophy, not when she was supposed to be a featherbrain.

“Lady Darent.” Rothbury was bowing before her. “Good morning. I trust that you have recovered from your experiences of last night?”

“I trust that you have forgotten them,” Tess said. “A gentleman would surely make no reference to our last meeting.”

A wicked smile lit Rothbury’s face. It deepened the crease he had down one tanned cheek. “Ah, but there you have the problem,” he drawled. “Surely you have heard that I am no gentleman, merely a Yankee sea captain?”

“I’ve heard you called many things,” Tess agreed smoothly.

He laughed. “And none of them flattering, I’ll wager.” He kept his eyes on her face. The intentness of his expression flustered her. “I am glad I saw you this morning,” he continued. He put a hand into the pocket of the elegant coat. “I have something here I think must be yours.”

Tess’s heart did a sickening little skip. She had wondered about the loss of the cartoons. She had wondered about them all the way home and for the best part of the night. She had not thought Rothbury had them, for surely he would have asked her about them if he had found them in her purse. Now, though, it seemed she might be proven wrong. For a moment her mind spun dizzily, then with a fierce sense of relief she saw that it was not the drawings he held in his hand but the thistle knife.

“My dagger,” she said. “How kind of you to reunite me with it.”

She saw a flash of surprise in Rothbury’s eyes. Perhaps he had expected her to deny it belonged to her. But the thistle knife had been Robert’s and was of great sentimental value to her if of no real worth. Tess was not going to sacrifice it.

“Did you find anything else of mine?” she asked, very politely.

Rothbury’s keen green gaze met hers. “Did you lose anything else?” he asked.

Their eyes locked with the sudden intensity of a sword thrust.

He knew about the cartoons. She was sure of it.

Tess suppressed a shiver, schooling herself to calm. Rothbury might have the satirical sketches, but he could prove nothing. And she must give nothing away. She knew she should be afraid, yet the beat in her blood was of excitement, not fear. It felt like drinking too much champagne, or dancing barefoot in the grass in a summer dawn. She had almost forgotten what it felt like for her senses to be so sharply alive.

“Only my clothes,” she said lightly.

Rothbury smiled. “Is that a habit of yours?” he enquired. “Losing your clothes?”

“Not particularly,” Tess said, “though gossip would tell you different.” She smiled back at him. “Pray do not trouble to return them. Men’s clothing never suited me anyway.”

Rothbury’s gaze slid over her in thorough, masculine appraisal. “You do indeed look charming in your proper person,” he murmured, in that voice that always seemed to brush her nerve endings with fire.

He gestured to a drawing of Shuna, Tess’s niece, which was framed on the wall above the vase of roses. “Your work?” he enquired softly.

It sounded like a complete change of subject, but Tess knew it was not. He knew she was an artist. It was only one small step from there to her being a cartoonist. She looked at the pencil portrait of her niece. Unfortunately she had signed it. Her heart missed a beat as she noticed that the signature bore more than a passing resemblance to Jupiter’s arrogant black scrawl. How careless of her….

“You seem unsure if this is your work or not.” Rothbury’s voice was faintly mocking now.

“No, yes!” Tess tried to pull herself together. “Yes, that is one of my drawings. Art is one of the few things at which I excel.”

Once again she felt Rothbury’s gaze on her face as searching as a physical touch. “I am sure you sell yourself short,” he said. “You must have many accomplishments.”

“I don’t sell myself at all,” Tess said. She gave him a cool little smile. “Pray do not let me keep you, my lord,” she added pointedly.

So clear a dismissal was difficult to ignore and she saw Rothbury’s smile widen in appreciation. “Oh, I am in no hurry,” he said easily. “I enjoy talking to you. But if you wish to escape me, then pray do run away.” There was more than a hint of challenge in his voice—and in his eyes. He retrieved the Voltaire from behind the rose bowl and held it out to her. “Don’t forget your book.”

“Gracious, that isn’t mine,” Tess said. “French philosophy? It must be one of Merryn’s vast collection.”

“My dear Lady Darent,” Rothbury drawled, “it has your signature on the bookplate.”

Damnation.

Tess snatched the book from his hand and flicked it open. The title page held no bookplate at all. She looked up to see Rothbury watching her closely. His lips twisted into amusement.

“So it is yours.”

“Very clever,” Tess snapped.

“I think you must be,” Rothbury said thoughtfully. “So why pretend to be a featherbrain, Lady Darent?”

Checkmate. If she was clever then Rothbury was at least one step ahead of her.

Tess shrugged. “A woman is no more than a fool if she lets a man see she is a bluestocking,” she said. “Or so my mama told me.”

“I don’t think you believe that.”

Tess’s heart skipped a beat at his directness. There was something predatory in his eyes now, the intensity of the hunter. Her mouth dried with awareness.

“Why pretend?” he repeated softly. “There is no need to dissemble with me, I assure you. Confident men are not afraid of bluestockings.”

Tess laughed. She could not help herself. “You may have a remarkably good opinion of yourself, my lord,” she said, “but there are a lot of very insecure men in the ton.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Rothbury said. “Is that why you feign ignorance, Lady Darent—so that you do not outshine any of your male acquaintances?”

Tess smiled. “It is easier,” she said. “Some men do have a very large—”

Rothbury raised a brow.

“—sense of their own importance,” Tess finished.

“How fascinating,” Rothbury said. “I suspected that you were a consummate actress.” He glanced at the book in her hand. “And I see that it is in the original French too….” His gaze came up, keen on her face. “So you read French Republican philosophy, Lady Darent. You sketch beautifully, you carry a knife and a pistol when you go out at night—”

Tess could see where this was heading. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have detained you quite long enough, my lord. I could not possibly keep you any longer.”

Rothbury’s laughter followed her across the hall. As she hurried back into the drawing room, Tess was all too aware that he had stepped closer to Shuna’s portrait and appeared to be examining the signature very carefully. She could feel the trap closing.

She shut the door behind her and leaned back against it for a moment, shutting her eyes. How could she throw Rothbury off the scent? He was too quick, too clever, right on her heels now. The only way she could keep him quiet, assuming he had told no one else of his suspicions, was to kill him, which seemed a little extreme, or …

Or she could marry him.

The room tilted a little, dipped and spun. Suddenly Tess’s heart was racing with a mixture of fear and reckless determination. A husband could not give evidence against his wife in court, for under the law they were considered indivisible, one and the same person. If she were to marry Rothbury she would be safe.

She groped her way to a chair and collapsed into it.

This was madness, utter folly.

It was the perfect solution.

Leaping agitatedly to her feet again, Tess ran to the rosewood desk, pulled open the drawer and grabbed The Gazetteer, flicking through the alphabetical list to the appropriate page:

Owen Purchase, Viscount Rothbury, on inheritance of the title as the grandson of the cousin of the 13th viscount …

Gracious, the connection had been as distant as all the gossips were saying.

Principal Seat: Rothbury Chase, Somerset. Also Rothbury House in Clarges Street, Rothbury Castle, Cheshire, and five other estates in England …

In that respect at least, Tess thought, Owen Purchase’s endowments were not to be underestimated. He also had an income from those estates that was reckoned to be in excess of thirty thousand pounds per annum, which was not outrageously rich but not to be sneezed at either. There was more invested in the stock market. He was, of course, a mere viscount and so she already outranked him, but …

Tess put a stop on her galloping thoughts, placed The Gazetteer gently on the fat gold cushions of the sofa and stared fixedly at the rioting rose pattern on the Aubusson carpet. Her chest felt tight, her breath shallow. She was not sure that she was really considering what she thought she was considering. Viscount Rothbury as her next husband.

Normally she would not countenance such a marriage because Rothbury was not the sort of man she felt comfortable dealing with. He was too young, too handsome, too authoritative, too everything. But she was, if not a beggar, then certainly not in a position to choose. And Rothbury possessed several advantages. Marriage to him would remove the threat that Sidmouth posed, since not only would Rothbury be unable to testify against her, no one would suspect his wife of sedition in the first place. He was also powerful enough to protect her and the Darent twins from Lord Corwen. Plus of course his most priceless attribute was that he would not expect her to occupy the marriage bed.

There was only one flaw in her plan. She was sure that Rothbury already suspected her to be Jupiter, so if she were to approach him proposing marriage he would surely be very suspicious indeed. On the other hand, he had no proof or he would have arrested her already. If she were clever and careful she might be able to persuade him of her innocence. Plus Rothbury had little money and a keen need for some to repair his estates, and she was very, very rich. He might well be tempted enough by her fortune to marry her anyway.

Tess realised she was clenching her hands together so tightly that her nails were biting into her palms. There were, in truth, precious few other options open to her in the husband stakes.

With a quick, decisive gesture she picked up The Gazetteer and tucked it under her arm. If Rothbury had returned directly to Clarges Street, then he would be home by now. There was no time like the present. She had a call to make before her courage deserted her.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WAS IN FACT THREE HOURS before Tess was ready to go out, since to her time was a relative concept normally measured by how long it took her to dress. Usually she did not have a great deal of difficulty in selecting an outfit for any occasion. Today was different, however. It was seven years since she had made her last marriage proposal, to the Marquis of Darent. On that occasion she had worn holly-green and had been well pleased with her appearance. She was not sure Darent had noticed it, though. She suspected he might have dozed off during her proposal, overcome by a laudanum-induced stupor.

The thorny question of what to wear to make Lord Rothbury an offer he could not refuse was not so easy, however. After trying on a few outfits, she finally settled on a jonquil-yellow gown and matching bonnet. She was disturbed to see that when she checked her appearance in the pier glass she looked young and apprehensive, her blue eyes wide and dark and the faintest hint of nervousness in the tense line of her cheek and jaw. She stood straighter and tried to smile. It came out more as a grimace. Anxious was how she felt, unusual for her, but not how she wanted to look. With a sharp sigh of irritation she picked up her matching cloak and reticule and hurried out to the carriage.

Rothbury House was in Clarges Street, not far from Joanna’s home in Bedford Street and a most quiet and respectable address. The house itself looked dusty and shuttered although Rothbury had been living there for at least a year. It was interesting, Tess thought, that the viscount had not sought to make an impact on society when he came into his inheritance. It was the ton that had courted him rather than he seeking recognition from the ton.

The carriage halted. Tess clenched her fingers briefly inside her fur-lined gloves. There was a curious pattering of nervousness in her stomach. This, she reassured herself, was not in the least surprising. She had proposed to a man only three times before and none of those men had been anything like Lord Rothbury.

For a moment she sat frozen still on the carriage seat, wondering if she had made a terrible mistake in choosing the viscount. It was not too late. Except it was too late, for the carriage door had opened, allowing a swirl of cold autumnal air inside. It was no servant standing there, waiting to help her alight, but Rothbury himself. Evidently he had called elsewhere on his way back from Bedford Street for he was still in outdoor dress and looking impossibly broad shouldered and tall in the beautifully cut coat. He had taken off his hat and there were snowflakes settling in his tawny-brown hair.

“Lady Darent,” he said. “I had not expected to see you again so soon. What may I do for you?” His voice was smooth as honey, that deep drawl rubbing against her senses like silk. It would be very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by such mellow tones. And that, Tess thought, would be another big mistake. She did not want to be lulled into anything by Lord Rothbury. She needed her wits about her.

He extended a hand to help her out of the coach and after a moment Tess reluctantly took it. She did not want to touch him. She rarely touched anyone. Brokeby’s cruelty had bred in her revulsion for physical contact. No matter how impersonal the touch was she shrank from it.

Rothbury’s touch was not impersonal. His fingers closed about hers and Tess could not quite repress the tremor of awareness and apprehension that quivered through her. He felt it too; his eyes narrowed momentarily on her face, a perceptive flash of green. Tess felt the heat burn into her cheeks. She was blushing again, so rare an occurrence that she had almost forgotten how it felt. Except that around Rothbury it was not rare at all. She concentrated on descending the carriage steps neatly. Falling into his arms at this or indeed any other moment was not part of her plan.

Once her feet were firmly on the pavement, Rothbury released her and stood back, but his gaze was still fixed intently on her face. He was, Tess realised, still waiting for her reply to his question.

“There is a business proposition I would like to discuss with you, Lord Rothbury,” she said, “but not out here in the street.” Her voice was not quite as steady as she might have wished. It lacked authority and she hated that.

Rothbury bowed ironically. He looked completely unsurprised, as though his female acquaintances frequently appeared unannounced on his doorstep to discuss some sort of mysterious business. Perhaps they did, Tess thought. She had heard enough about his past as an adventurer to know that her unexpected arrival was probably the least exciting or unforeseen thing that had happened to him all year.

“Then please step inside.” He stood back to allow her to precede him up the steps and into the hall. Tess’s immediate impression was of darkness. The hall was so full of statuary and enormous china vases that she was afraid she might blunder into one of them in the gloom. The previous Lord Rothbury, she recalled, had been a scholar of ancient civilisations. The collection must represent some of his research. She repressed a shudder. The house felt as dry and lifeless as a museum display.

“A mausoleum, I know.” Rothbury’s voice cut through her thoughts, reading them with uncanny accuracy. “I have yet to decide what to do with it.” He glanced at her. “Did you ever meet my cousin, the previous viscount, Lady Darent?”

“Not that I recall,” Tess said. “I heard he was a prodigious academic, always travelling and adding to his collections.”

Rothbury nodded. “We shared a love of travel, he and I. It makes for a bond between us even though we never met.” He smiled. “I assume that you know the rest of my inherited family though—my great-aunts Ladies Martindale, Borough and Hurst?”

Tess looked up sharply. This was even better than she had imagined. Ladies Martindale, Borough and Hurst were a trio of the most fearsomely upright dowagers in society.

“Lady Martindale is a very high stickler—completely terrifying,” Tess said.

“Even to you?” Rothbury murmured. “I thought you impervious to the disapproval of society.”

He loosed his coat and handed it with a word of thanks to a butler who looked as though he was part of the statuary.

“Would you like Houghton to take your cloak, Lady Darent, or will your stay be of short duration?” There was gentle mockery in his voice.

Tess hesitated. The house was not cold but she felt as though she required the extra layers of protection her cloak gave her, rather like a suit of armour. The conviction beat in her mind that she was about to make a very serious mistake. Despite all of Rothbury’s advantages—impotence, respectable relatives—she could not quite get past her discomfort.

But whilst she had been thinking, he had taken her arm and steered her into the library. The double oak doors shut behind her with a stealthy snap and it felt like another trap closing.

“I apologise if you think me high-handed.” His smile stole her breath, something that happened so rarely to her that for a moment Tess wondered if the tightness in her chest meant that she was ailing. The charm of handsome men generally left her utterly cold.

Rothbury leaned back against the library doors, arms crossed, broad shoulders resting against the panels, another barrier to her escape.

“I am at your service,” he murmured, “whenever you are ready to acquaint me with this business proposition you have.”

Tess’s throat dried. “I wanted …” She groped for the words that had scattered like petals in the breeze. “That is, I thought …”

One dark brow rose quizzically as Rothbury surveyed her confusion.

“I came here—” Gracious, she had lost all her town bronze. This would never do.

“I came here to ask you to marry me,” she finished, with all the finesse of a tongue-tied schoolgirl. “In name only, that is. I wish for a marriage of convenience.”

Mortified, she stood pinned to the spot whilst a burning blush seemed to creep up from her toes to engulf her entire body. It was difficult to see how matters could have gone more painfully awry. She had wanted to be so cool, so composed. She had wanted to be herself, Teresa, Dowager Marchioness of Darent, poised and self-assured. Instead, this man had taken all her confidence and turned it inside out. She should have known not to engage in this dangerous game of using Rothbury for his name and his protection, because any moment now he would call her bluff, accuse her of sedition and very likely have her thrown in the Tower of London.

Rothbury was silent for a very long moment. Finally, when Tess was about to stammer an apology and climb out of the window in her desperation to escape, his shoulders came away from the door and he started to move towards her. Panic gripped her by the throat as he drew closer to her. There was something about his physical presence that was so powerful, so authoritative, that it made her supremely uncomfortable. She did not feel threatened by him in the same way as she had by Brokeby, with that terrible fear that had made her skin crawl. Rothbury, she knew instinctively, was not a man who would ever hurt a woman. Even so his physical proximity filled her with unease.

Rothbury took her chin in his hand and turned her face to the faint light that penetrated the room from the long windows. Tess tried to remain still beneath his touch although the impulse to break away from him was strong. No one touched her. Ever.

“An extraordinary suggestion,” he murmured. “A marriage in name only. Why would you wish for that?” He allowed his hand to fall and Tess felt the relief swamp her, heady as wine, enough to turn her dizzy for a brief moment. Rothbury took a step away from her and then turned sharply back on his heel.

“It was not a rhetorical question,” he said.

Tess jumped. “Oh!” Her mind was a blank. Why had she not anticipated that Rothbury might ask that question—and a great many more difficult questions besides? She had hurried off to proposition him without laying the groundwork first. She should have realised that he was not the kind of man, like Darent before him, to accept such an arrangement without debate.

Rothbury was still watching her with one eyebrow raised in an odiously quizzical manner. And her mind was still blanker than a blank canvas.

“No doubt you will share your reasons with me before too long,” he said, still in the same gentle drawl. “Meanwhile, I have another question. This may seem impertinent, Lady Darent—vulgar, even—but I have to ask it.” He smiled. “What exactly is in this for me?”

OWEN HAD HAD A VERY entertaining ten minutes, possibly one of the most unexpected and interesting ten minutes that he had experienced in his entire life. He had received a number of marriage proposals over the course of his thirty-two years. Some had been from enterprising courtesans on the make, others from respectable young ladies seeking to escape the tedium of life in the schoolroom. One had been from a fabulously wealthy princess wanting to run away from an arranged marriage to a fellow royal. None had been as brazen as this proposal of a marriage of convenience from so notorious a widow who collected husbands with a similar reckless abandon to which King Henry VIII had gathered and shed his wives.

Owen had never imagined himself as anyone’s fourth husband. Until ten minutes before, the idea of marriage had been the last thing on his mind. And marriage to Teresa Darent, of all people … It was an absurd notion.

It was a fascinating notion.

What interested him in this moment was why Tess was asking. He had a very strong suspicion that she was playing a game of bluff and double bluff with him; she knew he suspected her of being Jupiter so she had come to defuse the threat he presented to her. Marriage was a hell of a way to do it. He admired her tactics. It was a daring move, risky but brilliant, demonstrating a breathtaking audacity. The decision he had to make was whether he was prepared to play her game, and all Owen’s gambling instincts told him to engage. He had been an adventurer all his life even if he now had the respectable cloak of a viscount’s title and fortune.

Owen had not expressed his doubts about Lady Darent and her role as Jupiter when he had met Lord Sidmouth that morning to discuss the events of the political meeting and riot. He was not sure what had held him silent; lack of evidence perhaps, the fact that he still only half believed it himself, or even a powerful feeling of protectiveness that made him want to defend Teresa Darent rather than condemn her. This last was as inexplicable as it was disturbing. He had no sympathy with the radical cause and he thought Jupiter no more than a dangerous criminal intent on destroying law and order. Yet still he had kept silent; something had held him back.

He was not the only man investigating the Jupiter Club, however. Sidmouth had plenty of men at his disposal—infiltrators, informers and spies as well as his formal investigators. Owen knew it could be only a matter of time before Jupiter was unmasked and the club destroyed. Tess would guess that too. So here she was, seeking protection.

“Most men would see marriage to me as a prize in itself and not ask for more.” Tess’s answer to his question was full of disdain. Her chin had come up. Owen repressed a smile. Ten generations of Fenner family pride was in those words. She made him feel as though he had committed a faux pas in even questioning her. Perhaps her previous three husbands had snapped her up before she had finished making the offer. Owen had heard that she had proposed to each and every one of them, that approaching her chosen prey was Tess Darent’s style, whether she had selected a man to be her husband or her lover. She did not wait to be asked. She was the one who did the hunting.

That was the gossip. The truth, Owen thought, was probably a deal more complicated. He was already coming to the conclusion that Teresa Darent was in almost all particulars the opposite of how she appeared.

At the moment, for example, he could tell that she was ill at ease. He sensed the nervousness that beat inside her, a fear that she was making strenuous efforts to hide behind a flawless facade. She had chosen to stand a good distance away from him, by the long windows that looked out across the terrace to the neat garden with its clipped box hedges and yew. The autumn day had taken a long time to brighten that morning and now the grey light was behind Tess, concealing as much as it revealed. Owen could not see her expression at all. She stood straight and still, like a pale flame in a dress of yellow silk that made her the only bright thing in a dull room. The gown should have clashed with the russet of her hair, so cunningly arranged beneath the matching bonnet, and yet it did not. Instead it was a breathtaking contrast, framing her face like a halo of fire. Each item of clothing she had chosen had been for obvious effect, and it worked. Owen knew nothing about fashion and cared less. He had an innate taste and wore his clothes with the sort of careless elegance that his valet deplored. Tess Darent, he thought, deployed her wardrobe like a weapon. She knew the value of appearance and the way it could give you protection as well as confidence.

He walked towards her very slowly, very purposefully, his footsteps ringing on the bare wooden boards of the library floor. There were no deep rugs or carpets here to soften the austerity of the room. Rothbury House had been woefully neglected under his cousin Peregrine, who had been widowed for years and had seldom been in England. All the Rothbury estates were in disrepair and would take thousands to renovate. Marriage to an heiress was an obvious solution, as his aunt Martindale had pointed out. If he wed and produced an heir, she had said, she would settle the Rothbury debts and pay for the estates to be restored.

Lady Martindale would not approve of Tess Darent as a bride. The idea of marrying a woman who would incur his great-aunt’s deepest disapproval pleased Owen, a small act of rebellion when he was hamstrung by so much of his new inheritance. It was not a good reason for marriage. He knew it. Yet it appealed to him.

He stopped when he was no more than a couple of feet away from Tess. Her violet-blue eyes met his very directly. There was now no nervousness in them. Owen wondered if he had imagined the tension he thought he had sensed in her. But no. He felt it again, and saw the way in which she stepped back, almost imperceptibly, to put more distance between them. She was withdrawing from him. Evidently she was not comfortable with physical proximity. Which was very odd indeed if the rumours about her were true.

“I doubt most men would see marriage to you as a prize if they are not permitted to sleep with you,” Owen said drily. “Forgive my plain speaking,” he added, seeing the flash of anger in her eyes. “I always find it best to be quite frank in discussions of an intimate nature.”

“I have never thought of marriage as an intimate matter,” Tess snapped. The pink colour had come into her face now. “I fear you have a sadly colonial view of the institution, Lord Rothbury. Marriage in the ton is for profit alone. You profit from my beauty and connections and I gain the protection of your name.”

“Forgive me again,” Owen said, “but is that an equal bargain?”

“No,” Tess said, “the bargain favours you by far. I would be the one compromising by marrying a mere viscount.”

“One does not need to possess a thoroughbred horse to admire its beauty,” Owen said.

Tess raised a haughty brow. “I beg your pardon? Is one of us an animal in your analogy?”

“And as for connections in the ton,” Owen continued, “I do not value them.”

“That is short-sighted of you,” Tess said. “So short-sighted I doubt you have the vision to appreciate your thoroughbred.”

Owen smiled. Oh, he appreciated her. She was beautiful enough to turn any man’s head. And at the very least, he thought, if he married her he would never be bored. Conversation with Tess Darent had the astringency of a dose of salts. Though no doubt she would say that a fashionable husband and wife spoke to one another as little as possible and preferably only via the servants.

“And your reputation?” he said. “Many men might balk at taking a wife with the sort of reputation for sin one would normally hope for in a mistress.”

Once again he had been brutally frank and he awaited her response with interest. Her defences were so perfectly in place, however, that he could discern not one flicker of emotion in her: no shock, no anger, nothing. She looked him over with that detached blue gaze he was starting to know.

“You,” she said, after a moment, “have a reputation as a pirate and a mercenary soldier. Most women would prefer such a man as a lover rather than a husband.”

Touché.

Owen inclined his head. “I was not a pirate, though I suppose you could say I was a mercenary soldier,” he admitted.

“Whereas I have never been a whore,” Tess said. The coolness of her response made him smile. She certainly had nerve. “And were we to wed,” she continued, “I would behave with the utmost propriety. I am marrying to try to rescue my reputation, so there would be no point in my sinking it further.”

“I feel I must point out,” Owen said, “that I found you climbing out of a brothel window last night.”

Her pansy eyes lit with mockery. “We were not betrothed last night, Lord Rothbury.”

He had to give her credit. She played the coolest hand of anyone he knew. Which was perfectly in keeping with a woman who might lead a secret life as a radical sympathiser, who carried a pistol in her reticule and who might well have been in Mrs. Tong’s brothel for purposes other than a night of debauchery.

He was intrigued. Owen admitted it to himself. He had a low threshold of boredom, the product of a lifetime of constantly moving onward and seeking new challenges. He had gone to sea when he was in his teens and had spent his life exploring, fighting and carving out a future. He liked unpredictability and risk. It was what made him feel alive.

Tess Darent was enough of a challenge for one man for an entire lifetime.

“Of course,” Tess said, very casually, “there is also my fortune. I am accounted very rich indeed.”

That got his attention. Owen realised that he had been vaguely aware that she was a wealthy widow but had no idea whether that meant she was merely plump in the pocket or wildly affluent.

“How rich?” he said.

Once again her blue gaze mocked his directness. “Over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds rich,” Tess said, frank as he. “Is that sufficient to tempt you, my lord, where my other advantages do not?”

Truth was he had already been deeply tempted. Now her words stole his breath.

“Extraordinary how very attractive a lady may suddenly become when she is adorned in gold,” Tess said, seeing his expression. “Now I am become a gift horse, in your analogy, or possibly a goose laying golden eggs.” But for all the dryness of her words there was a flicker of something else in her eyes that looked like disappointment. Owen wondered if she had wanted him to accept her for herself alone. It seemed unlikely that she would care.

“I cannot deny that a fortune of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds is a strong inducement,” he said.

“Well, at least you would never lie to me and pretend you cared more for my charming person than you did for my money,” Tess said, still dry. “You may be famously blunt, Lord Rothbury, but actually I prefer it. It saves trouble in the end.”

“Then perhaps we will deal well together,” Owen said. Their eyes met and he felt a flare of awareness, an attraction that was most certainly for her rather than for her fortune.

“You mentioned that you wished to marry to save your reputation,” he said. He gestured to a chair. “Why don’t you tell me more?”

She hesitated. There was real vulnerability in her face now and it was so unexpected that it touched Owen more than he wanted, more than he had expected. He had wondered if she had been using her desire to repair her reputation as a convenient excuse for marriage but now he saw that she was sincere. The problems she faced, whatever they were, were huge and they distressed her deeply.

“Please,” he said, still waiting for her to take a seat. “You can trust me.” He had moderated his tone before he realised it, gentleness sweeping away his previously rather abrasive frankness. He smiled ruefully to himself. Tess Darent’s skill at disarming a man was formidable. If he were not careful he would soon forget she was a dangerous political renegade and be taken completely off his guard.

This time she sat, perching upright on the edge of one of the hard library seats as though she half expected it to explode beneath her. Given the state of the springs this seemed a distinct possibility. Owen found himself studying the delicate line of her throat and jaw, a delicacy that seemed at odds with the stubbornness of her chin and the determination in her eyes. Tess Darent, it seemed, was all contradiction.

“My late husband, Lord Darent, took out a loan,” she began. A shade of exasperation touched her voice now. “His creditor is demanding payment.”

“Marriage is a rather extreme way to settle a debt,” Owen said, taking the seat across the table from her. “You could try the moneylenders first. And anyway, you have just told me that you are obscenely rich. Surely you can pay?”

“There is nothing obscene about my fortune.” Her tone was hard. “But you misunderstand me, my lord. It is not money Lord Corwen demands.”

“What then?” Owen said. He watched her face and felt a jolt of shock at what he saw there. “You?” he said. The possessive anger caught him unawares as it leapt and burned within him. He leaned forwards. “He wants you in settlement of the debt?”

She was already shaking her head. Her face beneath the brim of the bonnet was shadowed, her expression hidden. “No.” She took a deep breath as though she had to steel herself to force out the words. “He demands payment in the form of marriage to my stepdaughter.” Her face crumpled into disgust and a sort of despair. “Sybil is currently at school in Bath. She is a mere fifteen years old. Corwen wishes to wed her next year on her sixteenth birthday.” She raised her eyes to his. “You should understand that his lordship is seven and forty and that he requires a wife who is biddable and—” a shudder shook her “—innocent. He will take her in return for cancelling the debt.”

Owen felt a rush of revulsion. He stared at her, brows lowered. “But that is grotesque, monstrous. Surely—” He had been going to say that surely it could not be true, but he recognized the words were hollow.

Tess met his eyes. He could see something there that was deeper than abhorrence at Corwen’s behaviour, something of pain and grief that was sharp as an imprint on her soul. He glimpsed it in a second’s brief flash and then the expression was gone and he wondered if he had imagined it.

“Surely you have refused him,” he said.

“Of course.” Suddenly she looked tired. “I have offered to pay the debt in full but he has declined. Instead he threatens to ruin Sybil’s future. A word here and there that, like her stepmother, she is not virtuous….” She shrugged eloquently. “You know how fragile a young lady’s reputation can be, my lord. A debutante’s reputation is not like a lost reticule—it cannot be replaced. Once gone it is lost forever.”

“Corwen can have no grounds to slander her,” Owen said.

Tess shook her head. “Of course not,” she said, very quietly. “But it is my poor reputation that will taint Sybil’s life unless I can prevent it. Corwen will point to me as the worst of bad influences. He will say that I had the upbringing of Sybil for five years, that I am corrupt and that my immoral ways must surely have contaminated her. And he will be believed because people prefer to think the worst.” Suddenly her tone was fierce, ringing with sincerity. “I will never let that happen to Sybil. She deserves better than that. Her father left both his children in my care and I will not fail them.”

Owen got to his feet. He understood now Tess’s earlier pledge to behave with absolute propriety should they wed. She had made her choice: marry, gain a modicum of respectability and protect her stepchildren. To do so she would need to abandon any wild behaviour and become a pattern card of propriety. Owen wondered if she would be able to keep the bargain.

His lips twisted. “You wish me to be your fig leaf, Lady Darent,” he said, “to make you appear respectable.”

Tess laughed, a real laugh full of genuine amusement. Those pansy-blue eyes warmed, full of mischief. It startled Owen to see her in so unguarded a moment. Startled him, but pleased him as well. He found that he wanted to know more of this real Tess Darent away from the bright, brittle pretence. He wanted it a great deal. The intensity of his hunger for it was another shock.

“My fig leaf,” Tess said. “How very picturesque a description, my lord.”

“And how appropriate, since it seems that your clothes are always coming off,” Owen said. “At the brothel, in those paintings by Melton that everyone is talking about …”

The light died from her eyes. “I concede that that is certainly how it appears,” she said. She sounded cold now, lifeless. She shifted on the chair. “The paintings are from a collection belonging to my second husband,” she said. “They were never intended to be on show to the public, but—” she shrugged “—Mr. Melton must make his fortune as he sees fit.”

That shrug, Owen thought, covered more than a little distaste and a healthy dose of anger. Teresa Darent might pretend aristocratic indifference towards Melton and his impudence in making his fortune from her body, but Owen could sense that she had been deeply hurt and offended by it. Once again his protective instincts stirred. He reined them in sharply.

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