PROLOGUE
“Oi. Mail.”
This was the only warning that Hector Ferrars received before Ramsay Becham, the one man that Hector could truly call a friend, threw a small paper packet in his direction.
This was a particularly dangerous move, as Hector was standing over a hot forge, but he snatched the paper out of the air before it could be singed. He shot his friend a scowl, but Ramsay just chuckled, waved a hand over his shoulder, and left the blacksmith’s forge, off to annoy someone else.
Hector dusted off his hands, not that it did much to move the streaks of ash that perpetually coated his skin, and broke open … was that his father’s seal?
Except, as Hector learned as he read on, it wasn’t his father’s seal. At least not any longer.
His father was dead. For months now, apparently. And his younger brother was only seeing fit to write with the news now.
Which meant that Hector—for bloodymonthsnow—had been a duke and hadn’t even known it.
For some men, this might have been good news. It was an undisputed windfall, after all. It was the kind of shite that went into fairy stories for children—the blacksmith inheriting a dukedom.
But Hector was not that kind of man. He was the kind of man who crumpled the letter in his fist and threw it into the forge’s fire.
This was the news that he’d been dreading for—hell, for nigh on twenty years now. He’d known it would have to come eventually, but now that it was here …
He had to go to London. He had to go back to the south with all its falsehoods, with all those prim and proper smiles that hid the kind of cruelty that would lead parents to send away their own child, that would pit brothers against one another.
He looked at his ash-streaked hands and growled, “Duke of Metford … Duke of steel would be more fitting.”
CHAPTER 1
“You will want to smile, Lady Clio. Your reputation is already going to reach shore long before you do. You may wish to at leasttryto salvage things before it all gets away from you.”
Lady Clio Warson, sister to the Duke of Redcliff, was entirely certain that the look on her face could be most accurately described as agrimaceas she turned to face Lord Gwanton, but at least it was showing all of her teeth. That had to count for something.
“Ignore him,” Letitia Knightley, Clio’s former governess and current friend and chaperone, advised out of the corner of her mouth. “Look. We are almost in the dock. Soon we will be in London. Focus on that.”
“That might be more compelling to me if I actually wanted to return to London in the first place,” Clio muttered, sounding onlysomewhatbitter about it.
“You should have trusted that instinct,” Gwanton commented loudly. “You might have become accustomed to the rules of the Continent, my lady, but I fear that you will find London still has some morals and standards, unlike whatever it is that they get up to in France.”
“Belgium,” Clio corrected.
“Ignore him,” Letitia repeated.
But Clio hadtriedto ignore Gwanton. She’d been trying to ignore him since they’d left France days prior. She supposed she could only be grateful that he hadn’t been with them all the way from Belgium, as the coach that had taken them to the coast had been considerably smaller than the boat. Avoiding him aboard had been sufficiently difficult. He had been irritatingly impervious to her increasingly unsubtle brush-offs. She’d tried the cut direct, and thatstillhadn’t worked.
“But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” he went on. He was standing at what wastechnicallya respectable distance away, but he was more than making up for it by speaking at a deeply outlandish volume, “given therumors.”
“Don’t,” Letitia said resignedly, like she knew that Clio was going to ignore her advice.
And indeed, Clio did.
She whirled on Gwanton, whose face was twisted in a sneer. He really was a rather unattractive fellow, but not because of any of God’s gifts or lack thereof. It was his attitude that made him so unpleasant to look upon; he perpetually wore an expression as though he had recently smelled something revolting.
It was interesting, as that was generally how Clio felt, dealing with him, too.
“What,” she asked with all the ice in her voice that came from six centuries of aristocratic heritage, “could you possibly mean by that, my lord?”
The look in his eye was bright and acidic.
“I know that half thetonlikes to worship at the feet of the Lightholders like you are some kind of gods,” he sniped. “But those of us with decency—with good sense—withvirtue—we know differently. We see how you run dens of iniquity and bring fallen women into the fold, polluting the noblest houses in England with the blood of whores.”
