Chapter 1
Late Summer 1812
Ellis “Handsome” Maitland leaned back against the long bar, drink balanced in his hand as he scanned the wide, open room before him. It was a room he knew well, for he had hunted here at the Donville Masquerade for years. The notorious underground sex club was the perfect place for a man like Ellis to find lovers, find marks, find trouble.
Trouble had found him here, too. Not the harmless, fun kind. Therealkind. The kind that had destroyed too many lives. The kind he had to end now in the only way that made sense anymore. There would be consequences, but there always were. This time he wouldn’t be able to avoid paying them…and he had accepted that.
He slugged back his drink with a wince. A fissure of pain shot from his shoulder at the movement. He’d been injured there a few weeks before. The wound was healing but still ached. Only it wasn’t just physical sensation that made him flinch, as much as he’d like to pretend it was.Fearripped through his chest. Perhaps he hadn’tfullyaccepted the consequences that would come. But he was working on it.
Across the room, the big double doors carved with rutting lovers opened and a woman stepped through. Not all that shocking. After all, ladies made up nearly half the occupants of the room, seeking their pleasure with as much gusto as the men here did. Sometimes with more gusto, truth be told. It was a safe place to do so. Most everyone here wore masks, which gave all the attendees freedom to explore and surrender and play to their heart’s content. He wore one too and lifted his hand to touch the leather edge as he adjusted it.
What made the newcomer stand out was how little effort she put in to doing so. The ladies who came here were mostly experienced. Married women seeking what their husbands could not or would not provide, widows who refused to climb into a grave with their lost lovers, courtesans who sought the safety this club and its owner, Marcus Rivers, provided while they sold their wares for pleasure and enormous profit.
Everyone here had their role and their place, and as Ellis looked at the woman who had just entered the room, he realizedshedid not. It wasn’t that she didn’t try. She wore a mask, but unlike the other ladies who made a show with feathers and satin and jewels, the disguise was plain. Her gown was daring enough. The neckline dipped down, revealing the upper swell of a truly lovely pair of breasts, but it looked like she had merely altered an existing gown, perhaps removing some tulle or lace that had once offered more modesty when it was worn in a ballroom or a parlor. The gown was certainly not designed to attract in this den of sin. It hadbutterflieson the fabric, for God’s sake.
And then there was her demeanor. The lady stood stock-still just past the entryway and stared into the room, mouth open in just the slightest manner as she stared around her in what appeared to be shock.
Ellis had ceased to be shocked by anything in this world when he was eight. Jaded, his cousin always used to call him. Before Rook stopped speaking to Ellis weeks ago.
He shook his head and pushed that troubling thought away. Protecting those he cared about was why he was here. Not pretty ladies who were looking around the big room at couples pawing each other, suggestively dancing, rutting against the wall as others leered.
The woman across the room shifted, looking back toward the door behind her. But she didn’t run. She fisted her hands at her sides, and he watched her draw a long breath that lifted her breasts. Apparently gathered, she came farther into the room. So, there was steel in her. Courage. He respected that.
It had been a long time since Ellis had played the libertine. Once upon a time, it had been his greatest pleasure, his way to make a living. Love games were his expertise. He’d carefully chose a mark, one who needed what he provided and little more, or one whose bad behavior made his ultimate abandonment fit their prior crimes.
Then he seduced. He convinced. Ultimately, he fucked. Everyone left satisfied, at least physically, he with a heavier purse. But in the last year or so…he’d had no interest in such things. His only attempt at a seduction scheme had started and ended badly…with his cousin’s now-wife, Anne Shelley. Anne Maitland, he supposed, and winced at the thought.
The only flare ofrealdesire he’d felt in that time had risen at the most inopportune moment, with a woman who surely despised him. The new wife’s sister, actually. Juliana. Her very name was a benediction. A prayer Ellis sometimes woke saying in the night, hard as a rock as he remembered a brief moment when he’d held her in the midst of hell on earth.
But as he shook those thoughts away and stared at the woman at the door, he realized he wantedher. Justwantedher. Not for any ulterior motive, but because she had drawn his eye.
“Why not?” he muttered as he scanned the room another time and found it still devoid of the man he was hunting. “There won’t be many chances left for pleasure, after all.”
Those maudlin words hung in the air around him as he downed the remainder of his drink, set it behind him and shoved off the edge of the bar to stalk toward her.
She didn’t look like she fit here, but certainly she must. Women didn’t come to the Donville Masquerade unless they wanted the kind of pleasure innocents couldn’t fully understand. Her darting gaze and shifting body could very well be part of a game. Something a smart courtesan might do. Play the innocent. Bring in the bees through a different kind of sweetness than that of the experienced women who were moaning and pleading in the crowd around them. Hesitance had its beauty, after all. It made a man want to chase.
If this fetching woman wanted to play games, Ellis Maitland was the perfect man for her.
He edged closer, and she turned at his approach, lifting her gaze to his. He came to a sudden stop as he stared at those eyes. Eyes that he knew. Eyes that had haunted him for nearly a month, dancing into his dreams, digging him further into a hole he would never escape.
He knew those eyes. Knew their owner even though he’d only touched her once, held her once as she trembled in fear that was all his fault. The two of them had bled together. He, after being shot trying to protect her. She, after being sliced with a knife because he had failed. Even now, he saw the edge of a scar on her cheek peeking out from under the mask. He flinched at the sight of it and the proof it provided to his mystery woman’s identity.
Juliana Shelley.
But what was she doing here? What the hell wasshedoing standing in the middle of the Donville Masquerade, looking up at him with an expression of interest and fear, but not recognition?
Well, he was damned well going to figure that out. So he shrugged on a new mask, the one of “Handsome” Ellis Maitland. A persona he had come to hate as much as the physical mask that pinched the bridge of his nose as he smiled at her in false greeting.
Juliana Shelley couldn’t breathe. She knew how to breathe, of course. She must know how, she’d been doing it all her life. But she couldn’t seem to drag in air as the very tall, extremely well-favored man she’d noticed at the bar the moment she entered this place crossed the room toward her.
He couldn’t be coming forher, of course. Not when all around her far more experienced women offered things she’d been taught all her life to withhold. She was shocked by what she saw, in truth. Men and women grinding together in a titillating display of activities she had only ever read about in a naughty book she’d found in her father’s study months ago.
Being here was far more powerful than looking at those things, dreaming of them while she touched herself.
She swallowed hard because the man coming her way had stopped. He was just an arm’s length from her now, and he stared at her, seeking…something. She didn’t know what exactly, but she shifted under his regard.
He had a black leather mask covering the top half of his face, but she could see the almost navy blue of his eyes, the fullness of his lips, the harsh line of his jaw. His dark hair was a little too long and slashed across his forehead in a wild wave she somehow wanted to smooth.
