“Who is that woman?” Arabella asked, motioning.
Her aunt followed her gesture and caught her breath as she turned Arabella away. “That is Simone Stanhope and you should steer clear of her.”
“Why?” Arabella asked, glancing over her shoulder toward the woman again. “What’s wrong with her?”
She had already guessed some of the answer. After all, ladies didn’t go around having passionate encounters in the middle of public gardens, did they?Did they?
“She’s a courtesan,” her aunt whispered. “An infamous one. Ladies like you shouldn’t involve yourself in such things. Shouldn’t ask about women like that. Your father would be enraged.”
Arabella nodded slowly. She’d heard vaguely of courtesans and lightskirts. Almost always in negative and desperate terms. Their lives were used as threats. If she didn’t come to heel she’d end up making her living on her back like a whore. The very man who threatened her with that end was the same one who would sell her to further himself.
Even now he was coming back across the crowd, false smile bright on his expression, a man at his side. Arabella didn’t know who her father’s companion was, it didn’t really matter. They were all the same. Selfish men like her father. Men who wanted to buy her virginity and her youth and her assumed ability to breed them sons so they could continue their lines. Men who were three times her age and leered at her outwardly.
Her father stopped before her and introduced her to the man in question. Arabella nodded and smiled and pretended to give a damn, even though she didn’t truly pay attention. How could she when thoughts of that man and woman in the alcove haunted her.
Despite being pinned against a wall, Simone Stanhope hadn’t seemed trapped. She hadn’t seemed miserable. She hadn’t seemed to be out of control. She’d been free to throw her head back and moan so passionately that her pleasure couldn’t have been mistaken by a great many people around her, not just Arabella.
And Arabella was chided not to laugh too loudly.
She gave her head a tiny shake and then jumped when fireworks began to pop overhead. Their group turned to look at them, admire their beauty, Arabella felt their concussive explosions shaking her to her very soul. It seemed the night for such things, for realizations that once made couldn’t be unmade.
The biggest of those was that she didn’twantthe life her father had planned for her. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She’d known that from the beginning, hadn’t she? No, what she knew for the first time was what she wanted instead. Not to find some other gentleman who was more palatable to marry and who would ultimately control her just as the men her father chose would do. Not to give away her passions to someone who would put all his effort into breaking her so she would be a more proper lady.
She wanted what she’d seen tonight in the alcove. To live her life with freedom, to make her money off her own choices. To be able to laugh and moan too loudly for proper ears and to dance until dawn in the morning with as many men as she wished.
She glanced again at Simone Stanhope, who was watching the fireworks with a small group of her own. The man who had taken her was not with them. Simone stared up at the night, her face clear and bright and lined with a power that Arabella had never seen any woman in her life be allowed to possess. This woman wasn’t a broodmare whose entire existence was meant to make a man happy and comfortable.
She was a goddess.
No, Arabella Comerford was not going to marry some old man to please her father. She wouldneverwork to please him again. She would instead forge her own future, release her wild heart and damn the consequences of it all.
CHAPTER1
1813
Six Years Later
Silas Windham hadn’t been to the Donville Masquerade in six years, yet he found it much the same as he remembered it with its unapologetic celebration of pleasure and sin. He’d been in America all that time—running, his siblings would call it. And he would snort and deny it, but in his heart he knew it was true. Hehadbeen running for almost every day since he’d left London.
Of course, none of that mattered. He’d returned to the city a week ago now, and had been trying to find some way to ease back into his old life and finding it ill-fitting. Like he’d changed too much and his old clothes no longer fell around him as they should. Perhaps he had at that. When he looked around the great hall at the people flirting and teasing and often fucking, he felt little stir of longing. Once that had been his currency.
“Is that Silas?MySilas?”
He turned at the female voice calling out to him and couldn’t help but smile as his tangled emotions faded a fraction. “Simone,” he said as his former lover reached him and leaned in to kiss first one cheek then the other. He took both her hands and shook his head. “You haven’t aged a day.”
It wasn’t a pretty lie. Somehow she hadn’t. Although Simone was more than half a decade older than his thirty years, her dark hair and eyes were just as bright, there was not an additional wrinkle to her cheek. It seemed her life of joyful excess suited her.
“You are a flatterer, my dear,” she said, and slid her arm through his.
From any other woman, especially a courtesan like this one, he would have thought this was her trying to make a physical connection to perhaps land him again now that he was back in London. But Simone had always been as good a friend as she was a lover.
“How long has it been?” she asked.
“Six years,” he said, and refused to add that he could actually mark the time down to the day, the hour almost. Not because Simone had been so very important to him, but because just hours after his last heated encounter with her something had happened to him that had been life changing.
“Too long,” she said. “How are you, then? Are you home to see your brother?”
He tensed a little and pulled away from her grip. She let him go and no reaction to that rejection registered on her lovely face. “Yes,” he said, short but hopefully not cruel. He simply had no interest in getting into that topic with anyone. “But how are you?”
