Chapter 1
London, The Haymarket
June 1820
The darkness thrummed with anticipation. Arousal and bloodlust swirled through the air like the foul-smelling smoke from the gentlemen’s cheroots.
Men in formal evening dress stood shoulder to shoulder with tradesmen in homespun jackets and baggy trousers; breathless women clustered like bouquets of hothouse flowers near the scarlet cords marking off the ring at the center of the tavern.
Some were swathed in high-necked silk and lace while others sported the low-plunging décolletage of the demimonde.
It was a jumble of people who would never rub elbows under any other circumstances, but here, they all had one thing in common.
To a one, every single person was masked.
House rules of The Nemesis.
Bess Pickford lifted a trembling hand to check that her plain black domino mask still covered the top half of her face.
She was no fancy highborn lady, but it wouldn’t do to be recognized here. She might have come to London hoping for a little taste of adventure before she settled down to the rest of her life in the sleepy Wiltshire village of her birth, but even in her wildest imaginings, Bess never could’ve dreamed up this place.
The Nemesis, a back-alley tavern nestled amongst the artists’ garrets, portrait galleries, shops and theaters of the Haymarket, was known to serve a good quality brown ale and a well-dressed pullet with pease porridge for a very reasonable price during the day.
By night, however, as the curtains came down and the theaters and opera houses disgorged their throngs of pleasure-seekers into the streets, The Nemesis became something else.
Something dangerous. Forbidden. Exciting.
Bess, who was quite possibly the least exciting person she knew, wondered if she’d made a huge mistake in coming here.
Tension gripped her, a vision of the previous evening rising to the surface of her mind.
The darkened kitchen, lit only by firelight. The strange, heated intimacy of the shadows, the labored breathing of the man clutching his side at the big, marble-topped worktable—the pounding of her own blood when she raised the bottom of his white linen shirt to expose the sluggishly bleeding cut along his lower ribs…and also exposed the taut muscles of his abdomen and the arrow of dark hair leading down into his buckskin trousers.
She shook herself free of the memory. Not for you, she reminded herself sternly. He’s a duke, and a miserable son of a bitch besides, too high in the instep to condescend to even look at a woman like you.
Unless he needed her help. Like last night, when he’d stumbled into the kitchen in obvious pain, and she had insisted on tending his mysterious wound.
Over the excited hum of conversation and breathless tension in the tavern, Bess heard again the sound he’d made deep in his chest when she’d torn a strip from her own petticoat to wind round his heaving rib cage. The feel of his skin beneath her fingers as she tied the knot, hot and smooth and supple and alive.
Closing her eyes, Bess blew out a breath. This was exactly why she’d come to The Nemesis tonight.
If she was getting flustered by an encounter with the cold, unfeeling Duke of Ashbourn, she was in a right state.
Bess ignored the inner voice that pointed out Ashbourn had felt the opposite of cold under her hands, and the look in his intently focused eyes as he watched her…
Enough. Ashbourn was a gentleman. A duke. He’d have his pick of the virginal debutantes of the Season, but Bess Pickford was no debutante.
Nor was she a virgin, as it happened.
She’d come to London to help her friends, but she’d also promised herself an adventure while there.
Tonight, she intended to finally fulfill that promise. Before she lost her head and threw herself away on pining after the Duke of Ashbourn.
She wasn’t looking for a gentleman—in fact, quite the reverse.
Bess needed a scoundrel.
That was why she’d come to The Nemesis. That was why she stood alone near the back wall, waiting for the entertainment to begin, not sure what she should even expect, but knowing that this was the most scandalous adventure she could possibly have chosen because The Nemesis wasn’t an ordinary tavern.
