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CHAPTER ONE

“One hundred and fifty guineas.” The words came out in the low register Leonora had spent days practicing before her bedroom mirror, and she felt a small satisfaction that no one turned to stare.

This cravat is going to be the death of me.

The wool waistcoat felt less like a garment and more like a personal grievance, engineered by someone who had never once considered that a torso needed room to expand. Leonora shifted on the hard bench, wondering how any man drew a full breath without his buttons surrendering across the room. She had spent the last hour convinced the linen stock at her throat meant to finish her off slowly, and the padded shoulders of her coat left her feeling like a stuffed pheasant dressed for a harvest table.

If this was the daily armor of the privileged sex, she wanted to know why men were not weeping openly in the streets. Stays could compress a woman’s waist into an hourglass, true, and she had cursed them plenty in her time, but at least they did not make a woman look as though she had lost a fight with a laundry press. She had read enough natural history on her own to feel reasonably informed on the subject, and she was fairly certain none of it described anything as persistently cruel as a cravat tied one notch too tight.

A pin worked loose at her nape, and a lock of hair slipped free to settle against her ear. She blew upward, sharply, and it did not move.

Across the smoke-thick room, a gentleman in a charcoal coat lifted two fingers in the air and Leonora felt the irritation in her start to build.

“One hundred and seventy-five guineas,” he said.

Leonora narrowed her eyes at him. He had shadowed every bid since the gavel first fell, matching her with the same flick of the wrist each time, and she was beginning to suspect he found the whole exercise mildly entertaining rather than urgent, which was somehow worse. She lifted her paddle an inch higher than necessary.

“Two hundred guineas,” she countered.

More than anything, she needed to leave the auction house that evening with the necklace in her hand.

Let the gentleman across the room wonder why a slight young man in a coat too broad for his shoulders was so determined to empty his pockets over a bit of old silver and blue stone. She was not thinking of the murmur of rakehells and gamesters clustered near the bar pretending not to watch the bidding. She was thinking that the necklace under the chandelier’s light was the only piece of her mother she had left in the world, and that she had not spent a fortnight learning to walk like a man and tie a stiff linen stock like a valet simply to watch a stranger in a well cut coat carry it out the door.

Beneath the scratchy wool waistcoat and the layers of padding meant to mimic a broad masculine chest, her ribs ached from the effort of binding herself flat, a reminder of the perilous masquerade she was maintaining to secure a lost history. She did not let herself think further than that. There would be time later for the rest of it, for the parts of the story she kept even from herself on nights when the house was too quiet.

“Two hundred and twenty guineas,” the gentleman said.

Leonora let out a hiss that nearly popped the buttons off her waistcoat. She whipped her head around to glare at the source of the interruption, her eyes narrowing as she took in the man seated across the room. He was tall, lean, and possessed a severe, predatory sort of elegance that suggested he spent his entire life either plotting a hostile takeover or looking for someone to insult. With his brown hair, lean frame, and eyes that looked like they had personally witnessed the downfall of empires, he practically radiated the kind of wicked confidence that made honest folk want to lock their doors and hide the silver.

He was her shadow and she was determined to outrun him.

“Two hundred and fifty guineas!” She held her ground, holding her breath behind her teeth, praying to every saint in the calendar that the man would finally keep his mouth shut.

The auctioneer raised his wooden gavel. The room fell into a breathless hush. Leonora stared at the tray, her heart slamming against her ribs like a trapped sparrow. Finally. It would be hers. The necklace that served as the sole remaining thread to her mother, the single clue that had dragged her into this smoke-filled den of gentlemen, was about to be hers to hold.

“Going once, going twice...”

“Four hundred guineas.”

Leonora felt her soul detach from her body and float up toward the soot-stained rafters.

She died right there on the wooden bench. Who on earth drops four hundred guineas on an old piece of silver without blinking? She turned her head slowly, her eyes locking onto the other side of the room. The gentleman staring back at her was tall, with light brown hair that actually stayed neat without a pound of grease, and shoulders that did not need any stuffing inside his jacket, unlike her own clumsy padding. He looked far too refined for a shady auction house, wearing his coat with such grace, it made her feel ridiculous. He carried an infuriatingly charming, razor-sharp smile across his mouth as he watched her, and she supposed, in the interest of strict honesty, that he was handsome. Obscenely so, in fact, in the way that ought to be illegal in a room full of people trying to conduct business.

Not that she herself made a poor showing. Whatever this cravat was doing to her windpipe, she flattered herself that she cut a rather fine figure of a gentleman, all things considered… if one overlooked the padding doing most of the work where her shoulders were meant to be, and the boots that pinched, and the possibility that she was two shades past scarlet from the effort of breathing normally.

His smile was confusing. Why was he looking at her like that? He had no earthly reason to find a desperate young man in an oversized coat so intensely amusing.

Panic flared hot and bright in her veins. Three hundred guineas was the absolute maximum limit of the savings she had scraped together, squirrelled away through months of strict frugality and desperate planning for this exact charade. She did not have four hundred guineas. She did not have three hundred and fifty. She had reached the end of her financial tether, and the gap between her pockets and the auctioneer’s table was wide enough to swallow a carriage. Perhaps she should just give up. Perhaps this was where the grand, foolish adventure ended in utter humiliation.

But before her brain could send a single warning signal to her mouth, her arm shot straight up into the air.

“Seven hundred guineas.”

A collective gasp swept through the room, a chorus of indrawn breaths and stunned muttering. Leonora immediately yanked her head down, staring fixedly at her own boots while her mind dissolved into terror. What had she just done? She did not have the ghost of seven hundred guineas. If the hammer dropped right now, she would be unmasked, arrested, and likely thrown into a debtor’s prison where they fed inmates watery gruel and disappointment.

“Seven hundred guineas,” the auctioneer repeated, his voice trembling slightly with disbelief as he scanned the room. “Going once. Going twice... Sold to the gentleman in the corner for seven hundred guineas.”

Leonora swallowed hard, her throat turning completely dry as dust.