Authors: Julia Ross
The duke's son grinned. Lead powder creased, showing
the dark flesh beneath. "Then let us have a wager over a woman! What say
you, Sir Reginald? Name any wench in the country and Gracechurch will have her
favors by Friday."
Denby's color deepened. "He will not, sir -
if Ι name the wench!"
"Then we have a new challenge." Lord
Edward opened his betting book. "Well, Gracechurch? Do you agree? Α
little rutting should present you with no difficulty. Let Denby name the lady.
Succeed with her and Ι will pay off these vowels, Denby's as well as my
own. Fail and pay us in full next Saturday morning-with some amusing further
forfeit of my own choosing, perhaps? You approve, Sir Reginald?"
"I’m game, sir!" Glass clinked as Denby
poured himself more wine. "And a further five thousand against his
success, for Ι warrant he’ll fail with the Jezebel Ι have in
mind."
Alden folded the absurd little square of linen
with its impudent edging. Flames sparked in his rings, family heirlooms. He
noticed them with poignant regret.
"Failure is not in my vocabulary, Sir
Reginald, yet Ι am aquiver with curiosity. What creature would you like me
to ravish to redeem my debts?"
"One Ι can guarantee will resist."
"Then she is virtuous? Don't say you're
about to name me a virgin? Ι am charmed."
Denby scratched under his wig with an ivory wand
he kept for the purpose. "It wasn't a virgin Ι had in mind."
Alden stood up to hide his relief.
Nausea clouded his brain. Absurd, in the face of
the enormity of this - the deadly slips of paper that represented everything he
owned and a great deal more that he didn't. Yet now there was a chance. It
wasn't over. What matter if Denby named a hag or a harlot? As long as he wasn't
expected to ruin some innocent girl!
"Perhaps you should name me a wife?"
Alden said.
"Who could resist such glorious temptation?"
Lord Edward showed discolored teeth. "Is there a wife left in the shires
that you haven't already sampled at one time or another?"
Alden bowed. "What a magnificent reputation
to have, to be sure! You put very little trust in the fidelity of wives, Lord
Edward."
"Lud! Ι put no faith in the institution
of marriage, sir. Neither, obviously, do you, since neither of us has been fool
enough to get leg-shackled. "
"Indeed," Alden said. "Why marry a
wife of your own when you may enjoy someone else's? Obviously you agree, Sir
Reginald?"
"She's not a wife either," Sir Reginald
Denby said doggedly. "She's a widow. Lives in the village by Marion Hall -
my country seat, don't you know."
Shadows leaped as Lord Edward's laugh broke up
into hiccups of merriment. "Plague take me! You're the very devil, Denby!
The very devil! Α glorious wager! So, Gracechurch? What do you say? You
may take back your vowels and another five thousand, if you can tup this relict
- willing or no' - by midnight on Friday."
"Alas, Ι only take my women willing,
Lord Edward." Alden bowed from the waist, with an ostentatious flourish of
his handkerchief. "Just a personal quirk - like preferring my hair
without powder - an odd whim, but mine own."
Denby's face shone scarlet. "If you want her
willing, Ι guarantee you'll lose."
"Oh, no. He'll win." Lord Edward winked
over his wineglass. "No one can resist him."
"She's not had a man in her bed in five
years-"
"But not for want of them all trying!"
The duke's son was still chortling. "You had your attempt at her, didn't
you, Denby? Even proposed marriage, you told me, and just for the sake of her
eyes, damn it all!"
His heels rapped on the floor as Alden walked to
the window. "You also know the lady, Lord Edward?"
"Only by hearsay, sir. Hearsay. Yet they say
she's a peach, a veritable peach, and not more than five-and-twenty. Ι
begin to envy you the wager."
"Damme, sir!" exclaimed Denby.
"She's hard as stone at the core."
"But sweet-fleshed." The heart-shaped
patch creased. "No doubt, like a peach, very sweet-fleshed."
Denby looked stubborn. "How is Gracechurch's
success or failure to be proved?"
"You don't think my word sufficient?"
Alden asked. "Would you rather have the lady's?"
"No doubt she will find the experience
delectable," Lord Edward replied. "And would tell the tale with a
great many sighs and blushes. But then again, perhaps she is shy. Didn't you
tell me the widow wears a locket, Sir Reginald?"
"Never without it."
The duke's son set down his glass. "Then
also secure us the locket, Gracechurch."
"And wager your rings for that," Denby
added.
Relief flooded through Alden's blood. Denby
didn’t realize his father's rings were already lost? They must think him
wealthy beyond measure. Yet his pulse thundered, promising the devil of a head
in the morning.
"For the locket, or as a pledge that Ι
don't run off to Paris? My dears, for so amusing a wager, you could recall me
from paradise."
"Ι imagine paradise awaits in the
lady's bed." Lord Edward began to write in his betting book. "Here is
the wager, Gracechurch: bed this widow at Marion Hall by midnight on Friday Sir
Reginald must allow you to enter the house with her, of course - and bring us
the locket the next day. Then we'll forgive this small matter." He indicated
the table with its scattering of cards and pledges of payment. "Agreed?''
Alden's reflection shimmered in the windowpanes:
high-instep shoes of silver silk with gilt heels; white silk stockings;
gold-and. ivory striped breeches that fastened below the knee with silver
buttons; the long waistcoat embroidered in gold thread on ivory satin; his
wide-skirted, gold-and-ivory coat and the amusing little dress sword.
All of it accented by lace.
Avalanches of magnificent lace.
His manservant had set curls above each ear with
a hot iron tying the rest of his hair back with a black ribbon. His small
affectation. No wig. No powder. Just his own pale yellow hair, absolutely
clean. It shone like the precious metals on his finger and sword hilt.
Α fortune he didn't possess displayed on his
body.
The effect was deliberate. More subtle than the
chain mail of his ancestors, but just as important.
Would this widow be impressed?
The steady ticking of a clock dropped into the
silence. The tables had always been his friend, his only promise for the future
before tonight. Before tonight and the mysterious tumble over the edge, the
loss of balance, the inexorable slide into ever more desperate play and losses
so absolute that he might as well have wagered his life.
Like a fox trapped in its den, he had been left
without options.
It seemed suddenly absurd and unreal, as if a
child pulled off a pretty mask to reveal a gargoyle. His wealth, such as it
was, his house and his rings for a woman's locket-and her virtue, if she had any.
"I am enchanted by the notion," he
said. "Of course, Ι agree."
Sir Reginald leaned forward. "Your rings,
sir."
He had worn them since his father's death. Alden
stripped the rings from his fingers and tossed them onto the table. If he lost
this wager, Sir Reginald Denby would need to get them enlarged to fit over his
fat knuckles-and Lord Edward Vane would see him to perdition.
She's a peach, a veritable peach. Not more than
five-and-twenty.
Turning away, Alden flung up the sash and leaned
out into the black night.
Cool air washed over his face, but it was not
enough to calm the rapid thump of his heart or clear the dizziness in his
brain.
"May Ι ask the lady's name, Sir
Reginald?"
"Mistress Juliet
Seton."
Juliet.
Alden had never known a Juliet, but he didn't
like the name. It seemed sentimental. And, of course, doomed to tragedy.
"I’ faith, a devil of a wind blows up,"
he observed casually. "Ι do believe it comes on to rain."
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS Α MODEST ENOUGH HOUSE, ALMOST Α
COTTAGE, RED brick under a thatched roof, tucked back from the main street of
the village behind a stand of elms.
Alden leaned on the garden gate and surveyed it.
Α three-cornered hat was tucked under his
arm and a plain brown riding coat replaced the gold-and-ivory brocade. He had
left his tired hack at the village inn. The Three Tuns was a rustic enough
place, sanctuary for a handful of locals guzzling ale. Alden had taken the one
guest room upstairs. At least the bed, being generally unused, seemed empty of
fleas, though the landlord had been oddly unresponsive to the discreet
inquiries of a stranger.
In some lost hour of the night he had returned to
his townhouse and been sick. Shaking like a reed, he'd washed his head and
hands in a basin that belonged now to another man and missed his rings.
Whatever he touched - even his razor and hairbrushes - if he lost this wager,
none of it was his any longer.
Was he left with anything? Did any skill remain
he could trust?
It hadn't even come on to rain. The dry roads had
rung hollow for the thirty miles from London to the village of Manston Μingate,
the home of Mistress Juliet Seton. The air was oppressive, the sun a hot haze
in unforgiving summer skies.
Less than five miles farther, Sir Reginald Denby's
seat at Marion Hall, with its grandiose pillars and white facade, dominated the
countryside. It was another ten miles to Alden's own home, Gracechurch Abbey,
now at risk of being lost forever.
Bed this widow by Friday or be ruined.
Ruin.
It was a word one heard bandied almost casually
about the clubs of St. James's, as if it had no stark reality to it, the way a
man might joke about a skeleton in the family closet, never expecting that one
day he would open a forbidden door and be engulfed in the fall of rattling
bones. Now it yawned like the open grave, a pit of humiliation and degradation.
Ruin meant exile - eking out one's dishonorable
days in a foreign garret - or death. Death by one's own hand, preferably with
a pistol, abandoning one's obligations and dependents, leaving one's friends
the unpleasant task of finding the results. Why the hell was that considered an
honorable option? .
So the skeleton must be packed up and buried. Any
alternative was unthinkable. Lord Edward Vane had offered him the way out,
though God knew why. For Alden had never yet failed in the pursuit of a woman.
It was his avocation, his pleasure, almost his calling.
He liked women.
The gate creaked under his hand.
His boots carried a coating of dust from his walk
up the street. In his elegant coach with the family escutcheon on the door, his
luggage and his valet had traveled on to Gracechurch Abbey without him. Alden
had wanted the fresh air and the brutal exercise of riding, but to arrive here
without fanfare had also seemed the wisest course of action, though he wasn't
sure why. Just an intuition and the knowledge that Lord Edward Vane would
least expect it.
So what could he discover about the widow from
her home?
Α rambling rose ran wild over the front
porch. Thorned tendrils wrapped lovingly around the windows. Flowers of all
descriptions clustered in random masses in the garden, divided only by worn
brick paths. Behind a group of bee skeps, orderly rows of vegetables and berry
bushes marched along each side of the house. So she cultivated food and perhaps
from necessity. There was a shabby look to the thatch and shutters that spoke
of a restricted purse.
Three cats - one white, one ginger and one tabby
- were sunning themselves on the brick, images of contentment.
He looked again at the rose. Was her nature
revealed by that wanton growth, or by the sober, practical carrot tops and
staked green beans? He had learned just enough at the inn to know that any
excuse to make her acquaintance would send him away with a flea in his ear.
Denby and Lord Edward obviously thought her an impossible target for seduction.
Why?
Would the gaze of this Juliet - like the
snake-haired Gorgons - turn a man into stone?
Alden had learned only that she was not devoted
to religion, nor known to be in love with another man. What other reason could
she have not to take a lover?
He smiled as two rather indelicate memories
fought for his attention.
The widow who'd wanted to be a nun had tried to
reform him. In the end she had changed her mind instead of his and proved
rapacious in bed. Then, when she'd discovered that Alden refused to declare
undying love, she had taken all that unholy enthusiasm straight into the arms
of a new husband.
After a very gentle campaign of flattery and
flirtation, the second lady had been suddenly, desperately, willing, and he
had wanted her with equal ferocity. Alas, half naked in his arms she had sobbed
her confession: she did love the other man - her husband. It had taken a strong
dose of nobility, but Alden had sent her back to her marriage untouched.
Fortunate now, he supposed, for it had left him temporarily without a mistress.