London, February 1881
he brash American chit had nothing to do with dynamite. Sebastian would wager his life upon it. He watched her from across the crush of the Beresford ball as she flirted with the Earl of Bolton. He was trained to take note of every detail, each subtle nuance of his quarry’s body language.
Studying her wasn’t an unpleasant task. She was beautiful. A blue silk ball gown clung to her petite frame, emphasizing the curve of her waist as it fell in soft waves around lush hips down to a box-pleat-trimmed train. Pink roses bedecked her low décolletage, drawing the eye to the voluptuous swells of her breasts. Her golden hair was braided and pinned at her crown, more roses peeking from its coils. Diamonds at her throat and ears caught the light, twinkling like a beacon for fortune hunters. She wore her father’s obscene wealth as if it were an advertisement for Pears soap.
Everything about her, from the way she carried herself, to the way she dressed, to her reputation, bespoke a woman who was fast. Trouble, yes. But not the variety of trouble that required his intervention.
She tapped Bolton’s arm with her fan and threw back her head in an unabashed show of amusement. Her chaperone—a New York aunt named Caroline—was absent from the elegant panorama of gleaming lords and ladies. Dear Aunt Caroline had a weakness for champagne and randy men, and provided with sufficient temptation, she disappeared with ease.
Sebastian wasn’t the only one who was aware of the aunt’s shortcomings, however. He’d been watching Miss Daisy Vanreid for weeks. Long enough to know that she didn’t have a care for her reputation, that she’d kissed Lords Wilford and Prestley but not yet Bolton, that she only smiled when she had an audience, and that she waited for her aunt to get soused before playing the devoted coquette.
As he watched, Miss Vanreid excused herself from Bolton, hips swaying with undeniable suggestion as she sauntered in the direction of the lady’s withdrawing room. Sebastian cut through the revelers, following her. Not because he needed to—tonight would be the last that he squandered on chasing a spoiled American jade—but because he knew the Earl of Bolton.
His damnable sense of honor wouldn’t allow him to stand idly by as the foolish chit was ravished by such a boor. Wilford and Prestley were young bucks, scarcely any town bronze. Manageable. Bolton was another matter. Miss Vanreid was either as empty-headed as she pretended or her need for the thrill of danger had dramatically increased. Either way, he would do his duty and by the cold light of morning, she’d no longer be his responsibility.
He exited the ballroom just in time to see a blue train disappearing around a corner down the hall. Damn it, where the hell was the minx going? The lady’s withdrawing room was in the opposite direction. His instincts told him to follow, so he did, straight into a small, private drawing room.
He stepped over the threshold and closed the door at his back, startled to find her alone rather than in Bolton’s embrace. She stood in the center of the chamber, tapping her closed fan on the palm of her hand, her full lips compressed into a tight line of disapproval. Her chin tipped up in defiance. He detected not a hint of surprise in her expression.
“Your Grace.” She curtseyed lower than necessary, giving him a perfect view of her ample bosom. When she rose with equal elegance, she pinned him with a forthright stare. “Perhaps you’d care to explain why you’ve been following me for the last month.”
Not empty-headed, then. A keen wit sparkled in her lively green gaze. He regarded her with a new sense of appreciation. She’d noticed him. No matter. He relied upon his visibility as a cover. He flaunted his wealth, his lovers. He played the role of seasoned rake. Meanwhile, he observed.
And everything he’d observed thus far suggested that the vixen before him needed to be put in her place. She was too bold. Too lovely. Too blatantly sexual. Everything about her was designed to make men lust. Lust they did. She’d set the ton on its ear. Rumor had it that her cunning Papa was about to marry her off to the elderly Lord Breckly. She appeared to be doing her best to thwart him.
He fixed her with a haughty look. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
She gave a soft, throaty laugh that sent a streak of unwanted heat to his groin. “You mean to rely on your fine English manners now when you’ve been watching me all this time? How droll, but I already know who you are just as you must surely know who I am.”
His gaze traveled over her, inspecting her in a way that was meant to discomfit. Perhaps he’d underestimated her, for in the privacy of the chamber, she seemed wilier than he’d credited. “I watch everyone.”
Tap went her fan against her palm again, the only outward sign of her vexation aside from her frown. “As do I, Your Grace. You aren’t as subtle as you must suppose yourself. I must admit I found it rather odd that you’d want to spy upon my tête-à-tête with Viscount Wilford.”
Miss Vanreid was thoroughly brazen, daring to refer to her ruinous behavior as though nothing untoward had occurred. It struck him that she’d known he watched her and had deliberately exchanged kisses with Prestley and Wilford, perhaps even for his benefit.
He crossed the chamber, his footfalls muted by thick carpeting. Lady Beresford’s tastes had always run to the extravagant. He didn’t stop until he nearly touched Miss Vanreid’s skirts. Still she held firm, refusing to retreat. Some inner demon made him skim his forefinger across the fine protrusion of her collarbone. Just a ghost of a touch. Awareness sparked between them. Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly.
“Wilford and Prestley are green lads.” He took care to keep his tone bland. “Bolton is a fox in the henhouse. You’d do best to stay away from him.”
She swallowed and he became fascinated by her neck, the way her ostentatious diamonds moved, gleaming even in the dim light. “I’m disappointed you think me as frumpy and witless as a hen. Thank you for your unnecessary concern, Your Grace, but foxes don’t frighten me. They never have.”
Her bravado irritated him. Even her scent was bold, an exotic blend of bergamot, ambergris, and vanilla carrying to him and invading his senses. He should never have touched her, for now he couldn’t stop, following her collarbone to the trim on her bodice, the pink roses so strategically placed. He didn’t touch the roses. No. His finger skimmed along the fullness of her creamy breast. Her skin was soft, as lush as a petal.
“You do seem to possess an absurd predilection for your ruination, Miss Vanreid.”
She startled him by stepping nearer to him, her skirts billowing against his legs. “One could say the same for you. Why do you watch, Your Grace? Does it intrigue you? Perhaps you would like a turn.”
Jesus. Lust slammed through him, hot and hard and demanding. He’d never, in all his years of covert operations, gotten a stiff cock during an investigation. Thanks to the golden vixen before him, he had one now. While he’d decided she was not involved in the plot, he was still on duty until he reported back to Carlisle in the morning. He wasn’t meant to be attracted to Daisy Vanreid, who was not at all as she seemed.
Still, he found himself flattening his palm over her heart, absorbing its quick thump that told him she wasn’t as calm as she pretended. The contact of her bare skin to his, more than the mere tip of a finger, jarred him.
“Are you offering me one?” he asked at last.
Her lashes lowered, her full, pink lips parting. “Yes.”
And he knew right then that he’d been wrong about Daisy Vanreid. She bloody well was the dynamite.
Desperation.
Weakness.
Fear.
Those were the reasons why Daisy stood alone in a private chamber with the Duke of Trent in the midst of the crush of the Beresford Ball, daring him to kiss her. Also, perhaps just a touch of madness.
But it was a madness and a desperation both borne of necessity. A fear fashioned by violence. The weakness was a sin purely her own, and she loathed herself for it. Oh, how she wished she could be strong and defiant. That she could be brave, unafraid, the author of her own rescue.
But she couldn’t.
Why not, then, the handsome duke who’d been discreetly following her for the last month? His reputation preceded him. He was a rake, a rogue who belonged to the fastest circle in London society. Whispers and rumors about him abounded, but she didn’t care. He was a dangerous sort of man, though not in the way that made her mouth go dry and her body brace for an incoming blow.
So why not indeed? Ordinarily, she suffered a man’s touch as a means to an end. Lord knew she’d been engaged in the pretense of flirtation with as many suitable gentlemen as she could find in the hopes of routing her father’s plans for her. In the glow of London society, she had become a bon vivant, adept at hiding the flinch that had once marked her for a woman with an expectation of violence.
The man before her, the altogether beautiful Duke of Trent, had somehow swept past all the barriers she kept carefully girding her true self from everyone else. She hadn’t needed to feign her attraction for him. Hadn’t even fought the urge to wince, for no wince had been forthcoming.
Something about him spoke to her on a primitive level, in a way she’d never known existed. Yes, the Duke of Trent possessed an altogether different aura of danger. She hadn’t been prepared for the contact of his large, warm hand on her bare skin, for the way it had seemed to send sparks of electricity charging through the air between them. No fear. No almost insuppressible anticipation of pain. Nothing but him, consuming her world.
At such proximity, he was even more handsome than she’d supposed. His eyes were the most unusual shade of blue she’d ever seen, bright and lighter than the sky on a faultless summer day. They studied her now, dipping to her mouth.
Had she just offered him a turn? She didn’t recognize herself. Indeed, everything about this enchanted, worry-free moment, suggested she was dreaming. Soon, she would wake. Surely.
“I cannot decide,” he drawled, his patrician manner effortless, “if you are reckless with yourself because you’re a schemer or because you’re foolish enough to think you won’t get caught.” At last he moved his hand, his touch gliding upward, back over her collarbone to curve as if at home around her shoulder. “But as tempting as your offer may be, Miss Vanreid, I’m afraid I must decline.”
With that, he released her and took a step away. She felt the loss of his touch like an ache somewhere low in her belly. Of course she should have known he wouldn’t be so easy a conquest. Why then, had he been dogging her these last few weeks if it wasn’t her touted American fortune he was after?
Unless he hadn’t been following her or watching her? Perhaps it had been her overzealous imagination, fueled by one too many gothic novels she secreted from her father’s censorious eye. After all, she had run across any number of the same lords and ladies at the endless parade of society functions to which she’d dutifully marched at Aunt Caroline’s side.
She had to admit it was possible he had merely been a guest at the same events, and that he had accidentally stumbled upon her embrace with Lord Wilford. The thought of Wilford was enough to sour her mood. He’d been inebriated, and he kissed as she imagined a fish would. Even his mouth had tasted of an unlikely combination of champagne and algae.
Still, Daisy would have chosen him as a husband over the Viscount Breckly, which was why it had been so disappointing when Wilford had mumbled an apology and disappeared after she’d stiffened upon catching sight of an interloper.
That interloper stood before her now, handsome as sin. Rangy and broad and far too tan of skin and muscled of form to blend in with his fellow aristocrats. She had seen a flash of him in the partially ajar door of the music room where she’d slipped away with Wilford. And she’d been watching for him ever since.
But it would seem that the enigmatic duke didn’t want to play a game that wasn’t of his own making, and time was running out for her. In just a week, her father would arrive from New York, and he’d made his intentions clear. He expected an engagement to be finalized between herself and the officious Lord Breckly, a man who was thirty years her senior and smelled of sweat and unlaundered linens. A man who had attempted to lift her skirts and force himself upon her in the drawing room not two days past. Who would have, had not Aunt Caroline returned from the library bearing the book she’d been seeking in her flimsy ploy to force Daisy into spending time alone with the villain.
Daisy knew a stab of disappointment at the realization that the duke would not be the answer to her problems any more than Wilford had. However, she kept her expression neutral, as if she couldn’t be bothered to care if he remained or left. “If you must decline, then I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t linger. Lord Bolton should arrive at any minute and it would be dreadfully awkward if he found you here.”
The duke flicked a grimly assessing glance over her person that left her with the impression he saw far more of her than she would have preferred. In truth, she hadn’t said a word to Lord Bolton. She’d flirted with him, but he’d had eyes only for her bosom, and she’d delivered a sound tap of her fan to his arm for his insouciance.
“Lord Bolton has a reputation of which you are undoubtedly unaware,” he said then. “Run along back to your chaperone and forget you ever knew his name.”
Aunt Caroline was long in her cups by now, and at parties such as these, she made a mockery of the term “chaperone,” much to Daisy’s relief. It rendered her attempts to thwart her father’s plans a bit more sustainable. But she only had a week of such freedom remaining, and the Duke of Trent was encroaching on the days she had left.
She raised a brow. “Thank you for the advice, Your Grace.”
She needed to find someone to marry her in haste, and this man was not he. Gainsaying her father would only earn her the most vicious bruises imaginable, all strategically placed where no one’s eye would ever chance to fall. He liked to hit her in the stomach. He knew how to pull hair without ripping it from the root while causing the maximum amount of pain. His booted foot could do the most damage, she’d discovered the last time she’d gone against his wishes.
That grim knowledge was the ultimate source of the desperation propelling her—the frantic need to escape both her father and the life he’d predestined for her. If she had a choice between marrying Lord Breckly and anyone else, she’d decided anyone would do. Anyone at all who could help her to avoid a detestable marriage to a brute or another raised fist.
“Perhaps your American customs are not the same, Miss Vanreid,” the Duke of Trent said then, his tone patronizing. “Only one thing will come of you awaiting Lord Bolton in this chamber for an assignation, and it most assuredly will not benefit you. You’ll be ruined.”
Truly. For a man who wanted nothing to do with her, he was an odd sort. Unless…her mind grappled with their brief exchange, with the handful of times she’d caught him watching her.
Her pride had made her second-guess herself, but her common sense now reminded her that he had come to this chamber. He had intentionally sought her out. Their gazes had briefly clashed earlier, and she’d hoped he would follow in her wake after she exited the ballroom. And he had. Something about him was decidedly not as it seemed.
Either way, her patience was at an end. If he didn’t wish to kiss her, she didn’t have any further need of him. For she required to be ruined. Compromised. The sooner the better to avoid becoming Viscountess Breckly and escape her father’s wrath.
She stalked forward, intending to quit the chamber. “Good evening, Your Grace. If you won’t leave, then I shall. And if you don’t mind, seek someone else to harass in the future. Ducal condescension isn’t to my liking.”
But when she would have slipped past him, he caught her upper arm in a firm yet gentle grip, forcing her to face him. His scent hit her, a masculine blend of shaving soap and musk. She drank in the sight of him despite herself. Something about all that flawlessness made her long to disturb it. To muss up his hair, flick open a button.
He was perfect, handsome symmetry: hair the color of mahogany, high cheekbones, sculpted lips, cleft chin…even his philtrum seemed somehow too perfect, stubbled by the shadow of the day’s dark whiskers in an invitation to sin.
For a breathless beat, she imagined pressing her mouth there, in the groove just above his. Those whiskers would be rough to her lips. And she would inevitably slide her lips lower, until their mouths fused. The Duke of Trent would not kiss like a fish or taste of algae. She could tell.
“Why do you seek to ruin yourself, Miss Vanreid?” he demanded, as though he had every right to her answer. “Is there someone in New York you wish to return to?”
She thought fleetingly of Padraig McGuire, the man who oversaw the operations of her father’s factories in New York. She’d cared for him once. Not any longer. Both he and her father had seen to that.
But she allowed nothing of her thoughts to show as she faced the duke with defiance. He was a stranger to her, and he had no right to ask such an intimate question. No right to invade the chamber she’d escaped to, no right to touch her, no right to offer unsolicited advice.
No rights at all. “How dare you presume to ask me such a thing? In your words, Your Grace, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
He sneered, the perfect picture of arrogance. “If there is a young man in New York, you’d do best to forget him. Just as you’d do best to stay away from Bolton.”
Daisy wrenched herself free of his grasp. “While we’re dispensing advice, Duke, you’d do best to stay away from me. I neither need nor want your interference. If you fancy yourself a Galahad, go do it with someone else.”
Without a backward glance, she quit the chamber. After tonight, she had only six days left. Cerberus was at her heels, and she meant to secure her liberty by whatever means possible. The supercilious Duke of Trent could go hang for all she cared.