Many of Mick Boden’s acquaintances envied him his job. There was a certain glamour about being one of the famed Bow Street Runners. The common fallacy was that he spent his working days literally running to earth all of London’s and half of England’s most desperate criminals and hauling them off to the nearest magistrate and the just reward for their dastardly deeds. They saw his life as one of endless adventure and danger and action – and success.

Most of the time his job was routine and rather dull. Sometimes he wondered why he was not a dockyard worker or a crossing sweeper. This was one of those times. Lady Sara Illingsworth, a lady of a mere twenty years who had grown up in the country and presumably had no town bronze, was proving to be unexpectedly elusive. In almost a month of searching he had discovered no trace of her beyond those first few days.

The Earl of Durbury still stubbornly insisted she was in London. There was nowhere else she could have gone, he claimed, since she had no friends or relatives elsewhere apart from an old neighbor now living with her husband in Somersetshire. But she was not there.

Something told Mick that the earl was right. She was here somewhere. But she had not returned to Lady Webb’s, even though the baroness was now back in town. She had not contacted either her late father’s man of business or the present earl’s. If she had been spending lavishly, she had not been doing it in any of the more fashionable shops. If she had been trying to sell or pawn any of the stolen jewels, she had not done it at any of the places Mick knew about – and he prided himself on knowing them all. If she had tried to secure respectable lodgings in a decent neighborhood, she had not done so at any of the houses on whose doors he and his assistants had tirelessly knocked. She had not sought employment in any of the houses at which he inquired – and he had asked at all the likely possibilities except the grandest mansions in Mayfair. She would not have been foolhardy enough to apply at one of those, he had concluded. None of the agencies had been applied to by anyone bearing any of the names Mick thought she might be using. None remembered a tall, slim, blond beauty.

And so he found himself yet again with nothing to report to the Earl of Durbury. It was lowering. It was enough to make a man think seriously about changing his line of work. It was also enough to arouse all a man’s stubborn determination not to be thwarted by a mere slip of a girl.

‘She has not gone into service, sir,’ he said with conviction to an exasperated, red-faced earl, who was doubtless thinking of the hefty bill he had run up at the Pulteney in a month. ‘She would not have sought employment as a governess or lady’s companion – too public. For the same reason she would not have taken work as a shop clerk. She would have to work somewhere she would not be seen. Some workshop. A dressmaker’s or a milliner’s, perhaps.’

If she was working at all. The earl had never told him exactly how much money the girl had stolen. Mick was beginning to suspect it could not have been much. Not enough to enable her to live in style, anyway. Surely such a young, inexperienced woman would have made mistakes by now if she had had a vast fortune to tempt her into the open.

‘What are you waiting for, then?’ his lordship asked coldly. ‘Why are you not out searching every workshop in London? Are the illustrious Bow Street Runners to be outsmarted by a mere girl?’ His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

‘Am I searching for a murderess?’ Mick Boden asked. ‘How is your son, sir?’

‘My son,’ the earl said irritably, ‘is at death’s door. You are searching for a murderess. I suggest you find her before she repeats her crime.’

And so Mick began his search anew. London, of course, had more than its fair share of workshops. He just wished he knew for sure what name the girl was using. And he wished that she had not somehow managed to hide her blond hair, apparently her most distinctive feature.

It was a long week. Jocelyn spent far too much of it drinking and gaming by night and trying to whip himself into shape during the day by spending long hours honing his fencing skills and building his stamina in the boxing ring at Gentleman Jackson’s. His leg was responding well to exercise.

Ferdinand was incensed when he learned what had happened to his curricle and was determined to ferret out the Forbes brothers, who had dropped out of sight the day after the duel, and slap a glove in all their separate faces. At first he would not agree that it was his brother’s quarrel. It was his life, after all, that had been threatened. But Jocelyn was insistent.

Angeline had had a fit of the vapors at the news of the broken axle, had summoned Heyward from the House, and then, to divert her shaken nerves, had bought a new bonnet.

‘I wonder that there is any fruit left on any of the stalls at Covent Garden, Angeline,’ Jocelyn observed, viewing it with a pained expression through his quizzing glass as he rode through Hyde Park at the fashionable hour one day and came across her sporting it as she drove in an open barouche with her mother-in-law. ‘I daresay it is all decorating that monstrosity on your head.’

‘It is all the crack,’ she replied, preening, ‘no matter what you say, Tresham. You simply must promise not to drive a curricle again. You or Ferdie. You will kill yourselves and I will never recover my nerves. But Heyward said it was no accident. I daresay it was one of the Forbeses. If you do not discover which one and call him to account, I shall be ashamed to call myself a Dudley.’

‘You do not now,’ he reminded her dryly before tipping his hat to the Dowager Lady Heyward and riding on. ‘You took your husband’s name when you married him, Angeline.’

He was not as impatient as his brother and sister to find the Forbeses and punish them. The time would come. They must know it as surely as he did. In the meantime, let them remain in their hiding place, imagining what would happen when they finally came face to face with him. Let them sweat it out.

Several people asked about Jane Ingleby. She had created even more of a stir with her singing than he had expected. He was asked who she was, if she was still employed at Dudley House, if she was to sing anywhere else, who her voice teacher had been. Viscount Kimble even asked him outright one evening at White’s if she was his mistress – a question that won for himself a cool stare through the ducal quizzing glass.

Strange, that. Jocelyn had never before been secretive about his mistresses. Indeed, he had often used the house for dinners and parties when he wished them to be a little less formal than such occasions at Dudley House inevitably were. His mistresses had always also been his hostesses – a role that would fit Jane admirably.

But he did not want his friends to know she was in his keeping. It seemed somehow unfair to her, though he would not have been able to explain if he had tried. He told them she had had temporary employment with him and was now gone, he knew not where.

‘A devilish shame, Tresham,’ Conan Brougham said. ‘That voice ought to be brought to the attention of Raymore. She could earn a more than decent living with it.’

‘I would have offered her employment myself, Tresh,’ Kimble said, ‘on her back, that is, not with her voice. But I feared I might be trespassing on your preserves. If you hear where she is, you might drop a word in my ear.’

Jocelyn, feeling unaccustomedly hostile to one of his closest friends, changed the subject.

He walked home alone later that same night despite the danger of attack by footpads. He had never feared them. He carried a stout cane and he was handy with his fives. He would rather enjoy a scuffle with two or three ruffians, he had often thought. Perhaps any ruffians who had ever spotted him had been intelligent enough to estimate correctly their chances against him. He had never been attacked.

The mention of Jane Ingleby had made him unbearably restless. It had been five days, and it had seemed more like five weeks. Quincy had personally taken over that silly contract on the second day. To Jocelyn’s surprise she had signed it. He had expected her to haggle over a few small details out of sheer perverseness.

She was officially his mistress.

His virgin, unbedded mistress. How everyone who knew him would jeer if they knew he had engaged a mistress who had banished him from his own house, insisted upon a written contract, and kept the relationship unconsummated a full week after he had made her the proposition.

He laughed aloud suddenly, stopping in the middle of an empty, silent street. Ornery Jane. Even during the consummation she would doubtless not play the part of timid, shrinking virgin being deflowered.

Innocent, naive Jane, who did not realize how clever she was being. He had desired her a week ago. He had yearned for her five days ago. By now he was on fire for her. He was finding it difficult to think of anything else. Jane with her golden hair, into whose web he could hardly wait to be ensnared.

He was forced to wait two more days before a note finally arrived. It was characteristically brief and to the point.

‘The work on the house is complete,’ she wrote. ‘You may call at your convenience.’

Cool, unloverlike words that set him ablaze.

Jane was pacing. She had sent the note to Dudley House immediately after breakfast, but she knew that often he left home early and did not return until late at night. He might not read the note until tomorrow. He might not come for another day or two.

But she was pacing. And trying in vain not to look through the front-facing windows more often than once every ten minutes.

She was wearing a new dress of delicate spring-green muslin. High-waisted, with a modest neckline and short, puffed sleeves, it was of simple design. But it was expertly styled to mold and flatter her figure above its high waistline and to fall in soft folds to her ankles. It had been very costly. Accustomed to the prices of a country dressmaker, Jane had been shocked. But she had not sent the Bond Street modiste and her two assistants away. The duke had selected them and sent them with specific instructions on the number and nature of garments she was to have.

She had selected the fabrics and designs herself, favoring light colors over vivid ones and simplicity of design over the ornate, but she had not argued over the number or the expense, except flatly to insist upon only one walking dress and only one carriage dress. She had no intention of walking or driving out any time soon.

He would not have given her carte blanche over the house renovations if he had not intended coming back, she thought as she leaned close to the window yet again early in the afternoon. He would not have sent the modiste or the contract. Indeed, he had sent the latter twice, first two copies for her to peruse and sign and return, and then just one copy to keep, with his own signature – Tresham – scrawled large and bold beneath her own. Mr Jacobs had witnessed her signature, Mr Quincy his.

But she could not shake the conviction that he would not come back. The week had been endless. Surely by now he must have forgotten her. Surely by now there was someone else.

She could not understand – and did not care to explore – her own anxiety.

But all anxiety fled suddenly to be replaced by a bursting of joy when she saw a familiar figure striding along the street in the direction of the house. He was walking without a limp, she noticed before turning and hurrying to open the sitting room door. She stopped herself from rushing to open the front door too. She stood where she was, waiting eagerly for his knock, waiting for Mr Jacobs to answer it.

She had forgotten how broad-shouldered he was, how dark, how forbidding in aspect, how restless with pent-up energy, how – male. He was frowning as usual when he handed his hat and gloves to the butler. He did not look at her until he had done so. Then he strode toward the sitting room and fixed his eyes on her at last.

Eyes that looked not only at her dress and face and hair, she thought, but on everything that was her. Eyes that burned into her with a strange, intense light she had not seen there before.

The eyes of a man come to claim his mistress?

‘Well, Jane,’ he said, ‘you have finished playing house at last?’

Had she expected a kiss on the hand? On the lips? Soft lover’s words?

‘There was much to do,’ she replied coolly, ‘to convert this house into a dwelling rather than a brothel.’

‘And you have done it?’ He strode into the sitting room and looked around, his booted feet apart, his hands at his back. He seemed to fill the room.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘You did not tear down the walls, then?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I kept a great deal. I have not been unnecessarily extravagant.’

‘One would hate to have seen Quincy’s face if you had been,’ he retorted. ‘He has been somewhat green about the gills for the past few days as it is. I understand that bills have been flooding in.’

‘That is at least partly your fault,’ she told him. ‘I did not need so many clothes and accessories. But the dressmaker you sent said you were adamant and she dared not allow your orders to be contradicted.’

‘Some women, you see,’ he said, ‘know their place, Jane. They know how to be submissive and obedient.’

‘And how to make a great deal of money in the process,’ she added. ‘I kept the lavender color in here, as you can see, though I would not have chosen it had I been planning the room from scratch. Combined with gray and silver instead of pink, and without all the frills and silly knickknacks, it looks rather delicate and elegant. I like it. I can live here comfortably.’

‘Can you, Jane?’ He turned his head and looked at her – again with those burning eyes. ‘And have you done as well with the bedchamber? Or am I going to find two hard, narrow cots in there and a hair shirt laid out on each?’

‘If you find scarlet a necessary titillation,’ she said, trying to ignore the thumping of her heart and hoping it did not betray itself in her voice, ‘then I daresay you will not like what I have done to the room. But I like it, and that is what counts. I am the one who has to sleep there every night.’

‘I am being forbidden to do so, then?’ He raised his eyebrows.

That foolish blush again. The one sign of emotion it was impossible to disguise. She could feel it hot on her cheeks.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have agreed – in writing – that you are to be free to come and go as you please. But I daresay you do not intend to live here as I do. Only to come when you … Well, when you …’ She had lost her command of the English language.

‘Want sex with you?’ he suggested.

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Then.’

‘And I am not allowed to come when I do not?’ He pursed his lips and regarded her in silence for a few uncomfortable moments. ‘Is that in the contract? That I can come here only for sex, Jane? Not for tea? Or conversation? Or perhaps just to sleep?’

It would be like a real relationship. It was too seductive a thought.

‘Would you like to see the bedchamber?’ she asked.

He regarded her for a few moments longer before the smile came – that slight smile that lit his eyes and lifted the corners of his mouth and turned Jane’s knees weak.

‘To see the new furnishings?’ he asked her. ‘Or to have sex, Jane?’

She found his raw choice of words disconcerting. But any more euphemistic way of phrasing it would mean the same thing.

‘I am your mistress,’ she said.

‘Yes, so you are.’ He strolled closer to her, his hands still at his back. He dipped his head closer and gazed into her eyes. ‘No sign of steely martyrdom. You are ready for the consummation, then?’

‘Yes.’ She also thought she was ready to collapse in an ignominious heap at his feet, but that fact had nothing to do with a weak resolve, only with weak knees.

He straightened up and offered his arm.

‘Let us go, then,’ he said.

The furnishings had not changed, only the color scheme. But he would scarcely have known he was in the same room if someone had blindfolded him, picked him up bodily, and deposited him here. It was all sage green and cream and gold. It was elegance itself.

If there was one thing Jane Ingleby had an abundance of, it was good taste, plus an eye for color and design. Another skill learned at the orphanage? Or at the rectory or country manor or wherever the devil it was she had grown up?

But he had not come to inspect the room’s furnishings.

‘Well?’ Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed. ‘What do you think?’

‘What I think, Jane,’ he said, narrowing his gaze on her, ‘is that I will see your hair down now at last. Take out the pins.’

It was not dressed with its customary severity. It was waved and coiled in a manner that complemented the pretty, elegant dress she wore. But he wanted to see it flowing free.

She removed the pins deftly and shook her head.

Ah. It reached to below her waist, as she had said it did. A river of pure, shining, rippling gold. She had appeared beautiful before. Even in the hideous maid’s dress and the atrocious cap she had been beautiful. But now …

There simply were not words. He clasped his hands behind him. He had waited too long to rush now.

‘Jocelyn.’ She tipped her head to one side and looked directly at him with her very blue eyes. ‘I am on unfamiliar ground here. You will have to lead the way.’

He nodded, wondering at the great wave of – oh, not desire exactly that washed over him. Longing? That sort of gut-deep, soul-deep yearning that very occasionally caught him unawares and was shaken firmly off again. He associated it with music and painting. But now it was his name that had aroused it.

‘Jocelyn is a name that has been in my family for generations,’ he said. ‘I acquired it when I was still in the womb. I cannot think of a single soul until now who has spoken it aloud to me.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Your mother?’ she said. ‘Your father? Your brother and sister? Surely—’

‘No.’ He shrugged out of his tight-fitting coat and opened the buttons of his waistcoat. ‘I was born heir to my present title. I was born with an earl’s title, Jane. My family all used it until I became Tresham at the age of seventeen. You really are the first to call me by my given name.’

He had suggested it. He had never done so with his other mistresses. They had called him by his title, just like everyone else. He remembered now being shaken to hear his name on Jane’s lips a week ago. He had not expected it to bring such a feeling of – of intimacy. He had not realized how he had longed for such intimacy. Just that. Someone calling him by name.

He tossed his waistcoat aside and untied the knot of his neckcloth. She was watching him, her hands clasped at her waist, cloaked in gold.

‘Jocelyn,’ she said softly. ‘Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is at heart. Do you want me to undress too?’

‘Not yet.’ He pulled his shirt off over his head and pulled off his Hessian boots. He kept his pantaloons on for the time being.

‘You are very beautiful,’ she surprised him by saying, her eyes on his naked torso. Trust Jane to make such a remark! ‘I suppose I have offended you by using that particular word. It is not masculine enough, I daresay. But you are not handsome. Not in any conventional sense. Your features are too harsh and angular, your coloring too dark. You are only beautiful.’

An experienced courtesan could not have aroused him so deftly even with the most cunningly erotic words.

‘Now what have you left me to say about you?’ he asked, stepping forward and touching her at last. He framed her face with his hands, sliding his fingers into the warm silk of her hair. ‘You are not pretty, Jane. You must know that. Prettiness is ephemeral. It passes in a season. You will be beautiful when you are thirty, when you are fifty, when you are eighty. At twenty you are dazzling, breathtaking. And you are mine.’ He dipped his head and touched his parted lips to hers, tasting her with his tongue before withdrawing a couple of inches.

‘Yes, Jocelyn.’ Her teeth bit into her soft, moist lower lip. ‘For now I am yours. According to our contract.’

‘That damned thing.’ He chuckled softly. ‘I want you to want me, Jane. Tell me it is not just the money or this house or the obligation that wretched piece of paper has put you under. Tell me you want me. Me – Jocelyn. Or tell me truthfully that you do not and I will leave you to the enjoyment of your home and salary for the next five years. I will not bed you unless you want me.’

He had never particularly cared before. All conceit aside, he knew he was not the sort of man who repelled women who earned their living in bed. And it had always been a matter of pride with him to give pleasure where he took it. But he had never cared whether a woman wanted him or just the wealthy, rakish aristocrat with the dangerous reputation. In fact, if he had thought about it, he probably would have decided that he did not want any woman close enough to desire him.

He had never before been Jocelyn to anyone. Not to anyone in his family. Not to any woman. Not even to his closest friends. He would rather turn and leave now and never return than let Jane lie on her back on that bed simply because she felt obliged to. It was a somewhat alarming realization.

‘I want you, Jocelyn,’ she whispered.

There was no doubt she meant it. Her blue eyes were focused fully on his. She was speaking the simple truth.

And then she leaned forward, letting every part of her body rest lightly against him. She set her lips to the hollow at the base of his throat. It was a gesture of sweet surrender.

All the sweeter because it seemed uncharacteristic of Jane. He knew her well enough to realize it was something she would never do merely because surrender was expected of her.

He felt strangely gifted.

He felt curiously wanted. In a way he had never felt in his life before.

‘Jane,’ he said, his face in the silk of her hair. ‘Jane, I need to be inside your body. Inside you. Let me in.’

‘Yes.’ She tipped back her head and gazed into his eyes. ‘Yes, I will, Jocelyn. But you must show me how. I am not sure I know.’

Ah. Jane to the end. She spoke in her cool, practical voice – which he suddenly realized was a mask for nervousness.

‘It will be my pleasure,’ he told her, his mouth against hers as his fingers tackled the buttons down the back of her dress.