Table of Contents
TEMPTED BY THE VISCOUNT
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
TEMPTED BY THE VISCOUNT
A Shadows And Silk Novel
SOFIE DARLING
SOUL MATE PUBLISHING
New York
TEMPTED BY THE VISCOUNT
Copyright©2018
SOFIE DARLING
Cover Design by Ramona Lockwood
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-1-68291-616-2
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The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
What others have said about Sofie Darling’s work:
“Darling doesn’t disappoint . . . Absolutely an author to watch.”
- USA Today Happy Ever After
“If True Lies and Mr. And Mrs. Smith had a cousin it would be Darling's sizzling spy thriller. Darling invigorates the classic lessons-in-love trope with delightful characters, plenty of intrigue, suspense and heated sexuality that may have some readers turning on the air conditioner!”
- RT Book Reviews
“This story of intrigue and second chances will have you turning the pages quickly until the end. For a first book from this author, there is a lot of promise for books to come and I personally cannot wait!”
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To Eric, always
Acknowledgements
My first thank you is for Eric, who has been a source of love and support from before the beginning. Your quick, naughty wit brings a smile to my face every single day.
To the talented people at Soul Mate, thank you for your patience and guidance. In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to Caroline Tolley for always asking questions and always pushing.
Jennifer Asbury-Hughes and Scott Patterson, you are amazing at what you do. Thank you.
Elizabeth Harris, Sandra Spicher, Dunya Bean, Katie Graykowski, Kate Ramirez, Brooke Salesky, Pam Halter, Susan Brennan, and Debi Phillpott, thank you for lending me your insight and skill. Early on, your critique did so much to make this a better book, and me a better writer.
Max and Nate, you make my world a brighter and happier place. I’ll be forever grateful to a universe that made you my sons. (Bosco, replace “sons” with “dog,” and ditto.)
Chapter 1
London
4 April 1825
Olivia stepped inside the sweltering ballroom and felt as if a finch had been pulled on her. The Duke had assured her of a small Salon.
Instead, she stood amidst the crush of the Season. The champagne punch flowed with no end in sight, as did the gossip, and the ballroom brimmed with every member of the ton currently in London.
How alone a person could feel in a crowd of people.
“Lady Percival,” she heard a perfectly cultured lady’s voice identical to every other perfectly cultured lady’s voice in the room call out. “Or is it Lady Olivia now?” Soft giggles muted by raised silk fans floated on the air.
Before Olivia, an intimate circle of four couples radiated excitement, anticipating a gossip-worthy exchange, the ladies snickering in delight, the gentlemen shifting from foot to foot, discomfort evident.
“Lady Olivia will do,” she replied, with a succinct snap in her voice, and immediately regretted it. She shouldn’t be using that tone tonight, her first night back in Society after a six-month absence. It could reveal anxious nerves. She’d believed herself prepared for the stir her presence would create, but her body told a different story. Her heart was a hammer in her chest, and sweat slicked her palms.
“We were just speaking of you, and now here you are.” The chit’s smile curved a smidgen too wide.
Her name was Miss Fox, and Olivia knew not a whit about her. She didn’t much keep up with her Debrett’s.
“Your gown is ravishing. You must give me the direction of your modiste. A scandalous French one, to be sure.” Sensing blood in the water, Miss Fox pressed, “It’s so rare these days that you grace Society with your presence.”
A silence so taut a pin could puncture it expanded as the tight circle of couples awaited Olivia’s response. No choice but to proceed as she meant to go on, she drew herself up to her fullest height and met Miss Fox square in the eye. “One must be careful about the company one keeps at a large and indiscriminate gathering such as this. It isn’t as select as one might wish.”
Her gaze swept up and down Miss Fox, and the vulpine smile fell from the younger woman’s lips as the implication of Olivia’s words hit her. No one could deny the fact that though she may be this Season’s scandal, Lady Olivia Montfort still outranked Miss Anne Fox. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
Olivia didn’t await a response before gliding away across the ballroom’s polished mahogany floor to seek sanctuary in the ladies’ retiring room. A single, bracing moment of peace and quiet should shore her up for this night.
She’d hardly exhaled the sigh that had wanted release all evening, when the outer door opened and closed with a muted, but distinct, click. She was about to peek around the screen when a firm, matronly voice rang out. “I say, she is lucky to be received in polite society, and you know it, Clarinda. But with a benefactor like His Grace at her disposal, well, who can refuse her?”
Olivia startled backward, breath suspended in her chest, ears attuned to whatever words would come next.
“Now, Ernestine, His Grace isn’t her benefactor. She is his daughter by law. Besides, Lady Olivia Montfort is the daughter of the Earl of Surrey. She isn’t the sort of woman who needs a benefactor.”
“Was the Duke’s daughter by law, you mean,” Ernestine huffed.
“Yet,” Clarinda began on a conspiratorial whisper, “it was the Duke who backed her petition for divorce at the House of Lords.”
“From his own son.” Ernestine lowered her righteous voice an octave. “She petitioned for the divorce, Clarinda. What is this world coming to that a wife can petition the House of Lords for a divorce? Then have the audacity to continue living beneath the roof of her divorced husband’s father? I daresay, we may be near the end times.”
That went to show what this battle-ax understood of these matters: The House of Lords hadn’t the legal or ecclesiastical power to grant Olivia a true divorce. What they had was the power to set the marriage aside. It was called a divorce a vinculo matrimonii, and she was only the fourth woman in England to be granted one on the grounds of desertion.
Still, the gossipy duo was correct about one point: The Duke had thrown his support behind her in the endeavor. In fact, he’d been the one to suggest it, promising to ensure that her daughter Lucy remained, if not legitimate to the exact letter of the law, a fully-fledged member of the powerful Bretagne family. She was the granddaughter of a duke, and no one would dare forget it.
The daughter of an earl herself, Olivia understood power and privilege, or thought she had, until the Duke had chosen to flex his ducal muscle on her behalf and the might of the dukedom was revealed to her in its full glory and scope. It was a magnificent and awe-inspiring thing, that sort of power, and she’d never felt so humbled in her life as when it worked on her behalf. With nary a whimper of contradiction, the House of Lords had acceded to his directive in the matter. Still, she understood that if Percy hadn’t been a younger son, or if their daughter had been male, the outcome might not have settled so satisfactorily in her favor.
“But, Ernestine,” Clarinda’s voice lowered a conspiratorial octave, “Lord Percival Bretagne was alive these last twelve years. Can you believe it? We mustn’t be too hard on the poor chit.”
“The woman spent a decade running around with those artistic, bohemian types while her husband lay dead in Spain.”
“But he wasn’t dead in Spain,” Clarinda insisted.
“What sort of proper widow spends her time in those circles? I daresay,” Ernestine continued as if Clarinda hadn’t spoken. Olivia imagined brows lifted to the ceiling in damning hauteur.
“But the girl wasn’t a widow at all.”
“Girl?” Ernestine spat.
“Well, no longer a girl, I suppose.” Clarinda paused while another “humpf!” sounded from Ernestine. “But when she lost that boy—”
“You mean her husband, Lord Percival?” Ernestine interrupted.
“What a sweet love match they made in her first Season. Rumor has it she nearly went mad from the grief, poor dear.”
Olivia’s fingers curled into tight fists, the nails digging into her palms. They discussed her as if she was some sort of revolutionary bent on rending the very fabric of society in two.
Perhaps she was. Except that hadn’t been her intent at all.
When her sister Mariana had returned from Paris six months ago and revealed that she’d seen—and spoken with!—Percy, an avalanche of dread had nearly crushed Olivia, making it difficult for her lungs to draw air, suffocating her.
Percy was alive.
“He was His Grace’s favorite, they say,” Clarinda said.
Olivia couldn’t deny the truth of those words. Percy had been everyone’s favorite.
Except hers. At least, by the time he’d died. And most definitely by the time he’d rejoined the land of the living as, of all things, a spy, and the full weight of the truth crashed down on her: Percy had chosen to stay away—from her, from their daughter—for the last twelve years.
He’d been better off dead as far as she was concerned, which was why she needed to press forward with her plan to move house. Someday, he would arrive in Town, and when he did, he wouldn’t find her still housed beneath his father’s roof. She would eat glass first.
An unladylike huff of frustration escaped her. This morning, her plan had hit a snag. The Duke’s solicitors refused to assist her without his express consent. He would help her, of that she was certain, but she’d wanted to purchase a Mayfair townhouse herself and present it to him as a fait accompli. This final step toward independence was hers alone to take.
Yet, with no other option open to her, she’d had to petition her father’s solicitors for their services, even though her father and mother would remain in Italy for another season and have no ability to back her request any time in the near future. When she’d set out on this course six months ago, she’d had no idea how much male assistance a woman needed to become free and independent. Galling.
“Speaking of His Grace,” Ernestine began, a ribbon of girlish excitement twirling through her words. The door opened, and a roar of bright gaiety rushed in. The gossipy duo was exiting the room. “Have you seen him tonight? He is one eligible bachelor.”
“At five and sixty?”
“An unmarried Duke of Arundel is eligible at any age, Clarinda.”
The door shut behind the pair, and the outside world again dulled its pitch to a quiet muffle. Olivia stepped out from behind the screen and paused before a gilded Baroque mirror. Even its warm, reflective glow couldn’t mask the fact that her face spoke of devastation, like it had been scrubbed raw across a washboard. This wouldn’t do.
She leaned over the washstand and dabbed her skin with its cooling water. Hands to either side of the basin, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, clearing her mind on a long exhale. This Salon was no place for her past.
Another glance in the mirror revealed the red splotches mostly gone. Only a hint of pink remained, which could be taken for too much heat at a crush like tonight’s. Emotion could darken the sky blue of her eyes into stormy gray in an instant. She opened them a little wider into a semblance of their usual selves. The clouds receded.
Social armor intact, she stepped to the door, pushed it wide on a gust of festive cacophony, and her seventeen-year-old self danced before her on the happy notes of violin strings underlain by the grounding drone of cello and bass; the sporadic shrill giggle here and there, punctuating a witty remark like an exclamation point; the rustle of silk and superfine as guests wove in and out of each other, seeking good conversation, good gossip, and good champagne. All underscored by the dull, monotone din of the crowd as the light from a thousand candles glittered overhead, tiny prisms of chandelier crystals dancing to the subtle rhythm of the string quartet.
How her seventeen-year-old self had loved the controlled chaos of a party. Although there was pain on one side of this memory, she experienced the pleasure on the other side of it.
Her lips curved into her first genuine, if subdued, smile of the night. The past didn’t have to be all guilt and hurt.
How that girl would be giddy over the sight of this full-to-capacity ballroom, at the possibilities hidden within it. A tidbit of choice gossip. A chance to roam a room unchaperoned. A stolen glimpse of a handsome-beyond-compare boy with the deepest brown eyes in the wide world . . .
Oh, how Ernestine and Clarinda had conjured the past tonight. She longed to rush home and lie with Lucy, her daughter’s breath soft and regular in the cadence of sleep. Then she would steal away to her studio to ready the sketches she would present to her art master on the morrow.
But the present beckoned, and she must pretend to enjoy herself, smile pasted onto her face. She lifted her chin a notch and feigned indifference. She would be an ice queen, not the soft, gay girl this room had seen
over a decade ago.
It was too soon. Hardly a fortnight had passed since Parliament set aside her marriage.
For the people populating this room, life maintained a smooth, unwavering trajectory from birth to death. They couldn’t comprehend how her fate had diverged so dramatically from theirs. Six months ago, she’d been an unremarkable widow, if a little eccentric given her involvement with the arts. But they’d understood her.
Now? She was a real, live divorcée, little more than a new species on display at the zoo.
Across the crowd, she spotted the Duke’s signature shock of silver hair and began making her way toward him through the ever-changing maze of ever-sweaty ton. She could hardly remember a time when she’d seen more of Society’s luminaries assembled in one place.
Who was tonight’s honoree? She hadn’t been attentive to the details when the Duke had requested her presence tonight.
“Olivia!”
She turned toward the first welcome voice of the night, her sister’s. “Oh, Mariana, what a relief to see you.”
Upon their presentation at court, “Milk and Honey” was the moniker the Regent had bestowed on the Earl of Surrey’s twin daughters, Ladies Olivia and Mariana, in reference to their respective, un-twinlike appearances. Olivia’s clear, milky complexion had been the perfect complement to Mariana’s tawny hair and eyes.
“Lady Olivia,” Mariana purred, not unlike the intonation of a jungle cat settling in for a feast of minced rat. “Sir Edwin, here”—She indicated the rather pugnacious-looking man at her side—“was inquiring about The Progressive School for Young Ladies and the Education of Their Minds.”
“Oh?” Olivia smiled and began to back away. No good ever came of crossing Mariana when her lioness purr coupled with that particular glint in her eye.
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