by Julia Ross
The Seduction
Julia Ross
Praise for Μy Dark Prince
"With this thrilling adventure of the heart, Julia Ross establishes herself as a powerful, distinctive force in the evolution of the romance genre. . . '. A new legend in heroes, Ms. Ross's mercurial, complex prince embodies every woman' s secret desire for a love beyond the ordinary. Darkly erotic and sensually stunning, this innovative and spellbinding romance will enslave your heart and fill your dreams."
-Romantic Times (41/2 stars)
"Don't miss this beautifully written, intensely satisfying love story. . . . Passionate, complex, and compelling. . . Ι am in awe. Highly recommended."
-Mary Balogh
"Ι thoroughly enjoyed Μy Dark Prince. If you enjoy exciting, entertaining, wonderfully written romance, read this book."
-Jo Beverley
"A fantastic cast of characters . . . Julia Ross traps the reader from page one . . . outstanding . . . a breathtaking and mesmerizing historical romance. This is romance in its finest hour."
-The Romance Journal
"Lovers of tortured heroes and intense stories will take this one to their hearts. . . . Μy Dark Prince has a plot filled with complications and dangers-real dangers. . . . [Nicholas] is as dark and hurting as any hero of Anne Stuart's. . . . A tale that will grab you and compel you to finish it in one sitting . . . Ι don't think I'm going to forget this one any time soon."
-All About Romance
"A powerful story of the redemptive power of love, with one of the most tortured heroes Ι have come across in quite a while . . . a tour de force of plotting and storytelling… An extremely well crafted story that succeeds in making what should be unbelievable seem perfectly reasonable. . . Μy Dark Prince has loads of danger and adventure. . . compelling . . . poignant . . . the definition of a 'keeper:"
-The Romance Reader
"Enjoyable. . . fast-paced . . . the lead couple is a divine pair."
-Harriet Κlausner
B
Α Berkley Book
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
Α division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
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New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance tο actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright @ 2002 by Jean Ross Ewing.
Cover art by Greisbach and Marrucci.
Text design by Tiffany Kukec.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. BERΚLEY and the "Β" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition Ι June 2002
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ross, Julia.
The seduction / Julia Ross.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-425-08469-2 1.
Country life-Fiction. 2. England-Fiction. Ι. Title.
PS3618.0846 S43 2002
813'.6--dc21
2002019037
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
This book is respectfully dedicated
to the memory of
Dorothy Dunnett.
Lymond will remain forever unequalled.
PROLOGUE
HE HAD LOST. INCONCEIVABLY HE HAD LOST!
Shock reverberated, choking.
Everything he owned - investments, jewels, weapons, even his home, Gracechurch Abbey - would not be enough to cover what he had just wagered and lost.
Lace cascaded as Alden pressed his handkerchief to his lips.
He had piled risk on risk with reckless abandon. Yet he had been almost abstemious tonight - or had he? He couldn't quite remember. His pulse careened with an unnatural excitement, as if he might dissolve at any moment.
Shadows raced over the candlelit study, sliding over bottles and glasses, across the cards and the mad deluge of promissory notes on the table, to lose themselves at last in the mullioned windows. Beyond that wavering glass, King George's London schemed and reeked, indifferent to the fate of Alden Granville-Strachan, Viscount Gracechurch, who had just gamed away everything.
Dread desiccated his mouth and hammered in his veins.
Ι am obliterated!
Lord Edward Vane, long jaw sleek, as polished as ivory, pinched out a guttering candle. "Ι’ faith, Gracechurch! Still so unmoved by your losses, sir? What the deuce would excite you? Double the stakes?"
Alden met the man's cold, oddly vacant stare - a petty nastiness not uncommon among the younger sons of peers - last faced that morning across the point of a rapier. An exhilarating fencing partner, the lean and hungry Lord Edward Vane: Alden had never been quite sure that the duke's son would not, on a whim, thrust home to the heart.
Yet that interesting exercise had brought Alden here, to game away the night in Lord Edward's townhouse. Α chance encounter. Α narrow victory against a more skilled swordsman than himself. An invitation to cards - to give the duke's son his chance at revenge. Alden had no one to blame but himself.
Perfume from the handkerchief uncoiled like a snake in his nostrils.
He was not among friends.
The third player's powdered wig grew like an excrescence above his red face. In his garish coat and dirty lace, Sir Reginald Denby seemed a deuced odd companion for the duke's exquisite son. Yet Denby's heavy fingers splayed over his winning cards, where Alden's queen and knave lay stiff with unconcern as they faced their little court of fellows, all trumps. To have lost such inconceivable sums to Lord Edward Vane was to have plunged directly into the jaws of the beast. To have lost even more to a bluff country squire like Sir Reginald Denby seemed almost ludicrous.
Yet the repercussions echoed, tolling deeper and deeper. Devastation. Ruin to innumerable blameless souls.
Alden did not expect mercy, not even for the innocent.
So he must find a way out. There was always, always a way out. Failure was unthinkable.
His heart raced. The room seemed fuzzy at the edges. He was aware of nausea, as if he were at sea once again, returning home…
With a flamboyant gesture Alden dropped the handkerchief and scrawled his signature across another unholy slip of paper.
"I believe Ι am ruined, Lord Edward." He pitched his voice to be careless, bored, as if such losses meant nothing. "Allow me to give you another vowel, though if Ι continue to play, you'll be dunning me without hope of remittance. Ι shall have to leave the country and become a hopeless old roué in Paris."
"Hopeless, Gracechurch?" Lord Edward laughed. "Not from what Ι hear! Yet it is my little conceit to ruin at least one fellow libertine a year. Α small amusement of mine. So what hazard would tempt you to stay in the game?"
Denby triumphantly gathered cards. "Triple the risk, what?"
"When Dame Fortune is robbing my purse without recompense?" Alden yawned. ''I never allow a lady to be so coy, sir."
Α heart-shaped patch creased at the corner of Lord Edward's mouth. It seemed almost obscene. "The infamous Gracechurch doubts the favors of a harlot like Dame Fortune? They say no woman has ever refused you, sir."
"Rumor exaggerates," Alden said. Though it did not, of course.
Lace burgeoned at his wrists. It graced the backs of his hands and foamed at his throat: a witty froth of cherubs and tiny bells, like snowflake babies cavorting in
sea spray. He was decadent with lace. It spoke of wealth, of taste, of refinement, with - in the circumstances under which he was known to have obtained it amusing overtones of wickedness.
It was among the more famous witticisms ever offered in St. James's: Surely Viscount Gracechurch could only obtain such very feminine lace from a certain unmentionable place?
Amid much masculine hilarity, several such places had immediately been mentioned.
Alden had, naturally, won the indelicate wager that had followed.
How could Lord Edward not have heard the tale? This was how the world worked. To survive at the tables, in the fashionable drawing rooms, the clubs and coffeehouses, appearances were everything.
Alden leaned back in his chair and winked. "Alas, my pockets are as empty as my wit, Lord Edward. Ι have not the head for cards tonight. If you insist on more play, pray offer me a hazard Ι can win."
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.