by Gaelen Foley
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Georgiana’s Brood
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Praise for Devil Takes a Bride
Pillow Talk
Other Books by Gaelen Foley
Copyright Page
This book is dedicated with all my love
to the one person without whom
I’d never have become a writer. . . .
Thanks, Mom.
Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure.
—LORD BYRON
Don Juan, Canto I, stanza 133
CHAPTER
ONE
London, 1817
Fiery swords of lightning clashed across the sable sky. Great rolling clouds flung down a warning spatter of rain. Thunder growled in the distance, but the only sound in the dark, empty street was the frantic percussion of the girl’s running footfalls.
Every step jarred her in her thin kid half boots. Her dingy skirts swirled about her legs, threatening to trip her. Fleeing the glow of lanterns on the broad avenue, she raced up a murky side street, her long hair tangled and wild. Her pale young face was stark with terror as she glanced over her shoulder and pounded on, her fists clenched, her breath raking harshly through her gritted teeth.
With a small gasp, half a sob, she pitched around the corner ahead into a coal-black alley and immediately pressed backward out of sight into the shadowed alcove of a doorway. There, she held perfectly still, but for the panicked heaving of her chest. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.
They were only seconds behind her.
The riders came with the storm at their heels—relentless, inescapable as the approaching tempest. Another throaty snarl of thunder vibrated the windowpanes of the darkened building where she hid. She huddled down against the bricks, trying to make herself smaller, for when the low rumble faded, another sound still remained—softer, but more terrible by far.
Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.
The relentless cadence of hoofbeats grew louder. Becky Ward shut her eyes with a grimace of fear, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek. The narrow alley funneled the sound of their approach: the squeak of well-oiled leather, the jangle and hiss of deadly blades, guns, pikes, and pistols—weapons that did not even have a name in English.
Not that the riders had been sent to kill her. Oh, no, she thought bitterly. The prince wanted her brought back to him alive. If she had one advantage, that was it.
She yanked in the muddied hem of her skirt a split second before they came trolling past the mouth of the narrow alley. She stood trembling in the muggy heat of the summer night, holding her breath, agonized with waiting as they stopped mere yards from her hiding place.
They nearly had her, and, expert trackers, the Cossacks knew it. Prince Mikhail Kurkov had sent four of his best warriors after her, though many more were at his beck if these should fail. From where she stood, she could see the looming silhouettes of the second pair.
Huge, menacing men with thick beards and elaborate moustaches, the battle-hardened Cossack soldiers wore dark gray coats over baggy trousers, which they tucked into their black riding boots. Beneath the brims of their foreign-shaped helmets, their inscrutable faces were browned and leathery from life in the saddle, their slightly slanted eyes cool and efficient. It was said they were descended from the Huns.
One sniffed the air, trying to scent her out, while the others glanced around, murmuring questions and replies to each other in a low, rapid tongue that she could not decipher. She swallowed hard as they split up to continue searching for her in pairs. The first two continued onward while the second turned their swift, rugged horses around and headed back toward the wide, lamplit thoroughfare, whatever it was called. Oxford Street . . . Piccadilly? Becky wasn’t sure. When they had gone, she nigh collapsed with exhausted relief, leaning all her weight against the locked door behind her.
For a fleeting moment she allowed herself to shut her eyes.
Another hairbreadth escape.
After four days of this, on the run, hunted from town to town as she had made her way southward to London, she did not know how much longer she could last. She had not eaten all day and had reached a foggy-headed state of fatigue. Fear seemed to be the only thing keeping her awake; but closing her eyes brought no respite, for it immediately called back the crisp, awful image stamped on her mind of her mighty cousin’s crime. How could Mikhail have done it, killed that man in cold blood?
Worst of all, she felt in part responsible. If only I had not tried to interfere. . . .
She flicked her eyes open again with a shudder, and her hand crept instinctively to the tiny seashell she wore on a ribbon around her neck. Somehow she drew another small dram of courage from her final token from her father. Must press on.
She had to reach the Duke of Westland before the Cossacks found her.
As lord lieutenant of Yorkshire’s West Riding, it was His Grace’s duty to handle Mikhail, since the murder had taken place in his jurisdiction. Becky had not bothered with any of the lower-ranking justice officials because of her cousin’s high rank; none but a very powerful man would dare to stand against the half-Russian prince, who had also recently inherited her grandfather’s British earldom. Old Westland was known for his courage and integrity; she clung to her faith that he would bring Mikhail to justice—provided she could gain an audience with him in order to report the crime.
She knew how shallow aristocrats could be. After four days on the run, looking more beggar than lady of the manor, she was having doubts about whether she would even be received. The thought of being turned away at the door was too awful to contemplate. Westland had known Grandfather, she reminded herself. They had been political rivals rather than allies, but surely her grandsire’s name would be enough to make the great Whig duke listen.
Unfortunately, she had never been to London before in her life and had no idea where to find this place called St. James’s Square, where she had heard the duke kept his Town residence. The squad of Cossacks dogging her every step were not helping matters, for Mikhail did not intend to let Becky expose his brutal crime. No, he had other plans for her entirely.
Accustomed to submissive serf girls, the prince had become obsessed with trying to control her. With his hand around her throat and his cruel, hot whisper by her ear, he had made it clear how he would punish her defiance. I will teach you to obey, loobeemaya. Grandfather’s death had made him her legal guardian, but Mikhail was dead wrong if he thought he owned her like some sort of chattel. She’d rather die than be subjected to the brutal ravishment he had promised. The thought drove her on with grim resolve.
Gliding out of the alcove, she went cautiously to the edge of the alley and peered out. The Cossacks were gone. Glancing left and right, she slipped around the corner and continued on her way.
She hoped it wasn’t much farther, for her feet ached and she was starving. How many fancy garden squares could one city have? she wondered, but at least the elegant environs of the West End seemed much safer than the seedy tenement areas she had traversed at dusk. Now, however, past midnight, it was too dark to make out the street signs posted high on the sides of buildings. She stared and squi
nted at them as best she could, knowing that hunger and exhaustion would make it much too easy to become disoriented in the maze of this vast, dirty, bewildering city.
Oh, she missed her wide Yorkshire skies and silent, windy moors, and most of all, she missed her bed.
A sudden stab of lightning split the sky. Becky flinched, shrinking into her olive-colored pelisse. The churning clouds overhead were poised to launch their assault. She knew that she had to take shelter. It was futile to continue now. The intelligent thing to do was to find some unobtrusive place to hide from the Cossacks for the rest of the night and to escape the approaching storm’s fury.
In the morning when the light returned, she would be able to read the street signs again. She could even ask for directions when people appeared—not that she had had much luck in that vein. She glanced down at her rumpled, muddy clothes with a great sigh.
Thanks to her current state of dishevelment, every respectable-looking person she had approached for directions had brushed her off and quickly walked away, taking her for a beggar—or worse. Appearances, it seemed, mattered a great deal more in Town than they did in her rustic village of Buckley-on-the-Heath. She had even been proffered a most disgusting proposition from a well-dressed man old enough to be her father when she had walked by.
Startled by the lewd offer, she had fled, only realizing afterward that while she might have considerable freedom in the country, in Town, a girl walking alone—especially after dark—was universally mistaken for a harlot. That was why no one would help her.
Even the heartless jeweler whose shop she had ventured into upon first arriving in London had obviously reached the same conclusion. When she had nervously presented the great ruby secreted away beneath her clothing and asked how much it was worth, the jeweler had looked her over in her bedraggled state as though he suspected her of stealing it. He asked to see the authentication papers; Becky had never heard of such a thing, and in any case, had been compelled to flee her home without any forewarning. There had been no time even to gather some money or food or an extra set of clothes, let alone the proper documentation. Then she realized what the blackguard had been about—trying to swindle her.
With barely a glance at the enormous ruby, the jeweler had haughtily informed her it was a fake. Becky had been infuriated. He might think her a country bumpkin, but her mother had not raised a fool.
The Rose of Indra had been in her family for two hundred years. It was all the inheritance she could claim from her coldhearted noble relatives, and her only hope of saving her home and village from Mikhail. A fake, indeed! She had stormed out, disgusted, then decided to go straight to the Duke of Westland’s instead. The great Whig lord would just have to help her get a fair price for her precious jewel, in addition to helping her prosecute Mikhail for his crime. She only hoped that Westland would not take one disparaging look at her like everyone else had in this pompous city and turn her away, because if that happened, she had nowhere else to go.
She refused to give in to despair. Somehow she would survive. Why, Yorkshire folk were as ruggedly self-sufficient as they were mistrustful of outsiders, she told herself. She would jolly well survive on her own, just like Mama had taught her.
Yet, deep down, if truth were told, she was beginning to have a terrible feeling that her cause was hopeless. Mikhail was too powerful, too well-connected, too rich. There had been too many near misses so far over the past few days when his personal army of battle-hardened warriors had nearly caught her. As her fatigue deepened, she knew she was bound to make a mistake—one that could cost her, her freedom, her home—not to mention her virtue. I hate this city. I’m going to die here.
Reining in a fresh surge of desperation, she dragged her hand through her tangled hair and forced her thoughts back to the problem of finding shelter for the night before the storm hit. She knew she had to hurry. The treetops behind the high, spiked walls of the rich Londoners’ private gardens swayed and rustled. The air felt heavy with the weight of pent-up rain.
Folding her arms across her middle, she kept forcing one foot ahead of the other, her bleary stare traveling over the neat cobblestone streets of the slumbering neighborhood, with its tree-lined lanes and occasional lampposts giving off hazy orange globes of light. There was nowhere, nowhere, to go.
Flat-fronted town houses offered no shelter behind their bristling wrought-iron fences. She wouldn’t even have minded sleeping in a hayloft, but the alley passageways leading back to the stables were locked up tight. This was no way for the granddaughter of an earl to go about, surely, she thought in rueful exhaustion.
Down one street, up another. She made a halfhearted effort to scale a garden fence behind a stately darkened town house. She could see a dainty little gazebo in the garden that would have served her well, but she couldn’t fit between the tall wrought-iron bars, let alone make her way over their sharpened tips. Moving on, she turned a corner and, much to her surprise, arrived in yet another garden square. Hope rose.
She walked over to the fenced-in center park, read the engraved copper plaque, and scowled. Damn. Not St. James’s. The sign said Hanover Square. She looked around in misery, not sure where to go from here.
A volley of thunder in the distance stirred ancient memories of her earliest childhood at sea on Papa’s ship. She glanced at the lowering sky. Under normal circumstances, she wasn’t scared of much in life, but the shattering boom of cannon fire and the bloody, screaming, splintering destruction that she had seen those broadsides bring during the tenderest years of her childhood had left her permanently scarred with a fear of loud noises. Turning her face in to the wind, she brushed her blowing tresses out of her eyes and bleakly surmised it was going to be a bad night.
At that moment the storm broke in earnest, unleashing thunder crashes, lightning, and a torrent of rain. She let out a startled cry, the cold, sudden downpour jolting her into motion.
Dashing across the street, Becky took shelter in the first spot she found, trespassing or no. On the corner, a grand town house on the scale of a mansion offered a stately portico framed by fat white pillars. All of the windows of the house were dark at this late hour, and even if the owners were sleeping, she reasoned, they could not be so heartless as to mind her ducking under their portico to weather out the worst of the storm.
A moment later she was wiping the rain off her face and looking out at the elegant square from the mansion’s front porch. It should suit well enough for the night, she thought. The porch had low walls on the sides to help hide her if the Cossacks came past. A pair of spiral-shaped bushes in large urns flanked the front door.
Breathing a sigh of relief, she leaned against the house, then slid her back slowly down the wall in sheer exhaustion and sat on the flagstone floor. Shrugging deeper into her pelisse, she drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, watching and listening to the rain.
How alone she felt. Nothing new in that. Scowling to ward off self-pity, she reached into her pocket and reluctantly took out her last morsel of food: a lone peppermint candy that she happened to have on the night she’d had to flee. Picking a piece of lint off it, she put the round hard candy into her mouth and sucked on it slowly, trying to make it last as long as possible. Her stomach protested at the meager offering.
She glanced at the locked, bolted door of the mansion-house with its fine, brass, lion-mask knocker and wondered about all the food they must have inside, the big, fluffy beds. . . . The thought made her even more miserable. Leaning her head back against the brick wall, she only meant to close her eyes for a moment or two.
She never intended to fall sound asleep.
The worst of the storm had passed an hour ago, subsiding into a vigorous, soaking pour. Watery spheres of gaslight from the wrought-iron lampposts along Oxford Street illumined blowing sheets of rain. The streets of the West End appeared deserted—but for one elegant black town-coach that came rolling through the bluster and blow, drawn by a blindered team of midnight-colo
red horses.
The mood inside the coach was one of wicked merriment, its passengers four of the undisputed rulers of Society, bon vivants of the first order: tall, athletic, good-looking men in their prime with a reputation for thrill-seeking and hedonism. Impeccably dressed, they sprawled on the silk-upholstered seats while the snug space of the carriage brimmed with their lively repartee.
“Will you stop rattling that damned dice box?”
“No! I’ve got to warm it up so I can win back what I lost on the Molineux match. I’m going to take your money tonight, my friend. And yours.”
“You’re not content with having stolen my mistress? How is she, by the way?”
“Fine, except you spoiled her utterly. Damned expensive wench. Do let me know if you want her back.”
“No thanks.”
Sardonic laughter abounded; the four archrogues were heedless of the weather.
Highborn libertines connected to the best families of England, they took their pleasures where they willed and were each entirely accustomed to the pampered life of the aristocracy, every whim catered to by armies of servants from the day they were born. They had met at Eton as lads and had been fast friends ever since. Despite the edge of danger they presented, having fought a total of some fifty duels among them—the collective number of females they had seduced ranged into the thousands—the high world courted them.
Their presence at a party made it fashionable; their snub spelled doom.
Tonight they had favored the hostess Lady Everley with their late arrival at her ballroom. The Everley ball was one of the last of the Season before the high world removed to Brighton for the rest of the summer in its restless search for pleasure.
Having graced the ball just long enough to set tongues wagging and to half scare, half titillate a few doe-eyed debutantes into nearly swooning with their subtly insolent attentions, they had finished their drinks and made their bows with their practiced air of bored superiority, which was, of course, largely for show.
In roguish manly company again, haughty pretensions cast aside, they were bound for Lord Draxinger’s town mansion in Hanover Square for a late night of cards and gambling.