A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

by Sophia James

  An unexpected Christmas gift...

  Like all of London society, Lady Eleanor believed Viscount Bromley dead. Now, after six years, he has returned a changed man. Brooding Nicholas Bartlett has no memory of their one night of incredible passion—so how can she tell him he fathered a child?

  As Nicholas starts to regain his lost memories, he realizes the true reason he feels so drawn to beautiful Eleanor and her young daughter. And with the danger from his past threatening to rear its head, it’s up to Nicholas to protect his newly discovered family!

  Hidden among the masked revelers of an underground Regency gentlemen’s club where decadence, daring and debauchery abound, the four owners of Vitium et Virtus are about to meet their match!

  Welcome to...

  The Society of Wicked Gentlemen

  Read

  A Convenient Bride for the Soldier

  by Christine Merrill

  An Innocent Maid for the Duke

  by Ann Lethbridge

  A Pregnant Courtesan for the Rake

  by Diane Gaston

  A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

  by Sophia James

  All available now!

  Author Note

  I wrote the prologue of this book on a plane between Los Angeles and Melbourne after the Romance Writers of America 2016 conference, and by the time I arrived home in Auckland I both understood and loved Nicholas Bartlett, the lost Viscount Bromley and one of the owners of the club Vitium et Virtus.

  It was my absolute pleasure and privilege to work with Christine Merrill, Ann Lethbridge and Diane Gaston on The Society of Wicked Gentlemen series.

  I hope you enjoy the last story, A Secret Consequence for the Viscount, as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  A Secret Consequence

  for the Viscount

  Sophia James lives in Chelsea Bay, on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, who is an artist. She has a degree in English and history from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer on vacations at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at Facebook.com/sophiajamesauthor.

  Books by Sophia James

  Harlequin Historical

  The Border Lord

  Lady with the Devil’s Scar

  Gift-Wrapped Governess

  “Christmas at Blackhaven Castle”

  Ruined by the Reckless Viscount

  The Society of Wicked Gentlemen

  A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

  The Penniless Lords

  Marriage Made in Money

  Marriage Made in Shame

  Marriage Made in Rebellion

  Marriage Made in Hope

  Once Upon a Regency Christmas

  “Marriage Made at Christmas”

  Men of Danger

  Mistletoe Magic

  Mistress at Midnight

  Scars of Betrayal

  The Wellingham Brothers

  High Seas to High Society

  One Unashamed Night

  One Illicit Night

  The Dissolute Duke

  Visit the Author Profile page

  at Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  This book is dedicated to Linda Fildew, my wonderful and irreplaceable editor, who has been with me right from the start. Thanks for knowing when to give me a push to try new things.

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from A Governess for Christmas by Marguerite Kaye

  Prologue

  James River, Virginia—1818

  He was bone-weary and cold and had been for a long time now.

  He could feel it in his hands and heart and in the fury wrapped around each intake of breath, fear raw against the sound of the river.

  Once he knew he had been different. Such knowledge sent a shaft of pain through him that was worse than anything else imaginable, an elusive certainty drifting on the edge of misunderstanding.

  He swore as he lowered his body into the water, closing his eyes against the sting of cold. With the hand that still had feeling in it he grabbed at the rushes and steadied movement. He was here somewhere, the man who had slashed at him with a blade. He could feel his presence, close now, a shadow catching at space between darkness, barely visible. He held no weapon except for his wits, no way of protecting himself save for the years of desperation honed in distance. He couldn’t remember ever feeling safe.

  The voice came unexpectedly and close.

  ‘Nicholas Bartlett? Are you there?’

  The sound had him turning his head. For more or for less he knew not which. The name was familiar, its syllables distinct as they ran together into something that made a terrible and utter sense.

  He wanted to stop the sudden onslaught of memories, each thread reforming itself into more, building a picture, words that pulled at the spinning void of his life and anchored him back into truth. A truth that lay above comprehension and disbelief.

  More words came from the mouth of his stalker, moving before him, as he raised steel under a dull small moon.

  ‘Vitium et Virtus.’

  A prayer or a prophesy? A forecast of all that was to come or the harbinger of that which had been?

  ‘No.’ His own voice was suddenly certain as he shot out of the water to meet his fate, fury fuelling him. He hardly felt the slice of the knife against the soft bones of his face. He was fearless in his quest for life and as the curve of his assailant’s neck came into his hands he understood a primal power that did away with doubt and gave him back hope. He felt the small breakage of bone and saw surprise in the dark bulging eyeballs under moonlight. The hot breath on the raised skin of his own forearm slowed and cooled as resistance changed into flaccidity. Life lost into death with barely a noise save the splash of a corpse as it was taken by the wide flowing James to sink under the blackness, a moment’s disturbance and then calm, the small ridges slipping into the former patterns of the river.

  He sat down on the bank in the wet grass and placed his head between his knees, both temples aching with the movement.

  Vitium et Virtus.

  Nicholas Bartlett.

  He knew the words, knew this life, knew the name imbued into each and every part of him.

  Nicholas Henry Stewart Bartlett.

  Viscount Bromley.

  A crest with a dragon on the dexter side and a horse on the sinister. Both in argent.

  An estate in Essex.

  Oliver. Frederick. Jacob.

  The club of secrets.

  Vitium et Virtus.

  ‘Hell.’ It all came tumbling back without any bar
riers. Flashes of honour, shame, disorder and excess after so very many years of nothing.

  Tears welled, mixed with blood as the loss of who he now was melded against the sorrow of everything forgotten.

  The young and dissolute London Lord with the world at his feet and a thousand hours of leisure and ease before him had been replaced by this person he had become, a life formed by years of endurance and hardship.

  ‘Nicholas Bartlett.’

  He turned the name on his tongue and said it quietly into the night so he might hear it truly. The tinge of the Americas stretched long over the vowels in a cadence at odds with his English roots, though when he repeated it again he heard only the sorrow.

  He searched back to the last memories held of that time, but could just think of being at Bromworth Manor in Essex with his uncle. Arguing yet again. After that there was nothing. He could not remember returning to London or getting on a ship to the Americas. He recalled pain somewhere and the vague sense of water. Perhaps he had been picked up by a boat, a stranger without memory and shanghaied aboard?

  He knew he would not have disappeared willingly though his gambling debts had been rising as he had been drawn into the seedy halls of London where cheating was rife. There had been threats to pay up or else, but he had by and large managed to do so. His friends had been there to help him through the worst of the demands and he also had the club in Mayfair. A home. A family. A place that felt like his. He loved Jacob Huntingdon, Frederick Challenger and Oliver Gregory like the brothers he’d never had.

  Shaking fingers touched the ache on his cheek near his right eye and came away with the sticky redness of oozing blood.

  The eye felt strange and unfocused. The night was so dark he wondered if he had gone blind in that eye, a last gift from his pursuer. He shut the other one and tried to find an image, holding his fingers up against what little light there was on the water, and was relieved to see a blurry outline.

  He did not feel up to walking back yet through the reeds and the river path to the shade of the cottonwoods. He didn’t want others to see him like this and he needed to make certain there were not more who would be trying to hurt him. A tiredness swept over everything, a grief at the loss of a life at his own hands. He had not killed before and the quickness of fear was now replaced by an ennui of guilt.

  How could he ever fit in again? How could he be the lord he was supposed to be after this? Had his assailant held a family close? Had he been only doing a job he was sent to complete? The grey shadows in which he’d lived the last six years were things familiar. The sludgy silhouette of them, the blacks and whites of shining morality left as other men’s choices but not available to him. Twice before in America others had tried to kill him; different men in the pay of a shadowy enemy and the mastermind at pulling the strings.

  * * *

  He had used so many different names as he moved on for ever, away from discovery, fleeing relationships. In the end he only brought people harm and danger. If they got to know him they were always at risk and so he had not allowed such closeness. Twice before he had felt his stalkers near.

  Emily. The young daughter of the kindly reverend and his wife who had taken him in had been pushed off a cliff top. The girl had survived by clinging to the undergrowth, but he had understood that after that for him there could never be intimacy with anyone.

  New towns, different jobs and a series of women with favours for sale had followed. He did not seek out decent company again, but dwelt in the underworld of secrets, squalor and shallow rapport. He understood the people who were as brutalised and damaged as himself and there was safety in the shifting unsettled disconnection of outsiders.

  Peter Kingston. His name now here in the river town of Richmond, the capital of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia. He could disappear tomorrow and nobody would miss him, the man employed at the tavern of Shockoe Bottom who seldom spoke and hardly ever smiled. Stranger. Foreigner. Outsider. Murderer now. Another name added to all the ones he had gathered. A further disengagement. A shadow who had walked through the Americas with barely a footprint. Until tonight. Until now. Until his hands had fastened around the throat of his pursuer and broken the life from him.

  He leant over and was neatly sick into the green heart of some poison ivy.

  Leaves of three, let them be.

  The ditty came of its own accord as he wiped his mouth with the frayed edge of his jacket. Had he been truly regretful he might have laid his hand across the plant and allowed its penance. As it was he merely frowned at such an idea and stood.

  He would gather his few possessions and find a ship to England. Frederick, Oliver and Jacob would help him to make sense of things and then he would leave London to retire to the country in Essex. Alone. It was the only way he could see before him.

  As he looked back a fog bank slid by on the flat black current of the James.

  Chapter One

  London—December 26th, 1818

  It was one day past Christmas.

  That thought made Nicolas smile. He had forgotten the celebration for so long in the Americas that the presence of it here in London was somehow comforting. A continued and familiar tradition, a belief that transcended all difficulty and promised hope for the likes of himself? Or would it tender despair? He could not imagine any church exonerating his sins should he be foolish enough to confess them.

  The age-old music of carols could be heard as he left the narrow service alley behind the club of Vitium et Virtus in Mayfair and came around to the front door. Here the only sound was that of laughter and frivolity, a card game underway, he guessed, in the downstairs salon. High stakes and well funded. The few coins he had left in his own pocket felt paltry and he wondered for the millionth time whether he should have come at all.

  The late afternoon lengthened the shadows. He could slip away still, undetected, and make his way north. Boxing Day kept most people at home enjoying the company of family. There would be few around to note his progress.

  He swallowed as he looked up and saw the sky was stained in red. Blood red. Guilt red. A celestial nod to his culpability or a pardon written in colour?

  Digging into his pocket, he found a silver shilling.

  ‘Heads I stay and tails I go.’ It was all he could think of at this moment, a choice that was arbitrary and random. The coin turned and as it came down into his opened palm the face of George the Third was easily visible. The thought crossed his mind that had it been tails he would have tried for the best of three.

  His knuckles were against the main door before he knew it, the polished black lacquer of the portal attesting to great care and attention and a certain understated wealth.

  When it opened a big man he did not know stood there, dressed in the clothes of a footman, but with the visage of one who knew his intrinsic worth.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  Nicholas could feel the condescension. His clothes from the long voyage were dirty and they had not been well looked after. His beard was full and his hair uncut. He was glad there was no looking glass inside the door to reflect his image over and over again.

  ‘Are any of the lords who own this place present inside this evening?’

  He tried to round his vowels and sound at least halfway convincing. It would not take much for the man to bid those who guarded the front door to throw him out. He knew there was desperation in his eyes.

  ‘They are, sir.’

  ‘Could you show me through to them?’

  ‘Indeed, sir. But may I take your hat and coat first and could you give me your name?’

  ‘Bromley. They will know me.’

  ‘If you would just wait here, sir.’ The footman snagged Nick’s attire across a series of wooden pegs carved into the shape of a man’s sexual parts inside the front door. The sheer overtness of the furnishings shoc
ked him now, where once it had not.

  A further confusion. Another way in which he had changed. He swallowed and as dryness filled his mouth he wished he’d thought to bring his brandy flask.

  Then there was the sound of chairs scraping against the floor and the rush of feet, a door flung back against its hinges and three faces he knew like his own before him. Astonished. Disbelieving.

  ‘Nicholas?’ It was Jacob who came forward first just as he knew it would be. Rakish and handsome, there had always been an undercurrent of kindness within him, a care for the underdog, a certainty of faith.

  Oliver and Frederick followed him, each one as bewildered as the next.

  ‘You’ve been gone for more than six damn years...’ It was Oliver who said this, the flush of emotion visible across the light brown of his skin.

  ‘And to turn up like this without any correspondence? Why would you not let us know where you were or how you fared at least?’ Fred’s voice cracked as his glance took in Nick’s cheek and the bandage on his left hand holding the deep wound safe from further damage.

  Twenty-five days at sea had not helped the healing. It ached so much he had taken to cradling it across his body, easing the pain and heat. He released it now and let it hang at his side, taking hope from the bare emotion of his friends even as his fingers throbbed in protest.

  ‘Thank the Lord you are returned.’ Oliver stepped towards him and wrapped his arms around all the damaged parts of his body. It had been such a very long time since someone had touched him like this that he stiffened. Then Fred was there and Jake, enveloping him so tight in an embrace he hardly knew where one of them stopped and another one started.

  Safety. For the first time in years Nicholas took a breath that was not forced. Yet despite this, he himself reached out to none of them. Not yet. Not till it was over. Protecting each of them from harm was the only thing he now had left to offer.

  He should not have come. He should not have been so selfish. He should have listened to his inner voice and stayed away until he knew where the danger had come from. But friendship held its own beacons and the hope of it had led him here, hurrying across the seas.