Meet Meg, Bella and Celina—three loving sisters, desperate to escape the iron rule of their fanatical rector father…

One by one they flee the vicarage—only to discover that the real world holds its own surprises for the now disgraced Shelley sisters! How will they get themselves out of the scandalous situations they find themselves in?

Can betrayed widow Meg learn to love again?

Will pregnant and abandoned Bella find the man to turn her blush of shame to the flush of pleasure?

And how will virginal courtesan-in-training Lina discover the meaning of true passion?

Find out in…

The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters

Three sisters, three escapades, three very different destinies!

Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer’s Bride
Louise Allen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author

LOUISE ALLEN has been immersing herself in history, real and fictional, for as long as she can remember, and finds landscapes and places evoke powerful images of the past. Louise lives in Bedfordshire, and works as a property manager, but spends as much time as possible with her husband at the cottage they are renovating on the north Norfolk coast, or travelling abroad. Venice, Burgundy and the Greek islands are favourite atmospheric destinations. Please visit Louise’s website—www.louiseallenregency.co.uk—for the latest news!

Novels by the same author:

VIRGIN SLAVE, BARBARIAN KING

THE DANGEROUS MR RYDER*

THE OUTRAGEOUS LADY FELSHAM*

THE SHOCKING LORD STANDON*

THE DISGRACEFUL MR RAVENHURST*

THE NOTORIOUS MR HURST*

THE PIRATICAL MISS RAVENHURST*

PRACTICAL WIDOW TO PASSIONATE MISTRESS†

VICAR’S DAUGHTER TO VISCOUNT’S LADY†

*Those Scandalous Ravenhursts

†The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters

Author Note

Celina Shelley is the youngest of the Shelley sisters and the shyest. She’s always thought of herself as timid, compared to headstrong Meg and stoic, determined Bella, but her one act of rebellion lands her in a quite shocking and scandalous place, and from there she faces not just ruin but headlong flight from the law. Somehow Lina has to find reserves of courage she never knew she had. Discovering them surprises her almost as much as it did me!

I knew I had to find a sanctuary for her, and I literally stumbled on it in Sheringham Park on the north Norfolk coast, which became the inspiration for Dreycott Park. The house and park belong to the National Trust now, and the house is not open to the public, but you can walk in the park and climb to the top of the hill and the windswept gazebo as Lina did.

And it seemed right to give the shy sister a rakish adventurer for her hero. Both Lina and I fell head over heels for Quinn Ashley and I hope you do too as her adventure—the final episode in The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters—unfolds.

For AJH—free at last!

Prologue

London—March 4th, 1815

‘You, my dear Miss Celina Shelley, are most definitely an asset of the business.’ Mr Gordon Makepeace folded his hands on the desk blotter in front of him and smiled.

Lina had never seen a crocodile in the flesh, but she could imagine one very clearly now. ‘I believe you mean that I am an asset to the business, Mr Makepeace. That is, I hope that by keeping the accounts and managing the housekeeping here at The Blue Door I am repaying some of my debt to my Aunt Clara for taking me in.’ She looked at the closed door that communicated with her aunt’s rooms. ‘I really should go and see how she does. I was on my way to her when you arrived.’

‘I do not think so.’ The smile had vanished. ‘We don’t want you catching whatever it is she has, do we?’

‘My aunt has a chronic disease of the stomach. That is hardly contagious.’ Lina stood up and went to the connecting door. It was locked.

‘Sit down, Miss Shelley.’ The vague feeling of discomfort that had been almost unnoticed under the greater anxiety about her aunt became a chill shiver of alarm.

Twenty months ago Lina had run away from her miserable home life in a Suffolk vicarage to find refuge with her aunt. She had known of her only from one letter written to her mother years before and it had been a severe shock to discover that Aunt Clara, far from being the respectable spinster of her imaginings, was Madam Deverill, owner of one of London’s most exclusive brothels.

But Lina had burned her boats now; there could be no going back to the wretched safety of the vicarage, back to one of the only two people who loved her, the sister she had run away and left. Her father would never allow her over the threshold and the scandal of where she had been would tarnish her elder sister.

Lina had fled impulsively, snatching at the tenuous lifeline of that hidden letter. She had been so utterly miserable, she had felt so trapped, that escape was all she could think of, especially after Meg, her other beloved sister, had left. Now her conscience nagged her with the knowledge that she should not have left Bella alone.

Her elegantly alluring aunt accepted her without a murmur, gave her a room on the private floor at the top of the house with windows that looked out to the roofs of St James’s Palace, and proceeded to treat her as a daughter. How could she go back? Aunt Clara asked her. Her father would bar the door to her. Bella was the sensible, stoical sister, her aunt said. If she wanted to leave, too, she would. But Lina’s conscience still troubled her.

Gordon Makepeace had been a silent partner in the business ever since a crisis with a difficult landlord some years ago had plunged Clara into near-bankruptcy. His money had saved the business and now it flourished again, she explained to Lina when her niece insisted on taking over what work she could that did not involve her directly with the purpose of the establishment. Now, every month, Lina counted out the guineas that represented Makepeace’s share of the profits.

He had been a shadowy figure up to now, but this last bout of sickness had left Madam Deverill too ill to leave her bed and he had simply walked in and taken over. ‘Why are you keeping me from my aunt?’ Lina demanded. ‘You have no right—’

‘I have a considerable sum invested here; as Madam is not fit to run the business at present, I have been looking at the books.’ He waved a hand at the stack of ledgers. ‘I can see that opportunities are being missed, avenues of income are not being explored. I intend to take things in hand. There will be changes.’ It was a threat, not a suggestion.

‘What changes?’ Lina asked. Aunt Clara would be better soon, surely? She could not intend that this man should make decisions.

‘There are services that are not offered. Highly profitable services.’ He raised an eyebrow as though daring her to speculate. But Lina had listened while her aunt had explained the business to her in terms that even the most innocent daughter of the vicarage could grasp. The Blue Door sold sex. Luxurious, indulgent sex accompanied by excellent food, good wine and choice entertainment.

‘But I will not have virgins here,’ Madam had said. ‘Or children, or girls doing things they aren’t willing to. My girls get a fair wage and I make sure they keep healthy.’ And the fierce light in her eyes as she spoke had told Lina that these were more than merely house rules. Once, long ago, she realised, someone had forced her aunt to do things against her will and that had left deep scars.

Later she had discovered, to her stunned surprise, that her mother and her aunt had both been courtesans in their youth. At first she was too bewildered for questions, then, still almost unable to believe it, she had dared to ask.

‘We fell in love with brothers,’ Clara had said with a bitter twist to her smile. ‘And they seduced us and abandoned us here in St James’s, where we had innocently followed them. We were young and lost and heartbroken and it did not take long for us to be found by a brothel keeper.

‘We grew up fast,’ she added, seeming to look back down the years. ‘We saved, we found wealthy “friends” and I started my own house that grew eventually into The Blue Door. Your mama, bless her, never became accustomed—she took over the housekeeping and the books, just as you have.’

There was so much to come to terms with there. Lina asked only one question. ‘But however did Mama meet Papa?’ For surely the fiercely moral Reverend Shelley had never been inside a brothel in his life, except perhaps to harangue the occupants on their evil ways and the certainty that Hell’s fires awaited them?

‘She met him in Green Park. Annabelle always dressed well, like a lady. He tripped over and sprained his ankle, she stopped to offer him assistance—it was love at first sight. Then he was not the Puritan prig he grew into,’ Clara said with a sniff. ‘That came later. She never told him what she was, of course. He believed her when she said I was a widow and she was my companion. They married, he took her off into the wilds of Suffolk, they had three daughters and he became, year by year, more rigid, more sanctimonious. And she fell out of love and into a sort of dull misery with him.

‘I do wonder,’ her aunt had said thoughtfully, ‘if your father found out, or came to suspect, something about your mother’s past. We will never know now, although her letters tell of him becoming more and more suspicious and unreasonable. She met Richard Lovat and they eloped. She wrote to me, confident that your father would let you all come to her—you were only girls, after all. But he refused. Annabelle was beside herself—Lovat took her abroad, but she died in Italy two years later. I do not think she ever forgave herself for leaving you.’

Now Lina felt her vision blur and she wrenched her attention back to the man on the other side of the desk. She had left Bella as her mother had left her daughters. Well, she was paying for her heedless, selfish, panic now, it seemed. ‘What do you mean to do?’ she asked, trying not to show how she felt. Like all bullies he would feed on her fear.

‘Realise some assets, for a start. You, to begin with.’

‘Me?’ She swallowed.

‘You are a virgin, are you not, Miss Shelley? A most valuable asset—a pretty, well-bred young lady.’

‘No!’ She stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over with a thud.

‘But yes. Or I will demand the return of all my investment, and to meet that your aunt will have to sell the entire establishment, for I am certain she does not have the ready cash.

‘I will buy her share, of course, and then the pampered little trollops who work here will service all the clients—in every way the clients want. I’ll have none of this picking-and-choosing nonsense. Some flagellation rooms, a Roman orgy every week, an auction of virgins—those will get us off to a good start. I’ve got the ideas and very profitable they are, too.’

Lina edged around to the far side of the chair. Her heart was thumping, her mouth was dry. Perhaps Aunt Clara’s illness was contagious after all. She must be in a fever, dreaming this. ‘You…you would auction me off to the highest bidder?’

‘Oh, no, not an auction. I have an offer for you already from Sir Humphrey Tolhurst.’

‘The magistrate?’ But Sir Humphrey was fifty if he was a day. And pompous and only came to play cards and ogle the posture girls. She had seen him from the screened gallery that her aunt used to watch the activities in the salon.

‘That’s the man. I pointed you out to him in the street and he was very taken with you. He would not want to be involved in anything like an auction, of course; he values his privacy too much for that. I was able to set a very good price in consideration of that accommodation.’ Makepeace chuckled. ‘A very good price indeed.’

‘And then what?’ Lina asked, surprised to hear herself sounding defiant. She had never before turned and faced danger, or her father’s bullying anger. She had always been the timorous sister, the nervous one who ran if she could not hide. But it seemed that, if pushed to extremes, she could try to fight.

‘You can only sell my virginity once.’ Legitimately, that was. The girls had told her all about the ways to feign a maidenhead, as they had so much else that should have shocked her to the core. But their open, cheerful acceptance of the commerce between men and women, in all its weird and puzzling manifestations, had left her much wiser—in theory—and reluctant to judge them.

‘True,’ he said. ‘But it will give me a tidy sum to invest in the equipment this establishment is lacking. Flagellation is all the rage.’

‘Mother Moll’s is the specialist in that,’ Lina retorted, parroting the girls’ gossip. ‘There is too much competition for another flogging school so close.’

‘Oh, no. Not for the gentlemen who require chastising. This would be for those who wish to administer the punishment.’

‘But the girls—’

‘Will do as they are told or be out in the gutter.’

Lina clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. One of them, Katy, had shown her the scars she had received after a vicious flogging at another brothel. She had been imprisoned there until she’d managed to escape by climbing down the drainpipe.

‘I will leave,’ she said, trying her best to sound confident. ‘I will go back to my father.’

‘To the vicarage?’ he enquired, startling her with his knowledge. ‘Oh, yes, I made it my business to find out all about you, Miss Celina. Both your sisters are gone now—did you know that? And your doting papa has struck your name from the family Bible and denies he ever had daughters, so my man tells me.’

Bella gone? But where? She had soon realised that her letters home were being destroyed, just as her father must have destroyed those from her sister Meg after she eloped. But she had always thought that Bella was safe at home. Sensible Bella, housekeeping for their tyrant of a father…Please God that wherever she was, she was safe and happy as Meg must be with James, the young officer she had run away with six years before.

She realised Makepeace was still speaking. ‘You’ll do as you’re told, my girl, or your ailing auntie loses this house and her precious girls start earning their living like the common whores that they are.’

‘When?’ Lina whispered. There was the sound of doors slamming all around her, but they were in her head. If she had only herself to worry about she would run, even though she had nowhere to go. Anything, even going back to Suffolk and begging forgiveness on her knees, would be better than this. But that would leave Aunt Clara and the girls at the mercy of this scheming reptile. She could see no way out, none at all.

‘Tomorrow. They will send a carriage at seven in the evening. And you be nice to Sir Humphrey or I know who will be the first one to try out the new flogging horse.’

Lina edged towards the door, unwilling to turn her back on him. The handle turned and she was out. But not alone. A big bruiser, a man she had never seen before, stood in front of her aunt’s door.

Lina turned and walked away on unsteady legs to the room shared by Katy and Miriam. They were sprawled on the bed, laughing and playing with Miriam’s collection of paste jewellery. As Lina walked in they looked up, their smiles of welcome freezing as they saw her face.

‘What is it, Lina love?’ Katy slid off the bed, her dyed red curls bouncing.

‘Mr Makepeace has sold me to Sir Humphrey Tol-hurst.’ Lina heard her own voice, so flat and expressionless that she could hardly recognise it. She swallowed hard. If she gave way now she would collapse into hysterics, she was sure. ‘Tell me what to do so it will be over quickly. Please, tell me.’

Chapter One

Dreycott Park, the north Norfolk coast—April 24th, 1815

‘He’s coming!’ Johnny, the boot boy, came tumbling through the front door, shirt half-untucked, red in the face with running from his post in the gazebo on top of Flagstaff Hill. He had been up there every day since the message had arrived that the late Lord Dreycott’s heir was on his way from London.

Lina gave up all pretence of sewing and came out into the hall. Trimble the butler was snapping his fingers, sending footmen scurrying to assemble the rest of the staff.

She had not been able to settle to anything in the four days since Lord Dreycott’s funeral. When she had fled from Sir Humphrey Tolhurst’s house, terrified, desperate and wanted by the law, her aunt had sent her to an old friend’s rural retreat—to safety, so Clara had believed. But now her elderly protector was gone.

Lina smoothed down the skirts of her black afternoon dress and tried for composure. This was the end of her sanctuary, a brief seven weeks since she had fled from London, a price on her head for a theft she had not committed. The heir was coming to claim what was his and, no doubt, to eject hangers-on from his new house—and then what would become of her?

‘Where are the carriages? How many?’ the butler demanded.

‘No carriages, Mr Trimble, sir. Just two riders and a pack horse. I saw them coming through the Cromer road gate. They’re walking, sir, the animals looked tired. They’ll be a while yet.’

‘Even so, hurry.’

Hurry. Pack, take this money and hurry. The elegant square entrance hall blurred and faded and became a bedchamber. Aunt Clara, white-lipped, her face drawn after a week of racking sickness, dragged herself up against the pillows as Lina sobbed out her story.

‘He did not touch you?’ she had whispered urgently and they both glanced at the door. Makepeace’s bully boy might be back at any moment. ‘I swear Makepeace will suffer for this.’

‘No. Tolhurst did not touch me.’ The relief of that was still overwhelming, the only good thing in the entire nightmare. ‘He made me undress while he watched. Then he took his clothes off.’ It took a moment to push her mind past the image of indulged middle-aged flab, mottled skin, the terrifying thing that thrust out from below the swell of Tolhurst’s belly. ‘And he began to reach for me…And then he gasped, and his eyes bulged and his face went red and he fell down. So I rang for help and pulled on my clothes and—’

‘He was dead? You are certain?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Lina hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch him, but she could tell. The bulging blue eyes had seemed fixed on her, still avid with lust even as they began to glaze over. She had stared in horror as her fingers fumbled with ribbons and garters. ‘They all came in then—the valet, the butler, the younger son, Reginald Tolhurst. Mr Tolhurst knelt down and tried to find a pulse—then he sent the valet for the doctor and told the butler to lock me in the library. He said his father’s sapphire ring was missing.’

‘The Tolhurst Sapphire? My God.’ Her aunt had stared at her. ‘Wasn’t he wearing it when you—?’

‘I don’t know!’ Lina’s voice quavered upwards and she caught her herself before it became a shriek. ‘I wasn’t looking at his rings.

‘I heard them talking outside. They said the ring was not in the room, not in the safe nor the jewel box. The butler said Sir Humphrey had been wearing it when I arrived. Mr Tolhurst sent a footman to Bow Street, to the magistrates.’ She was gabbling with anxiety, but she could not seem to steady herself.

‘He said I would be taken up for theft, that I must have thrown it out of the window to an accomplice. He said I would hang like the thieving whore I was.’ She closed her eyes and fought for calm. Her aunt was ill, she must remember that. But she had nowhere else to go, no one else to help her. ‘I climbed out of the library window and ran,’ she finished. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘You must go out of London until the truth can be discovered,’ Clara said with decision, suddenly sounding more like her old self. ‘I’ll send you to Simon Ashley—Lord Dreycott—in Norfolk, he will take you in.’

‘If I go to the magistrates with a lawyer,’ Lina said, ‘they’ll believe me then, surely? If I run away—’

‘You live in a brothel. No one will believe you are innocent, and once they have you, there will be no attempt to establish the truth,’ her aunt said with all the bitterness bred of years of dealings with the law. ‘The Tolhurst Sapphire is famous and worth thousands. Did you read about that maidservant who was hanged a fortnight ago for stealing a silver teaspoon? It was found a few days after the execution where her mistress had lost it—down the side of the sofa. If they didn’t believe her, a girl with a good character, they are not going to believe you. Help me get up.’

‘But, Aunt—’

‘Hurry, Lina.’ Clara threw back the bedclothes and walked unsteadily to her desk. ‘Put on your plain bombazine walking dress. Pack what you need in bags you can carry. Hurry.’

‘There is no time to lose,’ Trimble urged.

Lina blinked. This was the present and she had to focus on the present danger, not the past. The staff lined up, tugged cuffs and aprons under the butler’s critical eye. Mrs Bishop, the cook, headed the row of maids; the footmen and the boot boy aligned themselves on the other side next to Trimble. It was not a large indoor staff—ten in all—but a reclusive and eccentric ninety-year-old baron had needed no more. Where should she, the cuckoo in the nest, stand?

‘Miss Haddon?’ Trimble gestured her to the front. It was uncomfortable using a false name, but her real one was too dangerous. Makepeace had considered that Celina Shelley sounded suitable for a courtesan, so the law had known her real name from the beginning.

Trimble seemed tense. Lina smiled at him in an effort to reassure both of them. In the days since her improbable protector had slipped away in his sleep, eased on his last journey by copious glasses of best cognac, an injudicious indulgence in lobster and too many cheroots, the staff had looked to her as the temporary head of the household.

She was, they accepted, Lord Dreycott’s house guest, a distant acquaintance in need of a roof over her head because of the indisposition of an aunt. Her eyes filled with tears at the memory of his kindness, masked behind a pretence of cantankerous bad humour. He had read Aunt Clara’s scribbled note, asked a few sharp questions, then rang for Trimble and informed him that Miss Haddon was staying for the foreseeable future.

Lord Dreycott had waved her out of his crowded, book-strewn library with an impatient gesture, but she had seen how his other hand caressed the note, the twisted, brown-spotted fingers gentle on the thick paper. He was doing this for Clara, for some memory of a past relationship, she realised, and Lina had not taken any notice of his gruffness after that.

Now she took her place and waited, her face schooled into a calm expressionless mask as she had learned to do for years in the face of Papa’s furies over some minor sin or another. Her fingers trembled slightly, making a tiny rustling noise against the crisp black silk, and she pressed the tips together to still them. Somehow she had to persuade this man to let her stay here without telling him why.

At last, the sound of hooves on the carriage drive. Paul, the second footman, swayed back on his heels to keep an unobtrusive watch out of the narrow slit of glass beside the front door then, as the sound of male voices penetrated the thick panels, he swung it open with a flourish. The new Lord Dreycott had arrived.

‘My lord.’ Trimble stepped through on to the arcaded entrance and bowed. ‘Welcome to Dreycott Park.’

Staring past the butler’s narrow shoulders, Lina could see only glimpses of the horses—a curving dappled grey rump and a long white tail, the arch of a black neck, the bulk of oilskin-wrapped cases piled on a pack saddle. Then the grey shifted and she saw its rider fleetingly. A dust-coloured coat draped over the horse’s rump; long soft boots without spurs sagged softly at the ankles; hair the colour of polished mahogany showed over-long beneath a wide-brimmed hat. He swung down out of the saddle and, even with the narrow view between butler and pillar, she saw the ease and suppleness of a fit man.

As he turned she dropped her gaze and Trimble backed into the hall to allow his new master entrance. Lina focused on where Lord Dreycott’s mouth would be. That felt a safe place to look. It was becoming easier now, but ever since that night she had to make herself meet a man’s eyes directly.

The male servants were deferential, trained never to stare, and she felt comfortable with them. Old Lord Dreycott’s rheumy, long-sighted gaze had held no terrors for her, but when any other man met her eyes for more than a moment she felt the panic building, her heart pattered in alarm and her hands clenched with the need to control her urge to run. She must overcome it, she knew, especially with the new baron, lest he guessed she had something to hide.

The swirling skirts of his riding coat filled the doorway and the booted feet stopped just inside, set apart with a confident stance that seemed to come naturally, rather than as a deliberate statement of ownership. Lina found herself staring, not at his mouth as she had expected, but at the carelessly tied neckcloth at his throat. This was a tall man. Her eyes shifted cautiously up to his jaw, darkened with several days’ stubble. When he pulled off the heavy leather gauntlets and slapped them against his coat it became apparent that it was dust-coloured because it was covered in dust.

‘My lord.’ Trimble coughed slightly as he took gloves and hat. ‘On behalf of the staff, may I offer our condolences at the loss of your great-uncle? I am Trimble, my lord.’

‘But I remember you,’ Lord Dreycott said with a wide smile of recognition, his teeth very white in his tanned face. ‘It is good to see you again, Trimble. Many years, is it not?’

‘It is indeed, my lord. And this…’ he turned as he spoke ‘…is Miss Haddon, his late lordship’s guest.’

Lina dropped into a curtsy. ‘My lord.’

‘Miss Haddon. I was not aware that there were any Haddons in the family.’ His voice was deep and flexible with a faint touch of a foreign intonation and more than a hint of enquiry.

‘I am not a relative, my lord.’ The stubble on his chin was darker than his hair, except for a thin slash of silver that must trace a scar that had just missed his mouth. Be persuasive and open, an inner voice urged. He must believe that you will be no trouble to him and might be useful. ‘Lord Dreycott was an old friend of the aunt with whom I used to live. When I had nowhere to go he was kind enough to take me in. I have been acting as housekeeper and companion for the past seven weeks, my lord.’

‘I see. I am sorry to put you to inconvenience so soon after the funeral, Miss Haddon. The date of my arrival in the country was uncertain, but fortunately I called on my agent at once. He had received the news, but it was, I regret to say, the day of the service. We simply rode on.’

‘All the way from London, my lord?’ That was more than one hundred and forty miles. She remembered the interminably long stagecoach only too vividly.

‘Yes.’ He seemed surprised at the question, as though it was normal for the aristocracy to take to the high roads on horseback rather than in a post-chaise or private carriage. ‘The horses were fresh enough and they are used to long distances.’

There was a bustle outside as the grooms arrived and led the animals away, Lord Dreycott’s man striding behind them. The baron half-turned to see them go and Lina risked a rapid upwards glance. Overlong hair, deeply tanned skin, and, from the sharp angle of his jaw, not a spare ounce of flesh on him. He was tall, but not bulky: a thoroughbred, not a Shire horse, she thought, the sudden whimsy breaking through her anxiety. He radiated a kind of relaxed natural energy as though something wild and free had been brought into the house. Lina felt oddly fidgety and unsettled as though that quality had reached her, too.

‘You will wish to retire to your rooms, I have no doubt, my lord. Your, er…valet?’ Trimble eased the dust-thick coat from his lordship’s shoulders.

‘Gregor is my travelling companion,’ Lord Dreycott said and turned back. ‘I assume one of the footmen can look after my clothes.’

Lina contemplated his boots. It should have been a safe place to look if it were not for the fact that the swirling pattern of stitching that spiralled round them took the eye upwards, leading inexorably to legs that were long and well muscled. The boots did not look like English work.

Where had Lord Dreycott been? She tried to recall what his great-uncle had said about his heir. A traveller, like I used to be. Only one of the family with any backbone, the old man had grunted. Only one with an original thought in his head. Scandalous rogue, of course. Shocking! He had chuckled indulgently. Never see the boy. He writes, but he’s the decency not to come sniffing round for his inheritance.

But this was not a boy. This was a man. Her stomach clenched as he moved to stand in front of her. Lina forced herself to look into his face for a second and wondered how gullible he was likely to be. Green eyes, cool and watchful in contrast to the easy smile he wore. Not blue eyes, not bulging, not filled with the need to use and take. The fear subsided to wary tension. But his scrutiny of her face was not indifferent, either, it was searching and intelligent and masculine and she glanced away to focus on his left ear before he could read the emotion in her own eyes. No, not gullible at all.

‘I hope the rooms we have made up will be acceptable, my lord,’ Lina managed, doing her best to sound like a housekeeper. That seemed the safest role for now. ‘We…I cleared as much as possible into the baroness’s suite, but the room is still very cluttered. The late Lord Dreycott’s idea of comfort was a trifle, um, eccentric.’

She had tried to tidy up after the funeral, but soon abandoned the attempt to create anything like a conventional bedchamber. There were piles of books on every surface, rolls of maps, a stuffed bear, a human skull and pots of every kind. Papers spilled from files and from boxes that she felt they should not touch until the heir and his solicitor could inspect them; half-unpacked cases of antiquities and the desiccated remains of an enthusiasm for chemical experiments, perhaps five years old, cluttered every flat surface and half the floor.

The adjoining chambers, last occupied by the late Lady Dreycott until her death forty years past, now held motheaten examples of the taxidermist’s art, vases with erotic scenes and dangerous-looking bottles of chemicals.

‘My idea of comfort is also eccentric. I can sleep on a plank, Miss Haddon, and frequently have,’ the amused voice drawled. ‘You will join me for dinner this evening?’

‘My lord, I am the housekeeper. It is hardly suitable—’

‘You were my great-uncle’s guest, were you not, Miss Haddon? And now you are mine. That appears to make it eminently suitable.’ He was quite clearly not used to being gainsaid.

‘Thank you, my lord.’ What else was there to say? And now you are mine. Was it her imagination that shaded that statement with a possessive edge? She needed him, needed his tolerance, his acceptance of her presence in the house until she heard from Aunt Clara that it was safe to return. And there had been no word, even though the announcement of Lord Dreycott’s death must have been in all the London news sheets days before. She dare not write herself; if Makepeace intercepted the letter, he would know where she was from the post-office stamps.

Soon she must establish herself as something more than a housekeeper, to be dismissed or kept at his whim, Lina realised. But as what? Somehow she must make the new Lord Dreycott decide to continue to shelter her as though he had an obligation to his great-uncle’s guest, and this invitation to dine was a step along that path.

Her conscience pricked her; he would be harbouring a fugitive from the law, however unwittingly. The old baron had at least a sentimental attachment to her aunt to motivate him to offer his protection—and he had known the truth. This man had no reason to allow her so much as a bed in the hayloft and every incentive to call the local magistrate if he discovered who she was.

But the alternatives were to give herself up to imprisonment, trial and probable hanging or to flee into the unknown with no way of her aunt contacting her and only a few guineas to live on. Set against those choices a troubled conscience seemed a small price to pay for tenuous safety.

Quinn studied the young woman’s averted face with a stirring of interest. What was his great-uncle doing housing this little nun? Her hair was scraped back into a tight knot at her nape and her body was shrouded in dull black from throat to toes. Old Simon was not known for his acts of charity; he had a well-earned reputation for scandal and he had kept a string of expensive birds of paradise well into his seventies. Was this girl his daughter, the product of his last fling before he returned to scholarly isolation in the country?

Surely not. No Ashley had anything but the arrogant nose that he saw in the glass whenever he bothered to look in one. No child of Simon’s would have a straight little nose like this young woman’s. The firm chin might be his, but not the blue eyes and blonde hair. This was not Simon’s natural daughter. ‘I look forward to dinner, Miss Haddon,’ he said.

In answer she dropped a bob of a curtsy, her eyes fixed firmly on his collarbone. It was a perfectly ordinary collarbone as far as he was concerned, certainly not one to attract such careful study. ‘At what hour would you care to dine, my lord?’

‘Seven, if that is convenient, Miss Haddon.’ Something rustled seductively as she moved and he frowned. He had just spent a year in the Near East, a region where silk was a commodity that all understood. That had been the whisper of expensive fine fabric and, now that he looked at the drab black gown with its dove-grey collar and cuffs, he saw the unmistakable gleam of pure silk. The modest gown was cut with elegance and made out of cloth more suited to a ballroom than a country-house hallway.

Quinn sharpened his focus on the smooth sweep of hair the colour of honey in the sun, the long lashes veiling the startling blue eyes. She moved again and a complex hint of spice and oranges flirted with his senses, subtle yet insistent. No nun, this, and no conventional housekeeper either. She was nervous of him, fearful almost. He could read her wariness as easily as he could that of a half-broken filly. It was puzzling—and arousing.

‘My lord?’ Trimble stood waiting for him. Quinn turned on his heel and strode across the polished marble to the staircase. At the foot of the stairs he turned and looked back. Miss Haddon was walking through an open doorway and he realised that the gown was not the dull garment he had thought it, not when its wearer was in motion. She swayed as she walked, her movements as subtle as her scent, and the silken skirts clung for a tantalising moment to the curve of her hip, the dip of her waist. This enforced return to England was going to be more interesting than he had expected, Quinn decided as he took the stairs two at a time in the wake of the butler.

Chapter Two

‘That heathen servant has been in here, sniffing around.’ Mrs Bishop, the cook, pounced on Lina the moment she appeared in the kitchen at half past six to make sure everything was going smoothly.

‘I am sure he is not a heathen,’ Lina soothed. ‘Gregor sounds like an Eastern European name to me. Perhaps he is of the Orthodox faith, but a Christian nevertheless.’

Mrs Bishop had perforce been acting as housekeeper for eighteen months, ever since the last one had been driven out by the late Lord Dreycott’s robust language, and she had welcomed Lina with open arms. Now she settled down to unload her worries.

‘I can hardly understand a word he says,’ she complained, not at all mollified. ‘Accent that thick you could cut it with a knife.’ As she had a north Norfolk accent that had taken Lina a week to comprehend, some mutual misunderstanding with the newcomer was only to be expected.

‘Perhaps he just wanted some supper,’ Lina suggested. ‘Where has Trimble lodged him? I do not think he is a servant, precisely. Lord Dreycott called him a travelling companion.’

‘Well, Mr Trimble’s given him a room in the attic, but he looked at it a bit sideways, so Michael says.’ Cook’s nephew was first footman and an unfailing source of backstairs information on everything.

‘It is the best he’s going to get at the moment if he does not want to live in a lumber room,’ Lina said. ‘It is uncluttered, which is more than can be said for the family and guest chambers in this house. Was hot water sent up?’

‘Hot water!’ Cook went red in the face and banged down her ladle. ‘Don’t talk to me about hot water, Miss Lina. They’ve drained the copper! His lordship saw that sarco-whatsit in my late lord’s chamber and said it would do as a bath and had the whole thing filled up with hot water, would you believe? And they both got in it, so Michael says—after they’d stripped off, mother naked, and got under the pump in the stable yard!’

‘That is outside of enough!’ Lina stared at the other woman. ‘What if one of the maids had seen them? Or you or I?’ The thought of Lord Dreycott, stripped naked and dripping with water, was outrageous. Yes, that was the word. She was…shocked.

‘All the footmen were up and down stairs with water cans for an age. They told Trimble to keep the female staff out of the way and then traipsed through the house dripping and got into the sarco-whatsit.’

‘Sarcophagus,’ Lina murmured. Trust his late lordship to keep a vast marble coffin in his bedchamber. It was a miracle he had not insisted on being buried in it. ‘Both of them together?’ It was certainly big enough to bathe two large men in.

‘Yes. Funny way to go on if you ask me,’ Cook said darkly. ‘You don’t think he’s one of them, you know—mollies—do you?’

‘No,’ Lina said, the memory of those green eyes running over her all too clear for comfort. ‘Whatever else the new Lord Dreycott might be, I do not think he is attracted to men.’ Cook still looked disapproving. Lina had been startled herself when the girls had explained that particular variation in sexual preference to her, but on reflection it seemed no stranger than many of the things that the customers at The Blue Door asked of the girls.

‘They travel together all the time, no doubt they are simply used to sharing bathing facilities,’ she suggested. ‘And I think they have been in the East, so perhaps bathing is different there.’

‘Fine behaviour for Lord Dreycott, I must say. Foreign.’ Cook returned to garnishing a dish of whitebait with a sniff that dismissed everything from beyond her home parish as outlandish and uncivilised.

‘I am sure he will become a conventional member of the aristocracy soon enough,’ Lina said. And after all, if the staff could learn to adapt to the old baron’s eccentricities, this one could hardly be worse. Although, dripping through the house stark naked…No, she was not even going to think about it.

Those long, muscled legs, those shoulders…No. It was surprising to discover that however dreadful the experience with Sir Humphrey had been, and however alarming it still was when a man stared at her, her response when confronted by a young, handsome and intelligent man was attraction and curiosity. There had not been many men like that in her life, which no doubt explained it.

‘He wants to know if we’ve got an ice house.’ Michael appeared in the kitchen, clutching an armful of bottles wrapped in straw. ‘I told him, of course we’ve got an ice house. Wants this putting in it and leaving.’ He held up one bottle. ‘And this one is for before dinner. They both look like water to me.’

‘I am certain we will soon adapt to his lordship’s little ways,’ Lina said. Men in her, albeit limited, experience, were demanding creatures, but most of them were at least predictable once one had sorted out their preferences.

The sound of the dinner gong reverberated through the house and set Lina’s heart rate accelerating with it. ‘I had better go up.’

The clock struck seven. Lina gave Cook a reassuring smile—although which of them actually needed the reassurance was moot—and hurried up the backstairs. Trimble held the dining room door open for her. ‘His lordship has just come down, Miss Celina.’ He permitted himself an infinitesimal lifting of his eyebrows.

It did not take more than a moment to see why. Lord Dreycott was studying the portrait of his great-uncle over the fireplace, his hands on his hips, his head tipped back. It was as though the two men confronted each other, the impression made more vivid because the portrait must have been painted when Simon Ashley was about the same age as his great-nephew.

The figure in the painting wore a powdered wig and a full-skirted suit of spectacular figured silk in powder blue. Ruffles and lace foamed under his chin, rings flashed on his fingers. But all the ruffles and silk in the world could not disguise the arrogant masculinity of the stance or the intelligence in the piercing green eyes that stared down at the room. Lina had looked at it many times over the past weeks and wondered what that dashing rake had been like before extreme old age had dimmed everything but his spirit.

Now she could see, for his heir’s resemblance to the young Simon was startling and, in his own way, he was dressed in as spectacular a fashion. Full black trousers were tucked into soft crimson suede boots, and a knee-length over-tunic of dark green figured silk was open over a white lawn shirt with an embroidered, slashed neck. His thick tawny hair was tied back at his nape and his pose made that determined chin and the long muscles and tendons in his neck even more obvious.

Lina could have sworn she made no sound, but she had only a moment to recover from the shock before Lord Dreycott turned. She dropped her eyes immediately, startled by a movement in the shadows at the back of the room. The man Gregor had also turned to look at her, his face impassive. He was dressed like the baron, except that he was all in plain dark blue save for his white shirt, and his hair was cropped short.

‘Miss Haddon.’ Lord Dreycott came forwards. ‘You will forgive my costume; I have no European clothing suitable for evening wear as yet.’

‘Of course, my lord.’ Who could object to sitting down to dinner with an exotic creature from the Arabian Nights or Childe Harold? She felt like a drab little peahen against his peacock magnificence.

‘Will you sit here?’ He pulled out the chair to the right of the head of the table, then took his own, which Gregor held. The man stepped back, folded his arms and gazed impassively over their heads as the footmen began to serve soup.

‘I have explained to Gregor that as it is highly unlikely that you intend to poison my food there is no need for him to taste it first,’ Lord Dreycott remarked.

‘Indeed, my lord?’ Lina said, so taken aback that she spoke without thinking, ‘As none of us knows you yet, we would have no reason to, would we?’ He raised his eyebrows at her forthright tone and she realised what she had said. ‘Forgive me, but do you have many attempts made upon your life?’

‘Enough to make me wary,’ he said. ‘It is hard to get out of the habit of precautions. Gregor, as you see, will watch my back whatever the setting.’

Lina choked back a laugh, the picture of the silent Gregor padding after Lord Dreycott at some society function tickling her imagination. The old baron had been outrageous, but he had never provoked her into almost giving way to giggles with her mouth full of soup. She could barely even recall the last time she had felt amused.

‘Must you call me my lord, Miss Haddon? I keep wondering to whom you are speaking.’

‘I am sure you will soon become accustomed to the title, and there is nothing else I may properly call you, my lord.’ Lina took a bread roll and tried not to stare at the richly embroidered shirt cuff so close to her left hand. Certainly she did not want to contemplate the tanned hand with a heavy gold ring on one long finger.

‘We could dispense with propriety,’ he suggested. ‘My name is Jonathan Quinn Ashley. No one calls me Jonathan and I suppose you will not accept Quinn as proper.’ She heard the amusement in his voice at the word. She doubted he often gave much thought to propriety. ‘You must call me Ashley, which is my surname. What is your given name?’

‘Celina, my…Ashley. But really, I cannot, it would be most unsuitable in my position.’

‘What position? You are a guest. And who are we going to scandalise?’ Quinn Ashley enquired. ‘Gregor is unshockable, I assure you. And after years in my great-uncle’s service I imagine Trimble and the staff are hardened to far worse behaviour than a little informality. Is that not so, Trimble?’ He pitched his voice to the butler, who was standing by the sideboard, supervising.

‘Indeed, my lord. My lips are, however, sealed on the subject.’

‘Very proper. Now, Celina, are we to dispense with the bowing and scraping?’

She looked up through her lashes and found he was watching her steadily. He did not appear to be flirting; his manner was friendly and neither encroaching nor suggestive. Her severe hairstyle and modest evening gown must be working, she decided. She doubtless looked the perfect plain housekeeper and was not in the slightest danger of any attempts at gallantry on his part.

‘If that is what you wish, Ashley.’ He nodded, satisfied, and went back to his soup. Lina took advantage of his focus on his food to study the strong profile. He looked intelligent and sensitive, she decided. How sad if he was the fifth son and all his brothers had predeceased him, as they must for him to inherit. ‘Did you have many older siblings?’ she enquired sympathetically.

He caught her meaning immediately. ‘No, no brothers or sisters. Quinn is for my mother’s maiden name, not short for Quintus.’ They sat back while the soup plates were cleared and the fish brought in. The steady green eyes came back to her face and she dropped her gaze immediately. Sensitive and intelligent, certainly, but also disturbing. When she caught that look she felt very aware that she was female. ‘Have you brothers and sisters?’

‘I had two sisters, Margaret and Arabella,’ Lina admitted. ‘But Meg left the country with her husband, who is a soldier in the Peninsula, and I do not know where Bella is now.’

‘So you are quite alone? What about this aunt?’ He did not appear shocked by her absence of family. Of course, an interrogation about her antecedents was only to be expected.

‘She fell ill and can no longer give me a home.’ Ashley poured white wine into her glass as the whitebait were served and she took a sip, surprised to find it tasting quite light and flowery in her mouth. It was positively refreshing and she took another swallow. She was unused to wine, but one glass could not be harmful, surely?

‘I see.’ For a moment she wondered if he was going to ask what she intended doing once he employed a proper housekeeper, a question to which the only answer was I have not the slightest idea, but Ashley simply nodded and reapplied himself to his food, which was disappearing at a considerable rate.

‘More fish, my lord?’ Michael proffered the salver.

‘Thank you. Forgive my appetite, Celina, we did not stop for more than bread and ale since London.’

She could not help glancing at the impassive man standing behind him.

‘We can try,’ Quinn Ashley said, apparently reading her mind. ‘Gregor.’

He growled something in a language Lina could not understand and Ashley said, ‘English, please, Gregor.’

‘Lord?’

‘Eat.’

‘No, lord.’ It was said with neither insolence nor defiance. ‘Later.’

Quinn shrugged. ‘Stubborn devil.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘If the housekeeper can sit down to dinner with you, I do not see why your companion may not,’ Lina said. The silent man made her uneasy, but she hated the thought that he was hungry, and if he would not leave the baron to eat in the kitchen, then there seemed only one solution. ‘Michael, please lay a place for Mr Gregor.’

It was Lord Dreycott, not she, who should say who ate at his table, but the new baron was so unconventional that the words were out of her mouth before she could bite them back.

‘You hear, Gregor?’ He did not seem offended that she was giving orders. ‘The lady wishes you to dine with us. Will you insult her by refusing?’

The man muttered something in his own language that made Ashley laugh and took the seat opposite her. ‘Lady.’

Michael began to serve the lamb cutlets. She only hoped they had enough to go round, now that a second large hungry male had been added to the table. Trimble slipped out, doubtless to warn Cook.

‘I must send for my uncle’s lawyer tomorrow. I assume the will has not been read?’ Ashley moved away her half-empty wine glass and filled another with red wine.

‘No. Mr Havers said they must first locate you. He seemed to think this would take some time. Your great-uncle certainly said it would.’ He’s off somewhere in Persia, lucky devil, were the old man’s actual words. Seducing his way through harems and getting into fights, I have no doubt. Presumably the fights came as a result of making an attempt on a harem and its occupants. Images of silks and sherbet and tinkling fountains came to mind. Dare she ask him about them?

No. This man was just as steeped in sin as the clients at The Blue Door, Lina reminded herself. And probably considerably more sophisticated and devious, she added. She should be on her guard, she thought; not all wolves had bulging blue eyes and unpleasant manners. Lina took a sustaining mouthful of red wine. It slipped down, warm and soothing.

‘My uncle had sent for me and I came as soon as the letter reached us. A message to go to Mr Havers first thing, Trimble, asking him to call at his earliest convenience.’ Ashley returned to his cutlets. Across the table Gregor had silently demolished the remains of the fish and was now eating meat with the air of a man who expected there to be wolfhounds to throw the bones to. A footman came in and added a dish of stewed beef to the table.

‘He sent for you? But he died in his sleep, and despite his age, it was unexpected.’ The doctor had actually muttered that he’d expected the aged reprobate to live to be a hundred.

‘He wrote a year ago to say I must return to pick up the pieces, as he put it. The letter took ten months to find me and then I had to travel back here. The old devil had his timing almost right, in the end.’ He paused and picked up his wine glass, looking into the claret as though it was a seer’s scrying glass. ‘I would have liked to have met him once more, I owe him a lot, but neither of us would have wanted me kicking my heels around the place for long.’

‘But it is so beautiful here,’ Lina protested. She had fallen in love with the wild grey sea just over the wooded hill that sheltered the house; the steep walks up through the woods on the opposite side of the valley or through the park; the wide expanse of sky that seemed to reach for ever.

‘Beautiful? I hope that there are many of your opinion, for I intend to sell it as soon as possible.’

‘Sell it? But you cannot—oh, I beg your pardon.’ She cut her gaze away as Ashley lifted his head to look at her. ‘It is none of my business.’ She had not meant to speak so passionately or draw attention to herself like that. Her nerves must be all over the place. Lina took another mouthful of wine and felt a little better.

‘You seem very attached to the place,’ he remarked.

He thought her anguish was for the estate, of course, not for her own position. Lina had thought that it would be several months at least before affairs were settled, time for her to find some way out of this impasse, or for her aunt to send news that the real culprit had been apprehended. But now, if Quinn Ashley meant to close up the house and sell at once, she could be without a home within a few weeks.

‘I think it lovely,’ she said colourlessly.

‘And you are wondering what will become of you,’ he said, his voice dry. He had not been deceived about her reaction for a moment. ‘My great-uncle has left provision for all the staff, he wrote that he had discussed it with them. I am sure he will also have thought of you, Celina.’

She could only smile and nod. Of course he has not! He did not know I existed when he wrote to you and, even if he did, I have no call upon him, none whatsoever. But she had to hide her alarm somehow—if he saw how desperate she was he would become suspicious.

‘I will take care of you, Celina,’ Ashley said, the deep voice giving the statement the weight of an oath, the faint foreign accent adding a suggestiveness that had her looking up warily, then away as she found he was studying her in return. It was only that hint of an accent that made her uneasy, surely? He was an English gentleman, after all, and she was a guest under his roof.

She should protest that he was too kind, demur at accepting assistance from a complete stranger, but she bit back all the polite responses. What she should do, she decided rather hazily, was to charm him. Why had she not thought of that before? Lina took another mouthful of wine. It was quite delicious and really rather relaxing. Things seemed so much clearer now.

Attempting to charm the baron was dipping her toe into dangerous waters, though—how far was just enough to make him feel chivalrous and responsible, but not amorous towards her?

One stormy winter evening when business had been slack, Katy and Miriam, the closest to her in age and her particular friends amongst The Blue Door’s courtesans, had amused themselves by trying to teach her how to flirt with a man.

‘Don’t think we can’t act like ladies if we have to,’ Katy had said. ‘It isn’t all wiggling your bottom and hanging your boobies out, you know. Lots of gentlemen like to pretend they aren’t paying for it, that they’re just getting very lucky indeed with some well-bred young lady. So Madam drilled us all in genteel flirting. You can’t stay here for ever, can you? You need to find yourself a gentleman and learn how to wind him around your little finger in ever such a nice way.’ Just as Mama did, Lina had thought with a pang of alarm. Was that what she must do to secure her future?

The girls had gone off into peals of laughter, then sobered up enough to spend the evening teaching Lina how to use her eyes, her fan, her voice, to entrap a gentleman.

She had never had reason to use that lesson, but she could try out some of the hints now. The sideways look from under the lashes was supposed to be enchanting. She tried it. ‘Thank you, I am sure you will look after me.’ Gregor made a noise deep in his chest, a laugh perhaps. She felt herself blush and looked down at her plate.

‘Count upon it,’ Ashley said, his voice deepening in a way that had shivers running down her spine, then, in an altogether different voice, ‘Is that by any chance a trifle?’

‘It is,’ Lina said, ready to jump to Mrs Bishop’s defence. ‘I imagine she has added it to the desserts when she realised that there are three of us at table.’ It was not the most sophisticated of confections and, from the way the custard on the top undulated, hinting at lumps lurking below, the poor woman must have been desperate for something to send up. The plates for the earlier courses had all returned downstairs scraped clean, even the beef casserole, which had probably been the footmen’s dinner, had vanished.

‘I haven’t eaten one of these for years,’ Ashley observed, helping himself and Gregor lavishly.

Lina took a rather more dainty almond cream and consumed it in tiny spoonfuls, wishing she had not challenged her nervous stomach with anything sweet. She smiled and nodded and laughed at any minor witticism they made and made play with her lashes until finally the men, having eaten the trifle, lumps and all, and a frangipane tart, appeared sated.

‘I will leave you gentlemen to your cheese and port,’ she said, getting up. The room seemed to shift a little. ‘I trust you have a comfortable night. I will see you in the morning.’ She met Ashley’s eye, then wished she had not. Somehow the atmosphere had become close, intense, loaded with an emotion she did not understand. All she wanted was the sanctuary of her own room and the privacy to worry about whether she had the skills to manipulate a man like Quinn Ashley.

Chapter Three

‘What do you make of the little nun?’ Quinn lounged on his great canopied bed and watched Gregor checking doors, windows and hangings in his usual obsessive search for assassins and escape routes. ‘Do stop that, Gregor. If there’s a fire, I will climb out of the window. I do not expect any other danger in this house except from the hazards created by my late uncle’s collection. And when we get to London it is likely to be pistols at dawn, not knives at midnight.’

‘Nun?’ The other man turned back from the wardrobe he was investigating. He spoke English with a heavy accent, but no reluctance, nor was there any sign of subservience in his manner now. It amused Quinn to observe his friend changing roles as the fancy took him or circumstances demanded. Gregor was enjoying teasing the servants and he was baffled by Quinn’s indifference to his new title. ‘That is no nun.’

‘No?’ Quinn sketched the scraped-back hair, gestured down his body as though to show the plain black gown, then mimed a wimple over his head. ‘What is she, then, because I am damned if I can tell?’

‘Trouble,’ Gregor grunted. Satisfied with his search, he settled into a huge carved chair. ‘A virgin. They are trouble always.’

‘You think she’s an innocent?’ Quinn stirred himself enough to lever his long body up on his elbows and peer down the length of it to look at the other man. He was not so sure. Those sidelong looks from under the heavy lashes, the pretty shows of deference combined with a slight pout—those were not the little tricks of an innocent.

‘She looks at you as though she has no idea what to do with you, but she would be quite interested to find out, if only she dared,’ the big Russian said.

Quinn snorted and flopped back on the pillows. ‘Jupiter and Mars, but I am tired. She is worried I am going to throw her out, that is all. And she is not used to the likes of us, my friend. I should not have fed her wine.’

‘You do not want her? I would like her.’

‘Offer her your protection, then.’ Quinn closed his eyes and told himself that it was too late, and he was too tired, to go downstairs and start rummaging in the library. Those books would still be there tomorrow. As for women, the blonde intrigued him, stirred certain fundamental male responses, but she would still be there tomorrow as well. Women usually were, and this one was not going anywhere.

Now was a good time to enjoy being clean, fed, relaxed. It was a couple of weeks since he had last had a woman, but deferred pleasures were usually sweeter for the contemplation. Like revenge. The urge for that was stronger here, in his great-uncle’s house.

London would give him both.

‘She is frightened of me, although she tried to hide it,’ Gregor’s deep voice observed, cutting through his attempts to doze. ‘Her eyes, they have fear in them when they look at me. I like my women willing.’

‘And she is not afraid of me?’

‘She is aware of you. And what is the word, almost the same?’

‘Wary?’

‘Da. Wary. Puzzled. You are not what she expects a nobleman to be like. And, of course, you are prettier than me, so she looks more at you.’

Quinn reached out a hand, took hold of a pillow and slung it in Gregor’s direction. It was hurled back with considerable accuracy. ‘Go to bed and stop thinking about women,’ he said, catching it. ‘Have they given you a decent room?’

‘A servant’s room, in the attics. It will do.’

‘You are certain?’ Quinn opened one eye and contemplated the motheaten bed canopy above his head. ‘I can ring and have you moved to a luxurious apartment like this one. It would only take an hour or two to clear a path to the bed.’

‘Tomorrow, perhaps. We have worried them enough today,’ Gregor said as he got up and stretched hugely. ‘They do not know what to make of us, they are fearful—or the little nun is fearful—and we shocked them with our bath.’

‘I am not going to splash about in two inches of scummy water in a tin bucket,’ Quinn said. ‘We made certain the women were out of the way, didn’t we?’

‘The women are sad that they did not see us and the men are jealous because we are so magnificently made,’ the Russian said with a wicked chuckle. ‘Like stallions. Good night, lord.’ He closed the door behind him just as the second pillow hit it.

Quinn lay still for a moment, then heaved himself up with a grunt, stripped off his clothing, tossed it on to a chair, blew out the candles beside the bed and fell back naked on to the covers in one continuous movement.

England. England after ten years, and now the dishonourable Mr Ashley was the fourth Baron Dreycott of Cleybourne in the county of Norfolk. A title he did not want, an estate he did not care about and, no doubt, a list of debts that would make no impression on his personal fortune. But all the hazards and discomforts of two months of travelling, all the squalor of a Channel crossing in the teeth of a late gale, all the grime and chaos of London, were worth it for the treasures in this house. And there was the added savour of the stir he would cause when he set about establishing himself in London.

Revenge. Quinn savoured the thought. Lies, arrogance, cowardice; three things he detested, three sins he intended to punish. It had not mattered so much for himself; he had been away and out of it. But Simon had suffered for his defence of his great-nephew and that was a score to be settled.

But he had waited ten years for vengeance; dreams of that could wait. As he dragged a sheet over himself and let sleep take him, he recalled the other thing he appeared to have inherited along with the title and the estate and the books. The wary little nun was an intriguing puzzle, because whatever else she was, she was not a housekeeper, he would bet his matched Manton duelling pistols on it. No, perhaps not those, he might need them.

Lina was doing her very best impression of a housekeeper the next morning, complete with a large apron that she wore like armour against the two disturbing male intruders.

She avoided them at breakfast, then almost bumped into Lord Dreycott in the hallway as they emerged from the small dining room. ‘My…Ashley. Good morning.’ In the cold light of day she regretted agreeing to use his name and worried about how her untried attempts at cautious flirtation had been received. Even one glass of wine, she concluded as she reviewed the previous evening in the cold light of day, was apparently enough to overset her judgement. Two had been foolish in the extreme. ‘A message has been sent to Mr Havers. I would expect he will be here by ten.’

‘So soon at short notice? What if he had something already in his diary?’

‘You are the most important thing, hereabouts,’ Lina said. It was the simple truth. ‘If he had appointments, he will have cancelled them. Mr Armstrong from the local branch of your uncle’s London bank, Dr Massingbird his physician and the Reverend Perrin will be close on his heels.’

‘You sent for them also?’ Ashley paused by the study door, obviously surprised by this initiative.

‘There was no need to tell anyone,’ she explained. ‘The local grapevine will have already passed on the news last night. The local gentry will leave it until tomorrow when they know your men of business will have all been to see you, then we may expect a great many callers. His late lordship did not welcome visitors, so they will all be agog to introduce themselves.’ Ashley shook his head, so she added, ‘Cook is already baking biscuits and we have ample supplies of tea and coffee left over from the funeral.’

‘I am not a betting man,’ Ashley observed, ‘but I will wager you a guinea against that ridiculous apron of yours that I will receive no social calls.’

‘But why not?’ Lina ignored the remark about her apron. She thought it gave her authority and an air of sobriety that had been sadly missing last night.

‘Because, my dear Miss Haddon, I am not received in polite society.’

‘But Lord Dreycott said that you have hardly been in the country for years,’ she protested. ‘None of them knows you.’

‘However, they will all have heard about me. And some of them will remember me. It was not simply my uncle’s reclusive nature that explained the lack of calls—we are tarred with the same brush. We will have a large number of biscuits to eat up, I assure you.’ His face showed nothing but faintly amused acceptance of this state of affairs.

‘Of course they will call. They have no reason not to—whatever have you done that they should react so?’

‘Being the man who debauched, impregnated and abandoned the Earl of Sheringham’s eldest daughter, is, you must agree, Miss Haddon, adequate cause for social ostracism in an area where Sheringham is the largest landowner,’ Ashley said. ‘The earl carries much weight, hereabouts. His son, Viscount Langdown, carries as much, and a horsewhip.’ Lina stared at him open mouthed and he smiled, went into the study and closed the door behind him.

She watched the panels, half-expecting Ashley to reappear and tell her that it had been a joke in poor taste, but the door remained closed. Behind her there was a discreet cough.

‘Trimble?’ Lina turned to the butler. ‘Surely his lordship is…surely that cannot be correct?’

The butler looked uneasy. ‘Perhaps I had better tell you about it, Miss Haddon.’ He held open the door to the salon. ‘We will not be disturbed in here.’

She followed him and closed the door. ‘He says he expects to be shunned by the neighbourhood,’ she said, her voice low as she joined Trimble in the furthest corner of the room. ‘He said he did something quite dreadful.’

‘Yes, indeed, refusing to marry his pregnant fiancée is not the action of a gentleman and must bring opprobrium upon any man,’ the butler said, his voice flat.

‘He really did such a thing? When?’ Lina stared in horror at the butler, but her mind was full of the picture of Quinn Ashley as she had just seen him. In his deplorably casual version of an English country-gentleman’s riding attire, with his frank speech and his amused smile, it was hard to visualise the new Lord Dreycott as the heartless seducer he freely admitted to being. But of course, to have insinuated himself into the bed of an earl’s daughter, he would hardly look like a ruthless rake.

‘Let us sit down, Trimble,’ she said. This was shocking news to absorb standing up. She had already spent one night under the same roof as a dangerous libertine, it seemed. Her mouth felt dry. Seduced, impregnated, abandoned…

‘The long-established staff here know the story,’ the butler said, perching uncomfortably on the edge of a chair. ‘His late lordship told us the truth of the matter. It seemed that Mr Ashley, as he then was, abandoned his pregnant fiancée ten years ago. Given that her brother was publicly threatening him with a horsewhip followed by castration, it seemed to his great-uncle that the prudent course of action was to send him off abroad with some haste. Once there, it seems, he decided he liked the life of a traveller and has seldom returned.’

Lina swallowed. She had no horsewhip-wielding brother to protect her. She had no one except a man whose promise to take care of her now seemed a cruel jest.

‘But he was not the father of her child,’ Trimble added with haste, no doubt reading her expression with some accuracy. ‘Please be assured I would not have allowed you to remain in the house if that were so, Miss Haddon.’

‘Why did she not marry the man responsible, then?’ she managed, relief making her feel faintly queasy.

‘Mr Ashley in those days was a charming, but somewhat unworldly, perhaps even innocent, young man,’ Trimble continued, not answering the question directly. ‘A studious, rather quiet gentleman, just down from university, his head full of books and dreams of exploration, as I recall him. I was only the first footman in those days, you understand. But, as his late lordship said, why would a beautiful, highly eligible young woman throw herself at the rather dull heir to a minor barony?’

‘Because she needed a gullible husband as fast as possible?’ Lina hazarded, distracted momentarily by the thought that Quinn Ashley could ever have been described as rather dull.

‘Exactly, Miss Haddon. Her parents, when they became aware of her condition, set her to entrap him and, I fear, he was all too willing to fall for her charms and into love. The flaw in their scheme was that they had picked on a romantic, idealistic young man who, when confronted by a passionate young lady positively begging to demonstrate her affection for him by the sacrifice of her virtue, struck a noble attitude—as he told his uncle afterwards—and refused to dishonour his bride-to-be.’

‘And then he realised what was happening?’

‘Not, so he said, until she ripped all her clothes off and became hysterical. Her father, when subterfuge was obviously impossible, offered Mr Ashley a very substantial dowry to wed her. He refused, broke off the engagement—and so they laid the child at his door and characterised him as a heartless seducer of virtue.’

‘But why?’ Lina thought for a moment. ‘Was the true father utterly impossible? Married, perhaps?’

‘They were unable to establish which of her father’s grooms it was, I regret to say.’ Lina felt her jaw drop. ‘She would still be in terrible disgrace when her condition became known, but the heir to a barony was a better father for her bastard than a choice of three stable hands.’

‘The poor baby,’ Lina murmured. ‘What became of it?’

‘I have no idea,’ Trimble said, his austere face hardening. ‘She, I believe, was married off with a very large dowry to an obscure Irish peer who needed the money.’

‘But Mr Ashley took the blame and did not reveal the worst of her shame,’ Lina said. ‘And that ruined his reputation.’

‘Exactly. He challenged Lord Langdown, who refused to meet him, threatening the whip instead. His late lordship attempted to intervene and was caught up in the scandal, his own name blackened by association. So you see, Miss Haddon, why we cannot expect callers from local society.’

‘They would have forgotten by now, surely?’ She did not like to think of Ashley ostracised for an injustice done to him ten years ago when his only sin had been to refuse to make an honourable sacrifice of himself. How could he have married the girl? There could have been no trust, no respect, in that marriage.

But he was a gentleman and a gentleman must not break off an engagement. Could he not have found some way out of the trap without abandoning her so brutally? Doubt began to gnaw at her strangely instinctive support for him. No, she decided after a moment’s thought, against a powerful earl Ashley would have had no leverage at all unless he had been prepared to tell the truth about his fiancée.

‘It might have been forgotten, if it were not for the fact that, once abroad, Mr Ashley rapidly set about losing what innocence was left to him, along with any shreds of his reputation,’ Trimble said in a voice scrupulously free from any expression. ‘The learned journals were only too happy to publish his writings from exotic parts of the world—but his late lordship used to read me stories from the scandal sheets with great glee. Not all Mr Ashley’s explorations were of a scholarly nature.’

‘What sort of stories?’ Lina asked, not wanting to know and yet drawn with the same terrible curiosity that made a carriage crash impossible to ignore. Harems again?

‘I could not possibly recount them to an unmarried lady,’ the butler said. ‘Suffice it to say that they make Lord Byron’s exploits seem tame.’

‘So he is not so safe, after all?’ She was fearful, and she knew that she should be, but a shameful inner excitement was fluttering inside her, too. Fool, she admonished herself. Just because he is not a fat lecher with bulging eyes it does not mean that he could not accomplish your ruin just as effectively and twice as ruthlessly.

‘I have every confidence that, in his own home and where an unmarried lady under his protection is concerned, we need have no fears about his lordship’s honourable behaviour,’ Trimble pronounced. Was he certain, or was he, a loyal family servant, unable to believe the worst of his new master?

At least I need have no fear for my reputation, being under his protection, for the world already believes me to be a whore and a jewel thief, Lina thought bitterly. It had taken a while, in the friendly comfort of The Blue Door, for the truth to dawn on her, but by taking refuge in a brothel, she had as comprehensively ruined herself as her mother had—and without having committed any indiscretion in the first place. But what of my virtue? Should she lock her door at night?

‘Thank you for confiding in me, Trimble,’ she said with what she thought was passable composure. The doorbell rang. ‘That will be Mr Havers, I have no doubt.’ She had no intention of being seen by the lawyer, a man who might be expected to receive the London newspapers daily and who doubtless studied the reports of crimes with professional interest. A description of the fugitive Celina Shelley would have been in all of them, she was sure.

The butler went out, leaving her shaken and prey to some disturbing imaginings. It was one thing to find herself in a house with a man who looked like the hero of a lurid novel, quite another to discover that he had the reputation to match and was probably as much villain as hero. Last night she must have been mad to exchange banter with him, to try out her inexpert flirtation technique. It was like a mouse laying a crumb of cheese between the cat’s paws and expecting it not to take mouse and cheese both in one mouthful. How he must have laughed at her behind that polite mask.

Trimble appeared in the doorway. ‘His lordship has requested that the household assemble immediately in the dining room to hear the will read, Miss Haddon.’

‘He cannot mean me.’ Lina stayed where she was. ‘I have no possible interest in the document. It is none of my business.’

‘He said everyone, Miss Haddon.’

‘Very well.’ Perhaps she could slip in at the back and sit behind Peter, the largest of the footmen. Provided she could feel safe and unseen, then it would be interesting to hear Lord Dreycott’s no doubt eccentric dispositions, she reflected, as she followed the butler’s black-clad back, slipping into the dining room behind him. Yes, there was a seat, shielded by the footmen and the epergne on the end of the sideboard.

Lina settled herself where she could just catch a glimpse of Lord Dreycott, Gregor standing impassively behind his chair. He was drumming his fingers very slowly on the table in front of him and looking across at the portrait of his great-uncle. Lina realised that the faint smile on his lips echoed the painted mouth exactly. It was a very expressive mouth, she thought, wondering if Ashley could school it into immobility when he was playing cards. Unbidden, her imagination presented her with the image of those lips on her fingers, her wrist.

She clasped her hands together so tightly her nails bit into her palms. She must not think of…

‘If everyone is here,’ said a brisk masculine voice, ‘then I will read the last will and testament of Simon Augustus Tremayne Ashley, third Baron Dreycott. To Henry Trimble, in recognition of many long years of loyal and invaluable service, the lifetime occupancy of Covert Cottage, a pension of seventy pounds a year, whichever items of clothing of mine he cares to take, unlimited fuel and game from the estate, the services of the garden staff for the maintenance of his grounds and the stuffed bear which he has always admired.’

Lina could see the back of Trimble’s neck growing red, whether from emotion or the thought of the stuffed bear—she imagined that was a joke between his old master and himself—she was not certain.

‘To Mary Eliza Bishop, in recognition…’

And so it went on, legacies both generous and eccentric to all the indoor and outdoor staff, even the boot boy. A donation to the church, To replace the cracked tenor bell, which has for so long rendered my Sunday mornings hideous. One hundred pounds to the charity for the widows of fishermen lost along this stretch of coast. Some books to fellow scholars and finally, All that remaining of my possessions and estate not elsewhere disposed of in this document, to my great-nephew and heir Jonathan Quinn Ashley.

‘There is, however, a codicil dated five weeks ago.’ The lawyer cleared his throat. ‘To the lady currently a guest in my house; residence at Dreycott Park, with all her expenses met, for the period of six months from the date of my death and, at that date, the sum of one thousand pounds absolutely, in memory of the great affection I bear to her aunt.

‘And I further instruct that my great-nephew Jonathan Quinn Ashley shall only inherit my books, maps, papers, parchments and documents provided that he retains full ownership of Dreycott Hall for a period of not less than six months or until he completes the editing and publication of my memoirs which I leave unfinished, whichever is the later. Should this condition not be met then all those papers, books, etc. etc. will pass to the Ashmolean Library, Oxford, absolutely.

‘That concludes the will.’ There was a crackling of thick paper as Mr Havers folded the document.

Chapter Four

Lina stared up at the enigmatically smiling portrait, stunned. Sanctuary and money beyond her wildest dreams, enough for an independent start whenever she chose to take it, the last generous gift from an old man who had the imagination and compassion to reach out to a total stranger and the generosity to commemorate an old friendship—or an old love. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

‘Can this be broken?’ Quinn Ashley’s voice was utterly devoid of any amusement now. ‘I have no intention of retaining this house and estate any longer than it takes me to pack up the books and papers and place it on the market.’

‘No, my lord, it cannot be broken,’ the lawyer said with the firmness of a man who had confronted many an angry heir in the course of his career. ‘The late Lord Dreycott consulted me most carefully to ensure that was the case, as he anticipated your objections. I should further point out that, as the lady has the option to remain here for six months, you will be unable to place this estate on the market until she chooses to leave, whatever your wishes to the contrary.

‘Now, if I might ask for the use of a room to interview each of the beneficiaries, I can settle most of the practical issues during the course of the day, my lord.’

‘Use the study,’ Ashley said. ‘I will discuss this further with you there now, if you would be so good.’ Despite the distance between them Lina could see that he had his face completely under control, but he could not keep the anger out of his eyes. He met her scrutiny and she felt as though she had just turned the key to imprison a tiger in a cage. The horizontal bars of the chair-back dug into her spine as she pressed herself against them in instinctive retreat.

Then self-preservation took over from her worries about what Lord Dreycott might think of her now. She had to face the lawyer and he would want her name. Her heart pounding, Lina got up, ducked through the service door at the back of the dining room and hurried to the stairs.

‘What the hell was the old devil thinking of?’ Quinn demanded as the study door closed behind them.

‘Ensuring that his memoirs are published, my lord,’ Mr Havers said. ‘I believe your great-uncle felt they might be overlooked for some years if you were at liberty to fit them in with your doubtless demanding programme of travels and your own writing.’ He shuffled the papers into various piles on the long table against the wall, obviously indifferent to the fact that his news had set Quinn’s plans for half the year on their head.

‘And what is this nonsense with the girl? Is she the reason the estate cannot be sold for six months?’ Quinn asked. ‘Is she his natural daughter? She has no look of him.’

‘I think it unlikely. I believe this is a quite genuine gesture in memory of his past attachment to her aunt. What is the young lady’s name? Lord Dreycott was curiously reluctant to give it to me.’

‘Haddon.’

Havers made a note. ‘I am sorry, my lord. But I am afraid you are encumbered with this estate, and Miss Haddon, for the term of six months at a minimum, or you forfeit the library.’

Quinn placed his hands flat on the desk and leaned on them, staring down at the worn red morocco leather surface. He had intended selling up the estate, moving everything he wanted to retain to his town house and settling down to establish himself in London. There was pleasurable anticipation in combining a sensible business move with the prospect of a long-awaited revenge on polite society.

He had perfectly respectable reasons to transfer his centre of operations from Constantinople to London—respectable motives to do with trade and scholarship. Now he would have to divide his attention between this easterly parish on the shore, his uncle’s memoirs and his real focus in London.

It was infuriating, but he knew when to yield to superior force. Great-Uncle Simon’s tactics were, as always, masterly. There was no benefit exhausting himself and his temper in an attempt to get around the will; he was stuck with Dreycott Park until the autumn. And he was stuck with the responsibility for a nervous, flirtatious and puzzling young woman as well. He supposed he could just leave her here to keep the place in order for six months.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Quinn said once he had his frustration under control. An outburst of temper would do no good. ‘Feel free to use the desk, Havers. Who do you want first?’

‘Miss Haddon, I think. Thank you, my lord.’

Celina was sitting on one of the hard chairs in the empty hall, her hands in her lap, her back straight. The apron had gone and she had enveloped her blonde hair in a thick black snood. She looked even more like an occupant of a nunnery than before.

She stood up when she saw him, her expression wary. As well it might be, he thought. What am I going to do with you? The option of simply leaving her here to run the house lost savour. His body stirred; it knew exactly what it wanted to do.

‘Havers will see you first, Celina.’

‘I am very sorry, my lord,’ she said as though he had not spoken.

‘For what?’ He was in no mood to be conciliatory.

‘For the fact that you cannot carry out your intentions, for the burden of my presence and for the diminution of your inheritance by the legacy to me.’

That sounded like a prepared speech. ‘The money is in no way an issue, Celina. It was my uncle’s to do with as he pleased and your presence in the household is no burden. If I appear less than pleased with my uncle’s dispositions, it is because of the disruption to my plans.’ And the unaccustomed experience of having my own will thwarted, if truth be told, he added mentally.

It was salutary, after years of doing what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted, to find himself constrained in this way just when he had resolved on a course of action. It was almost as though the old devil had second-guessed him and set out to throw a barrier in his path. Old Simon had been too cynical, and too unconventional, to worry about his own reputation and he would not have wanted Quinn thinking to avenge the slight on his good name.

‘Thank you. It is generous of you to reassure me,’ she said, her voice colourless. ‘It will be uncomfortable for you here, if your neighbours will not call.’ She was flushed now, her eyes, as usual, cast down. ‘Trimble told me about the scandal. It is very shocking that a young man could be treated in such a way.’

‘You believe me the innocent party, then?’ Quinn found himself irritated that her answer mattered.

‘Of course.’ She sounded almost sure, he thought grimly. Not certain, though. How very wise of her. ‘Trimble would not lie about something like that.’ But she thinks I might? ‘It was very honourable of you not to reveal the true parentage of her child.’

He shrugged. It had been romantic wrong-headedness and a wounded heart more than any loftier motive, he suspected, looking back now at his young self. ‘That must have been a source of pride to you,’ she added, laying one hand on his sleeve as though trying to offer comfort

‘I was a romantic young idiot,’ Quinn said. The shuttered gaze lifted a fraction and he knew she was watching him sidelong from beneath her lids. ‘That did not last long. Do not delude yourself that I am some sort of saint, Celina. The high-flown moral stance persisted just as long as it took me to discover the delights of the flesh well away from English double standards.’

Her pale hand was still on his forearm. He looked down at her bent head, the sweep of dark lashes against her cheek, the faint quiver of her fingers, the tender skin below her ear. The scent she wore, subtle and sophisticated and unexpected, teased his nostrils and his pulse kicked in recognition of her unconscious allure.

Or was it unconscious? he wondered. She had the grooming, the elegance, the little mannerisms of a woman used to pleasing men for a living. And yet, there was the apprehension in her eyes when she did permit them to meet his fleetingly, her lack of sophistication with wine, her retreats into shy propriety. A mystery, and Quinn enjoyed a mystery. And one involving contact with a pretty woman was even more enticing. He had six months to tease the truth out of her. As he thought it, he realised that he was not going to just take himself off to London and abandon her here. He wanted her.

He lifted her hand from his arm and raised it to his lips, just touching the tips of her fingers, letting his breath caress her. She stiffened and gave a little gasp, but he kept his attention on the pampered hand, the carefully manicured and buffed nails, the faint smell of expensive hand lotion. Celina cared for her skin like a courtesan, not a housekeeper.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked abruptly. But she did not pull her hand away.

‘You will hear some torrid tales from our respectable neighbours, I have no doubt. I thought it better that I warn you.’

‘I see,’ Celina said. ‘I do trust you, Ashley.’

That was like a jab in the stomach. He did not intend for her to trust him, he wanted to tease and intrigue her for sport, but if she truly trusted him then he should honour that. And perhaps he would—she was under his roof, under his protection. She might even be the innocent virgin she would have him believe.

‘I did not say you should trust me,’ he said, wanting to unsettle her, to pay her back for unsettling him. Her head came up and those wide blue eyes looked into his as though she was inspecting the inside of his soul—always assuming she could find it. ‘I simply wanted to set the record straight over that piece of history.’

‘Of course.’ The intense scrutiny dropped. ‘As always, it is for the woman to take care and it is upon the woman that the shame devolves if she is not vigilant enough of her honour. Excuse me, my lord. Mr Havers will be waiting.’

The brush of her silk skirts across his legs as she turned had Quinn gritting his teeth as a sudden stab of lust took him unawares. He pulled open the front door and strode off to the stables, more angry with himself for even troubling about Celina than he was at her plain speaking.

Lina had been watching his profile: the flexible mouth, the strong, straight nose that was almost too long, the thin scar that was visible now the stubble was gone, the hooded green eyes, the elegant whorl of one ear. He had seemed relaxed, as though he was telling her the plot of some novel, not his own story of disillusion, disgrace and sin. She did not believe in his detachment. Quinn Ashley was an excellent actor, but he had to be deeply frustrated by what had just happened—any man would be.

Then he had kissed her fingertips and the scent of him, sandalwood and angry, tense male, had filled her nostrils and she had been unable to snatch her hand away. A more experienced woman would have known how to extricate herself, but she had been left there, gauche and enraptured. When Quinn turned back to face her and she saw the look in his eyes she could see he was not relaxed. Not at all.

I did not say you should trust me. The smile had reached his eyes with those words. A smile and something else, something assessing and male and dangerous. In letting him take her hand, in confessing her trust, she had yielded to him and that had stirred some animal instinct in him.

Idiot, she scolded herself as she tapped on the study door and let herself in. He attracted and fascinated her and that was lethally dangerous. One brush of his lips on her hand and she was disorientated, disconcerted and breathless. It was worse than the wine.

‘Miss Haddon.’ The lawyer rose to his feet. ‘Please, be seated. This should not take long.’

Lina sat down and folded her hands in her lap, trying her best to look like a meek young lady and not a fugitive courtesan. With her hair invisible, her eyebrows and lashes, which were naturally darker, gave the impression that she was a brunette. Surely there would be nothing to spark Mr Havers’s suspicions, even if he had read her description in the newspapers?

‘Now, if I may have your first names.’

‘Lina,’ she said, watching him write Lina Haddon in careful script across a document.

‘And which bank would you wish the money deposited in, Miss Haddon?’

‘I do not have a bank account.’ Was it against the law to open one in a false name? Perhaps she would need papers to prove who she was. But surely in six months her name would be cleared. Or she would be hanged.

Lina repressed the shudder. ‘I must organise something. Might I have an advance of cash?’ It would need to be enough to make good her escape if they found her, but not so much that Mr Havers would think it strange. ‘Twenty-five pounds would be excellent.’

‘I am afraid that the money only becomes available at the end of six months, Miss Haddon.’ He made another note. ‘But all your costs will be met and that would include a reasonable clothing allowance and pin money.’

‘Oh.’ But she could not leave and find herself a new hiding place without cash in her hand. If she had a thousand pounds, she could hire an investigator, an agent to contact her aunt, a lawyer, flee abroad if necessary; but now, with no money, she must stay here or her aunt would not know where to find her.

And she needed to help Aunt Clara fight Makepeace, she could not just run away and abandon her. ‘Of course. I did not quite understand.’ She would have to stay here under the protection of a man who might turn out to be no protection at all, but thoroughly dangerous himself. ‘Thank you, Mr Havers.’

‘Thank you, Miss Haddon. Would you be so good as to ask Trimble to come in next?’

Lina delivered the message, then found herself staring rather blankly at the front door, at a loss what to do next. Cook would prepare luncheon and needed no further instruction, the house was as orderly as any that closely resembled a chaotic museum could be, and the thought of hemming yet another worn sheet was intolerable.

On impulse she ran upstairs, changed into stout shoes, found her cloak and told Michael, ‘If anyone wants me, I have gone for a walk up to Flagstaff Hill.’

‘His lordship says we’re to have a guest bedchamber made up for Mr Gregor,’ the footman said. ‘I’m confused about him, I must confess, Miss Haddon. I thought he was a servant to start with, but he sits down to dinner like a gentleman.’

‘I think he likes to tease us,’ Lina said, ‘to confound our expectations. Give him the red bedchamber.’

‘But that’s—’

‘The one where we put all the worst examples of the taxidermist’s art, including the crocodile. Exactly. It is about time that Mr Gregor realises he is not the only person in this household with a sense of humour.’

It seemed a very long time since she had laughed out loud, not since before Simon Ashley had been found cold in his bed. He had kept her in a ripple of amusement with his dry wit and scurrilous anecdotes, the wicked old man.

She was still smiling when she passed the archway into the stable yard and glanced through it at the sound of voices. Gregor was holding the head of the grey horse she had glimpsed when the men had arrived and Quinn Ashley was walking round it, running his hands down its legs, lifting each hoof in turn. Lina knew nothing about horses, but she knew beauty when she saw it and this animal with its slightly dished face, big dark eyes, long white tail and mane and air of disciplined power was beautiful.

Ashley and Gregor must be checking the animals after their long ride, she supposed, seeing an equally handsome black tied up at the rear of the courtyard with a sturdy bay beside it. She drew back against the arch and watched. The men were talking easily together, dropping a word here and there, hardly troubling to complete their sentences. Lina could remember when it had been like that with her sisters, Bella and Meg. They had been so close that one or two words, a phrase or a smile was enough to share thoughts and feelings.

Where are you? she asked in a silent plea for an answer that never came. Be safe, please be safe and happy. If she ever got out of this mess, she would devote her legacy to finding her sisters, she swore, hurrying away from the arch and the sight of the men and their easy, unthinking friendship.

She ran, paused only to open the simple iron gate into the park, then slowed as she followed the overgrown track that climbed up the side of the ridge that separated the park from the sea, sheltering the house within its wooded slopes.

Once carriages would have carried houseguests along this route up to the gazebo on the top where they could survey the sweep of coastline in one direction or the fine parkland in the other. But it had been many years since old Lord Dreycott had entertained houseguests who enjoyed picnics and flirtations in the coppices and the track had dwindled almost to a footpath.

Lina climbed on, only half-aware of the alarmed call of jackdaws and crows, the flash of colour as a jay flew across the path. If—no, when—she was cleared of this charge of theft, then what should she do? Aunt Clara had been so good to her it seemed like treachery to think of leaving The Blue Door, but she could hardly spend the rest of her life in a brothel.

Perhaps Clara imagined she would take over and run it one day. Lina could not suppress a wry smile at the thought of a virgin as abbess of a select nunnery. She had heard many of the names for houses of ill repute—school of Venus, vaulting school, smuggling ken, house of civil reception—but nunnery was the one that had startled her the most. As well as being an ironic name, it seemed that nuns were a popular male fantasy and The Blue Door had enough habits hanging in its bizarre wardrobe room to equip a small convent.

But she must acknowledge the fact that, however much she loved her aunt and liked the girls, that could never be her life, only a temporary sanctuary, one that could ruin her permanently by association.

Panting slightly, she reached the top of the hill. Set on stout wooden pillars right in front of her was the gazebo, built to add another twenty feet to the vantage point for anyone with enough breath still to climb. Lina lifted her skirts in one hand, took a firm grip on the rickety handrail with the other and mounted the steps.

At the top she went to the seaward side and leaned her elbows on the rail. The wind was fresh up here, bringing the scent of the ocean with it, and she pulled off her snood and hairpins, shaking her hair free so it blew out behind her in the breeze.

No, she could not live in a brothel for ever, nor run one, not with her lack of experience. And she had no intention of acquiring the practical knowledge, not after that hideous experience with Sir Humphrey Tolhurst. The thought of a man paying to touch her, of having to feign pleasure at the act, do whatever he wanted when she did not like or desire him, made her feel sick.

Now, if she could only come out of hiding, she had the resources to find herself a little cottage somewhere while she searched for her sisters. But she would not forget her aunt or the girls at The Blue Door, or look down on them for making the choices that they had. They had been forced into it, just as she had, but unlike her, or even Mama, they would find no escape. She would—

‘Why, I have found the little nun at last and she has cast off her wimple.’ He moves like a cat, Lina thought, spinning round on the platform to confront Quinn Ashley as he reached the top of the steps.

Then what he had said penetrated. ‘How dare you! How dare you call me a nun!’ But she had stood still while this man had kissed her fingertips, stood still and quivered with terrified pleasure. The thought of her own perverse weakness only fuelled her anger. Her loose hair settled round her shoulders in a cloud, partly obscuring her sight, and she pushed it back. ‘You…libertine, you…’

He took two strides across the platform and caught her wrists in his hands before she could strike him. ‘Do you seek to insult me, Celina? You will have to do rather better than that. I will willingly admit to libertine. Rake as well, for I can see that word forming on those very pretty lips of yours. Come then, let me give you stimulus for your vocabulary.’ And he pulled her to him, bent his head and kissed her.

Chapter Five

Celina had never been kissed on the mouth by a man before. Sir Humphrey had been too eager for her to disrobe to worry about preliminaries so she had nothing to compare this kiss with, no expectations of what it would be like. She tried to stay composed, in control, ready to pull free the moment Ashley relaxed his hold, but the shameful reality was that her brain forgot how to work and her limbs how to struggle, the moment his lips pressed against hers.

Whatever she had expected from a kiss, it had not been this totally enveloping sensual experience. Ashley’s warm lips moving over hers were disturbing enough in the intimacy of the gesture, but she could taste him as well and she felt the brush of his tongue against the seam of her lips and guessed he wanted her to open her mouth. Stubbornly she managed to keep it closed, even while she inhaled the scent of him mingling with the fresh smells of the spring woodland all around them and the tang of the sea breeze. His body was hot and hard and so much stronger than hers that even struggling seemed pointless. Or was it that his strength was arousing and, shamefully, she did not want to struggle?

Ashley released his hold on her wrists and put one hand in the middle of her back, the other hand raking deep into her loose hair. He growled, a husky sound of appreciation, as he shifted his stance to turn and get his back against the rail and Celina found herself pressed intimately close as his tongue began its assault on her closed lips once again.

She felt so strange. She ached and yearned and trembled and the inner voice that cried Stop! was drowned in the roaring of her blood and the hammering of her pulse. Lina parted her lips, felt the thrust of Quinn’s tongue. Heat flooded through her at the intimacy of the intrusion and for a moment she could not react. Her body, though, knew what to do; her own tongue moved, tangled with his, the taste of him filled her senses.

He was aroused; she felt him hard and urgent pressing against her. A flutter of alarm brushed against her mind and was drowned in the torrent of new sensation. Ashley’s hands moved, one sliding down, urging her against him, the other slipping between their close-pressed bodies to cup her breast.

Long, knowing fingers found the edge of her bodice, slid beneath it to find the tight-puckered nipple. A stab of fire lanced from his fingertips to her belly, terrifying in its effect.

She was aware, hazily, that in a moment she would be beyond rational thought, utterly at the mercy of her own untutored sensuality and Ashley’s skilful seduction. We were so innocent…Her aunt’s words seemed to ring in her ears. Innocent, seduced, ruined.

No, stop this. Now. He thinks I have yielded, she thought, then closed her teeth hard, released them as she felt his recoil, pushed out of his arms and was away down the steps, heedless of the slippery surface and the ancient rail.

She was almost at the bottom when she lost her footing and pitched down the final six steps, bumping painfully on the sharp wooden edges to land in an undignified, bruised heap on the ground. It hurt enough to bring tears to her eyes, but she was not going to dissolve into sobs in front of him, she thought fiercely, drawing in gasps of breath while she tried to work out if anything was broken.

Ashley came down the stairs after her with even more reckless haste, two at a time, and vaulted over her huddled body at the bottom, kicking up the deep leaf mould as he landed. ‘Hell, woman, of all the stupid things to do! These stairs are lethal. Don’t move.’ He knelt beside her. ‘Don’t move anything. Where does it hurt?’

‘I have been up and down those steps a dozen times,’ Lina retorted, indignation taking her mind off her bruises, and almost off the clamouring demands of her body. He was so close. ‘They are only dangerous if one is running away from a libertine! This is all your fault.’

‘There was no need to run—a simple no would have sufficed. Does that hurt?’ He took hold of her right ankle, his big hand gentle as it encircled the slender bones.

‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘Everything hurts. And take your hands off my…my nether limb. You would not take any notice of no,

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