Wicked Nights With a Lover (The Penwich School for Virtuous Girls #3)(10)

He rose up, hovering, looming within the narrow carriage door, overfilling it, blocking out all light. His eyes gleamed from within his shadowed features. She loathed that she couldn’t make herself move, that she lay on the floor of the carriage like a quivering mouse.

“Just do as I say. If you know what’s good for you, stay out of St. Giles.”

All her wrath bubbled to the surface at his terse command. How dare he speak to her like she was his to command? Words she’d never spoken before, dared not think—except perhaps when she was enduring one of Master Brocklehurst’s unjustified beatings—rose on her lips. “Go to hell.”

For a moment he did not move. Did not speak. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Perhaps the lady isn’t such a lady, after all.” She felt his gaze then, raking her, traveling over her with familiar insolence. “But then I don’t find that such a surprise.”

Sputtering, she clambered to the carriage seat.

“You beast!”

His laughter scraped the air, dragged across her stinging nerves. “Never fear. I’m certain I shall find my way to those fiery pits someday. Just do me a favor, sweetheart, and don’t wish me there before my time. And in case you didn’t notice"—he waved a hand about them and her gaze drifted to an ugly lodging house with broken, gaping windows. Stained rags were stuffed into the cracks in a weak attempt to ward off the cold—"this is fairly close to hell.”

He vanished from the hack then, his laughter receding, a drifting curl of sound, strangely provocative, winding itself around her where she shivered on the stiff squabs.

A sound, she would later learn, that would follow her to bed that night and haunt her dreams.





Chapter 5

Ash Courtland strode down the streets that stank of rot and acrid smoke from the nearby factory. The odor was as familiar to him as his own shape and form, and yet he smelled only the chit he left behind. The whiff of honey lingered in his nostrils.

Stepping over a gutter, he cursed low beneath his breath. He shouldn’t have let her go, he realized with an uncustomary pang of regret. He shook his head at the irrational thought. She was not a puppy one discovered on the streets, to be kept and coddled.

Still, he could not shake the feeling that he left something behind as he strode along the uneven sidewalk. Rarely had he met a female to stand toe to toe to him. She brought out the primitive in him—perhaps the chief reason he let her go. His primitive, savage nature was a thing of the past. He was a man of property now. Wealth. A respected businessman.

He and his partner owned two of London’s most popular gaming hells. Not to mention a mine in Wales and a factory in the north, the latter two only acquired at his insistence. Jack would just as soon have kept their business to gaming. His partner did little these days aside of letting Ash run affairs and increase their wealth, something at which he was proving vastly superior. Jack’s lack of involvement didn’t trouble him. Without the older man taking him under his wing, Ash would never have gotten off the streets.

After all he had accomplished, Ash didn’t need a female hanging about who looked at him as if he were still the lowest of street vermin—who, in fact made him behave that way.

He’d come far from the boy that skulked in the shadows committing all manner of vice and crime in order to survive. He possessed wealth and power that most men never knew. The only thing lacking was gentility, breeding. He vowed to have that, too. With a grimace, he acknowledged that snatching a female off the streets and mauling her in a hack like a caveman of old did not serve to that end. And yet those whiskey-hued eyes burned an imprint on his mind.

He sent a lingering glance over his shoulder, as if he would still find the hack sitting there. Feeling a stab of regret yet again, he cursed himself. So she was a pretty piece, with her black hair and flashing eyes. Pretty women were no rarity, he reminded himself. Beautiful women were common enough within the walls of his gaming hells. One interfering, hot-tempered virago didn’t bear notice.

Go to hell.

He laughed. Again. Those ugly words had sounded absurd in her soft, cultured voice. He’d bet that she’d never uttered them before.

But the sound of that voice, whispering a much different variety of words, words that enticed with naughty, wicked suggestions, filled his imagination.

A sound, he would later learn, that would follow him to bed that night and haunt his dreams.

The grand fa?ade of Hellfire appeared ahead, a porticoed palace amid the squalid dwellings. A steady stream of people passed through the grand double doors even at this time of day. Vowing to think of her no more and put his mind to more important matters of business, he entered the hell. The whirring of roulette wheels filled his ears as he stepped within the marble-floored interior. This, he mused, was all he needed. All he had left in the world.

“Miss Laurent! What a lovely surprise. Dear me, how long has it been?”

Lord Sommers swept inside the salon with a grace borne from years of aristocratic upbringing. His grandmother—may she rest in peace—had been a dowager marchioness and the most exalted patient Marguerite had ever served.

“Lord Sommers,” she greeted.

He proved every inch of his breeding as he politely bowed before her. Not even in the deep brown of his gaze did he betray the awkwardness of their last meeting, that uncomfortable encounter when he dropped to bended knee and begged her to become his paramour. Indeed not. To stare into his eyes, one would never recognize what must be his undoubted surprise at finding the woman who so coolly rebuffed his advances and declined his proposition calling upon him in his drawing room.