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Elissande Edgerton is a desperate woman, a
virtual prisoner in the home of her tyrannical uncle. Only
through marriage can she claim the freedom she craves. But
how to catch the perfect man?
Lord Vere is used to
baiting irresistible traps. As a secret agent for the
government, he’s tracked down some of the most devious
criminals in London, all the while maintaining his cover
as one of Society’s most harmless—and idiotic—bachelors.
But nothing can prepare him for the scandal of being
ensnared by Elissande.
Forced into a marriage of
convenience, Elissande and Vere are each about to discover
that they’re not the only one with a hidden agenda. With
seduction their only weapon—and a dark secret from the
past endangering both their lives—can they learn to trust
each other even as they surrender to a passion that won’t
be denied?
Excerpt The Marquess of Vere was a man of few words. This fact,
however, would astonish all but a select few of his numerous
friends and acquaintances. The general consensus was that
Lord Vere talked. And talked. And talked. There was no
subject under the sun, however remote or abstruse, upon
which he did not eagerly venture an opinion or ten. Indeed,
there were times when one could not stop him from
pontificating on that newly discovered class of chemical
substance known as the Pre-Raphaelites, or the curious
culinary habits of the Pygmy tribes of central
Sweden.
Lord Vere was also a man who held his secrets
close.
But anyone so deluded as to voice such a
pronouncement would find himself surrounded by ladies and
gentlemen on the floor, screaming in laughter. For Lord
Vere, according to public opinion, could not distinguish a
secret from a hedgehog. Not only was he garrulous, he
volunteered the most intimate, most inappropriate personal
knowledge at the drop of a hat—or even without a stitch of
haberdashery anywhere in sight.
He gladly related his
difficulties with the courting of young ladies: He was
rejected early and rejected often, despite his stature as a
peer of the realm. He gave up without hesitation the state
of his finances—though it had been discovered that he was
quite without a notion as to how much funds were at his
disposal, current and future, thereby rendering his
conjectures largely moot. He even ventured—not in mixed
company, of course—to comment on the size and girth of his
masculine endowment: enviable on both counts, the
measurements verified by the experiences of the merry widows
who looked to him for an occasional tumble in the
sheets.
Lord Vere was, in other words, an idiot. Not
a raving one, for his sanity was rarely questioned. And not
so moronic that he could not see to his daily needs. Rather,
he was an amusing idiot, as ignorant and puffed up as a
pillow, silly to the extreme, but sweet, harmless, and very
well liked among the Upper Ten Thousand for the diversion he
provided—and for his inability to remember anything told him
that did not affect his meals, his nightly beauty rest, or
the pride and joy that resided in his underlinens.
He
could not shoot straight; his bullets never met a grouse
except by accident. He rarely failed to turn knobs and
levers in the wrong direction. And as his gift for wandering
into the wrong place at the wrong time was legendary, hardly
anyone batted an eyelash to learn that he was an eyewitness
to a crime—without having any idea what he’d seen, most
assuredly.
Such an extraordinary idiot had he been in
the thirteen years since his unfortunate riding accident
that no one not privy to his more clandestine activities had
ever remarked on his proximity to some of the most
sensational criminal cases of the upper crust, shortly
before those cases were solved and the culprits brought to
justice.
It was an interesting life, to say the
least. Sometimes the tiny handful of other agents of the
Crown who knew his true role wondered how he felt about
playing the idiot for most of his waking hours. They never
found out, for he was a man of few words and held his
secrets close.
Of course, no secret remains a secret
forever. . . .the beginning of the end of Lord Vere’s secret
came, quite literally, in an ambush by a young lady of
questionable ancestry and equally questionable
methods.
A young woman who, in a strange twist of
fate, would soon become the Marchioness of Vere, his lady
wife.
9 The rats were Vere’s idea. His idea of a
joke, to be more precise.
London was emptying at the
tail end of the Season. Vere had seen his brother off at the
train station earlier in the day; tomorrow he himself was
headed for Gloucestershire. There was no time like the
beginning of August to appear innocently at a country house
to which he might not have been invited—and claim that he
had: After all, what was one more guest when there were
already thirty of them running about?
But tonight’s
meeting was about Edmund Doug- las, the reclusive diamond
mine owner suspected of extorting from the diamond dealers
of London and Antwerp.
“We need a better way to get
into his house,” said Lord Holbrook, Vere’s
liaison.
Holbrook was a few years older than Vere.
When Oscar Wilde had been the country’s leading literary
celebrity, Holbrook had worn his dark hair long and
cultivated an air of intellectual ennui. Now that Wilde had
gone off to a disgraced exile, Holbrook’s languor was
accompanied by shorter hair and a more straightforward
display of nihilism.
Vere helped himself to a piece
of Savoy cake. The cake was airy and spongy, and just sturdy
enough for a spoonful of apricot jam. Holbrook had a way of
keeping his hidey-holes—a smattering of properties across
metropolitan London—well supplied, so that whenever his
agents had to make use of one, there was always good liquor
and the makings of a proper tea.
Across the gaudy
drawing room—this particular house behind Fitzroy Square had
once housed a succession of kept women—Lady Kingsley dabbed
a napkin at the corner of her lips. She was a fine-looking
brunette about the same age as Holbrook, the daughter of a
baronet, and the widow of a knight.
As covert agents,
women had the advantage. Vere and Holbrook must assume
personas not their own in order not to be taken seriously—an
absolute necessity when one went about inquiring after
sensitive matters on behalf of the Crown. But a woman, even
one as sharp and capable as Lady Kingsley, often managed to
be dismissed on nothing more than the fact of her sex. “I
told you already, Holbrook,” she said. “We must make use of
Douglas’s niece.”
Holbrook, sprawled on a red velvet
chaise trimmed in gold fringe, filliped the most recent case
report lying on his chest. “I thought the niece hadn’t left
the house in years.”
“Precisely. Imagine you are a
girl of twenty-four years, well past the age when a young
lady ought to be married, and isolated from all the gaiety
and amusement of proper society. What is the one thing that
would tempt you the most?”
“Opium,” Holbrook
said.
Vere smiled and said nothing.
“No.” Lady
Kingsley rolled her eyes. “You would wish to meet eligible
young men, as many of them as can squeeze under one
roof.”
“Where do you plan to collect a houseful of
desirable bachelors, madam?” asked Holbrook.
Lady
Kingsley waved her hand in dismissal. “That is the easy
part, the mustering of manly lures. The problem is that I
cannot simply drive up to Highgate Court and present the
gentlemen—it’s been three months since I leased the
next-nearest house and I still haven’t met her.”
“May
I?” Vere pointed at the report on Holbrook’s chest. Holbrook
tossed the report his way. Vere caught it and skimmed the
pages.
Edmund Douglas’s estate, in which he’d
maintained residence since 1877, was a manor constructed to
his specification. There were hundreds of such new country
houses all over the land, built by those with a fortune to
spare, thanks to the prosperity of the Age of
Steam.
A fairly common sort of estate, yet one that
had proved difficult to penetrate. Plain burglary had not
succeeded. An attempt to infiltrate the staff had also
failed. And due to Mrs. Douglas’s ill health, the family
rarely mingled with local society, rendering useless the
more socially acceptable routes into the manse.
“Have
a domestic disaster on your part,” said Vere, to Lady
Kingsley. “Then you will have an excuse to approach
her.”
“I know. But I’m hesitant to damage the roof—or
the plumbing—of a leased house.”
“Can’t your servants
come down with something disgusting but not infectious?”
Holbrook inquired. “A case of communal runs?”
“Behave
yourself, Holbrook. I am no chemist and I will not poison my
own staff.”
“How about an infestation of rats?” Vere
suggested, more to amuse himself than anything
else.
Lady Kingsley shuddered. “What do you mean, an
infestation of rats?”
Vere shrugged. “Put a dozen or
two rats to run about the house. Your guests will scream to
evacuate. And the rats won’t do permanent damage to the
house, provided you have a ratcatcher set to work soon
enough.”
Holbrook sat up straight. “Splendid idea, my
dear fellow. I happen to know a man who breeds mice and rats
to supply scientific laboratories.”
That did not
surprise Vere. Holbrook had at his fingertips a large
assortment of bizarre and bizarrely useful
contacts.
“No. It’s a terrible idea,” Lady Kingsley
protested.
“Au contraire, I think it is pure genius,”
declared Holbrook. “Douglas travels to London to meet with
his solicitor in two weeks, am I correct?”
“Correct,”
said Vere.
“That should be enough time.” Holbrook
reclined back onto his red velvet chaise. “Consider it
done.”
Lady Kingsley grimaced. “I hate
rats.”
For Queen and country, madam,” said Vere,
rising. “For Queen and country.”
Holbrook tapped a
finger against his lips. “Funny you should mention Queen and
country, my lord: I have just received word of the
blackmailing of a certain royal and—”
Vere, however,
had already shown himself out.
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