by Gaelen Foley
Driven to uncover the truth about the mysterious death of his ladylove, the Duke of Hawkscliffe will go to any lengths to unmask a murderer. Even if it means jeopardizing his reputation by engaging in a scandalous affair with London’s most provocative courtesan — the desirable but aloof Belinda Hamilton.
Bel has used her intelligence and wit to charm the city’s titled gentlemen, while struggling to put the pieces of her life back together. She needs a protector, so she accepts Hawk’s invitation to become his mistress in name only. He asks nothing of her body, but seeks her help in snaring the same man who shattered her virtue. Together they tempt the unforgiving wrath of society — until their risky charade turns into a dangerous attraction, and Bel must make a devastating decision that could ruin her last chance at love. . . .
“Gaelen Foley ... is destined to captivate readers.”
— Romantic Times
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“... I don’t give serious kisses to men whose names I don’t even know.”
“Easily remedied,” he said as he flashed her a smile. “I’m Hawkscliffe.”
“Hawkscliffe?” she echoed, staring at him in ill-concealed shock. “Pray tell, what is the Paragon Duke doing here, gambling and trying to coax unwon kisses out of a demirep?”
“Oh, just entertaining myself,” he replied with a calculating smile. “You know full well that I won a proper kiss from you fair and square, Miss Hamilton.”
“Well,” she said archly, “no doubt you need it.”
Gently, she cupped his clean-shaved cheek in her hand, catching a glimpse of his smoldering eyes before she closed hers, then she caressed his lips with her own, slowly gifting him with a kiss that left the rest of the noisy, clamoring party and the city and the world behind.
His mouth was warm and silky, his smooth skin heated beneath her touch. She stroked his black hair and kissed him more deeply, leaning further over the table. She felt him pull her toward him. . . .
By Gaelen Foley
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group:
THE PIRATE PRINCE
PRINCESS
PRINCE CHARMING
THE DUKE
THE DUKE
Gaelen Foley
IVY BOOKS • NEW YORK
For Eric, and he knows why
For who so firm that cannot be seduced? —Shakespeare
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people for their extraordinary generosity to me in their respective fields of expertise: Mary Jo Putney, for her matchless tact in steering me out of a dead end in the planning stages; Richard Tames, eminent London historian, Blue Badge and British Museum tour guide, author of American Walks in London along with 130 other books, and all-around genius (read him, if you love London!); Sheila Tames, London and the Lakes guide and author, for also helping and bearing with me; Andrea Caweltia of the Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for supplying me with the information I needed about period music and instruments; Dr. Jean Mason, professor of history at Duquesne University and enlightened reviewer for The Romance Reader online, for scouring the manuscript for historical and logic errors; David Tucker, director of The Original London Walks Company, for his courtesy and helpfulness; the always-ready-to-help members of the Beau Monde online group, who all deserve vouchers to Almack’s in my opinion; Marina Richards, writing buddy, for reminding me to have the courage not to pull my punches with a story I needed to tell; and last but never least, heartfelt thanks to my editor, Shauna Summers, for being behind me every step of the way and allowing me the creative freedom to write books that break the rules.
Any mistakes, blunders, or misinformations are the author’s own.
CHAPTER ONE
London, 1814
Many years ago, as a curly-headed youth on grand tour, he had fallen madly in love with beauty and so had stopped in Florence to take drafting lessons from a bonafide Italian master. Starry-eyed and romantical, he had followed the light-winged muses south to the Bay of Sorrento, where he had first heard the ancient Italian proverb “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” He was an old man now, without illusions, cold and canny as a scheming pope. Beauty had betrayed him, but decades later, oddly enough, here on this gray English day, the Sicilian proverb held true.
A neat, slight-framed man, James Breckinridge, the earl of Coldfell, gripped the ivory head of his walking stick in gnarled fingers that ached with the needling April rain. He permitted his footman to assist him down from his luxurious black town coach while another held an umbrella over him.
The slumbrous quiet in this place was like a church, but for the pattering of the rain. He turned slowly, looked past the servants’ blanked faces, past the jagged wrought-iron fence, into St. George’s Burying Ground on the Uxbridge Road, just north of Hyde Park. Three weeks ago, he had buried his young bride here. Under a chilly gray drizzle, where the hill curved green, her marble monument rose like an angry needle to the smoke-colored sky. Beneath it, just where Coldfell had expected to find him, stood the tall, powerful, brooding silhouette of a man; wind-blown and lost, the wide shoulders slumped as the gusty rain blew his black greatcoat around him.
Hawkscliffe.
Coldfell’s mouth flattened into a thin line. He took the umbrella from the footman. “I shan’t be long.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Leaning on his walking stick, he began the slow ascent up the graveled path.
The thirty-five-year-old Robert Knight, ninth duke of Hawkscliffe, appeared unaware of his approach, stony and immobile as the monument. He stood in bleak granite stillness, the rain plastering his wavy black hair to his forehead, running in chilly rivulets down the stark planes of his cheeks, and dripping off his rugged profile as he stared down at the yellow daffodils that had been planted on her grave.
Coldfell winced at the ungentlemanly intrusion he was about to make on the other man’s grief. Hawkscliffe was, after all, the only one of the younger generation he respected. Some of the old-school pigtail Tories found the young magnate’s views alarmingly Whiggish, but none could deny that Hawkscliffe was twice the man his weak-willed father had been.
Why, Coldfell reflected as he hobbled up the path, he had seen Robert become a duke at the age of seventeen, managing three vast estates and raising four wild younger brothers and a little sister practically single-handedly. More recently, he had heard him deliver speeches in the Lords with a cool force and eloquence that had brought the whole house to its feet. Hawkscliffe’s integrity was unquestioned; his honor rang true as a bell of finest sterling. Many of the younger set, like Coldfell’s own idiot nephew and heir, Sir Dolph Breckinridge, considered the so-called paragon duke a rigid high stickler, but to wiser heads, Hawkscliffe was, in a word, impeccable.
It was pitiful to see what Lucy’s death had done to him.
Ah, well. Men would see in a woman what they wanted to see.
Coldfell cleared his throat. Startled, Hawkscliffe jerked at the noise and spun around. Tumultuous emotion blazed in his dark eyes. Seeing Coldfell, his dazed expression of pain took on a stab of guilt. With his honorable nature, it had no doubt tormented the duke to have wanted an old friend’s wife. Himself, he had never been that chivalrous. James nodded to him. “Hawkscliffe.”
“Beg your pardon, my lord, I was just leaving,” he mumbled, lowering his head.
“Stay, Your Grace, by all means,” Coldfell answered, waving off the awkwardness. “Keep an old man company on this dreary day.”
“As you wish, sir.” Narrowing his eyes against the rain, Hawkscliffe looked away uncomfortably, surveying the jagged
horizon of tombstones.
Coldfell hobbled to the brim of the grave, cursing his aching joints. When the weather was fine, he could hunt all day without tiring. But he had not been energetic enough for Lucy, had he?
Well, she had had her fashionable London burial, just as she would have liked. Having died at his house just outside London, she had a spot in the most exclusive cemetery in the city, complete with a Flaxman funerary monument, the height of good taste, sparing no expense. And well he should have to pay for this most expensive mistake—an old man’s folly, he thought bitterly. Beauty indeed was his weakness. With nothing to recommend her but a magnificent mane of flame-colored hair and the most luscious thighs in Christendom, the twenty-six-year-old Lucy O’Malley had been an artist’s model in Sheffield before she had bewitched him into making her his second countess. He had sworn her to keep quiet about her background, devising a false one for her. At least she had given that pledge sincerely, eager as she had been to join the ton.
Coldfell was merely glad he had not been forced to bury Lucy next to Margaret, his first wife, who was reverently enshrined at Seven Oaks, the ancestral pile in Leicestershire. Ah, wise Margaret, his heart’s mate, whose only fault had been her failure to give him a son.
“I am—very sorry for your loss, my lord,” Hawkscliffe said stiffly, avoiding his gaze.
Coldfell slid a furtive glance at the duke, then sighed, nodding. “It’s hard to believe she’s really gone. So young. So full of life.”
“What will you do now?”
“I leave for Leicestershire tomorrow. A few weeks in the country will help, I warrant.” A visit to Seven Oaks would also take him out of the way of suspicion when this man carried out the deed for him.
“I’m sure you will find it soothing,” Hawkscliffe said— polite, automatic.
They were both silent for a long moment, Hawkscliffe brooding, Coldfell reflecting on the uneasiness of living anymore in his elegant villa in South Kensington with its four pretty acres of sculpted gardens—the site of Lucy’s death.
“ ‘Lay her in the earth. And from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring,’ ” Hawkscliffe quoted barely audibly.
Coldfell looked at him in pity. “Laertes’ speech on Ophelia’s grave.”
The duke said nothing, merely stared at the carven letters on the monument: Lucy’s name, her date of birth and death.
“I never touched her,” he choked out abruptly, turning to Coldfell in impetuous anguish. “You have my word as a gentleman. She never betrayed you.”
Evenly, Coldfell held his gaze, then nodded as though satisfied, but of course he had already known.
“Ah, Robert,” he said heavily after a long moment, “it is so strange, the way they found her. She went out to our pond every day to sketch the swans. How could she have slipped? Perhaps my brain is muddled with grief, but it makes no sense to me.”
“She could never slip,” he said vehemently. “She was graceful... so graceful.”
Coldfell was taken aback by his ferocity. This was going to be easier than he’d hoped.
“Did your servants report anything strange that day, my lord, if I may presume to ask?” pursued the duke.
“Nothing.”
“Did anyone see anything? Hear anything? She was in earshot of the house. Could they not hear her cries for help?”
“Perhaps she had no time to cry out before she fell beneath the water.”
Hawkscliffe turned away again, his firm mouth grimly pursed. “My lord, I have the blackest suspicions.”
Coldfell paused, watching him. “I wish that I could put your mind at ease, but I’m afraid that I, too, am haunted by severe doubts.”
Hawkscliffe turned and stared penetratingly at him. His dark eyes glowed like hellfire. “Go on.”
“It doesn’t add up. There was no blood on the rock where they said she... struck her head. What am I to do? I am an old man. These sore limbs are weak. I haven’t the strength,” he said slowly, emphatically, “to do what a husband should.”
“I do,” vowed Hawkscliffe.
The earl felt his dry soul thrill to the resolve in the fiery young man’s eyes.
“Whom do you suspect?” Hawkscliffe asked in tautly leashed savagery.
Coldfell had never seen the man look so wild and fierce. He had to hide his glee. All he need do was utter the name, provide a target for all that churning wrath, then Hawkscliffe would duel and the viper who had turned on him would be struck down. He was not above playing Lucy’s devotees against each other to save himself and his sweet, flawed daughter, Juliet. What else could he do? He was nearly seventy, a little weaker every day. Dolph was in his prime, a brutally skilled hunter who had been blooded at the tender age of nine with his first stag.
The tremor that moved through his limbs was real. “May God forgive me,” Coldfell said under his breath with a look of distress.
“Whom, Coldfell? Do you know something? I know this was no accident, even if the coroner said it was. You and I are not fools,” he said hotly. “She was in that pond for four days before they found her. There is no telling what else might have been done to her before she was killed.”
“I see our fears run a similar course, Robert. To think that she might have been... violated. Oh, God.” He leaned on Hawkscliffe, who steadied him. “It’s almost worse than her death itself.”
Hawkscliffe’s chiseled jaw tautened. “My lord, I beg of you. Tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know, Robert. I only suspect. Lucy said to me once—”
“Yes?”
Coldfell paused. So hungry for someone to punish, someone to blame, he thought, passing a shrewd glance over Robert’s face, assessing his features like an artist preparing to sketch his portrait. It was the hard, noble face of a warrior. His raven hair flowed back richly from his broad forehead; beneath his wide, flared, charcoal black eyebrows, his piercing eyes burned with iron will; his hooked nose was aquiline, hawklike, his mouth, firm and clamped, yet there was a sensitivity about his lips that captivated women.
“She said there was a man who... frightened her.”
“Who was he?” Hawkscliffe demanded.
Coldfell drew a breath and looked away, knowing he was handing down a death sentence.
He was glad of it.
“My nephew, Your Grace,” he said, cool as a consummate Italian. “My heir, Dolph Breckinridge.”
“Oranges here! Penny apiece, sir, thank you and good day! Who’s next?”
In the hustle and bustle of a gray day in the City, she was as out of place as the bright, sweet oranges she sold on the hectic corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, handing them out like small suns to the dark-clad working gentlemen who gusted by between the worlds of government and finance—Westminster and the City, respectively. Bank clerks and barristers, city scrubs, journalists, hacks, tailors, respectable shopkeepers—even a passing deacon who was hurrying toward St. Paul’s stopped in his tracks at the sight of her, then, like the rest, was irresistibly lured.
If Miss Belinda Hamilton at all divined that it was some indescribable quality in herself that brought male foot traffic to a halt, she showed no sign of it, all businesslike efficiency, counting out change with her cold-reddened fingers poking through ragged gloves, determined, in all, to take her coming down in the world with a true lady’s uncomplaining grace.
A few months ago, she had been preparing giggling debutantes for their entrance into Society at Mrs. Hall’s Academy for Young Ladies; now, here she was, tenaciously clinging to the outermost rim of respectability by pride alone.
A wheat blond tendril of her hair blew against her rosy cheek as she looked up at her next customer and gave him his change with a fresh smile, weary but cheerful.
“Oranges, here! Who’s next, please?”
One of her regulars stepped to the fore, a portly barrister from one of the nearby Inns of Court. His black robes billowed and he sent her a chagrined smile as he clamped his legal wig atop his b
eefy head to keep the thing from blowing away. His gaze skipped down the length of her.
Bel looked away, picking out a large bright orange for him. She gave it a polish with the end of her apron, then leashed her large pride by sheer dint of will and put out her hand expectantly. “A copper, sir,” she sighed.
The barrister hesitated, then placed in her hand, not a coin, but a paper bank note that almost blew away. Bel knit her brow and looked at it more closely. Twenty pounds! She suppressed an appalled gasp and pressed the note back into his sweaty palm, revolted, though it represented a sum equal to almost three months’ worth of this work. “No, sir. No.”
“No?” he asked, with a glow in his small eyes. “Do but consider it, my dear.”
“Sir, you insult me,” she said, dealing him a frosty set-down like a baroness in a drawing room instead of a desperate and nigh-penniless girl alone on the streets of the great city.
“I’ll double it,” he whispered, leaning closer.
She lifted her chin. “I am not for sale.”
At her grand, withering stare, his heavy-jowled face turned beet red. He fled in embarrassment, his wig slipping askew. Bel shuddered slightly, scratched her forehead to gather her ruffled composure, then turned to deal hurriedly with the rest of her customers. It hadn’t taken long to realize that not all of them wished to buy oranges, a fact she politely allowed herself to ignore.
After her last customer had gone, she bent down over her large oval basket and began straightening up her oranges in tidy rows.
“Hey, ye wee bit o‘ muslin!” yelled one of the rough-faced costermongers across the street. “We ain’t gonna tolerate you on our corner much longer, girly. We got mouths ta feed. You’re runnin’ us outta shop!”
