A Little Light Mischief

by Cat Sebastian

  An Excerpt from A Duke in Disguise

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Cat Sebastian’s latest full-length novel,

  A DUKE IN DISGUISE

  One reluctant heir

  If anyone else had asked for his help publishing a naughty novel, Ash would have had the sense to say no. But he’s never been able to deny Verity Plum. Now he has his hands full illustrating a book and trying his damnedest not to fall in love with his best friend. The last thing he needs is to discover he’s a duke’s lost heir. Without a family or a proper education, he’s had to fight for his place in the world, and the idea of it—and Verity—being taken away from him, chills him to the bone.

  One radical bookseller

  All Verity wants is to keep her brother out of prison, her business afloat, and her hands off Ash. Lately it seems she’s not getting anything she wants. She knows from bitter experience that she isn’t cut out for romance, but the more time she spends with Ash, the more she wonders if maybe she’s been wrong about herself.

  One disaster waiting to happen

  Ash has a month before his identity is exposed, and he plans to spend it with Verity. The longer they explore their long-buried passion, the harder it becomes for Ash to face the music. Can Verity accept who Ash must become, or will he turn away the only woman he’s ever loved?

  Available now from Avon Impulse!

  Chapter One

  Ash knew all too well that there were two varieties of pleasure in life. The first included art, fine weather, good company, and all the rest of the world’s benign delights. A man could hold these pleasures at arm’s length, appreciate them with the proper detachment, and not mourn their absence overmuch. But a fellow could be ruined by overindulgence in the second category of pleasure: rich food, strong drink, high stakes gaming.

  Verity Plum belonged squarely in the latter category.

  For all she was one of Ash’s dearest friends and one of the few constants in his life, for all she and her brother were now the closest thing to family that he had in this country, being near her was a pleasure he meted out for himself in small doses, like the bottle of French brandy he kept in his clothes press, lest he succumb to the emotional equivalent of gout.

  As a very young man he had compared Verity, pen in hand and smudged spectacles balanced on the tip of her nose, to a bird diligently building a nest. Ten years later he knew it to have been the romantic delusion of a youthful idiot not to have straightaway seen the bloodlust lurking behind the spectacles; she bore more in common with a hawk picking the meat from its prey’s bones than with a songbird collecting twigs and leaves.

  He had arrived in town late the previous night, when the house was dark and the doors locked. He let himself in using the latchkey Mr. Plum had given him ten years ago and which he still carried on a string around his neck. Weary from the journey from Portsmouth and loath to wake the household, he left his satchel at the foot of the stairs, climbed up to the spare room, and went promptly to sleep. When he woke, a cup of coffee and a buttered roll sat on the table beside his bed, and his satchel rested on a hard-backed chair, which meant somebody at least knew he had arrived. Could be Verity, could be Nate, could be old Nan, who still came in every morning to do the cleaning. Could be a stray vagabond off the streets or one of the impecunious writers who often made their home in the garrets of the Holywell Street premises of Plum & Company, Printers and Booksellers.

  Now he cast his gaze around Verity’s study, taking in the cobwebs in every corner and the teetering piles of books, the grate that sat empty, the windowpane that had been cracked for over a decade. He would miss the tidy set of rooms he had shared with Roger. He would miss Roger, full stop. A sick chasm of loss threatened to open inside him. Ash’s earliest memory was going to live with Roger as an apprentice engraver; before that was only a series of flickering images, fractured and haunting, scarcely seeming to belong to Ash at all. But from the point he had gone to Roger, he had a home, a name, a place to belong. He had lived with Roger for over fifteen years, first as his apprentice, then as a colleague, always as a friend. A few days earlier, when Roger was preparing to board the ship that would take him to Italy, to a climate more suited to his failing lungs, his parting words had been to advise that Ash stay with the Plums. “Yes, yes, you might well hire a quite respectable set of rooms, but you’ll be talking to the shadows and naming every spider and earwig within a week. Stay with the Plums.” His mentor had been pale, his voice weak from coughing, his thin gray hair whipping in the wind, so his advice, quite possibly the last words he would speak to Ash in this world, had the weight of a dying request.

  “I could still come with you,” Ash had said again. He had made this offer so many times it had taken on the cadence of a prayer. “It’s not too late.” He spoke the words into the wind, to be carried away, off the shores of this island he would never leave.

  “I really can’t see how you expect me to recover when I’m worried about you,” Roger had replied, clasping the younger man’s hands. “It’s too much to ask.”

  “It’s just seasickness,” Ash replied pointlessly, because they both remembered vividly what had happened on the packet to Calais all those years ago, and then on the agonizing return journey to Dover. A storm-tossed ship was a perilous place to have a seizure.

  “And I just have a summer cold,” Roger had responded. And so Ash had embraced his friend one last time, watched the boat sail away, and then headed for London.

  Watching Verity now, as she scribbled on a blotted and crumpled piece of paper, her pale brown hair doing unspeakable things and a vast quantity of ink on her fingers, the grief that had dogged him since Portsmouth started to thin, only to be displaced by something else entirely. She must have encountered a particularly galling turn of phrase in the manuscript she was working on, because she made a strangled sound of outrage as she scribbled it out. How many times had he seen her perform just that movement over the years? He ought to be used to how she affected him, but during the months in Bath—that last, futile effort to see if the waters might restore Roger’s health—he must have forgotten how to resist her. He couldn’t remember how he used to guard his heart against this sudden rush of fondness.

  Without rising to his feet, he reached for an andiron and prodded the fire back to life. He still had on his gloves and coat to ward off the chill, but Verity had doubtless been toiling away in this cold room since breakfast. She occasionally made a sound of approval or a tut of frustration as she turned a page, and her pencil was forever scratching along the manuscript, but otherwise she worked in silence, perfectly still at the desk in the small room above the bookshop that she used as her office. The fire hissed, Ash idly paged through a book he had open on his lap, and Verity worked.

  Finally she turned over the last page. “Guess how many times Nate used the word liberty in this week’s Register,” she said without looking up from her paper, as if it hadn’t been six months since they had last seen one another.

  He suppressed a smile and mentally awarded her a point in the game of feigned mutual indifference they had been playing for a decade. He didn’t know which of them had started it or why, but he would hardly know how to act if they dropped the pretense.

  “Four?” he asked.

  “Sixteen!” She put her pen down and looked at him for the first time. There was ink on her cheekbone. “In a single article.”

  “How tedious of him,” Ash remarked lightly. Not for love or money would Ash throw himself between the Plum siblings when they were engaged in one of their skirmishes. Three was a difficult number for friendships, and only by careful neutrality did Ash preserve their balance. “Is it any good?”

  “If his goal is to get himself hanged or transported, then yes, I’d say it’s quite effective. Sometimes I think he actually wants to get arrested.”

  Ash thought this was entirely possible. The letters he had received in Bath from friends as well as from Nate and Verity themselves suggested that the arguments be
tween brother and sister on the subject of printing outright seditious libel were escalating even faster than the battles between radicals and the government. “He feels strongly about Pentrich,” Ash said, striving for diplomacy.

  Verity snorted. “He damned well does feel strongly. And so do I. But I can’t see what good his swinging by a rope will do anybody. I daresay this government would be only too glad to see us all dead, then there wouldn’t be anybody left to object.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes, smudging ink across her cheek. “He’s been saying he wants to travel north for the execution.”

  Ash frowned. While in Bath, with all his attention on Roger’s failing health, he had followed the events in the newspaper as he might the tidings of a far-off land. In Pentrich, Derbyshire, some poor benighted fools, half-mad with hunger and deluded by the lies of a government spy, armed with nothing more than scythes and knives and a harebrained set of demands, had been convicted of high treason. Surrounded by clean white streets and well-fed gentlefolk, the stories coming from the North seemed remote, something that belonged in the past. Roger railed against tyranny until he coughed too hard to speak, while Ash listened with half an ear and reserved his anger for a God who seemed intent on leaving Ash alone in the world.

  “The trouble with Nate,” Ash said, “is that he’s twice as clever as he needs to be.”

  “You wouldn’t think so if you read this article,” Verity countered. “He knows I can’t manage the press if he goes to prison, and even less if I’m in prison as an accessory.” She removed a pin from the knot of hair at the back of her head and used it to fasten a curl that had stubbornly worked its way loose, only succeeding in dislodging two more curls in the process. “At any rate, I altered some of the more incendiary phrases so at least this week’s issue won’t be the death of us.”

  She had probably also made her brother’s arguments twice as cogent and therefore three times as annoying to the government, but she knew that already. “Let me have a look at it.” He reached out and she placed the sheaf of papers in his hand.

  Nate’s bold scrawl unraveled across the page like a tangled skein of yarn, marked with slashes and arrows, then interwoven with Verity’s minuscule copperplate handwriting. Charlie, the Plums’ apprentice, would render a fair copy for Verity or Nate to approve before setting type, but Ash had enough practice to decipher Nate’s writing without much trouble. He read a few lines and raised an eyebrow. “Mentioning the guillotine was perhaps a bridge too far.” Verity had struck that line out with a stroke that nearly pierced the paper.

  “You see I’m not exaggerating, then?” she demanded, her eyes bright with the prospect of an argument won.

  “Mmm,” he murmured, trying to sound noncommittal. But even with Verity’s revisions, this article would at the very least bring the Register in for a level of scrutiny that would do its publishers no good. The entire country looked like a pot about to boil and Nate was all too eager to throw himself right into the hot water.

  She leaned forward and he found himself looking up from the paper expectantly, his own posture mirroring hers. “Heaven help me, I missed you, Ash.”

  He was taken aback by this foray into earnestness but did his best to hide his surprise behind a mask of cool indifference, quickly refocusing his gaze on the paper. He wanted to tell her that she absolutely needed to stop saying that sort of thing, that he had spent years on the edge of a precipice, and it would take only the slightest breeze to tip him over completely. But he didn’t think their friendship could survive that kind of honesty: if they acknowledged the potential he felt between them, then they’d want to do something about it. Then he’d lose her. Ash had endured too many losses, and was not willing to lose either of the Plums. So he leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. “Understandable,” he said with a blandness that was only possible after a decade of practice. “Without me around, you’d be the worst radical on the premises.”

  Verity laughed, a merry gurgle that made Ash’s heart almost hurt. “Speak for yourself. I’m an exceptionally good radical. Otherwise I would have let my brother print this bilge unedited even though it would be as good as turning him over to the redcoats. What I meant is that it’s reassuring not to be the only one in the house who has second thoughts about giving up one’s life and safety for a good cause. You heard that Mr. Hone was arrested?” William Hone, another publisher, had earlier that year spent two months in jail on charges of seditious libel. “He’s being treated as a hero. And he is, but I spent the entire summer worried that Nate would be next. I suppose that’s selfish, but so be it.”

  Ash raised an imaginary glass in a toast to the idea of not going to prison. He was not terribly keen on imprisonment himself, being fairly certain a seizure on a stone floor would not be one he would survive.

  “How long has it been since the last time you lived with us?” Verity asked, tilting her head and looking at him as if she had just noticed he was there.

  “Four years? It was in ’13 that Roger and I took the set of rooms near Finsbury Square.” They had lodged with the Plums when first coming to London, and then occasionally returned to stay with them in between hired sets of rooms. They had changed residences often, always hoping that it was the damp of a previous lodging that had left Roger in an increasingly worrisome state of health.

  “Truly, Ash, I’m glad to have you back,” she said, with a frank wistfulness that made Ash’s heart thud in his chest. “You’ve always been a stabilizing influence on Nate.”

  Ash tried not to be disappointed that Verity had missed him only insofar as his presence helped Nate. She had always thought first of her brother; this was nothing new, although the little worry lines that appeared around her eyes when she spoke of him definitely were.

  From beyond the thin sooty window he heard the bells of St. Clement’s chime for the second time since he had come in. It was time to leave. He hoisted himself to his feet and looked down at Verity. She was polishing her spectacles on the hem of her shawl; a tumble of tea-brown hair had worked its way loose to fall into her face, and that smudge of ink remained beneath her right eye. She must have sensed him looking at her, because she glanced up. Their gazes caught and lingered a moment too long. Ash promptly rose to his feet and left, closing the door behind him. If he let looks like that happen, they’d all find out exactly how fragile their arrangement was.

  How one was meant to feed all these people on a couple of mutton chops Verity did not know. Supper was supposed to serve four: herself, Nate, Ash, and Charlie. But Nate had come home with three friends he met at the pub, which would have been bad enough even if he hadn’t evidently also invited Amelia Allenby, the half-grown daughter of Verity’s friend. At half past seven, a carriage pulled up in front of the house and disgorged a girl in pearl earbobs and a white muslin frock, dressed as if she were going to dine with the great and good of the land, rather than pick at too few mutton chops and be an eyewitness to sedition. Amelia was seventeen and looked upon Nate with a degree of hero worship that nobody who brought three hungry radicals home to dinner deserved.

  Why did it always have to be something like chops when there were unexpected guests? Six days out of seven they had stew of varying consistencies, starting out as something reasonably substantial but stretched and thinned as the week wore on, until it became a sort of watery potato soup. She supposed Nan found a bargain on mutton at the market that morning. At least there were plenty of fresh rolls from the baker. When the dish of mutton was passed around, she handed it to Ash without saying a word. He caught her eye and passed the dish to Amelia on his right without taking any meat for himself.

  “Never worry, Plum,” he said in a low murmur that made her remember that he was, unfortunately, a man; if she had learned anything in her quarter century in this city it was that men were more trouble than they were worth. “I have a bottle of wine and some cheese upstairs. I’ll bring you some later.”

  “How provident of you,” she said, telling hers
elf very firmly that she was not to lean closer to Ash. “Clearly you remember what it takes to survive in this house.” The Plums had never kept a decent table, not even in Verity’s mother’s day, and Verity often wondered that they had any supper guests whatsoever. Not that Ash was a guest; he was, technically, a lodger, which meant he paid for this nipfarthing supper. She sighed. “But I truly can’t—”

  She was interrupted by raised voices from Nate’s end of the table.

  “They were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. In 1817.” Nate smacked his knife down with a thump that shook the table. “Of course I’m outraged. A group of men, after being convicted in a sham trial, are to have the entrails taken out of their still-living bodies. Why wouldn’t I be outraged?”

  “I don’t think it’ll come to that,” said one of the hearty young men, brandishing an entire mutton chop on the end of his fork. “I don’t recall hearing about Despard and his conspirators being disemboweled, although I was only a boy when that happened.”

  “Drawing doesn’t refer to the drawing out of the entrails,” said Amelia in her polished and plummy accent, as if this were normal dinner table conversation. Verity noted that the girl had not taken any meat, and appeared to be contenting herself with boiled carrots and a roll. “It refers to the drawing of the convict behind a horse. I was reading about it in a book on the Plantagenets.”

  “Were all those medieval chaps disemboweled just for fun, then?” the young man asked, leaning across the table towards Amelia. “Just a bit of a flourish on the executioner’s behalf, eh?” Verity had the alarming sense that the boy was attempting to flirt with Amelia. Trust one of Nate’s friends to flirt by means of discussing capital punishment.