Page 52 of The Duke of Deceit

But it was the woman herself who captivated his attention, how she turned to face him when he entered the little folly with her, how she reached delicate hands to untie her mask and push down her hood to reveal herself.

His heart skipped. She wasn’t the dark-haired woman he’d been expecting. The young attendant had gotten the color of her hair wrong in the lamplight. Not the woman he had expected at all—

But the one he very much wanted.

Jessamyn.

Her green eyes seemed to glow in the moonlit shadows, with her fair skin almost silver and her blond hair cascading freely down her back. His hands itched to shove themselves into its silky softness and spill it through his fingers.

He crossed his arms to keep himself from doing exactly that. “What are you playing at?”

“I could ask the same of you.” She cast a slow look over him. “I was wrong about you. You’re not the Duke of Disgrace.” She let the mask slip through her fingers and fall to the ground at her feet. “You’re the Duke of Deceit.”

Her soft words pulsed a low warning through him; so did the way she stood before him. She was different. Nothing about her showed any hint of even the smallest uncertainty, and damnation, this new confidence made her even more alluring.

“Is that why you invited me to follow you,” he drawled, “to level insults?”

“I needed to speak with you, somewhere completely private,” she explained, her voice soft in the shadows. “When I found out you’d returned to London and planned to attend Vauxhall tonight, it seemed the perfect way to meet with you. I asked Lady Bromley for a favor, and she invited Auntie and I to join her for dinner in her nephew’s box.”

He cast a disbelieving glance over her. “And you dressed like that for dinner with the matrons?”

“I arrived in a coat jacket over the dress, buttoned up to the neck. I removed it after I left the box and stashed it out of sight before I gave the attendant the message for you.” She paused. “I daresay, you were awfully willing to go off into the gardens with an unknown woman.”

“Well, Iama rake. It’s what we do.” Unable to help himself, he took a step toward her. “And you shouldn’t be alone with me in the darkness like this. You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

“Actually,” she whispered, then stopped his breath when she rose up on tiptoes and caressed her lips across his cheek to his ear, “I very much do.”

Her soft lips stunned him. “Because you still believe I ruined your sister that night you found us together?” It took all his strength not to wrap his arms around her and pull her fully against him so he could kiss her senseless.

“Because you’re not at all the heartless devil you want the world to believe you are,” she corrected with a whisper into his ear. “You see, I’ve uncovered the truth about you.” She stepped back just far enough to stare up into his eyes. Her gaze was piercing. “Underneath that black façade…you’re good.”

He stared at her, his mind reeling. How the hell had she discovered that? “Nonsense. As you said, I care for no one and nothing but myself.”

“Perhaps.” She leaned back against the stone ledge behind her, and her bright eyes sized him up with a long look fromhis hat to his boots. “But you also donate thousands of pounds each year to charities for women and children, defend the helpless, save prostitutes…” She shrugged her slender shoulders, and the billowing cape slid behind her to reveal a long, tantalizing stretch of bare shoulder interrupted only by a thin shoulder strap of lace. “Imagine my surprise to discover that the man I had dedicated so many hours and so much blunt to rehabilitating in the eyes of society had been goodhearted all along.”

His lips twisted, doing everything to appear as if her discovery of the truth didn’t chill him through to the bone. “And now you want your blunt back?”

“No. I want answers.”

He arched a brow. “You’ll have better luck with the blunt.”

She ignored that with a slight tilt of her head as she studied him. “You’re living a secret life. You want society to think you’re rotten to the bone, that their unmarried misses could be sullied simply by being in the same room with you and their sons led astray into wastrel lives of debauchery by being your chums. Why?”

Lucien had no intention of answering that. But perhaps he could work it to his advantage. “If I’m as good as you claim, then why do you still believe I ruined your sister?”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”

Yet even as she said that, he saw the doubt flicker in her eyes. She wasn’t certain, not anymore. He should have been overjoyed about that because it meant she would stop her war against him. But if she knew he’d been living a lie, what else did she know?

At his silence, she clarified, “Lots of good men fall prey to temptation.”

He took a step forward to close the distance between them. “Lots of good women, too.”

“Exactly. Which is why I came looking for answers tonight about you and my sister. One of you is lying. I need to find out which one.”

“It isn’t me.”

“Says the man who secretly outfitted an entire charity school in Limehouse, then lied to all of London about not liking children.”