Page 2 of A Lyon’s Lesson

“Of course!” Covering her disappointment, she rose and allowed him to lead her back to the ballroom, restoring her to her aunt’s side. With a casual flourish, he loped away as if he hadn’t turned her world on its head.

Chapter 1

London, May 1820

The curtains were dragged ruthlessly back from around Lord Kenrick Layne’s bed with a loud rattle that pierced his aching head like a thousand needles, and a cheerful voice said, “Rise and shine, my lord!”

“The devil run away with you Reynolds. What time do you call this?” groaned Rick, his hands pressing over his aching eyeballs and temples.

“After midday, my lord. And you promised to escort your mother and sister to a concert in Green Park at two.”

“Damn and blast! Why ever did I do that? It’s very unlike me!” He opened his eyes cautiously and found that his inestimable valet was holding out a glass with a dark, foul-smelling liquid in it. He took it gingerly and downed the disgusting stuff in a couple of swallows. Reynolds gave him a glass of water to wash away the taste, and he lay back against the pillows for a few moments of hell, while his stomach dealt with the lethal brew. When the urge to cast up his accounts had passed, he opened his eyes and regarded Reynolds with a lopsided smile. “I don’t know what you put in that, but it works every time.”

He sat up and accepted the cup of steaming hot, black coffee that Reynolds held out. The last part of the restorative process. Now that his stomach had settled, the smell of the coffee was divine, and he sipped it gratefully. “You are a prince of valets, my dear Reynolds. I am very glad you decided to hold me up on Hounslow Heath three years ago.”

Reynolds smiled, baring his even, white teeth and raising a single dark eyebrow that gave him a devilish air. The man was diabolically handsome, and while he could assume any number of accents at will and speak cant with the best of them, Rick had long suspected there was more to his background than he let on.

For his own inscrutable reasons, Reynolds had chosen to assume the role of Rick’s valet when the previous incumbent had left under a cloud. Rick did not tolerate thieves. Which was an irony considering Reynolds’s previous profession. But Rick knew instinctively that Reynolds would never steal from him.

The holdup that night had ended, in fact, with Rick accompanying the man to a nearby hostelry, where they had drunk and talked until dawn. Rick left him with the agreement that he would join him that night for an evening’s entertainment holding up carriages of the rich and famous. And thus began an unusual friendship.

***

Having done his duty by the womenfolk of his family that afternoon, Rick went in search of more convivial entertainment. The end result was that at one in the morning he rose from the table at the Lyon’s Den with his pockets sadly to let, the fumes of whisky wreathing around his head and the guilty remembrance that he had promised Mama that he would meet her and his second sister Heather—who had joined their mother in London following Ava’s hurried marriage to Ravenshaw, for a quiet introduction to the ton—at Lady Pennington’s drum at two and escort them home.

All this represented machinations on his mother’s part to force him into the path of eligible young women on the theory that the right one would stabilize him. Since Kenrick didn’t want to be stabilized—he liked his life the way it was, thank you very much—but he was too good-natured to say no to his mother, of whom he was extremely fond, he let her think her plans were working. They weren’t. He had no intention of changing his way of life or entertaining ideas of matrimony.

He stumbled out of the Lyon’s Den in Cleveland Row, with a vowel burning in his pocket to the value of five thousand pounds—money he emphatically didn’t have—past St James’s Palace and turned left up St James Street heading toward Conduit Street, where Lady Pennington’s drum was being held, his long loping stride eating up the yards easily.

The walk in the cool night air served to sober him up slightly but not much.

He wandered into the stuffy ballroom, to be met by a wall of candle wax and human sweat, ameliorated only marginally by the heavy perfumes designed to disguise the stink. He seized a drink from a nearby waiter and entered the throng to search for his mother.

He found her seated with her cronies, enjoying a conversation which she broke off to say to him, “Kenrick, I was beginning to think you would not keep your promise.”

The Dowager Duchess of Troubridge was a diminutive, faded blonde, who had been a beauty in her day. She had bequeathed her coloring of blonde hair and blue eyes to Kenrick and his sisters Ava, the eldest, and Ingrid, the youngest. And while Ava and Ingrid had both also inherited something of her determined personality, Kenrick had, unlike his brothers, proved to be his father’s true heir in terms of personality.

The late duke had never been known for his steadiness of character, and while marriage to their mother Jocelyn had settled him down a bit, even that had not been enough to cure him entirely of his fecklessness. Mama had adored Papa to the day he’d died, but she was not blind to his faults. Kenrick was painfully conscious that he resembled his departed sire in many respects, and while he was also aware that his similarity to his father was one of the reasons for his mother’s partiality toward him, it was also a source of her deepest worry.

He smiled down at her and bent to kiss her cheek. “Never fear, Mama, I would not leave you high and dry.” He looked around. “Where are your charges?”

“Dancing of course. Sarah wasn’t well this evening, so I have Deborah and Ruth as well as Heather.” His sister-in-law Sarah, the current Duchess of Troubridge, was the eldest of a brood of eight, and she had four sisters. Deb and Ruth were the eldest of them. Ruth had lately joined Deb for the season. Deborah was the beauty of the family, being fashionably dark, and Ruth was the plainest. So she didn’t tend to show to advantage beside her beautiful sister. Not that she seemed to mind.

But Ruth was of too quiet a disposition to appeal to Rick. His favorite of the Watson sisters was the youngest, Hepzibah, who was fourteen now and on the cusp of turning into a young lady. Or at least she was supposed to be. But rather like his youngest sister, Ingrid, she seemed disinclined to do so. The pair of them had been fast friends since Sarah married his brother Robert and would no doubt take London by storm when they were released upon an unsuspecting ton. Rick couldn’t wait.

“When did you want to go home?” he asked, a strong inclination for his bed overtaking him.

“Oh, not for at least another hour,” his mother said airily. “Why don’t you ask a young lady to dance?”

He smiled at this transparent effort, shook his head, and said, “I’ll be in the card room, I’ll see you in an hour.” He wandered away, nursing his drink. Leaving the ballroom, he went in search of not the card room, but somewhere quiet to take a nap. He found a room in darkness except for the stream of moonlight coming through the open double windows that gave onto the garden, and he sank down into one of the chairs. He set his drink on the side table and, with his feet stretched out before him, he settled in for a snooze.

He was jerked awake some little time later by a sound, that after a moment of disorientation resolved itself into a muffled female shriek. His chivalrous instincts aroused immediately, he rose, shaking off his fog of inebriation, and tried to pinpoint the direction of the sound of distress.

The garden. He stumbled through the doors and came out on a path that led in two different directions. Plunging down the path that led away from house and toward, he thought, the sound that had awakened him, he moved with long, swift strides, to emerge in a cul-de-sac lit by a single lamp overhead. Below which, a dark-haired man had a struggling woman with blonde hair in his embrace.

It was clear the man’s attentions were unwanted, and Rick’s reaction was lightning fast. He wrenched the fellow around by his shoulder, saying, “Let her go, you blackguard!”

In that instant he recognized both the man and the woman.