Nicola Cornick: One Wicked Sin

Hagan’s hand slid to her breast, fumbling. She could hear his breathing change and grow heavier with excitement.

The future starts here.

“A moment.”

They all jumped.

A man was standing in the doorway, one shoulder resting against the jamb. He was in black-and-white evening dress, and against the raucous color of the brothel with its damask walls and peacock drapes he looked stark and almost too plainly attired. He was tall with black hair cut short and eyes of a startling, striking blue in a lean, watchful face. Lottie felt Hagan stiffen, as though sensing a rival.

“Sir—” Hagan withdrew his hand. His face had reddened. “You intrude. You must wait your turn.”

The stranger’s eyes met Lottie’s. His gaze was so bright and piercing that she felt her breath catch. Odd, she thought, that in that moment there was something in his eyes that looked almost like reassurance. Odd and impossible, an illusion, for then he smiled and any impression of gentleness was banished. He strode forward, self-assured, dangerous.

“Oh, I do not think so,” he murmured. “I don’t wait in line.”

Hagan opened his mouth to speak but it was Mrs. Tong who intervened now, a sweep of her hand silencing him.

“My lord.” Lottie could not quite place the tone in the bawd’s voice. There was deference there, certainly, but something else too. Wariness? Lottie had known all manner of men, from overrefined dandies to brutish bucks, but she had never met a man whose presence felt quite so elemental. There was danger in the room. She felt it in the air and with a prickle down her spine. Suddenly the atmosphere was alive.

“I am sure Mr. Hagan would not mind waiting,” Mrs. Tong said smoothly. “If you would be so good, sir. Can I offer you a glass of wine perhaps? On the house?” She was already shepherding Hagan toward the door. The newcomer stood aside with studied amusement to allow him to pass. Lottie let out her breath on a sigh she had thought was silent until the man cast her a quick, appraising glance.

The door closed.

“You are Charlotte Cummings?” the stranger asked.

“No,” Lottie said. “Not anymore.” The only thing she had wanted from Gregory was money. He could keep his name. It was no use to her. “I am Charlotte Palliser now,” she said.

The man inclined his head. “I had heard that the Pallisers had disowned you.”

“They cannot take my name,” Lottie said. “I was born with it.”

He did not reply at once. He was watching her with that same acute interest that he had shown from the moment he had set eyes on her. His gaze held no sexual appraisal, only a cool calculation that made Lottie shiver for there was no softness in it at all.

“May I?” He gestured to the armchair. She was surprised he troubled to ask permission. Such courtesy sat oddly with the sense that this was a man who would take what he wanted whether anyone opposed him or not.

He sat down and crossed one ankle over the other knee, lounging back with a casual grace. His whole body, so long and lean, looked elegantly relaxed and yet Lottie thought it would be a mistake to dismiss him as yet another fashionable Corinthian. There was too much forcefulness beneath the surface, too much power and intensity banked down.

“Who are you,” Lottie said, “that Mrs. Tong allows you to dictate to her and does not even make you pay in advance?” It appeared that he was not intent on hurrying her into bed, whoever he was.

He laughed. “Ethan Ryder, at your service.” There was a wicked spark in his blue eyes. “And I pay afterward.” He raised an eyebrow. “I do believe you’re blushing. How singular—in a courtesan.”

Lottie turned her face away. He was right. She felt vulnerable, almost shy. This was a man who seemed to be able to strip her feelings bare with no more than a look, and she, no matter what people said, was no brass-faced strumpet.

“Mrs. Tong called you ‘my lord,’” she said. She knew that she sounded doubtful. He looked more like a horse master than an earl, for all his fashionable attire. At one time she had known the entire peerage and she had never met him before. She knew that she would have remembered him.

“How quick of you to notice.” He still sounded amused. “It’s no lie. I am the Baron St. Severin. Oh, and the Chevalier D’Estrange for good measure.”

“You’re French? ” Lottie looked up, startled. He did not sound French and it was beyond unlikely. She had no grasp of politics and no interest in gaining one, but even she knew that there was a war on.

“I’m Irish.” He smiled at her, full of charm. “It’s a long story.”

“An Irishman with a French title?” Lottie said. Something clicked in her mind then, a memory of her drawing room in Grosvenor Square and her bosom bows gossiping over the latest on dit, picking at it like crows.

What had they said of Ethan Ryder, the Irish soldier of fortune? She remembered that he was a famed swordsman, a crack shot and the best cavalryman in his regiment. It was rumored that he never lost at games of chance, that he took risks other men would run from, that he was cold and calculating where others were rash and foolish and so he never made a mistake, but waited and waited and wore his enemies down until they took the false step, made the blunder that gave him the game…. And beneath the stories there were the whispers; that he had killed a man in a duel; that he had escaped from the deepest dungeons; that he could pass unnoticed through an opposing army like a ghost….

Napoleon had weighed Ethan Ryder down with titles and money for his devotion to the French cause. He was a soldier of fortune indeed.

She saw the smile deepen on Ethan’s lips and a certain hard light spring in his eyes, as though he knew exactly what she was thinking and what she was about to say.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. You are the one who is the bastard son of the Duke of Farne and the circus trapeze artist. You betrayed your father and ran away to France as a boy and joined Bonaparte’s Grande Armée. I heard,” she said slowly, “that you had been captured by the British and were a prisoner of war.”

“I am all of those things.” He sounded imperturbable as though mere words, even harsh ones, had long ago lost the power to hurt him. “And you,” he said, “are the divorced former wife of a fabulously wealthy banker, the disgraced Ton favorite, now ruined and forced to sell herself to survive.”

The words fell quietly into the hot little room, but Lottie still flinched. It seemed, she thought, that Ethan Ryder was a deal more comfortable with his situation than she was with hers.

“You express my circumstances most graphically,” she said tightly.

He put his head on one side, his blue eyes narrowed on her face. “You don’t like to be described like that, do you, Lottie Palliser?” His tone was soft but it was not gentle. There was no compassion. Lottie wondered if he could look into her soul and see the tarnish there.

“You don’t want to face the fact that you chose to become a courtesan because you preferred survival to starvation,” he went on, “but it is the truth, just as all the things that you said about me are the truth.” His lips twisted in a parody of a smile. “I think that you and I are very alike, Lottie.” His voice was quiet. “We’re both survivors, both adventurers. We don’t believe in martyrdom.”

“We’re both prisoners,” Lottie said, unable to erase the bitterness from her voice. She made a slight gesture. “Should you not be locked up, my lord?”

He shrugged, supremely elegant and supremely unconcerned. “Plenty of people think so, my father included.”

“And yet,” Lottie said, “you are free.”