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Authors: Erica Ridley

Tags: #Man-Woman Relationships, #Historical Fiction, #Smuggling, #Smugglers, #General, #Romance, #Historical, #Secrecy, #Fiction, #Love Stories

Too Sinful to Deny

BOOK: Too Sinful to Deny
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TOO SINFUL TO DENY
“You came back,” she whispered.
“I couldn’t stay away,” was all he said in reply.
She stepped forward, then checked her progress. But her gaze was darkening and her breathing rapid, and Evan could no longer withstand this distance between them.
His lips covered hers and there was no more talking.
He expected resistance. There was none. Her mouth opened beneath his, kissing, biting, tasting. She seemed desperate for him, as he was for her. So he gave her what she wanted. Took what he wanted. And still he burned for more.
“We can’t be caught kissing,” she breathed against his cheek.
“I know.”
But he didn’t pull away.
And neither did she. . . .
Books by Erica Ridley
TOO WICKED TO KISS
TOO SINFUL TO DENY
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
TOO
S
INFUL TO
D
ENY
ERICA RIDLEY
ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
A huge thank you goes to my editor John Scognamiglio for loving this book as much as I do, to my agent Lauren Abramo for being generally awesome, to my critique partners Darcy Burke, Lacey Kaye, and Janice Goodfellow for believing in this story right from the beginning.
Enormous hugs also go to several talented authors I’m proud to call my friends, who have provided support in uncountable ways: Diana Peterfreund, Karen Rose, C. L. Wilson, Elissa Wilds, Kimberly Llewellyn, and Eloisa James. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my local RWA writing chapters as well—TARA, who put me on the path from “someday” to “today,” and STAR, who allowed me to read the first draft’s opening chapter at a critique session, way back when.
But the biggest thank you of all goes out to everyone who loves romance, who talks about their favorite authors, and who shares keeper-shelf books with friends or family. You are fabulous!
Prologue
February 4, 1814
London, England
Miss Susan Stanton muttered a most unladylike curse as yet more black snow slid down her ankle and into her already ruined boots. No matter.
Faster.
If Mother’s watchdogs discovered her absence before she had gotten the merest glimpse of Freezeland Street, Susan’s great escape would be for nothing.
It was unfair enough to be confined to one’s quarters for months on end whilst living in the greatest city on earth, and quite another to be forced to do so during the most celebrated fête of the Season: the once-in-a-lifetime Frost Fair. (Technically twice in a lifetime, in her case, but as Susan was two years old the last time the Thames froze over, that occasion didn’t signify.)
Dirty snowflakes streaked her spectacles, but Susan didn’t bother to clean the lenses. Her gloves were too wet to do much good, and her muff would only leave bits of fur in its wake.
Susan glanced over her shoulder to make sure the driver waited for her as promised before she dashed across Black-friars Bridge to what was left of the carnival below.
Running on snow-covered ice, however, involved a fair bit of sloshing and sliding, and Susan was forced to slow her pace or risk breaking her neck. Devil take it. How long before someone realized the caged bird had escaped? Thirty minutes? Twenty? Scarcely enough time to regain the town house before Mother arrived home, even if Susan gave up now and left posthaste.
But she was
so close.
Off-key music trilled from the gaudy tents. The elephants she’d read about were long gone, as well as the donkey rides and skittles, but the sharp wind still carried the garish laughter of the common folk and the pungent scent of fresh-brewed ale.
Five minutes. She could spare five quick minutes, just to see.
She paused at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge and gazed at the tattered tents still dotting the frozen river. Rot. There was no possibility of walking all the way to the designated Freezeland Street entrance in under half an hour, so she’d have to cut diagonally across the ice toward the tents. No more dallying.
But the instant Susan’s boot touched the frozen river, her foot sank through the melting snow, touched the ice, and shot forward as if propelled by magnets, sending her lurching. After a few moments of windmilling her arms, she managed to transition from sliding on accident to sliding on purpose—that is, until the entire cacophony of color and sound tilted drunkenly before her eyes.
Cold, wet air scraped down Susan’s throat as she gasped to see the ice breaking apart in jagged chunks. A terrible thunder filled the air. The river unfurled, rippling beneath the fragmented fair like a washwoman shaking crumbs from an old carpet. Far ahead, pie-men and toymakers alike abandoned their wagons in their mad scramble for the shore. The stench of the river’s fetid breath blasted from its frozen cage. Susan whirled around to dash back to the safety of solid land.
The ice disintegrated beneath her feet.
Susan flailed her arms for purchase as her body plunged into the frigid Thames. A jagged hunk of thick ice intercepted her forearm with a sickening crack. Pain engulfed her. Susan’s head went under. Hungry river water swept through her clothes, weighing her down, dragging her below.
She kicked with all her might and shot upward. The top of her head slammed against a floating sheet of ice with enough force to knock the spectacles from her face. Her thoughts turned sluggish. Her vision blurred.
Where was the churning slush she’d fallen through? Had the current swept her so far already? Fingernails bent backward as she clawed at the ice with one gloved hand. The other refused to respond to her commands, floating limp and heavy in the murk.
Her glove tore. Faster and faster, she scraped at the unforgiving ice until blood seeped from her raw fingers with every thudding heartbeat. Numbness, everywhere. Was she making progress? She couldn’t see. Her boots were leaden; her luxurious fur a smothering blanket, her string of pearls a noose.
Where were the peddlers, the barmaids, the fiddlers? So dark underwater. So cold. She beat at the ice, tried to scream for help, gagged when her aching lungs filled with frigid river water. Strange faces peered at her from the darkest edges of her vision, then melted into shadow.
Her limbs began to fail. Even her fluttering heart beat slower and slower, until . . .
Nothing.
The tumultuous river no longer tugged at her useless arm. Her lungs no longer struggled against the waves of foul water. The unrelenting cold no longer permeated her every pore.
Strange lips sucked at Susan’s mouth, drawing up putrid river water and forcing dry air into her lungs.
Her eyes flew open. People, everywhere. Not dozens, like before. Thousands. Many of them staring down at her from pale, misshapen faces. Some of them in the water, oblivious to her. And dry. How could they be dry underwater? Her vision greyed as they faded before her.
The lips returned, cold and clammy, and blew more foul air into her throat. Disgusting. She jerked her head to the side, stretched out her good arm, and reached for one of the strange dry people. Her hand floated through his chest and he blinked out of sight. Susan gasped, choked, vomited saltwater and algae. Her spinning head fell back hard, splintering a patch of ice.
Blackness again.
Chapter 1
March. The last of the plumed lords and ladies swooped into Town like crows feasting upon carrion. Susan had escaped both her splints and her bedchamber for the first time in six long, dark weeks—only to be bundled in the back of a black carriage and jettisoned into the vast void of nothingness beyond London borders.
To Bournemouth.
Bournemouth.
An infinitesimal “town” on a desolate stretch of coastline a million miles from home. Less than a hundred souls, the carriage driver had said. Spectacular. Thrice as many bodies had graced Susan’s London come-out party four years ago, not counting the servants. Being banished from Town was the worst possible punishment Mother could’ve devised. Nothing could deaden the soul quite like the prospect of—
Moonseed Manor.
Susan’s breath caught in her throat. Her mind emptied of its litany of complaints as her eyes struggled to equate the stark, colorless vista before her with “town of Bournemouth.”
Dead, brown nothingness. Miles of it. A steep cliff jutted over black ocean. There, backlit with a smattering of fuzzy stars, a bone-white architectural monstrosity teetered impossibly close to the edge.
Moonseed Manor did not look like a place to live. Moonseed Manor looked like a place to die.
Not a single candle flickered in the windows. The carriage drew her ever closer, its wheels bouncing and slipping on sand and rocks. Susan’s skin erupted in gooseflesh. She hugged herself, struck by an invasive chill much colder than the ocean breeze should cause.
The carriage stopped. The driver handed her out, then disappeared back into his perch, leaving her to make her presence known by herself. Very well. He could stay and mind the luggage while she summoned the help. Miss Susan Stanton was no shrinking violet. Although she wished for the hundredth time that her lady’s maid (and frequent collaborator in the very schemes that had gotten Susan in trouble in the first place) hadn’t been forbidden from accompanying her. She was well and truly exiled.
The back of her neck prickling with trepidation, Susan found herself curling trembling fingers around a thick brass knocker, the handle formed from the coil of a serpent about to strike. The resulting sound echoed in the eerie stillness, as if both the pale wood and the house itself were hollow and lifeless.
The door silently opened.
A scarecrow stood before her, all spindly limbs and jaundiced skin with a shock of straw-colored hair protruding at all angles above dark, cavernous eyes. The sharpness of his bones stretched his yellowed skin. His attire hung oddly on his frame, as though these clothes were not his own, but rather the castoffs of the true (and presumably human) butler.
“I . . . I . . .” Susan managed, before choking on an explanation she did not have.
She what? She was the twenty-year-old sole offspring of a loveless titled couple who had banished their ostracized disappointment of a daughter to the remotest corner of England rather than bear the sight of her? She nudged her spectacles up the bridge of her nose with the back of a gloved hand and forced what she hoped was a smile.
“My name is Miss Susan Stanton,” she tried again, deciding to leave the explanation at that. Mother had written in advance, so what more need be said? “I’m afraid I was expected hours ago. Is Lady Beaune at home?”
“Always,” the scarecrow rasped, after a brief pause. His sudden jagged-tooth smile unsettled Susan as surely as it must frighten the crows. “Come.”
Susan slid a dozen hesitant steps into a long, narrow passage devoid of both portraiture and decoration before the oddity of his answer reverberated in her ears.
Always.
What did he mean by that, and why the secret smile? Once one entered Moonseed Manor, was one to be stuck there, entombed forevermore in a beachside crypt?
“P-perhaps I should alert my driver that your mistress is at home.” She hastened forward to catch up to the scarecrow’s long-limbed strides. “I have a shocking number of valises, and—”
“Don’t worry,” came the scarecrow’s smoky rasp, once again accompanied by a grotesque slash of a smile. “He’s being taken care of.”
Normally, Susan would’ve bristled with outrage at the unprecedented effrontery of being interrupted by a servant. In this case, however, she was more concerned with the rented driver’s continued well-being. She was not sure she wanted him “being taken care of.” Shouldn’t the butler have said her
trunks
would be taken care of? She glanced over her shoulder at the corridor now stretching endlessly behind them, and wondered whether she were safer inside these skeletal walls or out.
Susan didn’t notice a narrow passageway intersecting the stark hall until the scarecrow disappeared within. She stood at the crossroads, hesitant to follow but even more nervous not to. After the briefest of pauses, she hurried to regain the scarecrow’s side before losing him forever in the labyrinthine walls.
If he noticed her moment of indecision, he gave no sign. He made several quick turns, passing tall closed door after tall closed door, before finally making an abrupt stop at the dead end of an ill-lit corridor.
This door was open. Somewhat.
A candle flickered inside, but only succeeded in filling the room’s interior with teeming shadows.
“Sir,” the scarecrow rasped into the opening. “It’s Miss Stanton. Your guest.”
“Guest?” came a warm, smartly accented voice from somewhere within. The master of the house? No. “You were expecting guests at this hour, Ollie?”
Ollie?
Susan echoed silently in her head. Lady Beaune’s husband was named Jean-Louis. Perhaps she was about to meet a distant relation. A cousin would make a lovely ally.
“All guests arrive at this hour,” a deep voice countered. “It’s midnight.”
Before Susan had a chance to parse that inexplicable response, the door swung fully open and a fairy-tale giant filled the entirety of the frame.
Her shoulders reached his hips.
His
shoulders reached the sides of the door frame and very nearly the top as well. His broad back hunched to allow his dark head to pass beneath the edge. Small black eyes glittered in an overlarge square face, his mouth hidden behind a beard the color of fresh tar. Arms that could crush tree trunks flexed at his sides. He did not offer his hand.
“Miss Stanton.”
Although her name was more a statement than a question, Susan’s well-trained spine dipped in an automatic curtsy as her mouth managed to stammer a simple “yes.”
He did not bow in kind. Nor was it remotely possible he was a child of Lady Beaune. He was easily five-and-thirty. Had Papa’s cousin remarried in the unknown years since Mother had last spoken to this distant limb of the Stanton family tree? Did Mother
comprehend
where exactly she’d condemned her daughter? Or care?
“Move out of the way, oaf,” came the cultured voice from before. “I must see this creature that travels alone and in dark of night to visit the likes of you.”
Rather than move aside, the giant stepped forward, crowding Susan backward. Her shoulders scraped the wall opposite. Her hands clenched at her sides.
A new figure filled the door frame. Tall, but not impossibly so. Well-muscled, but not frighteningly so. As smartly tailored as any London dandy, but with an air of barely contained danger more suitable to the meanest streets where even footpads feared to tread. Alarmingly attractive despite the too-long chestnut hair and day’s growth of dark stubble shadowing the line of his jaw.
“Mmm, I see.” An amused grin toyed with his lips. “My pleasure.”
He performed as perfect a bow as any Susan had ever encountered in a Town ballroom. Before her trembling legs could force an answering curtsy, the giant moved back into place, blocking the . . . gentleman? . . . from her view.
The giant’s thick arms crossed over his barrel chest. “Carriage?”
“Gone,” rasped the scarecrow.
Susan jumped. She’d forgotten his silent presence.
“Driver?”
The scarecrow’s terrifying smile returned. “Taken care of.”
Satisfaction glinted in the giant’s eyes. Susan was positive panic was the only thing glinting in hers. Would she be “taken care of ” next?
“Take her to the bone chamber.”
Susan’s heart stuttered to a stop until she realized the giant had said
Beaune
chamber, not
bone
chamber. Beaune, like Lady Beaune, her father’s fourth cousin thrice removed, with whom her family clearly should have kept a much more detailed correspondence. Yet even with this correction firmly in mind, Susan couldn’t help but doubt the Beaune chamber would remotely resemble the sumptuous Buckingham-quality guest quarters she’d hoped to find.
The scarecrow turned and headed down the hall without bothering to verify that Susan followed. He was wise not to worry. She had no intention of standing around under the giant’s calculating gaze any longer than necessary.
Susan scrambled after the scarecrow without a single word of parting for her host—not that the giant seemed particularly concerned about adhering to social niceties—and rounded a corner just in time to see the scarecrow ascend a pale marble staircase she swore hadn’t existed when they’d traveled this exact sequence of corridors moments before.
She hurried to his side before she got lost for good. “That . . . wasn’t Lord Beaune.”
A dry laugh crackled from his throat, accompanied by a sly glance from his dark, glittering eyes. “He seem dead? That’s the new master of Moonseed Manor. It’s to him you owe the roof over yer head tonight.”
Dead.
Her ears buzzed at the news. The news that Lady Beaune had been widowed and remarried was surprising enough. But the idea that Susan owed anything to anyone—much less her cousin’s new husband—was intolerable. She had once been Society’s princess! And would be again. Just as soon as she got back to London.
The wiry manservant led her through another complicated series of interconnected passageways. A lit sconce protruded from the middle of an otherwise unadorned passageway, as bleached and unremarkable as all the rest. Orange candlelight spilled from an open doorway, chasing their shadows behind them. Susan wished she could flee as easily.
“Your room,” came the scarecrow’s scratchy voice.
Susan nodded and stepped across the threshold. When she turned to ask him directions to the dining areas and drawing rooms (and when she might hope to see the lady of the house), he was already gone.
She faced the cavernous chamber once more, doing her best to ignore the uneasy sensation of walking into a crypt. Although the room was as cold as any catacomb would be, a large canopied bed, not a casket, stood in the center. The shadowy figure next to the unlit fireplace had to be a maid provided to ensure Susan’s comfort. Thank God. At least there was
some
hint of London sensibilities.
Susan stepped forward just as the cloaked figure swiveled without seeming to move her feet. Long white braids flanked a narrow face hollowed with hunger and despair. Age spots mottled her clawed hands and pale neck. An ornate crucifix hung from a long gold chain. Trembling fingers clutched the intricate charm to her thin chest. She did not appear to be starting a fire in the grate. She did not appear to be a maid at all.
“M-may I help you?” Susan asked.
The old woman did not answer.
Were there more sundry guests in this pharaoh’s tomb of a manor? Was this one lost, confused, afraid? So was Susan, on all counts, but the least she could do was help this poor woman find her correct bedchamber.
Before she could so much as offer her hand, however, a sharp breeze rippled through the chamber. She shivered before she realized she could no longer feel the phantom breeze—although it continued to flutter the old woman’s dark red cloak and unravel the braids from her hair.
In fact . . . the breeze began to unravel the old woman herself, ripping thread by red thread from her cloak like drops of blood disappearing in a pool of water. The wind tore long curling strands of white hair from her bowed head, then strips of flesh from her bones, until the only thing standing before Susan was the empty fire pit. The glittering crucifix fell onto the hardwood floor and disappeared from sight.
The chamber door slammed shut behind her with foundation-shaking force. Susan didn’t have to try the handle to know she was trapped inside.
She wondered what else was locked inside with her.
Evan Bothwick swirled his untouched brandy, then tossed the liquid into the fire. He didn’t jump backward as steam and sparks shot from the flames, giving the smoke a slightly sweeter air. For a moment, something akin to rancid fruit overpowered the more pungent peat. Neither odor, however, was what soured his stomach.
Empty glass dangling from his fingers, he faced his companion.
“I must know the truth.”
Ollie’s oversized frame hulked before the bar. “I don’t know a damn thing. She’s some London deb, here to repent the wickedness of her ways.”
“Not about your houseguest, brute.” Evan hurled his empty tumbler into the fire. The glass shattered on impact, but the smell of the smoke did not change. “I’m scarce interested in the blasted woman slamming doors abovestairs.”
BOOK: Too Sinful to Deny
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