PROLOGUE
Where a lonely girl ponders the benefit of bosoms
Hampstead, England ~1810
Damien DeWitt was the most fidgety boy Mercy Ainsworth had ever encountered.
In constant motion as he marched back and forth across his father’s lawn, it was a marvel she was able to capture his image. Tilting her head, she chewed on her bottom lip as her charcoal glided across vellum. Much to her artistic delight, sunlight spilled over her subject in a gentle wash, tossing shadows across his face, and setting the auburn strands in his hair aglow
She frowned, and her pencil stilled on the page.
Due to his restlessness, the curve of his startlingly rugged jaw was off, the pleasing line of muscle beneath his broadcloth coat not what it should be.
To her understanding, models sat for portraiture. And…they were often naked.
Of course, they knew they were being drawn.
Momentarily lost in a flurry of images, Mercy balanced her sketchpad on her lap and peeked around the hedge, realizing she’d erred in judgment. The lad who’d returned to Hampstead last evening from his first year at Oxford wasn’t the gangly, guarded boy she’d idolized since she’d first set eyes on him.
Damien had matured in all kinds of intriguing ways—while she was still very much…a girl.
Mercy glided her hand down her bodice, encountering creases, charcoal smudges, and two rows of Chantilly lace, but not so much as a gentle bump of bosom. Her Aunt Matilda, who’d been banished to their Hampstead estate after a misadventure on an illuminated walk at Vauxhall, said the changes to Mercy’s body would come with prayer and patience.
Coincidentally, Matilda hadn’t matured until her nineteenth year, around the time of her exile. Leaving Mercy to assume bosoms brought strife as well as happiness.
In any case, Matilda was one of the fortunate creatures who were stunning despite life’s miseries. Gorgeous after falling into a fountain last summer while fleeing a boozy baron. Gorgeous when arriving to breakfast bleary-eyed from raucous festivities the evening prior. Gorgeous while being shamed by her older brother, the Earl of Whitmore, over some silly blunder.
Shame the earl liked to heap on his children’s shoulders as well.
Particularly his eldest daughter’s.
In fact, in recent conversations, Mercy’s father fretted mightily over the similarities between his incorrigible sister and his hapless offspring. When Mercy had never caused a man to trip over a rug’s ragged edge or miss a stair due to blinding beauty—and she never would. Most people stopped looking when they reached the wild ginger tumble atop her head and didn’t take the time to investigate further.
Alas, she was different in a world that revered uniformity and refinement.
When refinement wasn’t a word anyone had ever chosen to describe the Earl of Whitmore’s wayward daughter.
Actually, Mercy was unremarkable except for her ability to draw, a gift that would settle as idly as rubbish to the bottom of a gutter once she married. The pursuit was merely tolerated because her family considered art a child’s pleasure—and her a child.
Resting back on her heels, Mercy watched the Duke of Herschel’s youngest son cross to the archery field, a still-quivering bow clutched in his hand. When Damien reached the straw target, he crouched low before it, his trousers pulling taut over his thighs and the rounded curve of his bottom. She knew it wasn’t appropriate to stare, certainly not at this, but she couldn’t help herself.
After all, it was an artist’s predilection to record movement and physique. Although, the accompanying flutter in her stomach was not an artist’s response but a woman’s.
Muted feelings lying in wait for her to mature.
The evening prior, from the dense pine thicket between their estates, she’d spied a scullery maid—one of those lucky, beautiful beings—whispering to Damien outside the servant’s door. Her lips at his ear; her hand lingering on his shoulder.
Mercy would never be able to entice a man in such a brazen way. She had neither the looks nor the courage.
Mercy palmed her chest, jealousy a beast seeking release. Want in such raw form was a new sensation.
The crunch of footfalls along the gravel path had her stumbling to her feet. She flipped the sketchpad’s cover over her portrait as her companion wriggled through a break in the shrubs. Miss Clark was breathless when she reached Mercy, her cheeks flushed, her expression vexed. The spinster sister of an impoverished baron, she was the seventh pitiable soul employed to keep watch over a girl the ton had begun to call an unrepentant termagant.
“I begin to see why this position pays so well,” Miss Clark huffed, plucking straw from her skirt and frowning at a torn hem. “Your escape from tea was brilliantly executed, and my previous employer worked in surveillance for the Crown. Therefore, I’ve seen numerous brilliantly executed exits.”
Alarm pierced Mercy’s skin as her breath caught in her throat. “Does he know where I am? I told the servants I had a megrim and would be retiring to my bedchamber.” Her father had given her a chance—the final, as he termed it—to behave or face being sent to London for the remainder of the year. If this companion quit in a fury as the last six had, Mercy was doomed to spend months in dreary confinement in her father’s sprawling Mayfair terrace.
The loneliest place on earth, in Mercy’s estimation.
