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She did not belong in a place like this.

He gave her a small nod, and something passed between them. Two people who had both just realized the same thing was at stake.

The bidding did not end there.

“We have sixteen hundred. Who can do better?”

The man with the drawl raised his offer, indignant now, as did two others, drawn in by the sudden spectacle.

“Surely, a lady like her is worth a pretty sum,” the man jeered as the crowd got louder.

“Seventeen hundred,” a stout man behind him announced, hiking up his pants and snorting.

“Eighteen hundred,” Nathaniel growled.

He was not competing. He knew he wasn't trying to win anything. He was ending a transaction he found obscene, by whatever means the room’s rules permitted him. He would not leave her to these wolves.

“Twenty hundred! Do we have twenty hundred?” the auctioneer yelled over the crowd.

“Here,” Nathaniel called.

The numbers had climbed higher than was sensible, but he didn’t care. The drawling man eventually fell silent, muttering to his companions about other women worth the trouble in the next lot.

The room’s attention narrowed on Nathaniel.

“Going once,” the auctioneer said, and no one else spoke. “Going twice.”

The hammer came down with a loud bang.

“Sold,” the auctioneer boomed, “to the gentleman in black.”

A ripple of applause moved through the room, polite and indifferent, as though something other than a woman’s future had just been decided.

Nathaniel did not clap. He kept his eyes on the stage, where his green-eyed beauty stood very still, barely keeping her composure. She was watching him curiously.

A footman appeared at his elbow within moments. “If you’ll follow me, sir, to finalize your acquisition.”

Acquisition.

The word lodged in his throat like a stone. As though he’d just purchased a horse or a length of good cloth.

He said nothing, only inclined his head and followed the footman out. They walked down a corridor lined with closed doors to a smaller chamber at the end. It was an office, a proper one, with a heavy desk, shelves of ledgers, and a fire burning low in the grate.

Behind the desk sat a man Nathaniel did not recognize. His face was uncovered and untroubled, holding every advantage as the man behind the charade. Beside him stood a second man, thin and ink-stained, a sheaf of papers already laid out before him. A solicitor, by the look of him.

At the far side of the room, the green-eyed beauty entered through another door. She was pale and rigid; her father’s hand still wrapped possessively around her arm.

It took everything Nathaniel had not to rip it off her.

CHAPTER 3

“Ah, my newest patron,” the man said to her father, his voice laced with the warmth of a host greeting a favored guest, rather than a man who had just sold his only daughter.

“Good evening, my Lord,” her father returned with a smile.

“I am Lord Alden, at your service. And you…” The man turned to the masked stranger who had just bought her. “You’ll forgive me if I say you’ve shown better taste than most of the gentlemen who came through that door. The lady is quite unlike the others offered this evening.”

Laura kept her eyes on the carpet, her arm still trapped in her father’s grip, and tried to breathe past the lump in her throat.