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“This way.” Harry used his cajoling voice, his spun-sugar voice, the voice so low one had to lean in close to hear it. The voice that had disintegrated a dozen petticoats and had given rise to more than one meeting a dawn with dueling pistols.
The seductive voice was overkill. It wasn’t Miss White’s cleverness that endangered her, but Harry’s craftiness, his wiliness, combined with her utterly sheltered upbringing. Why wouldn’t she place her paw in the trap? She’d never met a wolf before. Never been on a hunt. Never been the hunted.
She didn’t know to be wary. A true gentleman would not smile so dazzlingly to distract her from the knowing gazes of the lookers-on as he led her conspicuously from the safety of numbers off into the treacherous privacy of shadows.
As they slipped from the salon, Harry caught Lady Quinseley’s eyes. She gave him a subtle smirk of approval, and lifted the wrist from which dangled a pearl-embroidered reticule. Its bulging interior was filled with nothing but banknotes, all of which would soon belong to Harry.
All he had to do was what the throbbing in his loins urged him to do: Take his pleasure with the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.
Then walk away, leaving her to be discovered and decried, her inconsequential reputation in tatters and his still gloriously intact. Miss White would be shunned from society, tossed from the townhouse. And Harry would waltz back into his club with his pockets fatter, able to pay his father’s next bottle of port, and perhaps buy a few more months’ amnesty.
An easy trade. A necessary trade. A devil’s bargain the Hunter could not refuse.
No matter how terrible the storm his actions brought down on the innocent little lamb at his side.
“Do you visit this library often, Miss White?”
“Every day. I’m allotted twenty minutes every afternoon to clean it.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, her cheeks flushed with mortification at the implications of this confession.
She was not the countess’s guest. She was a servant.
Lady Quinseley had not lied when she’d claimed no one would come to champion Miss White’s cause once it was made known she was a fallen woman. Miss White was only accepted on the fringes of society as it stood now. She would soon be persona non grata. And, most likely, servant class forevermore. Doomed to wait hand and foot on her betters, despite having the same blue blood running through her own veins.
“But you do read?” he prompted, as if it was of no consequence at all to learn he’d absconded with a housemaid rather than a lady.
“Every chance I get,” she admitted shyly. “I spend two of my allotted minutes selecting a new title, which I stay up far too late reading by the light of a tallow candle.”
Tallow. The cheapest sort of candle, made of animal fat. Stinky, smoky, godawful. Something only peasants resorted to. Harry was certain Lady Quinseley had never authorized the purchase of a tallow candle in her entire life until she welcomed Miss White under her roof.
Welcomewas perhaps a strong word. Most likely, Miss White had been lucky to even be granted access to tallow candles.
The only question was why Lady Quinseley had bothered to open her home to the offspring of her husband’s mistress at all. The countess wasn’t known for charity and compassion. She was beautiful and ruthless and perhaps the most dangerous of all the sophisticated, soulless creatures in their London jungle.
Take the library, for instance. Lady Quinseley’s suggestion. She’d even moved the soirée to the adjoining room so that there would be as little delay as possible between the hunter meeting his prey and setting his trap.
The countess had done most of the work for him. The library overflowed with plush sofas and conveniently soft cushions upon which one could easily destroy an innocent young woman’s life.
The worst would be the knowledge that Miss White had come willingly. Harry had told her he was the Huntsman. He’d warned her there would be no subsequent proposal for marriage. His reputation had filled in the rest of the details.
Yet she’d looked at him with such sweetness and longing… as if she saw more than a cold, calculating monster. As if inside the beast, beat a heart of tarnished gold, begging only for the application of a hand accustomed to polishing sullied surfaces. As though she were made for him, and he for her. As though their collision need not lead to ruin, but to a better future for them both.
How disgustingly trusting. How naively trite.
And yet, when he’d placed her fingers to his lips, he’d wanted it to be true so badly, Harry had let himself believe, just for a second, that maybe she was right. That it wasn’t the heavy purse in the other room pulling his strings, but the tenderness in his own heart. That this was not a cruel seduction, but a prelude to a lifetime of kisses, each sweeter than the last. That he was not a beast, but his best self. A gentleman who acted like one. A man who did not take what did not belong to him, nor abandon those who trusted him.
The kind of man he might have been, were he not weighted down beneath the ocean of his father’s debts.
The kind of man he could still be, if only in this moment, if only to this woman.
Harry had never taken on the role of protector to a non-family-member before. It was hard enough to tread water whilst carrying his father and sister. He kept falling beneath the surface, then bubbling up to cough and sputter another day.
His choices were clear: Destroy an innocent girl, or walk away from a windfall. Disappoint his father. Enrage the countess. Become the next target in her sights. But save Miss White in the process. The clock was ticking.
Both of their fates were in his hands.
CHAPTER6
Bianca’s heart raced, as though she’d just stepped on stage to sing a solo without knowing the words to the song.
