touching me.” She made a funny little choking noise and held on tighter. “Oh, Tory, you came just in time.”
“It’s all right, darling. You’re safe now. I won’t let him hurt you again.”
Trembling all over, Claire turned toward the man lying on the rug, a dark streak of blood running from the gash at his temple. “Did you…did you kill him?”
Tory gazed at the baron’s still form and swayed a little on her feet. She took a breath to steady herself. It was dark in the room, but a sliver of moonlight slanted in through the mullioned window. She could see the scarlet stain spreading beneath Harwood’s head. His chest didn’t seem to be moving, but she couldn’t tell for sure.
“We have to get out of here,” she said, fighting an urge to run. “Put on your wrapper and get your satchel out from under the bed. I’ll go get mine and meet you at the bottom of the servants’ stairs.”
“I—I need to change out of my bedclothes.”
“There isn’t time. We’ll change somewhere along the road.”
The journey wasn’t unexpected. They had each packed a satchel three days ago, the night of Claire’s seventeenth birthday. Since that night, the lust in the baron’s dark eyes had grown every time he looked at her. They had begun making plans that very evening. They would leave Harwood Hall at the first opportunity.
But tonight fate had taken a hand. They couldn’t wait a moment longer.
“What about the necklace?” Claire asked.
Stealing the baron’s most prized possession had always been part of their plan. They needed money to get to London. The beautiful diamond-and-pearl necklace was worth a small fortune and was the only thing of value they could easily carry with them.
“I’ll get it. Try to be quiet. I’ll join you as quickly as I can.”
Claire rushed out the door and headed down the hall. Tory cast a last glance at her stepfather and raced out behind her. Sweet God, don’t let him be dead, she thought, sickened to think she might actually have killed him.
Tory shuddered as she hurried away.
One
London
Two months later
Perhaps it was the necklace. Tory had never believed in the curse, but everyone for miles around the tiny village of Harwood knew the legend of the beautiful diamond-and-pearl necklace. People whispered about it, feared it, coveted and revered the magnificent piece of jewelry crafted in the thirteenth century for the bride of Lord Fallon. It was said the necklace—The Bride’s Necklace—could bring its owner untold happiness, or unbearable tragedy.
That hadn’t kept Tory from stealing it. Or selling it to a moneylender in Dartfield for enough coin that she and Claire could finally escape.
But that had been nearly two months ago, before the two of them had reached London and the ridiculously small amount of money Tory had been forced to accept for the very valuable necklace had nearly run out.
In the beginning, she had been certain she could find a job as a governess for some nice, respectable family, but so far she had failed. The few clothes she and Claire had been able to take along the night they had fled were fashionable, but Tory’s cuffs had begun to fray, and faint stains appeared on the hem of Claire’s apricot muslin gown. Though their education and speech were that of the upper classes, Tory didn’t have a single solitary reference, and without one, she had been turned away again and again.
She was becoming nearly as desperate as she had been before she left Harwood Hall.
“What are we going to do, Tory?” Her sister’s voice cut through the self-pity rising like a dark tide inside her. “Mr. Jennings says if we can’t pay our rent by the end of the week, he is going to throw us out.”
Tory shuddered at the thought. She had seen things in London she wished she could forget, homeless children picking food scraps out of the gutter, women selling their frail bodies for coin enough to last another bitter day. The thought of being tossed out of their last place of refuge, a small garret above a hatmaker’s shop, into the company of the riffraff and blacklegs in the street was more than she could bear.
“It’s all right, dearest, you mustn’t worry,” she said, putting on a brave face once more. “Everything has a way of working out.” Though Tory was truly beginning to doubt it.
Claire managed a trembly smile. “I know you’ll think of something. You always do.” At just-turned-seventeen, Claire Whiting was two years younger but several inches taller than Tory, whose build was more petite. Both girls were slender, but it was Claire who had inherited their mother’s stunning good looks.
She had wavy silver-blond hair that reached nearly to her waist and skin as smooth and pale as an alabaster Venus. Her eyes were so blue they put a clear, Kentish sky to shame. If an angel dressed up in apricot muslin and donned a warm pelisse, she would look like Claire Whiting.
Tory thought of herself as a more durable sort, with heavy chestnut-brown hair that often curled when she least desired it, clear green eyes and a smattering of freckles. But it wasn’t just their looks that set them apart.
Claire was simply different. She always had been. She inhabited a world mere mortals could not see. Tory always regarded her sister as ethereal, the kind of girl who played with fairies and talked to gnomes.
Not that she really did those things. It just seemed as if she could.
What Claire couldn’t seem to do was take care of herself in any responsible fashion, so Tory did it for her.
Which was why they had fled their stepfather, made their way to London and now faced the threat of being cast out into the street.
To say nothing of being wanted for the theft of the valuable necklace—and perhaps even murder.
A soft August breeze blew in off the Thames, cooling the heat rising up from the cobbled streets. Comfortable in a big four-poster bed, Cordell Easton, fifth earl of Brant, lounged back against the carved wooden headboard. Across from him, Olivia Landers, Viscountess Westland, sat naked on a stool in front of her mirror, slowly pulling a silver-backed hairbrush through her long, straight raven-black hair.
“Why don’t you put down that brush and come back to bed?” Cord drawled. “Once I get through with you, you’ll only have to comb it again.”
She turned on the stool and a seductive smile curved her ruby lips. “I thought perhaps you wouldn’t be interested again quite so soon.” Her eyes ran over his body, sweeping the muscles across his chest, following the thin line of dark hair arrowing down his stomach, coming to rest on his sex. Her eyes widened as she realized he was fully aroused. “Amazing how wrong a woman can be.”
Leaving the stool, she walked toward him, long black hair swinging forward, the only thing hiding her very seductive body, making him harder than he was already.
Olivia was a widow—a very young and tasty widow whom Cord had been seeing for the past several months—but she was spoiled and selfish and she was fast becoming more trouble than she was worth. Cord had begun to think of ending the affair.
Not
