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  For Jess, who keeps me sane.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Again, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend and plot partner Tracy Grant. Her brain is amazing! I’d like to thank my friends, family, and dog for putting up with the fact that I checked out of the last year and half of our collective lives in order to focus on my writing. Special thanks to my friends Monica McCarty, Jami Alden, Bella Andre, Miranda Neville, Joanna Bourne, and Carolyn Jewel for listening to me whine and helping me celebrate. I’d like to add a new round of thanks to my “tweeps” (especially Sunita, Maili, Growlycub, and SonomaLass), who make the life of a shut-in author bearable and keep it entertaining. Twitter, how did I resist you so long? Last, my agent, Linda Chester, and my editor, Alex Logan: Thanks for being there and helping make this book a reality.

  PROLOGUE

  There are three private gentlemen’s clubs on St. James’s Street in London, each with its own rules and regulations governing membership. They are filled each day with peers who can’t be bothered to attend to their duties in the House of Lords, let alone what they owe to their estates and family. Their ranks are frequently swelled by the addition of their firstborn sons, who gamble away their youth and fortunes while waiting for their fathers to die. What’s less commonly known is that there is also one secret society, whose membership spans all three: The League of Second Sons.

  Their charter reads:

  We are MPs and Diplomats, Sailors and Curates, Barristers and Explorers, Adventurers and Soldiers. Our Fathers and Brothers may rule the World, but We run it. For this Service to God, Country and Family, We will have Our Due.

  Formed this day, 17 May 1755. All Members to Swear to Aid their Fellows in their Endeavors, Accompany them on their Quests, and Promote their Causes where they be Just.

  Addendum, 14 April 1756. Any rotter who outlives his elder brother to become heir apparent to a duke is hereby expelled.

  Addendum, 15 Sept 1768. All younger brothers to be admitted without prejudice in favor of the second.

  CHAPTER 1

  London, April 1785

  Bird chatter split the morning air, the sharp cries entering Roland Devere’s ears and cracking his head apart. He turned his face away from the sunlight streaming through the window and draped his arm over his eyes.

  Never try to out-drink Anthony Thane. Never bet against Lord Leonidas Vaughn. And never fence with Dominic de Moulines. Three rules to live by.

  And he’d broken all of them last night, though thankfully not in that order. The evening had begun with a bout of fencing at Angelo’s salle and ended in an utter debauch at Lord Leonidas’s house on Chapel Street. Vaughn’s wife had abandoned them to it with a queenly shake of her head, not even bothering to scold.

  The soft tread of someone in some not-too-distant room finally forced his eyes open. It sounded as though whoever it was were tiptoeing about in their stocking feet, but the soft creaks of the floorboards were almost more irritating than the birds. No, they were more irritating. Infinitely so, as they spoke to an awareness of his presence and condition.

  Roland pushed himself upright, head pounding uncomfortably as he did so. His coat was bound up at the shoulders, nearly swaddling him. He yanked it about. He was still fully dressed save for his shoes, which lolled beneath a chair across from the settee he’d spent the night on. His hair swung into his face, a dark, heavy curtain, and he shoved it back, hooking it behind his ears. A quick search of his pockets and the recesses of the settee failed to produce the black silk ribbon that normally contained his hair.

  The last time he’d downed that much port he’d woken upstairs in one of the finer houses of the impure in Florence with a troupe of disgusting little putti staring down at him from the bed’s canopy, their sly smiles and tiny pricks lurid in the morning light. Vaughn’s drawing room was an infinitely more welcoming sight.

  His own generation of The League of Second Sons had caroused their way through London, their band growing larger and more raucous as they went. They’d stormed Lady Hallam’s ball, invaded the Duke of Devonshire’s rout, and been ejected from the coffee house The League had made their own by the elder members who’d retired there for a quiet night. Ultimately, they had finished their evening here in Vaughn’s drawing room, or at least he had. No one else appeared to have laid claim to the other settee or the floor.

  Roland had a vague memory of Thane flirting with Lady Ligonier in the bow window just before his memory went black. Perhaps Thane had been lucky enough to accompany the lady home. Lucky devil if he had. For the life of him, Roland couldn’t remember anyone taking their leave, but he must have been in quite a state if they couldn’t even get him up the stairs and into one of the guest chambers.

  Roland ran his hands down his chest, yanking them away as a pin dug painfully into his flesh. He glanced down. A thin, brass dress pin, the kind used to hold a lady’s gown closed, secured a slip of paper to his coat. Roland tore it free, sending the pin flying.

  His own drunken handwriting crawled across the paper:

  I, Roland Devere, bet Lord Leonidas Vaughn one guinea I can beat Anthony Thane into the bed of Lady Olivia Carlow.

  All three of their signatures were scrawled below the statement, Thane’s with an artful flourish that bespoke amusement and sobriety. Roland crumpled the note in his fist. How many witnesses had there been? Who’d been left by the time they’d degenerated into boasts and bets? Good Lord, Lady Olivia was, in to some convoluted way, very nearly a relative of Vaughn’s, as his sister was married to Lady Olivia’s first husband’s brother. What the hell had they been thinking?

  A heart-shaped face, brilliant blue eyes under straight pale brows, a jumble of blond curls. Lady Olivia shimmered insubstantially before his eyes. She had been hotly pursued during her time on the marriage mart. An heiress and a beauty. She’d married well… or so it had seemed at the time.

  Lady Olivia had been through a lot in the last year. He ought to know, having borne witness to all the most humiliating details of the scandal that had ended her marriage. She didn’t need the gentlemen of the ton making sport of her, but it was inevitable that she would be pursued like a vixen by a pack of hounds now that she’d returned to town.

  Guilt at being one of those selfsame hounds surged before dissipating amid the rush of undeniable anticipation. Lady Olivia Carlow wasn’t quite a widow, nor was she ruined in the traditional sense of the word. Her situation was, in a word, unique.

  Numbness spread through Livy’s hands as she read the letter that had arrived on the silver salver with the morning post. The tingling spread up her arms and coalesced into a blinding ball of fury inside her chest. She stared dumbly at the words, raking her eyes over the sentences that sloped haphazardly across the page and ended in a nearly illegible scrawl of a signature.

  She’d known returning to town was a mistake. Had known it bone deep. But just when she’d convinced her father that it was a terrible idea for her to accompany him back after the Easter recess, her grandmother had started in, siding with the earl—against her—for the first time since her marriage had ended.

>   Her marriage. Livy’s stomach churned and she tasted bile at the back of her throat. Her marriage had been the great scandal of the ton the previous year, eclipsing even the runaway marriage of her former brother-in-law.

  Bigamy wasn’t a word an earl’s daughter was ever supposed to become familiar with, let alone something she was supposed to experience. It was still nearly impossible to grasp that the man she’d married, the man she and her father had chosen so carefully from her legions of suitors, had already had a wife. Some Scottish cutler’s daughter who was, even now, happily remarried and living in Canada.

  The crinkle of paper brought her head up from the insulting letter and pulled her out of the spiral of reminiscences. Her father was staring at her over the sagging upper edge of The Morning Post. Livy forced herself to pick up her teacup and take a drink. The tea was stone cold, and the sugar lay thick in the bottom, only half dissolved, but it served to settle her roiling stomach all the same.

  “Bad news?” the earl asked, brows rising to touch his gaudy silk banyan cap. Livy smiled as her gaze lingered on the cap. It was fussy and old-fashioned. So unlike her father, but her mother had made it just before she’d died and so he persisted in wearing it.

  Livy shook her head and refilled her cup. “No, just country gossip from Grandmamma,” she said, the lie coming easily to her lips. Lying was a new skill, but it had become a necessary one. She couldn’t possibly have been truthful about how she’d felt since her marriage had been invalidated. Not even with her father. Especially not with her father.

  The earl smiled, his attention already slipping back to the news of the day. There were ink stains on his fingers. A sure sign that he’d torn himself away from his desk to join her in the breakfast parlor.

  Philip Carlow was a man of intellect. A man who waged war in Parliament with verbs and won those battles with synonyms. But it wasn’t magic. He wasn’t like the bards of old, who could raise blisters with a word or lay waste to an army with a song. And today, she rather wished he were. Surely Mr. Roland Devere deserved some sort of reprimand for having made her such a preposterous proposal?

  Livy smoothed the letter on the table and read it over again, sucking the marrow out of every word. Devere’s penmanship was atrocious. His quill had stuttered and splattered ink across one corner of the letter. There was a dark ring where a glass of wine had been set down on the sheet of foolscap, making several words run and blur, but his offer—and the insult therein—was unmistakable.

  Devere was offering himself as the sacrificial lamb for the pyre of her marriage. Every widow must start somewhere, and he thought, perhaps, she would like to start with him. Arrogant bastard.

  Livy toyed with a muffin, breaking off a piece and slathering it with ginger preserves. She chewed thoughtfully. If only she were a widow. Widows were given a great deal of leeway in their behavior. Such an offer might even have been tempting if she were. Roland Devere, dark as a gypsy, handsome as a fallen angel, would have been a very good start for a widow in need of entertainment.

  As it was? No. Devere and his ilk were the last thing she needed. And this was just the beginning. Just a warning shot across her bow. She was damaged goods, and men who’d once vied for her smiles would be expecting something more—and offering a great deal less—this time around.

  She swallowed and took another bite, letting the heat of the ginger linger on her tongue. Roland Devere was a pompous ass, and he deserved to be punished. No, not just punished. He deserved to be tortured over an extended period of time for his presumption, and he should serve a higher purpose as added penance.

  Livy smiled and slipped the letter into her pocket. Not only should Devere do penance, he should serve as a warning to others, and she knew exactly how to go about making him of use.

  CHAPTER 2

  There was a pregnant silence about his parents’ house in Berkeley Square as Roland entered the front hall. He could feel a chill in the air. The clatter of shutters being thrown open and the distant din of the cook berating the scullery maid stood out distinctly. The words ruined and clumsy echoing up from the kitchen told the story of some broken piece of crockery or spoiled luncheon dish.

  The dim hall was a blessed relief after the god-awful glare of the streets. Roland had retrieved his shoes and escaped from Vaughn’s house with no one but an amused-looking maid as witness. His hat, along with the ribbon for his hair, seemed to have disappeared entirely, but his purse had expanded by a good hundred quid, so it seemed more than a fair exchange.

  Emerson, his father’s butler, greeted him with wide, wild eyes, like those of a cornered dog. The man glanced furtively at the closed door to the drawing room, nodded warningly at a footman in green-and-black livery who stood waiting in the far corner, and held his hand out expectantly.

  “My hat seems to have wandered off in the night,” Roland said with a shrug. “Fortunes of war, what.”

  Emerson’s hand dropped to his side like a pheasant shot from the air. “Breakfast has been cleared, but I can have something sent up if you’re hungry, sir,” he said, not taking his eyes from the closed doors. “Ham steak, perhaps?”

  Roland’s stomach revolted. “No. Thank you, but no,” he said. The butler’s gaze darted to him but returned to the drawing room doors as if drawn by a lodestone. “Everything all right, Emerson?”

  “Her ladyship has a visitor,” he replied, using the tone usually reserved for disasters of epic proportions or royal visitations, which were much the same thing in Roland’s experience. But that wasn’t one of the king’s footmen. Nor one of the prince’s.

  Roland studied the tall, solid double doors. Mysterious footmen aside, the most likely source of disaster was his sister. Margo, newly widowed and returned to England, was ripe for trouble. She’d spent the last decade in the midst of the French court at Versailles, where liaisons were an art form and no one played the game better than her husband, the comte de Corbeville.

  Well, no one except, perhaps, Margo.

  Headache forgot, Roland stepped past Emerson. At his touch, the door swung open without a sound. Silence filled his mother’s drawing room. It buffeted him like a cannonade.

  His mother looked as though she’d swallowed a toad and couldn’t quite choke it down. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. The countess’s fashionably grizzled hair trembled, shedding bits of powder that danced in the bright morning sunshine like brilliant motes.

  Seated across from her was Lady Olivia Carlow. The object of his wager smiled as she saw him, no hint of anger or reproach on her face. Behind them both, his sister, clothed in unrelenting black, sat in the window seat, sun flooding in behind her. Margo’s hands were idle on her needlework, poised as though frozen in time. Her expression was carefully, artfully, blank.

  A deep sense of dread flooded through Roland. Lady Olivia smiled again, but there was a brittle edge to her expression, a hint of too many teeth. He knew that expression, having seen it on his sister’s face all too often. The lady was out for blood.

  His mother finally caught her breath with an audible intake and attempted to gather her wits. “I’m so sorry, my dear. I don’t think—I-I-I didn’t quite—are you quite sure there isn’t some mistake?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Lady Olivia said with alarming good cheer. “But here’s your son now. I’m sure he can clear up any misunderstanding.”

  Dread flared into something closer to outright horror as Lady Olivia emphasized the final word. What the hell had he done last night? What had Thane—damn him—got him into? She couldn’t possibly know about the bet, and even if Thane had sought to hobble him by telling her—and had somehow managed to do so this very morning—there’d be no reason for Lady Olivia to run and tell tales to his mother.

  Roland glanced at his sister, hoping for a hint as to what was afoot, but Margo merely raised one brow and then pretended to return to her embroidery. However, an amused smile lurking about her mouth was very much in evidence as she bowed her head. Margo was enjoyi
ng whatever little drama was underway, which boded ill.

  Lady Olivia rose from her seat and stepped toward him. Her eyes pinned him in place, the deep blue a blaze of color in her pale face. One side of her rosy mouth curled up higher than the other as she smiled. She looked entirely too pleased with herself, too sure of herself. Whatever salvo had apprised her of the game they were playing, she was about to return fire.

  “Mr. Devere”—her hand slid down into the pocket slit of her gown with an audible rustle and emerged with a small, folded sheet of foolscap—“did you, or did you not, make me this very charming offer of marriage just last night?”

  She held the letter out, eyes daring him to take it. Roland plucked it from her hand and read it over, growing sicker by the second. He glanced back up to find Lady Olivia watching him, eyes steady and full of power. He’d seen a cobra once, brought all the way from India to dance at a duchess’s gala. The creature’s gaze had carried less threat than that of the lady who stood before him.

  “Perhaps,” Lady Olivia said, her eyes never wavering from his, “Lady Moubray would like to read it and judge for herself if I’ve misunderstood your offer.”

  Roland swallowed, his mind racing. What the hell was she playing at? She couldn’t possibly want to marry him. He was a younger son with a minor sinecure and a matching minuscule income. He hadn’t the power or position to wash away the scent of scandal that enveloped her. She needed a lord for that. If it were him, he’d be aiming for a duke. A royal one if at all possible.

  “No need,” Roland said, refolding the note he’d obviously dashed off at some point after the night had gone dim. It was all he could do not to crumple it in his fist and chuck it into the fire. His friends had let him do it, too, perhaps even instigated it. The bastards. “My offer was unambiguous and quite genuine.”

  “So I thought.” Lady Olivia’s smile became a triumphant smirk as she plucked the letter from his grasp and tucked it back into her pocket. “Perhaps when your mother and I have finished our tea you could escort me home.”