One Night of Sin (4 page)

No,
she thought as her fury surged. She would not tolerate this. They were
not
going to do this to her. With senses blurred by fear, instinct pounded in her veins—fight or flee. As Lord Rushford leaned nearer with a vain grin, boldly bent on kissing her, Becky attacked without warning.

She stepped forward suddenly and kneed him hard in the groin. He yelped in startled pain and let her go as he lurched to the side. In the blink of an eye she shoved the brown-haired man violently out of her way, and when Lord Draxinger reached for her elbow with a condescending, “Now, now, my dear,” she hauled back her fist and punched him in the jaw as hard as she could.

She dashed out of the portico and ran at top speed into the night, instantly drenched in the pouring rain.

For a full second Alec could not even react for sheer astonishment. He was rarely surprised anymore in life, especially by females, but the girl’s attack left him flabbergasted. Fort was laughing his head off, applauding her attack and yelling, “Bravo, my girl!” but Alec could only stare in shocked amazement at the sight of the other two members of his exalted set laid low. Rushford bent, wheezing, over his offending organ, while Drax rubbed his jaw with a groan and spit out a bit of blood.

“Chit knocked my damned tooth loose!”

All of a sudden, Alec laughed aloud. Good Lord, the chit had thrashed them, neat as a ninepence! How many women of England, their past conquests, would have paid in gold to see the great seducers thus unmanned? Alec was not among the casualties of the little hellion’s rampage, so he could appreciate the humor in it; but although she hadn’t touched him, she had certainly jolted him out of his “mood.” He was already in motion, dashing out of the portico’s shelter with a hell-raising grin.

“Where are you going?” Fort called as he ran out into the rain.

“To make sure she’s all right!”

“Her?” Rush croaked. “What about us?”

“You deserved it.” Squinting against the rain, Alec spotted the mysterious waif sprinting away down the street. “Miss!” he yelled, starting in her direction. “Come back!”

She cast a frightened glance over her shoulder, but just kept running. Plainly, she had no intention of trusting them now. Alec sent his friends a scowl. “I told you not to scare her.”

Then he set out after her at an easy jog, his longer paces allowing him to gain on her at once.

“Careful, old boy!” Fort yelled after him merrily. “Girl’s dangerous.”

“I like dangerous,” he replied under his breath. Indeed, he was eager to see what she might try to do to him.

He cast aside his initial prejudice about her kind. The lass had spirit, aye, pluck to the backbone. He had to know her name. She was a challenge, and challenges, like surprises, were so very rare in his life. More than being merely intrigued, though, he was concerned about her, too—perhaps, in spite of himself.

He was not entirely sure now that their first assumption had been correct, that she had arrived in advance of their usual summons for the
filles des joies.
She hadn’t been dressed like one, hadn’t smelled like one, doused in cheap perfume. She’d worn no rouge, no tawdry fake jewels. And she was sober.

Either she had just woken up and hadn’t yet known what was going on when his friends had besieged her with their excessive attentions, or there was another explanation for her naive alarm.

Alec intended to get to the bottom of it, solve her little mystery. It was not as though he had anything better to do.

Ahead, the girl paused on the corner, beginning to tire. Looking one way and the other, as though she wasn’t sure which way to go, she glanced behind her and now saw him chasing her. She jumped back, recoiling.

“Leave me alone!” she cried shrilly, though he was still half a block away.

“Wait! I just want to talk to you!”

She let out a furious sound and fled again, darting to the left.

With a glint in his eyes, Alec poured on the speed, drawing easily on his large, unused reserves of physical strength honed over many years of near daily training at the best fencing and boxing clubs in London. The puddles were deep as he splashed through them in his flat black shoes. He was still dressed for the ballroom in black trousers and tails, but the driving rain quickly soaked his shoulders and chest, sousing his favorite white silk waistcoat and plastering his hair to his head. Breathing harder with his sprint, he tugged off his cravat and threw it aside.

As he turned the corner onto Bond Street, a carriage-load of Drax’s expected guests passed him, hailing him in surprise, but he ignored them, absorbed in the chase.

He had a feeling he would not be going back to Draxinger’s for any cardplay tonight. No, he was already contemplating another kind of play altogether, the wondrous game of skin to skin. God, he needed it.

He had gone too long without. He had not had a woman since well before Lizzie’s wedding to Strathmore on Midsummer’s Eve. Rejected by the one girl he always thought he’d marry—if and when he was ever ready to settle down—Alec had not had the heart to resume his Don Juan ways.

Until tonight.

What the hell was he waiting for? His body ached for a woman’s touch. He made up his mind as he pounded on through the rain that this mystery girl would do as well as any. Besides, it would indulge his vanity to succeed where his friends had failed.

Passing a row of quaint shops with darkened bow windows, their shutters and doors locked up tightly for the night, the girl’s pace began to flag, as though she could not keep going much longer. She cast another anxious glance over her shoulder and saw him catching up.

Alec was almost upon her now, only a few yards behind, close enough to see the fury that flicked over her dainty features at his determined pursuit.

“Go away, you fiend!”

“No,” he panted cheerfully. She had yet to learn of his famed stubbornness—and he had yet to learn her name.

With a small yowl of pure feminine frustration, she rushed over to the nearest storefront, a haberdasher’s, and seized the only weapon she could find.

Snatching the long-handled candlesnuffer off its metal holder on the wall, she whipped around and swung it at him. “Stay back!”

“Oh-ho!” he laughed as he approached slowly.
I like this girl.
“What are you going to do with that thing? Put my lights out?”

“Keep your distance or I’ll brain you! I’ll do it, I will!”

He disobeyed, of course, stalking toward her another step or two as he caught his breath. “Easy, kitten—”

“Don’t you ‘kitten’ me!”
Whoosh!
—the metal bar sang through the air in her grasp. Her dark tresses flew; the dirt-streaked skirts swirled around her trim figure as she swung her weapon with admirable ferocity straight at Alec’s head.

He ducked, his fencer’s reflexes yanking him under the arc, but the nearness of the miss left him astonished all over again. Women had been threatening to kill him for years, but none had actually tried it before.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed, and then started laughing again. He couldn’t help it.

Her face flushed. “Don’t you dare laugh at me, you coxcomb! I’m not afraid of you! A hero’s blood flows in these veins, I’ll have you know!” she cried wrathfully, trying—rather adorably, Alec thought—to scare him away. “My father fought beside Nelson at Trafalgar!”

He held up his hands. “I surrender! Don’t hurt me!”

“Ugh, you—” Another massive crash of lightning overhead cut off her words and sent her darting under a nearby awning of one of the shops that lined the street.

Alec followed eagerly, but when he joined her, she was already in position to defend the small rectangle of dry territory she had claimed.

With her weapon at the ready, she begrudgingly allowed him to step under the cover of the striped tin awning.

The shadows were deeper in their shelter. He smiled wickedly at her as he approached. “Well, isn’t this cozy?”

The warm rain drummed upon the awning’s painted tin, dampening the sound and casting an air of intimacy over their taut standoff.

The girl backed up a step uneasily, adjusting her grip, more than willing, it seemed, to try again to break his head if he made one false move.

Alec was on his guard and half smitten—though that meant nothing. He was known to fall in love six or seven times a day.
Beautiful eyes,
he thought. He studied her by the distant streetlamp’s glow through a haze of rain. Big, stormy eyes full of fight and spirit, their violet hue a rare and fascinating color. Her thick dark hair was slicked back with the rain, accenting the delicate sculpture of her face. Raindrops starred her lashes and turned her plump lips to dewy roses. Dirty little stray. Ravishing.

And he wanted her.

He dared not tell her so, however, for fear of the risk to his health. Indeed, his amusement at her ire was bound to get him clobbered, but he could not wipe the roguish grin off his face. Finally, a distraction worthy of him. “You’re rather handy with that thing. Have you ever thought of playing cricket? Our team could use you at the Lords.”

She let out a dainty growl of exasperation.
Whoosh!
—again. He leaned back from the waist as the candle-snuffer sailed past his chest. He could have grabbed it, but then she would have run and his fun would end.

“What’s wrong with you?” she cried, obviously vexed by her miss. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“But mademoiselle, I only came to make sure you’re all right—and, of course, to apologize for my friends’ rude behavior,” he added with his purest choirboy stare. He offered a charming smile of humble male contrition along with it, but she eyed him warily, as though she wasn’t buying it. Well, she soon would. They always did. “They didn’t mean to frighten you—”

“I wasn’t scared!”

“Of course not.” Alec’s lips twitched with the effort not to smile at her bravado. “Still, it wasn’t very nice of them to disturb your slumber.”

She raised her weapon in menace. “Are you making fun of me again?”

“Why, no,” he answered softly. “I’m flirting with you, my dear.”

CHAPTER

TWO

“
O
h,” Becky said slowly, not quite sure what to do with this information. She flicked her fingers more firmly around the metal rod of the candlesnuffer, though, securing her grip—just in case he tried anything.

The man’s smile was knowing, irresistible. “There’s really no need for further violence, is there? Haven’t you left enough wounded men in your wake?”

“They deserved it,” she bit back hotly.

“Yes, they did,” he agreed, advancing another step, his hands held out in a soothing, conciliatory gesture. “But I didn’t treat you that way.”

She remained on her guard, but conceded that at least that much was true.

“What’s your name?”

“You first.”

He seemed startled by the command, then shrugged. “Alec.” He lowered his hands to his sides, making no move to come closer. “Lord Alec Knight, at your service.” He sketched a courtly bow, his hand on his middle. She wasn’t sure if he was still mocking her: His heaven-blue eyes danced. “You needn’t be afraid,” he added softly. “I mean you no harm. I know my friends gave you a bit of a start, but on my honor, you are quite safe with me.”

Becky eyed him warily. Safe, she thought, was a relative term. One thing was certain, though. There was nobody like him in Buckley-on-the-Heath. She had never met a man before who called her
mademoiselle.
Indeed, it seemed that in Lord Alec Knight and his companions, she had gotten her first glimpse of that fabled, nocturnal race, the London rakehells.

All the more reason to keep him at bay. His kind made a sport of ruining females. At least that’s what she had heard. And yet . . .

Blame her adventuring soul for it, she was a little intrigued.

Scrutinizing him cautiously, she decided that she did not sense any actual menace coming from Lord Alec Knight. Tall and strapping as he was, he could have ripped away her weapon if he’d had a mind to. No, by the look of him, any woman in this man’s radius was in a different sort of danger altogether.

Everything about him spelled heartbreaker. He had the face of an angel, a sinner’s smile, and the cool, hard stare of a jaded pleasure-seeker who didn’t give a damn about much of anything.

His weapons of seduction were formidable . . . that caressing gaze . . . that low, beguiling, slightly scratchy voice . . . that roguish playfulness—and, oh, that gorgeous face.

He had cast off his cravat, exposing the manly architecture of his throat. Without his neckcloth to hold his loose white shirt closed, the frilled V of his collar had parted down to the first button of his waistcoat, revealing the beguiling little notch between his collarbones and a tempting expanse of damp, gleaming skin.

Becky tried not to look.

Oh, yes, he probably had no trouble at all leading unwise women astray like the very Pied Piper. But although she averted her gaze, she could still smell the enticing cologne that clung to him; the rain and his exertions had heightened his scent. She could feel the heat of his muscled body from where she stood.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he murmured, a practiced line delivered with smooth persistence, as silvery miniature waterfalls cascaded off the awning’s edge behind him. A boyish pout skimmed his full, kissable lips. “You promised to tell me yours if I told you mine.”

“I didn’t promise you anything,” she informed him.

The flicker of mischief in his laughing blue eyes admitted to his attempt at trickery. He flashed a smile. “I must know, all the same.” He edged closer, the irresistible softness of his deep voice coaxing her trust; she resisted for all she was worth. “Tell me. I shan’t go away until you do.”

“In that case, it’s Becky,” she muttered, but did not offer her last name. The less he knew about her, the better.

Fortunately, her first name alone seemed to satisfy him just fine. “And why, Becky dear, were you sleeping in Draxinger’s doorway?”

Her pride bristled. “Maybe I was tired.”
Maybe I had nowhere else to go.

“The butler wouldn’t let you inside?”

What was he getting at?

“Why should I bother the butler?” she countered in a prickly tone, her pride smarting at the condition in which those rich, haughty fellows had seen her. They must think her low, indeed.

“You could have knocked on the door,” he chided with a smile. “The servants would have let you in if you had simply said the abbess sent you over for the party.”

Abbess?
Becky furrowed her brow and stared at him, and then her eyes widened as understanding dawned.
Oh, Lord . . . !
So, that’s why his friends had been so outrageously forward! It made sense now. Becky was appalled to realize that, along with his cronies and everyone else in this horrible town, Lord Alec Knight believed she was a whore.

And that, she thought angrily, was the only reason he was still standing here.

He didn’t care about her in the slightest. He was only after a bit of fun. “Come back to the house,” he coaxed her in a silky tone. “You just stay close to me. I won’t let the lads bother you.”

Torn between outrage and disbelieving humor at what a very bad day she was having, Becky shook her head slowly, stubbornly, emphatically. But her heart pounded.

Oh, this was rich. Finally, someone showed her a glimmer of concern in this hateful city, and now she understood why.

She was about to correct his error when she suddenly stopped herself, recalling how everyone she had asked for help today had simply brushed her off. Surely, if she told this bona fide London rakehell that she was an honest girl—if he surmised he was not going to get what he wanted—then he, too, would leave her standing here alone again, starving, hunted, lost. The thought of being left out here in the streets again, by herself, in the middle of the night, was somehow worse than Lord Alec’s shocking assumptions.

Worse by far.

So, at that moment, instead of speaking up, she did what any canny country Yorkshireman would do and kept her mouth shut.

No, let him believe of her what he willed. It didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. With her survival at stake, she was well past caring about her reputation. Somehow his golden presence made the night seem a little less black.

“Come, Becky,” he coaxed her gently. “You’ll catch your death out here in the wet. I can see you shivering.” He glanced at her weapon. “Why don’t you put that thing down?”

“Keep your distance!” she warned, but she could feel her defenses growing thin.

He smiled almost tenderly, studying her in the darkness. “Why do I get the feeling you haven’t been doing this for very long?”

“I—I—” She had no idea what to say. Did he mean
whoring
?

“It’s all right,” he murmured indulgently, his glance flicking over her body. “You needn’t be embarrassed of your inexperience. In fact, I’m glad to hear it. You’re much too pretty to be out on the streets, my dear.”

The compliment flustered her. Well, it must have been dark indeed if he thought that in her abysmal condition.

He put his hands in his pockets, regarding her with a thoughtful gaze. “How long have you been in Town?”

She swallowed hard. This much she could answer truthfully. “Oh, about . . . eight hours.”

He raised his eyebrows in amusement. “So long?”

She nodded. “I just arrived this afternoon.”

“From?”

“Yorkshire.” Her candlesnuffer dipped in her grasp as a lump of homesickness rose in her throat. Her chin trembled as she thought of her village and her beloved home, the ancient rambling Tudor hall at the edge of the heath. How she missed Talbot Old Hall, with its countless gables, climbing ivy, and four oak-carved angels standing guard atop the dramatic hammer-beam roof with swords and shields.

His eyes glowed. “A Yorkshire lass. How delightful. I’m from the north, myself. Born and bred in the Cumberland hills. Country lad,” he teased.

She could not help smiling ruefully at his claim and the unlikely image of this glossy London sophisticate scything hay or shearing sheep.

“Well, that’s a first,” he remarked in a low tone, studying her. “You have a beautiful smile, Becky.” His leisurely stare moved over her. “My my, dimples and all.”

She blushed, but then he shook his head and sternly took her to task. “This isn’t Yorkshire,
ma cherie.
You cannot proceed this way in Town. You could get hurt. Badly.”

He did not know the half of it.

“I’m not afraid,” she vaunted; a knee-jerk reaction, in truth, for of course it was a lie. She supposed such bravado was deeply ingrained in her from a lifetime of having to prove herself.

He smiled knowingly. Drifting closer, he casually placed one well-groomed hand on the side of her candle-snuffer. She failed to protest, mesmerized momentarily by his elegant fingers’ deft caress along the smooth wood.

He probably had an expert valet who buffed his nails for him in a monthly gentleman’s manicure, she thought. Hypnotic hands.

His nearness made her strangely weak. She could do nothing, enthralled by his glittering gaze and strong, sensitive hands; he took her weapon gently out of her grasp and set it back in its holder, easily disarming her—in more ways than one.

“That’s better,” he whispered. “Now we can be friends.”

When he turned to her again, she stared at him uncertainly, filled with an odd longing to put herself in his beautiful hands.
Help,
she thought.
Please help me.

He reached out and with a bold, slow, seductive caress, traced the line of her jaw with his fingertip. She quivered; the response surely amused him.

“So what do you think of our fair metropolis, after a full eight hours on London soil?” he inquired casually.

“Honestly?” At his encouraging nod, her confession tumbled from her lips. “It’s horrid,” she wrenched out, her voice breaking to a wretched whisper, her chin starting to tremble. “I hate it with all my heart.”

Her vehemence clearly startled him, but then he furrowed his brow and drew her closer. “Oh, darling, no. Shh, there. Don’t cry.” He put his arms around her, soothing her with his whispers; she stood there numbly for a moment, neither moving closer nor pulling away.

The contact routed her defenses, taking her greatly off guard. It had been so long since anyone had held her. Years. That thought alone made her want to cry. She closed her eyes.

“Shh,” he whispered.

She did not know him, but she was so weary, and the delicious strength that she felt in his arms and muscled body as he embraced her, invited her to rest against him.
Safety.
When he bent and kissed her brow, she simply melted, leaning her forehead against his lips, half asleep on her feet.

“Becky, my sweet.” His mouth skimmed her hairline and then he whispered, “Shall I take you home?”

“I can’t go home,” she said miserably, exhaustion and his kindness making her eyes well up with tears. She shut her eyes more tightly, not wanting him to see.

“So, it’s like that,” he answered thoughtfully, drawing what conclusions, heaven only knew. When he spoke again, his tone was mild, his breath warm against her brow, a sophisticated murmur. “Actually, you see, I meant . . . to my place.”

Oh, God.
He thought she was a harlot and was now genuinely propositioning her for the night. “Sir, I really don’t think—”

“Look at me.” He tipped her chin up with his fingertips, and when he stared evenly into her eyes, the world disappeared. “I’m not going to hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded slowly.

He wiped the single tear off her cheek, which had escaped her willful effort not to cry. “I understand better than you know, believe me. I can guess how it all played out. Some heartless cad back in Yorkshire had his way with you.” As he spoke, he slowly rubbed away the smudge of dirt on her cheek with the pad of his thumb. “Your parents threw you out. It probably wasn’t even your fault. Now you’re alone. You’ve got nothing, no one.”

Tears threatened afresh at his last words, because those, at least, were true. Unbearably so.

He shook his head with gallant tenderness. “We’ve all been down on our luck, my love. This isn’t the end. Don’t lose heart.” He kissed her head again. “Come home with me tonight. As a gentleman, I cannot leave you out here alone to fend for yourself. I’m sure there must be some way I can help. You’re very beautiful, you know. You’ll find no shortage of protectors. Yes, you’ll make your fortune, my girl, and when you do—” He pulled back, gave her a roguish smile, and chucked her gently under the chin. “I hope you shove it down your parents’ throats.”