Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

LONDON, 1878

B randon was having a nightmare.

That was the only explanation for the sight opposite him, he was certain of it. Either that, or he had imbibed one of King’s ingenious brews and was now suffering the delusional aftereffects of the dubious elixir.

“Have you nothing to say for yourself, Brandon?”

The sharp, censorious voice, however, was disturbingly real. As was the glacial green-eyed glare so similar to his own. And the massive, billowing silk gown, beneath which hid a crinoline more suited to the fashions of thirty years ago than now.

He blinked, hoping the action would dispel the image before him. Pull him from the throes of sleep. Cast away the demons brought about by one of King’s inspired concoctions.

But no.

His grandmother remained.

Hellfire. Perhaps she was real after all.

Brandon cleared his throat. “I do beg your pardon, Grandmother, but I have no notion of what I ought to be saying for myself.”

“Have you not heard a word I have just spoken?”

Admittedly, he had been wool-gathering. Hoping he had found himself thrown into some slumberous alternate reality.

“I’m afraid not,” he conceded.

Her nostrils flared, and for a fanciful moment, he imagined her breathing fire like a mythical dragon swooping in to scorch him and other unsuspecting mortals in her path.

“I will begin again, Brandon,” she said succinctly, as if she feared very much he lacked the mental acuity to comprehend. “Do try to heed me this time.”

Her scolding was nothing new; Grandmother had always been harder than granite. Although her dark hair had long since turned snowy and the face that had made her the most-sought-after debutante of her day was now lined, nary a hint of infirmity surrounded her. She was a tiny wren of a woman, but sturdy of form.

Now, as ever, she terrified him.

Brandon shifted on his dashed uncomfortable chair, wishing he’d had the forethought to have Grandmother await him somewhere other than the drawing room, a chamber he scarcely used for its fervent Louis Quinze devotion. “Of course. Pray, proceed.”

She inclined her head and, with a regal air, continued. “As I was saying, a visitor most unexpected and uninvited paid a call upon me yesterday. I am told she was turned away by your domestics. Ordinarily, I would have no desire to concern myself with such matters. Indeed, it is most unseemly. However, the child has your eyes and nose.”

Surely he must have misheard.

“The child?” he repeated, feeling as if the world had suddenly turned on its head.

Everything before him was unrecognizable.

“The girl child,” Grandmother elaborated, disapproval dripping from her voice.

Brandon was still struggling to understand. Was there wine to be had? A cursory glance about the drawing room suggested only tea that Grandmother must have requested. He needed something far less tepid.

“Are you attending me, Brandon?” she asked, her voice sharp.

He wrested his gaze from the tea and pinned it back upon his grandmother. “What girl child?”

“The one who was delivered, much to my butler’s horror, to my door yesterday afternoon by her mother, just before the woman ran off with her lover.”

“Who was the girl’s mother?” he managed, his necktie feeling more like a noose by the moment, growing tighter and tighter.

“She said her name was Mrs. Helena Darby-Booth.” Grandmother’s lip curled as if she had just tasted something spoiled. “A woman of ill repute, to be sure. She was dressed like a harlot, and it is to my everlasting shame that such a sinful creature should have had cause to arrive at my door after having been refused from yours. Have you any notion of the tongues that will gleefully wag? No, I daresay you do not. You are too busy cavorting with your lemans to save a thought for anyone other than yourself. Just like your father. I warned my darling Diana not to wed that scurrilous scoundrel. I didn’t care that he was a duke.”

His grandmother shook her head, caught in the throes of the past and temporarily distracted from her diatribe. Brandon was in shock. Helena had been his lover off and on over the years until she had abruptly married and left the stage some time ago. Had not that man been called Booth? Brandon searched the dim recesses of his mind for the name and the particulars. He had not seen her since, nor had he heard from her. What cause had she to call upon his grandmother, bringing a girl child?

One with his eyes and nose?

He swallowed against a rising sea of bile. “The sins of the father, madam. Tell me, if you please, why Mrs. Darby-Booth should have called upon you, bringing a child.”

“Because Mrs. Darby-Booth is following her new gentleman friend to America, and according to the letter she left with the girl, the man in question could only afford passage for two.” His grandmother’s green eyes, assessing and bright, narrowed. “She was required to leave the child behind, and she therefore deemed it better to leave the child in the care of her father’s family rather than an orphanage.”

No, no, no.

He heard the words Grandmother was speaking, but he didn’t wish to understand them. Surely this was all a dreadful mistake. Some manner of ploy Helena had concocted. He had always taken care with his lovers. He used a sheath. Unless… There had been occasions, particularly in times of drunken revelry at Wingfield Hall or in St John’s Wood, when he may have been too sotted to take care…

Dread seized him, a fist choking his lungs.

“In the care of her…father’s family?” he repeated.

“Yes, since the father himself refused to see her. There was a ship leaving, and our Mrs. Darby-Booth only had so much time in which to complete the task of abandoning her bastard child.”

His grandmother was forbidding.

Bastard child.

The father.

Eyes and nose like his.

A daughter.

Fucking hell , could it be possible he had a daughter he hadn’t known existed? That when Helena had left London, she had been carrying his child?

“How old is she?” he asked hoarsely. “The girl.”

“She tells me that she is four years of age, nearly five.”

It was as if Brandon had been dealt a vicious punch directly to the gut. The breath left him. He gasped for a moment, trying to suck in air, to make sense of everything he had just learned. The timing certainly suggested, along with Grandmother’s description, that he was indeed the father of the girl who had been deposited at her house yesterday.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

Surely not.

Surely it was impossible.

Surely he could not be anyone’s father.

“You…you spoke with the child.” He swallowed hard.

“Of course I spoke with the child.” Again, his grandmother’s lip curled. “Despite her rude origins, the girl appears to possess reasonable intelligence. But I will warn you, Brandon, that I will not lower myself to playing hostess to your illegitimate children. You must tend to your responsibilities as you see fit. I’ll not concern myself with them.”

The world was spinning madly about him. How much wine had he consumed last night? Was it the news or was it the despicable aftereffects of too much indulgence that had him feeling as if he were about to cast up his accounts?

“Her name,” he managed. “What is her name?”

Not that it mattered one way or the other. But if he was to be a father, then he might as well know what to call the child. Somehow, that seemed of grave importance.

“Her name is Pandora,” Grandmother informed him archly. “It seems uniquely appropriate.”

Pandora.

He had a daughter. Quite possibly. An illegitimate one.

And she had a name and his eyes and nose.

He patted his nose absently, thinking it perhaps a bit too sharp for a girl. “Where is she now?”

“In the absence of a proper nurse for the child, I’ve left her under the care of my companion, Miss Heale, at my town house,” she informed him icily.

He nodded, wondering what the devil he was meant to do with a child. “I suppose I must have her collected, then.”

“Yes, you must,” Grandmother said, stern. “I’ll not be responsible for her. It is time you bore some duty upon those strapping shoulders of yours.”

He stiffened at the judgment in her tone. “I do have a great deal of responsibility.”

And by that, he meant that he put rather a tremendous amount of effort into being an excellent host. His social gatherings were the stuff of legend. As the founding member of the Wicked Dukes Society, he took pride in his prowess.

As if hearing his thoughts spoken aloud, his grandmother clicked her tongue. “Hosting scandalous routs is not a responsibility, Brandon. When have you seen to any of your estates recently?”

“I correspond with my steward regularly,” he defended, even if that was an exaggeration.

In truth, the more recent letters he had received from the man remained stacked and unopened somewhere in the clutter of his study desk. He was far more concerned with Wingfield Hall than the entail.

“How regularly?” she demanded.

“It is none of your concern,” he countered. “With all your disdain for the former Duke of Brandon, I wouldn’t think you should worry yourself over the present one.”

“I do when the present one is my grandson and appears to be intent upon beggaring himself.”

He took umbrage at that. “I am hardly beggaring myself.”

“You depend upon the vast fortune you will receive from me when I die.”

God, she was too damned clever. It wasn’t that he anticipated Grandmother’s demise. For all that she was as hard-shelled as a tortoise, she was a part of his mother. And Brandon had adored his mother, who had died in childbirth when he had been but a lad of eight.

“I do nothing of the sort,” he said, shifting again on his chair.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I need not direct my funds or Wingfield Hall to you, Brandon?”

“No.” His answer was swift and honest. “It has not.”

Brandon was his grandmother’s sole heir, and his mother’s side of the family had been hideously wealthy from decades of building a fortune in manufacturing and trade. His father had never allowed his mother to forget her lack of noble forebears, though he’d had no compunction about availing himself of her immense dowry.

“Then perhaps it should.” Grandmother’s eyes narrowed. “I will not leave my fortune and my family’s lands to be pilfered by you as you abandon a string of illegitimate children about London in your wake like your father before you. Wingfield Hall is sacred to me, as you know. I would sooner consign it to Hades than leave it to a profligate to plunder like some sort of modern-day pirate.”

Wingfield Hall had become Brandon’s most exclusive den of pleasure. Vast and sprawling in the Hertfordshire countryside, it had been the site of the inaugural meeting of the Wicked Dukes Society for its convenience to London and verdant privacy. It had, for those same reasons, been the host of each meeting thereafter. It was also a desperately lucrative—and intensely secret—business. One he had taken great care to make certain his grandmother would never discover. Losing it had never seemed a possibility.

“You would deny your only flesh and blood his birthright?” he asked with deceptive calm, hoping she would see reason in such folly.

But Grandmother’s pointed chin went stubbornly up. “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but I will do whatever I must to save Wingfield Hall—and you—from ruin. I would sooner see Cousin Horace have it.”

“Ruin?” He might have laughed, were he not still so shattered at the prospect that he had somehow been a father for four bloody years without knowing, and had his grandmother not just threatened to give the shining jewel of his estates to a country booby distant cousin who smelled like sheep.

Grandmother sighed. “I have heard rumors you are a member of some infernal society devoted to iniquity. I needed my hartshorn when Theodosia Dowling told me she had heard it from Lady Agnes Bryson. I never could abide by Lady Agnes—she has hated me for years, ever since I won your grandfather after she had set her cap at him. It goes without saying that I disapprove wholeheartedly of any such scandalous claptrap. I thought better of you, Brandon. Truly, I did.”

She extracted a fan and, despite the relative chill in the air, began fanning herself. Brandon stared at her, everything he had just heard making no more sense than it had when she had first uttered it.

His mind whirled.

Grandmother had heard about the Wicked Dukes Society? But how? Years had passed since that Bordeaux-soaked night when he and five of his old Eton chums had first settled upon the notion. He had not supposed word would ever reach anyone, let alone her. After all, it was meant to be a secret society. Not that it was much of a society. More than anything, it was a friendship—a brotherly bond that each of them had found absent in their lives previously, whether by lack of blood brothers or lack of blood brothers who weren’t arseholes. It was also making them sinfully rich, even if some of them needed those funds more than others.

“Grandmother, I can assure you that I do not belong to any such society, infernal or otherwise,” he said smoothly, “and that Mrs. Dowling and Lady Agnes are indulging in scandal broth. It is idle gossip, nothing more.”

“Do not lie to me, Brandon.”

He held her gaze. “I would never lie to you, Grandmother.”

Unless I have no other option , he added internally.

“I’ll not be cozened,” she snapped. “Do you think me an imbecile? I’ve been hearing whispers about you for years, but I have refused to indulge in rumors. Look at where my forbearance has led—to your natural child being delivered to my door.”

Blast. This interview was not going well. His head was beginning to ache, and not just because Grandmother had been peppering him with a volley of unpleasant questions and revelations. But also because he was a father, and suddenly, his world had been not just upended, but burned to ash.

He had to concentrate upon what was truly important in this moment. It didn’t matter if Grandmother had heard the whispers, or that every man or woman who entered the hallowed walls of Wingfield Hall did so under a vow of strictest silence some had clearly broken. What did matter was the child—Pandora, he reminded himself.

She had a name. Dear God, what was a voluptuary like him going to do with a child? He’d need to hire a nursemaid. Could he send the girl away somewhere? So many details to sort through, and the lingering effects of the previous evening’s merriments still fogged his poor mind. It was too early in the afternoon for such dire news.

“Brandon, are you attending me at all?”

At the shrill tone entering Grandmother’s voice, he jolted from his musings.

“Of course, my dear,” he reassured her grimly. “It is impossible not to attend you when you are shouting at me.”

“I am not shouting!”

The echo of her voice in the chamber was a stark rebuttal.

He had never seen his otherwise impassive grandmother exhibit such a frenzy of emotion. She was in fine dudgeon now, twin patches of angry color on her cheeks, eyes sparking with fire.

“I apologize for the child’s unexpected arrival,” he said. “I’ll send someone to fetch her now if you’d prefer it.”

“She is a child, not a parcel.”

There was no pleasing his grandmother today.

And unfortunately, at that moment, the strains of the final aria from La sonnambula pierced the vexed silence that had fallen. Brandon winced, quite having forgotten that the famed soprano, Madame Auclair, had accompanied him home the previous evening. Any hopes he’d harbored of bedding her had died when she had begun to snore on the short carriage ride, the chanteuse having apparently consumed far more champagne than he had realized. He had seen her to a guest chamber.

Grandmother’s eyebrows rose. “What is that sound ?”

Dear God. What was Marie doing? The singing—whilst beautiful—was growing nearer. Where was Shilling, damn it? He relied on his butler to save him from such unfortunate circumstances.

Brandon tugged at his necktie. “Ah, opera, I believe.”

“Ah! non credea mirarti,” Marie sang.

The horror etched on his grandmother’s face would have been comical had the situation not been so disastrous. “There is an opera singer in your house?”

She may as well have said there was a rat in his house, so thorough was her disgust.

“Perhaps,” he offered noncommittally just as the drawing room door burst open.

“Sì presto estinto, o fiore.”

Marie was wearing one of his dressing gowns, her long, dark hair flowing in waves down her back. Judging by the swaying of her full breasts and her bare feet and ankles, it would appear she was completely nude beneath it. Her voice warbled at the sight that presented her—an august white-haired woman and Brandon fully dressed, a tea service between them—and then her song died entirely.

“Forgive me,” she said in heavily accented English. “I didn’t realize you had a guest.”

Grandmother’s tea fell to the floor, the delicate porcelain breaking into shards.