Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

WHERE CHILDHOOD COMBATANTS AGREE TO DISAGREE

A gaming hell on the Limehouse docks

London, 1846

A rock striking the windowpane pulled Nigel Streeter from sleep. A deep one, when he didn’t sleep deeply. He reached for the side of the bed typically occupied by his lazy effort at contentment before recalling his latest paramour, Delilah, hadn’t been happy about the reports—erroneous but believable—that he was bedding a Drury Lane actress.

Or an opera singer. Or a widowed countess.

Nigel couldn’t recall which narrative he’d been given by the scandal rags this time.

Delilah had vowed to never speak to him again—and this he believed as much as she had the rumors.

When another ping rattled the glass, he groaned and stumbled to his feet. His Bainbridge timepiece was on the dresser across the room, but the muted moonlight creeping in around the velvet drapes placed the time at a few hours before dawn. He and his factotum, Jerkins, had closed the gambling den at half past midnight, after sending a dozen nobs scurrying into the night with less in their pockets than when they’d entered.

The Devil’s Lair was, as planned when it opened twenty years before, a destination among destinations. Once a rotting Limehouse warehouse, membership was now more coveted than an appointment with the Queen.

Grumbling beneath his breath, Nigel muscled into his shirt and danced into a pair of trousers in the near darkness. He couldn’t hang out the window without a stitch of clothing on, now could he? It was probably that foxed baron he’d banished, returning to recoup the blunt he’d misplaced at the faro tables. His father’s closest friend and business partner, Xander Macauley, had trained him to manage the Devil’s Lair with shrewdness and compassion. They weren’t going to make their fortunes from the mis fortune of others. One day, the baron would thank him for saving his inheritance.

Although gaming hells dealt in desperation. And Nigel was the last man in England to discount what a desperate soul would do.

Cursing as he recalled his dreaded past when it was ages in the past, he stomped to the window, opened the squeaky casement, and leaned into the night. A night not unlike the cold, misty one when Tobias Streeter found him shivering beneath an overturned cart, his body racked with the effects of scurvy.

He squinted as a headache settled behind his eyes. Ah, hell. Arabella Macauley was standing in the alley in all her newfound glory. A carriage, having deposited her at his doorstep, was rolling away from her as she waved.

The urge to march down there and wring her neck was nearly overpowering.

Instead, when she looked up at him, he gave her a slashing gesture that meant, meet me around back , and strode to the staircase without stopping to yank on his boots. Seconds were of the essence when his employer’s only daughter, the apple of his bloody eye , was standing in a rookery passage in a cream-colored satin bit without a lick of protection that Nigel could see. The oak banister creaked as he manhandled it on the way down, a repair he added to his running list .

He couldn’t wait to hear what calamity she’d created this time.

Actually, he could. Wait, that is. But Arabella blasted Macauley had, for some unearthly reason, come to him. And Nigel owed her father, the man he considered his uncle and his friend , more than he could ever repay. For guidance over the years. For patience during his oft-troubled adolescence. For never looking down on him because he’d been born in a gutter, although Xander Macauley had been born in one himself.

So that, he figured, was that.

But he wasn’t going to be fucking agreeable about it.

Forget about the neighbors. Forget about her feelings.

Forget about, for once , the blessed decorum that had been gently beaten into him. It felt brilliant to act like a brute every once in a while.

Therefore, when he reached the landing, he wrenched open the service door and yelled, “Get in here, you troublesome chit!”

Nigel needn’t have worried about offending her. After stepping around him like he was something deceased she’d encountered in the street, Arabella sashayed up the gaming hell stairs like she owned the place.

Which, in a roundabout way, he supposed she did.

With the luck of fate and being adopted by the most incredible man he’d ever known, Nigel did, too.

The gas sconces he’d installed last month flickered as they traversed the corridor, tossing shadowed silhouettes across the Axminster runner. With modest success, Nigel managed to ignore Arabella’s bottom swaying in her stylish, form-fitting gown. However, the enticing scent of floral decadence attached to her crawled into his nose, then his brain, before landing in a part of his body that had never been involved before.

Not once. Not with her.

The irritating girl had turned into an irritating woman. A beautiful one.

Her poor parents were all he could think of.

“The gallery,” he snapped and motioned her down the first-floor hallway. His bedchamber was on the second, and he damn well wasn’t inviting her there.

“I know where it is,” she said, her ever-present smile in place. She gave his bare feet a long glance, her lips turning up at the corners. “I’m a Macauley, remember? And you’re a Streeter, two names forever linked in this Town.”

His temper sparking, he let her, and that shapely arse, get ahead of him, only to find her standing militantly at the gallery’s balustrade when he entered the room, pouring whisky into a tumbler he’d not invited her to fill.

He shut the door and leaned against it, watching her with a sense of doom.

Or destiny.

One of those gut reactions a boy raised on the mean streets rarely ignored. His heart raced for the unfathomable span of ten telling seconds before he yanked himself free of his helpless captivation. “What are you doing alone in this part of town in the dead of night without so much as a thin cloak for warmth? I’ve known you to be reckless but never senseless.”

She watched him over the rim of her glass, eyes the color of smoke blazing. So unusual a shade, the ton had taken to calling them the Macauley grays ages ago. She was the only female in her family to own them, and like her father and her uncle, the Earl of Stanford, they carried a devastating presence. “If I had anyone else to ask this small favor, I would. It’s not like you and I have done anything but argue since we were children. Your foul disposition is charming to loads of women, according to the accounts in the newspaper, but it’s not something I miss when I’m away from it.”

He wasn’t buying this admission, not for one minute . They weren’t enemies… but they weren’t friends, either. “Your brothers?”

Taking a sip, she shook her head. “Kit’s in Scotland with Dash, acquiring some new mechanism for the distillery. Tate is barely fifteen, and no help to anyone at the moment, including himself. Ryder is in the middle of exams at Cambridge, and if he fails another subject, my father is threatening to let the Duchess Society employ him as an investigator.” She laughed into her wrist, the sound chillingly lovely. He worked hard to disregard the desire that clawed through him. “Can you imagine, a male matchmaker? Your mother would love that.”

Nigel brooded from his spot against the door. This chit was a problem—and she’d always been a problem. Mouthy. Too intelligent for her own good. A pretty child with the promise of disastrous beauty. She rode her mount like the wind had taken her and made her own choices when no one was looking. Heedless in the way of the men in the Leighton Cluster, the ridiculous name given to his family of misfits. It was no wonder Arabella Macauley thought she could do anything considering the freedom she’d been given and the liberal views of every woman who’d had a hand in raising her.

Crossing to his troublesome dilemma, Nigel slipped the glass from her hand, and polished off the contents. She didn’t move, but the pulse in her throat burst into rhythm. “What is it you need, imp, on this dark and frosty night? Please recall I’m seldom asked to save the day. I didn’t count on ever having to save one of yours.”

Her gaze skipped over his hand to his face. His temper flamed when he saw a hint of compassion embedded in her silver eyes. To survive, he worked in a tarring house after escaping the orphanage, and the brutal employment left scars on his skin that depicted his past like marks upon a tombstone.

“Out with it,” he murmured, losing patience by the second.

Arabella braced her hip on the balustrade, her blinding smile finally showing signs of defeat. “My companion of several years, Katherine, the only person who managed to endure my stubborn nature and still enjoy being around me, ran off with Lord Gadsby. They met at his country party last spring, you may recall the event. Remember, it rained for days on end, and we all practically went mad from boredom? In any case, out of respect for true love, I promised her I’d give them enough time to make it to Gretna Green. If I alert my family now, they might be stopped. You know the baron’s mother is a horror.” She twisted her skirt in her fist and gave it a shake. “We got slightly emotional during our farewell, and I left my cloak and gloves in Gadsby’s carriage.”

Nigel clenched his jaw, his headache pulsing. “And you had him bring you here ? ”

“I told Gadsby if he breathed a word of my involvement, you’d do to him what you did to that earl at Epsom.” Arabella chewed on her bottom lip, a generous one, he hated to admit. She did have the loveliest pair, plump and the pale pink of a rose petal.

“The earl said something unpleasant about my mother and her damned matchmaking.”

Arabella tried without success to hide her smile. “I merely need a ride home. With someone who is used to breaking the rules.”

Nigel counted to ten, suppressing the urge to pitch his glass to the gaming floor a story below. “I haven’t stolen a bloody thing since I was eleven years old, imp. Not one pocket pinched in over twenty years. If you’re seeking a dishonest gambit, I’m not your man. I won’t lie to your parents after what they’ve done for me.”

Her lovely lips parted in shock. Then she reached out, grasping his wrist. He shook her off, but not before acknowledging her touch flowed through him like water down a fall. “Oh, no, Nigel. No . You’re my mother’s favorite, outside her own sons. You’ve employed dozens of her rescues from the workhouse at the Devil’s Lair. I only meant the times with William and Worth, those escapades with your brothers. And mine. The races down Bond, swimming in the Serpentine. You’re family, or close to it, so… here I am.”

For some reason, this rationalization didn’t suit.

Nigel was a decade older than Arabella Macauley. He was out of her league because of his low birth even if no one discussed it, and she, in some fashion due to lack of experience and age, was out of his.

And they weren’t family.

He wouldn’t want to press his sister back against a marble column and find out if she tasted as good as she looked.

He stared into his glass, morose to admit this sickening development. “I’ll get you home safely before dawn. I can pick any lock put before me. Just remember to avoid the third step going up the servants’ staircase. It creaks loudly enough to wake the house.”

“How do you know this?” she whispered.

He turned away from her, hoping the searing heat racing down his spine was due to the roaring hearth fire. “You’re not the first Macauley I’ve helped out of a catastrophe, imp. ”

“We won’t have to lie. But my father won’t have to find out you’re involved, either.”

Nigel yanked on his boots with a silent curse. Because if that happened, friend or no, Xander Macauley would murder him on the spot.