Sweetest Scoundrel

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  In loving memory of my mother, Beverly Walton Kerr McKinnell

  1940–2005

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my beta reader, Susannah Taylor, and my editor, Amy Pierpont, because, dudes, you would not have wanted to read this book without them. ;-)

  And thank you to my Facebook friend Jaclyn R. for naming Henry.

  Chapter One

  Once upon a time there lived a king so monstrous he devoured his own children.…

  —From The Lion and the Dove

  SEPTEMBER 1741

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  It took an extreme provocation to rouse Eve Dinwoody.

  For five years her life had been quiet. She had a nice house in an unfashionable but respectable part of town. She had her three servants—Jean-Marie Pépin, her bodyguard; his pretty, plump wife, Tess, her cook; and Ruth, her rather scatterbrained young maid. She had a hobby—painting miniatures—which also served to bring in extra pin money. She even had a pet of sorts—a white dove she had yet to name.

  Eve liked her quiet life. On most days she quite enjoyed staying inside, puttering around with her miniatures and feeding the unnamed dove oat kernels. Truth be told, Eve was rather shy.

  But Eve could, in fact, rouse herself from her quiet life, given enough provocation. And Lord knew Mr. Harte, the owner and manager of Harte’s Folly, was very provoking indeed. Harte’s Folly was the preeminent pleasure garden in London—or at least it had been before it’d burned to the ground over a year ago. Now Mr. Harte was rebuilding his pleasure garden, and in the process spending quite scandalous amounts of money.

  Which was why she stood on the third floor of a disreputable boarding house very early on a Monday morning, glaring at a stubbornly shut door.

  A drop of rainwater dripped from the brim of her hat onto the worn floorboards beneath her feet. Really, it was an absolutely disgusting day outside.

  “Do you wan’ me to break the door down?” Jean-Marie asked cheerfully. He stood well over six feet tall and his ebony face beneath a snowy wig gleamed in the low light. He still had a faint Creole accent from his youth in the French West Indies.

  Eve squared her shoulders. “No, thank you. I shall handle Mr. Harte myself.”

  Jean-Marie raised an eyebrow.

  She glared. “I shall.” She rapped at the door again. “Mr. Harte, I know you’re within. Please answer your door at once.”

  Eve had performed this maneuver twice already without result, save for a crash from inside the room after the second knock.

  She raised her fist for a fourth time, determined to make Mr. Harte acknowledge her, when the door swung open.

  Eve blinked and involuntarily stepped back, bumping into Jean-Marie’s broad chest. The man standing in the doorway was rather… intimidating.

  He wasn’t tall exactly—Jean-Marie had several inches on him and the man was only half a head or so taller than Eve herself—but what he might have lacked in height he more than made up in breadth of shoulder. The man’s arms nearly touched the doorway on either side. He wore a white shirt, unlaced at the throat and revealing a V of tangled dark chest hair. Wild tawny hair fell to his shoulders. His face wasn’t pretty. The exact opposite, in fact: it was strong, lined, and fierce, and everything that was masculine.

  Everything that Eve most dreaded.

  The man glanced at Jean-Marie, narrowed his eyes, leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, and turned his attention to Eve. “What.” His voice rasped deeply, like that of a man newly roused from sleep—a quite unseemly intimacy.

  Eve straightened. “Mr. Harte?”

  Instead of replying he yawned widely before running a hand over his face, pulling down the skin around his eyes and cheeks. “I’m sorry, luv, but I haven’t any more parts available for the theater. Per’aps if you come again in another two months when we stage As You Like It. You might make a passable”—here he paused, eyes fixed quite rudely on Eve’s nose—“maid, I suppose.”

  He turned his head and shouted over his shoulder, “Are there maids in As You Like It?”

  “A shepherdess,” came the reply. The speaker was feminine and had a beautifully accented voice.

  Mr. Harte—if it was he—glanced back at Eve without any real apology in his haggard face. “There. Sorry. Although I have to say, at your age and with”—he actually flapped his hand at Eve’s nose this time—“I’d look into something behind the stage, luv.”

  And he shut the door in her face.

  Or at least he tried to, but Eve had had enough, thank you very much. She stuck her foot in the gap, pressed her shoulder against the door, and walked into Mr. Harte.

  Who, unfortunately, didn’t move back as he ought to have done.

  He blinked, scowling down at Eve.

  This close she could see the little red veins in his bloodshot eyes and smell some sort of stale spirits on his person. Also, he seemed not to have made use of a razor in several days.

  His virility was nearly overwhelming.

  She could feel the old panic rising in her chest, but she fought it. This man posed no threat to her—not in that way, in any case—and Jean-Marie was right behind her, besides. She was a woman grown and ought to have been over these terrors years ago.

  Eve tilted up her chin. “Move, please.”

  “Look here, luv,” he growled. “I don’t know your name or who you are, and if you think this is how an actress gets a part at my pleasure garden, you’re—”

  “I’m not an actress,” she enunciated clearly, in case he was hard of hearing as well as a drunken oaf. “And my name is Miss Eve Dinwoody.”

  “Dinwoody…” Instead of clearing his brow, her name made him scowl harder, which should’ve made him positively repugnant and yet somehow… didn’t.

  She took the opportunity of his distraction to slip triumphantly past him.

  And then she skidded to a halt.

  The room was an absolute shambles, crowded to overflowing with mismatched furniture and dusty things. Stacks of papers and books slid off chairs and tables, falling to alluvial mounds on the floor. In one corner a huge heap of colorful fabric was piled, surmounted by a gilded crown; in another a life-size portrait of a bearded man was propped next to a four-foot-tall model of a ship, complete with sails and rigging. A stuffed raven eyed her beadily from the mantelpiece, and on the hearth itself a kettle steamed next to a teetering tower of dirty dishes and cups. Indeed, so filled was the room that it took Eve a moment to notice the nude woman in the bed.

  The bed itself sat square in the center of the room, an overgrown, unwieldy thing, hung with gold and scarlet curtains like something from a Turk’s harem, and in the middle reclined an odalisque, the golden coverlet barely concealing her curves. She was dark and sensual, her ebony hair spilling to olive-tinged shoulders, lips a deep natural carmine.

  Eve’s eyes widened abruptly as she realized what had been going on in this room perhaps only moments before. Her gaze darted to Mr. Harte before she could stop herself looking, for confirmation of… of… well.

  But Mr. Harte merely looked big, male, and irritated.

  Eve cocked her head. Shouldn�
��t there be some way in which to tell—?

  The woman sat up, the coverlet falling perilously to the very tips of her breasts. “Who are dees peoples?” she asked with a heavy Italian accent.

  Mr. Harte crossed his arms on his chest, his legs spread wide. The stance emphasized the bulge of muscles in his upper arms. “I don’t know, Violetta.”

  “I do apologize,” Eve said stiffly to the woman, presumably Violetta. Must Mr. Harte take up so much space in the crowded room? “Had I known you were in dishabille, I assure you—”

  Mr. Harte barked a nasty laugh. “You came bursting in. When, exactly, would you have stopped to—”

  “I assure you,” Eve began, glaring at the awful man.

  “It’s-a no problem,” the odalisque said at the same time, grinning and revealing an incongruous gap between her two front teeth. She shrugged again and the coverlet gave up the fight, falling to her waist.

  Mr. Harte glanced at the woman, paused, his eyes fixated on her now-revealed bosom, and then visibly shook himself before dragging his gaze back to Eve. “Who are you anyway?”

  “I already told you,” Eve said through gritted teeth. “I am Eve Dinwoody and—”

  “Dinwoody!” Harte exclaimed, pointing at her quite rudely. “That’s the name of the Duke of Montgomery’s man of business. Signs his letters ‘E. Dinwoody’ in the most affected hand I’ve ever seen…”

  He frowned suddenly.

  Jean-Marie and the odalisque looked at him.

  Eve raised her eyebrows, waiting.

  Mr. Harte’s moss-green eyes widened. “Oh, the Devil damn me.”

  “Yes, no doubt,” Eve said with a completely insincere smile. “But before that happens I’ve come to cut off your credit.”

  AND THIS WAS the inevitable reward for a night of too much drink, Asa Makepeace—known to all but a select few as Mr. Harte—reflected sourly. For one, in his wine-fogged daze last night he’d thought it a fine idea to take Violetta to bed again—when she was much too important an asset to the garden to risk an emotional entanglement. And for another, the aftereffects of a night of drinking—pounding temples and a generally weakened state—put him at a disadvantage in dealing with the termagant in front of him.

  He glared at Miss Dinwoody through his throbbing eyes. She was tall for a woman, thin with a mannish chest, and had a face dominated by a large, long nose. She was as plain as a shovel—and he was glad of it, because the witch was trying to steal away his sweat, his dreams, and his blood. Long nights lying awake, making bargains with the Devil and devising desperate plans. Hope and glory and everything that he breathed for, God blast his miserable soul. All he’d lusted for, all he’d despaired over, all he’d lost and then fought with bloodied fists to regain.

  She was trying to steal his goddamned garden.

  He lifted his upper lip. “You haven’t the right to cut me off.”

  “I assure you I have,” she snipped back in accents that would’ve made the Queen jealous. She wasn’t afraid of him, he’d give her that, though at the moment that fact irritated him.

  “The Duke of Montgomery promised me a full line of credit,” Asa said, slamming his hand down on the table and finding that the pose fortuitously helped to keep him from swaying. “We’re scheduled to reopen in less than a month. The musicians have the score, the dancers are practicing, and a dozen seamstresses are working night and day to finish the costumes. You can’t cut me off now, woman!”

  “The duke didn’t give you carte blanche to steal from him,” she said, her lips curling a bit on steal. Who was she to look down her overlong nose at him anyway? “I’ve sent you letter after letter asking to see your books, to examine your receipts of purchase, to be informed in some way of what you’re spending thousands of pounds on, and you’ve ignored all my correspondence.”

  “Correspondence!” He stared, incredulous. “I haven’t time for bloody correspondence. I have a theater to finish, gardens to plant, tenors, sopranos—and God help me, castrati—and mimers and musicians to order and collect and keep happy—or at least working hard—and an opera to put together. What do you think I am, a bloody mincing aristocrat?”

  “I think you’re a businessman,” she shot back. “A businessman who ought, at the very least, to be able to account for his expenditures.”

  “My expenditures can be found at the garden,” he roared. “In the buildings, the plantings, the people employed. Who are you to ask for my accounts?” He looked her up and down. “Why has the duke employed a female man of business in any case? What are you to him—his mistress? I’d think he could do better, frankly.”

  Behind him Violetta inhaled sharply, and the footman glared.

  Miss Dinwoody’s eyes widened—blue, he realized. Blue like the sky on a cloudless summer day—and he almost felt regret for his blunt words.

  Almost.

  “I,” she said with awful clarity, “am the duke’s sister.”

  He arched a skeptical eyebrow at her. She’d introduced herself as Miss Eve Dinwoody—the sister of a duke would be styled Lady Eve.

  Her lips thinned at his expression. “We have different mothers. Obviously.”

  Ah, that explained it, then: she was a bastard by-blow of her father’s, but no less an aristocrat for it. “And your blue blood makes you qualified to manage the garden’s finances?”

  “The fact that my brother entrusted the funds to me makes me qualified.” She inhaled and threw back her shoulders, pushing that meager bosom at him. “And none of that is to the point in any case. I’m cutting off your credit and your funds as of this moment. Mr. Sherwood of the Royal theater has offered to buy out my brother’s stake in Harte’s Folly, and I warn you now that I am seriously considering his suggestion, since it appears to be the only way my brother will see his money again. I merely stopped by to tell you in person as a courtesy.”

  She turned and swept from the room, as grand as any royal princess. Her giant footman smirked at Asa before following her.

  Courtesy? Asa mouthed the word incredulously at his closing door. What in the last five minutes did the woman think had been in any way courteous? He looked at Violetta, spreading wide his arms. “Bloody fucking Sherwood! She wants to sell my garden to my biggest rival. Never mind that Sherwood must be talking out of his ass—the man hasn’t the money to buy Montgomery’s stake out. God’s balls! Have you ever met a more unreasonable woman?”

  The soprano shrugged, jiggling what had to be the loveliest breasts in London, not that it mattered at the moment. “That is hardly the most important consideration for you right now, yes?”

  “What?” He shook his head. God, it was much too early for him to be parsing feminine riddles.

  She sighed. “Asa, caro—”

  “Hush!” He scowled at the door and then back at her. “You know I don’t like anyone overhearing that name.”

  “I doubt Miss Dinwoody and her footman lurk outside the door.” She actually rolled her eyes at that. “Mr. Harte, do you need the money this woman controls?”

  “Yes, of course I do!” he shouted, outraged.

  Violetta made a moue at his temper. “Then you had best go after her.”

  “That woman is rude, condescending, and just plain mean.” He waved wildly at the door behind him. “Are you insane?”

  “No.” She actually smiled at his bellow. “But you are if you think standing here and raging will change anything. Miss Dinwoody holds the strings to your purse and without her”—she shrugged again—“I will leave and so will everyone else who builds and works in your so-beautiful gardens. I love you, caro, you know this, but I must eat and drink and wear pretty gowns. Go now if you wish to save your garden.”

  “Oh, fucking hell.” He knew she was right.

  “And Asa, my love?”

  “What?” he growled, already turning to the door.

  “Grovel.”

  He snorted as he bounded down the rickety wooden stairs of his boardinghouse, but Violetta was canny about peop
le. If she said he had to grovel to that witch in order to get the money, he would.

  Even if it gave him an apoplexy.

  Asa burst out the door and into the street. Rain was drizzling down in a halfhearted way, the sky cloudy and gray. A few paces away Miss Dinwoody and her footman were walking to a waiting hackney carriage.

  “Oi!” Asa yelled, running after them. “Miss—”

  He meant to lay a staying hand on her shoulder, but the footman was suddenly between him and the woman.

  “Don’ touch my mistress,” the man intoned.

  “I mean no harm,” Asa said, hands palms out and at shoulder height. He tried for an ingratiating smile but had the feeling that it came off as more of an angry grimace. Grovel. “I wish to apologize to your mistress.” He leaned to the side to see her, but the footman moved with him. “Apologize most abjectly. Can you hear me, luv?” This last he simply shouted over the man’s shoulder. All he could see of her was the black hood of her cloak.

  “I can hear you just fine, Mr. Harte,” she returned, cool and composed.

  The blackamoor moved aside finally, as if by some unspoken command, and Asa found himself staring into those blue eyes again.

  They hadn’t softened.

  He swallowed a sharp retort and said through gritted teeth, “I’m so sorry, ma’am, I don’t know what came over me to speak to a lady in that way, especially one so”—he caught himself before he praised her beauty, because that was a bit thick even for him—“ fine as you. I hope you’ll find it within your heart to forgive my offense, but I’ll understand, I truly will, if you can’t.”

  The footman snorted.

  Asa ignored him and smiled.

  Widely.

  Apparently Miss Dinwoody was immune to his smile—or maybe males in general. Those sky-blue eyes narrowed. “I accept your apology, Mr. Harte, but if you think such a blatant bunch of nonsense will make me change my mind about my brother’s money, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  And she turned to go—again.