Page 1 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter 1

London, The Haymarket

June 1820

The darkness thrummed with anticipation. Arousal and bloodlust swirled through the air like the foul-smelling smoke from the gentlemen’s cheroots.

Men in formal evening dress stood shoulder to shoulder with tradesmen in homespun jackets and baggy trousers; breathless women clustered like bouquets of hothouse flowers near the scarlet cords marking off the ring at the center of the tavern.

Some were swathed in high-necked silk and lace while others sported the low-plunging décolletage of the demimonde.

It was a jumble of people who would never rub elbows under any other circumstances, but here, they all had one thing in common.

To a one, every single person was masked.

House rules of The Nemesis.

Bess Pickford lifted a trembling hand to check that her plain black domino mask still covered the top half of her face.

She was no fancy highborn lady, but it wouldn’t do to be recognized here. She might have come to London hoping for a little taste of adventure before she settled down to the rest of her life in the sleepy Wiltshire village of her birth, but even in her wildest imaginings, Bess never could’ve dreamed up this place.

The Nemesis, a back-alley tavern nestled amongst the artists’ garrets, portrait galleries, shops and theaters of the Haymarket, was known to serve a good quality brown ale and a well-dressed pullet with pease porridge for a very reasonable price during the day.

By night, however, as the curtains came down and the theaters and opera houses disgorged their throngs of pleasure-seekers into the streets, The Nemesis became something else.

Something dangerous. Forbidden. Exciting.

Bess, who was quite possibly the least exciting person she knew, wondered if she’d made a huge mistake in coming here.

Tension gripped her, a vision of the previous evening rising to the surface of her mind.

The darkened kitchen, lit only by firelight. The strange, heated intimacy of the shadows, the labored breathing of the man clutching his side at the big, marble-topped worktable—the pounding of her own blood when she raised the bottom of his white linen shirt to expose the sluggishly bleeding cut along his lower ribs…and also exposed the taut muscles of his abdomen and the arrow of dark hair leading down into his buckskin trousers.

She shook herself free of the memory. Not for you , she reminded herself sternly. He’s a duke, and a miserable son of a bitch besides, too high in the instep to condescend to even look at a woman like you .

Unless he needed her help. Like last night, when he’d stumbled into the kitchen in obvious pain, and she had insisted on tending his mysterious wound.

Over the excited hum of conversation and breathless tension in the tavern, Bess heard again the sound he’d made deep in his chest when she’d torn a strip from her own petticoat to wind round his heaving rib cage. The feel of his skin beneath her fingers as she tied the knot, hot and smooth and supple and alive.

Closing her eyes, Bess blew out a breath. This was exactly why she’d come to The Nemesis tonight.

If she was getting flustered by an encounter with the cold, unfeeling Duke of Ashbourn, she was in a right state.

Bess ignored the inner voice that pointed out Ashbourn had felt the opposite of cold under her hands, and the look in his intently focused eyes as he watched her…

Enough. Ashbourn was a gentleman. A duke. He’d have his pick of the virginal debutantes of the Season, but Bess Pickford was no debutante.

Nor was she a virgin, as it happened.

She’d come to London to help her friends, but she’d also promised herself an adventure while there.

Tonight, she intended to finally fulfill that promise. Before she lost her head and threw herself away on pining after the Duke of Ashbourn.

She wasn’t looking for a gentleman—in fact, quite the reverse.

Bess needed a scoundrel.

That was why she’d come to The Nemesis. That was why she stood alone near the back wall, waiting for the entertainment to begin, not sure what she should even expect, but knowing that this was the most scandalous adventure she could possibly have chosen because The Nemesis wasn’t an ordinary tavern.

Men came here to fight, to brawl—to win. But it wasn’t an ordinary boxing club either.

It was whispered that this was a place where every patron who walked through the door knew—hoped?—that if they were chosen by the victor of tonight’s bout…they would go willingly and eagerly to the winner’s bed.

Bess shivered, a potent blend of nerves and longing trailing down her spine like a touch.

Touch. She wanted it so badly—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d received anything more than a casual brush of a hand passing a mug of ale across the bar. Perhaps an impulsive hug from Lucy, or a friendly hip bump from Lucy’s older sister, Gemma, as the two women passed each other going about their duties at the coaching inn Gemma owned, where Bess worked as a cook.

It was enough to get by, Bess supposed. It didn’t necessarily have to be about passion—though she couldn’t deny that a wish to be desired as a woman was part of it.

There were simply times she felt as light and insubstantial as a puff of flour, and as easy to blow away. Her body ached for a touch that would make her feel real, seen, wanted…alive. And as an unmarried woman with no close family living, she had nowhere to turn for it.

Leastways, nowhere proper.

And here in London Town, far from Little Kissington and everyone who’d known her since she was knee-high to a bumblebee, Bess Pickford was ready to take a risk to get what she needed.

A boisterous group of women jostled her as they pressed closer to the boxing ring set up at the center of the low-ceilinged room. One of them cursed as she bobbled her drink, sloshing a light spray of beer over Bess’s bare arm.

“Pardon me, luv,” the woman cried, her eyes wide and dark behind the cream-colored velvet mask that contrasted luxuriously with the rich brown of her skin. “Ever so sorry, did I get your gown? Here, let me…”

Bess laughed and waved her off. “Pay it no mind. If I worried over every drop of ale spilled on me, I’d not last a day back home. I work in a?—”

The Black woman held up a hand to stop her, smiling wide and friendly all the while. “Careful! We all like our privacy here; I’ll warrant you’re no different. And whatever it is you do for a living that gets you regularly splashed with beer, I apologize just the same. Quite the crush in here, isn’t it? Well, to be expected, I suppose.”

“Is it?” Bess used a plain white handkerchief to wipe her arm dry, glad of the chance to cover how at sea she was…and how relieved she felt that her new friend had kept her from blurting out that she was the cook at a coaching inn called Five Mile House in Little Kissington, north Wiltshire!

She might as well take off her mask and toss it on the rubbish heap for all the good it would do her if she planned to tell all and sundry where she lived and worked. Good Lord.

“Of course,” the other woman said confidently, her glittering gaze sweeping the crowd with what looked like satisfaction. “Once the word went out he was coming back tonight, when usually we must wait weeks between appearances, well! It was all but guaranteed there’d be barely room to breathe in here. Especially after that bout last night. What a corker!”

“I don’t know who is supposed to be here tonight,” Bess confessed with a little laugh under her breath. “I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”

“Ah, a virgin,” her new friend purred, putting out a hand for Bess to shake. “You’ve bumped into the right person, luv. Or rather, the right person bumped into you. You can call me Madame Leda. I happen to be the proud proprietress of this fine establishment. Wait!”

Bess, who had indeed been about to introduce herself with her real name, closed her teeth with snap and felt her cheeks heat.

Madame Leda shook her head, giving Bess a sharp look. “You really are shiny new, aren’t you? And pretty, too. Dear me. Do you have any notion what goes on in this place?”

Uncertainty thrummed through Bess, but she didn’t let it show. “I don’t know everything that will happen tonight,” she said quietly, meeting Madame Leda’s watchful gaze. “But I know enough. I’m ready. I want to be here.”

After a long, charged moment, Madame Leda smiled and looped her arm through Bess’s crooked elbow. “Just remember you can always say no.”

Bess frowned. “I thought—I was told, once one walked in the door, one has agreed to…”

“Serve as tribute?” Madame Leda shrugged one slim shoulder. “Some people enjoy that idea, but the truth is, no one here is obliged to do anything they don’t like. Aside from the masks, that’s the only real rule. Do what feels good—to you and to whoever you’re with. If you don’t like it? Don’t do it.”

Unsure whether that rule made her feel reassured or not, Bess smoothed her damp palms down her skirts. She worried she’d spent most of her courage on merely getting to The Nemesis and deciding to enter. She’d been counting on the house rules to make her go through with the rest of it.

“Tonight isn’t a bad night to try the old Nemesis on for size, anyhow,” Madame Leda decided, turning her attention back to the crowd. “You’ll get a taste of the action with less chance of getting swallowed up yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

Around them, the noise of the restive spectators began to rise, whispers and gasps turning to shouts and wild applause and cheers.

“It’s Red Jack,” cried a young man at Bess’s elbow, his voice cracking with excitement.

Everyone in the room seemed to surge forward at once, a wave of humanity pressing Bess forward and nearly lifting her off her feet, catching her up in the tidal swell of hungry expectation.

“Because the main fight tonight will be spectacular, guaranteed,” Madame Leda crowed over the din as, on the other side of the ring, a beefy man with the brawniest shoulders Bess had ever seen pushed through the crowd.

He had a cocky grin and a shock of hair the color of roasted carrots. He wore nothing but patched breeches and a flamboyantly embroidered red mask that sat oddly on a nose that had been broken so many times, it looked like a squashed turnip.

The man raised his arms in a V as though he’d already won, bouncing on his toes and accepting the slaps to his back and shoulders as his due. He ducked into the ring and proceeded to throw punches at nothing, warming himself up for the fight to come.

“Is he one of your best fighters?” Bess asked, her heart sinking strangely within her. If this man won, he would have the right to claim any onlooker as his prize.

Of course, despite all her silly imaginings, there wasn’t much chance anyone would choose her out of this wild, worldly, glittering company.

Country rustic Bess Pickford in her plain, serviceable gown of dark blue cotton muslin and unadorned white linen fichu tucked into her modest bodice? When there was a woman over there in a gown cut so low, the rouged tops of her nipples appeared every time she took a deep breath?

No. No one was going to choose Bess.

And if this ginger-haired man did, would she refuse? Or would she go with him? She bit her lip.

But Madame Leda was shaking her head, a gleam of excitement brightening her eyes behind the cream mask. “Not that one.”

Bess looked away from the man puffing his chest out like a bantam rooster to the other side of the room, which had fallen silent. The throng of masked onlookers parted as if they were a set of curtains drawn back by slow, steady hands.

“That one,” purred the voice in her ear as Bess’s stare fell on the man who was making his way toward the ring.

Tall and powerfully built, the man had brown, wavy hair that fell carelessly over a plain leather mask. The mask covered the top half of a face of such hard angles and sharply cut lines, he appeared to have been carved from stone by a very uncompromising sculptor.

From the glimpses she caught through the crowd, his muscles, gleaming with oil in the low light, looked hard too. He didn’t have the breadth of Red Jack, who’d stopped to watch the man’s approach, but there was a quality to his movement, a barely leashed ferocity, that reminded Bess suddenly of the wolf that had prowled the winter forests near Little Kissington when she was a girl.

The last of his pack, the lone survivor of a dying breed, wild and cagey and vicious.

This man was like that. He had a lean, hungry look that raised the short hairs at the back of Bess’s neck, sending a bolt of instinctive alarm through her. She shivered, her nipples tightening into hard little knots under her chemise. Her thighs shifted restlessly.

“Who is that?” she breathed, unable to tear her eyes from the silent predator stalking forward through the crowd.

“They call him The Berserker, because…well. You’ll see. Oh, but have no fear, little lamb,” Madame Leda said, patting Bess’s arm. “They’re all here to watch The Berserker, and they’re all hoping to be the one he chooses at the end of the fight—but they’ll all be disappointed.”

“Why? Will he lose?” Despite the other fighter, Red Jack, being bigger and more obviously aggressive, Bess somehow couldn’t imagine it.

“The Berserker wins every fight. But he never chooses anyone.” Madame Leda gathered her skirts. “Now if you’ll excuse me, luv, I see my man over there needs my help with something. Enjoy your night!”

Before Bess could even thank her for the kind welcome, Madame Leda had disappeared into the mob trailing a cloud of night-blooming jasmine in her wake, and there was nothing left to distract Bess from The Berserker.

It was ridiculous, how hard she found it to look away from him. She couldn’t even see him clearly—there were too many people in the way, and the room was too dark and smoky and loud and chaotic—yet somehow, it felt as though he was the only thing she could see. As though an invisible cord connected them, pulling tighter and tighter and making her breath come in short little bursts.

She wanted him. And there was no way he would even notice her among the crowd, because everyone wanted him. She looked around and saw every single face turned to him, drawn to him, foolish, reckless moths aching to hurl themselves into a living flame.

For the first time in years, Bess wished she were someone else, someone more alluring. Like Gemma, with her saucy smiles and curves as luxurious as a cream-filled bun, or even Lucy, the little hoyden, bright and sharp as a lemon tart.

Bess…was more like good, plain bread. Warm and nourishing, serviceable, but hardly what anyone would call alluring .

Except that the man known as The Berserker stepped into the ring and looked across the space and through the masses of people…directly at Bess.

The line she’d felt between them before went taut and vibrating, jerking her forward, her eyes held by his, shadowed and enigmatic behind the mask. She couldn’t look away from them, even as Madame Leda reappeared inside the ring, effortlessly commanding the room with a charming smile and a voice that lilted over the clamor to introduce the fighters and explain the rules.

Bess heard none of it; the noise of the tavern faded as though she’d ducked her head under the water at the swimming hole near the bend of Westcote Brook back home.

She stared into The Berserker’s shadowed eyes, the color impossible to discern across the dimly lit distance, and he stared back.

The moment was suspended in stillness, as though they knew each other. As though they’d known each other forever.

Vaguely, at the periphery of her vision, she saw the other fighter, the ginger one they called Red Jack, move closer to The Berserker to say something in his ear. Something taunting, going by the cresting delight of the onlookers, who seemed to scent blood.

The Berserker didn’t appear to pay him any mind, giving no reaction at all, until Red Jack turned and gestured. And Bess could see…he was looking right at her, too.

People in the crowd nearest her started to turn, to stare, and she still couldn’t make herself look away from The Berserker’s gaze as it sharpened and went dark with a deadly gleam of rage.

The Berserker broke their stare, at last, and turned slowly to face the other fighter, who faltered at whatever he saw in the depths of his opponent’s merciless glare.

Red Jack didn’t have time to regret whatever he’d said, however, because in the next instant, The Berserker was upon him.

Bess drew in a breath that felt less like a gasp and more like the prelude to a scream that got caught somewhere in her throat. Every part of her body tensed and flinched at the raw, animal sound of a man grunting in pain, the loud thud of fists hitting flesh—until she realized with a shock that all the sounds were coming from Red Jack.

Not only had he not managed to land a single blow on The Berserker, but The Berserker fought in an eerie silence that made him seem something other than human.

He’s not even breathing hard , Bess thought in a haze of disbelief, until he took a particularly strong cross-body shot that twisted his bare, gleaming torso…and he made a sound like the low rumble of thunder before shaking it off.

But not before Bess’s dazed eyes had fallen to the long, shallow scrape, scabbed and still raw looking, that cut across his lower ribs.

No. It couldn’t be.

It must be a coincidence, her mind stuttered out, even as the rest of her catalogued and confirmed the details she’d noticed before but hadn’t been able to focus on.

Tall. Light brown hair that she was more accustomed to seeing ruthlessly tamed and brushed back away from a face that was all sharp edges and distinctive Roman nose. A lean, powerful body that moved with deceptively casual grace.

The wide, muscled planes of the chest she’d been close enough to touch the night before—the taut, hard lines of his waist where she’d wrapped his wound.

Red Jack got in another lucky blow, uncurling from his defensive hunch to drive his opponent back a step. The taller man skidded in the straw and he circled Red Jack slowly, stalking him around the ring with his back suddenly to Bess, and she saw…she saw…

She blinked hard and looked again, but still could not believe it.

There, poking out of his trouser pocket, was a bit of white cloth with a ragged edge, stained dark maroon with blood.

It was a strip from her own petticoat. The one she’d used to bind the cut on the ribs of…the Duke of Ashbourn.

The Duke of Ashbourn was the pitiless, feral beast known as The Berserker.

The Duke. Of. Ashbourn. Was ripping another man to shreds before the fascinated eyes of a hundred slavering spectators.

And when he finally put Red Jack down with a final hammer-blow of a single fist, the Duke of Ashbourn stood for a moment panting over the prone body of his enemy before slowly raising his head to find Bess in the wildly cheering crowd.

Still silent, without a single word, he lifted the same hand he’d used to beat his enemy into the dirt and pointed directly at Bess.

Then he turned and stalked out of the ring.