The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides #1)(33)

She surged to her feet. “Do not do this,” she pleaded, and held her hands up imploringly. “I beg you.” Tears filled her eyes and she hated that with her words and actions she was this weak, pathetic creature.

If he was at all affected, Ryker gave no outward reaction. “It is settled. Your belongings have been packed. His Grace is waiting.” With that, Ryker looked again to the clock. “I’ve business to see to.”

Business.

And she was just family. Not so very important, after all. The club came first. She’d always known that, but she’d in a night full of folly allowed Lord Robert Westfield to dismantle her world.

Four months. She’d but four months to endure the haute ton.

A dark fury threatened to overtake her, as she damned the day she’d ever had the misfortune of meeting Lord Robert Westfield.





St Giles, England

Spring 1822





Chapter 8


Rule 8


Be wary of rakes and rogues.

Anyone who believed Helena Banbury, girl of the streets, would ever find a husband was as corked in the head as a Bedlamite.

When she’d been shipped off to the Mayfair district of London, Helena had realized it.

The duke’s wife had taken one look at Helena and known precisely what she was, and had also realized it.

And most importantly, all respectable members of the peerage realized it.

Women such as Helena would never, ever make a respectable match. Ever.

Not that she wished to make a respectable match.

Or to be specific . . . any match. The whole idea of legally binding herself to any man who could put his hands on her in violence, and his prick inside her with lust . . . well, yes . . . she was better off without all worry of a husband.

She stood at the back of the modiste’s shop while the duchess spoke with Madame Bisset, who was no more French than Helena was a lady born and bred. Periodically the women would glance in her direction and shake their heads in that deploring way. The way governesses employed by her brother had when she’d shown a greater proclivity to numbers than she had any ladylike endeavor.

Her skin pricked with the familiar stares trained on her person, and she stiffened. A pair of flawlessly beautiful brunette twin ladies pointed and whispered. Bitterness twinged in her breast. Then it was not every day a genuine lady had opportunity to stare at a duke’s scarred by-blow. What those ladies failed to know was she’d suffered far greater cruelties than any they could ever inflict. She turned her attention to the arrangement of bows, and to give her hands something to do, she trailed her fingertips over each silly scrap, silently counting each blue ribbon as she moved down the narrow aisle.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

How many times as a child had she hovered outside shop windows much like this one, hungering to step inside and trail her coarse, dirtied fingers over those satin and silk fabrics?

She paused, staring blankly down at the fifth blue ribbon in the pile. She’d spent so many days yearning to know how the other half lived, casting wishes up at the dirty star-studded London sky for a chance to dance just once outside the streets of the Dials and inside the ballrooms of the elegant lords and ladies who’d failed to so much as see a small starving child.

Now Helena looked about the oblivious ladies in the shop, so casually throwing away their wealth, the same way their husbands, brothers, and fathers tossed coins upon the gaming tables. How much that love of frivolities and waste said of the people her brother had sent her to live amongst.

“They are lovely, aren’t they?” A voice sounded just at her shoulder. “I think with your coloring you’d look magnificent in a shade of green, but alas Mother insists you don pale yellows and beiges.”

That prattling pulled Helena from her own musings. She shifted her attention from the assorted bows to the fresh-faced, oft-smiling daughter of the Duke of Wilkinson. His only legitimate daughter. At seventeen, and only just having made her Come Out, Lady Diana was either hopelessly na?ve or incredibly generous of heart to not mind that her Season had been crowded by her father’s by-blow.

“Hmm?” Lady Diana urged, holding up two ribbons: a striped mint-and-white scrap and a sage-green bow. “Which would you choose?”

As much as she despised the world she’d been thrust into by Ryker, she could never muster a hint of meanness for the always-kind half sister who’d been far more tolerant than any other lady surely would have ever been.

Absently, Helena touched the ribbon in Diana’s right hand.

“Lovely choice.” The girl beamed. “I shall tell Mother . . .”

“No,” Helena said, her high-pitched request bringing the young lady to an abrupt halt. At the questioning look shot her way, she mustered a smile. “Her Grace has already been generous enough.” Which was not untrue. The woman had proven magnanimous with the garments and fripperies that filled Helena’s once-drab wardrobe. Just not with any true kindness. From the front of the shop, the blonde duchess, with her pinched mouth, glanced at Helena.

She made little attempt to stifle the loathing teeming from her gaze.

“Oh, do not be silly,” Diana protested. “Papa would wish you to have it. You are, after all, their daughter.”

Helena choked on her swallow, that sound lost to the smattering of giggles from the twin beauties, who whispered and gestured all the more. She would never be a daughter to the hateful Duchess of Wilkinson, and she would only be a child to the duke in the strictest sense of blood. Through the hint of the other girls’ meanness, Diana chatted on, as she always did, hopelessly oblivious. The girl gathered her ribbons and carried them to one of Madame Bisset’s girls.