Wicked Temptation (Regency Sinners 6)
Carole Mortimer
DEDICATIONS
My husband, Peter
Chapter 1
October, 1815
St. George’s Church,
Hanover Square, London
“I had not expected to see you here today, Lady Prudence.”
Pru’s attention was focused on the happy couple who had just been married, the Marquis of Wessex and his new marchioness, Pru’s closest friend, Jocey. The newlyweds were now accepting the congratulations and the throwing of rice from their guests as they stood outside the church.
Pru stood apart from both the newlyweds and their other guests. Not that it was truly necessary she have that physical distance for her to feel totally removed from other people. The numbness she had felt inside these past six weeks had succeeded in distancing her from her surroundings and the people in it.
She now turned her cool blue gaze upon the gentleman who had dared to interrupt that solitude.
“But I am very pleased to do so,” Lord Titus Covington, Viscount Romney, added warmly, once he knew he had her attention.
It was a warmth and pleasure in seeing him again that Pru did not reciprocate in the slightest.
It had not always been the case, of course. Viscount Romney, aged in his midthirties and unmarried, was undoubtedly one of the most eligible gentlemen in England. He was also very tall and muscular, dark-haired, extremely handsome, and in possession of a vast fortune. Pru had been smitten with him several months ago and had to watch enviously as he paid special attention to her twin, Priscilla, rather than to her.
The two sisters were identical twins—had been identical twins, Pru corrected hollowly. Because her sister no longer lived. Cilla had been killed in a carriage accident six long weeks ago. An accident which had also taken the life of one of Romney’s closest friends, Lord Jeremiah Worthington.
No one had been more surprised than Cilla and Pru when those two handsome gentlemen began to show them special attention during the late summer, Romney to Cilla, Worthington to Pru.
Ironic, then, that it was Pru and Romney who had survived the accident, along with the twins’ maid, and Cilla and Worthington who were now consigned to their early graves.
Pru gazed at Romney dispassionately. He now had several livid scars on his left cheek and down that side of his neck as a result of the fire that had consumed the carriage in which they were all traveling when the accident occurred. But those scars added to rather than distracted from his overall attractiveness, giving a dangerous and piratical daring to a face which was already far too handsome for any woman’s peace of mind: piercing, dark blue eyes, a long and aristocratic nose, with sculpted, firm lips above a square and arrogant jaw.
That he was also broad of shoulder, wide of chest, and slender of waist, with muscular and long legs, seemed an overabundance of masculinity and somewhat unfair to the other single gentlemen of the ton less fortunate in their attributes.
“Might I offer you and your maid a ride in my carriage to the wedding breakfast?” he suggested at Pru’s lack of response to his earlier remarks.
A reminder that she could not just continue to stare at him, unresponsive to any and all of his comments. Not only was it unacceptable in the polite society they both inhabited, but the fact they were talking at all was garnering a certain amount of curiosity from some of the other wedding guests.
Rightly so, of course.
Today’s groom, Lord Jericho Black, the Marquis of Wessex, was another of Romney’s closest friends, along with five other gentlemen present today, those seven gentlemen known in Society as The Sinners. Their friendship was of such closeness, Pru had no doubt those other six gentlemen were well aware of the rift that now existed between herself and Romney.
Mainly because Pru had consistently resisted every effort on Romney’s part to contact or see her since the accident, be it by letter or by a personal visit to her family’s London home.
During the first weeks after her sister’s death, she had been too numbed to wish to see or talk to anyone outside her family and her closest friend, Lady Jocelyn Forbes. Once that numbness began to abate, Pru’s refusal to see or accept any correspondence from Romney had been a conscious decision.
In her mind, whether it was fair or not, she had come to associate Romney and Worthington’s advent into her life and that of her sister with Cilla’s death.
She and Cilla had enjoyed a life of Society balls, parties, and general frivolity for the three years before Romney and Worthington decided to show such a marked interest in them this summer. A life where the only decisions the sisters ever needed to make was which gown or bonnet they would wear that day or evening, and which gentlemen they intended to flirt with.
It might have appeared a life of too much frivolity to some, but the Germaine family had not always been rich. Pru’s and Cilla’s childhood had been somewhat austere in regard to unnecessary purchases or comforts. A large legacy left to their father, the Earl of Winchester, when the twins were aged fourteen, by a distant uncle who had resided in America for over twenty years, had changed their circumstances overnight.
Their father, ever conscious of the life of frugality his countess and daughters had so far been forced to live, instantly began to indulge their slightest whim. An indulgence which had continued before and since the twins were seventeen and old enough to make their debut into Society.