The Wolf of Mayfair

How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!

—Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

The following morning, Helia stared out from the little space she’d made on the frosted windowpane and took in the storm still raging.

Deep drifts, the kind she’d loved to dive into as a child, blanketed the duke and duchess’s vast gardens. The branches of the lone spruce tree hung heavy under the burden of several inches of snow that had piled upon them. The six-foot-tall cast stone fountain of Venus stood with a bronze tray stretched over her head. From that metal platter, ice dripped like frozen teardrops that hadn’t been free to make their final descent to the Fiore Pond below.

The sky did cry, and it cried for Helia; the storm made travel impossible for a second day.

The marquess’s attempts to petrify her had turned out to be prophecy.

Helia’s eyes slid closed.

I am ruined.

A lady could escape notice in the dead of night, in the dead of winter, amidst a storm, but in the light of day . . . discovery was inevitable.

For secrets didn’t live in these streets—or, truth be told, any streets. People of every station subsisted on scandal, and inevitably their whispers became roars.

Or maybe, since her parents’ death, she’d become so accustomed to living moment to moment she’d merely deluded herself last evening.

What was more likely? That Lord Wingrave had been trying to scare her or that he’d known exactly what would happen were Helia to spend the night alone in his household?

Nay, a man of his prowess and reputation knew all too well, she’d been ruined the night she’d stepped through the foyer doors.

He’d taunted her with the idea of making her his mistress.

That offer he’d made had come because he knew she’d wake up with no other choice.

The whole world believing I’ve had you in my bed? And with no choices available to you, that would be your only course—becoming my mistress.

Helia’s breath came in raspy, noisy spurts, matched by the driving winter winds.

I believe you’d love that, Helia . . . Nay, I know you would. And not for the diamonds I’d drape you in but for the endless pleasure you’d find in my arms . . .

She’d be no man’s mistress. If she didn’t mind whoring herself, she’d have agreed to marry Mr. Damian Draxton and had the certainty which came from being a countess.

What was so very wrong with Helia that thoughts of being bedded by Lord Wingrave didn’t repulse her the same way thoughts of lying with Mr. Draxton did?

They were both horrid men.

Why then should so many women throw themselves at Lord Wingrave’s feet and, according to everything she’d heard whispered or read, beg to be his lover?

Only, you ken, Helia. You ken.

Shame brought her eyes sliding shut once more.

For fear alone had not kept Helia awake last night, into the wee morning hours, but instead, thoughts of Lord Wingrave.

There was no accounting for it—she found herself equal parts repelled by Lord Wingrave and fascinated by him.

The moment young girls stopped being repulsed by boys and became fascinated by romantic thoughts of a sweetheart, they imagined the one who’d be the first to kiss them. Helia was no different. In the dreams she’d carried, she’d share that magical moment with a man who was powerful, bold, confident—one such as the Marquess of Wingrave.

Tall and well muscled, and with an obsidian jaw as hard as his nearly black eyes, Lord Wingrave was more beautiful than any mere mortal man had a right to be. Helia, however, had always prided herself on being able to resist the allure of a rake with raven-black hair and a haughty stare.

Instead, there’d been the whisper of a moment where she’d thought he would kiss her, and God rot her wicked soul, she’d yearned to lose herself in Lord Wingrave’s embrace—just so she could be free for a moment of the threat breathing down on her.

Helia, revolted to the core at even contemplating such a thing with such a man, slapped her hands over her face and pressed hard.

Her reputation was ruined, and now she faced another threat—one just as great in its own right, and no less terrifying: staying here until the storm let up and being unable to resist any efforts on the marquess’s part to seduce her; that was, should he decide he wanted to.

Helia’s breathing grew shallow in her ears, and she took in and exhaled breath after shuddery breath.

The wind howled, and that mighty gust sent the thin branch of a nearby silvery birch colliding with the window.

KnockKnockKnock.

That branch continued its incessant beating, as if to drum sense into her clouded head.

Helia shivered; however, that slight tremble had nothing to do with the cold penetrating the thick crystal panes.

She folded her arms at her shoulders and rubbed the chilled flesh.

And yet, if you don’t fear him and your body’s shameful response to him, a voice taunted, then why do you remain shut away in your rooms?

From within the windowpane, she caught sight of her own reflection staring back—with both knowing and disappointment.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said to her likeness. “I am not hiding.”

She stared intently back, willing herself to believe that.

“I’m not,” Helia maintained.

She released a sigh. “Very well, I may have been hiding,” she conceded. “I was hiding.” She gave herself a stern look. “Are you happy?”

Finally being honest with herself, Helia acknowledged she’d remained shut away in her temporary rooms to avoid seeing the marquess again.

Which . . . given she’d been on her own these past three months, and faced the cruelty of her distant cousin Mr. Draxton, was ludicrous.

Everything was worse in the dead of night; shadows were monsters and groaning floorboards the wails of long-dead ancestors. And Lord Wingrave—a fearsome rake whose reputation preceded him—was no different.

But morning had come and they were both clearheaded.

With Lord Wingrave having offered Helia sanctuary—albeit more as a dare—he’d proven benevolent and merciful. Had he truly been cruel, he would have had one of his many servants toss her right outside, storm or no storm—as he’d initially threatened to do.

The more she considered it, she reckoned her exchange with Lord Wingrave—as well as her response to him—had been the culmination of the fear that had followed her on her flight from Scotland and to Horace House.

Or maybe you’re just telling yourself all this to make yourself feel better . . .

She gave her head a shake. It was time to stop hiding in her temporary rooms. She was in trouble, and whether she liked it or not—and she decidedly didn’t—the marquess was the only person she could turn to for help.

At last, the incessant pressure at the base of her skull which had nagged her since the moment she left her meeting with Lord Wingrave dissipated some.

Before she let all her earlier doubts and fears win out, Helia walked briskly across the room, and without stopping, she pressed the cast-brass door handle and sailed out into the hall.

When Helia reached the end of the corridor, she found two footmen, one stationed on each side of the passageway.

Each man wore a white powdered wig, and the two stood facing one another, their inexpressive gazes directed like the King’s Guard outside St. James’s Palace.

As neither servant paid her any notice, she cleared her throat.

Still, they remained motionless and numb to her presence.

“Excuse me,” she finally said, when it appeared they’d absolutely no intention of looking at her. “I was wondering if you can help me?”

The pair blinked in a like slowness. Only the bewigged fellow to her left, however, glanced at Helia—and, barely, at that.

“His Lordship, the Marquess of Wingrave,” she murmured.

The footman remained blankly staring, and she wondered whether her earlier assessment had been correct and the fellow was, in fact, simple.

When no response proved forthcoming, she spoke more gently and with greater clarification. “Do you ken where I may be able to find His Lordship, the Marquess of Wingrave.”

That managed to crack the composure of not one servant, but both.

A faint look passed between the two men.

“When at Horace House,” the footman on her left murmured, “His Lordship does not welcome company, miss.”

Aye, she trusted a man so surly didn’t . . . except maybe from the wicked women with whom he was rumored to associate.

Both servants went back to their on-alert position, and it soon became apparent they intended to say not a word more.

Again, Helia made a clearing sound—that had no effect. “Ahem,” she repeated a third time, more loudly. “I appreciate that . . . information about His Lordship’s preferences . . . ?” she urged, when only the slightly more communicative fellow on her left deigned to cast the faintest of glances her way.

A confused glimmer flared in his eyes.

“I trust you have a name?” she asked gently.

The handsome footman glanced back and forth, up and down the corridors, as if he sought the person whose identifier she’d requested.

Helia took mercy on him. “What is your name?” she asked in the plainest way possible.

That directness did not, however, cure the man of his befuddlement. “My name? Is . . . John Thomas?” With that, he straightened into his previously assumed position, clasped his big hands behind him, and stared sightlessly ahead with a blank stare to rival all the marble busts in the hall.

“Mr. Thomas, Lord Wingrave was so good as to make me a guest of Horace House, and I’d like to speak with him. If you would be so good as to share where I may find him at this hour?”

Helia favored him with her most winning smile.

The small, circular, black birthmark at the corner of the servant’s mouth disappeared under the grim line his lips formed.

“His Lordship breaks his fast at this hour,” he confirmed in a timorous voice.

Her grin deepened. “Splendid! Thank you so much for sharing that.”

Helia remained fixed to the floor and awaited further information.

They continued to stare blankly at her.

“Will you be so good as to provide me directions to the breakfast room?”

Both men appeared a breath away from crying.

“His Lordship will be expecting me,” she promised.

Their dubious expressions matched her inner self-ruminations, and for a long moment, Helia thought they intended to ignore her request, but then the silent-until-now servant on her right provided taciturn instructions.

Forcing a lightness she didn’t feel, Helia gave each servant a little wave and then went in search of the breakfast room.

As she went, she took in her surroundings.

Marble busts sat proudly on display upon French Louis XVI carved pedestals, accented in gold. The lifelike renderings of noble-looking strangers, whose hostile expressions and merciless eyes, frozen in time, dared a soul to do something as foolish as remain in this cold, forbidding place.

She reached the middle of the hall, which led to another like-decorated corridor, and stopped before a bust of a familiar visage—Lord Wingrave.

Bold and unflinching, the man who’d posed for this piece didn’t angle his gaze downward as the other subjects had.

The sculptor had expertly, masterfully, captured the likeness of the future Duke of Talbert and committed to stone a clear glimpse of the formidable, unyielding lord.

Helia drifted closer and stopped directly in front of the column. Unbidden, she stretched her fingertips out and traced the rendering of the marquess’s stern, perfectly proportioned mouth, lips as hard and unbending in stone as they were on the man himself.

Riveted, drawn in just as the artist had no doubt intended, Helia cocked her head and remained locked in her study.

The bust, not unlike the flesh-and-blood man, possessed a flinty gaze which silently commanded a person to look away, and yet the searing intensity of this marble stare also pulled a person in.

The enmity spilling from Lord Wingrave’s stone stare dared the creator of his piece to find a hint of warmth for his work. And yet . . .

Helia traced her fingers along the chiseled planes of his cheeks, lower, and then stopped.

The artist had found and eternalized the one and only softening of his subject—a faint cleft at the center of Lord Wingrave’s rock-hard jaw.

How could a man rumored to melt hearts and have women throwing themselves at his feet also be so cold as to abhor company?

How could these two opposing things be true?

They couldn’t. It . . . just wasn’t possible.

Helia had to force herself to look away from the marquess’s likeness and continue on to meet the flesh-and-blood Lord Wingrave.

At last, Helia reached the breakfast room.

Her wide-eyed gaze went to the twelve-foot, crystal-top, gilded-leg table positioned—undoubtedly strategically—at the center of the room, near enough the window that passersby might view the regal occupants breaking their fast, of which, at the present moment, there was just one.

From where he sat at the far left end of the table, Lord Wingrave glanced up from his plain toast, a bite suspended near his lips.

His steely eyes locked on Helia; from those cynical depths radiated a self-possession that glittered with some level of surprise.

Only a man so wholly confident in his self-worth and strength could manage such firm eye contact, and Helia, who’d never been without a word at the ready, found herself tongue-tied.

Sharpening that perpetually hard gaze upon Helia, Lord Wingrave set his partially eaten toast back on his pretty porcelain plate.

Say something.

In the end, the marquess took the onus of issuing the first greeting.

“What do you think you are doing here?” His voice rumbled like the violent wind that battered the windows.

Her heart jumped.

In the name of the wee man.

Helia found her voice. “Forgive me,” she said, grateful for the steady, solid delivery of her words.

She sank into a deep, respectful—albeit, belated—curtsy.

Aye, she trusted a powerful sort such as Lord Wingrave, a future duke, didn’t take well to not being shown his due respect.

Helia turned, and as she did, out of the corner of her eye, she caught the way some of the tension eased from Lord Wingrave’s excellently broad shoulders.

Uneasily humming the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” Helia made her way over to the gilded buffet, which was stocked with such a vast selection of breakfast foods, she wondered whether the duke and duchess had returned, and arrived with company for the winter season.

All the while she made the seemingly endless march to that offering, she felt Lord Wingrave’s gaze following her every move, boring through her.

When Helia reached the sideboard, she favored the footman standing on duty with a smile. “Good morn, Mr. . . .”

He stared with a blankness identical to that of the two Mr. John Thomases upstairs.

“I trust you have a name?” she gently inquired. She flashed him a gently teasing smile. “Unless all the footmen are known as Mr. Thomas as a matter of convenience for the master and mistress?”

Color splotched his cheeks, confirming just that.

She rocked on her heels. This chilly treatment toward one’s staff was not something Helia understood.

“Do you have a problem with that, Miss Wallace?”

That frosty question from over her shoulder brought Helia spinning around.

Lord Wingrave’s cold-eyed stare briefly suspended the words on her lips and the thoughts in her head.

You were right in your first assessment of this man and this place. Run. Hide. Flee.

He arched a glacial black brow, daring her to speak.

“N-no,” she sputtered. Except . . . “Aye.”

“Which is it?” he whispered.

Helia’s legs trembled and she pressed her knees together to keep them from knocking, lest he see the effect he had upon her.

“My family, we treated our servants as an extension of our family,” she murmured in explanation.

“Ah, how . . . quaint.” His lopsided grin mocked her more effectively than words ever could. “Now tell me, why did you not seek out the help of your servant family members instead of making yourself a nuisance for me?”

She faltered. “They couldn’t . . . They would have—”

“But they didn’t because, given their station, there was nothing they were able to provide you, is that not right, Miss Wallace?” he mocked. “That doesn’t sound like family.”

Helia looked him over, and for all the previous dread his presence roused, pity found its way inside her heart. How very sad were the lenses through which he viewed the world.

“On the contrary. What manner of family would I be if I let them risk both their livelihood and lives to help me?”

“You’d be as self-serving as the rest of the people in the world,” he drawled.

“People all provide different things, my lord,” she murmured. “My family’s servants were no different. They offered kindness and warmth and—”

“And how warm did their warmth keep you when you found yourself in need?” he cut in, effectively shutting down Helia’s attempt at enlightening him.

And this is the man whose mercy you find yourself at . . . ?

Her hopeful spirits dimmed.

With a more muted word of thanks, Helia helped herself to the dish between Mr. Other John Thomas’s fingers.

Sometimes, as her mother had been keen to say, it was best for one to haud yer wheesht . . . until a later time.

Not even here a single day, holding her tongue proved the cleverer option.

Helia turned her full attention to the well-stocked array of breakfast foods. Simultaneously, her mouth watered and her stomach gave an embarrassingly loud rumble.

Helia went ahead and began making her dish. She plucked a brioche bun and piece of french bread, thought better of it, and added another brioche bun. Moving purposefully down the row of trays and platters laid out, she helped herself to a honey cake, cold pork, liver, and french plums.

Food. Never again would she take that gift from God for granted.

She approached the end of the vast sideboard, eyed her heaping plate a moment, and then spooned a bit of scrambled eggs into the last hint of an open corner on her dish.

The slow scrape of wood striking wood brought her back around.

With a lethal and deliberate-looking slowness, Lord Wingrave unfurled each inch of his greater-than-six-foot frame.

At the raw, unfettered virility of the man glowering back at her, Helia quivered, as did the plate in her unsteady hands.

She tightened her grip.

Quivered? Speechless? What is next? Blushing? That third in the threeling signs of a besotted lady?

Helia made the agonizingly long march across the room, to the spot at the head of the table Lord Wingrave occupied.

With each step, she remained keenly aware of the gentleman staring impenetrably back at her.

Male perfection and virility aside—it was Lord Wingrave’s darkly enigmatic eyes. He possessed magnetism that alternately compelled a woman to both look away and look her fill, all at the same time.

And then, it happened. She who did not and had not and believed she’d never be so silly as to be drawn by a man’s stare alone, felt it—the finisher. Heat bathed her cheeks, in a stinging blush.

Aye, apparently she’d gone and completed that triunity of femininity.

At last, Helia reached the white-painted Louis XVI caned chairs nearest the marquess, promptly stopping beside the seat directly next to Lord Wingrave’s.

She instantly regretted her choice. Walking into the fire itself suddenly seemed a safer option.

Too proud, however, to retreat, she waited for him to draw her seat out, and when it became apparent he’d no intention of doing so, she set her dish down.

It was as though the slight click of her plate touching the table freed him of the words he’d already shown himself to closely guard.

“You’re here.” He bit out those two words.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not realize you’d break your fast so early. Given the late night we—you,” she swiftly corrected, “probably had.” She stole a discreet glance at the servant, whose impassive gaze remained impressively forward in his apparent attempt to make himself invisible. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

Another footman hurried over to draw her high-backed chair out.

With a single icy look, the marquess quelled the young man’s efforts.

Helia scrunched her nose up. Very well. She could see to her own seat.

With that, Helia tugged out the chair and sat. Desperately trying to avoid the sinister lord towering over her, she snapped a white linen napkin open, placed it on her lap, and then, collecting her fork and knife, began to eat.

While she chewed, she felt his formidable presence hovering over her. Unmoving.

The scrambled eggs on her tongue turned to dust, and she made herself find the courage to look up.

Lord Wingrave snarled: “What do you think you are doing?”

Oh, hell. She’d displeased him again.