Ruined by the Reckless Viscount Read online

  The Lady in Red

  Viscount Winterton abducts a woman to protect her—but he kidnaps the wrong girl in red! The scandalous carriage dash leads to the ruin of Lady Florentia Hale-Burton’s reputation...and the viscount’s apparent demise.

  Years later, Flora discovers her kidnapper is alive and as entrancingly handsome as she remembers! Disguised, she agrees to paint his portrait in an attempt to understand the man who’s haunted her fantasies. Is it revenge that has brought her this close to him again...or something even more reckless?

  “I am sure in your profession you must have some days in less than your petticoats, Miss Kensington.”

  “Miss...Kensington?” Her voice sounded rusty, the fright evident in every single syllable, for she trembled as she took in breath. “I think...you are indeed...mistaken.”

  “Acacia Kensington?” He heard the horror in his tone. “You are Miss Acacia Kensington, the paramour of my cousin Thomas, are you not?”

  She shook her head hard, the long blond hair falling loose now in a swathe across her shoulders and down over her chest.

  “I am not, sir. I am...Lady F-Florentia Hale-Burton...youngest daughter...of the Earl of Albany.” Each breath was raw with the effort of talking.

  “Hell.” He could not believe it. “Hell,” he repeated and all the clues fell into place. The servant running down the road before the park screaming. The ring. The priggish dress. Her voice.

  He’d kidnapped the wrong woman, rendered her unconscious and subjected her to the sort of danger and terror she’d probably never ever manage to recover from.

  For the first time in his life he was almost speechless.

  Author Note

  I love characters with secrets from the past, and if that past is intertwined with danger then it is all the better.

  James Waverley, Viscount Winterton, is again back in England after ruining Lady Florentia Hale-Burton’s chances of marriage.

  But the spark that ignited between them six years ago is about to burst into flames, and this time Florentia has devised an ingenious plan to discover just who Winter really is.

  SOPHIA

  JAMES

  Ruined by the

  Reckless Viscount

  Sophia James lives in Chelsea Bay, on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, who is an artist. She has a degree in English and history from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer on vacations at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at sophiajames.net.

  Books by Sophia James

  Harlequin Historical Romance

  The Penniless Lords

  Marriage Made in Money

  Marriage Made in Shame

  Marriage Made in Rebellion

  Marriage Made in Hope

  Men of Danger

  Mistletoe Magic

  Mistress at Midnight

  Scars of Betrayal

  The Wellingham Brothers

  High Seas to High Society

  One Unashamed Night

  One Illicit Night

  The Dissolute Duke

  Stand-Alone Novels

  The Border Lord

  Lady with the Devil’s Scar

  Gift-Wrapped Governess

  “Christmas at Blackhaven Castle”

  Ruined by the Reckless Viscount

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Excerpt from Cinderella and the Duke by Janice Preston

  Chapter One

  London—1810

  The door of the approaching carriage opened as it stopped beside her in a sudden and unexpected haste.

  ‘Get in now.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ Lady Florentia Hale-Burton could not quite believe what she had heard even as the stranger standing above her on the top step of the unliveried coach repeated it again more loudly.

  ‘I said get in now.’

  The man frowned when she did not move and leaned forward so that his face was not far from her own. A beautiful face, like an angel, she thought, though his voice held no notes of the celestial at all.

  ‘Look, unlike your long-suffering paramour, I am not up to playing this silly game of yours, madam. If you don’t get in this minute I will drag you inside and be done with it. Do you understand?’

  ‘I will do no such thing, sir. Of course I will not.’ Finding her voice, Florentia looked about wildly for some help from her maid, Milly, but the girl had dropped back, her mouth wide open in alarm as she turned to run. It was like some dream, Flora thought, the horror of it appalling, like a nightmare where no matter how much you wanted to escape you could not. Fright held her simply rigid. The sky was grey and the day was windy. She could smell cut grass and hear birds calling from the park across the road. An ordinary Wednesday on a walk she had done a hundred times before and now this...

  As the stranger stepped down from the carriage and took her arm she finally found resistance, swinging her heavy reticule at his face and connecting with a thump. The two books inside the bag were weighty tomes on the history of art, leather bound and substantial. The edge of one cut into the skin above his right eye and blood gushed down his cheek, though instead of looking furious, which might have been expected, he only began to laugh.

  ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘Thomas damned well owes me for this though he did warn me you might not come easily if he was not present. But enough now. We are beginning to attract some attention and if I am going to be of any help to you we have to leave immediately.’

  Grabbing at her, he pulled her hard against his body and she bit into his hand. Swearing, he brought one arm down across her breast when she screamed as loud as she could manage. Then he simply clamped his fingers on the top of her right shoulder and all she knew was darkness.

  * * *

  James Waverley, Viscount Winterton, couldn’t believe he was doing this, kidnapping his cousin’s whore before Hyde Park and rendering her unconscious. But Tom had insisted, pleaded, cajoled and finally called in any favour James had ever promised. So he had.

  ‘She’s a feisty one, you will find,’ his second cousin had insisted, ‘and if I was in any position at all to go and get her myself I would, but...’ He’d looked down at his leg cast from the ankle to the thigh. ‘She needs to be out of London, Winter, needs to be safe from those who might hurt her.’ And because one of his own unruly horses was responsible for his cousin’s broken leg, James had consented.

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Blonde and sensual. She will be wearing red, no doubt, as she always does and will be waiting on the corner of Mount Street opposite Hyde Park at five o’clock precisely.’

  Lord help me, James thought. Tom hadn’t mentioned that
she would be the type to scream her head off in fury or whack him with a heavy bag full of books.

  She didn’t have the appearance of a whore either, with her demurely cut pink and red day dress and old-fashioned hat, but then what was the look of one? He’d never required the services of a lady of the night before, though he had seen them around Covent Garden and the Haymarket and many of them had appeared...quite ordinary. Perhaps Acacia Kensington was one of those girls, thrown into the game by dire circumstance and the need to survive.

  She certainly had good teeth. The bite mark on his hand stung badly having cut the skin to leave it swollen and throbbing.

  Laying her down on the seat opposite, he took off his jacket and placed it under her head as a pillow. She’d wake up soon and there would be all hell to pay, the journey north taking a good few hours to complete. With a frown he looked away.

  Is this who he was now? A man who would hurt a woman? A man who might take the path of least resistance when quite plainly it was the wrong thing to do?

  Swearing, he sat back and glanced out the window. A young maid was running along the pathway and shouting at the top of her lungs, another couple joining her. When the man raised his hand in a fist the first shudder of things not being quite as they ought to be went through him and he was glad when the carriage turned into the main road north, its speed increasing.

  The blood from the cut above his right eye had begun to blur his vision and he swiped at it with the sleeve of his jacket, blotting the redness against dark linen.

  Thomas could do his own courting next time, broken leg or not, he thought, and if the girl came to as angry as she had been he didn’t quite know what he would do next. Put her out, he imagined, and let her make her own way from London, or not. In truth he didn’t care any longer.

  She had a damn expensive ring on the third finger of her right hand, the diamonds winking in the light. No false gold or cut glass either, the patina and shape of the piece telling him this was the real thing. Perhaps a paramour had gifted it to her. Tommy had the funds to procure such a bauble, should he have wished it, so maybe this was his doing. He was a man inclined to the grand gesture.

  The anger that had been his constant companion threatened to choke him and he pushed back the familiar fury. Once he would have told his cousin exactly where to go with his hare-brained schemes of procuring women, but now...

  The war had knocked the stuffing out of him and he had returned from Europe and the first Peninsular Campaign unsettled. He did not fit in here any more, having neither property nor much in the way of family, save a father who had taken more and more to the drink. He wanted to be away from the London set and its expectations, but most of all he needed to be away from the brutality of war. It had settled into him the aftermath of violence, making him jumpy and uncertain, the ghosts of memory entwined even in the ordinariness of his life here.

  * * *

  He swore again twenty moments later as sky-blue eyes opened and simply looked at him, the paleness of her cheeks alarming.

  ‘I think... I am going...to be...sick.’

  And she was, all over his boots and on her dress, heaving into the space between them time after time and shaking dreadfully. Her eyes watered, her nose ran and the stench of a tossed-up lunch hung in the air as she simply began to cry. Not quietly either.

  Banging his cane against the roof, James was glad as the conveyance drew to a halt, the countryside all around wide and green, the road empty before them and behind. He didn’t stop her hurried exit as he threw water he carried for the journey on to the carriage floor, drying what he could with great bunches of wild grasses pulled from the side of the road.

  She was gone when he had finished, disappeared into a tract of bushes behind a stone fence. He caught the hue of her red gown at some distance dashing between the trees of a small grove.

  Part of him wanted to simply leave her there and go on, but it was getting late and dusk would soon be upon the land. If she fell into a ditch or in with the company of someone who might really hurt her...

  Cursing again, he bade Thomas’s driver to wait for him and went in after her.

  * * *

  Florentia ran from tree to tree, her breath ragged as the asthma she had had since childhood came upon her with this unexpected exertion.

  She was crying and running and trying to draw in breath, sharp branches tearing at her gown and at the exposed skin on her arms and legs.

  Would her kidnapper follow? Would he kill her? Would he chase her and trap her here in the woods and the oncoming darkness and so very far from London?

  She tripped and went down hard, then got herself up again, the pathway more difficult to discover now, the sound of a stream further on and dogs.

  Dogs? Her heart leapt in her throat. Big dogs? The horror of it kept her still, the sound of crashing feet drawing nearer as two enormous black and brown hounds padded out from a break in the undergrowth and came towards her, lips bared and teeth showing.

  ‘Keep very still.’ His voice. The man from the carriage. Raw. Brutal. Furious. He sounded as though he would like to kill her along with the canines though the hackles of each dog were raised along bony spines, ready to spring.

  He’d stooped to pick up a few of the bigger stones around his feet and threw one hard and fast. A direct hit to the flanks had the lead dog crouching down and slinking backwards. Two long scars at the back of her abductor’s head were easily visible in the fading light. She wondered how anyone could have survived such wounds as that.

  ‘Get back, damn it.’ His words seemed to be having some effect as the second dog followed the other.

  ‘Walk slowly towards me.’ This was directed at her now. ‘Don’t run. They are hunting dogs trained to protect and defend. Any quick movement will have them upon you and my pistols are still in the carriage.’

  ‘You...would...shoot them?’

  He laughed at that, a harsh and savage sound. ‘In an instant, were I armed and they were attacking. Now do as I say.’

  She did because just at that moment the slobbering teeth of the hunting pair were infinitely more worrying than the possibility of this stranger hurting her. Again. She was pleased when he stood before her shielding her from the threat. ‘Now, walk backwards, keeping my body in a direct line with the dogs. Don’t make eye contact with them. Don’t trip. Look as if you are in charge until you get through the green shelter at the edge of the clearing and then turn and run for the carriage as fast as you can go and get straight in. Do you understand me?’

  ‘And...what...of...you?’

  ‘I will be fine.’

  He picked up another of the big rocks with one hand and a dead branch from the ground as a weapon and planted it before him. One of the dogs growled loudly in response and the noise had her moving back past the shelter of the bushes and away. As she scampered through the scrub at the edge of the clearing she simply turned and ran for the carriage, screaming at the driver about the dogs and the danger and slamming the door shut behind her.

  It was wet inside and smelt like hay, though the dress she wore bore the stronger stench of vomit. Taking a flask of water from a shelf at the back of the conveyance, she poured it across the skirts of her gown, the cold seeping through the red-sprigged muslin and making her shiver.

  Her breathing was worse. She could barely take in air now and the panic that she knew would not aid her was building. Placing her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes. This sometimes helped, but she needed the expectorant and the anti-spasmodics that her mother procured from Dr Bracewell in Harley Street. She needed calm and peace and serenity.

  Would she die here on the side of a country road and alone? Would her family even know what had happened to her? Would her body be left to the dogs to devour after strangers had stolen her jewellery and books and her dress?

  Not
to mention her virginity.

  The dreadful terror of it all had her sweaty and clammy and she began to feel strange and distant from things. It was the air...she couldn’t get enough of it.

  Finally, and with only the slightest whimper, she fell again into the gentler folds of darkness.

  * * *

  Hell, this whole journey was turning into a fiasco, James thought as he rejoined Thomas’s mistress in the carriage. She was on the floor now in a puddle of water, the cold liquid seeping into the red dress and darkening the fabric to scarlet. She was breathing strangely, too, the skin at her throat taut and hollow and a blue tinge around her lips.

  Finding his blade, he leaned forward and slit the tight fabric of her gown from bodice to hem, peeling it away from her. Without hesitation he threw the stinking wet dress straight out of the window and tucked his jacket about her before lifting her to sit up on the seat opposite. An erect position would make breathing easier, he thought, for he’d seen a soldier once with the same ailment on the icy roads between Lugos and Betanzos, and the man had insisted his head should be above his lungs or otherwise he would perish.

  Reaching over to a net shelf at the back of the carriage, he searched for the tin of peppermint grease he’d bought at an inn from a medicine man on the way down to London. His cousin was prone to a weakness of chest and the vendor had been so insistent on the healing properties of the treatment James had found coin and purchased it.

  Now he fingered a large translucent blob into his palm and rubbed at the skin around the girl’s throat, though the fumes of the ointment were strong and his eyes began to water. Surely such potency must have some effect on allowing breath. He wished she would speak to him so that he could see how she fared, but she simply sat there, a tight and angry presence. He knew she was now conscious—years of hard soldiering had taught him that difference—but he did not wish to harry her with the malady of her condition and the skimpiness of her clothing so he left her to herself and willed the miles gone.

  Her legs were badly scratched beneath the skirts, he’d seen that as he had lifted her and the shoes she wore were nothing more than thin leather and silk. A woman used to the boudoir and an inside life. Her hair in the fading light was the colour of honey and gold. He had imagined whores to be cheap and brassy somehow, an artificial enhancement on show for the customers they would be trying to attract. Acacia Kensington’s locks looked natural and unfussy.