Chapter One

      London—spring 1817

      ‘What exactly do you think you are doing?’ Mr Rathbone demanded, his deep-blue eyes fixing on her through the wisps of steam rising from the copper bathtub. Dark-brown hair lay damp over his forehead. One drop escaped the thickness of it, sliding down his face, then tracing the edge of his jaw before dropping into the tub.

      Laura slid her finger away from the trigger, afraid of accidentally sending a ball through the moneylender’s sturdy, wet and very bare torso. She had no intention of killing him, only frightening him into giving back the inventory he’d seized from her uncle Robert. Judging by the hard eyes he fixed on her, he wasn’t a man to scare easily.

      ‘Well?’ he demanded and she jumped, her nerves as taut as the fabric over the back of a chair.

      When she’d slipped into the house determined to face him, she’d expected to find him hunched over his desk counting piles of coins or whatever else it was a moneylender did at night. She hadn’t expected to surprise him in his bath with a film of soapy water the only thing standing between her and his modesty. What had seemed like a good plan in the pathetic rooms she shared with her uncle and her mother, when hunger gnawed at her stomach and cold crept in through the broken window, now seemed horrible.

      Laura settled her shoulders, shoring up the courage faltering under his steady stare. Beyond this humid room was nothing but ruin and poverty. She had no choice but to continue. ‘I demand you return to me the fabric you seized from my uncle.’

      The moneylender raised his arms out of the water, disturbing the calm suds, and she caught sight of his flat stomach before the soapy water settled back over it. His hands rested on the curved sides of the tub. They were long but sturdy, like those of the delivery men who used to haul the bolts of cloth off the cart and into her father’s draper shop. Mr Rathbone’s were smooth and free of calluses, however, and, except for the red of an old cut snaking along one knuckle, the hands of a gentleman.

      She took a step back, expecting him to rise from the water and rush at her. He did nothing except study her, as though appraising her market value. ‘And who exactly is your uncle?’

      Laura swallowed hard. Yes, this was important information to impart if one was to make demands of a naked man. ‘Robert Townsend.’

      ‘The gambling draper.’ Neither shock nor surprise broke his piercing stare. ‘He came to me six months ago in need of a loan to pay a large debt accrued at Mrs Topp’s, among many other establishments. In return for my money, he put up the inventory of the draper business as collateral. When he defaulted, I seized the goods, as was my right pursuant to our contract.’

      The floor shifted beneath her. Uncle Robert had lost the business. In the past, he’d stolen merchandise from the storeroom, a bolt of silk or a cord of tassel, and sold it to fund his gambling. They were losses to the business, but not the whole business.

      It couldn’t be gone, not after everything she’d done to hold on to it after her father’s death.

      Anger overcame her shock and she gripped Uncle Robert’s old pistol tighter, her sweating palms making the wood handle stick to her skin. ‘I don’t believe you. I know how men of your ilk operate, taking advantage of desperate people with high interest rates until they have no choice but to turn everything they own over to your grasping hands.’

      Mr Rathbone’s eyes narrowed a touch. What the gun and the element of surprise had failed to do, her smear of his character managed to achieve—a reaction.

      ‘If it’s proof you require, I’m most happy to oblige.’ He pushed up against the edge of the tub and rose.

      ‘Sir!’ Laura gasped and shuffled back until the edge of a table caught her hip. She clutched the pistol tighter, unable to tear her eyes away as fat drops poured down his slender body, catching in the ripples of his stomach before falling into the sloshing water of the tub. The drops were not thick enough to offer any semblance of modesty and she struggled to keep her gaze from wandering from his handsome face to the long length of chest, stomach and everything else beneath. Her heart pounded harder than when she’d crept into the house through the open terrace door, then pressed herself deep into the shadows of an alcove beneath the stairs when a maid had passed by.

      He lifted one long leg, then the other over the copper tub and stepped dripping on to the small towel on the floor next to it. Over a nearby chair lay a brown banyan of fine silk—French, she guessed, by the subtle pattern in the weave. She expected him to take it up and pull it on over the long expanse of him, but he didn’t. Instead he strode past her, through the wide double doors adjoining the dressing-and-bathing room to his bedroom without so much as a second look, as though she were not standing there threatening his life and he was not stark naked and leaving a trail of wet footprints on the wood floor. He headed to the small desk in the opposite corner of the bedroom, near the windows and across from the tall, four-poster bed hung with expensive embroidered curtains. Behind the desk, he opened one of the drawers. Neither the neat stack of papers on top nor the oil lamp on the corner did anything to prevent her from seeing him as Eve must have seen Adam after they’d tasted the apple. Laura could feel her own judgement coming. What she wouldn’t give for a lightning bolt from above, or at the very least a large fig leaf.

      ‘Here is the contract we drew up the day he came to see me.’ Mr Rathbone came around the desk, holding out the paper.

      Laura forced her eyes to meet his. ‘Would you please get dressed?’

      ‘This is my house. You broke into it and threatened me. I may stand as I like. Now here is your proof.’ The paper fluttered at the end of one stiff, outstretched arm.

      In the flickering candlelight she read the list of her uncle’s debts laid out in points in the centre of the page. There were more names than just Mrs Topp’s. Most were unfamiliar, but a few she recognised from snatches of conversation she’d caught in the hallways of their ramshackle building. Below the terms were Mr Rathbone’s signature and that of a witness, a Mr Justin Connor. Next to them sat Uncle Robert’s uneven letters, the wide way he wrote his R and T clear.

      It wasn’t so much his signing away the shop that shocked her, it was the document he’d put his name to. ‘Where did you get this paper?’

      ‘Mr Townsend brought it to me the night he came here seeking a loan.’

      ‘This is mine. I wrote this, it was my plan to save our business.’

      ‘It was an excellent one and, combined with the collateral he possessed to secure the loan, the reason I extended him the sum. He could have succeeded, if he hadn’t gambled the money away.’ He laid the document on the desk. ‘Are you quite satisfied?’

      ‘I am.’ And we’re ruined.

      ‘Good, then you won’t need this.’ Mr Rathbone grabbed the barrel of the pistol and wrenched it from her hands.

      ‘No,’ she cried, as naked as him without the weapon.

      ‘The gun would have done you no good. It was improperly loaded.’ He pulled the flint from the hammer and tossed the now-useless weapon on the desk along with the contract. ‘Had you fired it, you would have blown your pretty face off.’

      She looked to where the weapon lay on the blotter, as useless as her hope and her foolish plans. This morning