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      MILLS & BOON

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      To my awesome editor, Lara Hyde, because you were the first to see the beauty in him, and I thank you for that! By loving him as he is, you made it so easy for me to write his story. Thank you for letting me write him how he is; darkly beautiful. I’m so glad we got to work together on this book!

      To Barbara from the Happily Ever After blog, and Ashley (aka VampFanGirl) from the Lovin’ Me Some Romance blog. Thank you for all your support and enthusiasm for my writing, and all things Wallingford. I am so happy to have found you. You bring so much fun to what is sometimes a solitary career. And to all the blog hussies who carefully gathered all those “Sinful breadcrumbs” I spread on my blog. I hope his story satisfies and gets the inner hussy purring.

      And last, but never least, to all the readers who e-mailed me, requesting Wallingford’s book, I hope his story doesn’t disappoint.

       And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

      —Anais Nin

      Chapter One

      With a jaded outlook and a black heart, Matthew, Earl of Wallingford, knew exactly what human nature consisted of. Temptation and physical pleasure. At least he had it in him to acknowledge the flaw. Unlike so many of his peers, he did not pretend to be otherwise. He was an unconscionable wastrel without thought or feeling. A rake with insatiable appetites. A disreputable heartbreaker, women said with disgust as he strolled by. Yet it was these same women who entertained him in their husbands’ homes, with anything but disgust.

      Ah, the facade of Victorian morality. What a jest.

      It was a wonderful time for someone like him to be alive. Someone who didn’t believe the innate nature of humans was anything more than self-serving. He had seen very little goodness in his life. But then he had been the furthest from kind or good himself.

      Every day he was confronted with man’s startling avarice. And nowhere on earth was the confirmation of mankind’s selfish, pleasure-seeking ways more evident than in London, among the aristocracy’s elite.

      Behind fluttering silk fans, and beyond the fashionable ballrooms where champagne and polite conversation flowed, lay a cesspool of immorality and vice. It was this dichotomy that Matthew found so amusing. He enjoyed watching the members of the nobility feverishly working to implement the queen’s moral views on religion, family and sex. These were the men who married, fathered children and touted the merits of the married state thither and yon. They were the leaders whom the queen respected, whom she believed in. The ones who championed social reform, who rallied vigorously and vocally at parliament to keep the whores off the street and sex buried beneath a cloak of piety. It was these same men, he thought with amused cynicism, that he greeted in the evening as he toured the brothels, the gambling halls and the supper clubs. Hell, he even, on occasion, shared a cheroot and a glass of port with them while watching the naked dancers parade about, jiggling their breasts and bottoms from the stage where they danced seductively to a bawdy tune.

      Pious and moral, indeed. Even now the mayor’s secretary had a woman’s face in his lap and another’s breasts in his hand. And the mayor? He had taken his leave a few minutes earlier with his long-standing mistress hanging on his arm. Matthew wondered if the mayor had given his young wife and two-day-old son a second thought this evening. Not likely.

      The world-weary space where his heart and soul had once lain laughed at the ever-opposing sides. Morality and London were not symbiotic. Human nature and temptation, now they were synonymous. He, more than anyone, understood that.

      Glancing around the smoky supper club he suddenly realized that it never ceased to amaze him, the variety of proclivities offered in the metropolis. Vice of every kind was available in Victorian London. One didn’t even need a fortune to secure one’s pleasure. Some vices came cheap. Others, not so much. Some men would part with their souls for a chance to taste the sweet nectar of forbidden delights. It was that fact, coupled with his knowledge of what his peers lusted for, that had him here tonight.

      He knew a thing or two about lust and selling one’s soul. A painful, haunting lesson that, but one that had served him well. One that would pay him back tonight.

      Considered a connoisseur of the more pleasurable vices, Matthew was a leader in things such as depravity and scandal, and tonight he was using his reputation to further his goals.

      While the gentleman of the ton played at morality by day whilst indulging in sin at night, Matthew could not be bothered to pretend to be the former. He never was one for hypocrisy. Why act the gentleman when he was nothing but a bastard? He had never understood the need to act like two separate people. It seemed a lot of work, and for what? He respected these men no more than he would a thief or a convict. Perhaps, he thought with a small smile, he respected them even less. There was a certain honor among thieves, and these men, in their evening dress and smooth smiles, had no honor.

      So, not desiring to be a hypocrite, he lived his life in sin, day and night. And he would have it no other way.

      He probably should have felt a measure of mortification that he could so easily admit to such a flaw, but he was incapable of shame. He had no conscience or soul. No heart, either. That had broken and died years ago. The leftover pieces had petrified in his chest, leaving stone shrapnel in a black, empty place that felt nothing. Just a yawning void of…nothing. And he liked it that way.

      He didn’t get close to any of the women he took his pleasure from. And he never took them to his home, either, and preferred to rut on anything but a bed. Proclivities, he reminded himself. London could provide for even the most bizarre perversions. Finding women who would give him what he wanted wasn’t a trial. The only real difficulty was avoiding those irritating emotional entanglements that women liked to enmesh with the act. Fucking was fucking as far as he was concerned. The act was nothing but cock, cunt and the grunts of pleasure. There was nothing more to it than a physical connection in which a male and female’s genitals met. Of course, the poets would fiercely argue otherwise, and his best friend, Lord Raeburn would strenuously work to dissuade him of his slanted view. But Matthew knew better. He’d never been with a woman who didn’t spread her thighs for nothing. There was always a reason: coin, advancement, even something as mundane as making a husband or other lover jealous. There was always motivation behind it.

      It hadn’t taken a lot for Matthew to discover that women manipulated men with sex. It was a female’s most lethal and effective weapon. And being a man who rather enjoyed getting off, he had no recourse but to submit to them, despite their manipulations.

      “Evening, guv.” The sultry voice was followed by the brush of an ample breast along his arm. He stiffened, striving to put the old anxiety and distaste back in that gaping void where his soul had once resided. He didn’t care to be put upon by a female who took the lead. In