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      London, 1814

      Innocent Laurel Vernon is living a nightmare after being kidnapped and put up for auction in one of London’s most notorious brothels. Only the memory of private enquiry agent Patrick Jago gives her strength. Even though she only knew him for a few days, Patrick made her feel both protected and weak with desire.

      When Laurel sees Patrick among the brothel’s clientele, she isn’t sure if he has come to rescue her or to satisfy his own lust. But she is certain that he intends to bid on her!

      Dear Reader,

      When I was writing Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress I found myself becoming curious about Patrick Jago, the enquiry agent that Meg Halgate sends in search of her missing sisters. I sensed that behind Patrick’s businesslike exterior there was a man of action and that I would like to see more of him. He was certainly more attractive than the elderly ex-Bow Street Runner who I had been expecting to arrive.

      He carries out his mission for Meg, but mysteriously writes to say he is delayed in London. I had no idea why, so I set out to discover what he was doing. I did not expect to find him in The Temple of Venus, a high-class brothel, but there he was.

      I hope you enjoy discovering just what Patrick is about as much as I did!

      With best wishes

      Louise

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      About the Author

      Chapter One

      The Temple of Venus, King’s Place, St James’s London, May 1814

      The clock struck the hour. Eleven. Laurel clenched her tethered hands, felt the nails bite into her palms. It was going to happen now. It was hopeless, but she would not surrender lightly. She would fight and she would hurt whichever foul man they sold her to, even though she had no hope that it would do her any good. She wished her nails were longer. She wished she had a knife. She prayed she would not cry.

      Laurel forced herself to stand up straight and not huddle into a mindless, terrified ball. She was terrified, she admitted, but she was not going to give them the satisfaction of showing it. Her hands were shaking, her stomach was hollow but she was not a mindless victim, even if her concentration was all over the place, her imagination skittering from one hideous imagining to another.

      She stood in the shadowy antechamber, barefoot in the long white linen shift, her hair loose around her shoulders. Patrick, she thought as the two young women who flanked her, painted and scantily dressed in crimson silks in contrast with her virgin white, took her by the arms.

      How could the name of a man she had known only a few days give her strength? And yet she had not been able to get him out of her mind.

      Patrick, she repeated over and over as she was led through a door into a sudden explosion of noise and heat and the smell of alcohol and smoke, perfume and food.

      He stomach roiled and her knees shook, but she kept her head up. Patrick. He had been an impossible dream from the moment she met him in the inn room in Martinsdene—tall, serious, a private enquiry agent, all the way from Cornwall with a mission to find two missing women who had once been her friends. A man who had unaccountably made her weak with a longing she did not understand. She had spent three days trying to help him in his search for Lina and Bella Shelley, but he had given her the key to her future with news of her old friend, their sister Meg, who had employed him.

      As she forced her chin up and her shaking legs to walk, she remembered the blaze of feeling as she met his eyes that third afternoon as he prepared to leave. Something in his look had spoken to the feminine core of her in a language she had not been consciously aware of before. But then she realised something about him had attracted her from the very first.

      Patrick Jago was calm, intelligent and, by some alchemy she did not understand, he made her feel both protected and vulnerable. As his eyes had held hers, that look said that he was a man and she was a woman and that was all they needed to know. He is going to kiss me now, she had thought as he had moved closer. And nothing had happened. Perhaps she had been wrong and he felt nothing. Perhaps he was too much a gentleman to take advantage of an innocent young lady sharing a mild adventure with him.

      Then she had the sense to go, to run, not from him, but from her own foolish fantasy that here was the man she had waited for all her life. Because that was all it could have been—a fantasy.

      I’d have been safer throwing myself at him, she thought bitterly as she had a dozen times an hour for the past two days. Safer than arriving as an innocent lamb amidst the wolves who hunted in London’s crowded inn yards, the wolves who had snatched her up and borne her away as she had tried to work out where to change stage coaches.

      Her attendants led her toward a platform draped in white, untied her wrists and fastened cuffs around them so she was tethered between two classical columns. The present, in all its hideous reality, surged back.

      The noise was like the roar of the sea, beating at her brain. Laurel tried to sneer at the plaster and wood of the stage setting, the hypocritical idiocy of anyone partaking in this travesty of a Roman slave market, but it was impossible. The setting was a myth; the reality would be rape and captivity.

      Reluctantly her eyes focused on the mass of men crowding in front of the stage. Baying, she thought. They are baying. And I will wager that every one of them sees himself as an upright man of honour. Most of them will have wives, daughters.

      Patrick. Oh, she was so desperate that now she was hallucinating. Laurel stared at the tall figure in the third row. It is Patrick. He is real. He has found me. She almost sagged in her bonds with relief until she remembered he had no idea she had come to London. He was not searching for her: the only reason he could be here was to satisfy the same brutal lust that had brought these other men.

      It was the only thing that could have broken her spirit. I thought you were perfect, I thought you were the man I had dreamt of and now I know you are like the rest of them. She had even fantasised about giving herself to him, tried to imagine what it would be like to lose her virginity to his lovemaking. Yet here he was, and Laurel’s knees gave way as the disillusion and mounting terror swept through her.

      She saw him realise that she had recognised him. His mouth curved for a moment, but the smile did not reach his eyes. Instinctively, Laurel knew what he was about to do. He was going to bid for her.

      Patrick