Lady of Desire Read Free Page A

fours, she turned around to face the alley, her heart in her throat. Nearby, atop a moldering half boot and a coil of rusty chain, lay an abandoned spool of thick paperboard that had once inhabited the center of a bolt of fabric. Gingerly, she pulled the spool upright and leaned it against the placard’s edge, the better to conceal herself. The sound of her frightened panting filled the cramped, close space, but she could still see into the alley through the crack between the placard and the spool.
    How her arch rival, Daphne Taylor, would have laughed to see her in such a state! she thought, then held her breath as half a dozen men tore past, moonlight flashing on the knife each carried in his hand. A gunshot ripped down the alley and whizzed overhead. Ducking, she bit back a cry of alarm. More shots followed, then more footsteps sweeping down the alley toward her at a full run.
    Through the small crack between the placard and the spool, she saw four big male silhouettes materializing from out of the fog, spanning the alleyway. Her eyes widened in the darkness as they came closer and she glimpsed the brutal weapons they carried—more knives, lengths of lead pipe as well, and horrible wooden clubs with nails sticking out of the ends. She dared not breathe for fear of being noticed, heard.
    No wonder the boy had fled.
A gang
, she realized as gooseflesh shivered down her arms. Remembered tales and dark legends of what the London criminal gangs sometimes did to their victims filled her with terror. God help her if they found her, she thought. Desperately, she wished she were holding her favorite fowling musket in her hands, primed and loaded.
    “Get into position, ye bastards; they’re right behind us!” ordered a tall, wiry man with lank brown hair. She could hear the intense agitation in his voice.
    “Did you kill ‘im, O’Dell? I saw ye cut him!”
    “Don’t know. Got him good, though, I can tell you. Shite!” he muttered as their pursuers flung into the alley and charged at the first group.
    Before her eyes, the chase turned into a brawl. The two gangs attacked each other with a furor, screaming incoherently at each other as they fought.
    They might as well have been speaking another language, for she could not comprehend a word of their coarse Cockney jargon and the criminal tongue known as the “flash language.” The shadows veiled the worst of the battle from her sight—all she could make out was fast, ferocious movement, a great swinging and slashing—but the sounds alone were awful enough.
    To her dismay, rather than moving on, three more thugs rushed into the alley from the opposite direction, coming to the aid of their six embattled comrades. Now the four pursuers found themselves, in turn, sorely outnumbered. She could hear their cursing and ragged breathing as the others surrounded them on all sides.
    Then, without warning, a hideous roar burst directly overhead like a thunderclap.
    She looked upward with a gasp just as a tall, sinewy shadow leaped up with tigerlike agility onto the pile of moldy bricks adjacent to her hiding place. She caught a flash of wild green eyes in the darkness.
    “O’Dell!”
    Jacinda stared at the newly arrived man. The fight in the alleyway paused, the others exhaling ragged oaths. Moonlight haloed his tawny mane, limned his broad shoulders in silver, and glinted off the dagger he clutched in his hand like a shard from a lightning bolt.
    The wiry brown-haired man who apparently answered to that name cursed and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Still not dead, you son of a bitch?”
    The man in the shadows took a menacing step forward, edging into view with a cynical smirk. Jacinda’s eyes slowly widened.
    Why, it was Byron’s corsair come to violent, throbbing life. The band of moonlight down the middle of the alley striped his black-clad body and slanted across his hard, chiseled face like war paint. He wore a short black coat over a loose shirt of natural linen that