One Wicked Sin Read Free

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    “May I?” He gestured to the armchair. She was surprised he troubled to ask permission. Such courtesy sat oddly with the sense that this was a man who would take what he wanted whether anyone opposed him or not.
    He sat down and crossed one ankle over the other knee, lounging back with a casual grace. His whole body, so long and lean, looked elegantly relaxed and yet Lottie thought it would be a mistake to dismiss him as yet another fashionable Corinthian. There was too much forcefulness beneath the surface, too much power and intensity banked down.
    “Who are you,” Lottie said, “that Mrs. Tong allows you to dictate to her and does not even make you pay in advance?” It appeared that he was not intent on hurrying her into bed, whoever he was.
    He laughed. “Ethan Ryder, at your service.” Therewas a wicked spark in his blue eyes. “And I pay afterward.” He raised an eyebrow. “I do believe you’re blushing. How singular—in a courtesan.”
    Lottie turned her face away. He was right. She felt vulnerable, almost shy. This was a man who seemed to be able to strip her feelings bare with no more than a look, and she, no matter what people said, was no brass-faced strumpet.
    “Mrs. Tong called you ‘my lord,’” she said. She knew that she sounded doubtful. He looked more like a horse master than an earl, for all his fashionable attire. At one time she had known the entire peerage and she had never met him before. She knew that she would have remembered him.
    “How quick of you to notice.” He still sounded amused. “It’s no lie. I am the Baron St. Severin. Oh, and the Chevalier D’Estrange for good measure.”
    “You’re French? ” Lottie looked up, startled. He did not sound French and it was beyond unlikely. She had no grasp of politics and no interest in gaining one, but even she knew that there was a war on.
    “I’m Irish.” He smiled at her, full of charm. “It’s a long story.”
    “An Irishman with a French title?” Lottie said. Something clicked in her mind then, a memory of her drawing room in Grosvenor Square and her bosom bows gossiping over the latest on dit , picking at it like crows.
    What had they said of Ethan Ryder, the Irish soldier of fortune? She remembered that he was a famed swordsman, a crack shot and the best cavalryman in his regiment. It was rumored that he never lost at games ofchance, that he took risks other men would run from, that he was cold and calculating where others were rash and foolish and so he never made a mistake, but waited and waited and wore his enemies down until they took the false step, made the blunder that gave him the game…. And beneath the stories there were the whispers; that he had killed a man in a duel; that he had escaped from the deepest dungeons; that he could pass unnoticed through an opposing army like a ghost….
    Napoleon had weighed Ethan Ryder down with titles and money for his devotion to the French cause. He was a soldier of fortune indeed.
    She saw the smile deepen on Ethan’s lips and a certain hard light spring in his eyes, as though he knew exactly what she was thinking and what she was about to say.
    “Oh,” she said. “Yes. You are the one who is the bastard son of the Duke of Farne and the circus trapeze artist. You betrayed your father and ran away to France as a boy and joined Bonaparte’s Grande Armée. I heard,” she said slowly, “that you had been captured by the British and were a prisoner of war.”
    “I am all of those things.” He sounded imperturbable as though mere words, even harsh ones, had long ago lost the power to hurt him. “And you,” he said, “are the divorced former wife of a fabulously wealthy banker, the disgraced Ton favorite, now ruined and forced to sell herself to survive.”
    The words fell quietly into the hot little room, but Lottie still flinched. It seemed, she thought, that Ethan Ryder was a deal more comfortable with his situation than she was with hers.
    “You express