Led Astray by a Rake (The Husband Hunters Club 1)

“Listen well, Miss Monteith.” He sounded implacable. “I will be leaving here in two weeks for the demimonde ball, where I’ll find some pretty dancer, and after that I’ll take her with me to Paris for plenty of sordid dissipation. That is my world, and it’s not for you.”

“Nic, how do you—”

But he wasn’t going to listen to her. “This is the last time you visit me. If you come again I will have Abbot throw you out.”

She glanced away, and seeing her parasol lying on the ground, bent to pick it up. Her hands twisted the stem.

“Good-bye, Lord Lacey,” she said at last, and if there was a faint tremble in her voice it was hardly noticeable. He watched as she turned and walked away, her back straight, and reached down to massage his aching leg.

You really are a bastard, Nic Lacey, he told himself. Couldn’t you have been nice to her? But it wasn’t possible to be nice to Olivia Monteith. She would consume him, he knew it, he’d known it the last time. She would destroy them both. In the long run it would cause far less pain and damage if he was mean to her. She didn’t realize it now but one day she would. She would see that she had had an extremely lucky escape from Wicked Nic Lacey.

Chapter 8

“I won’t cry, I will not cry,” Olivia murmured to herself as she walked through the garden, blind to the beauties of perennial borders with their swaying foxgloves, and pleached arches of pear trees, and climbing roses of extravagant blooms. He’d made her feel as if this was her fault, and she knew he’d planned it that way. But he couldn’t destroy the feelings she’d had when she’d touched him and seen the desire in his face and his eyes. Desire for her, whatever he tried to tell her.

She’d been so certain she could win him over, and she wondered now if it had been that very certainty that was her downfall. Had she gone about it all wrong? She had tried to persuade Nic to her point of view by being herself—respectable, innocent, wide-eyed. But he’d seen her as someone to be protected from his reputation, an untouchable creature, totally off limits. English society was very strict in its boundaries; it worshipped the purity of respectable womanhood. Nic might be a rake, but she did not think he would ever set out consciously to ruin an innocent young lady, no matter what he claimed to the contrary.

So, instead of seducing her, he’d been nobly protecting her.

Olivia needed to adjust her strategy. Husband hunting involved taking risks, and so far she had taken very few, and none of them particularly dangerous, no matter what Nic said. She’d always known he wouldn’t harm her, so where was the risk? If she wanted him then she must be prepared to throw caution to the winds.

Excitement gripped her. Yes, what she needed to do was shrug off the trappings of Miss Olivia Monteith and plunge into Nic’s world. She must mingle with the shadowy, disreputable women of the demimonde. She must show him that she wasn’t a statue on a pedestal, but a living, breathing woman, and that she was not untouchable where he was concerned. In fact she was very touchable indeed.

He wanted her. Now all she had to do was show him that it was all right to want her, to take her, and to love her. She was perfectly willing to go to Paris with him and be dissipated, in fact she would insist upon it. They could be happy together.

If only Nic would allow himself to be happy.

Her steps slowed and she stopped, staring blindly at a statue of Pan set in the midst of a lily pond. She still burned with the sensations he’d created, excitement and need and daring. Whenever she was with him she felt that, but more, she felt alive, so that the rest of her life became dull and flavorless by comparison. Not being with him was something she could not contemplate; not being with him made her

feel desperate.

“I will have him,” she breathed. “I love him!”

“I beg your pardon?”

The imperious voice came from right behind her. Olivia turned and found a woman in a black silk mourning dress, wearing a black bonnet with a black dyed ostrich feather on her head. Her face had once been beautiful, but time and grief had aged it, pulling her mouth down at the corners, and turning her youthful skin to the consistency of crepe. But her eyes, Olivia saw with a jolt of shock, were Nic’s eyes—dark and intense and passionate.

“Lady Lacey,” she said, recovering herself. “I’m sorry if I intruded upon your solitude. I didn’t realize—”

“Who are you? I did not know I had a visitor, and you certainly are not one of the gardeners.” Was there a twinkle of a smile in her dark eyes? It gave Olivia courage.

“I have been to call on your son, my lady.”

In an instant Lady Lacey’s expression had hardened, the smile quite gone. Her voice into even haughtier heights. “I do not believe it proper for a young lady to visit my son without a chaperone.”

“I have my maid…” Olivia glanced about, as if expecting Estelle to pop up from behind the shrubs. “And we are neighbors, my lady. I am Olivia Monteith.”

“Monteith? I have heard the name. Weren’t your family once our tenants? You had an elder sister—”

“My father is a businessman, my lady. A banker.” Olivia tried not to be annoyed by her attitude. “We haven’t been tenants of the Laceys for over fifty years.”

Lady Lacey dismissed that with a wave of her hand—the Monteiths might have risen in the world but they were evidently still beneath her notice. “You should go home, Miss Monteith. My son is not to be trusted with young women. You are not safe here.”

“I beg your pardon, my lady, but I disagree,” Olivia said, her voice calm, while inside anger was beginning to simmer on Nic’s behalf. “I trust your son and I feel perfectly safe with him. He would never hurt me.”

Lady Lacey seemed startled by Olivia’s answer, or perhaps she just wasn’t used to being contradicted. “Would he not? How do you know what Dominic would do, Miss Monteith? You know nothing about him.”

“Yes, I do. He isn’t the man he pretends to be, my lady. But surely you must know that—he is your son. You must know him better than anyone.”