“I’m not so easily frightened,” she said boldly. “I can take what most women cannot.”
It was the truth, after a fashion. She took so much.
“I—didn’t frighten you?” he asked. “I didn’t hurt you?”
“No.” She drew a finger down his chest.
“What a shame.” Disappointment flared behind the dull pain in his murky blue eyes. “I’m surprised I was able to perform for you.”
His cock had been stiff with excitement at the thought of hurting her. He’d grabbed her arms and dragged her upstairs, and had barely made it to the bed before her tincture had taken hold.
Francesca’s cold heart froze another degree. Hard. Harder than stone. Than steel. Perhaps diamonds. A bit more innocence and goodness slipped away, but her mask never did.
“Well, my lord. You didn’t get what you wanted from me,” she said icily, “but I got what I came for.” She rolled away as he made a halfhearted swipe at her.
“What nonsense are you speaking?” he demanded.
Wordlessly, Francesca swept out of his bedroom.
Colfax’s bellows followed her down the grand stairs and out into the night as she navigated his gardens and used the wan moonlight to open the back gate where Serana’s man, Ivan, waited with the carriage.
He tipped his hat at her and she offered him a salute.
Once secured inside, she pulled the documents away from her breast and stared down at them, her breath quickening with excitement.
She knew where the other leaders of the Crimson Council would be. She might touch one of them … dance with him.
Seduce and destroy him.
Her hands trembled. She was in this game now. She had some decisions to make. Some secrets to keep, even from those who loved her most. Especially them. Because there may be a point of no return, and if that was the case, she couldn’t get them involved.
Those who went after the Crimson Council didn’t tend to survive.
CHAPTER THREE
Obsession.
It was something the Devil of Dorset often used as a weapon, but never succumbed to. He’d seen it bring the most powerful of men to their knees, because it distracted them from what they should be doing.
As a spy for the Secret Services who’d already sold his soul for secrets and blood, he should be doing any number of things.
But he remained crouched on a St. James balcony, observing through a window as Francesca Cavendish, the Countess of Mont Claire, undid the buttons of her bodice. Her every deft and decisive motion exposed one more inch of her décolletage and stole that much more of his composure. His pulse quickened, and then his cock as she shucked her blouse down slim, creamy shoulders.
She didn’t wear a corset. How scandalous. Not that she required one, he noted as his eyes greedily traced the expanse of her lightly freckled chest before a silk chemise frustrated the visual exploration. She was but a scrap of nothing. So slim as to be androgynous. Small, pert breasts puckered in the chill beneath the thin fabric; he could make out the slight protrusion of her nipple even from here, as her underthings were simple and without adornment.
The way his body reacted, one would think he’d never before watched a woman disrobe.
And he had. So many in his lifetime. Some had been allies. Others, enemies. A few had even been lovers. Most of the women he’d seduced, however, had been little more than marks.
None had been as dangerous as the Countess of Mont Claire.
The Devil of Dorset had been following the Lady Francesca since Swifton Street, and found himself quite uncharacteristically short of breath. Generally, he wouldn’t even work up a sweat when breaking into a shop, sprinting up four stories, sliding out the top window, and lifting himself onto the roof with nothing more than the strength of his arms, only to leap across several rooftops in the noonday sun. But as he made the one-story drop onto the balcony into a crouch, his chest fought a strange difficulty drawing in the requisite air.
The balcony afforded him an unrestricted view of the countess through the large window of the modiste’s top-floor dressing room. She stood amid her two roguish cohorts, improbably outshining them both.
And, brazen thief that she was, she’d taken his breath away.
The self-named Red Rogue Society consisted of three uncommonly lovely redheads with a penchant for mischief and all pastimes generally agreed to be masculine.
Lady Alexandra Atherton, archeologist, bluestocking, and the recent Duchess of Redmayne might have widely been considered the beauty of the infamous trio, but to call her dark-mahogany hair “red” was rather generous, and her features were much too perfect to be interesting.
The voluptuous Miss Cecelia Teague was about to marry the fierce and uncompromising Lord Chief Justice, Cassius Gerard Ramsay. So, though she might be as sweet and decadent as her strawberry lips suggested, a brilliant mathematician, and now the wealthiest businesswoman in London, her intelligence was forever in question. Ramsay, the surly Scot, wasn’t the cold, impeachable character he presented to the world.
At least not where Miss Teague was concerned.
Despite their distressing connections to recent investigations of his, the Ladies Alexandra and Cecelia were no longer of any interest to the Crown nor to the Secret Services. He had no reason to be following them anymore.
But he had to see her again.
The Countess of Mont Claire.
If only to prove to himself that she was real.
A gentleman would have looked away as the lady continued to undress, slipping her skirt and bustle from her lean hips to pool at her feet. He wouldn’t salivate at the sight of her long legs and curse the shapeless drawers that covered her backside as she bent to help the seamstress gather her discarded clothes.
The Devil of Dorset was no gentleman. Indeed, he was a voyeur by trade, lethal in both the back alley and the bedroom. He could steal the spotlight at any soiree and hold an entire audience in the palm of his hand, manipulating their every emotion and whim. He could assassinate in a room full of people, and no one would remember what he looked like.
He was a ghost. A chameleon. A shade of a man whose sole vocation in life was to be both notorious and invisible.
He pulled that ability about him now and stood against the summer sun blazing over the rooftops with only an alleyway between them. If the women looked in his direction, they’d be blinded.
Francesca was as much of a ghost as he. The world had presumed her dead after Mont Claire had been razed to the ground. But she’d risen from the ashes somewhere on the Continent, claiming to have suffered days of unconsciousness due to smoke inhalation. The story went that a Romani woman had spirited her out of Mont Claire in time, and the child had regained consciousness at a country hospital some counties away.
The Devil of Dorset had learned along with the rest of London about her impossible survival. She’d attended some finishing school on Lake Geneva and subsequently gallivanted with her fellow spinster friends across half the globe by the age of twenty-five.
He squinted through the window as Francesca apparently refused tea, punch, or champagne in favor of a strong scotch. Her gold hat lay upside down on a settee where she’d tossed it. Uncovered, her coiffed hair glinted with a ruby sheen, upswept to uncover the long, graceful curve of her swanlike neck.
The Red Rogues, indeed.
In a few short months, the Countess of Mont Claire had become the most notorious of them all. She’d famously fucked her way through half the available men in the ton and twice again the married ones.