Bearding the Lyon (The Lyon’s Den)

Chapter One

“This is a bad idea,” Elise whispered, her blue gaze flicking down the empty hall.

“Mrs. Dove-Lyon is out on the floor and there are no guards stationed on this level.” Anna squinted at the door in the dim light from the porcelain sconces on the wall and grinned at the brass lock. There’d be no need for the weighty ring of skeleton keys hidden beneath her pelisse.

A three-lever mortise. The Lyoness may as well leave the door unlocked.

“We’ll be in the Devil’s own scrape if they catch us,” Elise said.

“You always say that.” Anna gestured toward the unrolled canvas housing her tools. “Hand me the bent nail—no, the one with the smaller nail soldered through the end.”

Elise placed the handmade tool in Anna’s waiting hand, her thirty years of age more than enough time to perfect the deep frown that turned an otherwise pretty face into the classic scowl of a disapproving chaperone.

She’d get over her condemnation, because tonight, Elise was charged with more than keeping Anna to the straight and narrow line of propriety.

Tonight, she was the lookout.

A good thing too. Elise had an uncanny ability to head off trouble when Anna was so keen to fall headfirst.

“I always say it, and I’m always right,” Elise said, her searching gaze constant, her head tilted to pick out voices from the stairs leading to what was said to be scandalous rooms upstairs, or to the lower level, where a constant flow of gentlemen gambled.

“Not always.” Anna kept one hand on the fluted glass knob while the other teased the opening of the lock.

To think the Lyon’s Den used such a lock on the main office. With what was whispered to transpire behind closed doors here, one would have imagined these secrets to be guarded by a solid oak six by six door the width of a carriage.

“Name one time—one time—when your ideas didn’t end with us running from an enraged headmistress or nearly flayed alive by your brother or some worse creature?” Elise demanded, a dark curl falling over her forehead.

Anna rolled her eyes, the tool sliding into the hole in the lock, the nail on the end catching the first lever. “You exaggerate.”

“Remember when you meant to pick Mr. Felstmire’s lock to the goat’s pen? But what you did was unlock the neighboring gate where the enraged bull took offense at an interrupted night’s sleep?”

Anna paused. “Is that why there was so much screaming?”

Elise threw her hands in the air. “You are impossible.” She slumped unceremoniously against the wall with no regard for the printed cotton dress borrowed from Anna’s wardrobe.

The older woman being taller and slenderer in build, there were a good two inches between the floor and the dress’s hem and a rather unflattering gaping at her bosom.

“I shall wait here until the next disaster hits.”

Anna sighed. Another twist around the second latch. “So dramatic. I’ll remind you we almost get caught but never do.”

No headmistress, relation, or enraged bull had ever caught Annabeth Greene by the horns.

Elise didn’t seem comforted. “Listen to yourself. You are not a locksmith’s daughter any longer. You are now the sister to a lord. Think of what getting caught here would do to your brother’s standing.”

There was a tightening around Anna’s heart, like a fist squeezing.

“I’m doing this for my brother. That woman knows more than she says.

” No matter what Bow Street claimed, Mrs. Dove-Lyon must have had files, receipts, something Anna could use to find Will.

“You said yourself that she was hiding something.”

Elise had come, in disguise, the past sennight and gambled on the woman’s side of the hell. It had killed Anna to sit in the carriage two streets down and wait every night, but William’s request that she attend more society functions of late had made her face too recognizable.

She did have some sense of propriety. A thimbleful at least.

Elise huffed. “I said it would be easy to hide something, not that I’d discovered anything.”

But Anna would. She redoubled her focus on the lock, turning her tool with the slightest of adjustments. The third lever only need be teased into latching free.

“That lock is unpickable,” Elise said, tension clear in her tone. “We should leave before we’re—”

Clunk.

Anna grinned as the bolt gave. A glance over her shoulder. “You were saying?”

Elise’s wide eyes narrowed. “Your papa is turning over in his grave.”

Anna’s stomach clenched.

Papa isn’t here.

But Anna was.

Anna replaced her tool and tucked the small case into the reticule attached to her wrist. Hand on the doorknob, she pushed the door open and stepped inside the firelit office, her heart pounding in her chest.

Let’s see what you’re hiding, Lyoness—

A shift of air to her right.

Someone was in the room.

Anna spun on her heel and bolted for the door.

Large hands snatched her from behind. There was not even a second to gasp before one burly arm locked around her chest, the other hand across her mouth, the skin ridged and scarred.

Flashes of hot and cold turned her insides prickly, but Anna didn’t scream—she knew to do so would call more attention than she could afford.

A quick gaze to the hall behind her. No sign of Elise.

Good.

Anna flexed her hand, but the knife in her reticule was useless while her arms were locked at her sides.

“Use whatever is at your disposal. Anything can be a weapon, Annabeth.”

The advice from her childhood came with a wave of anguish and regret, but Anna pushed the past away. Now wasn’t the time to think of him.

No knife. No use of her arms. That left one option.

She bit down and twisted out of the hold when the man’s grip loosened.

The man swore and clutched his hand. A big man.

Anna kept her gaze trained on the brute as she inched back toward the hall. If she could reach the stairs, she may yet vanish into the crowd on the main floor before someone identified her.

“I told you I smelled trouble,” the man said, his voice gruff.

“A credit to your pack as always, Titan,” someone replied.

Anna froze. Two people in the room. She turned on wooden legs to see the woman in widow’s weeds behind the desk, nothing but a slash of red lips visible through the black lace of her veil.

Anna’s blood iced in her veins as her thoughts scrambled.

She was meant to be on the floor.

There’d be no slipping through the crowds, no escape Anna could laugh over later.

Not when the Lyoness herself had Anna in her sights.

“Come. Sit,” Mrs. Dove-Lyon said, her gesture indicating the chair on the other side of the desk.

Anna didn’t move.

“Mrs. Dove-Lyon told you to sit,” the giant behind her said.

He made as if to put his hands on her again, and Anna turned to fully face him.

“Touch me, and I’ll do worse than bite.”

The man startled.

There was a husky laugh from Mrs. Dove-Lyon. “There is no need to fret, Titan. You may return to your duties.” A shift of the woman’s body had Anna’s feet rooting to the spot. “Miss Greene isn’t going anywhere.”

Anna swallowed hard at the emphasis on her last name.

Mrs. Dove-Lyon waited until the big brute had left the room before she said, “You are Lord Brixby’s sister, are you not? Miss Annabeth Greene?”

“You are well informed, Mrs. Dove-Lyon,” Anna admitted. Of course she was. The woman was said to have files on every peer and extended family in London—apparently, that included newly minted viscounts as well.

Mrs. Dove-Lyon rested her hands on the arms of her leather chair, her actions casual. “I was saddened to hear of your brother’s disappearance. You must be quite distraught. How many days has it been? Six?”

“Eight,” Anna gritted out between clenched teeth. As if the woman didn’t know.

“I take it you were not satisfied with Bow Street’s inquiry into my establishment?” She waved toward the closed door. “Hence the need to break into my private office.”

Anna didn’t balk, didn’t prevaricate. “You used a double so everyone would believe it was you on the floor.” The woman had known someone would break into her office.

Blast, but how? Anna had watched from a distance, never setting a single toe on the cobblestone sidewalk on Cleveland Row.

And Elise . . . There wasn’t a woman alive more suited to avoiding notice when she chose to become invisible.

Which meant the Lyoness suspected retaliation for some grievance.

Gambling and high-stakes deals . . . Kidnapping wasn’t that far of a stretch.

Anna would get nowhere without the woman’s compliance. It shouldn’t be too hard.

Subtlety, charm . . . Too bad she’d learned charm the same place she’d learned propriety: her papa.

“Whatever half-truth you told, whatever bribe you paid out, I’m not so easy to brush off as the men at Number Four Whitehall.” Anna winced at the venom in her tone and softened it to mildly biting. “Will was last seen coming out of this gaming hell.”

A tense pause. A predator’s stillness. “A word of caution, Miss Greene: to my friends, I can be as kind and accommodating as a spring day in the countryside.” An edge entered the woman’s voice. “Call me a liar a second time, and I will show you an ice storm in June.”

Anna was many things: worried over her brother’s disappearance, angry at Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s unwillingness to divulge information, frightened at what constituted as “meat” in the pies off Hart Street. She was not, however, a fool.

Charm. Like the insipid Miss Kendell who’d constantly flirted with Anna’s brother at every society function. Anna adopted the other woman’s slightly whiny tone and withdrew a handkerchief from her reticule to dab at her bone-dry eyes.