Don’t Tempt Me (The Fallen Women #2)

Prologue

Northamptonshire, England

Yesterday, when they buried his parents, the sun shone.

Today, too, was incongruously sunny, cruelly bright and cheerful and hopeful, the birds singing and the first spring flowers blooming.

Ten-year-old Lord Lucien de Grey hid from the sun and the world’s horrible happiness.

His older brother Gerard found him, a ball of misery curled up in one of the numerous small passages of the old house their parents had loved. It had been a favorite of the Dukes of Marchmont since it was built, centuries earlier.

Gerard, three years older than Lucien, had become the tenth Duke of Marchmont.

“Don’t think about them,” he said. “That only makes it worse.”

“I wasn’t!” Lucien shouted. “You don’t know anything! I hate you!”

The battle quickly escalated from words to blows. They fought, that day and in the following days, over everything and nothing. Family members and tutors intervened, but no one liked to chastise two grieving boys, no matter how appalling their behavior.

They broke furniture and crockery. They broke a window and knocked the head off a statue their grandfather had brought back from Greece. So it went on for weeks.

Then one day their father’s great friend Lord Lexham appeared.

The two families had spent summers together.

For a long time every summer, it had seemed as though yet another Lexham baby had arrived.

By the time the fatal fever struck Lucien’s parents, Lexham’s brood appeared to have settled at eight: three boys and five girls, with the last child named Zoe Octavia.

Lord Lexham was one of the three guardians the Duke of Marchmont had appointed in his will to look after his sons.

Lexham was the only one who took an active hand.

His hand was active, indeed.

He hauled first Gerard then Lucien into their father’s study and gave them each a birching, and no light one, either.

“Ordinarily I do not believe in corporal punishment,” he said afterward, “but you pair are hard cases. One must get your attention first.”

No one—no one—had ever whipped them.

And yet, strangely, it was a relief.

It certainly got their full attention.

“We had better find something for you to do,” he said.

He found a great deal for them to do. He put them on a punishing course of study and exercise. It proved a powerful antidote to angry misery and brooding.

And then, as the bright spring warmed into summer, another antidote to sorrow entered Lucien’s life. Once again they traveled to Lexham’s country house. This time Lucien finally became personally acquainted with the catastrophe-waiting-to-happen that was Zoe Octavia. She was five years old.

Zoe Octavia Lexham hated rules even more than Lucien did, and broke them more than he did. This was no small accomplishment, considering how much harder it was for girls to break rules.

She ran away. Constantly.

She’d done it for the first time, he discovered, when she was four years old. She did it several times during that first summer after he’d met her and did not stop doing it in the years thereafter. She was the problem child. Her tendency to bolt at every opportunity was only one of the problems.

She rode horses she wasn’t supposed to ride. She played with children she oughtn’t to associate with. She was too often found in places where a nobleman’s daughter did not belong. She seemed to take delight in doing exactly what she was not supposed to do.

She lay awake nights, Lucien was sure, devising ways to annoy and embarrass her brothers, especially.

When she was seven, she dared her brother Samuel to climb onto the roof. He, six years older, informed her that he wasn’t a trained monkey and it wasn’t his job to entertain her. She called him a fraidy-cat-mudfor-brains. Then she climbed out onto the steepest part of the roof.

Lucien was the only one agile enough to fetch her down.

He became the one, too, who fished her out of fish ponds and tracked her to the gamekeeper’s cottage or the blacksmith’s when she went missing. None of her siblings ever had the least idea where to find her or what to do with her.

The cricket incident was typical.

She was eight years old. The boys were organizing a cricket game. She stormed up to him.

“I want to play, Lucien. Tell them to let me.”

“Girls don’t play cricket,” he said. “Go back to your dolls and your nursemaids, brat.”

She snatched up a bat and swung it at him—or tried to. She swung as hard as she could, and kept on going. Round and round she went, like a whirligig, and down she went, on her arse.

And there she sat, her disorderly golden hair standing on end and her vivid blue eyes wide open and her mouth open, too, so startled she was.

He laughed so hard, he fell down, too.

She was annoying, sometimes infuriating, generally impossible. And she was a bright, bright spot in his life.