Chapter 3
Tilly stepped into the awe-inducing ballroom of the Royal Pavilion and thought she’d gotten more than she’d bargained for when she’d embarked upon this little wild night.
She’d gotten the best night of her life.
This masquerade ball was everything she’d ever dreamed a masquerade ball would be—sumptuous, opulent, and mysterious, with all these aristocrats decked out in their finest. It was clear they all recognized each other behind their masks and were playing a big game of pretend of not knowing each other.
But wasn’t that the point?
How could a little wild night be had if one was being their ordinary, old self?
With a mask on, anyone could be anyone.
Even her.
It was freedom—and it was fun.
And, lawks, the champagne. How it flowed without end.
And the dancing, oh, the dancing…
She loved to dance, and she’d had no shortage of men—lords—vying for her hand.
Her, a lady’s maid.
But they didn’t know that, did they? As long as she kept her mouth mostly shut—one dropped aitch and the jig would’ve been up—she could be anyone. These lords didn’t know Tilly Birdwell from Eve of Garden-of-Eden fame, and she didn’t know any of them, either.
Well, that wasn’t strictly true.
An hour ago, there’d been one lord she’d recognized.
She would’ve known him anywhere, even after nine years, for he’d made promises to her once.
None of which he’d kept, if she was keeping score.
Sir Felix Mortimer.
She’d even come face to face with him.
And though she’d felt her heart in her throat, his gaze hadn’t lingered on her for even the split of a second—not like it once had.
Not like when she was sixteen.
At five and twenty, she reckoned she was now too advanced in years for his tastes.
And though she’d been whirling across the ballroom floor in a waltz, she’d managed to keep an eye on him until he disappeared into a room that she’d known was the card room.
She’d given it a few more dances. A bit of time to talk herself out of what she knew she would do, anyway.
But it wasn’t long before the little devil perched on her shoulder won, and she’d wandered into the card room, where she found Sir Felix playing Loo—a card game he’d taught her.
He’d taught her all his tricks, too.
She’d sat at the table, bold as she pleased, and all but dared him to recognize her.
He hadn’t.
And there was that irresistible urge, spurring her on, tempting her to beat him at his own game.
After all, she had a few guineas. Hard-earned guineas, lest she forget the realities.
But they were guineas she could lose and only be set back by a few months toward her dream.
What was fifteen years plus six months, anyway?
So, she’d cobbled a hasty plan together. If she lost at the start, she would chalk it up to an experience and walk away.
But she hadn’t lost.
She’d won—and kept winning.
Until she’d won one hundred and thirty-four guineas—one hundred and thirty-four guineas!
—and a ￡100 vowel off some flush lord and a large gold ring with a big oval-cut, cabochon emerald in the center.
The vowel was nothing to her. She wouldn’t be able to redeem it, as she wasn’t about to waste time haggling with an aristocrat. But that ring… It was a lord’s ring.
Would fetch a pretty penny, that ring.
By her rough estimation, this night had brought her years closer to opening her shop.
Years.
Her feet hadn’t touched earth these last ten minutes.
She came to a stop at the edge of the dancing floor. She wanted to dance—and she wouldn’t have to wait long to be asked.
There was just something about her.
She knew—and had accepted—this about herself. Men could never resist trying it on with her, as if their noses were specially attuned to her scent. In her former line of work, it had made her quite a few guineas. Guineas she’d had no choice but to earn.
Not if she’d wanted a roof over her head and food in her belly.
Not if she’d wanted to stay out of the workhouse.
Maybe if, when she’d been given the choice between Pizzy’s Pleasure Palace and St. Mary Magdalen Workhouse, she’d known what-all earning a guinea at Pizzy’s, then Number 9, would’ve been all about, she would’ve chosen the workhouse.
But she’d been all of fourteen years old, and it had been in Pizzy’s interests to let her discover those details for herself.
And by then, it was too late, wasn’t it?
She was a strumpet.
She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, then exhaled it all out, like she’d taught herself to do when those thoughts and memories came at her. And these last nine years that she’d been out of that life, it helped when she wanted to be in the here and now.
Her eyes opened—to find a crescent of men assembled before her, waiting for her to choose which would lead her onto the dancing floor.
The who didn’t matter much.
She simply wanted to dance until her feet could fall off.
Or, more like, until the clock struck eleven fifty-nine and she would scud it out of here before the grand unmasking.
She reckoned she had a quarter of an hour until then.
She reached out to accept a hand. Only, just before it clasped around hers, a large male form stepped into that sliver of empty space and took her hand, instead.
Her head had to tip back to get a good look at the fellow.
He was tall and broad-shouldered…dark hair that shone black…
and though he was wearing a mask, with his strong jaw, straight nose, and lips on the lush side, she could tell he was handsome and used to command… a lord.
Definitely a lord.
Behind his black mask, his eyes held a silvery light, as his other hand settled on her ribs and he pulled her closer. And those eyes staring down at her as he whirled them into the one-two-three of the waltz… Well, they were observing her with more intensity than this moment strictly warranted.
Instinctively, she made to retract her hand and pull away from him altogether—she was no lady, so she wasn’t under some obligation to dance with any old rotter who chose to dance with her—but he held firm as he kept them in time to the music.
A stunning, undeniable fact assailed her.
His lack of manners aside, this lord could dance.
Not a hint of stiffness in him as he led them around the ballroom.
Fluid and utterly at ease in his body, he was a dance partner of the divine variety.
A woman could be convinced she was dancing on air in his arms.
Except…there was something in the way he wasn’t taking his eyes off her.
It unsettled.
It unnerved.
It prevented her from giving over to the pleasure of this dance.
“Do I know you?”
She had to ask, for a possibility tickled at the back of her mind.
A possibility she didn’t much like.
This lord might’ve known her from her previous life.
But wasn’t that unlikely? It had been nine years, and she was a full-fledged woman now, wasn’t she?
“That’s a sharp game of Loo you play,” he said, his voice a deep, velvet rumble. The sort of voice that might send a shiver racing up a woman’s spine if she wasn’t careful.
Or even if she was.
Then the content of his words hit her, followed in the next second by recognition.
Oh.
This lord had been one of the other players in the game of Loo.
In truth, she hadn’t been paying attention to him, so focused she’d been on Sir Felix.
She’d sized this man up for just another handsome lord and hadn’t thought anything about him since.
She made it an express point not to think about handsome lords.
They were the ones who could completely upend a chit’s goals and aspirations.
She’d seen it happen, time and oft—had even been on the verge of it happening to her that once with Sir Felix—and it wasn’t about to happen to her at this stage in her life.
She could only think of one response. “Thank you.”
His gaze narrowed. “It wasn’t a compliment.”
A laugh startled out of her. “Why is that?”
“You’re a cheat.”
She supposed the tricks Sir Felix had taught her all them years ago could’ve been construed as cheating. She began calculating. “You’re the fellow with the hundred-pound vowel.”
“Aye.”
Her mind made up in an instant, she lifted her hand off his shoulder and dipped quick fingers into the valley between her breasts, which emerged clutching the slip of paper. “Here. Yours free and clear.”
Given the lift of the fellow’s brow, she reckoned she’d shocked him. Well, lords were easily shocked, weren’t they?
Reluctantly, he accepted the note and shoved it into a coat pocket.
She wasn’t finished. “And how much more did I take off you?”
She wanted no remaining ties between her and this too-handsome and too-intense lord after the final note of this dance echoed through the air.
Until he’d taken her hand, she’d been having the best night of her life.
And though she hated to give up even a penny of the one hundred and thirty-four pounds weighing heavy in her reticule, she didn’t see how she had much of a choice.
She didn’t need a lord hounding her heels.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“How much more did I take off you? Fifty pounds and call it even?”
“Fifty pounds?”
“I know for a fact that I took more off the others, but I’ll be generous—fifty-five.”
That would leave her with seventy-nine pounds—and the ring.
His jaw tensed and released. “Did you know Sir Felix before tonight?”
She laughed—and she didn’t much like that laugh. It sounded wholly composed of bitterness. The sort of laugh that corroded from the inside. In her previous line of employment, she’d been acquainted with that laugh from the older strumpets.
Of a sudden, a loud, blustery voice that Tilly once knew all too well cut through the music and gaiety, “I knew I knew you from somewhere. By gads, I knew it!”
She felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her and her irritatingly intense dance partner to a full stop.
The next second, she was face to face with Sir Felix.
Though he was wearing a mask, there was no mistaking the mean glint in his eye that he used to get.
And to think once she’d believed him the handsomest man in the world…
“Now,” he bellowed, his voice ripe with drunken belligerence, “what was your name again?”
Like that, the magic of the night vanished once and for all.
There would be no getting it back.
Tilly felt like an animal whose foot had been snared in a trap.
Run, urged the little animal being inside her. Run as fast as your legs can go…run!
And that was exactly what she did.
She shook off the hands of both of these men who each wanted something from her—nothing she felt inclined to part with voluntarily—and she let that little animal being take over and she ran, paying no heed to the bodies she muscled through and shouldered past…
the rooms and corridors she dashed through that only a few hours ago had gobsmacked her with awe…
the newly purchased cloak she was leaving behind…
Nothing was going to stand between her and freedom.
Outside and through the garden lit by sporadically hung lanterns and the twinkling stars above, she made a series of lefts and rights through the Royal Pavilion’s grounds until she reached the street, then it was more lefts and rights down streets she didn’t know until she was certain she didn’t hear the heavy, rhythmic thud of male footsteps behind her.
At last, she slowed her pace, her lungs struggling to catch her breath, her mind racing to gather her bearings.
And while she might not have the least idea where her feet had led her, a small cheer of triumph wouldn’t quiet down and she realized she was smiling.
Couldn’t stop, in fact.
The little animal being inside her had never failed her in the past, and it hadn’t tonight, either.
An amazed laugh erupted from her.
Sir Felix.
Well, wasn’t he a ghost from the past come to life?
And, oh, didn’t it feel just that good to have gotten something off him. A corrective balancing of the scales, as she saw it.
But her mind had no interest in tarrying on Sir Felix.
It was that other gent it wanted to linger over.
Now that she had a moment to properly reflect, what had been his angle?
With a little breathing room, she considered the possibility that she’d gotten it wrong back in the ballroom. That man hadn’t wanted the ￡100 vowel or the fifty-five pounds.
He’d wanted something else from her.
Well, there was only one other thing men had ever wanted from her—and he wasn’t about to get that.
A sensation rippled through her, as if her body was holding onto sense memories of him—of his skill at dancing…
of the feel of him, all masculine muscle and strength…
and the feel of herself in his arms—warm…
tingly…lit up from the inside… And a stray thought wandered into her mind, and she wondered if, perhaps, he was the sort who could get something else from her.
Something that involved more privacy than was afforded on a dancing floor.
She shook her head free of that stray thought, and her smile returned. There had been a hairy moment, for certain, but it had turned out all right, hadn’t it?
Better than all right.
She was the possessor of one hundred and thirty-four pounds and a ring she could sell in London.
She’d wanted a little wild night in Brighton, and hadn’t she gotten one?
As her feet pointed in the direction of the hotel, the giggle that floated in her wake could’ve been heard all the way down to the sea.