To Shoot a Sinner (Dreamers and Dukes #1)

Chapter One

Outskirts of London, England

Charlotte Aston hardly ever got enough sleep—a commodity she valued above all others. It was worth its weight in gold and, like gold, was all the more precious when one did not have enough of it.

This morning—if one could even call it that—Charlotte found herself more desperate for sleep than she had been in years, and that was saying quite a lot.

In fact, she would do anything short of murder to be back in her warm, soft bed at this very moment.

Instead, she was standing in this desolate field, her boots caked in mud and escaped tendrils of hair plastered to the back of her neck in the cool morning mist before the first birds had even begun to sing.

A voice sounded from somewhere in the mist, and Charlotte turned, raising her pistol into the oncoming dawn. There was another shout, and she fired, the sound of the pistol echoing in the morning stillness. Then everything went black.

∞∞∞

Benjamin Scarsdale was bored to death of duels. Granted, it had been years since he had been roped into such a stupid endeavour. But there had once been a time in his life when his youthful arrogance had practically begged for the young, equally arrogant toffs of London to call him out.

He had participated in at least five as the primary duellist and around the same number as a second for the few idiots he counted as friends.

He had always known it was foolish. Even in his wilder days—if one could call the years of scraping and clawing his way up from the gutter, wild.

Frenzied. Desperate. Determined. All might have been better descriptors.

The one that currently had him standing in a god-awful field in what could be called one of dear Mother England’s most miserable glooms to date was the kind he abhorred the most: a duel over a tart.

He also knew for a fact that the tart in question could not care less about a duel being fought over her—if she knew about it at all, which she probably did. Word travelled through the back streets of London faster than a bullet.

That was part of the problem. Honour, he could understand. The defence of a woman, he could understand. This was neither of those things.