The Art of Taming a Prizefighter (The Season of Forbidden Desire 2)

Chapter One

Ashwood House — London

The Ashworth ballroom blazed with a thousand candles, their light multiplied a hundredfold in the mirrors lining the walls, until Lady Helena Winford could hardly tell where the true light ended and its reflection began.

It was, she thought, rather like everything else in this room: nothing was quite as it appeared.

"Lady Helena. You look radiant this evening."

She turned, schooling her face into the pleasant, unreadable expression she had perfected over six seasons.

She inclined her head to Mr Pratt, a baronet's second son with damp palms and an unfortunate habit of discussing his hunting dogs at length.

"You are too kind, Mr Pratt."

"Might I hope for a dance later in the evening?"

"My card is rather full, I'm afraid."

It was not entirely a lie. Her card was full of names her father had all but written there himself.

Mr Pratt bowed and retreated, and Helena allowed herself a breath before the next approach, the next bow, the next careful exchange of nothings dressed up as conversation.

Across the room, her father stood in conversation with Lord Ashworth and two other gentlemen she did not recognise.

Even from this distance, she could read the set of his shoulders. Her father was watching her. He was always watching her now.

"You are doing that thing again," murmured her aunt, appearing at her elbow with the particular grace of a woman who had spent thirty years learning to move through crowded rooms without seeming to move at all.

"What thing, Aunt Margaret?"

"Looking as though you would rather be anywhere else in England."

Lady Margaret Pembroke's fan snapped open, as though she were brandishing a shield. "Smile, my dear. Everyone is watching."

"Everyone is always watching."

"Which is precisely why you must smile."

Helena smiled.

Over the years, she had learned that a smile cost her nothing and gave her nothing, a currency she spent freely because it meant so little.

She let her gaze drift across the ballroom while her aunt exchanged pleasantries with a passing acquaintance.

It was, by any measure, a spectacular turnout, nearly every family of consequence in London in attendance.

The room hummed with the particular energy of a hundred private calculations being made behind smiling faces.

In one corner, a mother steered her daughter toward a cluster of unmarried viscounts with all the subtlety of a woman driving cattle to market.

In another, two gentlemen bent their heads together, and although she could not hear what was being discussed, she knew well enough: a woman's dowry, a man's income, an estate's acreage.

These were the true subjects of every ballroom in London, however prettily they were dressed in the language of music and dancing.

Helena wondered, not for the first time, what it might be to attend such an evening for no purpose beyond enjoying it. To dance because she wished to dance, and not because a partnership had been quietly arranged between her father and some other gentleman's father weeks before.

She thought of the books hidden at the bottom of her trunk, accounts of places she would likely never see, women who had crossed deserts and sailed uncharted seas, and felt the familiar ache of wanting something she had been raised to believe she could not have.

Such thoughts were foolish. She knew this. A woman of her position did not choose her own life.

"Helena."

Her father's voice, low and controlled, sounded at her shoulder. She had not seen him cross the room.

"You have not danced with Mr Hartley."

"He has not asked, Papa."

"He will. When he does, you will accept."

It was not a request. Richard Winford, Earl of Winford, did not make requests of his daughter; he issued instructions and expected them to be followed.

For twenty-four years, Helena had followed them, mostly because it had never occurred to her that she might not.

"You turned away Lord Pelham in the spring. You turned away Mr Ainsworth not two months past. I begin to wonder, Helena, whether you intend to be a wife at all, or whether you mean to make a spectacle of this family's patience until I have no choice but to consider you unmarriageable."

"Papa—"

"You are four-and-twenty. You are not a girl fresh from the schoolroom, to weigh every suitor against some notion of a storybook affection. Mr Hartley is respectable. His family is old, his income is sound, and he has expressed a particular admiration for you."

Ahh, admiration, she thought. One always admires what one doesn't understand.

"I will not have you refuse him for want of a feeling that has no place in a match of consequence."

She wanted to tell him that it was not a storybook affection she wanted, only the smallest assurance that the man she married might one day look at her as something other than a favourable arrangement of assets.

But her father's face held the particular closed expression that meant the conversation was concluded, whatever she might wish to add to it.

"Yes, Papa."

"Good," he said. "I do this for your sake, Helena, whatever you may think of me tonight. The Season is nearly done. I would see you settled before it ends."

***

The evening continued as such evenings always did.

Helena danced with Mr Hartley, whose conversation ran chiefly to the superiority of his stables. She talked with a colonel recently returned from the Peninsula, who at least had the decency to be interesting, if overly fond of recounting his own valour. She smiled until her face ached with it.

It was during a rare lull, while her aunt was occupied with an old friend and her father had disappeared into the card room, that Lord Nathaniel Crawford found her.

She knew him before he spoke, knew him by the murmur that rippled through any circle of young ladies he approached, half admiration and half warning, and by the particular way he moved through a room as though he had already decided it belonged to him.

He was handsome, she would grant him that much, with his golden hair and easy smile. He had the kind of practised charm that made mothers herd their daughters subtly away even as those same girls glanced back over their shoulders.

Helena had met him perhaps a dozen times. She had never once liked him, though she could not always have said precisely why, only that his compliments felt less like admiration and more like appraisal, the way a man might admire a horse he intended to purchase.

"Lady Helena." He bowed. "You are wasted on wallflowers and dowagers this evening. Might I have the honour?"

"I fear my next dance is promised, My Lord."

It was, in fact, unpromised, but the lie came easily, and she offered it with the same smooth courtesy she offered everything else tonight.

Crawford's mouth curved, unbothered. "How fortunate for whichever gentleman claims you. Another time, perhaps."

"Perhaps," she said.

He inclined his head and moved off toward another cluster of young ladies, leaving her to breathe out slowly and hope she would not be obliged to invent another excuse before the evening ended.

Just then, her sister, Clara, appeared at her side, pale beneath her rouge and pressing a gloved hand to her stomach.

"Helena, I feel dreadfully unwell."

"Clara." Helena took her sister's arm at once, all thought of Crawford forgotten. "Sit down, here."

"I only need air, I think. It is so very warm." Clara sank into the offered chair.

Aunt Margaret arrived a moment later in a rustle of silk, already reaching for her niece's wrist to check her pulse.

"Smelling salts," her aunt said. "Helena, in the carriage, Simmons will have them in my dressing case. Go quickly, and tell no one why, or we shall have half the room believing your sister has been overcome by scandal rather than heat."

Helena did not waste time as she turned and made her way through the crowded corridors, murmuring apologies as she slipped past clusters of guests too absorbed in their own conversations to notice her passing.

The carriage yielded the salts easily enough, and she was making her way back through the entrance hall when a young maid stepped into her path, a slight, dark-haired girl in the Ashworth livery, her expression tight with urgency.

"Lady Helena?" The girl bobbed a hasty curtsy. "Begging your pardon, my lady, but your sister has stepped into the conservatory for air, and your aunt bid me to fetch you straightaway."

"Is she much worse?"

"I couldn't say, my lady, only that your aunt looked most anxious."

Helena thanked the girl and hurried in the direction she indicated, the salts clutched in her hand.

The conservatory, when she reached it, was a different world from the ballroom she had left. It was dim where the ballroom blazed, quiet where it roared, the air thick and green with the smell of orange trees and damp earth rather than candle wax and perfume.

A handful of lamps burned low along the far wall, casting more shadow than light among the potted palms and trailing vines. For a moment Helena stood in the doorway, blinking, trying to find her sister among the greenery.

"Clara?"

No answer came. She took a few steps further in, scanning the shadowed benches, the arched glass overhead, dark from the London night.

"I'm afraid your sister isn't here, Lady Helena."

She turned sharply to find Lord Crawford standing near the far wall, half-hidden in shadow, a glass of something amber in his hand.

Lord Crawford regarded her with an expression she could not quite name. Amusement, perhaps, with something colder beneath it.

"My Lord," she said carefully. "I was told my sister had come here for air. I must have been misdirected, forgive me."

She turned to leave, but as she did, he moved, unhurried, into her path.

"There's no need to rush off. I only sought a quiet corner myself, away from all that noise and heat. You look as though you might benefit from the same."

"I thank you, My Lord, but I am needed elsewhere."