Chapter 1
The Rookeries
Just outside the Devil’s Den
On this freezing-bollocks-cold night, Edgar Hollis, Viscount Kerr, took his leave of London’s seediest hell in St. Giles’s: the Devil’s Den.
Kerr left as he always did, with nearly a bottle of brandy in him.
The only exceptions were Susanna and Diane, a pair of courtesans whom he paid a premium to be his exclusive companions.
The tall, Junonian whores masked their revulsion at his scarred visage as flawlessly as any Drury Lane actress—hardly a surprise, given their ancient calling.
Though they always did a remarkable job penetrating the fog of his increasingly frequent ennui, tonight they had been unable to coax Kerr to his private suites.
Nothing about the club, its location at the heart of England’s most dangerous corner, or the company he kept, was suited to a gentleman.
But then Kerr, was a gentleman in name only.
His last respectable act could be traced just over ten years back—to the deep, rocky, violent waters of the Adriatic, to be exact.
There, under Lord Nelson’s legendary protégé, Captain William Hoste, Kerr fought in the decisive Battle of Vis.
Their vastly outnumbered British forces, consisting of four ships, defeated Frenchman Dubourdieu’s six frigates, numerous smaller craft, and a battalion of uninspired Italian soldiers.
That bloody triumph at sea marked the death of Boney’s path to India—and ultimately, Boney’s overall reign.
Kerr escaped unmarked on the outside. Little had he known until his return to England that the battle had also sounded the death knell of his tenuous ties to respectability.
But unlike before, Kerr made the decision and not the same members of the ton who’d spent years scorning him.
Which was naturally why his days on land proved limited.
As the son of notorious madman Mad Jack, he’d always felt more like an outsider than a privileged peer.
Upon his return, he discovered the honorable name he had pursued seemed even further away.
Not because he hadn’t been greeted with fanfare and adulation—he had.
His fiercest critics had since become his most stalwart supporters.
That annoyed him even more than the cold shoulders he’d faced before his war days.
That was neither here nor there; between his life experience, the sights Kerr had seen, the places he had been…the evil he had done, he couldn’t have been more removed from the noblemen at White’s and Brooke’s.
Oh, he’d tried.
After all, he’d been chasing honor and respectability since his birth. But between the inanities the peerage discussed—mindless politics, even more mindless, teeth-gratingly dull gossip—and, it hadn’t taken long to learn Polite Society was even further away than it had ever been for him.
In terms of London’s finest ladies, that was a different story.
For a bastard like Kerr, there was a distinction between what constituted ‘finest ladies’.
For example, he’d rather be flogged around the fleet than deal with a simpering debutante.
Kerr was more sailor than gentleman. Like all Jack Tars everywhere, he had no use for ladies, beyond one exception.
Bored, unhappy wives and eager widows to warm his bed he made an exception for.
Kerr didn’t keep company with them because they were stimulating conversationalists.
In fact, given their grating, whiny voices, he’d prefer they say nothing at all.
Fortunately, they eagerly knelt, serving the only purpose he had for them.
All of that explained why, when Kerr’s one true friend, Lord Culross, a brother in all ways but blood, came to him with a business opportunity—invest in Archdale Shipping—Kerr countered.
Kerr would captain his own ship (the surest and fastest way to sail himself away from England), but he wanted part ownership—a third for him, a third to Culross, and a third to Culross’s capable younger brother, Lord Alec, a seaman in his own right.
Where Kerr served the King’s Navy in Europe, Lord Alec served in the American War directly under Rear Admiral George Cockburn.
Culross came back with his final counter.
Kerr claims a third, and captains a ship in their fleet…
but Kerr would school Culross on sailing—which he would go on to do sooner than anticipated—help staff his ship, and whenever Culross eventually went on to sail his own ship, Kerr would serve as Culross’s quartermaster.
Kerr hadn’t hesitated. He’d shaken on it and signed.
Together, the three constructed a shipping dynasty—one that got them all further away from Polite Society, especially Kerr, and he suspected Lord Alec. Naturally, they didn’t speak about any commonalities. Men didn’t converse on matters that genuinely mattered. Too personal, and all that.
They’d become pirates of the seas; the king allowed them to dress it up as something polite, privateers. But the same rules of honor and codes which governed the navy didn’t apply to privateers. Pillaging, building personal fortunes, flying without flags weren’t accepted, they were expected.
There wasn’t any place Kerr felt more comfortable than the high seas.
Until his last sailing—at that, not even a mission.
He and Culross had been invited aboard the ship of Culross’s then friend, Captain Arran McQuoid.
The man’s newly married cousin, Mrs. Linnie Tremaine, previously courted by Culross, also happened to be aboard.
Not by any coincidence. Captain McQuoid had been foolish enough to believe Culross was in love with the girl.
Meanwhile, Culross had intended to create a divide between the McQuoids and the Tremaines.
After a flagless frigate sailed upon them, a violent battle broke out.
In the end, Archdale Shipping had been forced out—until Culross’s recent marriage to the lady’s sister.
As for Kerr…he had walked away with more damage than all his prior fights at sea combined. The demons had finally staked their claim over his mind, making him too dangerous to captain a ship. The scars he sported, now outwardly marked him an outsider to High Society…but not the ladies’ beds.
There was nowhere for him. Not anywhere he experienced a feeling of belonging, the exception being the Rookeries. Scarred enough on the outside and mad enough on the inside, he had come to feel more at home amongst society’s lowest dregs.
As on all the nights before this one, he had no expectation of finding peace.
He sought to fill empty sleepless nights in the same routine before sunrise came, and he did it all over again.
Nor was he one of those woeful fellows lamenting the unfairness of one’s existence.
From his days fighting Boney’s forces, Kerr sailed alongside enough sailors of all backgrounds and born to all stations to know each and every last one of them was bent for hell; each battling their own demons.
Kerr was one of the lucky buggers with a fortune to distract himself until the end sped up to meet him.
He sought out his own distractions and didn’t need to go finding them; there were plenty to occupy a bachelor rogue.
Take now, as he was drawing up his great cloak hood, when a creature in red, half-bent at the waist, approached the front doors of the Devil’s Den.
Even if it weren’t for the Mrs. Lacon wool cloak Kerr recognized from the visits, he’d made with mistresses to the premier modiste on 19 Berkeley Square, the dimwit sported, she’d have been a sight tripping and traipsing through London’s most dangerous parts.
Head down, hood back, brownish-blonde curls blowing around, she breezed by, passing right under his nose—none the wiser to him, let alone the dozens of other black-hearted devils looking to snatch souls.
If a chit didn’t know, strolling in the streets wouldn’t see her knocked into a wall, and with her skirts up, that was on her.
“Blast it, will you stop running away!”
Kerr froze.
The words were different. That voice, clear and innocent as the St. Lawrence church bells, he unfortunately knew all too well. Its speaker was ebullient and reckless, as she had been when they’d crossed paths on a snow-dusted Ermine Street, and she’d called out, “…Here I come…!”
This time, she didn’t announce her approach, but she may as well have.
Miss Andromena McQuoid-Smith. What else should one expect of the magpie?
Nothing. In matters of logic, reason, and circumspection, he had absolutely zero expectations for the reckless miss.
No one could deny she could have felled a second Troy.
Alas, despite her beauty and allure, the wench hadn’t the sense God gave a pea.
Stupidity was reserved for the chit and her kin alike.
Kerr wanted to leave the twit to whatever mischief she sought this night.
He wasn’t a charming rogue. A naval man first, turned privateer, Kerr was at best a rake—without all that terrible taste in tupping innocents.
At worst, he was a black-hearted rogue who didn’t give two shites if a reckless lady got the comeuppance, she was due.
And without a doubt, the stupid chit tripping and trampling over her two feet while chasing after a scrap of paper needed a lesson to scare her straight.
Alas, his long friendship with Miss Smith’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Culross, dictated that Kerr follow each noisy click-clack of the lady’s boots upon cobblestones, protect her, collect her, and deposit her back into the bosom of incompetent kin.
Loyalty was also what led him to join forces months earlier with Culross’s scheme to abduct the three daughters of the rival shipping magnate McQuoid family.
He, Culross, and Culross’s younger brother, Lord Archdale, were all to take the last remaining unmarried ladies—at that, on the way to one’s wedding to the Duke of Hartwell—and ruin them.
In name.