To Love a Dark Lord Read online

  To Love A Dark Lord

  Anne Stuart

  TO LOVE A DARK LORD

  What can I say about this book? It tends to be the most memorable of all my historicals, and yet it had a very troubled beginning. At that point in my career I didn’t necessarily write heroes who were that dark. Oh, they were alpha, and cynical, and brooding, occasionally, but they weren’t dark dark dark. Killoran was my first hero who was really over the top.

  I really wanted to write him. I had a clear vision of him early on, and I wanted to go for broke. Just throw everything in, no matter how dark, and see what happened. By that point in my life I’d lost a number of my family, all too young and without warning, and I was angry and grieving. I wanted to put all that emotion into the book, and I wrote the required three chapters and an outline, convinced of my brilliance, and sent them off.

  My editor wasn’t so sure. She sent it back to me, wanting me to pull back on just about everything. Now I’ve always been fairly arrogant, but I also try to listen to opposing opinions, so I dutifully went in, toned everything down, and sent it back to her.

  It came right back, with fourteen pages of notes, saying pull back more. Frustrated, I did, cutting everything and softening everything I could while still keeping my vision of what the book should be.

  It came back. Remember I said I was arrogant, right? At that point I said “no.” I said I would write the book, send in the rough draft and if it didn’t work then I’d pull it. But I couldn’t keep tweaking and tweaking and losing my passion.

  So I did. I tried very hard to shut out the worried voice of my editor and write the book that was in my heart, and in the end she accepted the book the way I’d written it. Later, when my extremely dark first contemporary came out (for another publisher and editor) she read it and asked me if that was what I’d had in mind for TO LOVE DARK LORD. I said yes. And she, bless her heart, said she’d been wrong to try to tame me.

  So Anne Stuart, Queen of Darkness was born, not without a long, hard labor, a contrary midwife and birthing pains.

  In the end, I’m very proud of it. But I’m still wondering what the original would have been like, if I hadn’t had to sweeten it.

  Tagwords: lethal hero, dark, Georgian, secondary romance, ruined heroine, murder

  Copyright 2011 Anne Stuart

  Chapter 1

  Just Outside London, 1775

  Emma Mary Catherine Langolet stood in the middle of the small, private bedroom at the Pear and Partridge. She was silent with shock. There was blood on her hands, she noticed absently. It was little wonder. The man who lay at her feet seemed composed almost entirely of blood, and most of it now formed a pool beneath him, staining the inn’s shabby carpet, staining her slippers and the hem of her dress.

  She stared down at her uncle. He’d been an unpleasant, unattractive man in life, and death hadn’t improved him any. Cousin Miriam was going to be most displeased with her, she thought.

  She hadn’t meant to kill him. Indeed, when she’d picked up the smallsword to ward him off, she hadn’t thought the ornamental weapon would actually do such extensive damage. Nor had she truly believed her uncle by marriage was intent on hurting her, despite his peculiar behavior.

  Until she’d looked into his small, piggy eyes and seen her death reflected there. And she’d known, incomprehensible as the notion was, that Uncle Horace intended to kill her.

  But she wasn’t the one lying dead on the floor. The smallsword that Horace DeWinter had set on the table had proved to be fatally efficient. She could still feel it slicing through flesh and bone, and the expression of astonishment on her uncle’s murderous, lustful face would haunt her dreams.

  He still looked faintly startled. Emma considered sinking to her knees in a proper attitude of repentance. She ought to feel sorry for such a mortal crime.

  But she couldn’t.

  He had been an evil, miserable man. Everyone, with the notable exception of her formidable Cousin Miriam, had felt his fists. There had been tales of his lasciviousness with the female servants, tales of his brutality toward all and sundry. He was wicked and evil and cruel, and he deserved to die.

  It was simply a great misfortune that Emma had to be the one to kill him.

  They hanged women, she knew that, though not often. They would surely hang her. After all, her uncle and his spinster daughter had taken her into their home when her father died, providing her with an austere, godly existence. She had no one to turn to for help—her father had been an extremely wealthy man, but tainted by trade. Her shy, aristocratic mother had been cast off by her family for marrying a foundry owner, and his substantial earnings from the armament trade hadn’t softened their attitude. Emma’s mother had died in childbirth, her doting father some twelve years later. And during the last seven years Emma had lived with the DeWinters in their large house near Crouch End, obedient to Miriam’s strict demands that bordered on religious fanaticism, dodging her uncle’s increasingly determined efforts to put his soft, pudgy hands on her body.

  It had been a game of wits, to keep from being alone with him, but she’d never realized how very serious it was. How determined and vicious Horace DeWinter could truly be. Her face was numb from the blow he’d struck her. She ought to pull herself together, she knew it. The maid who’d had the bad timing to appear had taken one look at the body on the floor and run off screaming. It would be only a matter of minutes before the noise she was making summoned the inhabitants of the old inn.

  Emma wondered idly whether they’d drag her out into the stormy evening and hang her there and then. It might be preferable to facing Cousin Miriam.

  Someone was watching her. She wanted to summon the energy to look, but for the moment she was distracted by all the blood on her hands. She had never thought he’d lunge for her like that. That he’d doubt her determination.

  She could still feel the blade sinking into his flesh.

  Killoran’s mood was not particularly sunny that winter afternoon. For one thing, he had a terrific headache, and the bottle of cognac he’d brought with him to cheer him during the journey didn’t seem to make any difference except to make his head pound even more fiercely. He’d regretted his acceptance of Cousin Nathaniel’s visit within one day of agreeing to it, but he’d been oddly loath to cancel it, and he’d let the invitation stand. If Matthew Hepburn, a country squire in the tiny Northumberland village of St. Just, had been a more worldly soul, he would have known better than to send his only son, Nathaniel, to the care of his distant cousin James Michael Patrick, the Earl of Killoran, for a bit of town bronze. The connection was so remote it was almost nonexistent—Hepburn’s wife’s sister was cousin to Killoran’s aunt’s husband—and indeed, Killoran could have ignored the request, since all the principals in the matter were long dead. He didn’t need Hepburn’s money, or gratitude, and he was never one to let himself be bothered by responsibility or guilt.

  But he accepted the imminent arrival of one Nathaniel Hepburn with a kind of cool grace, for one simple reason.

  He was bored.

  The cards always fell his way; the women did the same. He had conquered society, with the small and unlamentable exception of the proper young females, and he no longer had any interest in removing himself from his comfortable house on Curzon Street in London and returning to the charred ruins of Killoran House, the run-down horse farm that made up the bulk of his inheritance. If it were up to him, he’d never set foot in Ireland again. He had no family left, no land worth anything, no ties. He would die an Englishman. And if his current boredom didn’t abate, that happy day would come damned soon.

  Nathaniel Hepburn, age twenty-three, sounded, according to his father’s spiky, flowing script, like an absolute prince of young English
manhood. Sober, earnest, hardworking, intelligent. Determined to learn a bit of the ways of the world, he would then retire back to Northumberland and take up the reins of his father’s comfortable estate.

  If he hadn’t been drunk at the time, Killoran would have simply ignored the letter. Unfortunately, he’d taken to drinking deeply of late—it didn’t fill the emptiness inside him or relieve his monumental ennui, but it made him less aware of the deficiencies in his elegant, comfortable life.

  Instead Killoran decided to welcome his splendid young cousin into the ways of London society. He would open the eyes of this stalwart paragon, teach him something of the seaminess that lay beneath the pretty surface of the ton. When the task grew tiresome, as everything always did, far too quickly, he would send Nathaniel back to the bosom of his trusting family, older and wiser. If he needed to see a bit of the world, Killoran could be prevailed upon to show him. Including a tour of some places most country squires never even imagined could exist in the wicked environs of London.

  He was drunk, definitely, gracefully drunk, when he had come up with the notion and written the letter to Hepburn’s father, signifying his agreement. He was sober, definitely, irritably sober, when it had come time to fetch the young man at a posting house on the outskirts of London. Killoran considered getting drunk once more and ignoring the assignation. Instead he decided to take his bottle with him.

  He’d considered heading for the Continent—he missed Paris, missed the gaiety of Versailles, where the perspicacious inhabitants were some of the few who rightly preferred the Irish, and indeed any nationality, to the English. He wanted to spend a week in the arms of a plump French mistress who understood his needs and how to please him. He was mortally tired of people and their endless blathering. He wanted sex and silence, and he had no objections to paying for them. There was a certain honesty about such arrangements, devoid of the tiresome and false declarations of affection or even interest outside the bedroom.

  He flicked his cuff, noting the heavy fall of Mechlin lace against the inky-black satin of his coat. It was a particular conceit of his to dress only in black and white, ornamented with silver. His acquaintances would deride him for it—“You look like a demmed parson,” his acquaintance Sanderson would tell him, dealing with a skill untouched by the number of bottles he’d imbibed. But it was an effective conceit. He moved through society, watched by all. It provided a certain amusement.

  He put his long fingers to his temples, massaging them. He seldom bothered with wigs, and he kept his own luxuriant black locks unpowdered and tied back in a queue. He had a pounding headache, and was entirely ready to take his temper out on the so-perfect Nathaniel Hepburn.

  Of course, there was always the possibility that Nathaniel had managed to fool a doting parent and was a precocious sinner, old in the ways of wickedness. But he doubted it. Nathaniel Hepburn would be as sober and stalwart as his father assured him, a dead bore unless Killoran managed to bring him down to his own level. He certainly had every intention of trying.

  The Pear and Partridge was a small inn on the edge of the heath, and by the time Killoran’s chaise pulled up, it was growing dark, with a strong wind picking up. He dismounted with the languid grace that had become second nature to him, then strolled into the taproom and surveyed the inhabitants with a weary sigh.

  Nathaniel Hepburn was easy enough to pick out. He looked younger than his twenty-three years, with chestnut-brown hair tied back in a simple queue, a handsome face, and distrustful, disapproving blue eyes. Killoran noted with interest that the disapproval was directed at him.

  “Lord Killoran,” he said, surging to his feet with enough energy to make Killoran’s head pound even more. “I was afraid something might have happened to you.”

  “Please,” he said faintly, holding out a slim white hand. “Call me Killoran. Everyone does. Dear me, am I late?”

  Nathaniel stared at him uncertainly. “It’s past four in the afternoon, sir. I arrived early this morning.”

  “‘Sir’ is almost as bad as ‘Lord Killoran,”” he murmured. “I gather I’ve been remiss. Order me a bottle of French brandy, and once we’ve toasted your arrival and the horses are properly rested, we’ll start back to the city.”

  “But, sir…”

  “Not at all, my boy,” Killoran said with an airy wave of his hand. “Not another word. I know you’re grateful...”

  “Actually, I’m not.”

  Killoran halted. He refused to let his amusement show. Instead he reached for his quizzing glass, held it to his eye, and looked the young man up and down with a leisurely air. Insolent pup. “How fascinating,” he said faintly, his tone conveying his complete disinterest.

  “I’ll tell you now, sir, that I didn’t wish to come,” Nathaniel announced stiffly. “I have no need for town bronze, no need to expose myself to the fleshpots of a wicked city such as London. My father insisted, and I am, above all things, a dutiful son. But I don’t wish to be here, and I most particularly don’t wish to partake of your hospitality. My father may not have heard of your reputation, but when I was at Cambridge, there were tales enough of your excesses. The Irish earl is notorious, as I’m sure you have little doubt. Young men were warned not to gamble with you if they met you in society. If I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t be here, I promise you. I’d be back in Northumberland, I’d be married, I’d be—”

  “Ah,” said Killoran, still bored, “there’s a young lady involved. Tell me, child, is she unsuitable? The daughter of a dairymaid, perhaps?”

  “Miss Pottle is from one of the finest Northumberland families!” Nathaniel said furiously. “How dare you!”

  “You will discover, after a few weeks in my company, that I dare just about anything,” Killoran murmured. “And you will be spending several weeks in my company, won’t you?”

  “Unless you send me back early.”

  Killoran’s smile was far from reassuring. “I see. I was wondering whether your monumental ill manners were the result of ignorance or design. Obviously you were hoping I’d be so appalled by your rudeness that I’d send you packing. You forget, I’m an Irishman living in England. I’m quite used to rudeness and insults.”

  Nathaniel was temporarily at a loss for words. Killoran accepted that fact with gratitude.

  “In the meantime,” he continued before Nathaniel could gather together his prodigious powers of speech, “I’m going to lie down. Heroic emotions before dinner give me the headache. I intend to bespeak me a bedchamber for a few hours, and you can sit here and nurse your grudges. I believe there’s a mail coach heading north within the next few hours. If I come back downstairs and find you gone, I will assume your duty to your father proved unbearable.” He tilted his head to one side, surveying the young man silently. “If you stay,” he added gently, “you may discover that you lose all interest in the divine Miss Pottle.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nathaniel said in a sulky voice. “She’s lost all interest in me.”

  “Has she, now? Women are ever fickle. In that case, you might as well remain in London and drown your sorrows. There are any number of pleasing women in town, most of them with much pleasanter names.”

  “How dare you!” Nathaniel exclaimed.

  “You already said that,” Killoran pointed out in a deceptively mild voice. “Don’t be tiresome, my boy. Leave or stay, it’s up to you. I’ll be ready to drive back to town as soon as the horses are rested.”

  “Damn you,” Nathaniel snarled, but it was in a low voice. There was a limit to the young man’s bravado, after all.

  Killoran smiled sweetly. “Indeed.”

  The bedchamber mine host provided for him was damp, the linen unaired; the fire smoked, and the noise was appalling. Killoran was beyond objecting. He had tossed himself down on the lumpy bed with a complete disregard for his elegant clothes, unfastened his tormenting queued hair, and closed his eyes. The rain was coming down in earnest now, and the bedchamber was far from warm. The window
s rattled in their casements, determined breezes swept through the room, and Killoran’s mood did not improve. One hour of sleep, that was all he asked. Just enough to take the edge off the miserable pounding in his skull.

  The voices in the next room were muffled, angry. He heard a thump, and a cry that was cut off abruptly.

  Another man might have evinced some level of curiosity. Not Killoran. He had seen enough in his life to be particularly disinterested in the violent doings of others. It sounded as if someone had just met his demise, violently. He could only hope things would now quiet down.

  He was just drifting off into a pleasant, wine-benumbed slumber when a shrill scream sent him leaping off the bed. Whatever semblance of a good mood he’d possessed, and there’d been precious little, had vanished. He strode to the door, slammed it open, and advanced down the hall, in the direction of the witless screaming.

  All was silent now. The door stood open to a private bedroom, and there were only two inhabitants. One was a bedraggled, bloodstained, and astonishingly lovely young female.

  The other, at her feet, was quite dead. And so it was that he found himself at the Pear and Partridge, on the outskirts of London, embroiled in a cold-blooded murder.

  Things, he thought faintly, were definitely looking up.

  “Are you going to swoon?”

  The voice was cool, ironic, with the faintest trace of a lilt. It was enough to gain Emma’s attention. She looked toward the door, to the man lounging there, surveying her with a bored air.

  He was a startling figure, dressed in deep black satin, with ruffles of lace trailing down his cuffs. His waistcoat was embroidered with silver, his breeches were black satin as well; his clocked hose were shot with silver. He had no need of the diamond-encrusted high heels on his shoes to add to his already intimidating height, nor to show off the graceful curve of his leg. His hair was midnight black, falling loose on his shoulders, and his eyes were green, cold, amused.