Tempted By the Night by Elizabeth Boyle Read Free Book Online Page B

of London’s infamous gaming hells, where fortunes noble and grand and illicit and ill-gotten were won and lost on a nightly basis. Corinthian and bounder, cit and duke could be found deep in cards or dice.
    Rockhurst continued to wait, but for what, she couldn’t imagine.
    Rowan, on the other hand, leapt down from his spot and made his determined way straight for her side of the curricle.
    “Nice doggy,” she whispered down to him. “Nice Rowan.”
    The earl’s dog replied by growling low, then barking as if the world were about to end.
    “Rowan!” the earl snapped, dropping his cheroot and crushing it with the heel of his boot. Then he came around the carriage to where Rowan had her cornered in the tiger’s seat. “Be still.”
    Hermione held her breath, for she’d only been this close to Rockhurst a few times, and that odd flip of her stomach was starting to rise again.
    Oh, no, I can’t, she realized, her hand coming to her mouth. If she tossed up her accounts, he’d discover her for sure. That is, if his demmed dog didn’t give her away first.
    Just then the door with the peacock opened, light and music and laughter pouring out. Down the steps teetered the largest woman Hermione had ever seen. She wasn’t just fat, she was tall, as tall as the earl, and honestly, all the more intimidating in her grand red gown and garish makeup.
    Then Hermione took a second glance at both the woman coming down the steps and up at the various windows, her mouth dropping open. This wasn’t some gaming hell…but a… a brothel !
    He’d brought her to a brothel.
    Up until now, Hermione had been quite content in her fantasy that the outrageous rumors about the earl were just that: outrageous and hardly grounded in fact.
    But now…well, certainly, as she stared up at the woman on the steps, she knew without a doubt she was going to be sick.
    This was the sort of woman Rockhurst preferred?
    But that was before the proprietress spoke—in a gravelly, rough-hewn voice that drew Hermione’s gaze faster than a sale on silks.
    “Rockhurst, demmed fuckin’ time you got your arse down here. The entire place is going to hell! Literally. And I blame you for this. I won’t see a single profit tonight if you don’t do something. And do it now.”
    “Jiminy,” Hermione whispered. The woman on the steps was…a man.
    And now that she took another look, she realized she, or rather he, looked like something out of one of her mother’s amateur theatricals. Which didn’t give Hermione any sense of comfort.
    “I could leave, Cappon,” the earl said, whistling to Rowan and climbing back up into his curricle. “Serveyou right if I did. Haven’t paid me for the last time I got dragged down here.” The two men stared at each other for a moment, and then Rockhurst shrugged and started to pick up the reins.
    “Don’t you dare, Rockhurst!” Cappon called out, coming down the steps, his thick, meaty hands fisted into his red silk skirts to lift them above the filth on the steps and pavement. “You’ve a duty here.”
    “And you’ve a duty to pay me,” Rockhurst shot over his shoulder. “That’s the way the tribute works.”
    Again, they stared at each other, the earl calm and easy, while Hermione could see Cappon’s rouged jowls and lips working back and forth. After what seemed an eternity, the madame snapped his fingers, and a dwarf of a man dressed in equally bright silks came from within the house and hurried down the steps to the sidewalk.
    “Pay his nibs, Tibbets,” Cappon ordered. The dwarf tossed up a pouch, and Rockhurst caught it and gave it a simple heft, as if to measure it.
    “A bit short,” he said, curling the ribbons around his hands, his horses dancing in the traces, as if as anxious as anyone in their right mind would be to leave such a place.
    Cappon heaved another aggrieved sigh, and said, “The rest, Tibbets. Give him the rest.”
    Another pouch flew up from the little man’s stubby fingers, and