Duke of Depravity (Sins and Scoundrels Book 1) Read online

  Duke of Depravity

  Sins and Scoundrels

  Book One

  Scarlett Scott

  Copyright © 2018 by Scarlett Scott

  Kindle Edition

  Published by Dragonblade Publishing, an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Books from Dragonblade Publishing

  About the Book

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Crispin Ashforth returns from battle the newly inherited Duke of Whitley with two sisters under his charge. Publicly lauded as a hero, he is haunted by the bitter mission that nearly saw him killed and cost the life of his best friend. He’s desperate to drown out the demons tormenting him by any means, regardless of how depraved.

  All he needs to do is find a proper governess for his hellion sisters so he can drink and wench himself into oblivion. Enter Miss Jacinda Turnbow, who is as lovely as she is prickly. It doesn’t take Crispin long to realize he’s found precisely the sort of distraction he needs in the prim governess.

  But Jacinda has secrets of her own, and she’s no ordinary governess. To save herself and her father from ruin, she has agreed to infiltrate the duke’s home and search for evidence that he’s a traitor.

  Resisting his advances grows more difficult by the day, however, as she discovers there’s more to Crispin than the careless life of sin he’s cultivated. And the greatest danger she faces is losing her heart to the man she has no choice but to betray.

  Prologue

  Spain, 1812

  Crispin faced the most dangerous and feared Spaniard on the Peninsula, and despite the unease roiling through his gut, he did not flinch. A dark, embittered figure flanked by two large, armed guards, the man always dressed in simple peasant garb. But his speech, commanding presence, and almost flawless English marked him as something more than the picture he presented.

  He was known as El Corazón Oscuro.

  The Dark Heart.

  To some, he was a fabled hero. Like an avenging knight of old, he fought against French tyranny and oppression, striking back against rampaging armies that decimated towns, pilfering and ravaging homes and families. He avenged innocent civilians who were left to bleed to death in the courtyards of their small towns.

  To the French army, there were far more appropriate appellations for the man. Le Diable, they called him, or Le Sans Couer. Anything less would be a misnomer for a man responsible for killing over a thousand French troops in guerilla attacks all across the Peninsula. But he did not stop at enemy soldiers. Anyone suspected of harboring the enemy was fair game for death and violence. Even the innocent.

  Unlike most meetings called by El Corazón Oscuro, this one was being conducted beneath the cover of an early spring moon in a home that had been commandeered and subsequently destroyed by the French. Window panes and frames had been removed, and neither a stick of furniture, nor a jagged shard of crockery remained within. The place had been evis
cerated as surely as if a howitzer had blasted it to hell.

  The air was crisp and cool, the scent of impending rain looming as surely as the siege that would soon unfold upon Badajoz. The time to strike had imbued Crispin and his men, as it always did, with a reckless, pent-up energy that could not be settled upon one task. He felt it now as he and his best friend and fellow intelligence officer Morgan, Marquess of Searle, stood shoulder to shoulder and stared down El Corazón Oscuro.

  Part of him wanted to charge the fortifications of the city now. Part of him wanted to withdraw his sidearm and aim it upon the Spaniard. He did not trust the man. Never had, never would, and something about the evening meeting, with its unusual stipulations and obscure location, chilled him to his marrow. He could not shake the feeling that he would either return to his post in the morning victorious, or he would die this night and rot into the earth the same way so many other soldiers before him had.

  “More cannon,” El Corazón Oscuro charged into the uneasy silence.

  They had navigated this delicate dance many times before. Wellington supplied El Corazón Oscuro and his band of cutthroats and mercenaries with as many supplies, armaments, and funds as could be reasonably diverted. In return, the bloodthirsty men attacked vulnerabilities in the French line with a complete disregard for those they slaughtered. Last month, El Corazón Oscuro had attacked a French field hospital, the already wounded soldiers sheltering there nailed to trees to bleed to death.

  Crispin and Morgan, who had been friends well before their days as war comrades, exchanged a communicative glance. The Spaniard always asked for more at each meeting. But his campaigns against the French—limited, lightning-fast attacks—were too successful to resist. Inevitably, they would reach a compromise. Their commanding general had given them their utmost limits prior to their departure.

  “How many more cannon?” Crispin asked.

  “We have seven to spare,” Morgan added.

  El Corazón Oscuro’s lip curled. “Seven? Do you jest, Coroneles? We require at least fifteen for the French blockhouses in this region alone.”

  The defensive blockhouses of the enemy dotted major arteries, providing garrisons for infantry that protected intelligence and supplies. Attacking the bastions led to disruption in communication and provisions the French could ill afford. Already, their messengers traveled with cavalry numbering in the hundreds. Crispin and Morgan had been sent on countless missions to ensure the loyalty and success of local guerilla bands in the last two years alone. El Corazón Oscuro and his men were no different.

  Except for the stark evil of the man. War was hell, but murdering innocent women… Crispin’s gut clenched at the recollection of the aftermath of El Corazón Oscuro’s bitter campaigns of vengeance. Battle had a way of expunging all empathy from a man—he must either become impervious or succumb to death. But there remained some parts of his inner sensibility as a gentleman that he could not entirely dismiss.

  “We have seven,” Crispin repeated. Rumors regarding El Corazón Oscuro had begun to swirl, and Wellington had determined not to provide the leader and his forces more funds and armaments than any other band, in spite of his brutal successes. No one trusted the bastard.

  It was said El Corazón Oscuro had a French mother, which clouded his intentions beneath a shroud of suspicion, and that the chief motivator in all his actions was greed. It was also said that he could be easily bought. Even so, they had never denied El Corazón Oscuro any of his wishes before, having been given carte blanche to appease his bloodthirstiness.

  “Seven is insufficient,” growled the ruffian.

  “We feel confident that seven is adequate,” Morgan offered smoothly in his bland, drawing-room accent.

  Morgan’s cool, unflappable air was the stuff of legend amongst their ranks. After taking a bullet to the tip of his pinkie at Talavera, he had lopped off what remained with his sword and continued to fight.

  “Adequate, you say.” El Corazón Oscuro grinned without mirth, the effect more like a snarl.

  The man’s barely leashed savagery, coupled with his rampant ire, sent a chill down Crispin’s spine. He pitied those who had seen this vagabond’s angry visage as their last sight before oblivion. Men buried alive to their shoulders so they could die a slow and painful death, unable to free themselves. And then there was the French captain who had met his end over the hearth of this very home, hung by his feet over the fire so that his head roasted.

  “Adequate,” Crispin affirmed, tamping down the bile that rose in his throat when he thought of the still smoking body of the captain. The vile scent of charred human flesh would never leave a man.

  “Who are you to decide what is adequate, bonito Inglés?” he thundered, his gaze slicing to Morgan with dark, undeniable rage. “You with your fancy uniforms and your undying love from sweet-scented, pious hermanas and madres at home? You who have never had to watch your people be raped and killed. How the hell could you know what is adequate? We are tired of this cursed war, and we want it to end. It can only end with more cannon, more French cerdo blood. Give us the cannon, and the heavens will open to rain escarlata.”

  “French cerdo blood is it now?” Morgan raised a brow, challenging their reluctant ally for the first time. “How odd for you to react thus when I am given to understand you are half French yourself. With the rumors surrounding your… heritage, one cannot help but wonder at your true loyalty.”

  “My heritage,” El Corazón Oscuro repeated, his tone taking on a deadly quality. A quiet, violent rage. “Elaborate, bonito.”

  Bloody hell. Both the Spaniard cutthroat and Morgan vibrated with aggression as they squared off, looking like two wild dogs about to fight to the death.

  “Idle rumors often abound,” Crispin intervened. “Some question your motives. I am afraid that such word has reached our superiors. You understand, surely, they cannot allow for a surfeit of armaments to be put into the hands of forces that cannot be trusted implicitly as allies.

  El Corazón Oscuro spat. “Our ravens are hungry for their daily feast of Frenchmen, but perhaps they would like pretty Englishmen just as well.”

  “Do you dare to threaten us, vile son of a French whore?” Morgan gritted.

  El Corazón Oscuro’s eyes flashed. “You will regret your words, Searle. I will take great pleasure in making you eat them before I let the birds peck out your tongue.” He gave a jerky nod.

  A splitting pain crashed through Crispin’s skull in the next moment, and his vision went black.

  Chapter One

  London, Six Months Later

  “Read them aloud once more if you please, Jacinda. I think I may have inadvertently missed a number, for the sequence has no notable pattern.”

  Jacinda glanced up from the carefully transcribed document to her father. He was beloved in the lamp glow, his white hair askew from his familiar habit of running his fingers through the thinned strands whilst in thought. Their deciphering sessions grew increasingly tedious and fraught with blunders. At first, she had suspected his eyesight had grown worse than he wished to admit. Now, she could not help but wonder if something far worse was at work.

  Worry lanced her stomach, curdling the modest breakfast she had consumed not an hour before. But, she nevertheless lowered her eyes to the copy of the enciphered dispatch that had been discovered on the body of a French aide-de-camp. “One hundred. Ten. Twenty. One-and-thirty. Three. One hundred and four. Fourteen…”

  Painstakingly, she recited the numeric ciphers that had been transcribed for the eighth time. She had been reading aloud the documents that had arrived from the Peninsula, written in precise, small script, because Father could not read them. He recopied each number painstakingly in large scrawl his double spectacles rendered legible.

  Father frowned. “I do believe I transposed this fourteen to one-and-forty,” he murmured, bent over his task, nose frightfully near to the paper he scoured. “How many fourteens have you, Jacinda dearest? I have two-and-thirty at most recent
count.”

  “I do as well,” she said gently, wondering how she could broach the subject with him. How he hated to see his physician, for being the preeminent decipherer in London meant he could afford no weakness of body or mind. “According to my charts, fourteen is the most commonly appearing number in the dispatches written in the new method of enciphering.”

  “Yes.” Father raked his wizened hands through his hair without glancing up. “If only we knew what fourteen substitutes. Is it a word or a letter?”

  Jacinda’s mind turned to the matter of cracking the new French cipher, one so complicated that Wellington’s field officers could not unravel its mysteries. Like Father, who descended from a line of deciphers and remained one of a small, elite handful that worked for the Crown, she loved the sport of decoding. So much so that after James’ death, aiding Father was all that kept her feeling alive.

  “Dispatches number three, seven, eight, and ten all contain a combination of words,” she pointed out, confident they could exploit the weakness in the cipher by using the slipshod methods of the harried soldier who had not bothered to encrypt the entire communication.

  “Of course you are correct, as always, Jacinda.” Pride underscored Father’s words. “You are sharper than a rapier, my dear girl. Together, we shall unlock the keys to this and our army will have the advantage it requires against the enemy.”

  Tenderness rushed through her. Mama had died when she was quite young, and it had been just the two of them for so long now. She was grateful he had taught her everything he knew, that he prized her mind and encouraged her pursuit of knowledge. Not every gentleman possessed his heart of gold.

  “Thank you for always believing in my capabilities,” she said softly, tears pricking at her eyes.

  She refused to allow them to fall. She had not wept since the day she learned of James’ death. Nor would she cry now, for she had promised herself nothing could ever hurt worse than the certain knowledge that her soldier would never come home to her.

  “You have been blessed with both the intelligence and beauty of your mother,” Father said, smiling forlornly. “Nearly twenty years later, and the ache only grows stronger. How I miss her.”