Lady Ruthless (Notorious Ladies of London Book 1) Read online

  He turned toward her, catching her staring, and raised a brow. “My former wife was a coldhearted shrew who ate good-hearted men for breakfast. I am sure your bloody brother never stood a chance against her.”

  He spoke with such rancor that it took her aback. “You hated her.”

  The three simple words hung in the air between them.

  His brown gaze was upon her. Searing her. “I loved her once. Stupidly and without reason, other than that she was beautiful and told me everything I wanted to hear. The hatred, however, was earned. She worked hard for that. She deceived me, cuckolded me, and stole from me more times than I can count.”

  Sinclair’s admission shocked her. But then, his earlier words returned to her. My wife was a manipulative whore. For a moment Callie could not think of a single response. Her impression of Lady Sinclair, aside from the recollection of her loveliness, was vastly different. She had been a stunning woman, almost ethereal. The perfect foil to a man of the earl’s dark, sullen masculine beauty.

  “She was quite gracious when I met her,” Callie managed to say.

  “I have no doubt she was.” His tone, like his expression, was grim. “The heartless bitch would have been better served had she trod the boards as an actress.”

  “My lord,” she gasped, shocked. “It is unwise to speak ill of the dead.”

  “Or what?” The grin he sent in her direction was cold. “Hmm? They shall haunt us? Too late for that, princess. That woman ruined me a long time ago. There is nothing she can do to me from the grave that holds a candle to what she did to me when she walked this earth.”

  So much unabated vitriol. And for his own wife.

  He retrieved his knife then and stalked toward her side of the bed, still indecent in nothing more than his smalls.

  Callie stiffened at his approach but refused to flinch away from him.

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Lady Calliope,” he told her curtly, taking her wrist and slicing through the cord which had bound her wrist. “I will not hurt you.”

  “I am to believe the man who has taken me captive?” she bit out, rubbing her newly released wrist.

  The freedom felt exhilarating.

  He shrugged. “Believe what you like. You already do.”

  His chest was fascinating. She tried not to look at him, truly she did. But aside from the artwork and sculptures she had seen in Paris, she had never before had such a thorough view of a man’s naked torso. The Earl of Sinclair’s was splendid. There was no other word for it.

  She blinked, forcing her gaze away from those sculpted slabs of muscle. “You were the last person to see Alfred alive, my lord, aside from the servants, who overheard you threatening him. It seems an impossible coincidence for both the wife you loathed and the man she loved to die on the same night, does it not?”

  “Not impossible if it happened,” he corrected calmly. “I am sorry for the loss of your brother, my lady, but I am not responsible for it.”

  His sympathy took her by surprise, but she refused to trust him or his words. “Of course you would deny it. I hardly expect you to admit to having committed murder.”

  “And so you thought to falsify my confession through your vicious little book?” he guessed.

  Correctly.

  Blast him.

  “I was attempting to right a wrong,” she defended herself. “If I cannot have justice for Alfred’s death, then destroying the remnants of your reputation will have to suffice.”

  There. Some raw honesty for him.

  His countenance was unreadable, but his jaw was rigid. “What a vivid imagination you have for a gently reared lady.”

  She lifted her chin, eying him with all the defiance teeming inside her. “Pray do not act as if I shocked you. I am certain my work pales in comparison to the sins you have committed.”

  He gave an indolent shrug, his stare hard upon her. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I am not as evil as you imagine me.”

  Ha! She most certainly did not believe that. There was a reason he was known as Sin, after all. She was sure the rumors she had heard about him were true. All of them.

  “Only an evil scoundrel would abduct an innocent woman from London and take her prisoner,” she countered.

  “Ah, but I hardly think you are an innocent, Lady Calliope.” He stroked his thumb over the sharp edge of his blade as he watched her.

  “You will cut yourself again,” she warned him before thinking better of the words.

  He raised a dark brow. “Concern for me, princess? Take care, or else I shall think you have taken a fancy to me. Then again, I did take note of the manner in which you have been admiring my physique.”

  Her cheeks went hot anew. Of course he had noticed her silly ogling of him.

  “I was not admiring you,” she denied crisply. “You repulse me.”

  His gaze dipped to her mouth. “Your nipple said otherwise earlier, darling.”

  He had been awake. The utter knave!

  Even her ears went hot. “How dare you?”

  He had the audacity to flash her an unrepentant grin. “A man may as well grow familiar with the woman who will be his wife. I had to be certain you are not frigid. I will require an heir, after all.”

  With that, he sauntered back to the other side of the bed, still holding his blade as if he were a common footpad wielding a weapon rather than a peer of the realm. Gritting her teeth, she rose from the bed, clutching the counterpane to her breast for modesty’s sake.

  “I have already told you, I have no intention of marrying you,” she told him. “You cannot force me.”

  “Force will not be necessary, princess.” He was still grinning, the fiend. “Your protestation grows tiresome.”

  “As does being your prisoner,” she returned, her voice sharp.

  “Need I remind you that you brought this on yourself?” he inquired mildly as he donned his trousers.

  She pinned him with a glare. “I did nothing to deserve being abducted by a depraved villain.”

  His smile faded. He shrugged on his shirt. “You fired the first volley in this war of ours, my dear. If you had not done your damnedest to make certain you ground my reputation into the mud, I never would have even noticed you. Right now, I would be happily between Miss Mary Vandenberg’s thighs.”

  He was such a boorish devil.

  “You are coarse and horrid.” And she was burning, her cheeks aflame at his wickedness.

  “They call me Sin for a reason, princess.” He gave her a grim smile, working on the buttons of his shirt and hiding his chest from her view.

  The moment was strangely intimate. Wildly inappropriate. It was, she imagined, what husbands and wives did, rising together, dressing in each other’s presences. Only, in her mind, a husband and wife ought to love each other, the way she and Simon had.

  She forced herself to look away from the Earl of Sinclair, to search instead for her own garments. And that was when she recalled that her gown had been savaged by his blade.

  How could he expect her to go about wearing yesterday’s gown, with a sawed-off sleeve?

  “Do you need my assistance in helping you to dress?” he queried, disrupting the tense silence that had fallen between them.

  His abrupt change of subject took her by surprise, as did his offer. “Of course I do not require your help.”

  “As you wish.” He stalked to the door. “I will wait for you to dress. Do not try anything foolish, princess.”

  She watched him go, determined to find a means of escape.

  Chapter Six

  You may find yourself wondering, dear reader, whether I ever thought about the lives I had so ruthlessly ended. The answer may well shock you, for I did not.

  ~from Confessions of a Sinful Earl

  Sin’s first indication that something was amiss came in the form of Lady Calliope Manning’s grumbled curses.

  The woman had a filthy mouth.

  But of course, he already knew that, having read the drivel she had att
empted to pin on him. The bit about the orgy had been most riveting, but now was not the time to reminisce.

  The second indication arrived in the form of her squeal and the sound of rending fabric.

  Bloody fucking hell.

  What was the maddening creature doing now? He did not bother to knock. He threw open the door and was instantly greeted by the sight of the she-devil’s rump framed by the window casement. Her gown was torn, having been hooked on the hinges, and she looked as if she were about to jump.

  He was not about to have her death upon his conscience. If the fool jumped, she would break her damned neck.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, crossing the chamber to where she dangled herself from the window.

  “Getting away from you by the only means possible,” she retorted, but her voice was tense.

  He did not miss the fear.

  She was terrified.

  And well she ought to be. There was nothing to break her fall below save a pair of decrepit Grecian urns.

  He caught her around the waist and hauled her back into the chamber. “Plummeting to your imminent demise is more like. Have you no wits in that pretty head of yours? There is no way to descend to the ground below save jumping, and jumping from this height will only have one outcome.”

  She was trembling in his arms as he pulled her away from the window. The skirt of her gown tore more as he shifted her, ripping a strip off it entirely. But he had hacked off one of her sleeves the day before, so the dress was already fit for the dustbin. The proof of her terror left him oddly shaken. And furious.

  “Plummeting to my demise seemed a better fate than remaining trapped here with a madman,” she bit out, her hands clawing at his as the fight returned to her. “Release me, you oaf. You have ripped my gown.”

  “You ripped it yourself with your ill-fated attempt at playing a bird,” he observed, spinning her about so they were face-to-face.

  Her eyes were wide, framed by lashes that were impossibly long. “Return me to London, and I will not tell a soul what you have done.”

  Did she truly believe she was the one who possessed the bargaining power between them?

  His grip on her waist tightened. “I will return you to London after you have agreed to become my wife.”

  “Then I suppose we shall both remain here for all eternity!” Her gaze flashed with defiant fire.

  Even after almost falling to her death, she remained stubborn as ever. He supposed he ought not to be surprised. The woman had been fighting him at every turn. Clearly, his plan was going to require some additional effort. Spiriting her from London had not had the intended effect of forcing her hand.

  Instead, she had been all the more determined to flee him.

  Her bosom was heaving with her breaths. She was glorious in her ire, in her bravery. He could not deny it. Lady Calliope Manning was a ravishing creature. Infuriating. Wrongheaded. Vicious, too. But there was something about her that fanned the fires of desire within him into raging, blistering flames.

  “Eternity is a long time to wait,” he told her with a calmness he little felt. “Too long for me to wait to secure a wife.”

  “Find a different wife,” she spat, fighting him with renewed vigor.

  “I would have,” he gritted from between clenched teeth. “You chased them all away with your lurid tales and heartless lies.”

  That much was true, lest she had forgotten. She was the reason for this war.

  But like earlier when they had been abed, her fight stirred the beast within him. Her spirited rebellion made his cock hard. Preposterous, especially since he detested her and what she had done. Nevertheless, it was true.

  Her nostrils flared. “I would never have written those serials if you had not murdered my brother.”

  “A stalemate once more, my future beloved,” he said. “As I have already informed you—ad nauseam—I did not harm your brother. Has it ever occurred to you that he alone was at fault for his demise? Perhaps he was soused or otherwise behaving in reckless fashion when he fell.”

  “Alfred was not reckless,” she insisted.

  “Says the woman who was attempting to leap from a window,” he observed. “Have you never wondered, in all your fantasies about me, why I would have wanted to kill your brother? He had already been cuckolding me for months, and he was hardly the first to do so.”

  “The servants said you argued with him,” she returned. “They heard raised voices. You left in a rage, they said.”

  Perhaps he had; in truth, he could not recall. The time after he had realized the depths of Celeste’s betrayals remained something of a blur of drinking himself to oblivion and attempting to discover the extent of her debts.

  Devastating, as it had turned out. She had sold off every jewel he had ever bought her. Even the Sinclair emeralds and rubies were gone.

  “I did not like him, Lady Calliope, but I did not kill him.” And then, because she was still squirming and attempting to get away, he did the reasonable thing.

  He bent and scooped her over his shoulder.

  “Put me down, you brute!” she screeched, pummeling his back with her dainty fists.

  He swatted her bottom. “No. We are going to have breakfast, and you are going to listen to me. And no more attempts at jumping out the blasted window.”

  Callie glared at the Earl of Sinclair from across the battered kitchen table.

  “Eat,” he told her, gesturing to the plate he had placed before her.

  Somehow, he had procured fruit and cheese and some delicious-smelling bread. Perhaps his accomplice, the man who had replaced Lewis as her driver? Whatever their origin, fresh strawberries had never looked more tempting than they did now, mocking her on a chipped piece of crockery.

  She crossed her arms even as her stomach growled. “No.”

  He had even managed to make her what looked and smelled to be a passable cup of tea. Her lips were parched and her throat was dry, particularly after her near-demise earlier. As it turned out, attempting to leap from a second-floor window was not as excellent an escape option as she had supposed when she had been standing safely on the floor. Halfway out the window, she had not only gotten her dress hung up on the hinges of the casement, but she had also been assailed by a troubling burst of dizziness.

  It had not been one of her finer moments.

  Or one of her better ideas.

  And it had ended in the Earl of Sinclair pulling her to safety and then hoisting her over his shoulder as if she were a sack of flour.

  Also not one of her finer moments.

  “You will eat, damn you,” he growled. “I even made you some bloody tea.”

  Had he recalled her request the night before? It hardly seemed likely he would have gone out of his way to please her. After all, he made no effort to disguise his disdain for her.

  “You cannot force sustenance down my throat,” she told him brazenly.

  In truth, he was wearing her down. Part of her dizziness had been down to the unexpected height of the fall from the window to the ground below. Nary even a tree in which to shimmy onto a branch. But the other part of her faintness was being caused by the lack of food and drink she had stubbornly enforced since the evening before.

  “Do not tempt me, oh darling future wife.” Grinning at her, he held a strawberry to his own lips and took a bite.

  What was it about the sight of his sensual lips moving? Those white, even teeth flashing? There was nothing carnal about eating a strawberry, and the man before her was her sworn enemy. She ought not to be affected by the mere act of him breaking his fast. She ought not to think about those lips claiming hers.

  About those kisses…

  Those hated, awful kisses…

  She frowned. “I am not your future wife.”

  “You love your brother, do you not?” he asked mildly, before taking another bite of the strawberry.

  Callie clenched her jaw. “Of course I loved Alfred. That is why I wrote those memoirs. T
hat is why I have been seeking vindication for his death.”

  His protestations that he had not been responsible for Alfred’s death meant nothing to her. The timing was too suspect. Lord Sinclair’s rage and hatred for his dead wife was still palpable, a year later. She would not believe a word that slid from his lying tongue.

  “Your other brother, my beloved betrothed. The current Duke of Westmorland.” The earl took a sip of his own tea. “Mmm. I do prepare a fine cup if I say so myself. The tea is a bit old, but you would never be able to tell by taste.”

  Vile man.

  She wrinkled her nose, casting a glance around the cavernous, stone walls of the kitchen. Last night, much of it had been bathed in shadows and darkness. By daylight, all its details were plainly visible. Including the fact that it had been abandoned for some time.

  “Where did you find it?” She would not be one whit surprised if there had been rodent offal mixed in with the tea leaves if he had found it within the sparse depths of this centuries’ old kitchen. “And I love Benny as much as I loved Alfred. They are my brothers, my blood. The three of us were inseparable.”

  “Fret not, Countess of Sinclair-to-be.” He sipped at his tea again, cool and calm as could be. “The tea is safe to drink. No poison or rat droppings, if that is what you suspect.”

  She cast a longing glance in the direction of her own tea before she could quash the urge. So thirsty. She was so very thirsty, and the tea certainly smelled sweet and inviting. She could practically feel it gliding over her tongue.

  But there remained one insurmountable problem: he had prepared it.

  “I would sooner leap from the window upstairs than become your next countess,” she returned with what she hoped was equal composure.

  “Ah, but you had your chance, did you not?” He cast her an amused smile. “Instead, I saved you. You are welcome, by the way. I did not hear you thank me for sparing you the certain fate of the bird who cannot fly.”