Page 1 of A Touch Wicked
Chapter 1
London, 1872
James Grey, The Earl of Kent, had only heard of the Masquerade discreetly murmured between glasses of brandy at White’s. The stories alone were enough to inflame a man's desire.
Yet, as he regarded the invitation and box that had arrived on his doorstep that morning, he felt a foreign sense of trepidation. And James Grey — ever-practical, and certainly not prone to being emotional — was not a man who grew nervous easily.
“If you don’t go, I will.” James’s younger brother Richard read over the invitation. “I shall bear the hardship,” he declared dramatically, “of anonymous lovemaking. Oh, the sacrifice.”
James eyed his brother. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t pretend to be me.”
“Thank god I’d be wearing a mask, then,” Richard said, looking up from the letter. “Since I’m the handsomer brother and no one would be fooled otherwise.”
The Grey brothers were close enough in age and appearance that people often mistook them for twins. They both had the same dark blond hair and piercing blue eyes, the same broad shoulders and muscular form. They were, to use a word whispered among the ton,delicious.
Their personalities, however, couldn’t be more different. Richard bedded any attractive woman who crooked a finger at him — then left her by morning. James had a tendency toward longer affairs. He was a considerate lover, methodical in his devotion to female pleasure. His partners gossiped often about his mastery in the bedchamber, his ability to seduce.
There was only one problem: he never, ever yielded his control.
“The answer is still no.”
James swirled the brandy in his glass and drank. The afternoon light had cast the drawing room in a warm glow, and the light fell on that damned box as if God himself was telling James:take your mask, go to the Masquerade, and fuck a woman senseless. You know you want to. It’s been a month.
James’s last affair ended in the way they all did: when his mistress began to feel things for him and expected him to reciprocate.Feelingswere messy things. Too troublesome. He’d seen the destruction wrought when emotions clouded all sense of reason.
Perhaps that made the Masquerade a perfect solution to his month-long celibacy. Its draw was the anonymity of intimacy, uncomplicated by identity, status, money or duty. But James was not the kind of man who listened to his cock.
Or God, for that matter.
Richard waved the invitation in the air like a flag. “Don’t you understand how many people are clamoring for this?”
“I’m beginning to have some notion,” James said dryly.
Richard went on as if he hadn’t heard his brother. “I haven’t received one, and god knows I’ve tried. I even went so far as to try bribing the messenger into revealing the Madame’s identity. No luck.” He looked up at James and narrowed his eyes. “Why you?”
“I can’t possibly imagine.”
James considered telling his brother that he might not have bedded every woman of a certain age in Britain, but he didn’t take his pleasure and leave. Quick lovemaking was not something James Grey was capable of. He gave and gave and gave first, until her knees shook. Until her toes curled. Until she screamed for him.
He may not bother with things like feelings, but many women had tried and failed to make him theirs. Which was reason enough not to attend. "The last thing I need is to see some woman from this club in a ballroom. Especially, god forbid, a debutante. When I marry, I want it to be on my terms.”
“Not a concern,” Richard replied shortly. He pointed to the letter and quoted, “Members shall never reveal themselves to one another. We honor secrecy above all.”
“Noblewomen not expecting a betrothal after lovemaking,” James said doubtfully. “Assuming you can believe that overwrought letter.”
As a rich earl, aged nine-and-twenty, James knew it was his duty to marry and begin the business of producing an heir. Which seemed a rather dispassionate view of matrimony, but it was the way of theton. It was generally well known that James Grey — ever logical and scrupulous — had decided that his bachelorhood would end at age thirty.
And his birthday was just before the London season.
There’s still time, he thought, staring at the letter.
Hell, ambitious mothers had already begun shoving their daughters at him whenever he entered a ballroom. A man could only take so much of it before he went mad.
“I’ve had friends attend,” Richard said. “The rumors are true. If anyone breaks the rules, the Madame sends them a letter informing them they’re no longer welcome. Though I've heard she’ll allow people to trade memberships, depending on the circumstance.” He set down the invitation and regarded the slim white box. “What’s in this?”
“What do you think? The mask, of course.”
Richard opened the white box to find a leather mask nestled in the centre. Like something the devil himself would wear, it was pitch black and pointed at the ends, hornlike. Made for a sinner. Made for indulgence. It concealed just enough of the face to obscure a man’s identity. He could become a different person each night.
