LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 1

      She was going to take a lover: the very next man, in fact, who walked through the door of her establishment, Mrs. Booth’s Discreet Gentlemen’s Club. Lucia Booth sighed pleasantly, savoring the thought. She slouched comfortably, letting her posture relax in one of the tall high-backed chairs on display in her very fine front parlor, the room reserved for receiving special clients. Down the hall, she could hear the ticking of the long case clock in the still of the afternoon. The house was quiet. The whole city was quiet.

      The eight-month wonder of the Bath Season had ended last week. Anyone of note, anyone likely to need her unique services, had moved on to London. Those of lesser note had moved back to their estates. Even the girls who worked for her had gone for holidays on the coast. She didn’t really expect anyone to walk through her door. There wouldn’t be any lover.

      Still, the idea was a diverting exercise, one she’d used often enough in the past. There was a certain thrill, a challenge in taking an ordinary man who was ham-handed with compliments and possessed of two left feet and turn him into something sublime, something that pleased the eye and distracted the mind. Wives and fiancées the breadth of England would thank her if they knew the myriad men who darkened her door asking for that very service. A few simple tricks and one delicious rumor were usually all it took to transform a boring man into an interesting one. She knew just how to do it.

      Transformations were her specialty. Once they’d been all that stood between life and death, victory and defeat, escape and capture. Panem et Circenses. Rome had had it right. The masses were so easily steered—diplomats too—from truths when there was beauty to entertain them. Now such transformations were merely a hobby, reserved for use only among those seeking to enhance their marital credentials or their egos, her stake in the outcome much reduced from what it had formerly been.

      Those who had played for higher stakes in the past were dead, a cautionary tale against the sin of overreaching oneself. It had been pure luck she’d been spared—luck and perhaps a dash of her own innate boldness at the crucial moment. Lucia squeezed her eyes shut, mentally pushing the memories back, memories of a ballroom turned bloody. A sun-filled afternoon was no place for such reminiscence. She would go out into the garden and force herself to enjoy the quiet. She’d once dreamed of having nothing more to do than cut flowers. Only now that she had it, the dream did not satisfy. Perhaps she was not made for a life without intrigue, a life without him, the one man who had ever truly tempted her. It had been five years now. She ought to know.

      The front bell tinkled. Mary, the maid, would get it. Lucia could hear Mary’s hurried steps, the opening of the door, the low murmur of voices before the quick sound of Mary’s feet headed her direction.

      “Mrs. Booth, there’s a man here to see you.” Mary was slightly breathless. Lucia could hear the uneven spacing of her words.

      Lucia smiled softly, her eyes still shut. She gave a light laugh. There was someone left in Bath after all. “I was just thinking, Mary,” she began languidly, “how I’d like to take a lover.” She didn’t need her eyes open to know Mary was blushing to the roots of her blond hair tucked up ever so neatly beneath her cap. Even after a year, Mary hadn’t gotten used to her earthy humors. She couldn’t resist a little more teasing. “The very next man who walks through the door, I think.”

      “Then it’s my lucky day.”

      Lucia started at the low rumble of masculine tones, eyes flashing open, her senses catching too late the fall of a shadow across her sunbeam. There was a time when she would have known someone had entered a room, eyes open or not. She’d gotten lax. She was not lax now. Every sense, every fiber of her being was on alert. A man who did not wait to be received was dangerous.

      He swept her a courtly bow. “La Mariposa, we meet again.”

      She felt herself pale, an entirely new sensation and quite unpleasant. She rose, steadying herself against the shock with the chair arm. No one called her that, not anymore, and even those who had were a precious few. She’d long suspected even death couldn’t defeat him and that someday he would find her, although she rationally knew that to be impossible. Yet, here he was: her one temptation. Ronan St. Simon, spymaster extraordinaire, standing in her parlor looking as virile and as lethal as ever, topaz eyes agleam, dark hair sleek.

      There was a small gun in the drawer of the sideboard under the window, just a few steps from her if she could reach it. It would be enough to scare, to wound. First she had to protect Mary. It was a lesson one learned early if one wanted a fair fight: rid the environs of innocents, don’t give the opposition anything to hold against you. “Mary, you may leave us, it’s all right.”

      “Is it all right?” St. Simon asked with a sardonic smile that showed off even, white teeth. His gaze followed her. She was well aware he was laughing at her as much with his eyes as with his mouth. He knew he had her at a disadvantage, the element of complete and utter surprise working quite nicely in his favor. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

      “Maybe I have. You are supposed to be dead.” Very dead. The last time she’d seen Ronan St. Simon, he’d been gloriously alive, waltzing an ambassador’s daughter across a ballroom in Vienna just moments before the debacle that claimed the lives of the others, victims of a traitor’s deal. The events of that night had sent her scurrying into the anonymity of her last transformation, and him ostensibly to the grave. Elementary logic suggested otherwise. Dead people weren’t darkly handsome men sporting thin white scars along their jawlines or burning holes through a woman’s clothes with intense golden-brown eyes that rivaled a tiger’s.

      Everything about

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