King & Co.’s headquarters—a handsome brick building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—had been one of the firstpurchases Tess had made with her widow’s portion, and the satisfaction she’d felt on signing the deeds, that heady rush of independence, had gone a long way to lessening her guilt about the lies she’d told to get there.
Their first “case” had been to help Cecelia Talbot, an old school friend. Cece had lost her necklace while kissing a “gentleman” at a party, and the cad had been trying to blackmail her into marriage by threatening to send it to her father as proof of their “affair.”
Tess had lured the blackmailer into a maze at Vauxhall. Instead of the kiss he’d been expecting, he’d been greeted by Daisy’s loaded pistols, and a lengthy speech from Ellie reminding him that blackmail had been considered a capital felony instead of a misdemeanor since the case ofR. v. Jonesin 1776. As such, it was technically punishable by transportation to Australia—if not the death penalty outright—and that Ellie was quite prepared to ask her father to pursue a prosecution on Cecelia’s behalf.
This information had been enough to scare the miscreant into returning the necklace the following day, and to take an extended tour of the Greek Islands “for his health.”
After that, business had flourished. They’d gained cases through whispered word-of-mouth recommendations and a few newspaper advertisements, and now King & Co. was known for dealing with “sensitive matters” for London’s fashionable elite with the utmost discretion and remarkable success.
Professional satisfaction, however, was not the same asphysicalsatisfaction. It had been almost two years since her disastrous marriage, and Tess still had what Daisy called “an inexperience problem.”
Her situation was uniquely challenging. If Tess took a lover, she risked falling pregnant, and the gossip she’dheard suggested that methods of prevention were notoriously unreliable. Any child of hers would be obviously illegitimate, and it would be cruel to subject an innocent to the inevitable stigma and disadvantages of such a position.
She couldn’t choose another husband, either. Marriage would mean losing the income she received from the duchy and handing control of her person and her finances to a man who might forbid her to continue her investigative work.
That would never do. There was a mortgage to pay on the property at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Ellie and Daisy relied on their salaries for their own limited independence.
The only way Tess could ever marry again would be to find a man as rich as the old duke, whom she could trust implicitly. A man who would love her enough to allow her to make her own decisions.
Since solvent, attractive, trustworthy gentlemen were notoriously thin on the ground, she’d resigned herself to a lifetime of widowhood.
But not to a life of complete celibacy.
The solution, the three of them had decided, was for Tess to become someone other than the Duchess of Wansford for a night. As an incognita, a masked woman with no name and no morals, she could find a handsome stranger and do a little “passionate experimenting” without fear of discovery.
According to Daisy, Hinchcombe Park was the place to do it. Tom Careby’s masquerades were notorious for their licentiousness.
Still, Tess was having second thoughts. “I should never have suggested this.”
“Of course you should,” Daisy insisted. “You’re themost beautiful girl in England and you’ve never even been properly kissed. Orimproperly kissed, for that matter. It’s a travesty.”
“Do you mean she’s never been kissed with proficiency?” Ellie mused. “Or that she’s never been kissed in an indecent manner?”
“Either,” said Daisy. “Both.” She shook her head with a frown. “London’s full of rakes and scoundrels. I can’t believe so few of them have propositioned you.”
“Maybe there’s something about me that suggests I wouldn’t be open to advances? Am I too aloof? Too unapproachable?”
“Not at all,” Ellie said soothingly. “You’re utterly irresistible. And you looked radiant in half mourning. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who looked good in lavender. Lilac makes me look seasick.”
“Youhavedeveloped a bizarre interest in modern agricultural practices, though,” Daisy teased. “Not everyone’s as excited by truffles as you are.”
“You don’t think they can tell I’m still a virgin, do you?”
Daisy snorted. “Of course not. Despite my father’s claim to being able to spot one at fifty paces, men are not born with an innate maidenhood detector. Purity can’t be divined, like water. If itcould, every man would keep a dowsing twig in his pocket to see if it quivered whenever he got close to a girl.”
Tess chuckled at the mental image that produced.
Ellie gripped the windowsill as the coach lurched through another rut. “It’s more likely they haven’t asked because the matrons have scared them off, or because they’re afraid of being rejected. Most men would rather not try, than admit they’d failed.”
Tess let out a long sigh. When she’d first been forcedto marry the duke, she’d worried that thetonwould brand her a shameless fortune hunter—or worse, a murderess—but that hadn’t been the case.
While she’d eschewed social events for the first six months of full mourning, Daisy and Ellie had started a campaign to smooth her reentry into society by reminding everyone that she’d been forced into an unwilling union by her domineering father.
Her father’s own death, a mere eight weeks after the duke’s, had prevented him from denying this unpalatable truth.
The irony of him not living long enough to enjoy the benefits of having a duchess for a daughter had not been lost on Tess. She’d felt guilty at how little she’d mourned him, but he’d been an unloving, selfish parent and she was unaccountably relieved to be beyond reach of his manipulations.
Since a large number of society’s heiresses had been also forced into loveless unions themselves, she’d encountered an unexpected degree of sympathy when she’d finally returned to London.
