Chapter 1
It was the rain that ruined Henry Mortimer’s life.
Or possibly a cherry stem. The cherry stem had come first and therefore was chronologically more likely to have been the agent of his downfall.
He’d been twenty-one. Margo and Matilda had just made their debuts, and only as a favor to his best friend, Spencer, had he gone to the drawing room the morning after the eighteen-year-old twins’ presentation at court. As far as he’d been concerned, the twins were Spencer’s baby siblings, one more part of Spencer’s earldom that he—a mere solicitor—would for better or worse never have to worry about.
He’d met the twins years prior when he’d followed Spencer home from Cambridge, and he remembered them mostly as skinny freckled redheads who’d climbed in Spencer’s window in the middle of the night and tied him to the bedposts.
So he was not expecting to fall in love with Margo Halifax.
If he’d anticipated the cherry stem, he would never have called at Number Twelve Mayfair. Had he been able to predict the future, he would have moved to bloody France.
When he and Spencer strolled into the drawing room—Spencer carrying two enormous bouquets of irises that Henry had acquired on his behalf—the small square chamber was already filled with gentlemen. Henry spotted Matilda first. It was difficult to miss her. She was sitting atop the pianoforte, swinging her legs in time to a lively Scottish reel being banged out by one of Spencer’s idiot Harrow friends. She had an unlit cigar clenched between two fingers, and she waved it at them as they entered.
Henry blinked.
He had not called on many young ladies—none, in point of fact—but he was fairly certain this was not typical behavior. Spencer at his side heaved a long-suffering sigh.
He looked over the small room. He was already feeling dazed, and then his eyes landed on Margo, and Henry Mortimer was instantly, irrevocably, transcendently poleaxed.
They looked similar, Margo and Matilda, but Henry didn’t know how anyone could have confused them. Margo was more freckled, a constellation of gold stars trailing from her cheekbone down to the side of her mouth. Her front teeth were a little crooked.
While Matilda looked imperiously out over the callers clustered in the drawing room, Margo caught his eye, winked, and grinned.
“Do it, then,” said one of the blockheads encircling her. “No more boasting, Lady Margaret, or I’ll begin to doubt your honor.”
She held a cherry between her fingers, Henry noticed, a deep wine-y red, and at the blockhead’s words, she gave it a slow, sensuous roll. “Doubt not,” she said, and then she tugged the stem off with her teeth and sucked it into her mouth.
Just like the rest of the blockheads, Henry was fucking mesmerized. As he watched, Margo’s brow furrowed in concentration. Her jaw worked, then set, and he saw a flash of pink tongue, peeking out from her overlapping front teeth. Her lips puckered and pursed, and in his twenty-one years of life, he had never seen anything quite so erotically charged.
She reached up, stuck her thumb and forefinger into her mouth, and pulled them out with a wet pop.
Henry began to fear that he would unman himself.
“Ha!” she said triumphantly. “I did it!”
Between her fingers, Margo held the cherry stem, tied in a knot.
“Christ,” said Spencer, “that’s revolting.”
And Henry was never the same again.
But it wasn’t, he reflected now, entirely the fault of the cherry stem. He’d spent the subsequent seven years watching Margo and Matilda flout convention at every turn, drinking brandy out of flasks at the opera, emerging from closed carriages with gentlemen right on Rotten Row. He’d seen Matilda lay out one overeager young buck with her silk-gloved fist, and beheld with his own two eyes the infamous costume party at which Margo turned up dressed like Lady Godiva, a barely-there silk dress the same shade as her skin skimming dangerously along her breasts and hips.
He’d watched, and he’d listened to Spencer despair over their antics, and he’d even dined and danced and ridden with Margo, without once betraying the fact that he was, like the smarter half of thebeau monde,completely in her thrall.
As far as he was concerned, he’d been getting along fine enough. Until the bloody rain came and wrecked everything.
If it hadn’t been for the rain, he might not have been home when Margo knocked on his door. Or—even if he had been, he could have sent her away.
I’m sorry,he could have said,this isn’t a good time. I have company.Or maybe,Let’s talk again when Spencer’s back from Wales,or even,No, Margo, there’s no one here but me, and I need you to back away slowly before I drag you into my apartment and peel you out of that dress. With my teeth.
But it was raining, and it was October and colder than a witch’s tit. Her cloak was plastered to her head, and water was dripping in rivulets over her cheek—do not think about licking that water off, for fuck’s sake—and he wasn’t about to send her back out into the weather.
So when Margo said, “Henry? Can I come in?” he opened his door wider and answered, “Of course.”
Chapter 2
