He glanced around at the lavish furnishings he provided for her in the fine town house he leased. “Not unless you want to keep it and yourself on the streets. Bastards are tiresome, a burden I do not tolerate.”

“But you will ensure he is well cared for and loved, will you not?”

No good would come of changing his plans, but where was the harm in a small lie that would keep her enthusiastically welcoming him between her thighs? He gave her a much-practiced reassuring smile. “For you, I will do near anything.”

Perhaps he’d even replace his wife with her when the time came, if it came, if his countess did not bear fruit soon.

Taking the boy from the midwife, he headed from the room. Because he paid for his bastards to be “put away”—killed in baby-farming circles—he preferred to spread them out, never using the same farmer more than a couple of times. He’d recently obtained a new name, a woman he’d not visited before. He’d gladly hand over the required fee to Ettie Trewlove to ensure he was never again inconvenienced by this brat.

Chapter 1

London

Early March 1872

She was in want of a man.

And not just any man would serve. She had a particular one in mind.

Standing in a shadowed corner of the Elysium Club, an exclusive gaming hell singularly for ladies, Selena Sheffield, Duchess of Lushing, watched as the club’s owner prowled the floor with lengthy, lithe strides, reminding her of a large sleek lion, predatory and dangerous. His black fitted coat caressed his wide shoulders, as she suspected many a lady had. His black brocade waistcoat molded itself around his lean torso. His white shirt and knotted snowy cravat were pristine, a direct contrast to the swarthiness of his skin. He didn’t appear to be a man who spent all his time indoors.

She’d first caught sight of him last summer at Lady Aslyn Hastings’s wedding, when the daughter of the late Earl of Eames and ward to the Duke of Hedley had taken Mick Trewlove as her husband. Selena had known nothing about the Trewloves until that day, until she’d caught tidbits here and there as people whispered about the disreputable family that was naught but by-blows.

Then the Duke of Thornley had married Gillie Trewlove—a tavern owner of all things, for God’s sake—and the whispers had turned into a dulcet tone of alarm. More recently, one of the Trewlove brothers had taken Lady Lavinia Kent, sister to the Earl of Collinsworth, to wife, and suddenly no one could talk of anything other than the Trewlove bastards and the swath they were rapidly cutting through Society like Genghis Khan’s hordes intent on conquering what had once believed itself unconquerable.