A Gentleman Undone Read online

  Praise for Cecilia Grant and

  A Lady Awakened

  “Elegantly written, emotionally powerful … with a compelling combination of exquisitely nuanced characters and lusciously sensual romance. Sweet, poignant, and completely satisfying, A Lady Awakened is a romance to treasure.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Grant details Regency country life beautifully, with a firm and respectful hand, and the subtle yet engrossing courtship is enchanting and gratifying as it transforms these two strong-minded and very unlikely lovers.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This intriguing debut blends erotic themes into a plotline that has been used before, but never in this way. A desperate heroine, a wickedly sexy hero, an unexpected passion and strong storytelling along with compelling characterization mark Grant as one to watch.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “From the characters to the language to the love scenes to the plot, so much came together unexpectedly and beautifully. I loved this novel.”

  —JANINE, Dear Author

  “I’m in love with this author’s voice. It is hard to explain why I love her style of writing so much, but as I read I didn’t want to miss a single word.”

  —USA Today

  “A marvelous gem of a book … I loved it!”

  —New York Times bestselling author MARY BALOGH

  “If you only read one debut this year, this is the one to read. Incredibly sexy, surprisingly sweet. I loved A Lady Awakened!”

  —New York Times bestselling author ELOISA JAMES

  A Gentleman Undone is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Original

  Copyright © 2012 by Cecilia Grant

  Excerpt from A Woman Entangled by Cecilia Grant copyright © 2012 by Cecilia Grant.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book A Woman Entangled by Cecilia Grant. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53447-7

  Cover design: Lynn Andreozzi

  Cover photograph: Marie Killen

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  Excerpt from A Woman Entangled

  Prologue

  JUNE 1815

  WHAT THE devil were you thinking, to move him?” The surgeon stank of blood. In the meager candlelight allotted to this section of the makeshift hospital, he was all crags and shadows, and slick to the elbows with the life of other men.

  “None of the litter-bearers would stop for him. I waited hours.” His voice bled raw at the edges, rasped to almost nothing by a day of shouting over gunfire, shouting over cannons, shouting over the thunder of two nations’ cavalry.

  Just as well he couldn’t speak up. This was a church, or had been before its conscription into such gruesome service. Presumably it would be a church again, once all these men could be transported on to Brussels. Bruges. One of the proper hospitals, with proper beds instead of narrow benches and a cold stone floor. At all events a man ought to show respect.

  “You know they have their orders.” The doctor crouched by the bench on which Talbot lay, prodding at his lifeless limbs. Or not lifeless, strictly, because he was not dead. His chest heaved in a weird rhythm that seemed to bear little relation to breath. “They must take officers first, and then they look for the men we have the best hope of repairing. Lord knows we’ve got enough of those to keep us busy. We don’t need to go foraging for desperate cases.”

  Surely a doctor didn’t do any good to a patient by speaking that way in his hearing. Will opened his mouth to say something to that effect, and closed it again. The man’s demeanor must be the least of his concerns. The essential matter, it seemed, was the state of Talbot’s arms and legs. Broken as he was, he’d still been able to move fingers and toes when he lay on the field. So to transport him had perhaps been a mistake after all.

  No, not perhaps. Of a certainty, but a certainty barely glimpsed through the haze of three days’ exhaustion. Like some monstrous shape at some great distance, lurching to its feet to begin its shambling, implacable approach.

  Time enough to deal with that later. “Well, he’s here now.” Command came without conscious thought, after enough practice. Brush aside what was inessential, clear a path, and set the man on it. “There’s no foraging involved. All I ask is that you take a look and see what can be done for him, same as you’ve been doing all night.”

  “Did you not understand me?” The surgeon sat back on his heels, his face lost in shadow. “He’s had an injury to the spine. He’s got no movement or even feeling in his legs. There’s nothing we can do for him.”

  He swallowed. It felt like downing a handful of grape-shot. “How can you know that? You’ve barely looked at him. The light in here is too poor for you to properly see. What if it’s simply pain and prostration that’s left him unable to move?” Even through the shroud of fatigue he could hear the senseless, flailing nature of these arguments. Abruptly he clamped his jaws together, and took a step back.

  Something impeded his progress—someone, rather—some infantryman who’d not had the benefit of a lieutenant to find him a place on one of the pews. He lay crumpled on the stones, his wide, unbelieving eyes connecting with Will’s for a second or two before his gaze veered off to the darkness overhead.

  He wasn’t making a sound, this one. But others were. Sounds such as one heard in the aftermath of battle, made worse by their concentration in a small space, by the echoing effect of the stone walls, by the awful irony of the setting.

  Will breathed in slowly, and breathed out again. Two days ago he’d knelt in the crossroads at Quatre Bras, scrambling to reload his musket—powder, ball, paper, quickly—as the cuirassiers in their formidable gleaming breastplates charged in, and he’d thought, Now I know what Hell will be like. Some thirty hours later he’d revised the thought: Hell was a sleepless night in frigid rain with one battle behind you and another ahead, sodden uniform squishing comically as you lifted a hand and set it on the shoulder of some frightened young man you couldn’t find the words to console.

  Then Hell had been battle again, the noise and the stench and the comrades struck down, and Hell had been the search for survivors, and Hell had been the long wait with Talbot, the bone-weariness, the dwindling hope of aid, the desperation that had finally compelled him to pick up the man and c
arry him here. With his faculties intact he would not have made that mistake.

  Nor would he have made the mistake of believing he’d already seen Hell. Hell, clearly, was the hopeless section of the church-turned-hospital, broken soldiers discarded like so much human rubbish on the stones, crying to God or the doctor or their mothers for mercy that would not come.

  No. A man could drown in such thoughts, and he had better things to do this minute than drown. “Please.” The surgeon was rising to his feet; this was his last chance to find the approach that would compel him to do something for the man he’d carried into this hell. “He’s one of mine. I’m responsible for him. He has a wife and child.”

  “For God’s sake, Lieutenant, look about you. Every one of these men will be mourned by someone. Every one of them will weigh on the conscience of some lieutenant, or sergeant, or colonel who can point to something he might have done different.” A hand came through the darkness to graze against his sleeve: that was meant to be comfort. “In truth, even the litter-bearers should have had a hard time moving him safely. The outcome might very well have been the same.” That, too, was intended as comfort. Dimly he perceived the fact. “You did what you could. Now I suggest you get some sleep.”

  That was that, then. Talbot would be left to die. The litter-bearers might have brought him to the same end, but Will had done it, decisively, before they had a chance to try. “Wait.” Now it was his hand, lunging out to arrest the doctor as he turned away. He forced his paltry shredded voice lower yet. “Can you at least give him something? Opium? He suffers terribly.”

  But God, he knew the answer even as he rasped out those words. Every damned man still breathing here suffered terribly, and opium must be saved for the surgeries. “I’m sorry,” said the doctor, and Will could only let his hand fall, and watch the man’s form recede.

  On his left periphery, Talbot’s chest was still going like an amplification of his labored heartbeat. When would it stop? He ought to have asked. He raised a hand to his own face, dragging it from his hairline down over his eyes, his too-long-unshaven cheeks, his slack mouth, his chin. He turned, and knelt where the doctor had been.

  “I’m going to take you out of here.” The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth tightened and he managed a sort of nod. “The wounded are too many and they can’t spare a surgeon or even opium. There’s no purpose in your staying.” There’s no hope. What good would he do the man by saying that aloud? “Another of the hospitals might be better appointed, and we might find you some gin, at the least.”

  Gin. Not likely. Unless he proposed to start pillaging corpses in search of a flask. Of course that might come to sound reasonable, between now and when Talbot’s last breath left him.

  Will gathered his dreadful limp form from the pew and nearly staggered, not under the weight of the man but under the weight of the man’s misguided trust. He picked his way past dead and living bodies to the door, shadowed every step by a growing presentiment: there might after all be worse visions of Hell awaiting than anything he’d yet seen.

  Chapter One

  MARCH 1816

  THREE OF the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth. Old habit would persist in spite of anything life could devise.

  Will leaned on one elbow and rested his cheek on his palm, a careless posture that suggested supreme confidence in his play while also allowing him to peer round the fellow opposite and get a better view of the ladies. Not to any purpose, of course. He’d come into this establishment on a solemn errand, and courtesans had no part in his plan.

  Still, a man could look. A bit of craning here, a timely turn by one of the ladies there, and he could assemble a fair piecemeal picture of the four. So he’d been doing all evening as they’d sat down in different combinations at their card table, some fifteen feet removed from the great tables where the gentlemen played. And while every one of them—from dark temptress to flame-haired sylph to crystalline-delicate blonde—gratified his eye, only one thus far had managed to trifle with his concentration.

  He watched her now, her eyelids lowered and her fingers precise as she fanned out her freshly dealt hand. Not beautiful, no. Pretty, perhaps. Or rather handsome: a young man could have worn that aquiline nose to advantage, and that fiercely etched brow.

  She studied her cards without moving any of them—though the game was whist and all three of her companions were rearranging their cards by suit—and glanced across at her partner. Gray-blue eyes, expressive of nothing. She could hold all trumps and you’d never know.

  “No sport to be had there, Blackshear.” The words rode in on a wash of tobacco smoke from his right, barely audible under the clamor of a dozen surrounding conversations. “Those ones are all spoken for.” Lord Cathcart switched his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other while inspecting his hand. A queen and a ten winked into view and out. Luck did like to throw itself away on the wealthy.

  “There’d be no sport even if they were at liberty. A youngest son with no fortune doesn’t get far with their kind.” Will replied at the same low pitch and lifted a corner of his own card, a seven of clubs to go with his seven of spades.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” The viscount’s fine-boned profile angled itself two or three degrees his way. “A youngest son who’s just sold his commission might set his sights beyond the occasional adventurous widow.”

  “Widows suit me. No taint of commerce; no worries over whether you’ve seduced a lady into something she’ll regret.” The words felt flabby and false on his tongue, a stale utterance left over from the life that used to be his. He nodded toward the courtesans’ table. “In any case your birds of paradise are a bit too rich for my blood.”

  “Ha. I’ll wager your blood has its own ideas. Particularly concerning the sharp-faced wench with the Grecian knot. Stick,” he added to the table at large as his turn came.

  “Split,” said Will, and turned up his sevens. His pulse leapt into a hasty rhythm that had nothing to do with any sharp-faced wench. He pushed a second bid forward, and gave all his attention to the two new cards.

  An eight brought one hand to fifteen. Good chance of going bust on a third card and not much chance of besting the banker if he stuck. The second hand was better: an ace gave him the option to stick at eighteen, and also tempted him with the possibility of a five-card trick, if he counted the card for one instead of eleven and if the next three cards fell out in his favor.

  Were the odds decent? Twenty-one less eight left thirteen. How many combinations of three cards came to thirteen or less? With one hundred and four cards in play … eight aces, eight twos, et cetera, and eleven other men at the table who must already have some of those cards in their possession … hang it, he ought to have paid better attention in mathematics classes. Fine return he’d brought his father on a Cambridge education, God rest the man’s soul.

  “I’ll buy another on both hands.” Twenty more pounds in. Best to cultivate the appearance of recklessness early in the evening, when wagers were small. Prudence could wait until several hours hence, when most of these men would be drunk—make that drunker—and inclined to put up sums they’d regret the next morning.

  The new cards dropped in and he lifted their corners. Five and three. Twenty and twenty-one. Or twenty and eleven, with two cards and ten pips between him and the double payoff of the five-card trick.

  He flicked idly with a gloved fingertip at the corner of one card. Was he really considering it? Buying another card when he might stick on a total of twenty-one? His first night in the place, not two hours yet at the table, and already he was goading Fortune to do its worst.

  Well, there’d be no novelty in that, would there? He had a fair acquaintance with the things Fortune could do. A loss of thirty pounds would barely merit mention.

  “One more here.” He pushed another note out in front of his second hand.

  A knave of hearts grinned up at him when he lifted the new card, and quiet relief poured through h
im, loosening places that had wound themselves tight. No five-card trick, but neither would he be dunned for his recklessness. Unless the banker beat him with a twenty-one of his own, he’d have at least one winning hand. Maybe two.

  “Stick,” he said, and leaned his cheek on his palm again as the play passed to his left. The ladies played two straight tricks of clubs while he watched, the sharp-faced one producing her cards with smooth efficiency from their disparate places in her hand.

  Cathcart could needle him all he liked. She gave a man’s mind places to go, did such a girl. Let beautiful women air their attractions like laundry on a line, flapping for all the world to see. The woman who kept something back—who wore her graces like silk underthings against the skin, and dared a man to find them out—would always be the one to set his imagination racing.

  Even if he couldn’t afford to let any other part of him race along. He heaved a quick sigh. “What’s a Grecian knot?” he said, sinking his voice again. “Do you mean the way she’s got her hair?”

  “Hopeless,” the viscount hissed round the stem of his pipe. “Must not be a particular lot, those widows you favor. Mind you, I don’t suppose your hawkish Aphrodite is any too discriminating herself, judging by the company she keeps.” With a jerk of his chin he indicated a fellow down the table, a square-jawed, blandly handsome type who’d assured himself the next deal by reaching twenty-one on his first two cards.

  Curiosity buzzed wasplike about Will’s temples. He brushed it away. He hadn’t come here to gossip. The lady’s choice of protector was her own concern. “Hawkish, truly?” He leaned back and stretched his arms out before him. “Try to be civil.”

  Though admittedly this wasn’t much of a place for that. Bottles at the table. More men than Cathcart smoking, despite the presence of ladies, or at least women, in the room. Granted, a true gaming hell was probably worse. Gillray, the artilleryman, had claimed you could actually smell the desperation by four or five o’clock of the morning. Rolling off the pigeons in waves, he’d said, a stinking sweat more acrid than the sweat of healthy exertion. And why not? Fear had a scent, reportedly—you’d think battle would be the place to find that out, but amid the perpetual cacophony of scents, no one had ever risen up and proclaimed itself as fear—so why not desperation as well?