Demon's Bride

Would he consider his wife another obstacle to ignore? He had said that he wanted them to wait, to learn each other before consummating their marriage. Perhaps without the inducement of his wife’s body, there was little to interest him at home.

As she picked at the congealing remains of her breakfast, she felt a rush of blood to her cheeks. Disappointment—and anger—roiled within her. She had no expectations of marriage, yet even in her most hypothetical imaginings she had not anticipated being an afterthought to the man who claimed her hand. Clearly, however, that was how Leo saw her: a parenthesis.

Abruptly, she stood. The footman hurried to help her with her chair, yet she was halfway out the door.

As she climbed the stairs, resolution took shape. She would make herself essential to him. This house—its baleful silence, its icy shadows—she would find a way to transform it. He shu

His hunting ground. Leo breathed in its aromas as a predator sniffed the air for the acidic scent of prey. The smell of coffee was the smell of money—brewing, percolating, waiting to be consumed. He barely needed the jolt of energy from the drink. All he required for strength was here, fed by the sights and sounds of Exchange Alley. And his own deeds gave him unstoppable momentum.

Leo strode down Lombard Street, its narrow confines bound on all sides by coffee houses that served as the financial heart of London, and thus, the world. New Jonathan’s Coffee House. Garraway’s. Lloyd’s. Dozens, maybe scores more. Lombard Street and the cramped alleys of Cornhill and Birchin Lane demarcated the boundaries of the commercial kingdom. The air was thick with talk, hundreds of men’s voices all crashing together in a din some might call discordant. To Leo, the sound rang as clear and sacred as an oratorio.

“Seven hundred shares of the coffee venture. No less.”

“The demand for cotton only increases. You’re a fool not to buy now.”

“The Quakers have me by the stones, but there’s no help for it. Our future is made of iron.”

“There’s Bailey, the Demon—if you’re looking for deep pockets, he’s your man. But mind, he asks scores of questions and is anything but a silent partner.”

This made him smile. Rich gentlemen might mutely provide funds and collect returns, content with the fiction that, if they kept their interaction with actual business to a minimum, they would be less sullied. Leo didn’t give a damn. He’d get as filthy as necessary to wring the greatest profits. He had no man of business. He did not deal with brokers or jobbers. Everything that needed doing, he did himself.

The sun had not yet topped the spires of Saint Paul’s, yet the frenzy of the ’Change was at its height, and Leo in the thick of it. Precisely where he wanted—needed—to be. Within the few hours he had been here, he’d invested in a quarry whose slate tiles would be used to roof mill towns in the north, provided capital to ship English wheat to the Caribbean, and sold his shares in a Scottish timber venture. And the day wasn’t half over. There was still so much to be done. Fortunes to be made—his.

“Oranges, Spanish oranges.” A barefoot girl with a basket full of fruit picked her way through the crowd. Her cry could barely be heard above the clamor.

“I’ll take one,” Leo said.

“Two for a pe

God, he was married now, wasn’t he?

“Two, then,” he said, handing the coin to the girl. She passed two oranges to him, like a dirty-footed goddess creating new suns. With the transaction finished, the girl moved on, her cry of “Oranges, Spanish oranges” soon swallowed by the din.

Leo pocketed the fruit. Though surrounded on all sides by men and chaos and noise, his mind drifted back to his house in Bloomsbury, and the woman who now lived there. A

Had she been protecting herself from him? The thought had troubled him, and he had summoned his valet and dressed quietly, careful to keep from waking her. She would arise later to find him gone.

Something edged and acute cut through him. It took several moments for him to recognize the feeling: regret. Or at least, he believed it to be regret, never having felt it before.

Perhaps he ought not to have left her. At the least, he might have woken her or left a note to let her know where he was. Damned strange. He’d been accountable to no one for a very long time. Even his fellow Hellraisers. To feel any sense of obligation, even to a wife, chafed. Yet he couldn’t expect to marry and have nothing alter, could he?

Last night had been ... puzzling. Disturbing. To feel her fear shuddering through her body and into his. He had expected some nerves on her part. Hell, there had been nerves on his part, as well. He’d never made love to a virgin before, and he’d wondered about the best possible means of doing so. Gentle, slow. That much he knew. Yet A

His desire for her—that he felt even now, in this crowded, noisy alley—was unexpected, and a relief. Despite his ambition to marry a nobleman’s daughter, he never would have given his name to a woman he could not want in his bed. A

It was for these reasons that he had forced himself to wear a nightshirt, to hide his markings. Last night had shown him that what he had begun to learn of A

What he did want was to see her again. He should go back.

“To hell with the geminus,” he muttered to himself, “and the demands of Mr. Holliday.”

The ’Change could do without him for a day, a week. And in that time, he and A

Though Leo’s expertise at bedsport could not begin to match Bram’s, he had a suspicion that, once her fear diminished and she was initiated into the realm of sexual pleasure, A

But that fire would remain cool until he brought it forward. Which he could not do from miles away.

He’d return home now. Take A

Hopefully, the flirting stage would not last overlong. He was much more comfortable once the woman was already in bed. Last night had given him just a taste of A