Page 17 of The Devil in Her Bed
Blinking the thought away, he went to work.
Becoming someone else wasn’t so hard. Certainly, the props and prosthetics helped, but that would truly fool no one for long. The true art was in the small things. The thrust of his jaw, the shape and movement of his brows, tension in his lips and cheeks. The muscles too minuscule to define working to create an entirely different person with unrecognizable mannerisms. When one was familiar with another, it was more than their face that sparked recognition; it was also the way in which they stood, the movements of their limbs, their tone and inflection. The undefinable energy or lack thereof.
What would the countess prefer?
Should his mouth be hard, tight, and uncompromising? Or lackadaisical and debonair? Was he born to power? A lord, perhaps, with an entitled swagger and a bombastic wit. Or did he capture it? Consume it? A politician? A sober, cunning, nay,connivingmagistrate with his eye on the queen’s bench?
Hmmm… a solicitor could ask more questions without being suspected of anything, which aided his cause. On the other hand, a lord would get to drink more…
That decided it. He reached for the ginger wig and the pale powder, having not lost all of his tan he’d gleaned from his months of preparing to become the Italian count.
His hand paused before it wrapped around the powder as he noted he’d missed a few fingernails in his scrubbing. His hands were still those of Edward Thatch, the rabble-rousing East Ender with a loose tongue and an excellent ear to the ground.
As he meticulously groomed his nails, he caught himself glancing at the mirror. At eyes he wished he could change with the rest of him. Brown, with flecks of gold and green. His only real liability, the one recognizable thing about him. Through them, the Devil of Dorset always peered into the world.
He truly could look like anyone. Everyone. And no one.
But his eyes remained the same.
A question whispered through him, beleaguering his breath.
Who are you?
He always answered the same.I am an imposter. Because I cannot be who I was.
Francesca Cavendish had been a sweet, amenable, softhearted girl.
She wasn’t sweet anymore. But she’d been kind to Edward Thatch…
A kind imposter with a kind mouth.
The kind of mouth he wanted wrapped around his cock.
Fucking hell. He turned away from the mirror before he broke it.
He’d always had a cold streak. Where was it now? He needed it back, so he could reveal her, so he could break her. Because it was more than bloody likely another woman claimed her name. She was missing something Francesca Cavendish had. A dark freckle, almost a birthmark, on her top left lip. She was nothing like he remembered, like he’d imagined, and he’d imagined plenty over the years.
He needed to get to the ball, to get to the bottom of the mystery that was Francesca Cavendish.
As luck would have it, both of the men he’d built identities for had received an invitation to Cecelia’s ball, and, as per usual, only one of them would attend.
These men never ran in the same circles, for obvious reasons.
The Countess of Mont Claire wasn’t the only motive for attending the function.
Sir Hubert, the former Lord Chancellor, had been interrogated for weeks now. He’d given up the name of his cohort who’d trafficked the underaged girls from Cecelia Teague’s enterprise without her knowledge.
Lord Brendan Murphy. A general in a hidden army who’d also been invited to Miss Teague’s little soiree. So many questions would be answered today, at a philanthropic event for helpless women and children, no less.
How apropos.
Since Lord Brendan was Irish, the Devil of Dorset decided he would go as a Scot. A marquess. Higherup in the hierarchy, but with a penchant for vice and villainy.
Vice was where the devil found his darlings, after all, and Lady Francesca knew that more than most.
The Devil of Dorset had answered to many names in his lifetime. He’d chosen to be nobody, and could thereby be anybody. A specter in the dark and a man no one would miss when his sins finally caught him up.
But to Francesca Cavendish, he’d once been Declan Chandler, and the few short years at Mont Claire had been the only happiness he’d known.
