Unveiled (Turner, #1)

“Such humility, Mr. Turner.” Her disappointment tinged her words with bitterness. “Everyone’s wrong, eventually.”


“I’m not. I’ve no education to speak of. I know nothing of the classics. But I have this: I can look into someone’s eyes and see the truth. It’s how I made my fortune, you know.”

She swallowed. If he’d seen the truth in her eyes, he’d not stand so close to her now. “How do you mean?”

He must have heard the warning note in her voice, because he straightened and expelled a sigh.

“Everyone else is hampered by figures and facts, projections based on rationality. Every contract must be examined for soundness by a horde of solicitors; every word in it laid upon a coroner’s table and prodded until it divulges its last secrets. It takes days for most people to reach an accord. Sometimes months.”

“And you?”

“I make up my mind in seconds. Speed matters, these days. Prices fluctuate, rising and falling with every ship that comes into port.”

“What do you do, then? Sign contracts without having them looked over?”

He bit his lip. For a long time, he pressed his lips together, his expression abstracted. Then he whispered, as if imparting a very great secret, “If I trust a man, I’ll sign without reading it at all. Words on a page can’t stop a true betrayal. All they can do is muddy up the aftermath in Chancery. And as I’ve said, I’ve never been wrong.”

Margaret took another stunned step backwards. “Doesn’t that frighten you? To judge so quickly with so little evidence?”

He shook his head slowly—not an answer to her question, but a thorough rejection of her premise.

“I don’t think that is at all what you mean. I think what you really want to know is whether you are frightened to have been judged so swiftly. You fear you might come up wanting. You fear that when all is said, and a great deal more has been done, you’ll have nothing else I want, and I’ll be done with you.”

He described them so precisely that she could almost believe he had seen her fears. But these were not just idle nightmares, to be dispelled by the coming dawn. Once he discovered her name, he would turn his back on her. And this—whatever it was—would be finished.

He tapped one finger against her lips. “Kiss me,” he said, “when you’re sure that foolishness is wrong.”



MARGARET RETREATED TO HER room in the servants’ quarters with a pounding heart. She could feel the pulse in her neck beating in confused arousal. She eased the door shut behind her and stared at the yellowing whitewash.

There were very few truths in this world. One of them, though, she understood deep in her bones. A man like Ash, with his fortune and his prospects, could have anyone. She doubted he intended anything so casual as a single night’s seduction—he’d devoted far too much of his energy to wooing her to discard her so quickly.

But he couldn’t want her honorably. Dukes’ heirs didn’t marry their mistresses.

She had no sooner to think that than realization struck. Dukes’ heirs did marry their mistresses. She could think of one who had once done so: her father.

The sordid tale had been in all the papers when Ash had filed suit in the ecclesiastical courts. The events had been no less salacious for their being fifty years old. It was hard to imagine her father young and headstrong, but he must have been so once. When he had turned twenty-one, he’d married his mistress in a hushed-up ceremony held in a tiny town in Northumberland. He’d quietly brought his wife to meet his parents—and they had just as quietly threatened him with penury if he persisted in his foolishness.

But parents—even parents who were a duke and a duchess—could only do so much. There were no legal grounds for annulment. And so that impetuous, imprudent wedding had never been spoken about. The girl had been threatened with God only knew what—destitution, dismemberment, dyspepsia. She’d been bundled off to America, where she had wed a wealthy financier.

She’d shown neither hide nor hair in England in the decades that followed, until she made more than a minor sensation of herself, testifying on the matter at Ash’s behest.

So, yes. Dukes’ heirs did sometimes marry their mistresses. But Ash surely knew that it never turned out well. Not for the duke in question, nor for the mistress and most especially not for the family, waiting in confusion on the margins.

Thoughts of family made Margaret think of Richard’s letter. She’d tucked it into her lap desk, so that she might answer it at a more fortuitous time. She was supposed to tell him what she’d discovered about Ash. She was supposed to be finding evidence to undermine his claim before Parliament, not yearning for his kiss.