The Problem with Seduction

The Problem with Seduction - By Emma Locke

Chapter One

August, 1814

London

SURELY THIS WAS THE FIRST and only time Lord Constantine Alexander would ever approach another man and utter the words, “Pardon me, sir, but I believe you have my baby.”

Activities at the closest gaming tables ceased. Patrons cocked their heads or leaned forward in expectation of witnessing a scene that would no doubt be fodder for the better part of the night, if not the week. Con did his best to conceal his nervousness. A slightly mocking smile curled his upper lip. It felt more like a grimace. He had no idea how Captain Nicholas Finn would reply to his allegation—or indeed, if the larger, more seasoned man would even use words. An accusation like the one Con had just made could end in fisticuffs, or a call for his second.

He would really rather not get shot tonight.

Captain Finn’s mouth slowly snapped shut. Con had carefully rehearsed his speech to make it leap out like a pithy charge, but the captain had been given no such notice to prepare his rebuttal. Con clearly had the advantage of surprise.

The captain’s brown eyes narrowed in hard-edged disbelief. A muscle at his jaw tightened. Otherwise, he maintained control. “Who the hell are you?”

“Lord Constantine Alexander, at your service.” Con inclined his head, then capped the introduction off with a rakish flourish of his arm. He quelled the urge to shift under the other man’s rancor. He couldn’t afford to fail his mission, and that meant Finn couldn’t have any reason to doubt his claim. But Con didn’t like how it made him feel, having Finn look at him like some disgusting thing that had attached itself to the bottom of his boot.

Con tightened the smile on his lips into a smirk. A man who’d just publicly claimed to have impregnated another man’s mistress would smirk, wouldn’t he? Otherwise, if he were not a cocky cad intent on embarrassing his opponent, he would have done it all in private. “Well, do you or don’t you have my son?”

Finn didn’t respond. Con was careful not to twitch his fingertips against his leg. He must look sure of himself. He must look, well, cocky. He tilted his head to the right, as if having to do complicated maths in his head were a feat that required his full attention, and yet clearly conveyed that Con already knew the answer. “By my counting, you do.”

Finn thumped his empty tumbler onto the cloth-covered gaming table, causing a hollow knock that shook Con in his boots. Finn rose. Even standing, he had to tilt his head to glare into Con’s face. “I don’t need to count backward to know my own son.”

“Measure twice, cut once, my tailor says.” Con grinned, though he didn’t feel like grinning—far from it. But appearances had to be maintained. The first requirement of his assignment was clear: he wouldn’t see a shilling until the baby was returned to its mother. The ten thousand pounds he’d then receive would stop the moneylenders in their tracks. He needed this to work. It all added up to his freedom—each crisp bank note guaranteed he wouldn’t have to spend another night in King’s Bench, the debtors’ prison that all but had his name etched into a cell wall. If he failed at this tonight, there’d be no second chance.

He grinned again, as if the rest of his life didn’t hinge on the next few moments. “I believe this has all been a misunderstanding,” he explained loudly enough for anyone listening to hear. “Please, allow me to set the events straight so there can be no doubt.”

The second stipulation of his assignment dictated that Finn could have no recourse. If all went to plan, the men right here in this room would spread their accounting of this debacle across every club in London, leaving Finn no possibility of reneging once the baby had been restored to its mother. It was up to Con to cast that doubt.

“Four months ago,” he said, “you were summoned to a tiny hamlet in Devon by the notorious courtesan Elizabeth Spencer, who had been your mistress for the majority of three years. You were presented with an infant you were led to believe had sprung from your loins. Do I have the right of it so far?”

Finn didn’t spare a glance for the ring of men watching with unabashed interest. He didn’t stop to suggest that he and Con retreat out of doors, out of earshot. Instead, his eyes bored into Con’s with an intensity that made it hard not to squirm. As if he cared with every iota of feeling in him about what Con was saying. As if Finn’s whole life hung in the balance.

Con felt the first twinge of guilt.

“Well,” he continued when Finn’s only reply was a deepening of that discomfiting stare, “why did you think she was in Devon? It wasn’t to see her family. They live in Shropshire, and besides, I hear they aren’t on speaking—”

“What are you trying to say?” burst out of Finn in harsh, clipped syllables. His lips didn’t quite touch afterward, lending him a feral appearance. Con had never had a man bare his teeth at him before. Not in all seriousness, at least.

God. He really, really didn’t want to get shot tonight.

But if he had to choose between a bullet and the gaol—a very real choice he could be making in the morning—the bullet might be more survivable. Just the thought of being relegated to a damp, dark box weighed on his lungs until it felt as if an entire militia were stomping across his chest. When it came time to face being locked away again, his own terror might do him in. Now it helped him to sound beleaguered, as though it pained him to explain what he’d hoped would be obvious by this point. “I live in Devon. She went to Devon to have my baby. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

Their onlookers’ collective gasp preceded several occurrences of “I say!” and one “Really, that was not well done of you, Alexander.”

Finn seemed to double in size, as though his outrage made him physically larger and not just more intimidating. “That’s absurd. Elizabeth panted after my attentions for three years. She would never have—” But he stopped.

Con barely kept from smiling with relief. He’d done it! It could be his baby. Even Finn had to admit it. Not that the notion was that far-fetched. Elizabeth was a courtesan. Certainly, she need not remain faithful to a lover who’d repeatedly and publicly tried to wash his hands of her. Who’d spent so much time sailing the oceans that she might have taken a legion of bedfellows without his knowing a whit of it.

Whether or not she had done so, Con really wasn’t in a position to know.

Finn advanced a step, testing Con’s ability to stand his ground. “She’s my mistress. Not yours. You cowardly, bloody whelp. I demand your retraction. Go on. Take it back.” He swung his arm wide and Con flinched, belatedly realizing Finn had meant to include the gaming hell crowded with men in his declaration, not plant Con a facer. “None of you laid a hand on her, not in the last three years. She’s mine. Elizabeth Spencer is mine.”

A choked cough somewhere in the back of the room drew a new level of silence. Awkwardness hung thick in the air, as each man discernibly struggled to decide if it had been a tickle in a throat or a smothered admission of guilt.

Finn spun in the direction of the cough. Finally freed of his drilling stare, Con breathed a bit easier. He rubbed his damp palms against his coat. Yet his heartbeat thumped in his chest so hard, surely everyone could hear it. He hadn’t yet convinced Finn his mistress had been unfaithful. The child wasn’t in Con’s arms—yet. He wasn’t clear of King’s Bench—yet.

“Who did that?” Finn demanded. “Which one of you sniveling bastards wants to join young Alexander in a fist-pounding?”

Seconds of silence felt like minutes. Con resisted the urge to shift uneasily. If one more man would come forward, this would be so much easier. But the silence held.

Finn turned to face him. “See? You’re a liar.”

“She isn’t yours now, though, is she?” Con’s steady voice surprised him. He could’ve sworn Finn’s boot was already pressing on his throat. “And she hasn’t always been, even in the last three years. You’ve given her up a time or two, if I recall correctly.”

Finn glowered. But he didn’t argue the fact.

Con drew his shoulders back. As he’d done with every creditor who’d ever dogged him, every angry friend who’d ever demanded he fulfill an IOU, he feigned nonchalance. “You replaced her just a month ago with Millicent Kimble. A delectable piece, I credit you, as was Mrs. Brooks before her. And a little over a year ago, if I may relate your history aloud, you were keen on Beth Rawlings. I can’t fault your taste, Finn, but I must say, women do have a strong dislike of being jilted.”

Murmurs of agreement wound through the gentlemen present. He and Finn didn’t run in the same crowds, Con being far younger, but even he knew that the captain liked to flaunt his wealth in the form of expensive whores. Despite Con’s status as fourth son of a marquis, he couldn’t afford any of the costly women Finn used and discarded without a thought, and he had always been appalled by both Finn’s excess and his callousness.

“By my math,” Con said again, feeling surer of himself the longer Finn remained quiet, “the child you’ve been tricked into acknowledging is actually mine. I am sorry, old boy. But if you don’t mind, I’d like my son back. He was the cutest little imp when he was born, you see, and I will never forgive myself for quarreling with Elizabeth just a few days later.” He laughed quietly. “It’s too easy, is it not, to rile her passions. I ought to have minded my tongue when she was at her most vulnerable. I sent her running straight back to you instead.”

Finn’s eyes darkened, and the bronzed skin of his brow creased as his eyes narrowed further. That bit about Elizabeth’s passions had done it—just as she’d said it would. For she and Finn had fought like man and wife, even up to the end of their acquaintance. And last year, Finn had briefly cast her aside to pursue a new conquest.

Con was a devil of a handsome man. An objective evaluation, based on his observation that his twin brother was an out-and-out rake. Finn was realizing the crux of it now: Con was worthy competition. And beautiful, wealthy, self-made Elizabeth Spencer did not like to be crossed.

Con almost felt sorry for him. He couldn’t take too much time to pity his opponent, though. He didn’t have the baby yet. Only when Finn stormed out of the room, growling, “That duplicitous little slut. I’ll be damned if she sneaks your bastard under my nose,” did Con finally relax. And later the next morning, when a runner knocked at the door of Merritt House, rousing the staff with the announcement that a baby was to be delivered that very afternoon, did the dread in Con’s belly begin to uncurl.

But it was the ten thousand pounds quietly transferred into his account that fully unwound his insides and allowed him to take an unfettered breath. When the last IOU had been ripped asunder and even the smallest of his creditors walked away satisfied, Con exhaled a deep sigh of relief. He even had a few coins to spare.

Coins he might not have much longer, as he was in the mood to celebrate his own resourcefulness. Until he returned to Merritt House, and his mother greeted him at the foot of the stairs. “Constantine, where on earth have you hidden my beautiful little grandchild? Mr. Benjamin seems to think you’ve no intention of raising him here, but I told him that cannot be true. You wouldn’t keep your own son from his family, even if he was born on the wrong side of the blanket.” Her blue eyes dampened and her voice trembled. “Oh, Constantine, you wouldn’t, would you?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but he had no answer. He merely stared at his mother, powerless to reassure her that no, he wasn’t that kind of father. The uncaring kind. The absent kind. The kind his father had been.

It was his first indication that, perhaps, he hadn’t thought this scheme entirely through.





Elizabeth Spencer would have paid Lord Constantine twenty thousand pounds for the return of her son. Even more, had he asked. She’d not told him so, of course. She’d let him name his price, then bargained him down until he’d threatened to walk. It was not by accident that she had started out penniless and become a celebrated courtesan with an impressive collection of assets.

It was to her benefit, then, that he’d been as desperate for her money as she’d been for his services. After paying for his silence, she still retained more than enough in her accounts to sustain herself and Oliver for the rest of her life. She need not return to her old tricks. A relief, for she’d had a month to come to the realization that she wanted nothing more than to become worthy of being Oliver’s mother.

She would have done it, though. Selling her body was a pittance compared to what she would have done to get her son back. She would do anything—anything—to keep him. Nicholas had stolen five weeks of her son’s life from her. Five weeks of watching him grow, of holding him— She gasped for a breath. Surely nothing was crueler than Nicholas’s wielding the law to steal her child. Nothing except, mayhap, the false hope he’d given her prior, for after setting the three of them up as a family, and doting on her and Oliver for two glorious months, he’d had a change of heart. He didn’t need her to get to his son. He’d made short work of her, then.

She’d barely survived the heartbreak of losing her baby. The unbearably long separation, the weeks of Nicholas keeping her child from her, the days and nights knowing another woman was caring for her son, that she was never to see her son again, had felt like death. She would have done anything to have him back. Even after a full day of having him with her now, she hadn’t grasped the reality of Oliver’s presence. He was hers again. Here. At last.

Gazing into his beautiful little face, she touched his soft cheek and sighed the first real sigh of contentment she’d felt since…it didn’t bear thinking about. The past was the past. Nicholas was gone. Oliver was her joy, her life.

He squirmed in her arms, then eyes as pale as her own opened. He cooed and she smiled. “Well, look at you, there,” she murmured, nuzzling his tiny nose with her own.

Her vision was blurred by welling tears. Never again. She would never allow Nicholas to take him again. Even if she must live in fear of discovery for the rest of her life, she would do whatever it took to keep her child. Steal, lie, cheat. Nothing was worth the heartbreak of being separated from Oliver.

A scratch at the nursery door preceded the entry of her upstairs maid. Nelly, a girl with curly red hair peeking from beneath a mobcap, entered. “You have a caller, ma’am.”

Elizabeth didn’t need to be told it was a he. There was no other kind of callers. “Who is he?”

“Not one of the usual, ma’am. I didn’t recognize him.”

Elizabeth frowned. “Rand ought to have given you his name. You must ask next time.”

Nelly bobbed. “Yes, ma’am, and I would have done, but the man refused to give it. I know because I took a peek over the banister when I heard all the going-on. He’s sinful good-looking. But he didn’t come in a crested carriage or nothing that might give a clue as to who he is. I did try, ma’am.” Her pretty brown eyes shone with fear of reprisal and the thrill of a handsome stranger.

Elizabeth had taken her fill of handsome strangers. The bundle in her arms was the only male in her sphere now, and if the choice was between setting her son down so that she might nip at the lure of a mysterious caller and staying right where she was, there was no question. “Inform him that I am unavailable.”

“Do I ask him to return at a more opportune time?” A hopeful note in Nelly’s voice betrayed her new allegiance to the mystery man.

Elizabeth tucked Oliver’s swaddling more tightly around him. “I’m permanently unavailable to any man who expects me to dangle after him.” She ignored her maid’s titter of amusement. The girl was very young, not at all like the jaded maids Elizabeth was accustomed to. She was one of the girls Elizabeth had hired to attend her in Devon, where Oliver had been born. A more innocent staff had been required there, for Elizabeth had foolishly thought to escape her reputation and raise Oliver as the son of a brave captain who’d had the misfortune to perish at sea. Then Finn had arrived and importuned her to come back to London. She hadn’t had the heart to let Nelly go. Nelly had no family and no prospects. Elizabeth knew all too well the fate that awaited a girl who had no family, no prospects and no employer.

Minutes after her maid departed, the unmistakable cadence of masculine footfalls vibrated outside of the nursery door. Elizabeth frowned. There wasn’t time to set Oliver down before a solid rap against the frame caused her to startle. Even if there had been time, she wouldn’t have let her son out of her arms, not for a man. Especially not a rude one. How dare he barge in on her privacy after she’d already told him no?

Nelly’s pitiful protests were almost drowned out by Rand’s insistent demands that the man leave. A thunk against the door followed by a male grunt and Nelly’s screech caused Elizabeth to smirk in satisfaction. There was a reason her butler had the physique of a dockside worker. Let Rand see him out bodily, if that was what it took.

“Elizabeth,” a deep voice called through the wood paneling, “you have five seconds to make yourself presentable before I come through this door.”

She froze in her chair. It couldn’t be Lord Constantine. He’d already been paid.

“The devil you will,” Rand growled. “I have every intention of smashing your pretty face through this wall first.”

The door opened, followed by a man’s gloved hand reaching in. Then Lord Constantine himself ducked into the room, presumably avoiding Rand’s right hook, and slammed the door closed. “If this is what passes for hospitality around here…” he muttered, straightening his bottle green coat before he turned to her.

She remained seated, though her instinct told her to run. He posed no threat to her. Except, perhaps, the threat of a handsome near-stranger. He was sinful good-looking, to quote her maid, if one liked impossibly tall men with straight noses and a permanent furrow between their brows, which she very much did.

The door burst open and Rand’s burly build filled the frame. “I’m going to—”

Lord Constantine turned in place to face his opponent. He shook his head as if talking to a child. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“What the h—”

“It’s quite all right,” Elizabeth broke in before her butler could recover his wits and do actual, bodily harm to her guest. “Lord Constantine is the father of my child. I suppose that means I must see him on occasion, if only because I cannot legally keep him from seeing his son.” She gave her intruder a narrow smirk, sure now that she had nothing to fear from him. He’d won entry. Let him try for anything else.

If Rand’s wits had been addled by Lord Constantine’s tongue-in-cheek greeting, they positively scrambled at Elizabeth’s pronouncement. He stood upright, mouth agape, shoulders pulled back and hands fisted at his sides like the prizefighter he used to be. “Lord Constantine, madam—?”

She didn’t give his question time to hang in the air. The less said in front of Nelly, the better. “You know Lord Constantine,” she said with a husky laugh, as though they had indeed been lovers once and perhaps still were. “He’s always had a way of seeing me, even when he shouldn’t. You may leave now, Rand. Nelly, fetch another rag. Oliver is feeling damp again.”

Lord Constantine flinched, presumably at the thought of a wet babe. She smiled to herself, enjoying his discomfort. He had, after all, barged in on her.

Then the door closed behind her maid and suddenly the room felt cramped. Not because a cradle, rocking chair and two chests of drawers took up much of the space in the room. She was very much alone with a man whose broad shoulders and fashionably mussed hair once could have made her whisper an indecent proposal into his ear.

She laughed to herself. She had whispered an indecent proposal into his ear. It simply hadn’t been the kind that made a man hard. The opposite, in fact. “Lord Constantine, how do you feel about becoming the father of my child?”

Looking at the tall, well-formed man in buff breeches and black boots, she still couldn’t quite believe he’d said yes. Though she’d approached him precisely because she knew enough about him to suspect he’d agree, he was still very much a stranger to her. She liked it that way. She didn’t need him here, in her nursery, invading her privacy. In fact, it violated the terms of their contract.

She arched a single brow at the handsome rogue who watched her with a wrinkled, slightly pained brow. “My lord, I pray you don’t mind my saying so, but there is nothing more I want in this world than for you to see yourself out of my house.”

His answering grin caused a little flip in her belly. She was a mother, not dead. And he was sinfully good-looking. “I’ll be delighted to do so, but first, I must insist Oliver accompany me when I do.” He had the gall to look sheepish as her world teetered at a ledge. “Father’s rights, and all that. You do know what I mean, I think—Elizabeth?”