She certainly wasn’t what he’d expected when he’d engaged a music instructor on the recommendation of his friend the Duke of Ravenwood. He hadn’t been paying attention and had assumed Louis Beaton, the notorious composer, had a son.
Instead, the person who’d arrived at his home had been a curvaceous, bewitchingly green-eyed and dimpled female with a sunny smile that made everyone around her feel at ease. She wore plain gowns and hid her wavy light brown hairunder a white lace cap, like a spinster, but she was young and attractive.
Far too attractive. He shouldn’t be thinking about her at all. She was a member of his staff and therefore strictly off-limits.
“My sisters have sufficient supervision. Laxton wants to harm their reputations and I’m going to make him suffer for it.”
“All I’m saying is that there are ways of humiliating Laxton without further humiliating your sisters. More devious, secret ways.”
West had long suspected that his friend dabbled in espionage. Rafe took frequent, and very mysterious, trips abroad. And that stranglehold he’d just used hadn’t been any ordinary hold. Even suffering from a disastrous morning after, West should have been able to break free from the smaller man’s grip.
“Laxton aside, it’s worse than I’d thought. I knew that no respectable and well-bred young lady would have me. I didn’t know that my wicked ways had nearly ruined my sisters.”
“It’s unfortunate that they must pay the price.”
“I swear on my wasted life, Rafe.” West slammed his fist into his palm. “I’m going to find a way to make this right.”
Chapter Two
If Miss Viola Beaton were a character in a novel, she’d be the heroine’s best friend. The one who gave trusted advice, who poured a nip of brandy into her friend’s tea, offered a shoulder to cry on, and served as a staunch ally in times of adversity.
She often felt like a supporting character in her own life.
She’d been a bridesmaid three times now, and, while she was very happy for her friends, it was sometimes difficult to know that she’d always be backstage, the bridesmaid and never the bride.
Her twenty-four years of existence had revolved around the blazing sun of her father, Louis Beaton, once Britain’s foremost musical composer—whose works were commissioned by kings and lauded across the globe—now disgraced, in poor health, and buried by a mountain of debt.
Their circumstances were so straitened that Viola had been forced to take employment as music instructor to the Duke of Westbury’s five sisters.
Today her pupils were rehearsing the pieces they were to perform at a musical evening to be hosted here, at Westbury House, the duke’s London mansion, in less than one month.
Music was what she lived for, what she loved, and she was determined that the Delamar sisters would shine brightly amidst the polished and elegant debutantes of theton.
Lady Blanche, the eldest, sat at a gleaming pianoforte playing Mozart’s Sonata no. 11. Not a strand of blond hair dared escape her carefully coiled coiffure, and her back remained stiff and straight as her fingers ranged methodically across the ivory keys. She was technically proficient but played with a lack of feeling that Viola found more jarring than wrong notes.
Blanche’s four younger sisters were arranged before the pianoforte to simulate an audience. When Viola had begun giving them lessons, she’d had difficulty telling them apart. Their names all began with the letterB, and they all shared the famous Delamar brilliant blue eyes. But now that she’d been instructing them for several years, she knew them as well as if they were the sisters she’d never had.
Lady Blanche expected perfection of herself, and those around her. She took her role as eldest very seriously, scolding her younger sisters and attempting to mold them in her own polished image. She had her work cut out for her. Bernadette was a retiring, bookish young lady with not one elegant or musical bone in her body. She could butcher the simplest of tunes and render it a jangling cacophony. Viola adored her all the same.
The twins, Belinda and Betsy, shared the same brown hair and big blue eyes, but they were like night and day in all else. Belinda washigh-spirited, obsessed with being fashionable, and longed to be admired by a large collection of beaus, while Betsy was a hoyden who couldn’t care less about gentlemen, unless it was to best them at cricket.
Birgitta, or Birdie, who wouldn’t make her debut for some years, was Viola’s secret favorite, a sweet-natured girl who played the pianoforte with a sensitivity and emotion that couldn’t be taught. She had shown talent for musical composition and was to perform a piece of her own authorship at the musicale.
As for their brother, the duke, his conduct was not to be held as an example for any respectable soul. He slept the day away and left the house in the evenings with the sole intent of furthering his dreadful reputation as London’s Most Wicked Rogue.
Even when he was mostly absent, his formidable presence permeated the entire house. He left reminders of his decadent pursuits strewn about—playbills from bawdy entertainments, vouchers for debts at gaming hells, even the odd silk stocking or jewel-encrusted hairpin, mementos of passionate liaisons that fell, unheeded, from his coat pockets.
Blanche moved from theandante graziosomovement to themenuettoand Viola’s thoughts remained with the duke. He had the same gilded hair and dark blue eyes as his sisters, but he was a colossus of a man, with broad shoulders, a chiseled jaw, and the dangerously handsome face of a fallen angel.
Her friends were always scolding her on thesubject of Wicked Westbury. They thought she was secretly in love with him. Ridiculous! She’d never be so incredibly stupid as to give her heart to such a rake. Even though he was sinfully attractive, and his commanding bass voice gave her gooseflesh.
Even though she suspected his gruff exterior hid a warm and generous heart because he doted on his sisters, and they adored him in return. She’d gleaned that whatever drove him to drink and gamble had probably originated with his father who, by all accounts, had been exceedingly cold and distant toward his firstborn son.
She wanted to know more about his past. Sometimes she led the conversation toward him, to hear his sisters’ tales of their childhood. How their brother had always had a kind word for them, a smile, a new book, or toy. How all of that had changed when he was sent off to school after their brother Bertram’s birth.
The family had experienced its share of tragedies. The girls’ mother had passed from this earth six years ago, with Bertram following less than a year later in a horse riding accident. Their father had soon followed and the ladies whispered that he’d died of a broken heart.
When Westbury was a young man he’d gone downhill so swiftly, Blanche had told Viola with a deep sadness in her eyes. He’d lost himself in London’s demimonde. Developed a compulsion to frequent gaming hells and throw his money away until he stumbled home in the wee hours of the morning.