Bane Beresford. Ann Lethbridge

Blown out by draughts? Or a sign of his welcome? No matter which, the gloom suited his mood.

      ‘You should have left the dog in the stables,’ the butler muttered over his shoulder.

      Bane glance down at Ranger, part-lurcher, part-wolfhound, pressed to his left side. ‘The dog stays with me.’

      The butler tutted. ‘And how shall I announce you, sir?’ He gestured to the open door a few feet along the gloomy corridor.

      A wry smile twisted Bane’s lips. Was there a protocol to be followed? If so, he didn’t know it. ‘I’ll announce myself.’

      Looking shocked, but also relieved, the doddering old man turned back, shuffling down the dim stone corridor shaking his head. A wise old bird for whom discretion was the better part of valour.

      Bane approached the doorway on feet silenced by carpet. He paused at the entrance to the cavernous chamber. The flickering light from ten-foot-high torchères on each side of the heavily carved four-poster bed fell on the features of the shrunken man propped up by pillows. A face lined by dissipation and framed by thin strands of yellowing grey hair straggling out from beneath a blue silken nightcap. Bony shoulders hunched in silk valuable enough to feed a family of four for a year shook with a spasm of coughing.

      A dead man breathing his last. Finally. The chill inside Bane spread outwards as he took in the others clustered at the edge of the circle of light. Two women, three men, some of whom he recognised as family. He’d investigated all of his relatives to avoid unnecessary surprises.

      The older woman was his aunt, his grandfather’s daughter, Mrs Hampton, returned home as a widow. Her gown was the first stare of fashion as befitted her station. Tight curls of grey hair beneath a lace cap framed a middle-aged but still arresting face. As a young woman she’d been lovely, according to his mother, and too proud to make a friend of a lass from Yorkshire. At her side stood her son, Gerald, an almost too-pretty lad of seventeen with a petulant mouth and vivid blue eyes. The other young man was a distant fourth cousin. A Beresford through and through, slight, dapper, with blond hair and light blue eyes and a man his grandfather would have been happy to see as his heir had Bane not stood in the way.

      An aspiring tulip of fashion in his early twenties, Bane had seen Jeffrey Beresford in town. They had no friends in common, but they bowed in passing—an acknowledgement of mutual distrust.

      The other woman he did not know. Young, with a willowy figure, standing a good head taller than Mrs Hampton, she had inches on both young men. A Beresford also? She had the blonde hair and blue eyes to match the name, though she was dressed simply, in some dark stuff bespeaking modesty rather than style. The desire to see that statuesque body in something more revealing caused his throat to close.

      Surprised him.

      As a boy he’d had lusty thoughts about anything in skirts. As a man, a businessman, he had more important things on his mind. Women like her wanted home and hearth and a man to protect them. His life was about taking risks. Gambling all, on the chance for profit. No woman should live with such uncertainty. They were too delicate, too easily broken as his mother had been broken. The pain of her death had been unbearable. Not something he ever intended to experience again. Nor was it necessary. He was quite content to avoid the respectable ones while enjoying those who only wanted money in exchange for their favours, the demi-monde.

      So why couldn’t he keep his eyes from this most respectable-looking of females? Who was she? He wasn’t aware of a female cousin, close or distant. Not that there couldn’t be a whole host of relatives he didn’t know about, since he didn’t give a damn about any of them. But as his gaze ran over the girl, a prickle of awareness raised the hairs on the back of his neck. A sensation of familiarity so strong, he felt the urge to draw closer and ask for her name.

      Yet he was positive they had never met. Perhaps it was the wariness in her expression that had him intrigued.

      A blinding flash of lightning beyond the mullioned windows lit the room in a ghostly light. An image seared on Bane’s vision. Stark otherworldly faces. Mouths dark pits in pale skin as the air moved with their startled gasps. They looked like the monsters who had peopled his childish nightmares. His enemies. The people who wanted him dead, according to his uncle. His mother’s brother.

      In truth, he hadn’t expected to see family members here. He’d preferred to think of the old man alone and friendless as he gasped his last.

      Just like Bane’s mother.

      If not for this man, his mother might be alive today and the guilt of her death would not weigh so heavily on Bane’s shoulders. No matter how often he tried to put the blame where it belonged, on the man in the bed, he could not deny his own part in the events of that day. His thoughtless anger that had put her at risk. Hell, even his very existence, the reason she had run from this house in the first place.

      Power and wealth brought invulnerability. His mother had drilled it into him since the day he could understand his place in the world. And that was why he was here. That and to see the old man off to the next world. He simply couldn’t pass up the chance to see the dismay in the old earl’s gaze.

      He could count the number of times he and the old man had met face to face on one hand. But he had always been there, in the shadows, a threatening presence. Forcing his will where it was not wanted. Guiding Bane’s education, trying to choose his friends, but his mother’s brother had been more than a match for the earl. Bane still remembered his horror as he stood with his uncle on the doorstep of this house and listened to an argument over him, about money, about cruelty and murder. Accusations that had haunted him as a youth. Fed his anger at this man.

      But his temper was not the hot flash of his youth, the kind that brought trouble to him and those around him. It was a cold burn in his gut, controlled, and carefully directed. Guilt over his mother’s death had taught him that lesson.

      Since then, Bane had striven to be the gentleman his mother always wanted him to be. He had battled for the respect of the scions of other noble houses at school and held his head high. But at heart he was the son of a coalminer’s daughter. And proud of it. Mining was in his blood and showed in the scars on his knuckles and the muscles in his shoulders developed at the coalface.

      He was more Walker than Beresford, whether or not he had any Beresford blood.

      The lightning faded. Shadows once more reclaimed all but the man in the bed. As his coughing subsided, the earl’s gnarled fingers clawed at the bedsheets, then beckoned.

      Resistance stiffened Bane’s spine. He wasn’t about to be called to heel like some slavering cur. But, no, apparently this particular summons was not for him. The old man must not have seen him yet, since it was the two women who moved towards the bed, Mrs Hampton nudging the younger one ahead of her, making her stumble.

      Bane took a half-step, a warning on his lips, but the girl recovered inches from the earl’s warding hand, mumbling an apology.

      Who was she? Some indigent relative looking for crumbs in the final hours? There would be no crumbs for any one of them. Not if Bane had a say.

      ‘So you are Mary.’ The old man’s voice sounded like a door creaking in the wind. ‘She said you were no great beauty, but not that you were a beanpole. You take after your father.’

      ‘You knew my father?’ the girl asked, and Bane sensed how keenly she awaited his answer. Her body seemed to vibrate with the depth of her interest.

      The old man grimaced. ‘I met him once. Kneel, girl. I’m getting a crick in my neck.’

      Like a supplicant, the girl sank down. Anger rose hot and hard in Bane’s throat on the girl’s behalf, but she seemed unperturbed by the command and gazed calmly into the dying man’s face.

      She spoke again, but her low voice did not reach all the way to Bane in the shadows beside the door.

      The old man glared at her, lifted a clawed hand to twist her chin this way and that. Glimpses of her profile showed strong classical features, a straight aristocratic nose. Lush, full lips. A narrow