Learning To Seduce

Prologue

Thank God James had been there. He'd calmed the fellow down, and assured him that I hadn't meant any word of it - even though I bloody had! But you could not, Black explained this later when we had been alone, accuse a man of cheating without proof. And my only proof was that the design on the back of the cards looked strange, and maybe that I have never lost so badly before - which wasn't particularly convincing.

I suppose that I was lucky to have escaped with my life. That duke looked as if putting a bullet through the brains of a fellow player was something he did every day.

Though a bullet through the brain might have been preferable to what I knew was coming: trying to find a thousand pounds that I needed to pay off the debt.

I couldn't not ask my bank for it, the fortune my father had left me after his death just a little over a year before was being held in trust for me until my twenty-first birthday, and that was still two years away, I couldn't wait that long. I couldn't touch that money, that was certain but I knew I could always burrow against it.

The trouble was, who to ask, certainly not the bank. They'd only inform my mother, and she'd want to know for what I needed the money for, and I couldn't possibly tell her that.

My sister was a possibility, she was already of age, and had come into her part of their inheritance just that month. Isabella might reasonably be appealed to for a loan. She'd also want to know what the money was for, but she was quite easy to lie to, a good deal easier to lie to than our mother.

And if I came up with a good enough story - something involving poverty-stricken children, for instance, or cruelly abandoned animals, since she was tenderhearted - I was sure of at least four or five hundred pounds.

The problem was that I didn't like to lie to Bella. Oh, teasing her was one thing, but outright lying? That was another thing entirely. It offended my moral sensibilities, lying so outrageously to my sister, even if it meant, as in this case, saving my own hide. The fact that Bella would surely rather pay off my debts than lose me did not ease my conscience the slightest. No, I would have to find someone else to loan me the thousand quid.

I mentally ran through a list of my friends and acquaintances, trying to remember if any of them owned me any favors. I stopped right on front of the college gate that I was attending to, I reached out, still without consciously thinking what I was doing, and was not at all surprised to find the gate securely locked. It had been so, of course, since nine o'clock, and was now well past midnight.

My feet, again of their own accord, began moving once more, this time taking me past the gate, and along the high stone wall that circled the living quarters that I shared with two hundred or so of my fellow academicians. I was still running over my list of friends not even thinking about what I was doing, because this was now a routine that he had been doing over the past moths that little thinking was in need to perform it. I was, of course, going over the wall, as soon as I came to the spot where there was a good enough toeholds in the stone, that is.

Thinking back to my list, none of my fellow companions had any money that he knew. They were all in the same position that I was in ... waiting for their twenty-first birthdays, and their inheritances. A few had fathers still living, and a few of those were occasionally the recipients of gifts of cash. But no one that he knew intimately enough to ask for a loan of a thousand pounds.

It was as I dejectedly pushed back the dead ivy that covered the wall that I was about to climb, and stuffed my boot toe into a gouge in the mortar, that a voice called my name. I turned my head, swearing a little beneath my breath. All I needed now was for the proctor to be alerted to the act that I was once again scaling the wall-

I turned my head expecting the proctor, and saw that it wasn't the proctor at all, but that great ass of a duke. The fellow must have followed him from the tavern where they'd had their game. One would think that a duke had better things to do than follow penniless earls about, but apparently not.

''Look,'' I said, leaving my foot where it was, and resting an elbow upon my knee. ''You'll get your money, Your Grace. Didn't I say you would? Not right away of course, but soon-''

''This isn't about the money,'' the duke said. Really, but he looked nothing like a duke. Would a duke actually curl his mustache that way? And wasn't that waistcoat though velveteen, a bit well ... bright?

''This is about what you called me,'' the duke said, and for the first time, I saw that he was holding something in his hand. And in the bright white light from the moon I was also able to see precisely what it was.

''What I called you?'' Quite suddenly I wished that our conversation would be overheard. I prayed quite fervently that that Idiot proctor would overhear them and open the gate and demand an explanation. Far better-far, far better- to be sent down for being caught outside the walls after hours, than to receive a bullet through the gut - even if that bullet would likely relieve me of my debt.

''Right.'' The duke kept the mouth of the pistol trained on my chest. ''A cheat. That's what you called me. Well, The Duke doesn't cheat, you know.''

I became aware of two things at once. The first was that it seemed unlikely a duke - a real duke- would possess so erratic grasp of grammar.

The second was that I was going to die.

''Say good night, my lord,'' said the man-who-was-not-a-duke, and, still pointing the pistol on my direction, he pulled the trigger.

And then, quite suddenly, the bright light from the moon faded, taking my immediate troubles along with it.

Even though this hasn't hold your interest I am sure the first chapter will, I will upload as soon as Possible.

Rosetta*