Tempted - By Pamela Britton Page 0,1

days after that, another one still.

The townspeople went a little mad. Here was an end to their livelihood. No more fortunes would be made, not that the townspeople were swimming in blunt. No, indeed. They sought only to put food on the table. To clothe their children. To keep a roof over their heads.

For many, all that disappeared the day the marquis of Warrick sailed into Hollowbrook’s harbor.

And so we come to the end of our tale, though the beginning of another, for it is said that nothing angers a man more than losing his livelihood. Lord Warrick decimated Hollowbrook. That, it could be reasoned, was why they decided to make him pay.

’Twas Tobias Brown, head smuggler, and a man who’d just barely escaped Lord Warrick, who was put in charge of the project. But though he tried and tried to come up with a satisfactory plan, it all boiled down to one thing: Who had access to his lordship? Well, perhaps two things, for what would they do to his lordship if they did have access? Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Lord Warrick’s duties took him up and down the coast, his reputation such that more than one Custom House requested his aid.

And then one fine spring day someone spied an ad in the London Gazette, and wouldn’t you know it, the person advertising for a position was the very lord they plotted against?

HEAD NURSE NEEDED.

Must have experience with difficult children.

Good character, etc. etc. Marquis of Warrick, 106,

Manderly Street, London.

Aha, Tobias Brown thought. Here was a chance to infiltrate the enemy lair. Here was an opportunity to find an appropriate means of revenge, to perhaps even start the smuggling ring again; for if they could track his lordship’s moves, they would be able to gauge when and where to land contraband.

But who would infiltrate his lordship’s home?

Who, indeed…

Part One

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockle shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.

Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book,

c. 1744

Chapter One

No red cape.

No pitchfork.

No horns.

All in all Mary Brown Callahan would say that the Devil Marquis of Warrick didn’t look a thing like she expected.

Oddly enough, she felt disappointment. Of course, she couldn’t see his lordship all that well what with him sitting upon a bleedin’ throne of a chair behind his bleedin’ monstrosity of a desk.

“Please have a seat,” he said without looking up, his eyes firmly fixed upon a document before him, a clock on a mantel behind him tick-tick-ticking in an annoyingly sterile way. Somewhere off in the distance another clock chimed the quarter hour, the bong-ding-dong-dong finding its way into the room. Muted sunlight from the right reflected off the flawless, polished perfection of his desk. The ink-blotter lay exactly square, almost as if someone had used a measuring tape to place it. Papers were stacked at perfect right angles. A fragrant, rather obnoxious-smelling truss of red roses and rosemary squatted in a fat vase. It made Mary long to reach forward and mess it all up.

Instead, she took a seat, nearly yelping when the plush blue velvet did its best to swallow her like she were Jonah and the chair a whale. She jerked forward, looking up to see if his lordship had noticed. No. The swell were still engrossed in his work. Hmph.

She waited for him. Then waited some more. Finally, she began to tap her foot impatiently, her toe ticking on the floor in time with the clock … quite a merry beat when one got into the tapping of it.

The scratching of his quill abruptly stopped. His head slowly lifted.

Two things hit Mary at once. One, Alexander Drummond, Marquis of Warrick, had the prettiest eyes she’d ever seen, blue they were, the color of a seashell when you turned it upside down.

Two, he was not the ugly ogre she’d been expecting, which just went to show a body shouldn’t believe all the things that are said, especially when those words came from her silly baboon of a father, Tobias Brown.

His lordship blinked at her, frowned, then said, “I’ll be with you in just a moment,” slowly and succinctly—as if she had a whole hide of wool in her ears—before going back to work.

She narrowed her eyes. Would he now? Well la-de-da. His high-and-mightiness were right full of himself, wasn’t he, in his fitted jacket made of a black wool woven so tight, the fabric looked as shiny and as soft as a well-bred horse’s coat. His cravat