A Lily Among Thorns Read online

  CRITICS PRAISE ROSE LERNER’S DEBUT IN FOR A PENNY

  “Georgette Heyer, watch out! Rose Lerner serves up a sprightly and splendid Regency romance.”

  —Lauren Willig, author of

  The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

  “The grit of Dickens and the true-to-life, breathing characters of Austen. Rose Lerner is a new star in the Regency firmament.”

  —Judith Laik, author of The Lady Is Mine

  “As a debut Regency novel, In for a Penny really hits the mark. Unlike so many other Regency novels, this one really dealt with the grit of day-to-day life for a lord and lady. I was drawn into the story from page one . . . beautifully drawn characters in a richly painted setting.”

  —Book Binge

  “Rich in subtle characterization, deftly seasoned with danger, and tempered with just the right dash of tart wit and historical grit, Lerner’s historical romance is to be savored.”

  —Booklist

  “Not infrequently, I find myself reading debut novels with heart. However, finding a brand-new author who writes a first novel that not only has life, but also beautiful writing, charming characters, and attention to the small details happens far less often. In for a Penny is just such a book, and I adored it.”

  —All About Romance

  “Lerner’s prose is apropos of the era, yet updated enough to delight today’s reader. Her debut’s quick pace and smart dialogue are perfect as the adventure and passion unfold.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “In for a Penny is a wonderful, unusual, well-written Regency romance that is easily one of the best of the year so far. Leisure has a real gem in Rose Lerner and I can’t wait for her next release.”

  —The Romance Reader

  “In for a Penny is a charming and original Regency that will make you wish a man like Nev would stroll through your front door.”

  —Eloisa James, Barnes and Noble review columnist

  Other books by Rose Lerner:

  IN FOR A PENNY

  ROSE LERNER

  A Lily Among Thorns

  For Masha, the first to be enthusiastic about this book, and the best friend I could have asked for during the worst time in my life.

  DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Roth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4285-1176-7

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0989-4

  First Dorchester Publishing, Co., Inc. edition: September 2011

  The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book had two editors. I’d like to thank the first, Leah Hultenschmidt, for caring so much about this book’s success and for spotting exactly what it was missing, and the second, Chris Keeslar, for being kind and welcoming to an author nervous about change. I’d like to thank Tanya at Dorchester’s marketing department for making things much less scary for a newbie author, and Renee in production for making my books so pretty. I’d also like to thank my fabulous copyeditor, Kim Runciman, for asking good questions and saving me from many embarrassing errors and anachronisms.

  Thank you, of course, to my agent, Kevan Lyon, for being unfailingly even-keeled and good at your job, and just all-around awesome.

  Thank you to this book’s first readers and cheerleaders: Matti Klock, Dina Aronzon, Greg Holt, Steve Holt, and my mother, who all provided key pieces and made me believe the story had a future. Thank you to more recent ones: Gwen Mitchell for helping get the first three chapters in shape, Sonia Portnoy-Leemon for getting me through that nerve-racking time between submission and the revision letter, and Kate Addison for helpful feedback, helpful squee, and explaining why Serena couldn’t be eating a hot cross bun.

  Thank you to my fellow members of the Greater Seattle RWA for your advice, support, and friendship, and for putting on an amazing conference every year. I can’t even begin to list the ways you’ve helped me. Thank you to all my friends and family for believing in me, for being fabulous, funny, and generous, and for making my heart grow three sizes on a regular basis.

  And, finally and always, thanks to the Demimondaines: Alyssa Everett, Karen Dobbins, Vonnie Hughes, and especially Susanna Fraser, for seeing this book through several drafts and more than one identity crisis. I am so lucky to belong to a group of not just talented writers and wonderful friends, but also talented critiquers, who understand how a book fits together under its skin, and week after week tell me the hard truth kindly and tactfully.

  Prologue

  September 29, 1809

  Solomon Hathaway was drunk. He was drunk, and he didn’t want to go to a brothel. On the other hand, Mme Deveraux’s front steps were cold and windy. “‘The mouth of strange women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein,’” he said, and clung to the wrought-iron railing.

  Ashton and Braithwaite shared a disbelieving look. “Is the parson’s son quoting Scripture again?” said Ashton.

  “Don’t—don’t call me that.”

  “D’you prefer ‘tailor’s nephew’?” Braithwaite asked. Drink always made him cruel.

  Ashton snickered. “Leave off. It’s normal for a virgin to be nervous.”

  Solomon straightened. The motion made his head whirl. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  Ashton grabbed his sleeve. “Oh, don’t take it like that, Hathaway. Come along, this is the best house in London! This is why we came up to town on quarter day, isn’t it? To spend our blunt on things we can’t get in Cambridge?”

  “Yes . . .” Solomon was already regretting it. He should have gone home and let Elijah lecture him on obscure French poetry instead. “I was going to buy a cal—calor—calorimeter.”

  “A what?”

  “It measures heat. Lavoisier disproved the existence of phlogiston with it. No, wait—I’m getting my experiments confused—”

  Braithwaite pushed open
the door of the brothel. “He’s just making up words now. I’m going in. If Hathaway wants to turn twenty-one without ever knowing the touch of a woman, let him.” Heat gusted out in his wake, and after a moment his two friends followed him.

  Inside, Solomon took a deep breath into his cold lungs—and choked on an attar-of-roses fog. Scalding tears sprang to his eyes, refracting the room into red and gilt and skin. A great deal of skin, multiplied by dozens of elegant mirrors. He averted his eyes, but not before a flash of petticoat revealed raised red welts on a smooth thigh.

  A girl touched his arm, startling him. She was pale and dark and hit him like a fever, hot and cold at once. But even that chill grounded him, blocking out the heat of the salon. Were the fires kept too high, or had the brandy affected his senses? It would be an interesting experiment, the exact effects of alcohol on the blood—

  “Come upstairs,” she said.

  Solomon blinked, focused his eyes on her again. She was looking at him, but her eyes were empty. Nothing there. No human connection at all. He swallowed, trying to keep the bile down. “I think I should go.”

  “You’ll like it.”

  He followed her up a red-carpeted stair; she never once looked back, even when he stumbled. She wore a thin lavender percale, inexpertly embroidered with seed pearls. Its single muslin petticoat revealed every angle of her legs—or would have if he could have taken his eyes off the stairs long enough to see much above her ankles. They were neat ankles.

  The gown was stylish and becoming, but second-rate, he decided as they went down a dimly lit corridor. The muslin was not quite of the best quality. It wasn’t well-fitted either, but maybe she’d lost weight. She was very thin. His mother would want to feed her, give her bread with extra cheese and bowls of clotted cream the way she’d done to Solomon and Elijah when they were younger, “to put meat on their bones”—oh Lord, why was he thinking about his mother now?

  She went through an open door into an unoccupied room. The fire lit an enormous bed with hangings the color of red lead. He pressed his hand against the door frame, trying to stop his head from spinning. “It’s very warm downstairs.” It was warmer here. Only the girl’s cold face and the cool of the corridor against his back steadied him. There was a tiny round birthmark above her left eyebrow. He wanted to touch it.

  “It’s nearly October. Gentlemen don’t like gooseflesh. Just take off your coat.”

  He nodded. “Of course.” She met his eyes then. Hers were gray, gray and still empty. He was fairly sure she hated him. “We really needn’t—”

  There was a flash of scorn in her face. “Come in.” She wrapped her pale fingers around his arm and pulled him into the room. Her breasts pressed against the front of his coat as she reached behind him to pull the door shut.

  A tremor ran through him, a tremor that was all heat. This wasn’t how he’d imagined his first time with a woman, but maybe—

  She went backward, and he followed—but the bed took up most of the room, and he didn’t notice when she stopped moving. Suddenly he was pressed up hard against her, the busk of her stays jabbing into his stomach and her legs trapped between his own and the bed. They both grabbed at the bedpost for balance; his fingers meshed accidentally with hers and she kissed him. Her lips were warm and soft. She smelled like almonds and cheap perfume.

  She leaned back. Dazed, he tried to follow, but she’d brought her arm up between them to pop the buttons at her shoulders. Her bodice fell away entirely, revealing bare shoulders and arms and the tops of her breasts swelling above her stays. There was a little round birthmark there, too.

  The curtains were imperfectly drawn; a beam of moonlight fell starkly across her skin. That strip of moonlit flesh stood out like the mark of a whip. It shone with the faint bluish-white sheen of arsenic.

  Everything came to a head—the brandy and the sickening stench of roses, her distaste and his nerves, and most of all his uneasy guilt at trafficking in human flesh. He was in hell, and she was a damned soul sent to tempt him. Solomon stumbled back, his gorge rising. Hardly knowing what he did, he tugged his purse out of his greatcoat pocket. His entire quarterly allowance was in it, one hundred and twenty-five pounds lovingly counted out that morning at his uncle’s solicitor’s, and he held it out like a beggar with his alms cup.

  “Take it. Please, I’m sorry, take it.” He’d regret it in the morning, he knew that, but at the moment there didn’t seem to be much choice. Maybe if she took it, she’d forgive him. Forgive him for coming here, for whatever sins Ashton and Braithwaite were even now visiting upon some poor girl—and most of all, for wanting to push her back onto the bed and stare into her gray eyes and fuck her.

  He groped behind him for the doorknob. It was difficult, because his hands were shaking.

  She didn’t take the money, only watched him with her unreadable eyes. He dropped it on the floor and fled the room, covering his mouth with one hand.

  Chapter 1

  June 7, 1815

  “There’s a man to see you,” Sophy said, sticking her head through Serena’s office door. “He says he needs your help locating a missing object. What should I tell him?”

  Serena, up to her eyeballs in ledgers, opened her mouth to say no. Right now it was hard enough looking after her own people. She didn’t need to take on a stranger’s problem.

  On the other hand, he would probably pay her for her help. God knew she could use the money; the Ravenshaw Arms’ profits were down by four percent from this time last year. Because of the damned war, no doubt. Everyone had flitted off to Belgium to gawk at the young men about to be brutally slaughtered by Napoleon. As always, one person’s tragedy was someone else’s entertainment.

  Four percent wasn’t too bad, but she couldn’t help worrying. She’d already put off buying new bed-hangings for some of the rooms for months, out of a reluctance to deplete her small reserve. She didn’t like to risk compromising the inn’s wealthy, fashionable image, but it was better than letting some of the staff go.

  Serena couldn’t face that. She remembered what it was like to be penniless and on the street. “Show him in,” she told Sophy.

  Serena had found that it was a good idea to make visitors wait for her attention; it established that she was in charge, and gave them time to get nervous. So when the door opened again and the stranger came in, she finished her sum and double-checked it before looking up.

  It was him.

  She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t believe she had almost sent him away. She’d been looking for him for years. The Hundred and Twenty-Five Pounds, she called him, and she remembered him as if it had been yesterday. Hair like ripe wheat, freckles in a pale face, dreamy hazel eyes, a flexible mouth, and that unexpectedly stubborn chin. He’d looked like an angel.

  Either she’d embellished, or he’d grown up, or both. He didn’t look like an angel now. He looked like a man, solid and broad and taller than she’d thought.

  He looked tired, too, and worn. His hazel eyes were watchful now. It was idiotic how much it hurt her, that he hadn’t stayed young and unbruised forever. But he’s still beautiful, she thought. As if it made any difference what she thought.

  It didn’t, because on top of everything else he looked rich. Rich and stylish, in a well-cut coat and breeches, tasseled Hessians, an exquisitely tied cravat, and a fanciful crimson waistcoat, its enormous pocket flaps embroidered in orange and pale green. Everything brand-new and expensive, and cheerful in a way that jarred with his expression.

  She’d known he was a gentleman, coming into Mme Deveraux’s with his noble friends, but it still made her feel a little queasy. People like him didn’t associate with whores like her.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Solomon Hathaway.” She hadn’t remembered his voice at all beyond his educated accent; he’d barely spoken. Husky and a little rough around the edges, it wasn’t what she’d expected. “And you must be Lady Serena.”

  She nodded, carefully keeping all expression from her f
ace.

  “I—” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been told you could help me. There’s been a theft—a family heirloom—” He flushed a startling shade of red.

  He couldn’t even get the words out. No doubt he thought a man like him asking a woman like her for a favor went against the natural order of things. “Ashamed to ask for my help?”

  He frowned. “Of course I’m ashamed,” he said impatiently. “If Susannah weren’t so superstitious, she’d just get married without the damned things. Sorry. The dashed things.” He squinted at her. “Do I know you?”

  He didn’t recognize her. He was branded into her mind and he didn’t recognize her?

  He was getting married?

  Who cared? She wasn’t some daydreaming schoolgirl. She’d known the odds were slim that she’d ever see him again. She hadn’t expected anything to come of it even if she did.

  Yes, this was perfect. He didn’t know who she was. She’d find his missing object and they would be even. She’d repay her debt, send him on his way, and be free of him.

  Perfect.

  “No, we’ve never met.” She gave him a smooth smile. “Now tell me, why do you think I can help you?”

  “My uncle Dewington says you know every rogue in London by his Christian name.” There was a beat, and then he sighed, as if he’d just realized that was a strange thing to say but was resigned to it.

  He’d heard part of her reputation, anyway. “His or her Christian name, yes,” she said dryly. His uneasiness intrigued her. It seemed to be about a quarter self-consciousness and three-quarters not focusing on the conversation. What was he really thinking about?

  It annoyed her that she wanted to know, and, annoyed, she gave in to the temptation of a little rudeness. Just to see if she could make him blush again. “Solomon Hathaway. And the Earl of Dewington’s your uncle. Then—hmm. Your mother married beneath her, didn’t she?”

  He focused on the conversation then, his hazel eyes going green and piercing. “No one with Lord Dewington in her family could possibly marry beneath her,” he snapped. Well, she agreed with him there.