Tempting Eden Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1 - CUMBRIA, OCTOBER 1818

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 - CUMBRIA, NOVEMBER 1818

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 - LONDON, DECEMBER 1818

  Chapter 16 - LONDON, JANUARY 1819

  Chapter 17 - LONDON, APRIL 1819

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20 - CUMBRIA, JUNE 1819

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

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  PRINTING HISTORY

  Heat trade paperback edition / June 2010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rowe, Margaret.

  Tempting Eden / Margaret Rowe.—Heat trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 9781101435311

  I. Title.

  PS3618.O8729T46 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2009053825

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Prologue

  CUMBRIA, MAY 1814

  When he was done, she’d be the greatest whore in all Christendom.

  If they’d been in London, her body would have already been sold to the highest bidder in the Marriage Mart. He’d have had to dower her for some chinless earl to take his pleasure in her innocence. Since London was out of the question, and a ton marriage was not on her horizon, there was no better man than he to teach her. She was destined to be a prim little prude if he didn’t intervene.

  And she might prove more capable than her mother in providing him with an heir. No one would dare question him and live to tell the tale.

  Baron Ivor Hartford carefully watched his stepdaughter Eden as she sat across the gleaming mahogany dining table. He’d planted the seeds patiently, and soon it would be time for the harvest.

  Her pale plain face was flushed. She giggled.

  Excellent.

  She was not usually a giggler, but rather a serious girl. Earnest. Clutching her dead father’s dusty books to her ripening bosom with fervor, she had long surpassed the learning of the governess who was abovestairs with his younger stepdaughter. But Ivor would soon further Eden’s education beyond her wildest imaginings.

  Now he saw her attempt to rise from the table and sway. The footman rushed to catch her.

  “I’ll take care of her, Henley,” the baron said.

  All night he had signaled Henley to refill Eden’s glass. They had been quite alone at dinner. His wife was upstairs recovering from yet another miscarriage, deep in her laudanum dreams.

  When Eden had placed her hand unsteadily over her wine goblet, Ivor had teased her. “Why, Puss, you’re a grown woman now. Eighteen. If you were in town, you’d be drinking champagne and whirling about the dance floor with the young bucks. You might even be married and a mother yourself. A little wine won’t hurt you.”

  He had cajoled and flattered, and she had drunk.

  He picked her up now and carried her up the stairs. He sent her maid, Mattie, away to fetch some headache powder. No doubt Eden would have need of it.

  Hartford placed her on her bed. Her arms were still around his neck. He disentangled her, brushing against her breasts, then settling his hands firmly on each luscious mound. Her eyes flew open in surprise.

  “So beautiful, Puss,” he whispered. “You’ve bewitched me. I cannot help myself.” Then he bent to kiss her full on the mouth. As her lips opened in protest, his tongue took advantage.

  “Mm. You taste like spring wine. Delicious. Sleep well, Puss, and dream of me.”

  Chapter 1

  CUMBRIA, OCTOBER 1818

  Eden Emery was well and truly ruined. In all senses of the word.

  She didn’t resemble the sort of female that one would even want to ruin. She was as thin as a wraith, having lost her appetite for food and most other things quite some time ago. Her tightly braided schoolgirl plaits, shadowed gray eyes and pale skin made her unexceptional, perhaps even unappealing, in every way. But one man had not thought so, and he lay dead in her bed.

  Somewhere down the long hallway her sister Jannah coughed. Eden couldn’t turn to her for help. Jannah would expire from shock knowing the lengths that Eden had gone to keep her safe. Warm. Fed. Untouched.

  Eden turned away from Ivor Hartford’s body and washed herself thoroughly, scrubbing the sin from her skin with an almost vicious vigor. Her own body now repelled her because it had so compelled him. Her mother had not been in her grave a day before the man had come back to her bed. He’d ridden her hard to prove his dominance, and she had let him, as she let him do everything.

  He had trained her well. He’d said and done things to her to weave her into his web, as helpless and mindless as a fly. She had even betrayed her own mother without much remorse when the woman was alive. How foolish Eden had been, thinking the baron might leave her alone once there was no one to trick.

  What a selfish, naïve idiot Eden had been. Jealous, at the heart of it. She had a beautiful, stupid mother, and she was an ugly, smart daughter. She’d been every bit as stupid as her poor mother. More so.

  How simple it was to fall into their old routine once her mother was gone. With one flick of an eye or raised eyebrow, Eden knew what was expected of her, and knew the consequences if she refused.

  Not that she would think to do so.

  At least Ivor was a man of habit. After he had established his unquestionable mastery over her once again, he had slept in her bedchamber Saturday nights, the better to torture her in church Sunday mor
ning with his pious façade, and had spent Sunday evenings celebrating his own peculiar brand of religion. Occasionally he varied from this routine, just to keep Eden sufficiently off-kilter. In fact, tonight was Wednesday.

  She dressed herself in her most severe black woolen gown, a leftover of what seemed like endless years of mourning, twisting her braids into an unbecoming bun, neutralizing her womanhood with studied care. Holding her breath, she cleaned her stepfather as best she could and struggled to get him back into his dressing gown. She no longer had the need to keep her tongue and told him in plain and vulgar language how he had robbed her of her future, even if in her long-ago childish vanity she had been more than complicit. She spoke of her late father, a surprisingly ecumenical country vicar, who’d named his children for the paradise of different cultures.

  Elysium, her beloved brother Eli, had died at Waterloo. Jannah was dying down the hall. Eden herself had shrunk in size as she grew in sin. There had been no heaven on earth for any of Vicar Emery’s offspring. However, there was no doubt in her mind that Lord Hartford was going to Hell, no matter what it was called. And she would soon follow.

  When Eden was satisfied that every button was buttoned and all traces of his wicked pleasure were gone, she straightened Ivor’s body on the bed and rolled him off, and he landed with an unpleasant thud on the carpet. She stripped the bed and stuffed the soiled sheets in her wardrobe, then smoothed the coverlet over the bare mattress. The room needed airing as well. Shivering, she opened both windows into the night. The candles flared. Lord Hartford had always insisted on light, the better to see her humiliation and ultimate compliance. And sometimes, he used the candles for altogether different purposes.

  She arranged an open book on the floor near her chair, neatly placing her magnifying glass on the side table. She then sat down and counted to one hundred, listening to her heart race, composing her thoughts. Should she ring for the servants? No, that implied she was in control of her emotions. And she certainly was not that. She wondered if they could be trusted to keep the manner and location of Lord Hartford’s death quiet. He had used them with as little charity as he had his stepdaughter. She rose, closed the windows and flew out into the hall.

  “Help!” she cried. “Help! Lord Hartford has fallen ill!”

  No doubt Jannah would awaken. There was no help for it. Hopefully Mattie would not let her get out of bed.

  After an agonizing wait, Kempton, Lord Hartford’s bleary-eyed valet, shuffled down from his room. Several other servants clustered outside Eden’s bedroom door, unwilling to look at their master’s form on the floor.

  “I was reading,” Eden gasped, having no difficulty summoning a note of panic to her voice. “He must have felt unwell and seen my light, come to me for help. I think—I fear—he is dead.” She shuddered. This was no act.

  Reading. Ha. Milo Kempton had not been in the baron’s service long, but long enough to know the prim and proper Miss Emery must be turning cartwheels while she played the sorrowful stepdaughter. It hadn’t taken him but a few weeks to figure out there were strange things afoot in this isolated house, for all that the other servants kept their mouths shut. Knew what side of their bread was buttered, they did. It was hard to come by employment up here. The baron was a right bastard when he felt like it, but that hadn’t bothered Kempton none. Kempton needed a job, too. He’d been an army man, and after a few months begging on the streets, he had been ready to work for the devil himself.

  He bent and turned the devil over. Lord Hartford’s eyes were open, his lips tinged blue. There was no question he was dead. Kempton glanced up at Miss Emery. Her dark eyes slid to a corner of the room. Guilty as sin. And he was glad of it. Maybe something good would come of his employer’s demise after all, for both of them.

  “I’ll take care of him, miss,” he said, straightening up. “He told me before he went to bed he wasn’t feeling up to snuff. I’m only sorry he bothered you instead of calling for me.” He winked at her, quite broadly, so she couldn’t miss its implication. He was ready to lie for her, and ready to lie with her if it came to that. She was a plain, skinny thing, but those were sometimes the ones who were most surprising. She must have had some mysterious hold over her stepfather for the old goat to be regular as clockwork in her bed. “Perhaps you should go downstairs. Get Mrs. Washburn to fix you a cup of tea. Or a tot of brandy. You’ve had a nasty shock.” He smiled and patted her shoulder. She stumbled backward at his touch.

  “Yes,” Eden said faintly.

  My God. Kempton knew. That smirk. The overly familiar press of his fingertips into the fabric of her dress. What would it take for him to keep silent? Eden made her way downstairs, only to realize that she was still barefoot as she reached the cold flagstones of the hall. She closed the library door against the hushed grunts and grumbles of the servants above as they laid out Lord Hartford in his own bed. He had been a large man, and his dead weight made moving the body difficult. Eden had reason to know.

  Why had she chosen the library instead of her mother’s cheerful pink parlor? The library was Hartford’s room, smelled of him, his books, his liquor, his cigars. Here she had spent hours on the leather couch, posing for his artistic fantasies, fearful one of the servants would enter the deliberately unlocked door. Touching herself at his precise directions and unraveling in shame. Bending over his desk as he entered her from behind, one of his hands muffling her cries while the other snaked around, forcing her sweet agony. Standing mute and shackled as he struck her bottom. But his brandy was at hand. Eden poured a staggering amount and drank it down, trying to control her shaking. A tap at the door, and Mrs. Washburn entered, bringing her hot, strong tea and a plate of biscuits. She set them on the empty desk.

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Eden. This hasn’t been a happy house for you, has it? First your poor brother, then your mama. Miss Jannah sick. And now Baron Hartford.” The older woman smoothed her skirts, as though she were smoothing the wrinkles out of her thoughts. “We, all of us staff, hope the new baron is a better man. You’ve suffered enough.”

  Eden looked at the housekeeper. Mrs. Washburn’s face betrayed nothing, but her little speech hinted otherwise. If they had suspected how Lord Hartford had used her, they hadn’t lifted a finger. Well, how could they? It wasn’t their place or their business what the “quality” did. They needed the shelter as much as she and Jannah did in this remote corner of the kingdom. Eden felt the first tears of the evening sting her eyes. “I’m not sorry he’s dead,” she whispered. “But I didn’t kill him, I swear it.”

  “Nonsense, love! Not for one minute did I think that,” said Mrs. Washburn, sounding shocked. “It was well past time, the old bastard. Sit down. Drink your tea. Charlotte is making up the yellow room for you to sleep in tonight. I’ll go help her. But ring if you need anything else.”

  Eden swallowed the hot tea without tasting it. What she needed could not be supplied by a dozen Mrs. Washburns. But she’d have to make the best of it. At least the past four years had trained her for something.

  “Make sure Jannah is all right. I’ll come up to her as soon as I can.”

  “You worry about you. We’ll take care of your sister.”

  The housekeeper left her alone after lighting some lamps. Eden must write to Ivor’s solicitor. He’d know how to get in touch with the baron’s heir, some nephew she had never met. And she had to find out what provisions had been made for her and her sister. She knew her mother had brought nothing to her marriage but her vague beauty and three hungry children. Eden felt sure her mother married Ivor simply for their security, for who could love such a villain?

  Well, Eden had. At first. Fool that she was. And when she had finally come to her senses, Ivor had threatened to turn to her younger sister for comfort. So they continued their devil’s bargain. Eden was as well trained as any courtesan and had come cheap besides. He had only given her the one gift, a loathsome reminder of his mastery.

  And now the bargain was over. Eden and Jannah were
to be at the mercy of another lord. Eden searched through the baron’s drawers for correspondence and found the address of his solicitor. She set to writing a sanitized version of this night’s work, refusing to allow her hope and fear to take hold and blossom. Jannah was too sick to leave Hartford Hall. Eden only hoped the new baron would permit poor relations of his uncle’s to remain. So she could not flee, not yet.

  When she was done, she tore the silver collar from her throat and threw it in the fire.

  The next day, Jannah had been soothed, more letters written, the service organized, the menu discussed with Mrs. Burrell and Mrs. Washburn. Surely some in the tiny village would make the trek to Hartford Hall after Reverend Christopher did his best to trek to Hartford Hall after Reverend Christopher did his best to induct Ivor Hartford to the afterlife, if only out of curiosity to gain entrance to the house. The baron had refused visitors after both his stepson and his wife died.