Read All Through the Night for Free Online Page B

to establish a fund for the men Matthew had misled so disastrously.
    The estate’s trustees decided she would not. They had, they informed her, a solemn responsibility to see that Matthew’s fortune benefited Matthew’s widow, not nameless, faceless ex-sailors.
    But once the idea had taken hold of her, Anne was not to be gainsaid. She needed to do this thing—do something, anything—to help Matthew’s men.
    She’d begun by asking for donations soon after arriving in London. The ton had greeted her solicitations enthusiastically, impressing each other—and the popular press—with the enormous sums they promised.
    But pledges and payments, Anne had quickly learned, were not always the same thing. And when confronted, those who promised money threatened to destroy the Norths’ social position should Anne reveal their “economy.”
    So she stole what had been promised.
    At first she’d robbed only those who’d pledged in public and reneged in private. But over the course of months she’d added others to her list of victims: dandies without occupation or conscience, ladies who squandered fortunes on the turn of a card.
    Jack Seward had stopped her.
    She resented it. She hated having to give up the night but she’d no choice.
    He’d said she’d stolen something he wanted, but, try as she might, she could not think of what that could be.
    And until he’d found whatever it was he’d lost, she needed to lay low. Reason demanded that she stop. She would listen to reason.
    “Where’s Father?” Sophia whispered urgently. “We can’t be introduced if Father is not here.”
    “Introduced to whom, Sophia?” Anne asked, glad of the interruption.
    “Good God, Anne. Will you attend to the conversation? I just told you. He’s here.”
    “Another infatuation, Sophia?” she murmured. “Who this time? Lord Strand? Lord Vedder?” She frowned down at a button that had come loose on her long white gloves and began working the tiny seed pearl back into its satin loop. “Who is, Sophia?”
    “Whitehall’s Hound,” Sophia said. “Some call him Devil Jack.”
    The seed-pearl button popped off Anne’s glove and fell to the floor, skittering away beneath the sweep of a hundred skirts. A little tremor raced beneath her skin, a tingle signifying danger, disturbingly familiar and even more disturbingly gratifying. It was the same feeling she experienced when she donned a black mask and for a few brief hours became Wrexhall’s Wraith.
    She no longer fought against acknowledging the ruthless, rapturous sensation. It was only when she risked death that she experienced the edgy excitation that told her she was alive. After so many years of running from memories, she’d finally found a place where the past did not exist: London’s rooftops.
    There she’d become votary to the acceleration of her own heartbeat, to the laboring of her lungs as she flew, to the challenge of a hushed, locked room.
    Her hands clenched in her lap. The echo of excitement died, replaced by a cold sense of foreboding. She’d been a fool to taunt him, with his wounded eyes and grave manner and gentle voice. She’d been a fool to kiss him. She was worse than a fool to want more.
    “He’s too delicious,” Sophia whispered.
    Carefully Anne lifted her gaze. There. Across the room, moving through the jostling company like the wolf Lady Sheffield kept. Just as contained and aloof, his demeanor as mild, his eyes, like the wolf’s, those of a killer.
    He searched for something. And Anne knew—far, far too well—for whom.
    She watched him, praying Sophia would not notice her interest, praying he would not come closer, stimulated by the notion that he would, appalled at her reaction, helpless to look away.
    He was transfixing, forbiddingly handsome with his rumpled golden hair, firm jaw, and piercing eyes. But something more than the arrangement of his features drew the eye. He had an indefinable quality of refinement about him, a gentleness of manner that,