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Viper. A fool to even believe that she was capable of being the Viper.
    She shivered again and drew a wrap around the green dress. He was right, however. She needed to find some way to escape his house. For the first time since enduring the advances of the coal delivery man so long ago she was frighteningly aware that she had finally met a man whose touch she didn’t seem to mind at all.
    And… and… if he could make her tingle all over with just one touch of his fingers, what else could he make her do against her will? The hard won will that she had avowed as her own, not twenty minutes before?
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    Hades reined in his stallion and stopped the horse just inside Bayswater Lane. Leaping lithely off his horse, he threw the reins around a fence post and walked briskly along the road until he arrived at a terraced house that looked just like the rest of the others along the street. Lace hung in the window, and large numbers on the door proclaimed it to be number 31. Pulling Melissa’s note out of his pocket Hades glanced down at the small neat handwriting that marked the address on the outside of the folded parchment. It definitely said 31 Bayswater Lane.
    Striding to the door, Hades lifted the knocker and slammed it down. No one answered. What a surprise. The assistants had known that the Viper had been captured and vanished to save their own skins, just as Granwich had said they would. He peered in at the window, but the front room was dark.
    Shaking his head, Hades pushed the note back into his pocket and walked back to his horse. He’d try round the back and then leave. And then he would interview Melissa again, in the library. Truly find out what she knew and who the hell she was . He stopped mid-step, a foreboding unease lurking low in his chest. It all fitted surely? That his ‘Diana’ was in fact Melissa Sumner, the daughter of the infamous woman who had married Edgar Stanton and then with her new husband, had tried to murder Lord James Stanton. Of course Melissa was the Viper. Spawn of spawn and all that. Uneasily, Hades untied his horse from the post. There was nothing devilish about her though.
    The long, coughing and spluttering line of people started as soon as he rounded the corner into the small lane behind the terraced house. Leaving his horse in the road, and putting his handkerchief to his face, he edged to the front of the queue where a red-faced woman doled out medicines and cures whilst consulting a book written in the tiniest of hands. Henry pressed his handkerchief closer to his face. Bloody hell, an apothecary business?
    The stout woman stopped consulting the book as Hades’ shadow darkened the pages and she glared at him with all the might of a fishwife. “Get to the back of the line, sir. We don’t care whether you have money or not, you wait with the rest of them.”
    He didn’t have time to protest before she began to shout, waving the book in the air. “Mr. Hobbs, get this man to go to the back of the queue. I can’t deal with him and decipher Melissa’s handwriting, it’s like reading beetle tracks.”
    A round gentleman, also sporting a quite red face, jovially waddled to his side as Hades stepped back. “She’s a battle-axe my wife, but she’s doing a splendid job,” he said conspiratorially. “Melissa’s disappeared and we’ve no idea where she’s gone.”
    Hades nodded, slowly withdrawing Melissa’s note from his pocket.
    Silently the man read the note and looked at Hades. “Where is she?” Hades winced as Mr. Hobbs’ face turned a deep worrying maroon. “What have you done with our Melissa, you bastard?”
    “I have done nothing with her. She has decided to take a holiday. She merely asked me to give this message to you.”
    Mr. Hobbs clenched his fist, and with a milling arm, let fly at Hades. With lightning vigor, Hades shot out his hand and grabbed the man’s smaller fist in his own. He sighed and waited until the man was unbalanced and let go. Mr.