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Dev would hate her even more.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE HACKNEY CARRIAGE put Miss Francesca Devlin down in front of a set of anonymous rooms in Hemming Row. She stood on the cobbles feeling a little drunk with a mixture of guilt, fear and a giddy excitement that was making her head spin. This was a part of town she had visited for the first time only two weeks ago. It was an unfashionable quarter where she knew no one and no one knew her; that, she had been told, was the beauty of the place. Her reputation was quite safe. No one would ever know what she had done.
    After her first visit she had promised herself that it was just the once and it would never happen again. She had gone through the motions of her daily life exactly as she had done before. Nothing was different. Yet everything was different.
    The second summons had come this very night, at the Duke and Duchess of Alton’s ball. Chessie had tucked the note into her reticule, hidden it beneath a white embroidered handkerchief and had spent the rest of the evening in an agony of impatience mixed with anticipation. She had known from the momentshe unfolded the note that she would go. Like her brother she had inherited a streak of recklessness, a need to gamble, and this was the greatest game of her life. If she won she would secure everything that she had ever desired. If she lost… But she did not want to think about losing. Not tonight.
    Gambling was in Chessie’s blood. Her childhood had been stalked by poverty, the furniture pawned to pay her father’s debts and no food on the table. Those moments had been interspersed with rare occasions when they had been so rich it seemed to Chessie that she could not quite believe the grandeur of it all. On one occasion her father had won so much that they had ridden around Dublin in a golden carriage pulled by two white horses like something from a fairy tale. That day she had eaten so much she had thought she would burst. She had gone to sleep between silken sheets and in the morning she had woken and the carriage and horses had gone and her mother was crying, and within a week the silken sheets had gone, too, and they were back to coarse blankets. And then when she was six, her father had died.
    Through it all there had been Devlin, four years older than she, tough, protective, grown harder than any child should have to be, determined to defend her and his mother, too, no matter the cost. Chessie knew Dev had worked for them, had very probably begged, borrowed and stolen for them, too. It was Dev who, after their mother died, had gone to their cousin Alex Grant and made him take responsibilityfor them. The experience had bound them as close as a brother and sister could be. They had had no secrets—until now.
    Chessie paused on the doorstep and almost ran back to the house in Bedford Street where Alex and Joanna thought that she was safely in her bed, back to the world she knew. Except that it was too late, for she had already taken the steps that would leave that world behind. She had done things that a fortnight ago she would not have dreamed of—gone out unchaperoned at night, traveled alone in a hackney carriage, things that other people did all the time but which were forbidden to a young girl of unimpeachable reputation. She smothered a laugh that had a wild edge to it. Young girls did not indulge in games of chance with a gentleman. Nor did they pay with their bodies when they lost.
    The door opened silently to her knock and then he was drawing her into the candlelit room where the gaming table was already set up and the cards waiting. Chessie thought about winning and felt a rush of excitement that lit her blood like fire. Then she thought about losing and shivered with a different sort of excitement. He was kissing her already, with a passion that stoked her desires and soothed her fears. This could not be wrong because it felt right. Her gamble was not really on the cards but on love, and surely love conquered all.