Read Queen of Diamonds for Free Online Page A

home or shave twice a day.
    As bad as the women were, the men were worse.
    Harry enjoyed a fine wine, but not waking up wishing he were dead. He played a decent hand of whist, but was not about to gamble away what he’d worked so hard to restore and preserve. As for women, he was no monk, but neither was Harry a libertine, needing a woman, a different woman, every night, like so many of the town bucks. He regretted that females had so few choices in life that so many had to sell their bodies, but he did not like buying a woman’s favors. He liked the occasional tumble, with the kind of willing woman one could bed without having to wed—or pay.
    Most of all he despised the morals of the
beau monde
that were anything but beautiful. Adultery was rampant, and no one seemed to care.
    So-called gentlemen tossed their marriage vows aside like so many flower petals at the wedding. The ladies were supposed to wait until they had presented their husbands with an heir before taking a lover, but who could trust an unwritten social rule when a holy sacrament was without value? No one seemed to honor their word.
    Harry intended to, when the time came, and he intended to marry a woman with the same scruples. The thought of Harking Hall going to some other man’s by-blow had kept him from looking for a bride, fearing he would never find that rare, virtuous female.
    Maybe he was a prude, a prig, and a Puritan, as his brother-in-law called him. But Harry liked his life, and saw nothing wrong with taking pleasure in his accomplishments, instead of merely accomplishing pleasure.
    He’d come by that sense of responsibility and hard work the hard way, haphazardly raised by parents who were precisely what he least admired. His father was a dissipated debauchee, paying his estate no attention except for what he could sell off to finance his gambling and expensive ladybirds. Lady Harking was the scandal of local society, flaunting her young lovers at the neighbors’ dinner parties in revenge, Harry supposed. By the time the former viscount succumbed to the pox and his wife drowned off a boat in Italy with some mad poet, Harking Hall was dilapidated, deep in debt, and Harry’s sister’s dowry was long gone.
    Harry’d spent the last nine years making repairs: to the tenants’ farms, the ancestral home, the Harkness family name, and the family coffers. He’d even managed to repay the money he’d had to borrow so his sister could wed respectably, her dowry restored.
    Respectable, hell! Olivia’s head had been turned by a handsome baronet, thrilled that a fine and fashionable London gentleman had paid her attention at the local assembly. Harry should have made her wait. He should have investigated Sir John Martin’s background. He should have taken a horsewhip to the dastard. But Olivia was his only sister, edging toward spinsterhood, and Harry could not afford a London Season for her. She was older than Harry, and he thought she was wiser. Hah!
    So here he was in London, choking on the air and dodging hopeful hostesses, chasing a drunkard, a gambler and a womanizer just like his father had been, only this one happened to be his brother-in-law.
    Good riddance he’d thought, when Martin had left Harking Hall in the middle of the night. Olivia would be far better off without the muckworm who had a mistress in the village, an ongoing affair with the vicar’s cousin, and a room at the inn—Easy Ellie’s room—when he was too foxed to ride home. Olivia had her son and her daughter and the management of Harry’s home. She would not miss the pitying looks from the neighbors or the shouting and the tears, or the bruises she tried to hide. Neither would Harry.
    Harry’s niece and nephew would be better off without seeing their father stagger home, his clothes awry, stinking of cheap wine and cheaper perfume.
    And Harry would have been a great deal better off if he had not had to