Read The Duke for Free Online

Bel paused to hide the coins in the tiny leather purse at her waist inside her cloak. Drawing a deep breath, she pulled her hood back up, nodded good night to the laundress, and forced herself back out into the chilly darkness.
    It was only a quarter hour’s walk to the hovel she now called home. The greasy yellowish fog seemed to have thickened, throwing noises behind her like heavy footfalls, making her own steps ring strangely off the brick houses in the narrow, twisting alleyways of the rookery. She glanced over her shoulder and walked faster.
    A striped alley cat glided by. Shrill laughter spilled from a lit window above. She looked up in its direction, turned the corner and, in that split second, the man grabbed her.
    Her terrified scream was muffled by a rough, callused hand.
    She immediately began fighting, blindly thrashing against an iron grip as she was swept into a small side alley.
    “Shut up.” The big man jerked her, then shoved her hard into the wall.
    She barely caught herself in time from sprawling headlong. She looked up in wide-eyed terror to find the warden of the Fleet, clearly very drunk.
    A sickening
knowing
promptly spiraled down to the pit of her stomach, paralyzing her. The carriage ride...
    He had planned this.
    “Hello, pretty,” he slurred, harshly pressing her up against the alley wall as though she were one of his unruly prisoners.
    Struggling for calm, Bel swallowed hard. She was shaking uncontrollably. Her chest heaved with fright. She tried to back away, sliding along the wall. He stopped her, bracing his meaty hand on the bricks to block her path. With his other hand, he touched her hair. He smiled. She sobbed.
    “Told you we’d compromise, didn’t I? Everything’s going to be just fine, lass. Long as you give me what I want.”
    “No,” she uttered.
    “Oh, aye,” he said hoarsely. He lowered his stinking mouth and tried to kiss her.
    Wrenching her face away from him, she shrieked but he stifled the sound, clapping his hand over her mouth again. She fought against his brutal strength, her mind somehow refusing to accept that it was happening. Then his hand, hot and dirty, curled around her throat and he ground himself against her, his breath rasping at her ear. She grimaced in utter terror as tears welled in her eyes.
    “Nice and easy now, girly, be still,” he grated in a voice like rusty iron. “Ye knew ye had it coming.” He pinned her hands above her head.
    The details of the next few minutes she would never clearly recall.
    The darkening world blurred and slowed and all she could hear was the pounding of her heart roaring in her ears. She sobbed and made herself stare up at the stars, tiny cold jabs of light like the heads of pins. Only the metallic clinking of the huge key ring he wore at his waist pierced her wild, black hysteria as he held her against cold cutting brick, tore her clothing, grabbed and hurt her. Then pain beyond horror, pain such as she had never known flashed before her stricken eyes, blinding her like lightning, sharp as a knife in her belly. The warden grunted and suddenly sagged against her, gasping, his grip slackening; she fought free with a scream trapped in her throat and ran.
    “You tell anyone, and I’ll take it out of your pa’s hide!”
he shouted weakly after her.
    Blind with crying, clothes torn, hair disheveled, she flung into a crowded thoroughfare with street lamps. She didn’t remember the Charley who found her and mistook her in a wild, incoherent state for a gin-drunk streetwalker, and apparently had escorted her to the magdalen house. She didn’t remember the women there who helped her. She only remembered sitting for nearly three days on a cot against a barren wall with her knees drawn up, thinking over and over again, That’s all I’m good for now.
    Life as she had known it was over.
    She—prim, respectable Miss Hamilton—knew better than anyone that there was a clear-cut line separating decency from