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would hear that a female had knocked Ainswood—the last Mallory hellion—on his arse.
    Being a hellion, Vere would rather be slow roasted on a spit than admit the damage to his pride or show anything of what he truly felt.
    And so he answered her smug contempt with the provoking grin he was famous for.
    "Well, let that be a lesson to you," he said.
    "It speaks," she informed the onlookers. "I reckon it will live."
    She turned away, and the rustle of her bombazine skirts against her legs sounded like the hissing of serpents.
    Ignoring the hands reaching to help him, Vere swung up onto his feet without taking his eyes off her. He watched the arrogant sway of her rump as she sauntered away, coolly collected the dog and the girl, and turned into Vinegar Yard's southwest exit, out of sight.
    Even then he couldn't bring his full attention to the men about him because his mind was churning with salacious scenarios that landed her on her back instead of him.
    Still, he knew the trio about him—Augustus Tolliver, George Carruthers, and Adolphus Crenshaw—and they knew him, or thought they did. And so his expression remained the drunkenly amused one they'd expect.
    "Let it be a lesson to her, eh?" Tolliver said, chuckling. "What lesson was that, I wonder? How to deliver a jawbreaker?"
    "Jawbreaker?" Carruthers echoed indignantly. "And how could he be talking if it was? I vow, you must be half blind. It wasn't the uppercut that dropped him. It was that curious acrobatic trick of hers."

    Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    "I've heard of such things," said Crenshaw. "Some-thing to do with balance, I collect. All the rage in China or Arabia or some such—and about what you'd expect from those heathen inscrutables."
    "About what you'd expect from Lady Grendel, then," said Carruthers. "I heard she was born in a Borneo swamp and reared by crocodiles."
    "More like Seven Dials," Tolliver said. "You heard this lot, cheering her on.
    They know her. She's one of their own, spawned in the back-slums of the Holy Land, I don't doubt."
    "Where'd she learn heathenish fighting tricks, then?" Crenshaw demanded. "And how is it no one ever heard of her before a few months ago? Where's she been keeping all this time that no one remarked a Long Meg like her? It isn't as though she's hard to see, is it?"
    He turned back to Vere, who was swatting mud from his trousers. "You'd a close enough look and listen, Ainswood. Any hint of the Holy Land in her speech?
    London bred, would you say, or not?"
    Seven Dials was the black heart of one of London's seamiest neighborhoods, St.
    Giles's parish, which was also known ironically as the Holy Land.
    Vere doubted that the Grenville gorgon would have needed to travel beyond its boundaries to learn the kinds of dirty fighting tricks she employed. That he'd discerned no Cockney accent meant nothing. Jaynes had grown up in the back-slums, yet he'd lost all traces of the accent.
    Perhaps she had sounded more like a lady than Jaynes did a gentleman. What did it signify? Plenty of lowborn wenches tried to ape their betters. And if Vere could not at the moment recall a single one who'd made it seem so natural, he could not, either, discern a single reason to stand here blithering about it.
    Covered with mud outwardly and simmering inwardly, he was in no mood to Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion
    encourage this lot of morons to exercise their limited intellects upon this or any other point.
    Leaving them, he made for Brydges Street in a storm of outrage, the likes of which he hadn't experienced in years.
    He had hurried to the curst female's rescue and found her all but begging for a riot. His timely intervention had beyond question spared her a knife in the back.
    In reward, he'd received an earful of brimstone and taunting defiance.
    Miss Insolence had actually threatened to black both his eyes. She'd threatened him —Vere Aylwin Mallory—whom even that great big-beaked brute Lord Beelzebub couldn't pound into