DANCING WITH A ROGUE

Prologue
London, 1792

Gabriel watched his second parent die of a broken heart.

She died with a curse on her lips.

Gabriel stood at her bedside and his heart broke for what he decided was the last time. It had shattered in pieces when he saw his father shrivel under bankruptcy, then charges of fraud. At nine, he had stood helplessly by as the man he loved was sent to prison where he died just weeks later.

The injustice had killed his mother at the same time, though she continued to breathe for another three years, three years during which they went from a comfortable home full of love and security and promise to poverty—moving steadily downward from one set of rented rooms to another until now when they lived in a cold one room hovel above a tavern where she had cleaned and he had seen to the horses.

His father had been the most honorable man Gabriel ever knew. The Honorable Matthew Manning had preached honor and generosity and tolerance, though he received little of any of them from his family. The third son of an earl, he’d received only a Navy Commission. After ten years, he’d met the daughter of a merchant, fell in love, and used her dowry to start a small shipping business.

They’d not been rich, but unlike many of his friends his mother and father loved each other and their son. They’d had two other children, one of whom died in childbirth and the other dead of a lung ailment at one. The loss of the two made their love for Gabriel all that much stronger.

And then the day came when everything changed.

They’d tried to keep it from him. At first, anyway. But he knew something was terribly wrong: Secretive sessions in the study, the maid in tears, a number of the servants suddenly dismissed after years of service, a father who no longer had time for him, his mother’s face aging in front of him.

The final destruction of his family came with his father’s arrest in front of his wife and son for selling rotten food and poor equipment to troops in the field. He’d kept telling his son and wife that the truth would emerge, that he was innocent. But his father disowned him, the court convicted him, and three new partners took over the business.

The same three that had framed his father.

Their names were engraved in Gabriel’s memory: Stanhope, Daven and Stammel. They had lured Matthew Manning into bringing them into their business, framed him and stole his company. They hadn’t been satisfied with that; they had to humiliate him, ruin him, disgrace him.

After his father’s death, Gabriel’s mother fled to her sister’s home in America. They were welcome there, but Gabriel watched his mother decline steadily.

And now there was nothing left of the pretty, vibrant, loving person who had once filled a room with smiles and laughter. He hadn’t seen a smile in those three years. He hadn’t heard her laughter.

She’d become a shadow who stayed in her room, a writhe dressed in black. She wanted only one thing: revenge.

And she taught her son well.

Gabriel leaned over and kissed her a cheek growing cold and closed the green eyes that had become dull. He touched his mother’s cheek. "I’ll do what you could not," he vowed. "I’ll clear father’s name and I will make the three of them pay. I swear it."

He stood upright and his gaze gave her one last look. He didn’t want to remember her like this. He wanted to remember her with black ringlets tumbling over her shoulders and green eyes more vivid than any emerald.

Perhaps he could again some day.

When three men were dead.