.

armchair beside the fire, the book she had been reading still lying open upon her knees.

      He was also struck by how incredibly young and vulnerable she looked without the light of battle in her eyes and the flush of temper upon her cheeks. So young and vulnerable, in fact, that Dominic questioned how she could ever have survived her first week in London without falling victim to some disaster.

      Not that he imagined for one moment that Caro would have succumbed quietly—she did not seem to do anything quietly!—but she wasn’t physically strong enough to fight off a male predator, and her youth and lack of a protector would have made her easy prey for the seedy underworld of a city such as this one. As it was, he had no doubt that Caro had Drew Butler’s visible protection to thank for her physical well being this past week, at least.

      If Dominic had needed any reassurance that he had done the right thing in now placing Caro in his protection, then he had received it this evening when he’d visited Nicholas Brown at his home in Cheapside.

      The bastard son of a titled gentleman and some long-forgotten prostitute, Brown, whilst now giving the appearance of wealth, had in fact grown up on the streets of London, and was as hardened and tough as any of the cut-throats that walked those darkened streets. A toughness he had taken advantage of by building himself a lucrative business empire that often catered to the less acceptable excesses of the ton; Nick’s had been the more respectable of the three gambling clubs the man owned.

      Within minutes of Dominic being admitted to Brown’s house earlier, the other man had had the unmitigated gall to offer to allow the masked lady to sing at one of his other clubs, until such time as Nick’s reopened. An offer Dominic had felt no hesitation in refusing on Caro’s behalf!

      Looking down at her now as she slept the sleep of the innocent, he could only shudder at the thought of her ever being exposed to the vicious and seedy underbelly of Nicholas Brown’s world. At the same time Dominic feared that Brown, with his many spies in the London underworld, might already know that the young woman now staying with him and masquerading as his widowed cousin was that same masked lady …