A Midsummer Night's Sin. Kasey Michaels

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To the two astonishingly accomplished women

      my sons married, Susan and Tammy, with love

      What revels are in hand? Is there no play,

      To ease the anguish of a torturing hour? William Shakespeare

       A Midsummer Night’s Dream

      PROLOGUE

      HE DIDN’T FOLLOW fashion, he made it. He had the air of the finest salons of postwar Paris about him, fairly reeked of suave sophistication. When he’d taken to growing his blond hair nearly to his shoulders, half of the young fashionables had rushed to do the same, a few going so far as to resort to hairpieces.

      He rode a strawberry roan stallion with a white diamond-shaped blaze. Sales of strawberry roan stallions soared, as did the profits of one Jacques Dupuis, former jockey and a true artist with whitewash.

      He could make a violin weep, turn a pianoforte naughty and played the flute because he thought it amusing. Unemployed music masters found themselves beleaguered with demands for lessons, and those who would term any music “a beautiful noise” hadn’t yet had their ears abused by the efforts of dozens of tone-deaf young French fops.

      He shunned the theater, and tickets sales plunged. He made a joke, and all of Paris laughed. Young ladies dreamed of him, young men fought to be seen with him. Hostesses showered him with invitations … to their parties, to their boudoirs.

      They called him Puck, the name delighting them. He was so very unacceptable, yet welcomed everywhere.

      He was le beau bâtard Anglais, the beautiful English bastard, the beloved pet of Paris Society, and completely, wholly delicious.

      And now he had said his adieus to the openly distraught Paris and returned to the land of his birth, just in time for the new London Season.

      Where he was known only as Robin Goodfellow Blackthorn.

      Bastard.

      PUCK POSED AT THE mantelpiece in the lavish drawing room of the even more lush mansion in Grosvenor Square, the very heart of fashionable Mayfair. He appeared nonchalant in his fine French clothes, his cravat a masterpiece, his tailor’s appreciation for his client’s fine physique evident in the exquisite cut of the broadcloth jacket and form-fitting trousers molded to his long, lean body.

      He wore his most ingratiating smile with the ease of long practice and concealed the intelligence in his fascinating blue-green eyes. Everything depended on how he handled the events of the next few minutes, yet to the casual observer, he seemed affably stupid and as dangerous as a dandelion.

      In truth he was on his guard, wary of these two gentlemen, whom he knew to be considerably more complex than just another pair of boring Englishmen, who might be able to trace their ancestry back to the Great Flood but couldn’t be trusted to otherwise know enough to come in out of the rain.

      They’d been playing a game for the past quarter hour, speaking of this and that and the other thing, each pretending the other was anything but what they were. Who’d win this dance of wits and deception was anyone’s guess, but Robin Goodfellow Blackthorn invariably preferred to wager on himself.

      “I do admire the English countryside,” Puck remarked, apropos of nothing that had been said thus far. “The area around Gateshead, for example, is quite laudatory. Why, I could wax on about the place for hours.”

      Handed that sort of encouragement, Baron Henry Sutton at last cut through the aimless, polite banter, which Puck had known the man had been itching to do since his arrival.

      “You’d blackmail us?” The baron looked to his friend, one Richard Carstairs, and said, “And there it is, Dickie. The bastard’s attempting to blackmail us.”

      “Oh, hardly, my lord, although I must remonstrate just a little, as I see no reason to bring the circumstances surrounding my birth into the thing,” Puck protested, stepping away from the mantelpiece and further into the game. “I was merely reminiscing on my earlier brief acquaintance with Mr. Carstairs here, when we were both passing a lovely evening in Gateshead last year. Charming place, if a bit off the beaten track for a gentleman such as Mr. Carstairs. Jack, however, one might discover anywhere, mostly when one least expects to, and up to mischief, of course.”

      Dickie Carstairs, a fair-skinned, round-cheeked fellow, whose rather