Estelle's Story Read online

  Second Chance at Love 1

  Estelle’s Story

  Princess Estelle Moreland is married to a brutish man who is making her life a living hell. She tries to follow her dissolute husband to one of his favorite brothels in the seedier side of London, needing evidence necessary for a legal divorce. Thugs attack her in an alley, but she’s rescued by two of the most gorgeous men she’s ever seen. They take her with them as they escape.

  When Prince Julian Thurstan and Count Alek Faust meet Estelle and hear why she was in such a neighborhood, they decide to take action. In the process of freeing Estelle, they ignite a fire of passion in her that burns red-hot and can’t be extinguished—no matter where they are.

  In 1890s London, the legal system is stacked against women. Julian and Alek set about releasing Estelle from her horrid matrimonial bonds, matching wits against a cruel and cunning man determined to keep his only source of wealth—his wife.

  Note: This book was previously published with another publisher and has been extensively revised and expanded.

  Genre: Historical, Multiple Partners

  Length: 39,189 words

  ESTELLE’S STORY

  Second Chance at Love 1

  Robin Gideon

  POLYAMOUR

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: PolyAmour

  ESTELLE’S STORY

  Copyright © 2012 by Robin Gideon

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62242-090-2

  First E-book Publication: December 2012

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2012 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

  If you have purchased this copy of Estelle’s Story by Robin Gideon from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Robin Gideon’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Gideon’s right to earn a living from her work.

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  DEDICATION

  This one is dedicated to Fred and Shannon, with love.

  ESTELLE’S STORY

  Second Chance at Love 1

  ROBIN GIDEON

  Copyright © 2012

  Chapter One

  London, England—April 1893

  Her heart was pounding against her ribs with such force she was surprised the driver of the hansom cab couldn’t hear the drumbeat. She said, “Stop here!” with a shrillness to her voice that surprised her. Struggling to sound calm, she added, “Please, driver. I’d like to get out here.”

  The driver reined the old mare to a stop. Pulling the lever, he opened the twin doors in front of the coach’s single occupant.

  “Are you certain you’d like to get out here?” His English was coarse, the accent suggesting early years lived somewhere near the Edinburgh docks rather than a lifetime in London. “This isn’t a safe part of the city for a lady.”

  Princess Estelle Moreland had no choice, though she greatly appreciated the driver’s concern. From her purse she extracted a silver coin, thought about the man’s concern for her safety for only a moment, then extracted a gold coin.

  After stepping down onto the street, she looked up at the driver, who stood at his perch at the tail end of the carriage. She asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  “No, my lady,” the man said, exposing the fact that he had several teeth missing. “But I can see that you’re a proper lady.” She handed him the coin, and his eyes widened in shocked appreciation. Before he could say anything more, she raised a gloved hand to silence him.

  “Please, should anyone ask, say nothing of this fare. You’ve never seen me. Do I make my wishes clear?”

  Beneath the battered felt hat, his eyes narrowed as he gazed questioningly at the woman dressed from head to toe in fine black wool, as though for a funeral—or to hide in the shadows of London’s backstreets.

  “If that’s what you want,” the coachman answered after some delay, “then I’ve never seen you.” He looked around and his hand unconsciously slipped into the left hand pocket of his coat, his fingers curling around the jackknife he kept there. “You’re sure this is where you want to be left off?”

  But the princess, traveling incognito, had not waited for the coachman’s final question. She had already headed off down the unlit alleyway, searching for her husband, loathing everything about him, willing to put her own safety in great peril if only she might find a way to get permanently free from his influence.

  Contempt for her husband put steel in the young woman’s spine. Even in a man’s world—and turn-of-the-century England was most assuredly a man’s world where women, even titled princesses, were little more than chattel—there were limits to how deplorable a man could behave before the courts decreed that the wife had a legitimate excuse to petition for a divorce.

  The alleyway was narrow, the two-story buildings on either side made of wood, not marble or granite or even stone of any type. East of the center of town, this neighborhood of London had been in poor condition a hundred years earlier. Neither the inhabitants nor the buildings had improved with age.

  “Looky here!” came the male voice as a thick-bodied man stepped out of the shadows.

  Estelle wheeled so quickly toward the sound of the voice that she lost her balance and stumbled several steps to the side. There were three of them. The men had been standing quietly in the shadows like Nile crocodiles, ambush predators just waiting for someone with money in his pockets to step into the alley on his way to one of the nearby brothels or opium dens. It was always best to catch the men
predebauch. Their pockets were full of coins when they arrived, but they were almost always empty as they made their way back to their homes in the finer neighborhoods of historic London.

  She was too frightened to even scream. There was no doubting the intentions of the men as they fanned out, moving so that she couldn’t possibly run away without having to fight her way past at least one of them. A wall of what had at one time been a furniture warehouse but was now an opium den stopped Estelle.

  The leader of the trio, the shortest but widest of the men, stepped in front of Estelle, moving close enough so that she could see his face in the dim light of the alley. A knife scar ran from his forehead, down over his left eye, then to his cheek before stopping at the corner of his mouth. There didn’t seem to be a pupil in that eye, and it shone wet and white in the moonlight. In his left hand was a long-bladed knife.

  “Let’s have the purse,” he said, his tone almost conversational. When Estelle hesitated, even though it was out of fear rather than a desire to keep her belongings, he raised the knife over his head and whispered, “You wouldn’t be the first little bitch whose ears I had to cut off before she figured out she had to listen when I talk!”

  He did not raise his voice even to a normal conversation level, and that was part of what made his words so menacing. Estelle had no doubt that the man’s boastful threat was based on facts. Sadism hovered around him like a foul aura.

  “Here!” the princess said, thrusting out her small silk purse. In her haste, she dropped the purse to the cobblestones underfoot. “T–take it! I’ll give you what you want!”

  The thief hardly stood five foot six, and he was by no means a slender or athletic man, and he was seldom entirely sober. But when the small silk purse hit the alleyway and coins jangled inside, he moved with astonishing speed, easily besting his companions to the purse. Speed, treachery, and a completely unrestrained willingness to use violence were the reasons he was the leader of the three-member gang of thieves.

  Rising, the purse in his left hand and the deadly knife still in his right, he smiled at his captive.

  “Going to be a good evening, I should think,” he said. He shook the purse and the coins tinkled inside. His two companions laughed. To Estelle, he asked, “What brings a woman with money here? You don’t look like a smoker.”

  Estelle shook her head and tried to speak, to explain the reason she was in a seedy back alley instead of in her own home, but though her lips moved, no words were formed in her throat. The gang leader chuckled malevolently and took a half step closer to his beautiful captive.

  “Maybe you’re not a smoker. Maybe you’re here looking for someone. Usually it’s men that look for women to buy, but you…” As his words trailed off, he smiled, revealing a mouthful of badly decaying teeth. “Course, some men come down here looking to buy pretty boys. If you’re on the market for pretty boys, you’re going to save yourself some money.” He laughed, this time barking out his savage glee. “You just found yourself three pretty boys that’s going to do you right and good in this here alley!”

  It was a cultured male voice, sounding faintly Germanic though the words spoken were in English, that responded, “Perhaps not.”

  Boot heels clicked against the cobblestones. Two men, both tall, their silhouettes displaying long capes that fluttered like wings as they walked, stepped into the alleyway. Seeing them, Estelle nearly fainted dead away with relief.

  “This ain’t none of your business!” the leader said, wheeling around to face the intruding duo. He had his big knife raised to shoulder height, ready to stab or slash. Seeing an advantage in numbers, his tone changed as he added, “But I bet you fine gentlemen got gold in your pockets. Let’s see what you got, and maybe I’ll see it clear to let you live.”

  Estelle could not see the new men well, though even in darkness she could tell that they were dressed in formal evening attire. They were big men, she could see, one several inches taller than the other, but both at least six feet.

  The shorter of the two, the one who wore a top hat, spoke then, his English with a hint of upper-class elitism bred into it. “You men have made a lot of mistakes in your life, but you’ve always been able to walk away from them. If you don’t walk away now”—he smiled, his white teeth gleaming wolf-like in the moonlight—“you’ll never walk again.”

  Estelle could not say why the casually delivered threat was so frightening to hear. Perhaps it was because of the man’s obvious breeding and education that the deadly threat made her shiver. Maybe it was because he had smiled, the facial expression in stark contrast to the violence he had promised. Whatever it was, Estelle believed instinctively that this was not a man who issued empty threats.

  With her attention on the tall, cape-clad figures, Estelle hadn’t noticed the leader of the thieves move—until he suddenly grabbed her by the arm and jerked her away from the wall. An instant later he had an arm thick with muscle wrapped around her body, and the cutting edge of his long-bladed knife against her throat.

  “Either of you assholes move, I’ll cut her throat!”

  Estelle’s eyes rolled back in her head, and for a second or two her world began to spin as she felt herself losing consciousness. But then she inhaled deeply and blinked her eyes, and through a sheer force of will she brought herself back from the edge of fainting. This was not the time to be a weak woman, a voice whispered in her brain. She needed to be strong if she was to free herself from her husband. An instinct for self-preservation put a fire in her belly and a glittering light in her eyes.

  “Don’t cut her,” the taller of the two gentlemen said, his Austrian accent more pronounced when he spoke quickly. “That won’t do anyone any good.”

  “Let’s see the wallets! I want your money now, or I’ll spill her blood!”

  One of the thugs started toward the gentleman, assuming they would simply hand over their wallets. He stopped when he realized both men were holding pistols, and both pistols were aimed at him.

  “Jim–Jimmy…shit…Jimmy,” the guy stammered as he backpedaled quickly.

  The gang leader—Jimmy—put his hand over the plump mound of Estelle’s right breast, squeezed hard enough to make her wince in pain, then cackled and said, “So you got guns! So what? Drop the guns, or I cut her throat!”

  Estelle felt the coarse, callused fingers groping her breast. Under any other circumstance, she would have felt defiled by being touched by such a loathsome creature as Jimmy. With a razor-sharp blade to her throat, Estelle—never a particularly spiritual or religious woman, though she attended services because it was expected of a woman of her station—found herself praying for celestial interference.

  The shorter of the gentlemen, the one who spoke English without a foreign accent, took a step closer to Jimmy. He made a patting-down motion with his left hand, as though to calm the knife-wielding thief while at the same time keeping a short-barreled revolver pointed at what little of Jimmy was exposed behind the voluptuous, terrorized captive.

  “Your name’s Jimmy, I take it. Listen to me carefully now. I want you to be very calm. Is that clear?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Are you calm? If you are not calm, people could get killed, and that would be a terrible thing.” He was close to Estelle now, and when he smiled, she was shocked at how handsome he was, and at how casual he was under the circumstances. “Are you calm, Jimmy? I need an answer from you.”

  “I’m calm,” the thief said, the undercurrent of suspicion thick in his gravelly tone.

  “Now be very careful with that knife. Okay?”

  Seconds passed in complete silence. Estelle tried to keep from trembling, but she couldn’t help herself. Having lived a life of great wealth, she had seldom as an adult been in any situation where her money, power, and influence couldn’t dictate the behavior of those around her. Except where her husband was concerned. He was the bane of her existence and the exception to every rule.

  “Jimmy, are you careful with that knife?”
the gentleman asked.

  “I’m careful,” was the quiet response.

  The gentleman turned his gun to the closest thief and squeezed the trigger. In the confined space of the alleyway, the sound of the weapon firing was explosive. The gunshot was still echoing before Estelle’s high-pitched scream of terror ended. The thief tumbled backward in the alley, stiff-legged with arms outstretched. When he hit the cobblestones, he did not move. The bullet had gone through his heart.

  Jimmy had seen death before, but he was visibly shocked at the cold-blooded killing of his friend. He turned his black gaze upon the gentleman and hissed. “You…you just killed him dead!” His lips pulled back in a feral snarl of decaying teeth. “I ought to cut her throat for that!”

  If the gentlemen were in the least bit intimidated by Jimmy and his one remaining living friend, it didn’t show in their demeanor. Estelle, her heart pounding and her ears still ringing from the nearness of the explosive gunshot, was stunned at the sudden violence and instantaneous death—but not saddened by it. She had no naive illusions as to what Jimmy and his men had intended to do to her had the gentlemen not stepped out of the shadows like vengeful, righteous apparitions.

  “Jimmy, your friend was sacrificed to prove a point,” the Englishman said, taking another half step closer to Estelle. He held his pistol at arm’s length, pointed at Jimmy’s eye as he cowered behind his voluptuous captive. “The point is that this is a fight you cannot win. The only question is how badly you’ll lose. If you let the woman go now, I promise you won’t be killed.”