Led Astray by a Rake by Sara Bennett

he invited both the brunette and the redhead into a private room, and gave himself up to the hot sensual pleasures of the flesh, he’d feel more like his old self? Nic smiled as he imagined a ménage à trois, each woman vying with the other for his attention.
    But the next moment he was cursing under his breath as he realized that he’d been picturing the two women with the same face. A face he knew all too well and was trying hard to forget.
    Olivia Monteith’s face.
     
    As soon as Olivia stepped through the door, she entered another world. A darker, far more sensual world than any she was familiar with. Beautiful women in revealing gowns circled the room, as elegant as gazelles, and gentlemen prowled among them, like sleek jungle lions, hunting.
    A shiver ran over her flesh.
    In all the preparation and fuss of getting there, she had not allowed herself to consider that what she was doing was dangerous, but she knew that if she had…well, she would have ignored the warning. After all, she was hunting, too—husband hunting. She was on the scent of Wicked Nic Lacey, and when she found him she’d lure him into her trap and close the door.
    Estelle had been very helpful, seeing to her travel plans and her stay, incognito, in an inn at a nearby town—information, she said, she’d learned from Abbot. Olivia soon discovered she wasn’t the only single lady staying there, and what was normally a situation for censure and comment provoked no questions at all, not even a curious sideways glance. Understanding followed. The demimonde ball, held in a grand manor house outside London, was a lucrative yearly event, andthe innkeeper had no intention of making things awkward for his customers.
    Estelle also chose her clothing for the ball, smuggling it into her room at Bassingthorpe. She’d liberated it from the attic, and after a thorough cleaning, and various additions and alterations, it was ready. Olivia laughed when she tried on the dress for the first time, unbelieving that anyone would be seen in public in anything so revealing, but Estelle insisted there would be far more eye-catching outfits than this. Now, of course, she understood that the dress was perfect. Estelle had known exactly what Olivia needed to wear in a place where the woman who created the most attention attracted the wealthiest protector.
    Black silk and velvet.
    The dress was tight at the waist and indecently low over her breasts, accentuating her curves, while its starkness framed her fair beauty. The other women had gone for bright colors, to draw the eye, or pale shades, as if to mock their long-lost innocence. In her black dress, Olivia stood out like a raven among the pigeons. She was already being ogled, and although she had yet to see the man she had come to capture, she told herself that it wouldn’t be long before he spotted her.
    “Pretend you’re at a debutante ball, miss,” Estelle had advised her. “Abbot told me that the principle is the same, really, because the prettiest, most outstanding ladies go to the highest bidders.”
    This seemed a cynical attitude, but Olivia found it did help to think of the exercise in such terms.After the first moment of awkwardness, she set her chin high, and thrust back her shoulders, and strolled into the glittering ballroom as if she had been born to be a demimondaine.
    She soon discovered that many of the women knew one another, and there were some curious and resentful glances cast in Olivia’s direction. Ignoring them, and the stares of the gentlemen standing around the perimeter of the room, she began to circle with the others.
    It didn’t take Olivia very long to pick up their manner of walking—swinging her hips and tossing her head. A wicked smile curled her lips as she perambulated, wishing her four friends from the Husband Hunters Club could see her now. They were the only ones she would ever be able to tell about this adventure, and she was looking forward to describing to them, in lurid