Irresistible, page 1
Irresistible
The Phoenix Club
Book Six
Darcy Burke
Irresistible
Copyright © 2022 Darcy Burke
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9781637260845
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Book design: © Darcy Burke.
Book Cover Design: © Erin Dameron-Hill at EDHProfessionals.
Editing: Lindsey Faber.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Irresistible
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Darcy Burke
About the Author
Irresistible
Society’s most exclusive invitation...
* * *
Welcome to the Phoenix Club, where London’s most audacious, disreputable, and intriguing ladies and gentlemen find scandal, redemption, and second chances.
* * *
Jessamine Goodfellow has spent six Seasons avoiding the parson’s trap, and spinsterhood is finally within her grasp. A brilliant scholar, she longs for adventure and new experiences, things her family frowns upon. Presented with the opportunity to use her puzzle-solving talent on a secret mission for the Foreign Office, Jess eagerly accepts. Even when it means posing as the wife of a scorchingly attractive Scotsman whom she must also covertly investigate as a possible double agent.
* * *
Lord Dougal MacNair, the new Viscount Fallin, has always completed his assignments for the Foreign Office alone. Now he’s saddled with an overly enthusiastic amateur partner. She possesses a remarkable intellect, but something about her isn’t quite right, and after two failed missions, Dougal is certain someone is working against him. Battling their secret suspicions, Dougal and Jess dive deep into their cover as a married couple, which arouses temptations they find irresistible.
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Prologue
Edinburgh, Scotland, August 1815
* * *
The low ceiling and dark beams of the Oak and Thistle ought to have felt claustrophobic, but to Dougal MacNair, the space was a warm hug, holding him close after too much time away. Glancing across the small, worn table at his cousin, Robert Clark, who was just three years younger than Dougal’s twenty-eight, he felt a surge of affection. He was only sorry it had taken the sudden death of his brother to bring him home.
“Ye’re going to be the earl, then?” Robbie asked.
“Eventually.” Dougal still couldn’t quite believe it. He’d created a life for himself—one that he liked very much—that didn’t include being an earl or even living in Scotland. Now he had to change everything. On top of losing Alistair, it was too much to contemplate. And so he preferred to avoid thinking about it too deeply. At least, not yet. The time would come, very soon, probably, when he’d have to face it. For now, he just wanted to be with his family, both here in Edinburgh and just north near Stirling, where his father’s seat, Stagfield, was located.
A tall Black man brought tankards of ale and deposited them on the table. “If we weren’t busy, I’d plant myself right next to ye and hear what ye have to say.”
Dougal looked up at his Uncle Rob and nodded. “I know. Just as I know Robbie will tell you everything.” Well, almost everything. As cousins, they shared certain secrets.
Uncle Rob grunted. “Aye, he will. I’m glad ye made it to town.” Town being the Old Town of Edinburgh, where Rob’s tavern was tucked into a basement along the Lawn Market. Rob owned the building and leased out several floors. He and his family lodged on the second floor. The New Town, where Dougal’s father owned a new, fashionable house in Charlotte Square, was not at all what Uncle Rob had meant. Dougal might stay there when he came to Edinburgh, but this was as much a home to him.
Leaving them alone, Uncle Rob returned to the bar on the other side of the common area. Dougal took a long drink of ale, the taste taking him back to the many summers he’d spent here before he’d gone south to Oxford. He looked over at Robbie. “When are you going to start making your own ale?”
“Och, not for a while yet. I just started the apprenticeship last winter.” He sipped his ale and narrowed one eye at Dougal as he set his tankard back down. “Ye sound like my father.”
“We’re both enthusiastic about your future. You can hardly blame us.”
Robbie stared at him a moment. “What about yer future? Ye going back to London?”
That answer fell firmly in the category Dougal preferred not to think about at the moment. “Yes, at some point.” He at least wanted to meet with his superior at the Foreign Office, even if it meant he wouldn’t complete another mission. The thought of that made him anxious. He had unfinished work.
“I dinna think your father will like that.”
Perhaps not, but he would understand. Still, Dougal hated leaving him, and it was more than just the grief of losing Alistair. So much more that Dougal wasn’t yet ready to face. “He knows I need to go back, at least for a short while.”
“Yer father’s a good man, and he loves ye like no other,” Robbie said with a confident nod before taking another pull from his tankard.
What he said was true, and it was remarkable because Dougal’s father wasn’t his sire. He was white, just as Dougal’s mother had been white. She’d stepped outside their marriage, which hadn’t troubled her husband. Their union wasn’t a love match, and after four children, they’d agreed to take comfort where they might since they would not with each other.
When Dougal’s mother’s affair with a Black ship captain had resulted in a child, Dougal’s father hadn’t hesitated to claim the babe as his own son. He’d raised Dougal with love and ensured that no one questioned Dougal’s parentage—at least not to their faces. There were always whispers. It wasn’t unusual for a man to raise his wife’s bastard as his own, but in Dougal’s case, it was rather obvious he wasn’t the product of his two white parents. He was a Black man in a white household, and there was no hiding that. Nor did Dougal’s father—or any of the rest of his family, which had included another brother besides Alistair and two sisters—make any attempt to do so. They loved and included Dougal as one of their own.
That hadn’t meant that Dougal didn’t notice he looked different from them. When he asked his mother about that, she never wanted to discuss it. So he’d asked his father, and he too had avoided answering, which Dougal had later learned had been in deference to his wife’s wishes. She hadn’t wanted Dougal to meet his Black relatives. Aunt Mairi said it was because she feared they would want to take him away, and that Dougal would want to go.
After his mother died when Dougal was eight, his father had brought him to this very tavern to meet his sire’s family. By then, Captain John Clark had perished at sea when his ship had gone down in a storm, but the rest of the family had been thrilled to learn that John had a son. They had, in fact, asked if they could have him, but Dougal hadn’t wanted to leave his father. Instead, they’d agreed that Dougal would spend time with them each year when the earl and his family came to Edinburgh.
Robbie sat back in his chair and smirked as he regarded Dougal. “Will ye still come here when ye’re the earl?”
Dougal scowled at him. “Of course I will. Why would you think otherwise?”
Leaning forward, Robbie sobered. “I was only jesting. I know ye’ll still come here. We’d drag ye if necessary.”
“It would never be necessary.” They were his family, just as his father and the white brother he’d recently lost to an accident were. “Forgive my bad humor.”
“To be expected as ye’re grieving.” Robbie’s dark eyes gleamed with sympathy. “We’re all so verr a sorry. We loved Alistair too. Family is family.”
That was a phrase they all shared. So much that it ought to have been their family motto. In addition to the brother he’d just lost, Dougal had lost another brother along with their mother to fever. He also had two white sisters who were long married with children of their own. Here in Old Town, he had Robbie, his Uncle Rob and Aunt Mairi, several other cousins, and another aunt and uncle who was a tailor. They’d all come to Stagfield to mourn with Dougal and his father. Family was family.
“I know you loved him,” Dougal said quietly. “That has always meant a great deal to me.” Just as it had always touched him that his white family loved his Black family. They’d all come together—for him.
“What will happen with your position in London?” Robbie knew the truth of Dougal’s life in England, that he worked in a…special capacity for the Foreign Office. That was because Robbie had been with Dougal in the Black Watch when Dougal had been recruited for this work. He was the only person, outside of the people he worked with, who was aware. Dougal had never told his father or his brother. He shouldn’t have even told Robbie, but he’d been there and discovered what was going on. Besides, Dougal supposed he’d wanted, or needed, to tell someone.
And now Dougal had to consider whether he would tell Robbie another secret. About his father. He wanted to, but the words wouldn’t come. If he spoke them, they would become all too real, and he wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
“I’ll have to tell them I’m leaving. But there’s something I’m rather desperate to do first.” Dougal spoke softly so no one could hear him.
Robbie leaned over the table. “Desperate?”
Dougal oughtn’t share this either, but he would. He needed to talk it out. “Before Alistair died, there was some difficulty with two of my missions. In the first, I was given what seems to have been a sham message.”
“The courier system was compromised?” Robbie asked. He’d acted as a courier before leaving the Black Watch and understood how things worked.
“I believe so, particularly since the following mission resulted in the death of the courier.” Dougal thought of poor Giraud, a Frenchman who’d come to England after the revolution and pledged his allegiance, his throat torn open.
“Bloody hell,” Robbie breathed. “Do ye think there’s someone working against ye in the office?”
“I don’t know, but I have to be open to the possibility.” Dougal pressed his lips together. “Now you see why I must return to London.”
“Aye. I wish I could help ye.”
“You’ve got your apprenticeship,” Dougal said.
“But if ye needed me, ye’d ask?”
“I would,” Dougal assured him. “There are few people I would trust to help me, and you are one of them.” The others were close friends of his in England, namely Lord Lucien Westbrook, who also served the Foreign Office in a secret capacity.
A young Black girl dashed toward their table. It was Aila, who at nine years old was Dougal’s youngest cousin. “This was just delivered fer ye, Dougie.” She handed him a sealed letter. “Footman from Charlotte Square brought it.”
“Thank you, Aila.”
“Off with ye,” Robbie said with a wave when she seemed to want to linger.
She blinked at them. “But Da wants to know what it says.”
Dougal smiled to himself while Robbie laughed. “I’ll tell him later. Now off with ye,” he repeated.
Aila shrugged before spinning about and going back to where her father stood behind the bar.
The familiar seal told Dougal where it came from—Lucien. As Dougal scanned the short missive, the tension he’d carried since Alistair’s death intensified, drawing him tighter than a bowstring.
“Doesna look like good news,” Robbie said before taking another drink of ale.
Dougal refolded the paper and put it in his coat. “I need to return to London immediately.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.” Lucien’s note had been short, which was to be expected. He wouldn’t write anything of import, just that Dougal was needed back in town at his earliest convenience. That was Foreign Office-speak for get your tail to London as quickly as possible.
“Will ye go back to Stagfield first?” Robbie asked.
“Of course.” Though it meant heading north before heading south, Dougal couldn’t leave without seeing his father. Whatever the Foreign Office needed would keep for one extra day.
As it was, they were going to have to get used to not having him at all.
Chapter 1
London
* * *
Jessamine Goodfellow finished the last letter of the cipher she was solving and set down her pencil with a satisfied smile. Spinsterhood was going to suit her just fine. But then, she’d long thought it would, not that her parents agreed. Surely after six Seasons, they would see that it was time to just give Jess her dowry and permit her to live her life unwed. Two of their three daughters had married well. Surely that was enough?
“Did you finish?” Kathleen Shaughnessy, Jess’s relatively new but very good friend, asked from the other side of the table where she was sketching furiously on a large piece of parchment. They were both the houseguests of Lady Pickering, one of London’s most respected ladies, who was acting as their temporary chaperone while their families were out of town.
Jess nodded. “I did. This one was quite challenging.” Every week, she received two to three ciphers from the mysterious Mr. Torrance, whom she’d met at the British Library. A charming older gentleman, he’d seen her solving a riddle and given her a cipher to try. She’d been instantly enthralled, solving it quickly. Torrance had been delighted to offer to send her more, if she was keen to continue. She’d leapt at the chance, and for the past few months, she’d enjoyed her new hobby very much. “Once I determined that frequently used terms were given two or three numbers, everything came together.”
“Well, I am not finished,” Kat said with considerable annoyance. She was very particular when it came to her drawings, pouring all her energy into her work, just as Jess did with her ciphers.
Jess craned her neck to see Kat’s sketch. “You’ll get it.”
Kat scowled at the drawing. “I may have gone too far to fix it. I should probably start over.” She sat back in her chair and looked over the table toward Jess’s completed cipher. “Well done, you. You’ve been working on that for, what, three days?”
“Yes. That was the last of the latest batch from Torrance. I expected a delivery yesterday, but nothing came. It was as if he knew I was struggling to finish the last one.”
“How interesting.” Kat didn’t appear overly interested, however, as her focus was on her drawing. She could be rather single-minded about things, and if she was unhappy with her work, she would be fixated on it until she wasn’t.
“Do you want to start your drawing over?” Jess asked, knowing Kat preferred to discuss that.
“I think I must,” she said with great resignation. Then she launched into a lengthy monologue at what she needed to do better and how she might accomplish that. At last, she looked toward Jess, her expression slightly sheepish. “My apologies. You are the only person who allows me to go on and on. You’re such a considerate friend.”
