Roberts Nora. Black Rose

She dressed carefully, attending to the details of her appearance as she hadn’t done for months. Her personal maid had run off weeks before, and she had neither the wit nor the will to hire another. So she spent an hour with the curling rods herself — as she had in the years before she’d been kept so lavishly — meticulously coiling and arranging her freshly rinsed hair.It had lost its bright gold luster over the long, bleary autumn, but she knew what lotions and potions would bring back its shine, what pots of paint to select to put false color in her cheeks, on her lips.She knew all the tricks of the trade. How else could she have caught the eye of a man like Reginald Harper? How else had she seduced him into making her his mistress?She would use them again, all of them, Amelia thought, to seduce him once more, and to urge him to do everything that must be done.He hadn’t come, in all this time, in all these months, he hadn’t come to her. So she’d been forced to send notes to his businesses, begging him to come, only to be ignored...