Gambling Lion

Pride of Lions:
Nicholas de Bresancourt was an aristocratic but penniless refugee of the bloody French Revolution from which he’d escaped as a four-year-old orphan, thanks to Francis Granville and his friends. Nicky had lost everything: family, estate and fortune, and grew up hating those responsible in France for ending countless innocent lives on the guillotine and then Bonaparte, whose megalomania had put his country through so much further upheaval and war. With no other means to support himself or earn a living, and his pride refusing to allow him to accept the charity of his wealthy adoptive family, Nicky has joined the British army, keen to serve and help end the interminable war in Europe.
With Francis as a mentor, Nicky has matured into a charismatic, able man and a capable fighter, as well as a lover of many women. He is also trilingual, thanks to growing up and being educated at an English school with a Spanish step-mother and French step-father. He is therefore ideal material to work as an undercover operative and put his talents to use on behalf of his adopted country.

Part 1: Gambling Lion
London. June 1812.
He was carrying important dispatches from the British Army HQ in the Peninsula to the War Ministry in London and hadn’t been home for over a year.
While waiting for confidential and urgent documents to take back to the Army high command, Nicholas de Bresancourt is ordered to meet an inscrutable gentleman in the innocuous-sounding Department of Information in Whitehall. Lord Ashcroft wants to utilise his talents to track down a dangerous French agent who has been causing trouble for those still battling Bonaparte across Europe, and has now turned up in Spain. Meanwhile, Nicky also takes the opportunity to catch up with his adoptive relations, including the dying family matriarch, the nearest thing he’s ever had to a grandmother, as well as the wife he was inveigled into marrying and now wants rid of.
Unsurprisingly, being Nicky, he decides to take a few hours off for a bit of personal R&R from the stresses of family matters and work. Good looking, charismatic and a consummate lothario, he heads out on the Town with a few regimental friends and they take him to a new gambling salon in Mayfair which is all the rage: Le Lion D’Or, owned by a mysterious masked woman who calls herself La Lionesse. Inexplicably fascinated by the lady, who in turn seems very taken with the handsome soldier, she asks him up to her private quarters to continue their game of cards and he accepts, and that’s when she raises the stakes…