Never Tempt a Rogue: A Rogues' Rulebook Novella (11 page)

Fueled by Pacific Northwest coffee and inspired by multiple viewings of every British costume drama she can get her hands on, Christy Carlyle writes sensual historical romance set in the Victorian era. She loves heroes who struggle against all odds and heroines who are ahead of their time. A former teacher with a degree in history, she finds there's nothing better than being able to combine her love of the past with a die-hard belief in happy endings.

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Stay tuned for
Rules for a Rogue
, the first novel in the Romancing the Rules Series, coming from Avon Impulse in November 2017!

Scandalous Wager

Wanton Wager

Reckless Wager

One Scandalous Kiss

One Tempting Proposal

One Dangerous Desire

Here’s a sneak peek of
Never Trust a Scoundrel
, coming September 2017!

Excerpt from

CHAPTER ONE

Maxwell, Viscount Devery, was in the midst of a huff.

Firm arms flailing, elegant hands gesticulating, long legs pumping, he stomped a path back and forth across his brand new Aubusson rug. Vases and knickknacks, freshly dusted by his two young housemaids, rattled like dry leaves in a wind storm.

Both housemaids were outside the door of the drawing room while Lord Devery’s storm raged, fussing over who got first dibs staring at him through the crack in the frame. When impassioned, the man was simply too delicious a sight to miss.

In his fashionable Bond Street clothing, when his attentive valet had clipped his hair and shaved his chiseled features, the viscount was every inch an Adonis. But now, striding about in shirtsleeves with silky black hair riffling in disheveled waves over his head and his deep voice roughened with fury, he was more akin to a warrior. The young maids were certain he’d win any battle, if only by incinerating his enemies with one of his infamous “devastating Devery” gazes.

When the viscount wasn’t dominating their attention, the housemaids spared longing glances for his handsome friend, Grayson Thorne, Earl of Rothwell, who sat bearing the tirade from one of the viscount’s plush new settees. Though less volatile, Lord Rothwell was no less appealing. Golden, lean, and taut—like a lion ready to pounce—he carried himself with a lithe grace no woman could help but admire. And if his beauty wasn’t compelling enough, the earl’s prospects were. The man was first in line to a dukedom.

“Wasn’t it always meant to be a parody? How could anyone imagine a book titled
The Rogues’ Rulebook
to be anything but a farce?” Devery stopped long enough to swipe his snifter from the mantle and swig down a bit of the amber liquor inside. “Rogues don’t have rules! If they did, they’d be as boring as proper gentlemen.”

“Perhaps the reading public hopes it’s all true.” Rothwell subtlety lifted his pocket watch from his waistcoat and glanced at its face.

“They prefer to believe the three of us are incurable rogues? Because London needs more rogues, apparently.” With a third friend, Alex Evering, Max and Gray had authored a scandalous book they dubbed
The Rogues’ Rulebook
. Beyond whatever roguish deeds had already marred—or enhanced—each man’s reputation, they were now feted and famed for the utterly outrageous tales recounted in their book. Readers had come to believe each man as libidinous as the stories, many of which they’d dreamed up during a boring country house party over far too much French brandy.

“Is it truly so burdensome?” Gray quirked a tawny brow, doubt writ large in his aquiline features.

“Look at me.” Max gestured at his rumpled clothing, then scrubbed a hand along his unshaven jaw. “I’m a prisoner in my own home. When I go out, women pursue me like a Bow Street runner hunts a thief.”

“And you’re never tempted?”

“Tempted? I’ve no interest in chastity, Gray. I pleasure as many as I can, but a man needs to eat and sleep. A body requires recuperation.”

Gray chuckled, thoroughly unsympathetically. “The furor will die down, and you can soon go back to pleasuring a reasonable amount of women, I’m sure.”

Max swigged down the final gulp of brandy. “From your lips to—”

“My lord, a caller for you.” Mr. Fenwick, Max’s recently hired butler, was an inordinately tall, straight man and possessed an irritating habit of interrupting at the worst possible moment.

“Have you lost your mind, Fenwick? I’ve told you I am not at home to anyone.”

“I do recall your directive, my lord.” The balding servant nodded solemnly.

“It was a command.”

“Yes, of course, my lord. I do recall your command.”

Max turned back to Gray and took a breath to continue his rampage, though he’d be damned if he could recall precisely where he’d left off.

“But this caller is a young lady, my lord,” Fenwick persisted.

“There, you see! It never ends.” Max thrust a finger at Gray, who sneered down his aristocratic nose at the digit, every ounce the duke he would soon become.

“A young lady who—”

“No, Fenwick.” Max stomped toward the door and lifted a hand to push his butler out of the room bodily, if it came that.

“…says she is…” Fenwick continued, apparently unperturbed by his master’s approach.

“Good God, man, do you mean to provoke me to violence?”

“…Lord Westing’s sister.”

“Emily?” Max stopped as if he’d slammed nose first into a wall.

“Miss Emily Danbury.” The elderly butler held a calling card at eye level and squinted at the buttery yellow square of paper. “So it says here, my lord.”

A memory, bright and refreshing, bloomed in Max’s mind. Brown curls, peach plump cheeks, and a silly little giggle. Even Westing adored his sister, and as the brother of three sisters, Max knew that was an extraordinary feat. A kind of giddy relief fizzed up his chest. Knots in his neck and shoulders began to unfurl.

Emily Danbury—a light, frothy counterpoint to all the drama of the past months. His own sisters were married and settled. He hadn’t been able to tease or talk nonsense with them in years. He longed to spend time with a female who had no wish to bed him, one who did not tempt him to think of divesting her of every inch of satin and silk.

“By all means, send her in.”

After looking at Max for a full minute as if he’d completely lost his mind, Gray rose swiftly and announced, “I’ll be off then.”

“We’ll see each other at the club on Thursday and finish this discussion then.”

“Oh, goody. Something to look forward to.” The problem with Gray’s sardonic quips was his dry delivery, without a hint of humor. If he didn’t know the man better, Max would consider Rothwell an insufferable prig.

When the earl had departed and Fenwick hied off to fetch Miss Danbury, Max walked to the mirror over the mantel and sighed. Nothing about the blue-black crescents under his eyes or wild disarray of his hair made him look at all the sort of man who should be entertaining an innocent young woman on a Monday afternoon. He stared at his debauched reflection and wondered when the lines across his forehead had formed. And where had he acquired those divots between his brows?

Poor Miss Danbury was calling alone at the home of a notorious rake. He wondered if she knew of his frightful reputation. Surely she’d heard of the
Rogues’ Rulebook
. Why come unaccompanied by her brother?  Was she in the midst of some dilemma that required his aid? Perhaps Westing was ill and unable to come with her himself.

Once again Max cursed the infamy that damned book had wrought. He’d been out of touch with friends and family for weeks.

Before he could worry more or do anything to settle his disheveled state, Fenwick’s tread halted at the drawing room threshold. “Miss Emily Danbury to see you, my lord.”

Max glimpsed a blur of brown and green in the mirror before turning toward the girl he’d last seen years ago.

At his first sight of her, he sucked in a breath and locked his knees to hold himself upright.

The lady was so lovely one look snatched his air and sent a shot of lust rocketing through his body. The same body that had exhausted itself on lust, worn itself out giving and receiving pleasure. Yet suddenly he was ready, and he willed his groin not to provide very evident proof of the fact to his friend’s sister, if that’s who she was.

Suddenly he doubted her identity. Not a single aspect of the extraordinary feminine figure before him resembled Westing’s plump younger sister. This lady’s dark hair wasn’t simply brown. More chestnut. Perhaps sable. The sunlight played it like a symphony of chocolate and amber, with a few notes of gold. Eyes of lightest green, like precious Chinese jade, assessed him in a slow perusal from brow to boot, and her shape… Max swallowed hard. His brain retreated to the simplest of equations—if her waist was there and the tips of her boots there, then her legs must be…long. He swallowed again, thinking of those very same long, slim legs wrapped around his waist, hooked ankles bouncing against his backside, the slide of a heel down the back of his thigh.

“Lord Devery? Do you not remember me?” Her pale green eyes widened the longer he gaped at her, and then—no, please no—her lush pink mouth fell open and a rosy tongue snaked out to wet her lips.

“Yes, of course.” His voice emerged too husky, and he coughed to cover it. “You’ve grown.”

“My brother used to say I was a plump sapling.” She grinned and a swell of guilt washed over him to match the swell of lust currently converging in his groin. He remembered that grin, and the sweet little dimples on either side of her mouth. “I suppose I’ve sprouted into an unexpectedly narrow tree.”

“Willowy.” The word rasped out of his mouth before he could stop it. The woman was gloriously built on an Amazonian scale, but with curves in all the places his hands and mouth liked best. “Like a willow tree, I mean.”

“I should hope not.” She frowned and an adorable cleft appeared between her sable brows. Far more appealing than the lines on his forehead. Enticing even. He itched with the desire to slide his finger across the spot and smooth the sign of worry away. “Willows droop. Am I drooping somehow?”

Not drooping. Pert was the word that sprung most readily to mind. Not that his mind was working particularly well. It was too busy insisting his eyes ogle every inch of her shapely frame.

“What brings you to Devery House, Miss Danbury?”

“Ah yes. Might we sit, my lord? This will take a bit of explaining.”

The moment she moved toward him, the scent of clean skin swathed in honeysuckle-sweet perfume made his mouth water. Every impulse told him to sit next to her, as near as he could manage without shocking her, to inhale every ounce of her sweetness, absorb any bit of goodness she could spare.

But at the last moment some sliver of decency cut into the haze of lust that fogged his brain and he took a chair across from her.

Gave him a better view, anyway.

Emily swallowed hard when Lord Devery seated himself. The man didn’t sit up straight like most gentlemen of her acquaintance, nor lazily cross his legs as was her wastrel brother’s habit. Instead he reclined languidly, his massive body both melting into and dominating the damask. One long arm lay flung across the settee’s back, and his knees were parted. The position offered a far too vivid view of black trousers pulled snug over taut thighs, spread as if whatever he housed between them was too sizable to allow him to sit any other way.

“I’m not your usual sort of woman, my lord.” Emily frowned the moment the words were out, realizing they carried a meaning she’d not intended. She was not at his doorstep for the reasons that drew other woman. His carnal talents didn’t interest Emily in the least, but she needed Lord Devery’s help.

He, of course, seemed to grasp that other meaning, an implication that she’d come for the seduction ladies craved since the publication of his infamous book.

“What I mean to say is that I am more like a man than a woman.”

The rogue barked out a shot of laughter, then raked her with a searing gaze from head to toe. “Not from where I’m sitting.”

She’d never met a man with such potent power to make her feel as if he could see beyond her layers of clothing, that he could undress her with a single glance. Rumor had it his steel grey eyes were devastating to behold, but Emily found them unsettling. His heated gaze offered everything, but gave away nothing.

“I have a profession, my lord. It’s a privilege men usually horde for themselves.”

He grinned but then seemed to think better of it and sat forward, elbows braced on those broad thighs of his. “Tell me what sort of woman you are.” He licked his lips, drawing her attention to the soft arch of his upper lip and lush flare of his lower.

The man was worse than she’d imagined, and every bit as wicked as she’d heard. Scoundrel, rogue, reprobate. Somewhere she’d begun a list of the epithets others used to describe him. In preparing to petition his assistance, she’d readied herself to withstand his seductive onslaught.