The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke (5 page)

“Very nice,” he murmured. “And what about down here? All delicious and tender, too?”

She swallowed thickly as his hand wandered down into the warm hollow between her thighs. “Oh, Emma,” he said, briefly closing his eyes, “you’re so wet, darling. Let me bring you off.”

“Bring me—” A blush of shame rose to her skin. Her woman’s place softened, opened moistly at his invitation. She made no move to stop him.

“You need it.” His scarred knuckles drifted over her mons to the engorged folds beneath. Her inner muscles melted, awaiting his touch. “Don’t you?” he murmured.

She closed her eyes against the temptation burning deep in her belly.

He bent his head and licked tenderly across the tops of her breasts. Her face heated, and the heat spread, meeting the fire in her belly.

“I can’t—” Her voice broke.

“Hush. I’ll take care of everything.” His thumb glided across her tender nipples, back and forth, until the pleasure-pain made her tremble. He shifted closer. His erection throbbed through his long cambric drawers and dressing robe against her bare thick belly.

“Why am I allowing this?” she asked with a helpless groan.

One long calloused finger pressed into her pulsing cleft. “Because your body is asking for it. Dear Emma, am I welcome here?”

He kissed her as she struggled to answer. He tangled his thumb in the soft tuft of hair that crowned her cleft. Slowly he inserted two more fingers into her crevice, flexing and unflexing them inside her. She gasped. Sighing in pleasure, he removed his hand and lifted it above her shoulder. Her pearly essence glistened enticingly on his knuckles. She heard him growl his approval deep in his throat.

He kissed her forehead. “Tell me,” he said huskily. “How long has it been since a man has entered your body? Since you touched yourself?”

Her eyes flew open. “You impertinent man.”

He grinned, the cleft in his chin deepening. “We’ll deal with my impertinence later, shall we? For now we have to take care of you.”

She squirmed. He laid his other hand flat on her belly, imprisoning her. His eyes fastened to her face, he gently pinched her hidden bud between his fingers until it tautened and her hips bucked. His gaze darkening, he forced his three fingers back inside her tight, aching passage. She felt exposed, vulnerable, ripe.

She shook her head. In denial? Delight? Perhaps both. He kissed her again, his tongue ravishing her mouth, absorbing her soft moans. His hard thigh pressed against her flank. She put her hand on his powerful forearm. He raised up slightly, his shoulder muscles corded with strength. He was as sexual and beautiful, and as unprincipled, as an ancient god.

In a moment she would put him in his place.

But now, ah, now. She stared up at his gorgeous face. The heat in his eyes sent a current of sexual awareness down her spine. So uninhibited. So male.

Somewhere outside she heard the clatter of carriage wheels and hooves upon the cobbles. She lifted her hand to the back of his sun-burnished neck. She felt his muscles tighten at her hesitant touch. His breathing deepened. His shaft thickened against her thigh as he drew his body against hers.

He rotated her hooded bud again. The pleasure in her body intensified. Hot. Tight. Forbidden. All the while he watched her, understanding her every weakness.

Her brother’s home.

Her school.

A practical stranger.

Viscountess Lyons being ravished by a man she’d only known for hours. His large, warm hand wandered in a caress over her breasts. His agile fingers worked her, thrust between her plump wet lips. In and out. Warm blood swirled in a pool to the aching hollow of her sex.

“Too long,” he whispered. “And now I’m here. When I met you today, when we talked at the wedding, I felt as if we had known each other before.”

“Less than a day,” she whispered.

“No. It did not seem so, at least not to me.”

She bit the inside of her cheek. He was leaning on one elbow now, intensifying the wicked pleasure he gave her. His gaze was riveted to the shadowed juncture of her thighs. Her excitement grew.

Her hips lifted into his hand. She couldn’t control her movements, her need. He exhaled, closed his eyes. “It must have been a long time,” he murmured. “You’re trembling and so very snug inside.”

She could not speak. The warm droplets of moisture that gathered between her thighs betrayed whatever protest she might attempt. How long had it been? Her belly quivered, and a deep pressure built at the base of her spine.

She had
never
known desire like this.

“Give yourself this one pleasure,” he whispered darkly. “Come alive for me.”

And she did. Her body clenched. She was powerless to stop it. He held her as she peaked, as her ability to breathe stopped, as instinct stormed her senses. She fell under his spell. She sobbed, years of subdued desire unchained. Who was he, this man? What devil’s power did he possess to do this to her?

“Emma.” His deep voice penetrated her bewilderment.

She shuddered. She refused to look at him, awash in pleasured shame and wonder.

“Emma,” he said again, his face pressed to hers. “Are you all right?”

She felt herself slowly return to sanity. Her body pulsed in the aftermath. To her surprise she found herself stroking his hair, the hard planes of his face. Offering him comfort. Who
was
this man? Who was she? After this day, she did not know.

“When I first saw you at the wedding,” he said, “I—”

She pressed her finger to his lips. “I am a widow, Lord Wolverton. Despite what just happened, that part of my life is over.”

“You didn’t die with your husband,” he said after a long pause.

She lay unmoving for several moments. His eyes were closed. His face rested against hers. “I thought I’d died once,” he said. “God knows I did everything in my power to destroy myself, but I didn’t.”

She felt tears sting her eyes.

It was evident that his head injury had not affected his more basic functions. Her limbs shivered involuntarily as she finally attempted to disengage her body from his.

Feelings familiar and yet not.

She had married before the middle of her first season, her husband a cultured Scottish viscount and modest landholder. She’d thought that his reserved nature would suit her. They had been good companions, more friends than lovers. In fact, the sum of her sexual experience with her quiet-mannered husband had consisted only of stolen touches and hurried couplings under the covers. Indeed, Emma had emerged from their rushed matings more dissatisfied than not. To this day she blushed remembering how Stuart had announced on their wedding night that it was time to put his little sausage in the oven.

She could not think of a man as well-constructed as Lord Wolverton possessing anything as inconsequential as a sausage. Her limited contact with his heavy male appendage had been proof enough. To think of taking an organ of such proportion inside her own body made her breath quicken. Adrian and her late husband could not have been less alike, in physical form and character.

She slid out of his arms, a poorly planned strategical move if ever she’d made one. Every part of her body came into electrifying contact with his. Her dressing gown dropped back down to her bare ankles. She felt his hot, hard gaze travel over her naked trembling body.

She found her footing and with it the remnants of her control. She wasn’t going to cry. “I’m leaving you now.” Her voice sounded steady. Her emotions were not. “You must stay in that bed until the physician gives you permission to leave it.”

He studied her in smoldering silence. “I have no excuse for my behavior.”

She retreated to the door. “Nor I.”

He sat up, his hard face hidden in shadows. “I swear to you I will never tell anyone what just happened. On what little honor I have.”

She turned away.

“I swear to you, Emma.”

“Good night, Lord Wolverton.”

She opened the door. His deep voice followed her into the darkened hallway. Her heart pounded in her throat. “You have my word.”

The word of a mercenary.

He sank back onto the bed as the door closed with a sharp reverberation that sent a thunderclap of agony through his head. He laughed out loud, defying the pain. Reveling in it, in fact.

He felt incredibly foolish, elated. Yes, his head hurt. But—he was blessedly lucid enough to recognize his infatuation with the tidy Emma Boscastle, a proper lady who’d thought to put him in his place and had almost done it, too.

He knew she didn’t trust him. Why should she? But from the instant he sensed her watching him at the wedding today, he had felt his first spark of hope since returning to England. Perhaps there was a purpose to it, after all. Blow to his skull be damned, he had met a woman he wanted to impress.

He’d just made a hell of an impression, too, demanding intimacy on their brief acquaintance. Did she already despise him? Of course she must. What he’d liked most about her was her mettle, her way of noticing every misstep made by others, as if she were silently lamenting the entire world and trying to put it all right.

As if nice manners could mend all the evil on earth. Could she mend a man as broken in soul as he? No woman had ever tried. His dark reputation had attracted the ladies in droves. Emma, on the other hand, had disapproved of him from the moment they met.

She was a Boscastle, one of those spellbinding souls who burned with vitality and purpose. That alone would be enough to explain her irresistible appeal. His best friend, Dominic Breckland, had lost his heart to Chloe Boscastle at the lowest ebb in his life. Fortunately, Dominic had also had the good sense and good fortune to marry her. But the whole bloody lot of them broke hearts as unwittingly as other people breathed. Which answered the question of why he’d felt compelled to defend Emma in the first place.

Still, that hadn’t given him the right to seduce her. She had merely been fulfilling some sense of obligation for what he’d done today. Made a cake of himself and gotten crowned by a Chippendale chair into the bargain. Emma Boscastle might conceivably be able to heal his injury, but all her propriety couldn’t fix the complicated pain of his personal affairs.

He breathed out a sigh. What if she
could
put him to right? Wouldn’t that be a feather in her cap? It was impossible, of course. No one could undo what he’d become. He’d been raised to better, aspired to worse, and there was no denying his manners had slipped over the years.

One had little need for etiquette in his past profession, in the dark, dirty places where he’d fought and loved. But a levelheaded woman like Emma was a different matter altogether, and he’d relied on his wits alone too long in this sorrowful world not to claim a treasure when he saw it.

Chapter Five

Disgraced.

Emma had disgraced herself. There was simply no one else to blame. True, she had not asked Lord Wolverton to come to her defense today. But neither had he insisted she rush to his rescue, either. Or into his arms.

Those strong protective arms that had anchored her to his magnificently built body. She’d been mar ried for years and had never known a need so keen, so deep reaching that it overcame her judgment. Had she felt sorry for him? Or for herself? With a few simple words he had dismantled her emotions. To think that her brother or his wife might have walked in, and she would have had to explain that—that she had come close to sleeping with a stranger, peer of the realm or not. She lifted her hand to her heart. She wasn’t sure whether she ought to pay penance or do something unspeakably wicked like…stand at the top of the stairs and bellow a few swear words. She whispered them instead.

“Damn. Damnation.”

What had come over her? She wasn’t the one who’d been hit on the head.

However, she was the one who had let herself be half seduced by a man of his appalling reputation when no other man had managed to steal as much as a kiss on the cheek from her in years. Not even that Sir William, whose shabby behavior made her feel unwholesome and—Adrian’s love play had left her feeling vulnerable but not violated. Upon escaping him, she should have experienced any number of appropriate reactions.

But not this sparkling invigoration, this sense of Sleeping Beauty awakened after a hundred years of dormant desire, of being swept up into the stars, of walking…

“The hallstand, Emma,” a familiar masculine voice warned behind her. “Watch where you’re walking. We don’t need another invalid on our hands.”

A guilty blush pinkened her face at her brother’s gentle reprimand. “Well, who moved it, then?” she demanded, laughing shakily.

The intelligent blue eyes of her second eldest brother, Lord Heath Boscastle, studied her for a moment. Of all her family members he was the most protective and perceptive. And there was certainly something for him to perceive if he looked deeply enough. “No one. The hallstand has always stood there. Are you sleepwalking, Emma?”

“Of course not. It’s my habit to check on the girls before bed every night.”

“I know,” he said in amusement. “However, they sleep in the other wing on the floor above. As they have ever since they arrived here.” His gaze drifted past her to Adrian’s door. “I thought you might be on your way to check on Wolf,” he said in a casual tone she knew better than to trust.

Wolf. She cringed inwardly at the too-apt sobriquet. Spying in the military had refined Heath’s instincts. She would absolutely die if he guessed what had just happened. She could not understand it herself. Pray God Adrian was a man who kept his promises, or, well, she cringed to imagine the repercussions.

As calmly as she could, she answered, “I did check on him, naturally. One feels a sense of responsibility when a man has been incapacitated on one’s behalf.”

His lips thinned into a hint of a smile. “Incapacitated? I think he could have been struck by an entire table and still survive. But I am curious, Emma. Just how responsible for his well-being do you hold yourself?”

This was the test. The trial by Boscastle torture. Heath’s blue eyes boring into one’s inner thoughts like a tomb-raider exhuming a book that held the secrets to the universe. He knew nothing. How could he know?

Furthermore, she was a grown woman, not a debutante, although until this moment she’d never had cause to lie to her family. “I hold myself responsible in the extreme,” she replied, her voice unwavering, her regard challenging him to make more of it at his own peril. Brother and sister, they stood as equals on the Boscastle sibling battlefield.

“In the extreme. Interesting choice of words, Emma.”

“Would you expect any less of me?” she inquired in an even tone that gently sent the ball back into his court.

He hesitated. “I cannot recall a similar situation in the past by which to judge you.”

“Surely you know me well enough to realize that my duty to obligation will always be met.”

He stared down at her with such tender intensity that she was tempted to throw herself into his arms and plead for understanding. For guidance. And if he’d probed any deeper, she might indeed have been brought to that humiliating pass.

But Adrian had given his word that no one would ever know. Their secret. Their shared sin.

Heath’s voice penetrated her reverie. “The line between obligation and inclination often becomes blurred, and if one is not looking up—”

“—then one walks into the hallstand.” She touched his arm. “Thank you for your concern,” she said with deliberate lightness. “Are you on your way to visit him?”

“Is he awake?”

“He was a few moments ago. I cannot vouch for his temper, however. He appears to have a complete intolerance for his infirmity.” Although infirm in no manner described the full-blooded devil who had not only discovered a chink in her armor but had aroused womanly instincts she had long believed to be becalmed. In a single day, she had discovered that the one man she believed to be her decent admirer was anything but, and the man of an indecent past who had defended her honor—Well, it remained to be proven exactly what he was and why she now felt constrained to defend her interest in him.

It rained during the first night of his recuperation. Adrian had forgotten how different the English rain was from the storms that swept across the Far East. English rain burrowed deep into the marrow. Despite it or perhaps because of it, he drifted into a fitful sleep. Into this miserable clime he had been born.

He would have found mordant amusement in his plight except that the laudanum had taken effect. He felt its soporific power seep into his system, and beneath it, penetrating even deeper, the warmth of Emma Boscastle. The touch of a gentlewoman’s hand. A soft yet reprimanding voice.

The door opened slowly.

Adrian glanced up, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Please, let her have come back. She would probably need an excuse. Claim she’d forgotten to shut the drapes or move the stool from the middle of the floor so he wouldn’t fall in the night. He didn’t give a damn what reason she used. He’d be a good boy for once and not tease. He would beg her forgiveness and promise to behave if she would talk to him.

He knew what Emma must think of him. He was a poor friend who took advantage, a scoundrel, a seducer. The truth, however, was that he’d had only two other lovers in his life. One had been a half-caste courtesan who’d taught him everything he was dying to know about sex. His last long-term affair had been with a French gentlewoman who’d taught him everything he wished he had never learned about love.

“Are you going to come in or not?” he asked quietly. “If you do, I will apologize for what I did.”

The bed curtains rolled back on their rings. He reclined in a relaxed pose against the pillows; he had to restrain himself to wait patiently for her to approach him.

A bloody good thing it turned out to be, too. It wasn’t Emma’s delicate, disembodied features that materialized from out of the shadows.

It was the lean, cynical face of her older brother, Lieutenant Colonel Lord Heath Boscastle, who stared down at Adrian for several meaningful seconds before inquiring with a guarded smile, “Apologize for what, exactly?”

A less seasoned gentleman would have cracked under the strain of that sphinxlike stare. Adrian remembered rumors of French spies who spoke secretly of their respect for the quiet-spoken, enigmatic Englishman who had not ever broken under torture.

Ofttimes Adrian wondered what Heath’s bravery had cost him personally. No one would ever know. Heath was the type of man who would shrug off either praise or acknowledgment of what he considered to have been his duty. One presumed he would carry his secrets to the grave. He was a fine officer.

In fact, Adrian had more than once regretted he’d not enlisted in the regular British military and fought alongside the Boscastle brothers and their ilk. He’d never formed the camaraderie amongst his peers that other nobly born military officers had. But then he had been seeking to escape his aristocratic identity. In fact, he’d left England at sixteen, his life made intolerable by his father’s taunts. He had met Heath Boscastle not long after at a Prussian military academy. Heath had gone on to a quiet but personal glory. Adrian had given himself to adventure and darker acclaim.

Yet he could still remember his last conversation with the man who now claimed to be his father, Guy Fulham, the Duke of Scarfield. Well, it had been more of an eavesdropping until Scarfield had caught Adrian by the scruff of the neck and humiliated him in the midst of a house party.

“Look at you, listening at keyholes like a dirty little thief. But then I shouldn’t be surprised, should I? Your mother was naught but a whore, and your natural sire was a soldier. Not even an officer, if you please. An ordinary, ignorant soldier who didn’t even have the wherewithal to survive a year in battle.”

His life had started to make sense then. His father had grown aloof since the death of Adrian’s mother four years earlier. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out a few unsavory facts about his place in the world. The old duke wasn’t his blood, as it turned out. Soon enough the abuses and malignant neglect of the man he’d believed to be his father assumed a more dramatic meaning. Adrian’s young mother, Constance, had apparently taken a lover, a common soldier who happened to be passing through the village, and that’s why the duke had come to despise the sight of Adrian.

The old bugger thought his heir was a by-blow.

The revelation should have broken Adrian’s spirit. Another boy would have been shamed by repeatedly being reminded he was the accidental product of an adulterous affair. Instead, it cheered him immeasurably. Gave him a new purpose in life. He decided to become a blood-and-guts soldier like his real father. He would show the duke what he thought of his stuffy old world. He’d become a great military adventurer, a wealthy nabob, and flaunt his successes under the aristocracy’s nose.

Only it hadn’t worked out that way at all. Revenge, Adrian had discovered, rarely did. Yet by the time he’d set upon his path, he couldn’t turn back. He was as much a victim of his vengeance as he was the perpetrator.

He hadn’t counted on the rest of the world not exactly agreeing to his half-cocked plans. Or himself. Fighting had knocked most of the anger out of him. In fact, he’d gorged himself on so much violence that he had become numb.

He’d had military adventures, all right. Only his reputation had been built as a mercenary, not a hero. He had trained native soldiers to beef up British forces and subdued insurgents in the battle against French encroachment on foreign holdings. The rulers who appreciated being spared an assassin’s knife had rewarded him in gold, rupees, and diamonds. He had been granted trading rights by East India Company and held mercantile interests in Bombay, Madras, China, Persia, and India. He’d made his name by agreeing to fight anywhere for a price.

And then a year or so ago the duke had the gall to ask Adrian home, claiming to be stricken with some mortal affliction. He wrote that he hoped to make amends. Home? For the love of hell, Adrian had only come back to England because he’d be a fool to refuse an inheritance that was his by right. No other reason, although he was ready to settle down.

And if he wanted to claim a woman forbidden to him by friendship?

“Adrian.”

He glanced up moodily at the mild reproach in his host’s voice.

“Yes?”

“I asked you what it is you are apologizing for.”

“Apologizing? Ah.” He frowned. The head injury must have jolted his brains, after all. He rarely brooded on the past. “Well, I’m sorry for all the bother. It’s bloody embarrassing to have a chair broken on your noggin and then end up being cosseted like a vestal virgin.”

Heath sighed. “You were defending my sister. There’s no need to apologize for that.”

Adrian regarded the other man with a scowl. “Except that I bollixed it up. The true offender sneaked away, and I fainted at your sister’s feet like a girl. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m of a mind to finish what I started. Where does Sir William reside?”

Heath shook his head. “Drake and Devon were already planning to have breakfast with him when Emma pleaded for mercy. She’s not as scandal-prone as the rest of us. Let this go for her sake.”

“I don’t need anyone else to stand in for me,” he said heatedly. “I could have challenged him myself. Or not.”

Heath laughed. “Actually, friend, I’m afraid you’re not quite capable of even
standing
by yourself, let alone fighting a duel.”

“Damn it all to hell,” Adrian said mildly. “Are you going to insist I stay?”

“I think you need another spoonful of that sedative.”

“I think I should take the whole bedeviled bottle.”