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Authors: Mia Marlowe

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BOOK: Touch of a Scoundrel (Touch of Seduction 3)

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Dr. Farnsworth erupted in a deep hacking cough. Emmaline stirred herself from her place by the fire and hurried to his side.

“Father, are you all right?”

Farnsworth nodded, unable to speak between coughs. Emmaline said their hurried good nights as she shepherded him to the door. The old man muttered halfhearted protests, but allowed himself to be led away, supported by his daughter’s arm around his waist.

Theodore hurried after them to offer his help, solicitous as a family beagle.

After seeing the coughing fit, Devon realized Dr. Farn-worth’s pallid skin was probably due to illness and in no way detracted from his account of the Tetisheri statue. He shook his head at the way he’d suspected the professor of chicanery. He was in serious danger of becoming a skeptic.

“Let me know if I can help you with the guest list,
Maman,
” Louisa said as she excused herself with a yawn. “There are several charming fellows I’d like to see in Devonwood Park.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about that. The party will be sprinkled with your gallants,” his mother said. “After all, it’s your brother’s responsibility to make sure you marry well. Where better for you to make your choice than at a house party?”

“Who said anything about choosing?” Louisa said. If Beelzebub had a daughter, she couldn’t have managed a more impish grin. “I don’t want to marry one of them. I only want to play with
all
of them.”

She kissed her mother’s cheek and flounced from the room, her broad skirt swaying saucily.

Devon frowned after her. His normally tranquil family life was becoming more chaotic by the moment. He was unexpectedly attracted to the woman his brother wanted. His brother was turning into a lap dog without any will of his own. And their baby sister was well on her way to becoming a flirt of monumental proportions.

“Good night,
Maman,
” Devon said, as he gave his mother a dutiful peck on the cheek.

“Do not think you’ll get away that easily, young man. I saw your face after you lifted that bit of black silk. You had a vision.” She grasped his hand and pulled him down onto the settee beside her. “Now what was it?”

“Nothing,” he said, dragging a hand over his face. He didn’t want to tell his mother about the eerie sense of doom the image of the asp had left him with. “It was nothing. A flash Sight only. No true message. Once I realized the cloth was
Sending,
I dropped it.”

That was true enough. His last vision was like nothing he’d ever experienced. It was like trying to peer through isinglass or interpret the shadowy remnants of a dream. He was certain the snake wasn’t real.

But Devon was convinced the danger was.

“No vision. No headache. Truly.” He had to distract her from this topic. No good could come from sharing his disturbing
Sending
. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Then tell me, what on earth were you doing with your brother’s fiancée so long in the orangery?”

His mother’s new subject of conversation was not an improvement over the old one.

“I wasn’t doing anything with her, and she’s not his fiancée.”
Yet.
“We know next to nothing about her. I was hoping to remedy that.”

“Hmmm.” Lady Devonwood leaned back and cast an appraising gaze at him. He’d seen the same look in her eye the last time she’d considered acquiring a new stallion for their herd in the country. The horse had already thrown a couple riders. She had to weigh whether the beast was already too riddled with vice for subsequent training to make a difference. In the end, she’d bought him, but no one other than Devon could ride him. “And what did you learn about Miss Farnsworth?”

That she kisses like Aphrodite reborn. And if I don’t get her out of Theodore’s life quickly, our family may never recover.
Of course, he couldn’t tell his mother any of that. “She enjoys Keats and a spot of botany.”

“Hmmm,” his mother said again. “What a pity the girl doesn’t wear spectacles like her father. I suspect I could get a good
Sending
out of that sort of glass.”

Despite her glowing praise for the ability that marked them as unique, Devon’s mother hadn’t willingly sought out an opportunity to use her gift of touch in years. Hers was a weaker gift than Devon’s. It was limited to discernment of a person’s past through contact with any glass object they’d handled, but using her abilities still carried a stiff price for Lady Devonwood. The last time she’d purposefully touched a glass object, the ensuing headache had left her bedridden for a week.

“No,
Maman,
I don’t want you to subject yourself to that,” Devon said. “We’ll learn more of Miss Farnsworth in the days to come without resorting to Preston witchery.”

“It’s not witchery. It’s simply something we’re born with. Would you call it witchery had you been left-handed or redheaded? No.” She gave her head an emphatic shake. “I’ll not have you denigrating Great-Grandmere Delphinia’s legacy to the lineage that way. Besides, according to all the family stories, it was love at first sight between her and your great-grandsire and—”

“Love at first sight,” Devon grumbled. “Yet more proof of witchery.”

“Bite your tongue, son. Love, however it arrives, is not something to be mocked.”

He knew his parents’ marriage had not been a love match, at least, not at first. His mother often likened them to a pair of frogs set in a pot to boil. Their affection warmed so slowly, she only realized at his passing how deeply she’d come to love Devon’s taciturn father. His father had loved her just as intensely, even though he’d found it difficult to express.

His mother rested a gentle hand on his forearm. “I only tell you these things because I want you to be proud of who you are, Devon, where you’ve come from and what you can do.”

“There’s the rub, isn’t it? There’s not much I can do with my prescience.” He leaned forward, elbows balanced on his knees, and sighed. “What good is it if I can see the future but am powerless to change it?”

“Devon, stop blaming yourself.” She palmed his cheeks and turned his face toward her so she could press her lips to his forehead. “I certainly don’t blame you. You did all you could.”

She rose and bade him good night, leaving him to stare at the strange statue alone.

Her words were cold comfort. Even if she didn’t hold him responsible, that didn’t change a thing.

His father was still dead.

C
HAPTER
10

“
N
ow, children, stop fussing,” Monty said as Theodore and Emmaline helped him up the long staircase. She was surprised to notice how loosely his jacket draped around his frame. He’d lost more weight than she’d suspected, leaving him frail, his bones bird-thin. Another spasm of coughing shook his body. He pulled out his handkerchief again to cover his mouth, but wasn’t quite quick enough.

Theodore stared at the faint pinkish tinge at the corner of Monty’s mouth and then met Emma’s gaze in wordless sympathy. He left Emmaline in the sitting room of the Blue Suite, hustled her father into his chamber, and rang for the valet, Fritz, who appeared almost instantly.

Emmaline was prepared to help Monty, but the valet wouldn’t hear of it. He promised to take special care of “the good Dr. Farnsworth,” and disappeared into Monty’s room.

“Fritz will get him ready for bed, and if I know our Fritzi, he’ll see that your father has a hot toddy to bundle him off to sleep as well,” Teddy said, his tone brittle with forced normalcy.

Emmaline heard Monty’s voice through the closed door, rasping after his fit. She still detected his usual lilt of jocularity as he spoke with the man who assisted him into his nightshirt.

“Tell Mr. Fritz to be sure to mix in extra honey and lemon,” Emmaline said. Her father wasn’t fond of the peaty, smoky flavor of scotch without plenty of other mitigating ingredients. Still, a toddy might be just the thing to quiet his cough and help Monty sleep.

“Travel is exhausting and we’ve been on the move for months now. That’s all it is,” Teddy said. “With a proper bed, I’m sure the professor will be right as rain in no—”

“No, he won’t.” She’d been lying to herself for a while now. Tonight, she finally had to face facts. Emmaline sank into one of the Tudor chairs and let her tears come. Her shoulders shook.

She’d tried to fool herself into thinking Monty’s ailment was temporary, but she’d never heard of anyone who suffered from consumption getting better. Even if they were successful with this confidence scheme and managed to raise the ridiculous sum of money demanded by the Görbersdorf sanatorium, there was no guarantee of a cure at that German mountain retreat.

Theodore knelt beside her chair and took her hand. “Do you want me to summon a physician?”

She shook her head. “We both know what this is. All a doctor will do is bleed him and purge him. It’ll only make him weaker.”

It was hard to imagine her life without Monty and his outlandish schemes twirling at its center. The small scared child who still lived inside her shivered. With Monty gone, she’d go back to being plain Emma Potts, alone, cast adrift in the world.

“Don’t be afraid, Emmaline,” Theodore said softly.

His words startled her. She hadn’t thought him able to divine her emotions so accurately.

“You have me now.” He pressed a kiss to her knuckles.

Her breath caught at the shining goodness of his heart. Not for the first time, she wished there was something real, something true about her courtship with Theodore.

Maybe she could will it to be so.

She leaned down and cupped his chin to tip his face up to hers, inviting him to kiss her. She needed him to kiss her. Needed it to be more searingly real than his brother’s kiss in the orangery.

Theodore’s mouth closed over hers for a few heartbeats.

It was pleasant. A gesture full of comfort. Sweet enough to melt the heart.

But Teddy’s kiss didn’t make her toes curl in the slightest.

Why couldn’t she love this kind man? Theodore’s soul might glint with shining whiteness, but hers was black as a Stygian stream. She drew back. “You’d better go.”

“I wish I didn’t have to. I wish we were already married so I could stay with you.”

“Theodore, please, that’s inappropriate.” She bit her lower lip. “I haven’t even said yes yet.”

“Why don’t you?” He plopped down on the floor beside her chair and rested his head against her knee. “You know how I love you, Em. What’s stopping you?”

Yesterday she’d have told herself it was because she was a confidence huckster and he was her mark. She needed to maintain professional distance. But what if she convinced Monty to abandon the game? Maybe then she could accept Theodore’s proposal.

Emmaline had picked up the
pigeon drop
in no time. Would love be so difficult a game to learn?

She stroked his thick blond hair, feeling very tender. Teddy was sincere and attentive. He made her feel like a princess every time he looked at her.

So what if his kisses were as exciting as a second cousin’s?

Of course, Emmaline didn’t have any second cousins so far as she knew, but she imagined kissing one would feel exactly like kissing Theodore. Plenty of women made do with the merely pleasant and were grateful to have found it in a husband.

Emmaline might have been one of them if she hadn’t kissed Lord Devonwood. Twice.

Monty’s renewed cough in the next room made her lift her head. Just like that, she knew she was deluding herself when she imagined that anything deeper might grow between her and Theodore. Even if she weren’t confused by her body’s response to Lord Devonwood, there was still the fact that for the sake of his health, Monty needed this confidence game to succeed. That sanatorium in the Alps was his only hope.

Which meant she was better off without permanent entanglements with either of the brothers. It made no sense to become attached to someone she had to swindle.

“I must go.” She rose and headed for Monty’s chamber. “Father needs me.”

C
HAPTER
11

E
mmaline didn’t say no this time.

Her breasts fit Devon’s hands perfectly. Soft and silky, with hard tips the color of peach pits that fairly burned into his palms. The wonderful thing about that cream and rose gown was the neckline was cut low enough that her breasts practically tumbled out of their own accord, though it had been his pleasure to ease them free. The stiff bodice provided an admirable shelf for her luscious bosom now that he’d liberated her breasts from their whalebone constraints.

He stepped back to admire his handiwork. Emmaline looked up at him, her eyes enormous, her face taut with need. Her breasts rose and fell in time with her short jerky breaths.

He could happily watch them for hours.

“Griffin, please,” she said. She made a desperate little noise in the back of her throat as he bent to circle her nipples with his tongue. The fact that she wanted him nearly made him lose control and spill his seed in his trousers like a callow youth.

He’d always known there was a caged beast within him. Now the chain he kept on it snapped. He turned her around with no gentleness at all and made short work of the lacing at her spine. Then he clawed through the similar fastenings of her corset and released her. He grasped the neckline of her undergarment and ripped the cotton all-in-one beneath the corset. He bared her back all the way down to the sweet cleft of her bum.

He yanked the gown lower, taking the crinoline with it, ripping the sheer cotton between the wires of the hooped cage that enclosed her lower half. She didn’t complain.

He made a mental note to buy her a new wardrobe later, one that was designed to be removed with less effort. Of course, he could always just lift her skirt, but he burned to see all of her.

She stepped out of the ruins of her gown, her back still to him, wearing only her gartered stockings and neat cream-colored slippers. She lifted her arms and pulled the pins from her coiffure, shaking out her long locks. Gleaming with inner fire, her hair draped her shoulders like an autumn mantle.

But lovely as the shining locks were, his attention was riveted below the curve of her waist.

He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more erotic than her heart-shaped bum above those neatly tied bows on the backs of her thighs.

He sank his teeth into her shoulder as his hands palmed the globes of her buttocks, lifting and teasing. He didn’t break her skin, but he marked her all the same. She was his. She groaned in pleasurable agony and leaned back into him. She arched her spine, pressing her bum against his hardened groin.

He thought about bending her double and taking her from behind with her fingers splayed on the cool slate squares of the orangery floor.

No, if his goal was to convince his brother Emmaline was wrong for him, it wouldn’t do to ravish her here in the solitude and sweetness of his interior garden. Better for him to carry her naked through the house so all could see the American miss for what she was.

He scooped her up and started for the door. She draped her arms around his neck and leaned her head on his shoulder.

“I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you,” she murmured.

So confiding. So trusting.

He wanted her, too. And now he’d have her. Protecting his brother from her was just an added bonus.

“I just didn’t know how to tell Teddy.” She took one of his earlobes between her lips and sucked hard.

His eyes threatened to roll back in his head and he stopped before he reached the door.

What if he didn’t want to protect Ted? What if he wanted her for himself?

He pinned her against the smooth stone wall of the orangery. After a few moments of fumbling, he freed his cock from his trousers. She hitched a leg over his hip and he slid into her, a warm, wet homecoming.

For a moment, he found himself wishing there was more to this joining than animal passion. He was surprised and a little shaken by the longing in his chest. A pleasurable release was all he’d come to expect from such an encounter.

Why hope for more?

But part of him still wondered if it was possible that in taking him into her body, she could also take in his soul. Might it be that she knew him? And despite what she’d seen inside him, still accepted every bit.

Then their mouths met in a kiss that stole the breath from his lungs.

Like a succubus, she drained every bit of moisture and wind, every bit of his life from him, but he didn’t care. Devon strained against her, plunging in with abandon while she urged him on with nearly incoherent little commands.

“Deeper . . . yes, there . . . oh, that.”

Devon’s world spiraled down to the ethereal physics of heat and friction. To the wonder of her dark, wet cavern and the pressure of seed rising in his shaft.

“Devon, you bloody bastard!”

As his body erupted in shuddering spasms, he turned to see his brother standing in the orangery doorframe.

Murder glinted in Teddy’s usually mild eyes.

Devon jerked himself awake. Daylight streamed in narrow slats through the shutters over his windows. His body continued to pump the last bit of his nocturnal emission onto his own belly.

“Damnation,” he muttered.

He removed his nightshirt and used it to clean himself, feeling even dirtier when he was done. He drew on a black silk banyan and rang for a bath to be drawn, hoping that would remove the musky tang of his dream from his mind.

Emmaline Farnsworth had been as good as her word. In the weeks that followed the tumultuous day of their arrival, she’d been careful never to be alone with Devon again. He saw her only each evening at the supper table and once at breakfast when he’d been foolish enough to rise early to join the family for buttered eggs and kippers.

Fritz bustled around the suite, setting up and filling the copper hip bath in the adjoining private dressing room. Devon’s bedchamber faced the front of the house, but the dressing room looked out over his walled garden. He parted the heavy curtains and looked down at the Dionysus statue.

She was there again. After breaking her fast each morning, Emmaline had taken to spending time in the shady retreat. Continuing to draw the drunken god, he supposed. She was always bent over her sketchbook.

Devon watched her from his window above, tormenting himself with the line of her spine and the way her hair curled in tiny tendrils along her nape. He could almost taste the salty sweetness of the skin along her hairline.

“Your bath is ready, milord.”

Devon dismissed his valet with a silent wave. He didn’t trust his voice not to be inappropriately passion-rough.

As Devon removed his banyan and settled into the tepid water, he reminded himself that he had not experienced a vision. Nothing was written in stone. Just because he dreamed of rutting Miss Farnsworth six ways from Sunday, it did not signify that sexual congress between them was inevitable.

It was only a dream.

Part of him didn’t seem convinced. Up it rose like a tower between his legs.

He took it roughly in his hand.

“It was only a dream,” he repeated as his strokes fell into a frenetic, almost punishing, rhythm. “Only a dream.”

BOOK: Touch of a Scoundrel (Touch of Seduction 3)

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