How to Tame a Modern Rogue

by Diana Holquist

  “You’re wearing—er…”

  “Admiring my fall-front knee breeches?” He turned around to show her the lacing at the back. “Easy access.”

  She was admiring his jaunty, tight pants. She could admire every detail, of course, because there was no shirt on over the pants. Sam in the pants was a breathtaking sight, despite the fact that he was obviously nuts.

  “I shall resist the impulse to comment on your work-manlike and sensible sleepwear,” he said.

  She was as stirred by the effort that must have gone into finding old-fashioned pants as she was by the way he fit into their skintight fabric. Grippy thighs. Figured. Probably, it was no work at all to get the pants. Most likely that Charlie guy again. If he knew how to get a horse and carriage over the Brooklyn Bridge, surely it was child’s play to get lace-up pants that fit Sam like a glove. She shook her attention from his crotch. “Sam. I don’t think this is a good idea because—”

  “Wait, look!”

  She waited. She looked. “What?”

  “My thigh muscles. They’re rippling.”

  They were.

  “I’ve been practicing all night.”

  Now that, she didn’t doubt. “I’m sorry. Good night, Sam.” She turned to the door, but Sam got to the door-knob first.

  He shut the door with a sickening click.

  Ally’s heart sank. “You cad.”

  “Rogue.”

  “I can go down to the front desk and get another key.”

  “Not if I don’t let you.” He stepped in front of her, blocking her path.

  “Now see here, Sam. Just because we had a few little kisses—”

  “Kisses? Marvelous idea.” He grabbed her and stopped the flow of words with his lips, warm and insistent against hers. He smelled like leather, and she wondered if the pants were leather and so she touched them and—good God—the pants were baby-soft suede and under them was Sam and he pressed against her thigh and he was hard. She tried to pull away. “Sam!”

  Only when he was thoroughly done kissing her did he mumble into her neck, “Why do you keep calling me Sam? I am the duke.” He pulled her close and she let him because he wasn’t wearing a shirt and it felt so impossibly good to touch his warm, smooth skin with so much muscle tensed just underneath the surface, ready to uncoil. Maybe just this once, he wasn’t Sam, but the duke. What the hell? Duke Whatthehell. Her hands were trapped between their bodies and all she could manage was a feeble struggle, which felt so enormously sexy against his bare chest, she struggled again just to feel him deny her.

  Then, all at once, he swept her off her feet and into his arms. She gasped with shock and indignation.

  “You’re coming with me, Princess, whether you like it or not.” His voice was gruff and dominating and not at all like the playful Sam she was getting to know.

  He started down the hall with her in his arms. “I’m going to scream,” she said, kicking at him.

  He only tightened his grip. He was being a brute, and it was fun. She liked the way he carried her, as if she were a feather in his arms. She liked the way her shoulder wedged against his right pec. She especially liked the way he smelled, of leather and skin, warm and musky. And somehow, she told herself that it was okay to like all this because they were just playing—it was a game. A fantasy. Not real.

  They had come to his door and he was struggling to hold her in his arms while extracting his key card from the waistband of his ridiculous pants. “No one would dare tangle with the Duke of Midfield, especially in matters of bedding a woman. So scream all you like. I’d enjoy it, actually.”

  She rolled her eyes. This was insane. It was silly. It was…fun. Also, sexy in a way that turned her inside out. She did owe him, after all, for helping them over the bridge. For being so sweet playing twenty questions. For protecting them all from the killer kitten. And, he had bought lunch…

  He had gotten the card out of his waistband and was trying to insert it in the door slot. She took the card from him and managed the door. The small light blinked green.

  He met her eyes. “Thank you, Princess,” he said while he smiled such a devilish smile, she knew she was lost.

  He pushed inside the room, knocking her leg on the doorjamb. “Ouch.”

  “Oomph.” He hit his head on something.

  “Bloody hell.” Her robe was caught on the doorknob.

  Finally, they maneuvered into the small room.

  “Tonight, Princess, you’re mine.”

  “Oh, God, crocodile,” she murmured.

  “Excuse me?”

  She explained June’s idea of a safeword.

  “So, crocodile?” he asked.

  “Maybe alligator,” she admitted.

  “Really?” He didn’t make another move.

  “Okay. Well, gecko.”

  “Ha!” he cried, triumphant. “No tiny gecko would ever stop a woman like you.”

  He set her down and she stood before him and he began to circle her like she was a horse he was considering buying. “Sam—”

  “Duke!” he corrected, continuing to circle. She felt absurd. And chastened. And controlled. She felt incredibly sexy. “Duke,” she said, trying it out. The single word stirred her. She was in her cotton robe and under it were her men’s striped vintage pajamas, and yet, she felt as sexy as if she had been wearing a negligee.

  He removed her robe and laid it carefully on the bed.

  She gulped. “I think—”

  “Don’t think. And for God’s sake, don’t speak. You are here for one reason, Princess. To become mine. I have been waiting years for this moment, since I first met you as a child of fifteen, in your first bud of youth.”

  “Okay, crocodile. That’s gross.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. Okay. Cut that.” He cleared his throat, turned his back, and then turned again to her. She could feel the heat rise off his bare chest. “I have been waiting for this moment since the first time I laid eyes on you in your crummy apartment, hung over and dressed in these same despicable pajamas that I will now remove and burn.” He unbuttoned her pajama top as if he had all the time in the world.

  “Not so good either,” she said.

  He stopped. “Okay. You’re right. Too much truth in all that to be a good fantasy. Wait. Let me think.” He turned away again, loosened his shoulders like an athlete, dancing a little jig in place. He spun around to face her, his eyes blazing. “I am a man undone. I can’t live without you, Princess. I must have you. Now. Or I will die of longing and regret.” He dropped to one knee.

  God, I’m easy. Ally’s insides quaked with desire. “More of that.” She knew he must be joking, but he seemed so sincere.

  “Will you have me, Princess? Have me as I am, a scarred and despicable man?” He took her hand and kissed it. The kiss went all the way to her toes, then shot back up again.

  “That’s my favorite kind of man,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” He rose to take her in his arms. “Because once I begin, I can’t be responsible for stopping.” He kissed the base of her neck. “I am not a gentleman.” He kissed her under her right ear. “I am a beast, beyond control. A scoundrel. A rogue.” The line between playing and not playing had faded to nothing, and now she was Ally, talking to Sam, and he seemed to be telling her something important.

  “Then I will control you, sir,” she answered, bewildered. Where had that come from?

  He smiled.

  “Undress me,” she said, not caring where the urge to talk this way came from, just caring that it felt so good.

  “If you insist, madam. I am entirely at your service.” Sam bowed his head and then got to work.

  Ally shivered with desire, her body defenseless. She knew they had been joking around, but the look in his eyes now was no joke. That her body quivered was a dire matter in need of remedy. He wanted her as badly as she wanted him. A terrible man is undressing me. A rake. A man with no regard for anything beyond his own pleasure.

  And I like it.
<
br />   He pushed the fabric off her shoulders, revealing her flushed skin.

  “Hmm…,” he murmured. “Lovely.”

  And then, he was upon her.

  They were on the bed, somehow, a tangle of limbs and tongues. He wasn’t kidding about being unstoppable. He loomed over her, a dark shadow pressing down. He was still wearing the ridiculous pants, and she felt cross at their impudent interference, pouty as befitted only a princess. “Remove the pants, Duke.”

  She could see a shade of his smile in the darkness. “As you wish.” He raised his hips and shimmied out of the pants.

  Oh my, oh my.

  Her heart stopped beating as she took in the sight of him. She reached out to touch him, unable to resist. “Oh!” She hadn’t meant to squeal like a virgin princess, but Sam was as endowed as Duke Blackmoore.

  She felt his grin as he pressed his lips to hers and brought his body back to hover over hers, the tip of him tickling her stomach. “I await your command, Princess.” But he didn’t await her command. Instead, he reached down between her legs and felt her wetness. “That feels like a command to me.”

  And he’s smart.

  He slid two fingers inside her and she gasped with the pleasure of it. His thumb caressed her while his fingers moved inside. “Like this, Princess?”

  “I didn’t tell you to touch me,” she managed, surprised she could sound so haughty when she felt so wobbly and weak.

  He withdrew his hand, and she tried not to grab his wrist and command him not to listen to some dumb princess who obviously didn’t have a clue what she wanted.

  “Punish me for my transgression,” he growled.

  Her body went limp. She managed to squeak, “I think I will.”

  He waited, watching her. His flashing gray eyes took her breath away.

  “Twenty minutes of hard labor for you, sir,” she said when she had found her voice. She put her arms over her head, stretching out luxuriously. “Get to work, Duke. I don’t want to hear another word until—” She hesitated. Talking dirty was turning her on, but the sensation of losing control was starting to make her queasy.

  “Until you scream for mercy, Princess? Until you come so hard, I have to hold you down? Until I make you forget your own name and leave you quivering with exhaustion and desire?” Between each phrase, he kissed her. Carefully and thoroughly.

  To hell with control. “Yes. All that.”

  “Very good, madam. I shall bend to your will.”

  God, she was beautiful.

  He hadn’t expected her to be so beautiful.

  Small, creamy, white, glowing.

  Okay, so it was a game to her still. He bit her neck and didn’t give a damn. Kissed her lower lip and cared even less. Took her nipple into his mouth and remembered that she still thought he was useless except in her fantasy. But at that moment, her nipple growing hard and hot in his mouth as he rolled it on his tongue, he didn’t give a damn. All he cared about was pleasing her.

  “Sam. God. Now. Please.”

  She called me Sam.

  She knew exactly what she was doing and who she was doing it to, even if she would deny it later. It hurt him to anticipate the denial that he knew would come.

  But he couldn’t rush. He would be a gentleman, no matter what she thought of him. “Protection?” he practically growled. “I have a Regency-era sheep-gut sheath—” She gasped and sat up, alarmed. Then relaxed when he flashed her the foil-covered Trojan.

  He watched her face as he entered her, slowly, so exquisitely slowly, carefully, his princess. The exquisite sensation of opening her spread through every inch of his body. So, he had to dress up in laced pants and carry her off? Had to pretend he was someone else? None of it mattered. All that mattered was the way she desperately gripped his shoulder, the way she thrust her hips up to him, begging for more, now, faster, please…

  Ally Giordano was the woman who would make him whole again.

  He knew it as surely as he knew she was going to come, now, hard and strong, rocking in his arms, shuddering into the power of her release. She is mine and I won’t betray her, even when she betrays me.

  He knew she would as surely as he knew that he couldn’t hold on in her wet, soft, smoothness another instant. She was playing, but his playing had ended. He pushed into her. Again. Again. Harder and faster as he came.

  They lay limp, spent, in each other’s arms.

  “Duke?” she said.

  He pushed a lock of hair off her face.

  “I think someone is licking my toes.”

  Sam scooped up the tiny kitten. “It’s just that dastardly troublemaker. Have no fear. I vanquished him once, I will subdue him again.” He scratched the kitten under his chin and the little ball of fur instantly went limp with ecstasy. If only women were this easy.

  Actually, for him most women were.

  But not Ally. He had jumped through hoops to get her here. And this was only halfway at most. He stroked the cat, wondering what to say to Ally that would tell her how he felt about what they had just done. About how he didn’t want to play games; he wanted to try to understand how he felt about her. He wanted to try to change the way she felt about him.

  “Ally, that was amazing. I don’t want you to think that this was no big deal to me. Because it was a big deal. I’ve slept with a lot of women, it’s true. And I’m not sorry about it. But I think you and I could have something more than a game. I think I could…we could…Ally, tell me what you think.” He stopped, breath held.

  But she, like the kitten, was fast asleep.

  Ally awoke in the duke’s bed. She looked at the clock: 9:27 a.m.

  Holy hell, what had she done? That scene last night was not in The Dulcet Duke.

  And yet, she felt lovely. Positively tingly.

  And decidedly quite sore.

  I left my grandmother alone the whole night!

  She jumped out of bed and pulled on her clothes. Sam slept soundly through her bustling, the cat asleep on his chest, which was a relief as she didn’t want to face him. She slipped out of his room and tiptoed to her own, not remembering until she got there that she didn’t have the key. She knocked. “Grandma? Are you up?”

  No answer.

  She knocked louder.

  “Granny Donny? It’s Ally. I locked myself out.”

  Nothing.

  She looked around the empty hallway. Would she really have to go to the lobby and beg to be let in wearing her pajamas and sporting her bed-head hair like a blinking neon sign: i had awesome sex last night!

  From the silence all around her, that seemed likely.

  Then the panic hit her like a sucker punch to the gut.

  What if Granny Donny wasn’t in there?

  Ally raced to the lobby down six flights of fire stairs, unable to wait for the elevator. Her slippers flew off on the third floor, but she couldn’t waste time to stop for them. She emerged into the lobby barefoot, the marble cold against her feet. What had she done, leaving her grandmother alone like that? She pushed past the businessmen in black suits and families with small children, all of them either scowling or, worse, nodding knowingly at her disheveled pajamas and bare feet. “Excuse me. Emergency. Sorry.”

  At least she wasn’t wearing lingerie.

  “Hi. I have a problem,” she began. But then she stopped. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something—or rather, someone—waiting for a cab just outside the front doors. Her mouth went dry with fear.

  Her mother? Here?

  She left the counter in a daze, making her way through the bustling lobby full of stewardesses and bellhops pushing carts loaded with baggage. She bullied her way to the revolving doors just as her mother ducked into a cab.

  “Mom?” This was impossible. How would she recognize her mother after ten years across a crowded lobby? How could her mother be here? Ally had so many awful memories of following strangers when she was younger, thinking they were her mother. The shock when they whipped around to face her was etched into her
nerve endings.

  The cab screeched away from the curb, the back of a woman’s head next to that of a taller man (Her father? It was crazy to think it…) just barely visible through the glare hitting the back window.

  “Mom?” she said again, more quietly, to no one. “Dad?” Her bare feet were cold on the recently washed wet concrete. The warm, early-morning wind whipped through her thin pajamas. Everyone was frozen around her, staring at her, and she couldn’t have cared less.

  “Cab?” the doorman asked politely, keeping his eyes on her bare toes.

  “No. Thanks.” It probably wasn’t them. How could it have been them? She mumbled an apology to the crowd waiting for cabs, then went back inside the hotel to get her key, praying her grandmother was in her bed.

  Granny Donny was in bed, peacefully asleep.

  Ally tried to shake off the discomfort of her morning encounter. After all, it was most likely no encounter at all, but rather a case of mistaken identity. She had seen only the side of the woman’s face, the back of her head.

  Judging by Granny Donny’s snoring, nothing had happened here. She dismissed her fantasy as residual weakness from her sex-ravaged night. A warning?

  No. Pull it together. Ally had a lot to do today, and she was already desperately behind. She wasn’t happy about leaving her grandmother with Mateo and Sam for the few hours it would take her to check out the housekeeper, Eloisa. Maybe they could change their plans. Wait together at the hotel and pay for a cab to bring Eloisa here to pick up the house key and car. After all, Ally ought to get used to having access to her grandmother’s money.

  Maybe she could send Sam.

  Sam.

  Oh. My. God. Sam.

  What had she done? That delicious little interlude last night was a fluke. A one-timer.

  The best sex she’d ever had?

  Yes.

  And more than sex. It had been wicked and playful and fun. Outwardly, they had kept in character the entire time, and she had felt as if she was his princess. He had accepted her whims like a true gentleman, and yet he still made love to her like a savage. How had he managed that? That a man was allowed to be that skilled in bed was not fair.

  Although, she hadn’t been half bad either, judging from his reaction to her touch. They had slept, then made love, then slept again. The night was a blur. She had shown him a thing or two about what a princess could do to a duke. She could still see his wicked smile flicker in the darkness as she pushed him back against the mattress, commanding him to be still while she tasted him. By the end, he’d been begging her to stop and not to stop and ohmygod yes…