Contents
Title Page
Dedication
“I want you to kiss me,”
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Read all three irresistible...
Also by Jillian Hunter
Copyright
For Jennifer,
with all my love
“I want you to kiss me,” Lord Wolverton urged. “Just once.”
“Just once,” Emma whispered, her voice skeptical, unsteady.
He drew her tightly into his arms, ignoring her whispered protests. Emma’s lips tingled in expectation as his lips brushed her mouth. Pleasure lanced like sunlight through her senses, her confusion.
“Lord Wolverton,” she said, unable to subdue another shiver, “this cannot be good for your health.”
His tongue encircled hers, a slow tease of sensation that intensified her breathless pleasure. “Believe me, it is.”
Chapter One
LONDON
1815
There was a wolf at the wedding.
Emma Boscastle, the widowed Viscountess Lyons, was not sure whether it had been a guest or one of the maidservants who had whispered the unsettling observation in passing during the wedding reception. At first she thought nothing of it. The remark could have referred to one of their host’s large hunting dogs or merely to a ravenous guest.
A lady did not lessen herself by a listening to idle gossip. By profession she was obligated to set an example to others and not to indulge her prurient curiosities. This was, after all, the wedding of one of her former students, held in the Portman Square home of the bride’s in-laws, not a common countryside assembly.
Several minutes into the nuptial breakfast, however, the remark took on a more intriguing design. She’d just decided that the handsome gentleman standing across the room had an appealing air of the disreputable about him. Which would explain why she could not resist staring at him and why she ought to stop. Sadly enough, the fact that he was accompanied by three of her own brothers, Lords Heath, Drake, and Devon Boscastle, only enhanced his dangerous aura. He was probably a person to be avoided. Heaven knows she would have avoided her own family if she were not related and therefore obligated to offer them guidance.
Her suspicions about the attractive stranger were only confirmed after the champagne toast when he turned suddenly and smiled at her over the top of the wedding cake. She returned his roguish smile before she knew what she was doing. His perceptive hazel eyes positively twinkled with mischief.
Did she know him? Surely she’d remember a man with his commanding presence unless he had never been presented to her in polite company. One had to admit he pleased the eye with his dark, wheat-blond hair, chiseled features, and broad-shouldered frame.
She hazarded another thoughtful glance at his angular profile. He exuded the restless energy of a wolf in gentleman’s attire—A shock of realization went down her arms. It couldn’t be. Her brothers had not brought the notorious Adrian Ruxley, Viscount Wolverton, to Miss Marshall’s wedding.
A wolf at the wedding. The scandalmongers referred to him as a professional mercenary. If one believed the worst, he was a soldier of fortune who’d turned his back on his aristocratic upbringing to spite his father and had chosen to fight pirates in foreign lands.
Emma’s younger sister Chloe, admittedly not the most unbiased of witnesses, claimed that Lord Wolverton was misunderstood, a valiant rogue and loyal friend to his select circle of friends. Emma suspected that the truth lay somewhere in the middle of these differing opinions.
Would her brothers have dared to invite such a disputatious person to a wedding?
Of course they would. The dear scoundrels might be settling into their respective marriages, but they were still possessed of the scandalous Boscastle spirit. Honestly, nothing was sacred in this family. Her siblings picked the most controversial of companions, men and women that proper Society scorned. In fact, Emma had been so afraid that one of her brothers would embarrass her that she’d missed half the ceremony keeping an eye on the three of them.
Still, the wedding had gone off like a dream; despite the bride’s repeated avowals of gratitude toward her mentor, Emma had modestly refused to acknowledge the role she had played in making this a memorable event.
She was a woman who cherished tradition. Observance of formality almost enabled one to forget the vulgarities that existed outside the polite world.
More than anything she enjoyed a good wedding. Another breath of hope gently released into stale humanity. The bonhomie. The beautiful gowns. The dignity of ceremony and commitment.
And then, at the conclusion, came the lyrical clink of bone china as one savored a well-prepared breakfast. She gazed in pleasure at the heirloom silver polished and regally placed upon white damask tablecloths. Detail. Lovely detail. It made one believe that life could and should be marked by order and beauty.
“I shall be attending your nuptials next, Emma,” her cousin Charlotte teased, appearing at her side. “The girls are taking bets on when Sir William will offer for you.”
“Taking bets? The students of my academy?” Emma laughed reluctantly. “He and I have not even discussed our future.” Although Sir William Larkin, a gentleman barrister she’d met only a few months ago, had more than hinted at marriage during the few plays and picnics they had attended together.
“Wagering on my wedding,” she murmured in mock disapproval. “I don’t know what our school has become.”
“The best,” Charlotte said with an exuberant voice that made Emma wonder how many glasses of champagne her cousin had imbibed. Charlotte was by nature reserved, but one always sensed a certain rebellion simmering beneath.
Still, Emma appreciated the hard-won praise. As the foundress of a small ladies’ academy that was located in her brother and sister-in-law’s London home, she took a personal responsibility for her pupils. Those ladies who graduated proudly referred to themselves as The Lionesses of London. In other words, they had survived Lady Lyons’s intense guidance to emerge as perfect young gentlewomen.
If only on the outside.
She could not be expected to extend her influence when they left her, unfortunately, and her current pride of cubs was showing quite a wild bent that absorbed all her energy.
“Speaking of the best, where have the girls gone?” she asked. She’d brought her four oldest students to the wedding in the belief one should put etiquette into practice to perfect it.
“The last time I saw them they had just sighted Lord Wolverton and were begging Heath for an introduction.”
Emma blanched. Every conceivable form of social ruin flashed through her mind. “And you allowed this?”
“Well, I didn’t—do stop worrying, Emma. Heath would never permit the girls to come to harm.”
Emma glanced around the room in alarm. “Dear, dear. It isn’t the girls who appear to be in danger. Do you see how they behave the minute they’re unleashed?”
“Unleashed?” Charlotte asked, startled. “Is that the word that you used?”
“Just look for yourself.”
Lord Wolverton stood rather helplessl
y in the center of the female circle looking…like a man desperate to escape. It was an image one could hardly reconcile with his reputation as a professional mercenary.
At the moment, however, it was not Lord Wolverton whose conduct deserved criticism, no matter what his past. It was the three girls encircling him with all the subtlety of milkmaids on the common green. Erupting into raucous giggles. Fluttering their fans and eyeing his lordship as if they had forgotten every subtle precept Emma had hammered into their young heads.
She swept forward, forcing herself not to look at their gentleman victim. “Girls, may I have a word with you at the table?”
Three pairs of ivory fans snapped to attention. Chastened by the voice of she whom her own family called the Dainty Dictator, they dutifully trudged toward the table before which Emma waited.
“I shall say little.” She gazed at their downbent heads. “Until later. For now you should be congratulating the newlywed couple and, one dares to hope, setting your aim on achieving a similar state for yourselves.”
“But he’s a duke’s son—”
“Silence. He is notorious, and—” Emma broke off in consternation.
Girls being girls, she feared she would only whet their female curiosity by adding details of the man’s adventurous history.
It was her opinion that most young women harbored a secret attraction to forbidden gentlemen. Not that Emma had ever been so afflicted in her past. As the sister of five Boscastle brothers, she had observed one too many wicked males at work to harbor any romantic illusions about marrying one.
“There are only three of you,” she said suddenly. “Someone is missing. Where is Miss Butterfield?”
“She ate too much lemon syllabub, Lady Lyons. She ran upstairs and said she was going to be sick.”
“At a wedding?”
“Disgusting, isn’t it?”
Emma grimaced. “I’ll give her a few moments to recover. And then we shall all make a quiet departure.” She cast a covert glance about the room for Sir William. He seemed like such a decent gentleman, a little dashing but mature and a man of principles. Surely he had not gone without a proper farewell. But then perhaps he’d tried and she had been too distracted to notice—
Distracted.
She looked up hesitantly, into the hooded eyes of the man standing across the elegantly spread table. Normally she would not meet a man’s regard long enough to make an assessment. But what a remarkable face he had. In an expert glance she took in his well-tailored cutaway gray silk coat and the black pantaloons that molded a pair of long, muscular—she blinked in disappointment.
Was the man wearing riding boots, to a wedding? And had he just pressed the heel of his hand down on the table beside the plate of herbed sausages? That would never do.
She tsked to herself, turning away before he could notice her. Too late.
“I beg your pardon,” he said over her shoulder. She had to admit he had a deep, beautiful voice. “If you just said something to me, I didn’t quite hear it.”
Much ado about nothing.
A decade had not changed the dreary rituals of English Society.
Having escaped the voracious debutantes that Heath had warned him would attend the wedding, Adrian had wandered over to the table and the graceful-looking woman who stood on the other side. Heath’s younger sister, he thought.
A safe haven in a sea of insincerity. The Boscastles had committed too many sins themselves to cast judgment. Adrian felt free in their midst to speak his mind, to be himself. They poked fun at pretense, and they were always joking, having one another on. A man could breathe around the Boscastles.
When the young lady rather shyly smiled back at him, he put his hands behind his back and pretended to examine the wedding cake. His gaze lit on the row of candied violets adorning the top tier.
“Comfits,” he said. “I haven’t had a comfit since I was five. My mother used to sneak them to me at Christmas. Afterward she’d pretend the cook had forgotten them again and she would send back to the kitchen for more.”
He glanced around. Then he reached up to pinch one from the cake. A slender white-gloved hand buttoned all the way to the elbow descended upon his wrist like a guillotine.
He grinned playfully. “Sorry. I didn’t know they had your name on them.”
She stepped around the table to show herself. Not that there was a great deal of her to show, but what Adrian observed seemed more than appealing.
Firm breasts like a pair of apples, a nipped-in waist, and the rest looked promising, or what he could see in her gray-green gown with pleated ribbons and deep flounces at the neck, wrists, and hem. She should have wings, he thought. A garden fairy with fast hands.
“They don’t have anyone’s name on them,” she said under her breath. “They’re for decoration.”
“Decoration?” he asked in amusement.
“It’s in the little touches,” she murmured. “The details.”
“Is it?” he said, eyeing her covertly again.
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” she said softly, as if comfits were some cryptic code only a certain few could interpret.
He folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t want to understand the damn things, only to eat them.”
“This is a wedding,” she reminded him, her lips parting in astonishment.
“I know what it is,” he said in a mock whisper. “I guessed the instant I spotted the bride and groom. And now I know that the comfits are yours. I wasn’t really going to take one, by the way.”
“Then why did—oh, never mind.”
“Boys,” he added, guessing what she was thinking. “We’re all the same.”
He lowered his hand obediently, noticing her lips twitch in what might have passed for another smile. She looked like a Boscastle, with her compelling blue eyes, but most of her siblings had glossy black hair, and hers was a subtle apricot gold drawn into a figure eight on her graceful nape. Her skin seemed as white, as tempting, as the thick icing on the wedding cake.
He wondered suddenly what she’d look like in the buff with that spun-gold hair twined around her breasts and backside. An angel, perhaps, who incited earthly feelings in this mortal man.
He cleared his throat a little guiltily. “I know what you mean about the details of certain wedding ceremonies,” he said. “I’ve been to jungle kingdoms where human heads are presented as part of the bride’s dowry.”
She looked at him in chagrin. “That isn’t at all what I meant.”
He sighed good-naturedly. “I didn’t think so.”
There was a long pause.
Emma did not react outwardly to his blatant teasing, inured since birth to male provocation. In fact, this gentleman had a long way to go before he could truly unsettle her, although she really shouldn’t be talking to him at all. But at least while she did, her students could not make ninnies of themselves over him, and he was in her brothers’ company.
“Isn’t it fortunate,” she asked, challenging him, “that we live in a civilized society?”
“That’s a matter of—”
Fortuitously, at that instant, the soft organ music of the small orchestra resumed its soothing recitation. Emma could not guess what he’d been about to say and concluded she was the better for her ignorance. The duke’s heir had closed his eyes, singing to himself in a surprisingly pleasant, low-pitched voice. “‘Lord Jesus Christ—’”
“This is no place for profanity, my lord,” she reprimanded him gently.
His hazel eyes opened in lazy amusement. “‘Lord Jesus Christ, be present now.’ It’s the name of the prelude.”
“Prelude?”
“Bach. The music. Don’t you recognize it?”
“Oh, Bach.” She caught her breath at the delighted grin he gave her. She thought fleetingly that he didn’t look nearly as frightening in person as the accounts of his past exploits would lead one to expect. There was no scimitar between his teeth, at least. “I am sorry,” she sa
id at last. “I wasn’t paying attention.” Not to the music, anyway.
“Think nothing of it.”
She nodded, staring across the room. His gaze stole over her. Emma only noticed this secretive infringement because she could see his reflection in the gilt-candelabra mirror that hung above the mantelpiece.
How embarrassing. She would have recognized Bach if he had not taken her off her guard with his remark about human heads. Her gaze met his in the mirror. Her cheeks flushed with an unseemly warmth.
He smiled again, with an open candor that rendered it impossible for her to ignore him. It wasn’t appropriate, the headmistress of an academy flirting with a soldier of fortune, family friend or not. And at a wedding, mind you. It was a good thing her girls had gone into the small ballroom with Charlotte.
If her students hoped to catch Emma in an indiscretion, she trusted she would disappoint them. She was a widowed viscountess of no great wealth but of a stable, respected place in Society. She accepted her purpose in life, and not only as the founder of an academy for the edification of London’s young ladies. As the elder sister of a band of scandal-prone siblings, she had offered herself to serve as the moral compass of the clan.
The fact that none of the free-spirited Boscastles bothered to consult a compass and consequently wandered through life willy-nilly could not be attributed to negligence on her part. Emma had fought to save her sibs. Heaven knew how she’d fought.
She took great pains to preserve the family name whilst her family did everything possible to taint it. Take the tall, recklessly handsome man who kept studying her in the mirror. Heir to a dukedom notwithstanding, he hardly appeared to be a man with whom a lady should share more than a glancing nod.
And yet there was a playful appeal about him that made her wish she could kick up her heels and indulge in that infamous Boscastle behavior. A few moments of dangerous flirtation, she thought wistfully. She’d married at eighteen, a debutante, and she should have settled into sedate widowhood.
You’re the good girl, Emma, both her parents had praised her before they died. You’re our de
The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke Page 1