Never Tempt a Rogue: A Rogues' Rulebook Novella

by Christy Carlyle

  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.