In My Wildest Fantasies (Love at Pembroke Palace Book 1)

by Julianne MacLean

  “No,” she replied. “But he is coming tomorrow, thank goodness.”

  “Devon!” the duke called out. “How wonderful that you have returned! And your beautiful wife. You are a work of art, dear girl.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace,” she replied with a smile.

  “I see you have a letter from Vincent,” Devon said.

  “Indeed, I do.” The duke handed the letter over. “And just look at the sunset, will you? I dare say, we are doing well.”

  Devon exchanged a curious look with Blake, then read the letter. A knot tightened in his gut, and he ran a hand down over his face.

  “Surely not,” he said, holding the letter out to Blake.

  Blake read it, too. “Good God. No, he can’t be serious. He’s engaged?”

  “Yes!” the duke said, dancing about on the steps. “Oh, Vincent, I am so proud. I shall give him my best shotgun for hunting. Or maybe that pair of boots he sometimes borrowed without asking. And look at the weather, would you, please?”

  They all turned and admired the colorful sunset on the horizon.

  “Who is the lady?” Rebecca asked, while Devon was still unable to speak, for he was in shock. Blake handed her the letter.

  “Goodness,” she said. “It is Lady Letitia, the Duke of Swinburne’s daughter.” She glanced at Charlotte, who was biting her lip. “She will be our sister-in-law.”

  “Vincent has acted too hastily,” Devon said. “He has not given it adequate thought.”

  “When did adequate thought ever get a man to the altar?” the duke asked. “A young, robust man needs to listen to his doodle-dasher. Eh? Eh?”

  Blake sighed. “She is a handsome woman. That was probably enough for Vincent, under the circumstances.”

  “She is the perfect young gel,” the duke said cheerfully. “I shall adore her. He is bringing her home tomorrow.”

  Devon inhaled deeply and looked back toward the sunset. Rebecca laid a gloved hand on his arm, expressing her understanding.

  “So, it appears the curse has been thwarted, for the time being at least,” Devon said, with a notable sense of defeat as he looked into his wife’s lovely, knowing eyes.

  “Indeed, thwarted!” his father shouted triumphantly. “Now, do tell me, what time is supper? I am hungry for beef.”

  “Shall we enjoy the diary tonight?” Devon asked, pushing through the large portrait on the wall in Rebecca’s bedchamber and closing it softly behind him. He stopped and turned around, however, to swing the portrait open and closed a few times. “These hinges need to be greased.”

  Suddenly his wife leaped onto his back and wrapped her legs around his waist. He laughed, and she dropped to her feet on the floor, pulled him around to face her, and crushed his lips with hers.

  “Where were you?” she asked, after a deep and tantalizing kiss. “I thought you would never get here.”

  He somehow managed to get an apology out between laughter and more kisses. “I’m sorry—Blake kept me late in the library.”

  Rebecca pulled his shirt out from inside his breeches and lifted it up to his chest, then went down on her knees, kissing his bare stomach along the way, probing his navel with her tongue. He was instantly, overwhelmingly aroused.

  She looked up at him with a wicked smile as she unfastened his trousers. “I shall read to you from the diary tonight,” she told him, “but this will be the last time.”

  “Why the last?”

  “Because after tonight, we shall contrive our own fantasies and write our own future.” She pulled his breeches down to his ankles and rose to her feet, while he ripped his shirt off over his head.

  “But before we put it away for good,” she added, “I thought you might like to know what happens to Lydie and Jess.” She pulled off her nightdress, tossed it to the floor, and climbed onto the bed.

  “I admit I’ve been curious.”

  She rested her cheek on a hand and beckoned him with a smile. “Come here, then.” She patted the spot beside her and pulled the book out from beneath her pillow. “Now, where did we leave off?”

  He slipped beneath the covers and faced her. “I’ll be happy to listen to anything you wish to read to me.”

  She flipped through the pages, then settled on an entry toward the end. “In that case, lie back and listen.”

  He obeyed her command—all ears as she began to read.

  “Dear Diary,

  “Today I learned an important lesson, the most important of my life.

  “He came, as I hoped and dreamed he would. I had only just finished writing my last words to you when I heard a commotion downstairs at the inn. It was my love, Jess, who had followed my father’s coach and found us in London. He came bursting through my door like a white knight. He faced my father with a sword and demanded my hand in marriage, and my father could do nothing but submit. Father let me go, and Jess took me away. My brave hero, Jess, who did it because he loves me.”

  Devon laid a hand on Rebecca’s arm, touching her with his own love. She continued reading.

  “That was one week ago, and we were married today. I love him more than life itself, and I know we will be happy. We will have children together and raise them in a happy home, and I will forever be thankful for the day we met.

  “So my lesson, Diary, is this: One must always believe in what the heart knows, and never give up on it. Jess is the world to me, as I am the world to him. We are everything to each other. This is bliss.”

  Rebecca closed the diary and placed it on the bedside table, then faced Devon without a word.

  For a long time, he looked at her, then he inched closer and wrapped his arms around her waist. “I am glad they found their bliss,” he said. “I have found mine, too.”

  “Oh, Devon.” She took his face in her hands and kissed him.

  “I would not have understood those words a month ago,” he told her, “for I did not know the true meaning of bliss until you entered my life.”

  “But what about the pain you once knew?” she asked. “You had not forgiven yourself for what happened between you and Vincent four years ago, and you used your guilt to put distance between us. Are you able to truly let go of that now?”

  He touched her face and ran a finger over her hair. “I will always regret what happened, and I will always feel pain when I think of it, but I will not continue to feel dead inside, as I have for the past three years. I have come home, and my heart has come back to life. I have found happiness again, thanks to you. And perhaps someday, I will earn Vincent’s forgiveness, though it will not be easy with Letitia as his wife. The woman despises me for choosing you. She will encourage his bitterness.”

  Rebecca kissed Devon in the lamplight, and he rolled her over onto her back, using his lips and mouth to express his love for her with tireless devotion to both her emotional and erotic pleasures. For an hour he delighted her senses, sent passionate jolts of excitement to her core, and filled her with a yearning he had every intention of fulfilling.

  When he finally entered her in the darkness, she cried out and pulled him close, and he made love to her gently and tenderly, looking into her eyes the entire time, moving with great care and attention to detail. He used every skill he possessed as a man to work her up to a powerful climax, and the instant he felt her body tremble and shudder beneath his own, he, too, surrendered to his own pleasures, feeling the shimmering heat of absolute love fill his whole being.

  They fell asleep for a short time with his body still inside hers, then they woke to make love again.

  It was almost dawn when they finally surrendered to sleep, their bodies drained and sated, and if not for the knocking at their door at daybreak, Devon would have slept until noon.

  But it was not to be that morning. He was forced to rise and pull on his trousers. He left Rebecca sleeping and crossed the room to answer the persistent
caller. When he opened the door, there stood his mother with a sleeping infant in her arms.

  “What is this?” Devon whispered, not sure if he might in fact be dreaming.

  “We have a problem,” the duchess said flatly, in a quiet voice so as not to wake Rebecca. “A woman just left this child on the doorstep. A few of the footmen are out searching the grounds at this very moment, hoping to catch her.”

  “There is no indication who the woman was?” Devon asked.

  “We have this.” She handed him a note, and he blinked sleepily, willing his eyes to focus on the elegant penmanship. It was too dark to read any of it in the corridor, so he carried the note to the bed and lit the lamp, then read what it said.

  He turned to face his mother, who was still standing in the doorway.

  Rebecca sat up, clutching the covers to her neck. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t quite know,” the duchess said. “This baby was just left here, and I do not think Lady Letitia is going to be happy about it when she arrives to have her engagement announced later today.”

  Rebecca became instantly wide awake. “It’s Vincent’s?”

  “That is what the letter writer claims,” Adelaide replied.

  Devon collapsed onto a chair. “If that is true, this is his bed. He made it. He will have to lie in it.”

  At that moment, the baby began to babble in the sweetest, most adorable manner, and Rebecca leaped out of bed with the sheet wrapped around her, and joined the duchess in the doorway to indulge in a very maternal round of doting, coddling, and cooing.

  Excerpt from The Mistress Diaries

  Read on for an excerpt from book two in the

  Love at Pembroke Palace Series.

  He told me he would treat my heart with great care. He was lying of course, for it was all a very clever, skillful seduction…

  Cassandra Montrose cannot deny that she lost her head a year ago when she was whisked out of a London ballroom by Lord Vincent Sinclair, the most desirable man she’d ever met. She never imagined that she could engage in such wicked behavior with a man she barely knew, but in that heated moment, alone in his coach, the passion she felt for him was undeniable—even though she knew that after her surrender, she was unlikely to ever see her lover again.

  Until a fateful secret brings her to his door…

  Cassandra always believed that her pride would prevent her from becoming any man’s mistress – especially a rogue like Vincent, who cares for nothing but his inheritance. Yet she has a very good reason to remain in his life. If only he did not tempt her so…

  “Enthralling, passionate, and suspenseful

  till the very last page is turned…”

  – ReaderToReader.com

  The Mistress Diaries

  Excerpt Copyright © 2020

  Julianne MacLean Publishing Inc.

  Prologue

  I have always considered myself a woman of high moral fiber. How then could I have done such a thing? Where were my values and principles? But of course, I know the answer to those questions. It was without a doubt the blinding intensity of his charm, which made me forget everything I believed in.

  —from the journal of

  Cassandra Montrose,

  Lady Colchester,

  May 14,1873

  Lord Vincent Sinclair kicked open the door of the sumptuous London hotel room with staggering brute force and carried Cassandra Montrose, Lady Colchester, across the threshold.

  Already delightfully tousled and flushed, for he had kissed her senseless in the coach the entire way there, Cassandra laughed and wrapped her arms tighter around his neck.

  “I cannot believe we are doing this,” she said. “How shall I live with myself in the morning? You are a very bad influence, Lord Vincent—a rake of the highest order.”

  He grinned and kicked the door shut behind him, then carried her across the rose-scented room in a glorious fluttering of silks and lace. He set her down by the enormous mahogany bed draped in crimson and gold velvet.

  “How wonderful that you are aware of my most distinguished reputation, darling. Now I can be sure there will be no unrealistic expectations in the morning, no tears or broken hearts.” He grinned flirtatiously, his eyes smoldering with wickedness. “In that regard, I suppose I should warn you now. I am not the kind of man a woman should pin her hopes on.”

  She raised a mischievous eyebrow. “As I said, a very bad influence indeed.”

  Pulling at his white cambric bow tie and unbuttoning the top of his shirt, he smiled with devilish intent. “I assure you, Lady Colchester, I have not yet even begun to be a bad influence. My best is yet to come.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  He paused a moment just to look at her, then slowly removed the mother-of-pearl combs in her hair and slid the pins from her upswept locks, tucking them into his breast pocket with a confident glimmer in his eye.

  Cassandra’s heart drummed with anticipation as her hair came loose and fell onto her shoulders. She had never imagined she would ever be so bold, so brazen, as to leave a ball and dash off into the night with a darkly handsome stranger she had only just met, a reputed rake and heartbreaker. But she supposed life was full of surprises—and not all of them as exciting as this one was turning out to be.

  For that reason alone, she deserved this night of pleasure, didn’t she?

  Yes. One night of passion before she went forward with her life. It was more than she ever would have imagined for herself earlier that evening when she had almost resigned herself to a loveless marriage for the second time in her life.

  Almost.

  Vincent took her face in his hands, ran his thumbs lightly over her cheeks and gazed into her eyes with urgency. “I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “You put a spell on me, and when the night was coming to an end, I knew I couldn’t part from you. I had to steal you away.”

  He took her into his arms and held her for a brief, breathtaking moment before he lowered his mouth to hers. The kiss was deep, damp, and tasted of champagne, and the intimate stroke of his tongue was so gratifying, so stimulating to her senses, she wondered how she was ever going to survive the multitude of pleasures to come.

  He slowly turned her to face the bed, then began to unfasten the tiny pearl buttons at the back of her gown. Cassandra shivered at the sensation of his skillful fingers working down her back, and when he slid the lace neckline off her shoulder, she melted, for his hand was warm as it brushed lightly over her skin. He touched his lips to her nape, and her entire being trembled within.

  With measured proficiency, he turned her to face him again and began to undress her, keeping his eyes fixed on hers the entire time.

  As she met his penetrating gaze, she recognized something dark and cynical in his eyes—something almost dangerous. It was as if he wanted her to see it and to know that he was not to be romanticized. This is not love, he seemed to be telling her. Nothing will come of it. This is just one night.

  Strangely, however, she was not deterred. She had no reservations about what they were about to do. She wanted only to experience the sexual act as it was meant to be experienced—with a man who knew exactly how to awaken a woman to real pleasure.

  Carefully, he dealt with the clasp on her priceless jeweled necklace. He peeled her gloves from her hands, laying soft kisses on her wrists, then knelt before her and removed her satin slippers and silk stockings, one leg at time.

  Whenever he bared more of her hungry, yearning flesh, he laid a kiss in that place and touched her with teasing, featherlike fingers that made her ache and burn for more. It was the most exquisite undressing of her life.

  At last she was standing naked before him, openly, without shyness or modesty, aroused by the cool air on her feverish body. She had never felt so beautiful, so feminine.

  Nor had she ever felt so reckless. It was
outside anything she had ever done, and she prayed she would not burn in Hell for it—for giving in to her sexual desires so heedlessly with a man she barely knew, without a care for the consequences. But the fact of the matter was, she cared for nothing at this moment but her own pleasures.

  What was it about this man? No wonder he was famous for his seductions.

  Sliding a hand down the plush line of her hip, she reveled in her arousal while he swept his gaze appreciatively from her eager eyes to her full breasts, then down her long, slender legs. There was a dark hunger in his expression as he began to remove his own black and white formalwear—his jacket, his white tie and white waistcoat, his trousers and underclothes. He tossed everything to the floor, even his heavy pocket watch and cuff links, then stood nude by the bed, his strong, muscular body gleaming in the golden lamplight.

  Cassandra was mesmerized. All she could do was stand and wait, breath held, for him to touch her.

  Gazing into the blue depths of her eyes, he stepped forward, and her heart quickened with need. Were they really going to do this? She was trembling with anticipation.

  He took her upper arms in his hands, then covered her mouth with his. The kiss was fierce, deep and insistent. A moment later he was easing her onto the bed, their bodies entwined intimately on the soft crimson covers.

  “You have bewitched me,” he whispered as he dropped hot kisses down her quivering belly. “I knew from the first moment I saw you that I had to have you.”

  “I felt it, too,” she replied, “just as I feel it now. I can barely comprehend it. All I want is to give myself to you completely. I want nothing else. It makes no sense when we have only just met.”

  Bold words, all of them, and foolish, when she considered what she knew of this man—that he was the wildly disreputable son of a duke and could send the blood rushing to her head with mere kisses alone. But she couldn’t think straight when he touched her, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fathom anything outside of this blissful need to be close to him, even if it was only for one night.