Touch of a Scoundrel (Touch of Seduction 3) Page 10

  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.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Emmaline 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.”

  CHAPTER 12

  When Devon finally made it downstairs after his ablutions, he was met at the foot of the steps by his butler.

  “Good morning, your lordship. One trusts you slept well.” It was Baxter’s standard morning greeting and did not require a response. The butler held a silver salver before him with a single card on it.

  “Despite the earliness of the hour, Lord Northrop has come calling. He awaits your pleasure in the parlor,” Baxter said with an irritated sniff.

  Devon suspected it upset his butler’s agenda when members of the aristocracy forgot the accepted hours for receiving guests and appeared willy-nilly at inopportune times.

  “Shall one inform him that you are not at home?”

  Baxter wasn’t proposing he tell a lie. Such a thing would be as far removed from that worthy servant’s righteous imagination as the outrageous idea of sitting down in his employers’ presence. “Not at home” might well mean “not receiving guests at this time” for any number of reasons, even if one was on the premises.

  Or more sinisterly, it might signify “not at home” to the specific visitor. That carried almost as sharp a sting as a direct cut.

  The convention was understood by all.

  All but Northrop. If Lionel Norris, Marquess of Northrop, was told such a thing, he would roar through the house in any case in search of Devon. Northrop had no patience for anyone else’s schedule. Devon’s mercurial friend cared only that his own be disrupted as little as possible.

  “No, I’ll see him,” Devon said. He hoped his friend wasn’t in search of another loan. Northrop was always light in the pockets and just as perpetually forgetful about repaying his debts.

  He had been his frequent companion since their days at Oxford together. Northrop didn’t come into his title until much later, long after he had passed the age of majority. But when they were boys together, he understood how the weight of the peerage acquired early bore down on Devon and did his best to lighten matters. Even if their interests had diverged spectacularly since their school days, they still had a solid past as the foundation of their friendship. Loyalty was something upon which no man could put a price.

  And Northrop was nothing if not doggedly faithful.

  To his friends, at least. Devon knew better than to inquire too closely on that subject with respect to Northrop’s mistresses.

  Devon found him sprawling on one of Lady Devonwood’s favorite wing chairs, a thigh slung over its brocade-covered arm. Northrop’s booted foot tapped out the rhythm of a tune only he could hear. His chin rested in his palm in an air of total boredom. His jacket and waistcoat were cut in the first stare of fashion, but the elegant fabric was so wrinkled it was obvious he’d passed the night in them. The top two buttons of Northrop’s shirt were undone. His collar was missing a stud, sticking out on one side at an odd angle.

  A shock of dark hair fell over his forehead, nearly obscuring eyes that were blue as the surf off Brighton on a summer’s day. Northrop didn’t twitch so much as an eyelash when Devon entered with Baxter in his wake.

  “Hullo, Dev,” Northrop slurred. “You’re unusually late to rise.”

  “And you’re unusually early to call.”

  “Not me. Haven’t been to bed yet. Why don’t you keep a dram of whisky in this blasted parlor?” Northrop shot an evil glare at Baxter. The whites of his eyes were shot through with tiny ribbons of red. He’d either been drinking all night or someone’s finger had poked him soundly in both sockets. “All that one would offer me is tea.”

  He shuddered as if Baxter had suggested he drink hemlock.

  Devon glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel. Only half past ten. When Northrop was this deeply in his cups it was very hard to fish him out of them. Best thing to do was see him safely under the table with more spirits and let him sleep it off.

  “Fetch some whisky, Baxter.” Devon turned back to his friend and took the other wing chair. “To what are we drinking this fine morning?”

  “To heaven. To hell. To how many angels can dance on the bloody head of a bloody pin. What do I care?”

  “Good.” Devon hitched a leg over the arm of the chair in conscious imitation of the marquess. Later he’d move his leg back down and Northrop would probably follow suit. He often used this technique to settle his friend. “I thought we might be drinking to your health and I’d hate to waste the whisky. Seems to me that’s a lost cause.”

  Northrop cast him a withering glance.

  Baxter returned with two tumblers of amber liquid and served both gentlemen. Devon made to clink rims with Northrop, but his friend tipped up his glass and drained the contents in one swallow without waiting for a toast. Baxter raised his brows wordlessly and sidled from the room.

  “You’re vexed over something,” Devon guessed.

  Northrop lifted his empty glass in an equally empty toast. “High marks to you, Griffin. You were always the brightest of the three of us.”

  He referred to the trio of friends who styled themselves the “Fallen Angels.” Devon, Lord Northrop, and Lord Kingsley had formed the unholy trinity while they were at Oxford. Tales of their bad behavior set the bar quite high for would-be scoundrels who hoped to follow their example. Devon and Kingsley had grown up since then. The jury was still out on Northrop.

  Devon let his leg slide off the arm of the chair and sat upright.

  “A regular Lucifer the Light-bearer in the flesh, that’s you.” Northrop eyed his glass as if considering whether or not to lick its sides for the last of the whisky, then laughed, raucously and belatedly, at his own wit. He slid his leg off the arm of the chair and let his boot hit the parlor floor with a resounding thud. “Of course, I’m vexed. I had to hear about it at White’s, for God’s sake, instead of from you. How could you keep this opportunity from me when you know damned well it could be the answer to all my money woes?”

  Better stewardship would be the answer for his friend’s money woes, but Devon knew better than to suggest it. Northrop might not mind taking loans, but he was adamant about not taking advice.

  “What the devil are you talking about?” Devon asked.

  “That bleeding statue, of course, the Titty-sharing thing-gummy. What did you think?” The tumbler slipped from Northrop’s fingers and shattered on the polished hardwood. “Sorry about that. Deucedly clumsy of me.”

  Devon waved away his apology. What was Sheridan crystal among friends? “How did you happen to hear about the Tetisheri statue?”

  “I told you. I was at White’s and who should be there but your brother with an older gent. Thick as thieves, the pair of them, huddled over a thick journal, nattering away at something in a secretive manner.” Northrop leaned back into the tufted wing chair. “Well, nothing draws a crowd like a secret, you know.”

  He looked hopefully at Devon’s whisky glass, but Devon didn’t see the need to ring for another one for his friend, even though he was certain Baxter lurked just on the other side of the doorjamb. If Northrop was already unable to keep a tumbler in his grasp, he’d be safely snoring soon.

  “At any rate,” Northrop went on since no more whisky seemed to be in the offing, “pretty soon someone asks Theodore what’s the meaning of all those odd little squiggles and drawings in his book. Frankly, I suspected they had a stash of French postcards hidden in there, myself.”

  Trust Northrop to hope for pictures of women in lewd positions and indecent states of undress. Northrop changed mistresses more often than some men changed their socks.

  “Imagine my surprise when I find out there’s a treasure to tempt Midas hidden in the Egyptian sands. And it seems our Teddy’s got hold of the map, as it were.” Northrop pressed a fist to his breastbone to stifle a belch. He was less than successful. “Then I learn your brother’s all set
to mount an expedition to recover the hoard.”

  So much for keeping the statue a secret till Dr. Farnsworth was ready to present his scholarly paper on the subject at his mother’s house party.

  “Trust me, the investigation is still in the preliminary stages,” Devon said. “No one should be contemplating an expedition yet.”

  “Well, they are, and it was damned bad form of you not to let your friends sign on with the first subscription of investors.”

  “Investors?”

  “Yes, the way fellows were clamoring to be allowed to buy into the enterprise, I wouldn’t be surprised if Teddy’s already incorporated the damned thing and sold stock certificates. I certainly would have,” Northrop said, his speech as thick as his tongue. “I’d expect Theodore not to come to me with it. But you, Dev, what are you thinking to keep such a thing from your friends? If we split the expedition between you and me and Kingsley, we’ll be rich as Croesus when all’s said and done. Now, whatever they find, it’s likely to be divided so many ways, the riches will be like a trickle of water when it ought to have been a flood.” He shook his head. “Badly done, old son. Badly done.”

  “First of all,” Devon said testily, “you haven’t any money to invest.”

  “I would if you loaned it to me.”

  “Not a farthing.” Devon rose and pulled his friend to his feet. “Come, Northrop. Be serious. Do you really think I’d keep you from something I thought had a Chinaman’s chance of success? You’re drunk and you’re rambling. Let’s take a turn around the garden to clear your head and I’ll send you home in my barouche.”

  Devon’s chest constricted at the thought of running into Emmaline in the garden after his erotic dream and just as deeply erotic bath. All he wanted was a few moments with her to prove to himself he wasn’t a mindless, rutting beast, but she’d been adroit at avoiding him.

  Devon was counting on the fact that he had Lord Northrop with him to keep Emmaline from bolting when she saw him approach. He understood why she took pains to steer clear of private speech with him, but he chafed at not being able to talk with her at all. With his slightly tipsy friend in tow, Devon could force a conversation without seeming boorish.