Chapter Fourteen #3
Slowly, he told himself. She deserved his time, the best he could give her after their initial awkward indiscretion. “I am trying to control myself,” he explained. “I’m afraid I feel a little wild at times.”
“My wild wolf.”
“Tame me, Emma.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Sometimes a lady knows when to appreciate what nature has unleashed. A storm over the mountains. Rain at a summer picnic. A duke who does not follow the rules of his realm…”
His heartbeat raced so that it hurt to draw a breath into his lungs. Sexual tension gripped his muscles, thickened the very air he shared with her. His cock ached heavily in his trousers. How he craved this woman.
She pressed herself into his hand.
With a low growl at this unexpected enticement, he pulled off his damp glove and sought the sweet tenderness of her flesh. Her submission. He had waited for her capitulation, knowing that he was hers from the first time he’d seen her.
“You must think me a devil,” he said in a raw voice. “I have deliberately enticed you to abandon those principles you esteem.”
“And what,” she asked in a voice even deeper than his own, “if I admit to you, my devil, that it is you I esteem most dearly? That I would give up everything to be yours?”
He rubbed his free hand over his face. “Then I am yours to do with as you wish. Polish me. Instruct me. Turn me into one of those mincing Englishmen you admire. I care not. Just don’t refuse me, Emma. Make me into whatever you wish, but I beg you with all my heart, make me yours.”
The Boscastles, Heath reflected in annoyance, had never exactly been known for their patience.
Drake had practically drummed a hole in the library desktop.
Gabriel had gone through three of Heath’s best cigars.
Devon kept wandering back and forth to the window until at length he had settled in his chair to nod off.
It was, therefore, a relief when the eldest Boscastle brother, Grayson, graced them with his domineering presence. “Did you hear a suspicious noise when you entered the house?” Heath asked, not one to waste words.
Grayson shrugged out of his cloak. “It was probably me slamming the door. Am I too late?”
“That depends,” Heath said, sitting back in his chair. “Does Jane know you are here?”
“Of course not,” Grayson said. “Have I not always been the soul of discretion? Jane is preoccupied with some new Italian shoemaker. At least that’s what she said.”
Devon started to laugh. “She knows.”
“Precisely what does she know that I have not been apprised of?” Grayson inquired with a dark look around the room.
“Sit down,” Heath said. “And I shall tell you the facts as I understand them. It started less than a fortnight ago at a wedding…”
Grayson frowned. “It always starts at a wedding.”
Heath paused. “On second thought, I would feel better if one of you walked around the house to investigate the noise we just heard. I’m willing to stake my name that it was not a door slamming.”
Harriet stood in vigil in the garden beneath Lady Lyons’s bedchamber as she had countless times for her brothers during the course of one of their Mayfair robberies.
This was an easier lay, though, even if less exciting.
She couldn’t see a bleeding thing from her hiding place and while she wouldn’t go to gaol if she got caught, she wouldn’t win a purse of sparklers, either.
Nothing had happened.
Not a glimpse of his nibs playing at rantum scantum with Lady L, an event that, by Harriet’s estimation, should be under way at this moment.
She sank down on the summerhouse steps. She’d been half hoping to hear her ladyship screaming off her garret, her with her grand manners and all.
“Her silence tells the true story, don’t it?” Harriet whispered to the skinny gray cat who’d wandered up to sniff at her shoes. “You and I have our share of secrets, eh, Puss?”
Harriet had seen enough of life in Seven Dials to gather that men and women took an inordinate pleasure in joining giblets. But while Harriet might be a liar and a thief, she cherished her own virtue. Not that it mattered much to a girl destined for Newgate. Still, Harriet—
The cat turned its head. Harriet blinked, hearing footsteps from the direction of the kitchen. Someone muttering in annoyance about the bench she’d dragged across the door in the event a busybody decided to snoop about the garden. Lord Wolf hadn’t paid her for that particular act of precaution.
She’d collect it from him later, with interest, if he had a good night.
The door rattled harder. A disembodied voice from an upstairs window called down to her.
“Psst. Harriet.” That Butterfield pipsqueak’s reedy voice wafted down. “Miss Boscastle is looking for you.”
She shot to her feet. “Hell’s bloody bells.”
There was nothing to do for it. She had to hide Romeo’s ladder from yon idiot banging at the door, not to mention hiding her own sorrowful self from Charlotte Boscastle’s patrol.
It wasn’t the first time she’d hefted a ladder over her scrawny little back in the name of impropriety; it probably wouldn’t be the last. Still, at this rate she could go into retirement on what his lordship owed her for doing her duty.