2Rakehell

Debra Glass

Lady Primrose Black has a dilemma.
Her father-in-law’s dying wish is that she reunite with her estranged husband
and produce an heir. She hasn’t laid eyes on Lord Black since their wedding
night five years ago, when he left Scarborough Hall in a rage. Nevertheless,
she resolves to find him, knowing once she does she will have to use every
method at her disposal to entice the rake she never stopped loving.

Viscount Adam Black harbors dark
needs and he will accept no less than his wife’s complete and utter surrender.
Each sensual encounter leaves Primrose wanting more but as she submits to her
husband’s every decadent desire, she resolves not to lose him again. For the
secret that drove Adam away still haunts him. And this time it could prove
fatal for them both.

Inside Scoop:
This
nineteenth-century heroine explores her naughty side in this Victorian romance
with BDSM elements.

A Romantica®
historical erotic romance
from
Ellora’s Cave

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to several author friends without
whose selfless help this book would not have been possible. To the best editors
in the world, Kelli Collins and Julie Naughton. To Lynne Connolly, my eyes and
ears on British soil, for sharing her invaluable knowledge of lords and their
ladies fair. To Naima Simone for plotting with me and reading this story in the
works. More than once, I might add. To my dear friend, Stormy Pate, for her
twists turned out over hurried lunches. And to Alexandra Christian with whom I
share a muse.

London, 1898

“You ain’t one o’ them singers o’ Psalms are ye now?”

Primrose didn’t know which of her senses assailed her the
most. She flinched at the grating sound of the woman’s East End accent and
struggled against the urge to avert her gaze from the soot-covered face, the
soiled and gaping bodice of a threadbare frock, the almost maniacal gap-toothed
grin.

The bitter-almond stench and brown smoke of opium hung heavy
in the air, compelling Primrose to plunge her hand into her reticule and
retrieve a handkerchief with which to cover her nose.

“Wotch yerself, Trudy!” a second woman blared and then raked
her hand under her nose as she sniffed mightily. “That’s a regular lady yer
addressin’.”

Trudy scoffed. The fetid air she huffed set a strand of her
greasy brown hair in motion. “She ain’t no lady, Betsy. By the sound of her
she’s an American!”

Betsy slapped at her compatriot to shush her. “Don’t mind
her none, ma’am.” She grinned with pride. “I knows a lady when I sees one.”

Primrose straightened, refusing to retreat behind the two
burly stable hands she’d brought from Scarborough Hall.

Clad in a loose-fitting suit of gray, a sallow-skinned
Chinese man with a long rat’s tail of a braid slithering over his shoulder
approached. He bowed slightly. “You here to partake?” he asked in thickly
accented English.

Primrose nervously wound the drawstring on her reticule
around her fingers. He’d just asked her if she intended to smoke one of the
opium pipes!

In looking around at the odd conglomeration of classes
lolling on pallets and shelf-like beds lining the walls like corpses in the
catacombs, she wondered if other ladies, such as her, came to this squalid
place. Here, there existed no distinction between the haves and the have-nots.
The fine hairs prickled at her nape. “No,” she blurted. “I was told I might find…Lord
Black here.”

“Ah, Lord Black! Good customer,” the little man said. His
thin lips stretched into a smile. He stepped aside and gestured toward the back
of the squalid den. “Lord Black in back.”

Primrose gulped. She’d ventured quite far enough into this
den of iniquity. Acrid bile rose in her throat at the very idea of entering farther.
Fear that she might not ever see the light of day again bedeviled her, but she
willed it away. If Black was indeed in this awful place it was up to her to
drag him out.

His most recent brush with an untimely end was incentive
enough to retrieve him, but today, Primrose had a more pressing reason to
return Black to Scarborough Hall.

She glanced back uncertainly at Mathers and Hawkshaw before
she lifted the hem of her day gown off the grimy cobbled floor and started
toward the rear of the den. On her left and right men of the peerage and the
lower classes alike lay in all states of undress alongside naked women Primrose
could only presume were prostitutes. One couple was actually copulating out in
the open for all to see. Not that anyone seemed to care. Still, Primrose
shielded her peripheral vision with her hand.

Most of these people were under the spell of the demon drug.
In spite of propriety, the sight of the woman astride the man’s…privates…magnetically
compelled Primrose to peep between her fingers. Warmth flooded her and she
quickly squelched her immoral yearnings. “Such vile and wanton behavior,” she
snapped under her breath.

Toward the back, terraced berths were filled with all manner
of people, mostly sailors with their heads thrown back, their chins tipped up,
their dulled gazes turned on the newcomers.

Was it any wonder Black had been beset by bandits?

She flinched, recalling the headline brought to her
attention only yesterday.
Lord Black Foils East End Burglary and Attempted
Murder.

But were it not for the news she probably would have never
found him.

From the black shadows, red lights waxed and waned in the
bowls of the pipes.

This place must truly be hell and its denizens the very
devils spoken of in the good book. Primrose swallowed thickly as she peered
closely at a man to determine he wasn’t the one she sought.
If this is hell,
then why do their expressions indicate such rapture?
She shook off the
sinful voice in her head and silently prided herself that she had never fallen
prey to such hedonistic desires.

“My lady?” Hawkshaw asked softly as if he might rouse some
of the demons from their opium-induced stupor. “That him?”

Primrose squinted as she stepped toward what appeared to be
a man lying on a silk bed between two completely nude women whose limbs draped
possessively over his. One of the long, narrow opium pipes lay discarded at the
side of the bed.

She hadn’t laid eyes on Lord Black in the five years since their
wedding night. But even in this sordid place, her heart fluttered as she
recognized her husband.

But for the nasty bruise over his left eye, he looked
content—so unlike the last time she’d seen him, his expression stormy and
black, his hair wild about his swarthy face, his amber eyes glittering like the
garnet pin secured in the folds of his snowy neckcloth. In his wedding finery,
he’d been devastatingly handsome.

Naked, even after all this time, he was magnificent.

Dark hairs wisped across the muscled plane of his chest,
growing thicker and wilder as they formed a tight trail leading from his navel
downward. Primrose pursed her lips as she looked her fill at his flaccid
phallus, lying so innocently in its nest of curls.

Her breathing hitched as she recalled how that particular
part of his anatomy had looked on their wedding night. Erect, proud—and
terrifying.

Then she’d been but a green debutante, barely old enough to
marry and wholly unprepared to become a wife.

Well, she was different now. Older. More mature. Better
acquainted with the depths of deception men would go to in order to advance
themselves in the world.

Lord Black hadn’t changed. That was obvious. He was still a
rakehell and a rogue.

She kept that foremost in her mind as terror that he could
have easily been killed at the hands of some back-alley mobsman.

With her thumb and index finger, Primrose lifted one of the
women’s hands off his chest, flung it aside, and then punched him in the
shoulder. Hard.

His eyes snapped open and focused. His clouded gaze collided
with hers and held. Then the hardness returned. The ice. His brows lowered.
“I’ve died and gone to hell.”

“Not quite yet, dear husband.”

He shirked free of one of the women and raked a hand through
his hair. “I never figured you for a bounden slave in the trammels of opium.”

Primrose resisted the impulse to sigh lest she breathe in
the substance and contaminate herself. “Get up from there. I’ve come to fetch
you back to Scarborough Hall.”

At that he laughed heartily. “You?” He chortled again.

She tightened her fingers around the ribbons of her reticule
to keep from trembling. She’d vowed to hate him—and hate him she did—so why did
the mere sight of him still turn her insides to porridge?

He reached for the pipe and hailed a Chinese boy who sat
waiting to assist.

“No!” Primrose knocked it away. “I’ll not permit it.”

His eyebrow arched wickedly. She half thought he might in
his drugged craze lunge after her and pummel her senseless, though she’d only
ever witnessed his temper once when he’d struck the wall in their bedchamber.

“Well, my little wife has grown a spine.” His admiring gaze
raked her from head to toe and then back up again, causing chills to rise on
her flesh in spite of the close confines of the den. “I thought you’d
hightailed it back to New York. What pray tell has you venturing into an opium
den in Whitechapel to drag me away from this pair of very willing women?”

She winced at his barb as one of the women began to stir.
When the ginger-haired female—who most assuredly had never once been referred
to as a lady—reached for Adam’s privates, Primrose gasped and turned her head
away.

“My lord, you’re positively indecent.” And yet, was that a
twinge of jealousy nibbling at her? She shivered and twisted her head farther
in the opposite direction. God forbid.

“There, there, pet.” His plaintive coos to the woman raised
Primrose’s hackles. She’d thought she’d heard it all until he continued. “My
wife’s about and though I’d relish another tumble with you at least let me rid
myself of her first.”

Primrose could ignore his jibes no longer. All thought of
delicacy, of delivering bad news to him gently, faded as she snapped her head
around. “Your father is on his deathbed and had he not called out for you
specifically, trust me,” she spewed, gesturing expansively toward the den’s
occupants, “I’d leave you here to wither away with this lot of miscreants and
reprobates.”

Adam stared and for a brief instant Primrose recognized a
shard of remorse that softened the gemstone hardness in his eyes. Jerking her
chin, she reminded herself of the single time before she’d seen that look. But
that was long ago and she was no longer a child in love, an innocent offered up
for the slaughter.

He sat and reached, initially Primrose thought, for his
clothes, which lay in a rumpled heap at the foot of the bed. Instead he
retrieved his opium pipe and beckoned the Chinese boy to return. The child, no
more than ten, rushed forward and prepared the drug. Adam’s shoulders rose and
fell with a deep breath. “Go home, Primrose. The earl doesn’t need me at his
side.” His tone indicated resignation.

In stark disbelief, Primrose watched him breathe in the
smoke as she tried to sort out the myriad facts presented her. He’d denied her.
He’d turned his back on his father, the Earl of Thorley.

And oh dear Lord in heaven, Adam had uttered her name. How
could the sound of it coming from his lips still cause her heart to beat like a
wild bird’s wings in flight?

She hated him for still having the ability to render her
thunderstruck.

The muscles in his face relaxed and he sank back down
between the women, descending into an opium haze. Primrose's eyes narrowed. The
coward. She shouldn’t have expected anything less.

Gathering her skirt, she turned. “Manhandle him into the
coach. If you have to treat him roughly I’ll gladly answer for it.”

“Yes, my lady,” Mathers said in an incongruously
high-pitched voice for his gargantuan size as he reached for the lord’s
clothing.

“Don’t bother dressing him,” she bit out. “He can dress
himself when and if he comes to.”

She rushed out of the opium den and once outside, sucked in
great breaths of air, only to cough and sputter at the acrid stench of burning
coal mixed with human and horse offal. How could anyone live in this
ubiquitously gray and awful place?

“Can ye spare a tuppence, yer ladyship?” a male voice
warbled from the gutter.

Instinct urged Primrose toward the coach bearing the Thorley
crest. Her conscience however insisted she reach into her reticule in search of
a coin for the poor beggar. She bent and placed it in the crippled man’s
gnarled hand.

“God bless ye,” he said, his voice whistling through three
yellowed teeth.

Primrose nodded and allowed the footman to assist her into
the open door of the coach.

No sooner had she settled against the squabs than Mathers
and Hawkshaw thrust Adam’s naked form inside. Primrose drew her pumps back as
they deposited her unconscious husband on the floor and then piled his clothes
on top of him.

The footman secured the door and the coach dipped in the
back as Mathers’ and Hawkshaw’s weight was added on.

The hour had grown late but the dim light delineated the
patrician lines of his face, the hard sinew of his arms and shoulders. His hair
had grown unfashionably long and curled at his nape. Primrose coiled her gloved
fingers tightly against her fist to endure the sharp desire to brush an errant
lock from his face, to inspect the purplish bruise inflicted upon him by a man
whose life was now no more.

At one time, she’d loved him so much it hurt. As a girl
she’d longed for him. She’d refused to believe the terrible, terrible rumors
that were bandied about in his wake.

But she was no longer that wide-eyed girl, his damsel in
distress.

No. She’d hardened herself against Adam—or so she’d thought
up until today. Her gaze slid down the length of his body to his cock once
more. Her stomach clenched when she considered the intrepid scheme she’d
concocted.

Adam’s encounter with street brigands and his father’s
imminent demise weren’t the only reasons she’d sought out her estranged
husband.

The Thorley line needed an heir.

One of Thorley’s last coherent—and quite adamant—requests
was that she find Adam and together ensure the family line continued. At first
Primrose had balked but finally she’d promised the earl.

Could he possibly know the distress his insistence caused
her? Of course she wanted a child. She wanted a good many things from her
husband, none of which he’d been willing to provide.

The instant Adam had done his duty and sired a child, he
could gladly go back to his life of whoring and philandering for all Primrose
cared.

As the mean streets of Whitechapel faded into the distance,
Primrose’s anxiety mounted. She really hadn’t expected to find him so quickly.
But now that she had and now that he was on the way back to Scarborough Hall
she wondered how she’d ever be able to keep him there long enough to get her
with child.

Hopefully he still possessed some semblance of a conscience.
His father’s dementia had grown increasingly worse over the past three months
until all he seemed to remember were events from years ago. A bout of pneumonia
had rendered him bedridden and Primrose feared the worst. In spite of their
rocky start her love for the man had intensified over the years, especially for
the way he’d treated her as one of his own family when her husband had
abandoned Scarborough Hall—when all of British society regarded her as an
American interloper, a vulgar dollar princess willing to trade an inheritance
for a title.