The Duchess Diaries: The Bridal Pleasures Series (27 page)

“Excuse yourself,” the man murmured, flicking his fingers dismissively over his partner’s bare shoulder. “Busy here. Pillage another passageway, mate.”

Charlotte gasped as Gideon released her hand and drew his cutlass with efficiency and without hesitation.

The man, a mask looped over his wrist, looked up in disbelief. “You wouldn’t dare use that.”

“Yes, he would,” Charlotte said. “Please believe me.”

“It’s the Duke of Wynfield,” the man’s partner cried in delight.

“Wynfield,” the man said slowly.

“I think so,” she said, grinning at Gideon.

Within moments the couple had disappeared, leaving Cleopatra and an arrogant buccaneer alone in the dark.

He drew her to a recess in the wall and lowered his head. She sighed, unresisting. He lifted one arm over her shoulder and braced his palm against the wall, not only discouraging her escape but shielding her from view. His mouth covered hers in a deep kiss that dominated, devastated, and lit dangerous impulses in her blood.

He was like a bolt of lightning, and he made her come
alive
. His mouth ate at hers. His hands wandered up her sides to softly mold her breasts. Her neck arched. How could she want and ache and need like this? What had happened to her?

“Let me go,” she whispered, insensible, incoherent.

“Why should I?” he said with his lips against hers. “We aren’t ourselves tonight. You are a legendary queen who lived to torment her male lovers.”

“But it’s you who are tormenting me.”

He smiled, the brim of his hat overshadowing his face. “I’m a buccaneer, and it’s my turn to treasure-hunt.” His hand traveled between her breasts to her throat.

“Take my necklace. Just remember that it belongs to Jane, and she isn’t one to ignore an offense.”

His smile deepened. He traced his fingers across the hollow of her throat. “For one thing, I don’t want the necklace. I want you, and you’re promised to me.”

She shivered at the elemental sensuality in his eyes. “But—”

“A promise is a promise. The longer I wait, the deeper I want you.”

She closed her eyes. “I feel peculiar.”

“If you faint I’ll have to throw you over my shoulder and carry you to the coach. People will talk.”

“I—”

His hard mouth captured hers again. She felt male heat and the steel of his cutlass as he pushed his body into hers. His strength kept her from a slide to the floor. He kissed her like sin on the prowl. He kissed her until she didn’t care whether they were caught and confronted.

It didn’t matter anymore which one of them had instigated this burning attraction. Maybe she had poured all her passion into her diary. But he had unleashed it and transformed it from the page to the physical.

“That will have to do for now,” he said, breaking away, the imprint of his body on hers so powerful she would be aware of it for the rest of the night.

Her eyes slowly opened; she saw the desire etched in the stark lines of his face. “We should go back inside,” she whispered.

He tipped back his hat. “Yes, but I’d rather not.”

“I’m sorry that I made you accept the invitation.”

Warmth kindled in his eyes. “It was worth it. Although I’ll only take you back into the ballroom if you swear you won’t let other men stare at you.”

“I request the same favor. I saw you dancing with that lady in knee breeches.”

“Believe it or not,” he said, taking her by the hand, “I thought it was your cousin Chloe.”

He didn’t leave her side for the rest of the night. He followed her as if he were one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens. He thought about what she had said. She might not be experienced in worldly matters, but…

It was true. He had plenty of friends. But for too long he had lived without a family—no brothers to offend or
sisters to defend. There was no one he could rely on in a crisis except Kit, who had started a family of his own.

Later that night, when Gideon returned to his house, he realized that the servants were the only ones left of the past with whom he could share memories.

He could rely on them.

And he realized that his single living relative, Sarah, the young daughter he rarely saw, should have been able to rely on him, and he had failed her.

He had sought refuge in a black mist when his father and wife died. He had been one of the walking dead himself. One drunken day had blurred into the next.

He had agreed when Sarah’s dying grandmother had insisted it would be an abuse on his part to expose a little girl to his hedonistic lifestyle. It hadn’t occurred to him to change the way he lived. He couldn’t pull himself together long enough to care whether he lived at all. He had been so immersed in self-misery that if he could have obliterated the past and prevented the future all at once it would have been a relief. And yet there was only so much a man could blame on grief.

Did his daughter miss him? How could she when he had never played a prominent role in her life?

He wanted her back.

He wanted to make amends to her for the past.

He wanted his daughter to have a real family again.

And more than anything he wanted as his wife the woman he hadn’t even had the wisdom to choose.

T
he well-sprung carriage flew along the Windsor Road. One of its passengers, the Duchess of Scarfield, had been spurring on the belabored coachman with promises of high promotion if he made it to London in time for the wedding. Indeed, in her husband’s estimation, the weather was afraid to disobey his wife.

“Calm down, Emma,” Adrian said, his head comfortably settled on her lap, above which his heir had taken residence and was growing by the minute. “The family wouldn’t dare hold a wedding without you.”

“Do not placate me with such nonsense, Wolf. There is nothing my family will not dare. This is what happens when I am not there to offer them guidance.”

“We’ll be there soon enough, love.”

“No, we won’t. It is already too late. How many times did I warn Charlotte not to put secrets on paper? Why do I hope for better? My family is destined for disgrace.”

He smiled to himself. As Emma increased with this
pregnancy, she reminded Adrian of a delicate bone-china teapot whose function was to release frequent bursts of steam.

“You’re worrying for nothing, Emma,” he said to soothe her. “I doubt that Charlotte has any secrets to tell.”

“I don’t want to arrive a minute before the wedding.”

“Of course not.”

“I want to be there for the preparations.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Are you trying to placate me?” she asked.

“Well, no—”

“If I know Jane and Chloe, they will have Charlotte wearing a dress from that scandalous Madame Devine. I don’t suppose you remember her. She makes provocative attire for mistresses and West End Wives.”

He looked up as innocently as he could.

She frowned down at him as if he hadn’t deceived her for a second. “Don’t answer. I have enough on my mind. And what about the academy?” She fidgeted, leaning over to lift up the curtain. “Can’t you make this coach go any faster?”

“We wouldn’t want to harm our little heir, would we?” he asked, sitting up in resignation. “The academy will survive. Do not worry.”

“Of course I will worry. No one else is willing to take the burden from me.”

“Well, what good does it do?”

“Men simply don’t understand.”

The former Emma Boscastle, the widowed Viscountess Lyons or, as she was known in the family, the Dainty Dictator and Mrs. Killjoy, was considered to be the anomaly in the London line. Militant in her quest to reform
the unrefined or scandal-prone, she had considered it her calling to open an academy for young ladies as an example to her own family members, who continued to embarrass her with their incessant love intrigues. “I thought I’d found a kindred soul in Charlotte,” she mused. “She was almost as levelheaded as—”

“—you.”

She nodded. “She thrived under my tutelage. She admired me, you know. But perhaps I set a bad example. I was a hypocrite.”

“Emma, if you had not set a bad example we would not be married and expecting our child.”

“True enough.”

And a moment later she was tapping her toe against the door, her aggrieved face framed in a wreath of apricot-gold curls. “This is exactly what Lady Clipstone is waiting for—the final fall. I have to be there to prevent it.”

“What fall? If I read the situation correctly, Charlotte was caught in a trifling affair with a man who is marrying her. A wedding, Emma, end of story.”

“A missing diary, Adrian. Beginning of the end. She may as well have published an encyclopedia of embarrassment.”

“Well, you’ll be there soon enough to sort it all out.”

She subsided with a deep sigh into his arms. He nestled his face in her hair. “Stop,” she said halfheartedly, laying her head back on his chest.

“No.” He locked his hands beneath her breasts. “You can’t make me.”

“I could, you know.”

“Then try it.”

“Perhaps I don’t want to,” she said, conceding to him with a smile.

“Four years of marriage,” he mused. “Don’t forget that we were a scandal at the time. I’ve always wondered, and perhaps I’m better off not knowing, but what turned you and Lady Clipstone into such bitter rivals? Weren’t you once friends?”

“We were going to open an etiquette school together,” she mused.

“And?”

“And I have to keep some secrets, Adrian, unless Charlotte has spilled them all with her indiscreet pen.”

At length they stopped at a coaching inn outside Camberly. Once a mercenary and soldier of fortune, Adrian rarely had to use his rank to secure a decent room in the taverns he visited. He was as rough to the observant eye as Emma was dainty.

But he was especially protective of her during this first pregnancy. He walked up the stairs behind her, ready to catch his little teapot if she should slip, which she almost did when a small girl on the escape from her governess came flying down like a fury.

“Honestly!” Emma exclaimed to the harried governess, who squeezed past her on the stairs in pursuit of her fleeing charge. “Aren’t children taught any manners these days? That little girl needs a firm hand.”

“She needs a pair of prison guards, madam,” the governess tossed back at her. “And as soon as she is delivered to her parents, I shall be delighted to retire my hand.”

Emma glanced at her husband, shaking her head. “A girl that boisterous is destined to cause trouble; mark my words. I know an undisciplined child when I see one.”

“Shocking,” he said, thinking of the tortures he had carried out at that age. “What is the world coming to?”

She picked up her skirt and huffed out a breath. “I see that grin on your handsome face. You do not fool me for a moment.
Our
child will not be allowed to run willy-nilly in public places. Nor in private ones, either.”

“As you say, my little teapot.”

“What did you call me?”

He laughed. “Nothing, dear heart. Don’t upset yourself or the baby.”

Grayson rarely let a fortnight pass without giving a party for one reason or another. To receive a gold-edged invitation to one of his lavish affairs was an honor in the aristocracy indeed. His Park Lane mansion never went to sleep. Sentries and servants patrolled the grounds around the clock, fortified by steaming mugs of hot cocoa made from the fresh milk the dairymaids delivered every day. Bakers brought trays of hot bread, pastries, and savory meat pies to the tradesmen’s door in the basement kitchen.

But now there was to be a wedding. The house buzzed like a beehive. The kitchen staff ordered the other servants around, and the other servants obeyed. The best cutlery must be brought out of storage. The table linens had to be pressed with hot irons. There had to be room cleared for guests and for the great piles of gifts sent from well-wishers. The menu for the wedding breakfast needed the approval of the marchioness. The footmen needed new soft-soled shoes so that they could glide about as quietly as ghosts. It took effort to make a Mayfair wedding look like a scene from a fairy tale.

S
ir Daniel had an unpleasant day ahead of him. His first task was to visit the duke and Miss Boscastle at the Park Lane mansion where she was residing until the wedding. Harriet was present, which did not surprise Daniel. Still, he could not look at her so elegantly dressed without remembering the tangle-haired guttersnipe she had been when he first arrested her, and how she fought him when he had entrusted her to Emma Boscastle’s care. Her life had been transformed from that moment. How he wished he could sweep every vulnerable young boy or girl in London off the streets.

“Your Grace,” he said with a deferential smile, bowing over her hand.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Just tell me that you have found the diary.”

He shook his head and straightened. “I wish I could. If anyone knows where it has gone, it is a guarded secret.
I have interrogated all of my sources, with nary a clue overturned as to the diary’s whereabouts.”

“Oh, dear,” Charlotte said faintly. “I think I shall need something stronger than tea.”

Sir Daniel glanced away, but not before noticing the concerned look that the duke sent his demure fiancée. Was it possible that this arrangement was deepening into genuine affection? Perhaps this diary affair had brought some good, after all. Daniel believed in love and marriage, even if both had eluded him.

Gideon stirred. “And the sapphire necklace has not passed hands?”

“Not in the obvious shops,” Sir Daniel said. “Which is in itself unusual. It might be that the thieves have escaped the city.”

Charlotte gave a soft sigh. “I so wanted this to be cleared up before the wedding.”

“There are still four days left,” Gideon said, his gaze turning introspective.

Harriet lifted her chin. “He’s right.”

“I have a horrible feeling,” Charlotte said softly, “that it has indeed fallen into wicked hands.”

Gideon walked slowly across the street, holding up his hand to interrupt the flow of midday traffic. It stung his pride that he would not be able to keep his promise to Charlotte’s family. He had failed to recover the lost diary before the wedding.