The Duchess Diaries: The Bridal Pleasures Series (6 page)

“Or whether they stole it,” Charlotte said bleakly.

“Stop acting as if the world hinged on your thoughts, Charlotte. Who would go to the trouble of stealing your diary when I have a fortune in jewels in my suite?”

G
ideon was the last person to leave his carriage. He’d dropped off Harriet and her boisterous friends at a party in Grosvenor Square, ignoring their pleas for his company.

“You don’t really want to spend the rest of the night in a courtesan’s bed!” Devon, the soul of discretion, shouted across the street. “You want to be with us!”

Gideon shook his head, instructing his driver to proceed to the exclusive brothel on Bruton Street. He was gathering his hat and gloves when he noticed a bulky object squashed between the seams of the squabs. He hesitated before he pulled it loose.

What looked like a dead animal turned out to be Harriet’s unflattering turban and a…a book? Odd thing to bring to a party.

He slid across the seat to catch the light and opened to the first page of what he realized was a diary. And it didn’t belong to Harriet.

He grinned. Could this possibly belong to Miss Boscastle? It ought to be a thrill a minute. How exciting a day in the life of a schoolmistress must be. So many pages filled with dainty, precise script. He could only imagine what an engaging tome of propriety she had written. Something along the lines of,
Lord Higgleston used his fish fork for his steak. Oh, horrors.

“Your Grace!” a sultry voice called out from the bordello’s upper window. “Have you turned bashful all of a sudden? Or would you like me to meet you down there?”

He quickly closed the diary and stepped out of the carriage, ignoring his footman’s faint smile. There was nothing subtle about Gabrielle Spencer. She sold sex for a living and considered herself worth the price she demanded. Should he take her to his house for the first night?

They had promised each other nothing, except that tonight he would make a formal offer for her exclusive services as a courtesan and companion.

A footman escorted him up a private staircase, bypassing the other visitors, and into a candlelit antechamber. Too late Gideon realized that he had the diary tucked under his arm. There was nothing to be done for it.

“Gideon,” Gabrielle said in welcome, wrapping her arms around his neck before the footman was through the door. She pressed herself against him with an uninhibited enthusiasm that might have aroused him if Charlotte Boscastle’s diary had not stood between them like a brick.

She laughed, looking down, her large brown eyes luminous.
“Did you bring that for me?” she asked, sliding her hand down his neck. “I promise you that I can perform any act in your book.”

“You absolutely could not.”

She smiled wickedly. “How much would you care to wager?”

“At the price you charge I doubt I can afford to wager at all.”

She shook her head. “You are wound tightly tonight. What can I do to relax you?” She reached down for the diary. “Are there secret vices inside this book that I can indulge?”

He lifted her hand from the diary. There was no denying her appeal. “Some secrets aren’t meant to be shared.”

“Even between lovers?”

“Yes.”

“I found the house I want,” she said absently. “It’s close to yours and convenient for entertaining. And I have a list of my shopping needs. May I show it to you before we settle down?”

“If you like.”

“Wait here,” she whispered. “I have bought the most wickedly designed garments you’ve ever seen. There’s sherry on the sideboard already poured.”

He helped himself to a drink and sat down on the tufted silk chaise, flipping idly through a few more pages of the diary until he saw his name in an entry.

He sat upright, choking on his swallow of sherry. His eyes watered as disbelievingly he read:

Hell’s bells,
he thought. When had this happened, and why had it slipped his memory?

He opened a page that was marked with a long-stemmed red rose. The rose had been preserved, but the ink on the page appeared to be relatively fresh.

Her most recent entry?

He strained to read in the poor light.

The Ball

Dammit.
He squinted. What an inconvenient place for an ink smudge. He’d never know what Charlotte’s unrestrained self had wanted to do with him.

He glanced at the clock in the corner. Gabrielle was taking her sweet time.

Was she making him wait to heighten his desire? To let him know that until he paid her price she was still available to other men?

He didn’t like to wait.

He didn’t particularly like visiting a brothel to formalize an association, either. Nor was he proud of himself
for reading another woman’s diary. He ought to stop. But he found he couldn’t.

“My goodness,” Gideon murmured, shaking his head. “Who would have guessed it? The schoolmistress has a hankering for more than academics.”

His in every way a man can claim a woman
? Did she understand what she had written? Was there more?

He quickly turned the page.

The Truth

Gideon frowned. That was unflattering, as well as unfair. He’d only been pretending to look around the room so that he wouldn’t seem to be staring at her. Sometimes a gentleman could not win.

He read on.

He snapped the book shut.

Had he forgotten to thank the footmen for his champagne? How criminal of him. He treated his own staff well. Or did he?

Well, so much for telling both sides of a story. It seemed Miss Charlotte Boscastle couldn’t decide whether he was the darling or the devil of her dreams.

He set aside the diary, trying not to look as it fell open again to a random page.

The Past

Gideon burst into laugher. If she was a giantess, the boy must have been a gargoyle.

Interesting woman. Heaven help her if this diary fell into another’s hands.

He’d try to put her out of his mind for the rest of the night.

And the first thing in the morning he would have his butler return it to her with a dozen red roses and his wishes for an eventful, if invented, life.

If there were other inflammatory entries in the diary, and he felt certain there were, they hadn’t been meant for anyone to see. An honorable man wouldn’t read a lady’s secrets. A scoundrel would—and use them to his advantage.

She was infatuated with him, and he pitied her for that. What would she think if she knew he had been reading her memories in a house of Venus?

He didn’t want her to know.

As a friend of her family, he was obligated to spare Charlotte any embarrassment. Not that he was to blame for her imagination or Harriet’s carelessness.

“Gideon,” a provocative voice said above him. “I’ve been standing here forever. I had no idea that you would prefer reading over me.”

Neither had he.

She crossed the room to the couch, gently descending onto his lap and slipping her fingers inside his neck cloth. In her other hand she held a list of items to be bought that would probably bankrupt him. “Why do I feel that I don’t have your full attention?”

“I—”

“It’s that book,” she said with a pout. “You haven’t taken your eyes off it all night. I’m going to throw it out the window.”

“No.” He sat up. She reached down. “Leave the damned thing alone.”

“Why don’t we burn it and make love in front of the fire?”

“I’m not burning a book.”

“It’s the book or me.” She slid out of his lap.

He smiled. “That is a very easy choice.”

She waved her list under his nose. “I’m happy to hear it. I don’t like being ignored.”

He stood abruptly. “I don’t like ultimatums.” And he turned before she could find her voice, the diary under his coat once more, the attraction he felt for Gabrielle dying an unmourned death.

There was a deeper passion between the pages of Charlotte Boscastle’s diary than he would find in this house.

Charlotte whirled around from the window and flew across the room to embrace Harriet. “Thank goodness you’re here. I’ve been frantic for you to return.”

“I rushed back as soon as I was given your message. What in the world is wrong?”

“Please tell me you put my diary in a safe place. Please.”

“All right. I put the diary in a safe place.”

“Where?” Charlotte asked, nearly collapsing in relief.

Harriet frowned as if she were reviewing the evening’s events in her mind. “We were in this room when you were writing at the desk.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “And…?”

Harriet looked blank.

“And what, for the love of creation?” Charlotte demanded, flinging her hand in the air. “What happened to the diary?”

The color drained from Harriet’s cheeks. “Oh, God. I hid it in my cloak and took it with me. I thought you’d gone off with the girls; the front of the desk had dropped
open, and I was afraid it would fall into the wrong hands.”

“But it didn’t,” Charlotte said. “Because you put it in a safe place.”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“Where is it?” Charlotte asked through her teeth.

Harriet winced. “I left it in the duke’s carriage.”

“The duke being your husband, Griffin, I hope and pray?” Charlotte said, giving Harriet an encouraging smile.

Harriet shook her head. “My husband is in Brighton. I’m talking about the other duke. The one who’s made you lose your wits.”

Charlotte looked aghast. “Not Wynfield?”

“I’ll lie,” Harriet said quickly. “I’ll swear it was my diary. I’ll throw myself at the duke’s mercy.”

“What if he reads it before we find him?” Charlotte asked, aghast at the thought. “Do we even know where we can find him?”

Harriet hesitated. “He was going to meet his new mistress at Mrs. Watson’s house the last I saw of him.”

“What have I done, Harriet?” Charlotte whispered. “What demonic power overcame me that I turned tender encounters into torrid half-truths? Why was I not content to
tell
the truth? Why, you ask?”

“Well, I really don’t.”

“Because I am a Boscastle, after all, and passion is like a poison in my blood that, despite all efforts to the contrary, makes itself known.”

“You’ve lost a diary, Charlotte. It’s not as if you gave birth to a royal heir and forgot where you put him.”

“You don’t have a notion of what I’ve written. What if he reads it?”

“Your stories are sweet and charming.”

“The diary is different.”

Harriet scoffed. “What man, really, would choose reading a lovesick lady’s journal over a courtesan’s company?”

“I have to get it back tonight. He can’t read it.”

“Then I will have to help you.”

“How?”

“We’ll break into his house. He won’t even know we were there.”

N
ick Rydell was a professional burglar and street thug who operated his business from St. Giles. His name carried weight in the underworld, and he was proud of the crimes he committed. Until tonight. He didn’t know what had come over him when the lady sitting across from him in her squeaky carriage had offered him a job and he’d accepted. Spite, that was what had gotten him going. He’d been thinking like a girl.

His client looked as if she were on her way to a tea party in Bedlam, wearing a hat that reached the carriage roof and thinking herself all stylish, he was sure. He supposed her coin was as good as anyone else’s. Still, he’d have turned down the lay outright if Lady Clippers, or Clipstone, or whatever the hell her name was, hadn’t confessed that she knew of Nick through his previous association with his former partner. Harriet Hoity-Toity. The name poisoned his blood like bad gin. He hated
how it made him feel. But that didn’t stop him from craving another taste of it.

“Why didn’t you ask ’arriet to do the job if you and she are such good friends?” he said, surveying her hat through one half-opened eye. The damned thing looked like a chimney with smoke pouring out of the top.

“That person and I are
not
friends. It is an insult to decency that she has ascended in society.” She shook her little fist in his face. “It’s an outrage that I have been reduced to consorting with convicts as a means to justice. You promised me that I would have that diary in my possession at the end of the ball.”