She glanced at his long-chinned profile in regret. “I’m ready. Adam—”
“Take your position, Jocelyn,” he said, stepping around her. “This is hardly the place for trivial chitchat.”
Chitchat.
Oh, he despised her.
He could not even bring himself to look at her. She marched forward, her arm upraised. What did she care for a stupid competition when her life was ruined? What did—
She found herself suddenly standing face-to-face with her opponent, Mrs. Lily Cranleigh. Dignity, she reminded herself. This was the time to show dignity. But then Lily let her racket drop to the ground, and when Devon went to retrieve it, she sent Jocelyn such a malicious look that dignity ceased to matter.
Lily laid her hand on his shoulder as he straightened.
The match began.
And all of a sudden Jocelyn could not control the force that seized hold of her. It blazed through all her genteel breeding. It consumed her so completely that it almost made her believe in supernatural possession of a person’s soul.
One moment she was flying across the courtyard to keep aloft the cork-and-goose-feather shuttlecock that Adam had carelessly sent sailing over her head. The next she and Lily were running toward each other in a mad race to bat their separate shuttlecocks higher than the other.
From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a rather evil grin on Devon’s face. Then she heard Lily mutter, “Don’t you worry, Devon. I know how to take care of my competition. I’ll show your little wallflower what’s for.”
She felt a fleeting moment of uncertainty. Was that a threat? Did the widow view her as her competitor for Devon’s sexual favors?
Well, of course. She was a naïve little wigeon to think otherwise. Just because Devon was being forced to marry Jocelyn did not mean that he in any manner whatsoever meant to change his ways.
Or the widow to change hers, man-greedy trull that she was.
“I know how to take care of my competition, too,” she muttered under her breath, the muscles in her shoulder tightening with anticipation.
“What?” Lily asked, her arm freezing.
Jocelyn’s voice sounded so menacing and unladylike that Lily glanced at her in surprise. There followed the briefest instant when Jocelyn actually felt ashamed of herself. She almost took a step back as a courtesy.
But then one of the male guests laughed. And even if it wasn’t Devon, she could imagine how amusing she and Lily must look to his jaundiced eye, one the woman he desired, the other one he did not, yet would have to marry, battling over a bit of feathered cork.
Suddenly she did not care. The whole of England could be watching, and she did not care. She was a woman obsessed with a single goal. She was a woman whose own brother had once told her that she could flatten him in a dead run faster than all of Boney’s armies combined.
The two shuttlecocks spun upward toward the sun, hers and Lily’s, competing for the same current of air, competing for a prize not acknowledged or even clearly defined.
“Mine,” Lily muttered with one arm raised, the other crooked at the elbow to push Jocelyn away. “It’s mine, you greedy guts.”
Jocelyn’s mouth tightened, and her vision blurred at the edges. The ladylike response would have been to retreat, to give Lily the chance to swat her shuttlecock first.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. In fact, she couldn’t even see properly to say exactly what she was doing.
“It’s my cork,” she said in a rather frightening voice.
Lily grunted. “The bloody hell it is. That is my shuttlecock.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
She stretched her arm toward the sun. And sprang into the air to swing her racket. Her elbow collided with Lily’s large, heaving breasts. Her racket connected, in a loud solid whack, with Lily’s perfect, uptilted nose.
Lily looked down as a thin trickle of blood spurted onto her upper lip. Her squeal of pain and outrage shattered the enrapt silence like a thunderbolt. “She attacked me! My God, I’m bleeding. Oh, my God! There’s blood all over…everywhere. I’m fainting. I’m going—”
“By God,” a young gentleman cried. “She’s going to faint! Somebody catch her.”
“It came at me like a meteor,” she bellowed, amazingly vocal for a woman in a swoon.
A male guest pushed Jocelyn aside. “Don’t fret, Mrs. Cranleigh.”
“My nose! My nose! Am I disfigured?”
“I daresay the bump will go down in a few weeks,” the gentleman consoled her.
“Weeks?” she shouted.
People were running all over the court. Servants with dampened napkins, unattached men who would kill for the chance to comfort the distraught and injured widow. Jocelyn stumbled backward and barely felt the masculine body that buffeted her before she was standing alone.
“Good God, Jocelyn,” Adam muttered, pulling his own handkerchief from his vest pocket. “You didn’t need to assault her. I understand this situation has got you all upset, but, really.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said, although no one paid her any attention. The entire focus of the players was on Mrs. Cranleigh’s battered proboscis, and the understandable fuss she was making over her opponent’s unladylike aggression.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Lady Winifred said as the widow slumped into the arms of the first two men to reach her. “One would think she’d been hit by a rifle not a racket.”
A well-built, fair-haired man who bore an air of authority sauntered up behind Jocelyn, his handsome face wearing a grimace. “She’s making enough of a damned racket, I know that.”
“I feel awful,” Jocelyn whispered.
“Not as bad as she does, I reckon,” her brother Jason said as he shoved his way through the gathering. “What the devil did you do that for, Jocelyn? It was hardly sporting.”
Winifred gave him a little push. “It was only a game. Everyone knows you can get hurt playing games.”
The fair-haired arrival grunted. “Perhaps we can send her on a slow boat to Peking. I have one anchored in the harbor about to launch. A long sea voyage would give her time to heal.”
“I think I’m the one who should take a boat to China.” Jocelyn slipped back a few more steps. Then another, and another, until she was standing alone at the edge of the crowd.
A fat raindrop fell on her forehead. Why couldn’t it have rained an hour earlier so that the wretched game would never have been played?
How was she supposed to make amends for behavior unbecoming to anyone but an Amazon? What unearthly urge had possessed her?
She wheeled awkwardly, unable to listen to Lily’s sobbing for another moment. Unfortunately, she could not make the undetected escape she’d hoped for. Devon stood directly in her path, his gaze averted. Oh. Now he was so embarrassed that he couldn’t even look at her. And if he said anything about his lover’s nose she might just hit him, too.
“Please let me pass,” she said with all the composure she could summon.
“Wait a moment,” he murmured, then bent to pick up something on the path.
“If you’re going to make fun of me,” she said to his down-bent head, “you can at least have the kindness not to do so to my face. I’ve taken about all the humiliation I can withstand.”
“You’ve dealt your share of it, too,” he said. “And I wasn’t making fun of you.” He straightened, his eyes dancing with unholy mirth. “Here. I was only going to give you this.”
She stared down at his hand. Cupped in his broad palm was a goose-feathered shuttlecock. Her shuttlecock, to be precise, the one she had been certain Lily had stolen. The blood drained from her face, and she could not utter a word. To think she had battled in public over a cork, and it hadn’t even been her cork.
“Well, never mind.” He looked around appraisingly as if to reassure himself that no one was watching. Then he slipped the shuttlecock inside his long-tailed morning coat. “It will be our secret. It’s the
least I can do, considering.”
“Considering?” she asked in hesitation.
“A husband and wife are meant to be on the same side, aren’t they?” he said with mischief in his voice.
She swallowed hard. How could she possibly guard her heart against the man when he said things like that? she wondered wistfully.
“I wish someone had stopped me before I made a spectacle of myself.”
“There wasn’t time,” he said, shaking his head. “You shot across the lawn like a bullet.” He paused. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I was quite impressed by your initiative.”
She held back a laugh. “Now you are making fun of me.”
“God forbid. I am not. I would never mock a woman with an arm like yours.”
She backed away from him. The other guests were approaching, Lily among them. “Perhaps you should comfort her,” she said awkwardly.
He glanced around.
“It appears she’s got enough company at the moment.”
She nodded, half-turning to escape. “I really want to go to my room now.”
“Wait a minute.” He grasped her by the wrist.
“Devon—”
“I’ll show you a detour if you don’t want to meet anyone on the way.”
She sighed. “After what I just did, I don’t ever want to meet anyone…”
He pulled her behind a high wooden trellis overgrown with ivy. “This doesn’t look like a detour,” she said dubiously, her gaze lifting to his.
He grinned, whispering, “It isn’t, but someone’s coming.”
There was barely enough room to hide, let alone place any distance between them. She stood peering out through the ivy, Devon at her back, his hand resting on her shoulder. His warm, strong hand, slowly turning her around to face him. His sultry gaze captured hers, enticed her with the promise of dark pleasure. She swallowed a moan. Then his arm locked around her waist and crushed her to his chest and heavily muscled thighs.
She closed her eyes, not fighting his embrace. If anything she arched as if she were inviting more, although of what she was not sure. His heart. His strength. All that he was.
She could still hear voices on the pathway beyond the trellis. She drew a breath, opened her eyes in hesitation. He smiled and tightened his hold, refusing to relinquish her, his eyes glittering with temptation.
The voices drew nearer, then dimmed. Temptation flared. She gave herself up to it.
Devon lowered his head to kiss her, and both the sky and the sinful blue of his eyes blurred as she parted her lips. Anticipation shivered down her spine.
His kiss seduced her. A dangerous languor took possession of her body, her mind. She was aware of his arousal, the thick column of muscle that pressed through her clothing like a brand. She stopped breathing, his mouth devouring hers. This moment alone existed. This man.
And then the voices penetrated her haze of pleasure. Two male guests were walking past the trellis. One of the voices sounded familiar. His gaze rueful, Devon lifted his head to listen.
“God, what a sight that was. She almost knocked Mrs. Cranleigh senseless. What did the woman ever do to her?”
“If your head wasn’t in the punch bowl half the time, you’d know. Jocelyn is Boscastle’s lover, and he got caught with the wallflower in the tower and has to wed her.”
“He was caught by her father?”
“Sir Gideon himself. And all I can say is that Jocelyn must have inherited his violent streak. My uncle told me that he used to beat…”
Their voices faded. Jocelyn broke away from Devon, feeling sick inside. She could have corrected that gentleman at least on one point. There was actually quite a bit more that could be said on the subject of her father, but she hoped that it would never be said in her presence, or that Devon would hear it.
She edged around him.
He turned swiftly, staring at her in concern. “Jocelyn—”
“It’s all right.”
“Dammit—what about the detour?” he called after her.
She merely shook her head and turned blindly into the tall row of cypress trees that led to the castle. She was glad he didn’t make everything worse by trying to follow her.
He watched her escape with the dignity of a royal princess—a princess surrounded by a court of ignominious subjects. He’d been fully prepared to either ignore or defend her against the hurtful remarks they’d overheard. But Jocelyn hadn’t given him a chance to react one way or another.
And now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure what had caused her such obvious distress: the gossip about him and Lily or the reference to her father. She hadn’t given him much of a hint.
Still, he’d seen the humiliation on her face before she had fled him, and the Boscastle in him had wanted to come to her defense. But could he defend her against the wounds of the past? The truth was that he’d been sickened himself to hear her being degraded. And he was at least partly to blame.
He heard Lily coming up the path, her soft laughter indicating that she had not been mortally wounded after all. As a gentleman, he should undoubtedly emerge from his hiding place and ask about her injury.
But he did not move. He couldn’t when he could still see Jocelyn’s slender figure weaving in and out of the trees. He wanted to run after her. He would have if he had known what to say to comfort her. He only knew that he hated to see her so distressed.
A little later that same afternoon, however, in an impromptu boxing match that started in the topiary garden, he “accidentally” knocked into the hedgerow the two men who had been discussing Jocelyn on the path. He then apologized profusely for the matching pair of black eyes that the two dazed gentlemen would wear by evening.
Of course, only an idiot would have believed it was an accident. But no one dared say a word, except for his older brother Grayson Boscastle, the fifth Marquess of Sedgecroft, who had taken it upon himself as the head of the family to guide his siblings away from sins he had once committed. In this instance, however, Grayson seemed to approve of Devon’s pugilistic outburst.
“Good for you,” Grayson said. “A man ought to defend the woman he intends to marry.”
The woman he intends to marry. The mere thought gave Devon a piercing pain right between his temples. He strode out of the garden without a backward glance, his coat slung over his shoulder.
“May I assume by your morbid silence that what Emma has told me is true?” Grayson inquired, following at his heel. “You were caught in a compromising position with Sir Gideon’s daughter, and you have agreed to marry her?”
Devon slowed as they reached the castle’s inner courtyard. “It’s true,” he said distractedly.
Grayson exhaled through his teeth. “Well, I have to admit that this is a shock…and that the lady certainly knows how to aim her racket.”
Devon grinned reluctantly. “She wasn’t supposed to aim for her opponent’s nose.”
“How did it happen?” Grayson asked quietly. “How in the name of God did you let yourself get caught?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I was led to believe I was meeting another woman.”
“That wouldn’t happen to be the same one whose nose is by now swollen like a sausage?”
“All I can tell you is that Jocelyn and I were apparently deceived into meeting each other.”
“Do you have any idea by whom?”
“I thought at first it might have been Gabriel.”
Grayson frowned. “A reasonable guess, considering he has been in competition with Drake for years. Yet while Gabriel has lived a hard life and enjoyed his little torments, he’s still one of us.”
“I know,” Devon said.
“If we were dealing with any outraged papa other than Sir Gideon,” Grayson said, “I would suggest a bribe—”
Devon held up his hand. “I did not go to the tower without an inherent understanding that a tryst, even one planned, carries a certain risk.”
“It’s the element of ri
sk that makes a rendezvous irresistible,” Grayson agreed.
“The problem with this line of reasoning, unfortunately, is that I assumed any risks incurred would be easy to rectify. I didn’t know I was meeting Jocelyn.”
“I am sorry, Devon,” Grayson said. “At least she is not without a certain charm.”
“Yes,” he conceded. “It would have been nice, though, if we had been a little better acquainted before walking to the altar.”
He stared up at the east castle tower, thinking how elegant and benign it appeared in the daylight. “Having been foolish enough to walk into a trap,” he said quietly, “I have no choice but to accept responsibility, if only in outward appearance. Everyone assumes I will run away, but I’m perfectly willing to give her my name.”
“And nothing more?” Grayson asked after a thoughtful pause.
“I don’t know what I have to give,” Devon said with a self-deprecating smile. “She’s probably not getting the best end of the bargain. And I suppose, well, a man can go about his private affairs after he marries, can’t he?”
“Many men do,” Grayson said, nodding.
“Have you not been tempted to stray?” Devon asked.
Grayson smiled. “It has never entered my mind even once. I find myself more than satisfied with Jane, both in our bed and in her company.”
“Perhaps that is because you chose her.”
“Yes, perhaps, although you must remember that our courtship was anything but smooth.”
Devon resumed walking through the courtyard. He did not have to love Jocelyn or make her any promises in private that he did not intend to keep. He did not have to change his ways to accommodate their arrangement. They could come to a compromise.
Honor would be satisfied if nothing else.
Less than two hours later, Jocelyn’s brother found Devon in the library with a group of other male guests and quietly informed him that he had received a message from Sir Gideon insisting that the wedding be performed within a week so as to discourage speculation.
Devon shrugged. Having resigned himself to the inevitable, the time and place did not seem to matter.
“He would prefer,” Jason added, “that the ceremony take place in Lord Sedgecroft’s London chapel for the sake of privacy. If Lord Sedgecroft agrees, that is.”
The Sinful Nights of a Nobleman Page 7
