When finally Devon relaxed his vigilance enough to fall asleep, it was for only two hours or so before a commotion on the ground floor filtered into his awareness. He sat up, stiff, cramped, and grinned at his reflection in the looking glass. His bare-arsed, lightly bearded image grinned back, Jocelyn’s right arm knotted around his waist.
An errant ray of sunlight fell upon his wife’s bare ankle. Her Egyptian costume lay in a lewd display on the carpet. He groaned as the voices downstairs began to assume an all-too-familiar tone.
Jocelyn stirred, lifting her flushed cheek from her pillow to murmur, “Someone is downstairs. It’s too early for callers, isn’t it?”
He grunted. He craved nothing more than to crawl beneath the covers beside her and go back to sleep. “Yes.”
“Is it the authorities?” she asked in alarm, apparently wide awake herself. “Did you kill Thurlew last night?”
“Yes,” he said unhappily to her first question. “The authorities are here. And I can only hope Thurlew died.”
She sat up, one pert breast peeking out from the sheet. “If there is going to be an inquiry, do you not think you should at least shave? Put on your pants? A dressing robe?”
He sank back beside her, his free arm folded behind his head. He was in no particular hurry to rush downstairs and face his uninvited visitors, although he doubted he could wait them out forever.
He had recognized the voices as those of Grayson and Emma, two of the three family elders. He supposed he should be grateful Heath was in Scotland.
“There’s going to be an inquiry, all right,” he said in resignation.
His wife wriggled out of his grasp. “Perhaps I should talk to the magistrate first,” she said in rising panic. “I could explain how Thurlew drugged Mrs. O’Brien, then abducted me, and how I feared that he would harm the Boscastle heir. And that, you, assuming—” She stopped in midsentence. “I don’t think you’re taking this at all seriously. You could at least pretend to show respect for the judicial process.”
He stretched his supple form, the muscles of his belly rippling like liquid steel. “Why?”
“I don’t know how to answer that, Devon,” she said in exasperation. “While I understand that you were justified in shooting Thurlew and will neither appear before a jury nor be sentenced to a penitentiary nor to picking oakum, you should at least assume an attitude of gravity. As well as a suit of clothes.” She shook her head. “You look quite dissolute.”
He yawned. “I’m going back to bed. Cease your chatter and kiss me.”
“The devil I will.”
He opened one eye to witness her leap from their bed, her breasts bobbing as she went on a wardrobe hunt for appropriate attire. His gaze drifted over her sunlit nudity. Owing to her consternation, she was granting him a deliciously immodest display of her curvaceous form.
He felt fresh craving for sex as he beheld the firm white globes of her rump raised in the air while she bent to pick up a stocking. His groin tightened. He debated taking her in that position, on her hands and knees in front of the looking glass, but with regret decided against it. They might get carried away and knock over some of the furniture in a frenzy of lust, thereby alarming the visitors below. He could just imagine explaining such noises to Emma.
Jocelyn straightened without warning, waving his waistcoat at him. “Are you waiting for me to dress before you summon your valet? Or are you going to loll about all day with that lustful grin on your face?”
He sat forward, willing his painful erection to subside. “Is it possible that your breasts have become larger in this last week, or have I never been allowed the pleasure of examining you in the daylight before?”
She dropped the waistcoat between his feet. “Would you like me to bring the matter of my breasts before the magistrate?”
“Not unless you’d like to witness me shoot him through the heart, too.”
“Are you not going to be serious for once?”
“I’m very serious about this.”
“About the size of my breasts?”
“Yes.”
“Devon, for the love of—”
He stretched forward in one sinuous move to capture her hand and trap her between his hard-muscled thighs.
“Your nipples are darker too, aren’t they?” He brushed his knuckle across one tender peak. “Surely I have not been that inattentive. Let me have a closer look.”
She shivered as, with a tenderness that few women could resist, the handsome beast took her breasts in his hands and weighed them in his palms like ripe peaches at the market.
“Why did you not tell me?” he asked simply, lifting his gaze to her face.
She shook her head, submerging herself in the depths of his blue eyes, his low caressing voice. She should not have been surprised that a Boscastle male would perceive the early signs of pregnancy, being the sexual creatures that they were.
However, it did not please her to realize her husband had experiences in these frank matters when she had only the vaguest understanding of the facts of reproduction herself.
“How can you tell?” she asked somewhat resentfully.
He gave her a guileless smile. “How can I tell what?”
She swallowed, her emotions suddenly in turmoil. “Jane said that it is ill luck to talk of my condition until we are certain that it is true.”
“Fine.” He laid his broad palm protectively against the curve of her belly. “I won’t tell anyone. Unless I’m asked, of course.”
She glanced down at his dark head, her heart beating hard. How she loved him. “And what will you say if you’re asked?”
“I don’t think I should lie, do you?”
“Hmm. Perhaps not. I mean, it isn’t the sort of secret that one can keep indefinitely. Perhaps for a little while longer.”
He broke into a grin. “To hell with keeping it a secret. Let’s tell everyone right now. We’ll go to the park and stand on the corner, informing random passersby. I’ll have a monument erected to proclaim our news in case anyone doesn’t hear me shouting.”
“Then you’re pleased?” she asked, biting her lip.
“I am absolutely out of my mind with delight.”
She sighed happily and tangled her fingers in his thick black hair. “Should we not dress now to face the magistrate?”
He looked up at her with a rueful grin. “Didn’t I correct you? It’s the marquess who’s downstairs, not the magistrate.”
“The marquess?” she whispered in alarm, glancing over his shoulders at the door. “As in Grayson?”
“God, is there any other? The marquess and his major-general.”
“His who?”
“The Dainty Dictator of the family. Emma.”
He eased off the bed, the bones and the musculature of his body a tribute to youth and battle-hardened strength. “After she’s done scolding me on not being a proper protector to you, I shall no doubt wish I had faced a magistrate and been sent to a solitary jail cell.”
“So that I should raise our child alone?” she teased. Leaving the bed, she passed him the pantaloons that he had thrown upon a chair.
“Alone? In this family? Sweetheart, there’s hardly any fear of that.” He dressed, pausing to kiss her once before he put on his coat. “There’s no fear of me abandoning our child, either. The Boscastles have their faults in spades, and I do not pretend to seek absolution for all my sins, but family always comes first, even among the worst of us.”
“Emma means well, you know.”
“I do know. And she’s usually right, which makes all the rest of us look shabby in comparison.”
She nodded, feeling weepy all of a sudden again. It would not do to dissolve with the marquess and his sister waiting so patiently downstairs. The passionate loyalty of which Devon spoke was perhaps the facet of him she had loved first and now loved the most. There was no doubt in her mind that his capacity for devotion was a legacy of his dynamic ancestry.
And the child she thought
she had conceived would most likely inherit the notoriety of its noble lineage.
“Unless I fight to intervene first,” she thought aloud.
He pivoted at the door. “Did you say something?”
She regarded him with a wistful smile. Sinful he might be, but at least he had managed to dress himself and present a decent appearance while she sprawled about like a well-tumbled tart between their disheveled bed-sheets.
He cleared his throat and gave his crisp neckcloth a final tug. “You might want to dress before you face them.”
“Splendid idea,” she said drily.
He walked to the side of the bed and stared down at her, the devil in his deep blue eyes. “On second thought, perhaps you don’t want to dress at all.” He began to unfasten his neckcloth.
She laughed, scandalized. “What are you going to tell your brother?”
His eyes glittered. “Somehow I think Grayson will understand. God knows he wrote the book on seduction.”
She subsided back onto the sheets. “Won’t he be offended if we ignore him?”
“Not if we name our firstborn in his honor,” he replied, tossing his coat back onto the chair.
“And if it’s a girl?”
“Then we shall name her after Emma.”
“Emma will not understand.” She paused, her eyes widening as he peeled off his pantaloons and stood before her. “Emma,” she continued, albeit her mind was suddenly not on her sister-in-law, “would not find our behavior listed under proper late-morning etiquette in any of the guidebooks she lives by.”
He lowered himself onto the bed to kiss her. “Then I say we should write our own book on the subject.”
“A literary endeavor? Now that I might consider, but as to the writing of it without our clothes—”
“Jocelyn.” He laid his forehead against hers. “Hush a moment, I am inspired. I have a notion what the very first line shall be.”
“Once upon—”
“I love you,” he said.
She clung to him, letting the words sink in. He hadn’t needed to tell her, but she was glad he had. “With an opening like that, there’s no question as to how the tale should end,” she said softly.
“How?” he whispered.
“I love you, too.”
He pressed her back onto the bed. “Then all that’s left is for us to take care of the middle of our story. And I don’t think either of us will have to look far to find inspiration.”
Watch for Emma Boscastle’s story…the next seductive tale in the Boscastle Series!
THE DEVILISH PLEASURES OF A DUKE
by Jillian Hunter
Available in stores in summer 2007 from Ivy Books
The stranger’s eyes glinted through the slits of his mask. The next thing Jocelyn knew, his hard mouth descended on hers in a deep, devastating kiss. Gentle. Ruthless. Irresistible. He kissed her throat, her shoulders, then slid his mouth lower to suckle the tips of her breasts.
“Let’s do away with our masks, shall we?” he murmured. “As a matter of fact, let’s do away with the dress you’re wearing.”
“It’s you,” she said in a strangled voice.
“Of course it’s me,” he murmured.
And Jocelyn did not need to ask his name. Because she knew. Mask or no mask, she knew.
“Devon Boscastle.” She stared up into his beguiling face as he wrenched off his hood and removed his mask. His beautiful mouth quirked into a grin.
“Jocelyn.” He added insult to injury by breaking into laughter. “It is you.”
Also by Jillian Hunter
(published by Ivy Books)
THE SEDUCTION OF AN ENGLISH SCOUNDREL
THE LOVE AFFAIR OF AN ENGLISH LORD
THE WEDDING NIGHT OF AN ENGLISH SCOUNDREL
THE WICKED GAMES OF A GENTLEMAN
The Sinful Nights of a Nobleman is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Ivy Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2006 by Maria Hoag
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ivy Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
IVY BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-49524-2
v3.0
The Sinful Nights of a Nobleman Page 23
