The Heart of a Scoundrel

by Christi Caldwell

  Warring with himself, he slid a hand to her center and stroked her until those eager moans became hungry cries. “Forgive me,” he rasped and then plunged deep into the heaven of her body.

  Her cry ended on a shattered scream that he silenced with his kiss. Phoebe went taut in his arms and squeezed her eyes so tight a single drop slid down her cheek, ravaging him so that the desire to drive back her tears was even greater than the need to continue pumping himself within her until he spilled his seed.

  “I am so sorry,” he rasped. “If I could have spared you this hurt, I would have.”

  She gave a jerky nod and then forced her eyes open. Pain bled through her eyes but she mustered a small smile and something shifted inside him. And because the panic pounding away inside his chest threatened to overtake him, he began to move slowly, withdrawing, and moving forward. Until the pain receded from the blues of her eyes, replaced with the haze of desire. Then she flexed her hips, almost tentatively, and he increased his pace. Phoebe folded her arms about him and matched his rhythm. Their bodies rose and fell with the sheen of sweat slicking her skin, giving her an other-worldly beauty that shattered his logic so all he wanted was to lose himself within her.

  “I-I never kn-knew I could feel like this,” she rasped, echoing the very thought thundering through his mind. She raked her nails lightly down his back and he squeezed his eyes shut at the pleasure-pain of both that seductive gesture and her words.

  Neither did I. Agony kept those words silent. One wrong word and he would be lost—in every way.

  Their thrusting took on a desperate, primitive beat and he slid his shaft in and out of her tight cavern. White light flecked behind his eyes. “Come,” he urged on a hoarse command.

  She arched her hips up, meeting his pounding rhythm. “Yes, take me with you,” she pleaded and then her slender body went stiff in his arms. Urging her on, he reached between them again and played with her nub. With a loud, desperate cry, the folds of her sheath tightened about him and she screamed her release to the heavens. Propelled onward by her surrender, Edmund pumped harder and faster, and then with a triumphant groan, poured himself deep inside her until every last logical thought, word, or feeling was drained from him. He collapsed atop her, sated. Edmund rolled to his side and pulled her against him.

  They lay there with time melting away, and instead of the sated sense of at last knowing her so he could move on from her, there was…guilt. He’d taken her as he would any other woman, when she’d been deserving of a bed and vows and all things good. Never before had any person’s interests mattered to him more than his own—until now.

  “What is it?” she whispered, as she plucked at the fabric of his shirtsleeves. She angled back and looked up at him with concern in her eyes. “Did I do something wrong?”

  She’d ask that when he was the sole, vile blackguard between them? He shoved aside the stirrings of guilt at having taken her in Lord Essex’s gardens and dropped a kiss atop her brow. “You did everything right.” His praise elicited a pale pink blush on her cheeks. Masculine pride at being the first to know Phoebe’s body filled him. Never before had he cared whether a woman had lain with another or how many lovers she’d known. This woman was different…for the idea of her sharing this with another filled him with bloodlust as a rapidly growing, insidious sentiment that felt a good deal like jealousy spiraled out of control. On the heel of that, a slow building panic spread through him. He abruptly sat up.

  “Edmund?” She looked at him through confused eyes.

  “Come,” he commanded gruffly. “You must return or your,” our, “absence will be noted.”

  Edmund retrieved his jacket and fished out a handkerchief. The intimacy of brushing the evidence of their loving and the traces of her innocence from her soft, inner thighs momentarily froze him. Through the years, he’d taken care to never spend himself inside a woman. In addition to not wanting to propagate the world with his bastards, he’d loathed the idea of that intimacy for the loss of control it signaled. Yet, in the moment when climax had been near, he’d wanted to brand her, Phoebe Barrett, as his. Terror ran roughshod over his muddied thoughts.

  “What is it?” she pressed, concern lacing her question.

  Edmund gave his head a curt shake, incapable of words. He’d thought once he’d taken Phoebe Barrett, he could purge her from his life. Loathing gripped him. In the end, she’d given a worthless bounder such as him the gift of her virtue and only fueled a growing hunger for her. He put her hair and wrinkled gown to rights, aware the whole time of her probing stare.

  Not another word was uttered however as they made their way from the gardens and into the conservatory. As he pulled open the door of Essex’s prized room, Phoebe hurried out of the room and back to the festivities. He stared after her.

  Would he ever have his fill of Phoebe Barrett?

  Chapter 11

  He didn’t come around. In fact, he hadn’t come ’round in more than four days. Phoebe stared into the contents of her cup of chocolate, while her mother and sister prattled on about fabrics and shopping excursions and all manner of things that didn’t matter.

  Despite his request to court her, his absence these days indicated that whatever sentiments she’d imagined between them were, in fact, imagined. It was as her friends had said of Edmund—men with his notorious reputation didn’t dabble in the respectable and they assuredly did not court ladies. Likely, he’d taken his leave of her and her stern-staring friends and remembered why he craved a rake’s life.

  Panic slapped at the edge of her mind. In a decision that had belonged entirely to her, she’d given her virginity to him. Even now, she could be carrying his child.

  Nausea churned in her belly and she tightened her shaking fingers upon the cup, just as her brother sailed through the open breakfast room doors.

  How could he be so carefree when her world had been so shaken by her actions at Lady Essex’s?

  “Mother, Phoebe, Justina,” he greeted, moving with the swagger of a youth just out of university. He stopped at the sideboard and heaped a plate full of eggs, bacon, cold ham, and warm, just made bread.

  Phoebe managed a lukewarm greeting and then returned her attention to her drink.

  “What is the matter with her?” Andrew called across the table as he slid into a seat.

  “She’s sulking.” Justina spoke with a maturity that brought Phoebe’s head up.

  “I am not sulking.” Her family studied her with matching stares and she shifted in her seat. “I’m not,” she said defensively. She wasn’t sulking. She’d merely been reflecting on her own regrets over Edmund and what might have been and why it might not have been and… She groaned and set her cup down. When she picked her gaze up once more, she found her mother and siblings still studying her. This time, regret and pity lined their faces.

  “It is about the marquess,” Justina said noisily, the overly loud whisper a secret to no one.

  “It is not—” They stared pointedly at her and she sighed again. It was the marquess.

  “What about the marquess?” Andrew asked. With no forthcoming response from Phoebe, he turned to first his mother and then his sister. Mother nibbled at her toast while Justina made a show of buttering her bread. They were loyal, the Barrett ladies. When he looked to her again, Phoebe picked up her fork and knife and made a show of slicing her already very sliced ham. With a frown, he waved over a liveried footman. “I, for one, like the gentleman.”

  Phoebe’s silverware clattered to the porcelain plate. “You know the marquess?” Her heart hammered wildly with this foolish desire for some additional glimpse of Edmund; the suitor who’d come and gone. But it was madness to believe he knew—

  “Oh, yes, know him quite well.” Suddenly, he glanced about, registering the intent stares trained on him and stretched the interminable moment out by taking a long sip of his coffee…and promptly choked.

  Despite the nightmare facing her as a fallen woman, a wistful smile pulled at Phoebe’s li
ps. For all his show, Andrew was really nothing more than a boy. That smile dipped. A boy who professed to know Edmund.

  “You know the marquess?” Phoebe was grateful when her mother spoke the question, sparing her from asking that very question a second time.

  “I know him, a bit,” he amended.

  “You merely read about him in the papers,” Justina said with a bluntness that raised the color in his cheeks.

  “I know him,” he persisted, sounding more like an insolent child in debate about his lessons with a nursemaid. “I told him all about Phoebe.”

  She choked on her swallow. “You what?” Her voice emerged garbled and her mind frantically raced to put to right Andrew’s words. “What did you say?” What had he said?

  Suddenly registering the severity of his interference, he shifted back and forth in his seat. “I merely told him you detested needlepoint.” Which didn’t seem a detail Edmund would much care about.

  “What else did you say?” she bit out.

  He furrowed his brow. “Well…”

  “Andrew,” his mother snapped, with more seriousness than she’d exhibited in the course of Phoebe’s twenty-one years.

  “I merely sought to gauge the seriousness of his…” She groaned over her brother’s words. “…intentions.”

  Phoebe dropped her head into her hands and shook it back and forth. No. No. No. But blast and double blast. Yes. Yes. Yes. Andrew had no doubt gone and discussed that very intimate part of her and Edmund’s relationship, which likely accounted for why a notorious rake would suddenly cease to visit. Oh, God. Did he even now believe she’d sought to trap him into marriage? “What have you done?”

  “He seemed very interested,” Andrew said.

  She whipped her head up. “He did?” And then her heart promptly sank. If he’d been interested, as her brother said, he would have come by, but instead he’d disappeared. The one gentleman she’d ever truly felt a connection to—a man who knew the struggle of being labeled one thing by gossips, when he was, in actuality, a very different person. A person who dreamed and hoped. And a man who, in a stolen moment of magic, she’d given her virginity to. Fear curled her toes. For she’d now given the gift expected of any gentleman’s respective bride.

  “Oh, yes,” Andrew said after he’d taken several sips of his coffee. His lips pulled in a grimace, likely at the bitter, black brew. “He claimed he was uninterested in polite ladies.”

  Their mother gasped into her fingers.

  “He said that?” Phoebe dropped back in her seat, her heart dipping all the further. Her friends had been correct in their suppositions of the marquess, then. She struggled to breathe through the fear and panic weighting her chest.

  A twinkle glinted in Andrew’s eyes. “He did, however, profess to be interested in you.”

  She scrambled forward, a question on her lips, as with her brother’s flippant comment, hope was restored.

  The words however remained unspoken, as their father chose that inopportune moment to enter the breakfast room. They stared at him in mute silence as he scratched his enormous belly. He stared at them all with a frown on his florid cheeks. “Who is interested in whom?”

  Phoebe bit the inside of her cheek. She loathed the idea of her drunken, reprobate father knowing anything that mattered to her. If experience had taught her one thing about her useless sire, beyond how a marital connection could fill his rapidly depleting coffers, he had no interest in his children.

  “Well,” he grumbled, wandering over to the sideboard and piling a plate full of breakfast ham, sausage, kippers, and egg. He added one additional scoop of eggs and then carried his plate to the head of the table. When no response was forthcoming, he glared at his wife.

  “We were speaking of Phoebe making a match,” Justina said softly, even in her innocence wise enough to leave off on details.

  With gusto, their father speared the meat on his plate and proceeded to shovel heaps of food into his mouth. “Oh,” he spoke around his food. “A match with whom?”

  Phoebe dropped her gaze to her untouched dish, repelled by the abhorrent man whose blood she shared.

  He belched and helped himself to another bite. “I said—”

  “The Marquess of Rutland,” Andrew blurted. “Ouch.” He flinched and frowned petulantly at Justina which could only mean she’d given him a deserved kick.

  Father picked his bulging, wide-eyed gaze up from his plate and glanced about the table. “Rutland, you say?” A flicker of something flared in his bloodshot gaze that gave Phoebe pause; a sense of knowing, which was, of course, madness. Her father didn’t know anything of her interests, hopes, or desires. He never had. And he’d assuredly not be aware of the secret of her regard for Edmund.

  Their mother wrung her hands. “He is a marquess and therefore quite respectable.”

  Her husband snorted and opened his mouth as though to say more on it, but then promptly flattened his lips and took another bite of cold ham.

  Phoebe’s shoulders drooped with relief as her father once more demonstrated the same regard he had through the years, asking nothing further about Edmund or his courtship. Another tug pulled at her heart. Or his previous courtship. She shoved back her chair so quickly that it scraped along the wood floor. Her family eyed her with mixed degrees of concern and, in her father’s case, apathy. “If you’ll excuse me.” She dropped a curtsy and walked briskly to the door, her neck burning with the stares trained on her person.

  “Where are you off to, gel?”

  Her father’s words jerked her to a halt in the doorway. Phoebe turned slowly back around, dismayed by this unexpected inquiry. “Where am I off to?”

  “Is something wrong with your hearing, girl?”

  “The museum.” She ran her palms over her skirts, uncomfortable with his sudden, inexplicable interest. As a girl, she’d become accustomed to his detachedness and didn’t know what to do with a father who asked probing questions.

  “Which museum?”

  Such as that one.

  “The Leverian.”

  He fell silent, scrunching his mouth up in deep concentration as though he sought to file away that rather uninteresting piece. Phoebe tipped her chin up. “Does that meet with your approval?”

  Either too self-absorbed or too stupid to detect the mocking challenge in that question, her father waved a hand about. “I don’t care how you entertain yourself, chit.” With that he returned his focus to consuming his plate of breakfast meats, dismissing her.

  She used the distraction to make her escape, suddenly very eager for her visit to the Leverian so she could be away from her father, her inquisitive siblings and mother, and then perhaps even away from the hurt of Edmund’s defection.

  *

  Curtains pulled tightly closed, it was unnaturally dark in Edmund’s office. Seated on the aged, brown leather sofa with his head in his hands, he pressed the heel of his palms against his eyes in a desperate, now futile, attempt to drive Miss Phoebe Barrett from his thoughts. He’d believed that simply staying away from the dark-haired beauty would restore order to the cold, debauched life he’d lived all these years. Alas, the lady had a power more potent than the witch Medusa, for Phoebe had managed a feat no other had—she’d frozen him and muddied every belief and pledge he’d carried through the better part of his life. A vow to never know pain or care, but damn it, she had slipped past his guard and like her beloved Vikings, vanquished his sanity.

  He’d resolved to not use her as part of his master scheme of revenge against Margaret Dunn. A bitter, ugly laugh rumbled up from his chest. When he’d first met Margaret, he’d fancied himself in love. After he’d been humiliated at the Earl of Stanhope’s hands, fighting for the right to the lady’s heart, he’d had a bloodlust for revenge. It had driven him. Consumed him. Only strengthened by the daily reminder of his own failings as a man. How very strange to realize he wanted something more than revenge—he wanted Phoebe.

  It defied logic; this hungering for a lady
so wholly innocent that she’d be fool enough to see good in even him. She is not so wholly innocent anymore thanks to your selfish desires… The muscles of his stomach clenched reflexively as something…something that felt very much like guilt swamped his senses. When he’d led Phoebe to Lord Essex’s gardens, the sole intention had been to assuage his lust for the lady. He’d not given thought to anything but having his fill and purging her from his thoughts. Edmund dragged a hand down his face. Only now, in the light of a new day, having emptied his seed into her tight, virginal channel did he confront the mind-numbing truth—once would never be enough. His breath came hard and fast as terror momentarily blinded him. A knock sounded at the door bringing his head up. “Enter,” he rasped out.

  The door opened and his old, faithful butler shuffled slowly in bearing a missive in his hands. “M-my lord.”

  With a silent curse, Edmund leapt to his feet and met the man in four long strides, saving him from a lengthy walk across the expansive office. “I told you to have one of the footmen see to this task,” he snapped. “If you insist on holding your damned post, you should be circumspect with your footsteps.”

  A smile played about the heavily wrinkled face. “The movement is—”

  “If you say good for your constitution, Wallace, by God I’ll sack you.”

  Wallace’s grin deepened. “We shall say beneficial, then, my lord.”

  He snorted and accepted the letter held between the servant’s gnarled fingers. His heart thudded to a stop in his chest at the familiar crest stamped upon the note. Edmund slid his finger under the seal and quickly scanned the hastily penned note.

  She is at the Leverian.

  A Judas is what the lady’s father was.

  And what does that make me? The temple guard at Gethsemane?

  Edmund crushed the note in his hands, wrinkling it into a noisy ball. What was this? These weak feelings of regret and pain and remorse, he barely recognized within himself, sentiments he’d thought himself emotionally dead to.