Never Seduce a Scoundrel

by Sabrina Jeffries

  “Yes, darlin’, like that.” His fingers dug her into hips. “Damnation, you feel good.”

  He felt good, too, so good that the urge to move against him was nearly irresistible. But resist the urge she did. She sat there immobile, careful not to touch him except where they were joined.

  After a moment, his eyes shot open. “Move, damn it.”

  “All right.” She placed her hands on her thighs and stroked in circles.

  The glare he cast her would have set fire to a glacier. “Up and down, Amelia.”

  Struggling not to smile, she ran her hands up and down her thighs.

  “Amelia…” he said in a warning tone.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” she said innocently.

  “You know damned well it’s not. I want you to make love to me.”

  “Then you’ll have to be more specific in your requests,” she chirped, enjoying herself. “How exactly do I make love to you? What part should I move first? Where? How often? When do—”

  “Damn you.” Seizing her head in his hands, he kissed her with a desperation that resonated deeply in her loins. Still she sat there, not touching him, not moving.

  He ripped his mouth from hers to growl, “An obedient wife would know what I want of her.”

  “She’d be able to read your mind? How extraordinary. I didn’t realize that such a talent came along with obedience.” She cast him a mischievous smile. “And you know perfectly well that any mealymouthed, blindly obedient wife wouldn’t be sitting atop your lap unless you demanded it. She’d be too embarrassed. And too busy groveling at your feet. In fact, if I were to be a truly obedient wife—”

  She started to lift up off his cock, and he caught her to him. “Enough,” he growled against her ear. “Enough, you teasing, impudent plague of a woman. Give me what I want, Amelia.”

  “An obedient wife?” she whispered, as he skated his mouth over the pulse beating furiously in her throat.

  He hesitated, then let out a heartfelt groan. “No. You. Just you. You’re the only one I want.”

  She sucked in a breath, not daring to believe that she’d won. “And in the morning? What then?”

  His hands slid down to cup her breasts, to rub the nipples erect once more, and his mouth was warm and tender as it laved her ear. “I’ll go to France, all right? Just give me my Delilah back.” He pumped his hips beneath her as his hands feverishly caressed her breasts. “Please, darlin’…be my Delilah tonight…because in the morning we begin a very long dry spell…”

  That was all it took to make her move, to have her throwing her arms about his neck and showering his face with kisses. She undulated against him, sliding up and down on his cock, pumping it fervently.

  They’d never made love this way before, but she felt as if she’d been born to do it. It was the most exquisite sensation yet, having him deep inside her while at the same time having control, being able to press herself hard against him exactly where she wanted to feel him hard against her.

  “Yes…” he rasped as she rode his cock in a fever of need. “Yes, Delilah, yes…faster, darlin’…God have mercy…faster, faster…”

  She did exactly as he asked. Since she’d won, she could afford to be generous. And he responded to it with all the fervency she could desire, his fingers plucking her nipples, his mouth plundering hers and giving her such rich pleasure, she thought she would die of it.

  As she ground down upon his cock over and over, the tension building inside her, she tore her lips from his. “Is this what you want?” she demanded, feeling her own release just beyond her, out of her reach. “Is this what my big, strapping soldier of a husband wants?”

  “You know it is,” he said, his voice raw, guttural. He nipped her lip, then soothed it with his tongue. “I want you, darlin’…just you…”

  She fisted her hands in his hair, her legs aching from the force of her motions. “But only…if I do as you say.”

  “Do as you want.” His eyes slid shut. “Do as you please…just don’t…leave me.”

  Her throat tightened. “I won’t,” she vowed.

  “If you try, I’ll hunt you…to the ends of the earth.”

  The fierce words sent a thrill coursing through her. It was the closest Lucas had ever come to a declaration of love, and she cradled it to her heart. “No need for that.” She brushed a kiss to his lips, his closed eyelids. “I’ll never leave you, my love.”

  At the word “love,” his eyes shot open to search her face. “You won’t rest…until you…have me broken and bleeding at your feet…will you?”

  Leave it to Lucas to see “love” as defeat. Even as she ground her hips more urgently, feeling the rush to release seize her, she fixed him with a fiery glance. “I won’t rest…until you love me…as I love you…”

  The look of yearning that came over his dark features was so powerful even his scowl couldn’t disguise it. “God have mercy on me,” he groaned. “Because it’s damned certain…that you won’t.”

  Then they were straining together, pounding, thrusting, lost to anything but each other, to their mutual need and desire and…dare she hope…love.

  As he spilled his seed inside her and cried out her name with all the fervency of a vow, all the desperation of a prayer, she clutched him close and let her love wash over them both, hoping it was enough, swearing she would make it enough.

  And long after she collapsed atop him, long after their hearts had settled into a more normal rhythm, and she lay spent and sated across his powerful body, she repeated the vow to herself. She loved him. And somehow she’d teach him to love her.

  He stretched out and dragged her into his embrace, pressing her head to his chest and brushing her hair with his lips.

  It was only later, after his breath had grown even and she was certain that he slept, that she roused the courage to say again, in a furtive whisper, “I love you, Lucas.” Then she gave herself up to the sweet exhaustion tugging her own eyelids closed.

  When next she awakened, he was gone, and the sun was streaming through her filmy curtains. She jerked upright in a panic, cursing her tendency to sleep like the dead. Surely he wouldn’t have left without telling her good-bye!

  But a cursory examination of the room showed that his knapsack was gone, along with his boots and some of his clothes. An unnamed fear gripping her, she dragged a nightrail and a wrapper over her body, then hurried down the stairs.

  She found Dolly sitting in the breakfast room, staring vacantly out the window.

  “Where’s Lucas?” Amelia asked.

  When Dolly turned to Amelia, her eyes were red. “Gone to France with your father. Didn’t you know?”

  “I did, but…” She sank into a chair. She’d hoped he might say something before he left, something to give her hope for their future.

  “George suggested that you and I return to Torquay to await their return. The season is ending anyway, and if you stay here, you’ll have to deal with gossip about the elopement.” She stared down at her hands. “This way, we can start the tale that you and Lucas are on your honeymoon. No one need know that you’re in Torquay. Besides, if George has to make arrangements to sell the town house upon his return—” She broke off with a little sob.

  “Oh, Dolly,” Amelia said, forcing her own troubles to the back of her mind. She hurried to sit beside her stepmother and put her arm about her shoulders. “Everything will be fine, I promise. Lucas will never demand money of Papa, you’ll see. And in France he’ll find proof that your brother is dead, and that will be an end to it.”

  “Youbelieve me about Theo, don’t you?” Dolly said in a plaintive whisper. “You believe I never set out to deceive you?”

  “Of course, dearest. Of course.”

  Tears slid down her cheeks once more. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, you know. I saw your husband’s evidence this morning, all the banking documents and newspaper reports and—” She broke off with a choked cry. “Theo was every bit as bad as your husband claim
ed—a bounder, a scoundrel, a thief.”

  “You didn’t know,” Amelia said softly.

  “I did,” Dolly protested. “Deep down, I suppose I knew. I just didn’t want to face it.”

  When she burst into sobs, Amelia drew her into her arms and murmured soothing nonsense, wondering what she would have done in Dolly’s place. Probably brained Theo Frier with a pitcher. And that wicked fellow in Rhinebeck, too.

  But that wasn’t Dolly’s way. She always wanted to believe the best of people, and when she couldn’t, she retreated. Or, in the case of those she loved, avoided the truth. Dolly had spent a lifetime hiding from things, and Theo Frier had taken advantage of that.

  After a while, when her sobs lessened, Dolly pulled away. “Listen to me, sweetheart. You mustn’t let any of this come between you and your husband.”

  “It’s all right, I—”

  “No, I mean it.” A soft smile touched her lips. “I won’t have you lose him over me. Anyone with eyes can see that Major Winter adores you.”

  Amelia’s heart tightened in her chest. If he did, he had an odd way of showing it, running off to France without even so much as a kiss good-bye. “Do you really think so?”

  Dolly nodded. “Of course, your father feels differently. He’s too angry to see it.” She gave a small smile through her tears. “He spent half the night vowing to thrash the major.”

  Amelia gave a bitter laugh. “That’s not a surprise. I spend half my days vowing to thrash the major.”

  “And the other half? How do you spend them ?”

  Her throat tightened. “Wanting to hold him so close, he can never doubt that I love him.”

  Dolly beamed at her. “I’m sure he knows, sweetheart. And I’m sure he loves you, too.”

  Lord, she hoped so. Because she didn’t know how she’d survive if he didn’t.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Dear Cousin,

  Amelia’s husband and father have gone to France on an errand neither she nor her stepmother will divulge. It has made my dear pupil very melancholy, which tells me that poor Amelia is in love with the major. I can only hope for her sake that he feels the same. As I learned very well from my marriage, loving a man who does not love you leads to nothing but disappointment.

  Your anxious cousin,

  Charlotte

  Ilove you, Lucas.

  Lucas had expected those words to eventually lose their power over him. Yet after a week spent crossing the Channel, then trudging across the same French countryside he’d traversed barely a month ago, they only consumed him more. They glittered in every morning dawn, they beat through every step he took, they swirled maddeningly through his dreams at night.

  They succored him after every chilling nightmare.

  At first he’d tried to convince himself that Amelia had spoken them only to manipulate him. But after days reliving every moment he’d spent with his wife, he’d given up believing that. If he ever had.

  Amelia wasn’t his mother. If she had been, she would have said she loved him the first time she’d thought it might gain her something, like when she was first ruined. She’d have thrown the words at him when she’d begged him to show her stepmother mercy.

  She wouldn’t have said them after she’d made her point. She wouldn’t have burst out with them in the midst of their lovemaking. She certainly wouldn’t have whispered them when she’d thought him asleep.

  So he had to accept them as truth: she loved him. His bewitching Delilah of a wife loved him. And instead of racing back to England to swear his undying devotion, he was standing in a graveyard in Lisieux with his gruff father-in-law.

  Throughout their long trip, Lucas and Lord Tovey had discussed Lucas’s military career, his prospects as a consul, even his imprisonment at Dartmoor. Lucas had heard about the progress of Lord Tovey’s apple orchards, how many sheep had lambed the past spring, and which tenants had done well. The one thing they hadn’t talked about was what absorbed them most—their wives. It was as if they feared that talking about the situation would make it real.

  But now they were staring at a gravestone neither of them could ignore. It read, in English:

  Here lies Theodore Frier

  Beloved brother and friend

  May he find the peace in death

  Denied to him in life

  Lucas read it with a sinking in his chest. Amelia had been right when she’d said it was revenge that drove him. Because now that he saw the words carved in stone, his disappointment was so overpowering that he realized just how badly he’d wanted Dorothy to be lying.

  “It looks authentic,” Lord Tovey said beside him.

  “Yes.” But they both knew that didn’t mean much.

  “What shall you do now? We could hunt down that fellow Lebeau, who prepared the body for burial. The man maintaining the parish register may not have known where he went, but surely someone does.”

  The desperation in Lord Tovey’s voice struck a powerful chord with Lucas. The man was in a terror that he’d lose his wife, and Lucas knew exactly what that was like.

  “We could also speak to the local apothecary,” Lord Tovey went on. “Those fellows at the inn said he would return by evening. He might know something more about the death recorded in the parish register.”

  Lucas sighed. If the apothecary didn’t know anything about the death, there would be another trek to find this Lebeau. And for what? So Lucas could prove that Frier was alive? So that he could make sure his revenge hadn’t been snatched out from beneath his nose by a twist of fate?

  In the end, all he’d probably learn is what he’d learned here—nothing solid. A lot of little things, but no real proof.

  When Lucas still didn’t answer, his father-in-law growled, “Tell me what to do, Major. Give me some task, or I shall go mad with worrying what you will do to my Dolly.”

  Lucas tensed, shaken to the soul by such desperation. He understood it only too well. There were some things worth lowering one’s pride and begging for—redemption, mercy…one’s wife.

  Lucas stared at the drawn face he’d come to know well in the past days, at the graying temples and the anguished brown eyes that reminded him so much of Amelia’s. “You believe Frier is dead, don’t you?”

  The sudden hope in Lord Tovey’s eyes was so poignant, Lucas had to look away. “I do. But whether I believe it is not the question. It’s what you believe that counts. And what proof your government will accept.”

  Lucas was silent a long moment, then finally admitted what he hadn’t dared to before. “As long as they get their money, my government will accept what I tell them. If I make a rubbing of the gravestone, report what I found out here, and give them the death certificate, they’ll probably accept my word. For them, the money is what matters.”

  “Are you sure?” Lord Tovey said hoarsely.

  “Yes. The one who cared most about seeing Frier dragged back to stand trial was me. If I proclaim him dead, they’ll accept that he is since they know how fiercely I wanted him captured.”

  “Ah,” Lord Tovey replied, a wealth of meaning in that word. Clearly, he understood after a week what Amelia had recognized that night in London—that Lucas was driven by far more than the embezzlement. Lucas wanted justice, for his father and for himself. And he could finally acknowledge that he wasn’t likely to get it—at least from Frier.

  He’d had plenty of time over this trip to review his evidence in light of Lady Tovey’s claims. Things he had ignored before now loomed larger in his memory. Like the evasive manner of Dorothy’s former employer when Lucas had asked why the woman left. Or the trail of good reports she’d left behind her wherever they lived.

  He’d been so determined to see her as a manipulative seductress that he’d made the evidence fit. Because it suited him. Because it suited his hate.

  Because his search had given him something to live for, when his whole life had been one long measure of grief.

  But finally he had a chance at something other tha
n grief—a wife who suited him, who wanted to bear his children and have a life with him…who loved him.

  He gave a shuddering breath as he faced his wife’s father. “So you would stake your honor, everything you stand for, on the belief that your wife is telling the truth?”

  Lord Tovey stared him down. “I would be a fool not to. I’ve spent two years learning her moods, finding out what will bring tears to her eyes, and what will make her laugh. Two years of breakfasts and dinners together, two years of memorizing every freckle on her dear face…two years of knowing when she is lying and when she is telling the truth.”

  Lucas lifted an eyebrow. “You didn’t know she had a brother.”

  “No, but I knew she had a past.”

  Lucas blinked. Apparently he hadn’t been the only one hiding things.

  “Despite what you think,” Lord Tovey continued, “my wife is not particularly adept at deception. I guessed after a week of marriage that Obadiah Smith was a clear invention, for no woman who’d ever been married could have been as continuously surprised by the intimacies of marriage as my shy wife. After a month, I realized that she had some dark secret plaguing her. But I never pressed her because I knew she’d tell me when she was no longer afraid of losing me if she did.” His voice shook. “When she could finally accept that I loved her too much ever to let anything separate us.”

  A lump lodged in Lucas’s throat. “You’re as much a romantic as Amelia. Who, by the way, never realized any of what you realized about your wife. She believed Dolly was innocent from the very first, no matter what I said.”

  “That’s because Amelia desperately wanted a mother, and Dolly gave her that. And because my daughter couldn’t imagine that anyone she loved would ever deceive her in anything but the most superficial manner. When she gives her trust, she gives it with her whole heart, and it would take a powerful effort for anyone she loved to destroy that trust.”