Temptation & Twilight (8 page)

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“Honour was met,” Larabie’s second announced, and Black all but flew between the small space that set them apart, confronting the man with his fist knotted in his cravat.

“Honour was not met,” he snarled. “Larabie shot him in cold blood. None of the rules were adhered to. It wasn’t a fair duel.”

“It wasn’t fair of him to bed my wife!” Larabie roared, and Iain, not wanting to hear the earl’s pompous voice a second longer, rasped and waved his friend back over.

“Let it go,” he murmured as Black knelt down beside him. “I don’t think it’s fatal, anyway. Besides, I plan on playing this up to the lady. Surely she will see to it that I am well compensated for this business.”

“Damn you, this plan of yours is going to hell.” Iain shrugged and winced in pain as a tearing burn made its way down his left arm. “Shoulder, I think.

Bloody bastard is lucky it’s my left.”

“Make way, gentlemen,” the physician ordered. He set his black bag down on the damp grass beside Iain’s head. Alynwick’s coachman had taken a carriage lamp and was holding it over them, allowing its soft glow to illuminate the scene. Above him, Iain could see Larabie’s jowls quivering. To his left stood Black, his expression the colour of his name. The doctor pulled at Iain’s coat, revealing the soaked shirt beneath.

“Well, will the bastard live, or shall I make plans to leave for the continent tonight?” Larabie muttered.

“Shoulder wound,” the physician announced. “There’s no need to flee the scene, my lord.”

“Lucky bastard. Like a cat, he is. But one day, Alynwick, you’ll use up those nine lives, and I hope that when you are on the ninth and final one, it is my bullet that BOUND GALLEY EDITION March 23, 2012

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sends you straight to hell. Come along, Sheridan,” the earl ordered. “It is time to return home to deal with my wife.”

“Into the carriage, my lord,” the physician instructed.

“I shall follow in mine. The bullet must be removed and the wound cleansed.”

“I thank you,” Iain growled as Black hefted him up from the wet grass, and none too gently, either. “My man will see to it.”

“You keep a surgeon at the ready, do you?” the physician said with offended hauteur.

Iain laughed at the thought. Sutherland was no doctor. He was barely a valet. But he was a hell of a villain, when Iain found himself in need of one.

“Well, then,” the doctor muttered with a snap of his leather satchel. “I shall bid you good-night.”

“You shouldn’t have ordered him away,” Black snarled as he all but dragged Iain up the carriage stairs. “Your injury is extensive. What if Sutherland can’t manage it?”

“Then I should think that butler of yours,” he gasped as he fell onto the carriage bench, “would do nicely.”

“Billings is at home with my wife, keeping her safe.

I am not having him removed to tend you and your stupidity.”

“Fine, then,” Iain said as he let his head fall back against the squabs. Dawn was slowly rising in the distance, and he closed his eyes as blood continued to pump from his shoulder. “Take me to Sussex House,” he said, his voice sounding distant to his ears.

“Sussex House?” Black enquired. “What for? Patch yourself up first before we descend upon Sussex.”

“Damn you, man!” Iain roared. “Honour a man’s dying wish. Take me to Sussex House, to Elizabeth,” he heard himself murmur. Thankfully, he passed out before he could hear Black’s response.

BOUND GALLEY EDITION March 23, 2012

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ON THE EDGE OF Grantham Field, amongst the trees and the fog, stood a town coach with four gleaming black stallions. No one saw it, for he did not want them to. He was not ready for them yet. But soon… Soon the Brethren would be his.

“Did you expect this?” his companion asked as she smoothed her delicate hand up the length of his thigh.

Indeed, he had not. Alynwick was always the wild card in the troika that made up the Brethren Guardians.

A hotheaded Scot, and a man who barely had any control over his base desires and his animal rage.

He had thought the marquis would simply blow the earl away, but instead, Alynwick had been wounded.

A measure of glee swam inside him. Alynwick was wounded—considerably so. It would make things that much easier with Alynwick out of the picture, even temporarily.

Patience,
he told himself as the placket of his trousers fell open, and he was gripped by a knowing, skilled hand.

Patience always paid off in the end. He had waited a long, long time for this. And soon, he would be rewarded.

Soon, the Brethren would belong to him—to Orpheus.

“Take me,” she whispered, and he rapped his walking stick against the carriage, sending the vehicle lurch-ing forward.

“Soon, pet,” he mumbled. “I have something to do first. A little surprise for His Grace.”

“It’s not like you to be so kind,” she murmured as her lips worked their way down his neck.

“I’m in the giving mood,” he mumbled, thinking of what he would do. “And Sussex will be the benefactor.” IN THE END, Black ignored his request, which was so typical of him. The bastard always did whatever he wanted.

BOUND GALLEY EDITION March 23, 2012

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Instead of taking him to Sussex House, Black carried him, half-conscious, from the carriage and into Iain’s own town house, past his shocked butler, whose harsh, indrawn breath echoed off the fourteen-foot-high ceiling, and all the way up the ornately carved, curving staircase to Iain’s bedroom, where he dropped Iain onto the bed as though he were a sack of grain. Only then did Black rouse Sutherland.

Shortly after, his valet stumbled into the room, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “And what scrape have ye gotten yourself into this time, my lord?”

“What does it look like?” he growled. “I’m bleeding onto the sheets.”

Sutherland grunted when he saw the extent of the wound he was expected to work on. “Won’t be a pretty sight after I’m done, my lord.”

“He’s too pretty now,” Iain heard Black state in his characteristic sombre voice. “A little mark to remind him of his arrogance should be his reward for this night’s business. Patch him up, Sutherland.”

“The ladies will only find the scar more endearing, I’m afraid.”

“Yes. Peculiar how many ladies find something of merit in Alynwick.”

“I’m awake and can hear every damn word you’re both saying.”

“Good,” Sutherland muttered as he tore the blood-soaked shirt from Iain’s chest. “Then you know I’ll make a botch of this shoulder. But you’ll live.”

“Scotch,” he demanded, before saying, “I don’t give a damn what it looks like, just stop the bleeding.”

“You won’t be saying that once you have a look at my handiwork, I’ll wager.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sutherland, I’m not a vain man.” BOUND GALLEY EDITION March 23, 2012

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“I wonder if you’d be claiming that if it was your face I was to work on.”

“Well, then I’d look like the devil on the outside, just as I am on the inside, wouldn’t I?” Sutherland quirked a thick auburn brow. “Yer in one of those moods tonight, I see.”

“Get on with it, or I’ll drag myself out of this bed and find someone more inclined to work, instead of prat-tling like a maid.”

The sound of the crystal stopper popping out of the decanter was music to his ears. However, the roar he let out when Black poured a good measure of the liquid gold onto his shoulder was not.

“Like bloody hellfire,” he gasped between gritted teeth, stiffening under the burning onslaught. “And there’s cheaper stuff to be used for medicinal purposes.

That’s a twenty-five-year aged single malt, Black, and you’ve pissed it away for no good reason.”

“I assumed saving your hide from a stinking puru-lence would be reason enough.”

“The inferior brands can do that as well as any of them.”

Black merely raised one laconic brow as he peered down at him from the side of the bed. “I’ll leave you to your duties, Sutherland. Nothing more to drink for his lordship, no matter what he says or threatens you with.

I’m tired of lugging him about tonight. I want him to walk into Sussex House on his own two feet.”

“Right, my lord.”

Iain glared at the door as it slammed behind Black, then turned to give his valet a wrathful glare. “Cease coddling the damn wound and sew it shut. Or better yet, heat the poker and singe it closed.” It would match the brand on his chest, the one that had BOUND GALLEY EDITION March 23, 2012

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been seared upon his flesh when he had been anointed as a Brethren Guardian. Iain had stoically endured the pain, making his father press the glowing brand harder into his skin, trying to break him. But Iain had always been as stubborn as a mule and had refused to do anything but look up into the spiteful eyes of his father and dare him to do his worst. He had suffered silently beneath his initiation. He could withstand the same now.

“I will not burn you,” Sutherland said with disgust.

“Barbaric thought. I’ll sew you up good and tight and hope for the best.”

“Much more expedient with the poker. Use it.” Sutherland ignored him as usual. And unable to provoke a fight to give himself something to fix upon other than the pain, Iain thought of pleasure. His thoughts drifted back to the hours before—at the Sumners’, when he had clutched Elizabeth’s voluptuous curves to his hard body.

A man could make a meal out of her. He certainly wanted to. An image took hold, and he barely felt the straight needle prick him, diving under skin and tissue, grabbing more flesh before being pulled tight, tugging the ragged edges of his wound together.

Closing his eyes, he thought of Elizabeth, her long, sable hair unbound, spilling in velvet waves upon a glistening mahogany dining table. Naked, pale, full curves outlined against shining veneer, beneath the delicate glow of a chandelier. She was surrounded by wine goblets and tiered plates of grapes and strawberries.

He sat at the end of the table, sipping a dark merlot, studying the landscape of her body, the way it arched and curved before him. He would wait—would make her wait—as he watched her. He would talk to her, suggest wicked, lascivious things he wanted to watch her BOUND GALLEY EDITION March 23, 2012

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do. She would respond to his voice, would be helpless to stop the movement of her body along the table. Her lips would move and part, her breasts… He groaned, not in pain, but pleasure, as he thought of the way her breasts would bounce and sway. He’d have her on her knees, palms planted on the table as she crawled to him, amidst rolling grapes spilling from overturned silver dishes, and streaming rivulets of red wine snaking from toppled goblets. He would watch her, unable to take his gaze off her breasts, the turgid nipples, the way her shining hair moulded to the sway of her full, rounded hips.

“Lower” he would command, and she would respond, as she had once responded so beautifully to his voiced commands. In this fantasy, it was no less true. Lower…

And she would raise her hips, lower her breasts till they just scraped the table with their pointed tips. He’d watch the red wine cover her nipples as she crawled, and the wine drip from them.

Licking his dry lips, Iain watched his fantasy play out in his heated mind, the drops of crimson wine slipping from elongated nipples, the slow, seductive crawl on her knees to him, the feel of his cock, so hard, so throbbing, released from his trousers, his hand fisting it…. Then the movement of his body, the lowering of his head, his lips beneath her breast—so close, waiting for the next drop of wine to slip effortlessly onto his tongue. Her sigh when he drew her into his mouth and suckled, as he pleasured himself… He could come just imagining it.

“I believe, my lord, that we are all finished.” Reluctantly, Alynwick pulled himself from the fantasy to see his shoulder bandaged in white cloth. One glance down the length of his body to his tented kilt made him close his eyes with a groan.

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“Whatever you were thinking about, my lord,” Sutherland said knowingly, “it worked. You didn’t flinch once.” TWO HOURS LATER, Alynwick sat in a large chair before the Duke of Sussex, with yet another tent in his kilt as he thought of the images that had flowed through his vivid, fevered imaginings while Sutherland worked over him.

How easy it was to conjure the image of a fair Elizabeth, naked, crawling toward him, red wine staining her body. In his mind he had been seated like a sultan before a harem girl, studying her—his possession. He loved to watch, and there was no woman he found more fascinating than Elizabeth York, with her exterior of innocence, and the eagerness of a harlot. He’d once watched her in the grass, watched the undulations of her body beneath his roving hand as he made her come with slow, knowing caresses and whispered words that were far too indecent for any well-bred young lady’s ears.

She had been younger then, less full than she was now. She’d been beautiful to his eyes, but now… Now he’d give what remained of his soul to see her body, all full, voluptuous curves and soft planes, with secret places for his hand to touch, his lips to caress. He’d had only a glimpse of it last evening, and he wanted more. So much more. To say he was hungry for her was an amusing un-derstatement. He was
starved
for her.

He groaned, wiped his palm along his unshaved face.