Her Errant Earl Read online

  “You’ll be back in London in less than a fortnight,” she predicted.

  “I shall prove you wrong.” He startled her by moving his caress to her cheek. He had never, not even during their courtship, touched her face. Just a slow, deliberate swipe of his thumb over her cheekbone, his long fingers cradling her jaw. Hardly anything, really. Hardly noteworthy, and yet it chipped at the careful boundary she’d crafted between them.

  She tilted her head, severing the contact. “What do you want?”

  But his hand merely continued its gentle travels elsewhere. Down the curve of her throat, then sliding to cup the base of her skull. His eyes scoured her face intently, as though she were a book whose meaning somehow evaded him. “Your hair is very pretty. Have I ever told you that?”

  “No.” She eyed him warily. There was a time when she would have welcomed his praise, when she’d craved his smallest gesture. When she’d wanted to be more than the American fortune he’d married. But that time had ended. “Sham flattery will get you as far as traveling on a one-legged pony would.” Which was to say nowhere at all.

  “What of truthful flattery?” His thumb kneaded into the taut muscles of her neck in lazy circles. “You’re lovely.” His breath teased her lips. He’d drawn nearer, near enough to kiss. He leaned forward.

  No. She would not allow him to so easily sway her. He didn’t deserve her, the knave. “Please don’t.”

  It was too bad, really, that she hadn’t realized what he was about, that she’d been so pathetically naïve. He had done his best to court her as though it wasn’t her fortune he was after. She knew differently now.

  “Don’t what?” He came even closer. “Don’t do this?” Pembroke lowered his mouth to hers for a slow, soft kiss. He fitted his upper lip between hers, gently at first, and then with increasing pressure, catching her bottom lip between his teeth and tugging. “Or this?” He pulled the bedclothes from her grasp.

  She wasn’t sure which was worse, his sudden amorous advances after so long a silence or her traitorous reaction to them. He cupped her breasts through the delicate fabric of her nightdress. A slow, languorous ache slid through her, no matter how much she tried to stifle it. Every part of her body reawakened. He’d introduced her to this world of pleasure before shutting her out of it.

  “Pembroke,” she protested, but her voice was shamefully weak. She loved his hands on her, always had. The awful man knew his way about a woman’s body, and though it was plainly the result of far too much carnal knowledge, she couldn’t deny the way that particular surfeit of knowledge made her feel. Her nipples hardened.

  She forced herself to think of the women whose bedchambers he’d been frequenting during his absence. Their names were a dagger’s prick to her senses. Lady Lonsdale. The Duchess of Eastwick. Mrs. St. Hillaire.

  He grazed her lips with his again, exerting just enough pressure to leave her hungry for more. He knew how to kiss, the devil. “Have you missed me?” he whispered into her mouth.

  She swallowed, holding herself stiffly, refusing to capitulate. “Not in the least.”

  Hadn’t there been the Countess of Ardmore, after all? Lady Northclyffe, too. The gossip had been more prolific than a New York blizzard. At first she’d devoured each troubling bit of news. But it had been too painful, and so she’d stopped her connection with the outside world, save letters from her dear friend Maggie in London and her family in New York, who remained blissfully unaware of her husband’s peccadillos.

  His mouth moved over hers with increasing insistence. He smelled divine. Lady Shillington. The actress Lillie Longwood. She bit his lip. Not with enough force to bloody him, but with a pressure that stated her resistance. He could not simply appear in the night and bend her to his whims with his good looks and bone-melting kisses. No, he could not. She was not a twig to bow in the wind of his whims. She was a woman. A woman with a heart and feelings, a woman who’d been cured of the naïveté with which she’d married him.

  “Damn it!” He hauled back, staring at her as though she were a creature he’d just witnessed in the wild for the first time. “You bit me.”

  “Did I?” She kept her tone light, unconcerned. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “I detect a notable lack of sincerity.” He pressed his fingers to his mouth before holding them out for inspection. “No blood, thank Christ.”

  She caught the bedclothes in her hand and held them over her bosom as though it were a suit of armor. “I wouldn’t dream of disfiguring you. What would all your ladybirds think?”

  “Ladybirds.” He stared at her, his expression revealing nothing.

  Did he think her daft? Well, perhaps she couldn’t entirely blame him for his underestimation of her. After all, she’d been duped by him before, and her stupidity aggrieved her still.

  “The women you’ve been taking to bed,” she elaborated. “I won’t call them ladies. It’s a title they don’t deserve, regardless of their ranks.”

  “I have no ladybirds. Darling, it’s you that I want.”

  The bold pronouncement sent a flurry of old longing through her before she tamped it down. How was it that he could treat her as if she were no more important than a cup of tea and still set her aflame? Thankfully, even if her body and heart were turncoats, her common sense remained. “You cannot expect me to believe such tripe.”

  “Believe it, love.” He squeezed her upper arm. “I’ve come for you.”

  He had come to Carrington House, yes. But his intentions weren’t as pure as he pretended. Couldn’t be. Not after all this time, all this silence. She couldn’t help but wonder why, given the intervening months and lack of word, he would appear in her chamber, ready to seduce her as though she were one of his strumpets.

  Very well, she’d play at his game. All the better to rout her enemy. “Why now?”

  “Why not now?” He gave her another maddening kiss.

  She broke it, her palms finding his shoulders and pushing. “Perhaps I ought to rethink your disfigurement. I don’t trust you, Pembroke. You’re a stranger to me, and I certainly don’t want your kisses. Surely there are any number of women scattered about London who would be more than eager to receive them.”

  “I’m not so strange. I’m your husband.” He slid her nightdress down over her shoulder. “And I daresay your lips might be telling me one tale, but your body tells me another. You aren’t as cold as you would pretend, my girl.”

  “You’re five months too late recalling we’re wed, my lord.” How many nights had she lain alone, thinking of his kiss, his hands on her, his body joining hers? Far too many to give in with such ease, her conscience warned her. She did not wish to become a victim to him yet again. “Or do you expect me to believe you’ve suffered a blow to the head and have been wandering about London an amnesiac left with no choice save pilfering the drawers of every woman you can find?”

  He nipped the curve of her shoulder with his teeth, sending a shiver of awareness through her. “On that account, I can assure you that you’re hopelessly wrong, my dear. I’ve never once purloined the drawers of any lady of my acquaintance.”

  How like him not to deny his sins but to attempt distraction and seduction instead. “That is probably owed to them not wearing any,” she said with grim boldness, not caring if she shocked him. Let him be shocked. Let him be angry. Let him be anything but the cad she’d married, all beautiful of face and silver of tongue.

  He cast her an amused glance as he licked her skin. “Have you a peculiar habit of peering beneath other ladies’ skirts? I daresay if you have, I might be tempted to watch.”

  The rotten man. She should’ve known she couldn’t shock someone of his reputation, a man who thought he could leave his wife to collect dust in the countryside while he gadded about London, only to return months later with fast hands and a wicked mouth. “Of course I haven’t, you scoundrel.” She shrugged away from him. “If there is anyone in this chamber with a fondness for being beneath other ladies’ skirts, it is you.”


  “Fair enough. I’ll own my failings.” He stilled, capturing her gaze with his. Even after all he’d done, the impact took her breath. “I’ve hurt you.”

  Pembroke said it as though he were just processing the realization, almost as if the fact that she possessed feelings was a revelation. Perhaps he had never thought of her as a flesh-and-blood woman with expectations and emotions. Certainly, it would have been far more convenient for him that way.

  Of course he had hurt her. He’d hurt her far more than she cared to admit and far more than she would admit to him. “You disappointed me and misused me.”

  “I’m sorry, darling.” He bent his head and kissed her shoulder again.

  She wished that apology hadn’t slid so effortlessly off his tongue, for it only underscored his disingenuousness. But she wasn’t the girl he’d married any longer, now was she? She had come a long way from the quiet, shy debutante who’d been more terrified of London’s Upper Ten Thousand than she’d been of New York’s frigid Four Hundred.

  Victoria stopped him again. “No. You mustn’t.”

  “Ah, but I must.” Her husband’s mouth was on her neck, kissing a trail over her bare skin.

  She steeled herself against him. His brand of persuasion was exceedingly intoxicating, but the price would prove dear. It always had with him. “When last I saw you, your tone was quite different,” she reminded.

  “Circumstances change.” Somehow, the bedclothes had pooled around her waist once more. He peeled the fabric of her nightdress back and kissed his way down the swell of one breast.

  “How could they have changed so swiftly?” She pushed him away but he caught her hands, turning them over to kiss. “You made it abundantly clear you didn’t want a wife, and you most certainly didn’t want me.”

  “I did no such thing,” he scoffed. His teeth scored the sensitive center line of her palm.

  Victoria recalled all too well the awful argument they’d had before he left for London. His words still stung, even with the intervening time that had passed. I married you because I had no other option besides penury. My father demanded it. I bloody well never wanted a wife. I’ve done my duty, and now I’m going to carry on living my life as I see fit.

  The Duke of Cranley held Pembroke’s purse strings, she had discovered after their nuptials took place. The duke wanted his heir to settle down, and he’d done what he needed to make certain the unruly Pembroke would comply. He’d cut him off. Having satisfied the old man’s stipulation, Pembroke had once again had no need for an unwanted wife. He’d left her behind in the country and pretended as if she didn’t exist.

  She’d somehow been foolish enough to believe he held her in regard, but he had merely been good at manipulation and getting what he wanted. She had begged him to stay, and he’d looked through her as if she were a piece of furniture in his study. Expendable. The reminder was like stepping into a hip bath of ice water. She shoved him. “Go away, Pembroke.”

  He rolled over onto his back, his big body stretched out alongside hers, and heaved a sigh. “I can’t go away. I live here.”

  “You live in London,” she countered.

  “I live wherever I choose.”

  She supposed he did. But he’d chosen to live as far away from her as possible. Victoria straightened her nightdress and propped herself up on her elbow to study him. “Why have you decided to return to Carrington House? Truly?”

  He skewered her with a ferocious frown. “Why pepper your husband with blasted questions when he’s just returned home? Should you not be overjoyed to see me?”

  Victoria considered him, wishing he was not quite so debonair, not quite so compelling. Not quite so likeable in spite of his voluptuary ways. His teasing air and persuasive kisses were like wine. She didn’t dare over imbibe. “No. I daresay I ought not to be. If you think you can return here after mostly ignoring me for the entirety of our marriage and expect a warm welcome, you are positively delusional.”

  “It’s only been a fortnight or so.”

  Oh he was a maddening creature. “It’s been five months.”

  “Dear me. Has it?” The look he directed her way was half sheepish.

  And then, like a sudden burst of light in a dark room, it came upon her, the real reason for her husband’s return, for his presence in her chamber, his skilled kisses and roaming hands. Her lips tightened and a wave of fury hit her with so much force her body trembled with it. “You’ve spent the money you received in the marriage settlement, haven’t you?”

  He frowned. “Of course not.”

  She didn’t believe him. “The duke has cut you off.”

  “Lower your voice, my girl. You’ll have all the miscreants belowstairs prattling about us.”

  “I am not your girl.” Her outrage heightened at his blasé tone. “The only miscreant in this house is you, Pembroke. Now leave me to my slumber and find your own chamber. For that matter, go back to London. Surely there are any number of women awaiting you. I don’t want you here.”

  “I daresay you’ll change your mind. Let’s not make a row of it.”

  She gritted her teeth and reached for the Dickens volume, holding it aloft in threatening promise. “If you don’t get out at once, I’ll give your nose another good, hard thwack with Great Expectations.”

  Pembroke rose to a sitting position, raking a hand through his already-disheveled hair. “You wouldn’t.”

  Perhaps she ought to blacken his eye while she was at it. “I most certainly would. Now get out.”

  ell good Christ, this was proving an utter disaster. There was a very real possibility of bodily harm at the hands of his countess, who currently wielded a book of Dickens as though it were a sword with which she could run him through. Not only that, but she presumed to order him about, demanding that he leave this chamber which, by rights, was truly his, along with everything in it.

  Along with her.

  Jesus, the fire-spitting creature before him was not the woman he’d left behind the day after they’d wed. His plan suddenly seemed far more difficult than he’d supposed, for it all had gone straight to Hades the moment he’d stepped into her dark chamber. The quiet young lady he’d known had turned into a book-wielding virago. Perhaps she was even a trifle unhinged. His nose still smarted with the sting of her unexpected blow, and he found it nearly impossible to believe that she’d actually bitten him as though she were a feral dog.

  Of course, perhaps he wasn’t so unlike a feral dog himself, for her nip had made him harder than he’d already been. Although she had made every effort to push him away, he didn’t mistake her body’s reaction to him. Nor did he mistake his to hers.

  Tonight, he saw her in a way he hadn’t before. He’d caught a glimpse of vulnerability in her unguarded expression before she’d chased it away with scorn. But it had been there, and that fleeting impression hit him square in the gut as he considered her now. She was just a woman, trapped as surely as he, more than a mere pawn in his war against his father.

  The realization shook him in a way nothing else had in his admittedly misbegotten thirty years of life. She raised the book higher, as though to somehow menace him, and the action disbanded the spell that had settled over him. He should have gotten good and soused before coming to her. Perhaps he was growing as addled as the duke.

  “Bloody hell, woman, put the book down,” he ordered. “I’ll overlook the first blow and even the bite, but if you attempt to maim me again, I’m afraid my patience for spoiled American girls will be at an end.”

  But his words only served to rankle her even more. Roses bloomed in her cheeks, her full lips tightening into a grim line. The oddest urge to kiss them back into their natural, pliable shape hit him. Ridiculous. He didn’t want this woman, this stranger with a gleaming cascade of golden hair falling over her shoulders, with her flat New York accent and freckled, retroussé nose. He never had.

  In the time he’d been away, his mind had not often flitted to her. It was true what she’d sa
id. Petite souris, he’d thought when he’d first seen her in a crushed ballroom, little mouse. His to play with and then abandon at will. It had been dreadfully easy to ply her with charm. Easier still to leave her behind and all but forget her existence as he buried himself in all manner of vices in London.

  “Indeed, my lord?” Her voice was frigid as Wenham Lake ice. “How very amusing, for I find that my patience for spoiled English earls who’ve never known an inkling of responsibility in their misspent lives is at an end as well. That means you really ought to go.”

  She had cheek, and the perverse streak that had always run through him admired her gumption. But her words had also touched a far more sensitive vein inside him, the one he’d fought for years to dull with hedonistic distraction. Responsibility. Duty. They were words he loathed, words that in his youth meant accepting whatever abuse his father had chosen to inflict upon him. It is your duty as the heir. You have a responsibility. For a moment, as the past threatened to intrude upon his sanity, he swore he could feel the brutal lash of the last caning he’d received, hear the sick crack of bone. Broken ribs were the devil of a thing.

  “Careful, darling,” he warned.

  She watched him, seemingly weighing her options. The Dickens volume remained aloft, her battle colors flying. “What should I be careful of? What will you do, sir? Will you bed me and then leave? Will you abandon me to rot here for a year? Ten years?”

  She had no notion of who he was, of just how low and depraved he could be. And she was foolishly brave to mock him, to tempt the beast within to roar to life. “I’m much larger than you.” Keeping his tone even was a struggle. Suddenly, he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. This should have been easy. Quick. Instead, he’d spent the last half hour attempting to bed her and being routed at every turn. “I could very easily bend you to my whims, my dear. I could take the book from you. I could take you, if I chose.”