A Much Compromised Lady Read online

  A MUCH COMPROMISED LADY

  Published by Shannon Donnelly at Smashwords.com

  Copyright 2011 Shannon Donnelly

  ISBN: 978-0-9831423-6-2

  Discover other works by Shannon Donnelly at Smashwords.com

  Romantic Times Top Pick - 4½ Stars and Gold Medal

  for Amy

  whose patience, good cheer, and editorial fortitude

  makes this all a pleasure

  CHAPTER ONE

  His senses spun from half a bottle brandy, but St. Albans knew he had not drunk so much that spirits had conjured the half-naked lady in his bed. She sat upright with the white linens bunched in her fists and pulled to her chest, her hair tumbling loose, and firelight warm on bare, golden shoulders.

  Anticipation quivered under the warmth of the brandy, and St. Albans realized with a shock that he could not recall the last time he had felt such an emotion. A disinterested part of him studied that question with a scholar’s dispassion. But he was no scholar. And so he concentrated instead on the novelty of surprise—and the delight that reached past jaded boredom.

  “One of us must be in the wrong room,” he said, allowing a smile to twist up the corner of his mouth. “I do so hope it is not I.”

  She shook her head. A long curl of hair as black as the shadows that clung to the corners of the sparse room brushed across one golden shoulder. She had lovely skin. Too dark for beauty, true enough, but the dusky tones hinted of exotic lands and things foreign to English soil.

  “Close the door—quickly,” she said, her voice low.

  St. Albans smiled. He held a woman’s voice to be the most critical component of beauty, and she had a voice like wild honey, rich and deep, with an intriguing touch of refinement. This storm-soaked night had indeed improved.

  From down the hall, the noise of a woman’s babbling and a man’s shouting carried through the inn. St. Albans was only too happy to shut the door on that racket. Crossing the room, he kept his stare locked on the lush body hinted at under the bedding that she clutched to her.

  It would spoil the fun if he did the mundane, so he did not ask her name. He simply walked toward her, enjoying the brandy spinning in his head and the vision of her spinning in his sight.

  Her eyes glowed luminous in the dim firelight. Large and dark and endless. A softly rounded chin lifted, and a wide mouth made for indulgence edged into a smile. She did not look as if she belonged in this dilapidated room, and irritation flashed hot across St. Albans’s skin. She ought to be lit by a dozen beeswax candles and draped in fine linen. Her chamber should be hung with velvet tapestries and warmed by thick rugs. A silk gown ought to caress her skin, and slide from her at his touch.

  Oh, yes, she looked lady enough to be wrapped in luxury.

  Instead, the room in this provincial inn halfway between Newmarket and nowhere was a shabby thing.

  It was the best to be had on a soaking, late spring night, but it was a cramped space, with the paneling scarred by age, the board floors bare and dusty, and limp, dingy curtains better suit a monk’s cell. A single rough wood chair sat before the fire, while a shaving stand huddled in the corner next to the four-poster bed, opposite stood a hideous maple wardrobe with carved cherubs that had long ago had their wings chipped from their plump shoulders.

  It served him well enough, he had thought earlier upon being shown to the room, and it had also served him right for traveling without his usual entourage of servants to arrange his comforts with his own linens and things about him. But now he was quite pleased not to have those encumbrances. She might not have found her way to his chamber if there had been a valet, and far too many other servants to bar her from entry.

  When he stood next to the bed, she shifted up to sit on her knees. One slim, sun-browned hand let half the covers fall away.

  His mouth dried as he glimpsed the curve of her breast, and his lips quirked as he noticed that, under the covers, she still wore her shift and corset.

  Not so daring as she wants me to think.

  He wondered at what game she played. Hope flared all too briefly that it might be an interesting one. He shuttered the emotion at once. Hope was a fool’s hobby, and he was no fool.

  Reaching out, her long fingers deftly plucked the diamond from his cravat with a touch so light he barely noticed it. She tossed the gem onto the shaving stand with as much concern as if it were a bit of lint she had removed, and began to unknot his cravat. Her other hand held the covers to her breasts. He watched those tempting curves rise and fall with fast, agitated breaths. From excitement—or something else?

  Stripping off his cravat, she sent it the way of his stickpin. Her slim fingers started undoing the buttons of his waistcoat.

  She frowned as she worked at his clothes, her fingers deft and all too clever. Ah, what else could those fingers do? She bit her lower lip as she struggled with the ruby buttons—an endearing gesture that made him want to do the very same thing. She had lips that invited tasting, full and wide, plump as dark cherries.

  With his waistcoat undone, she looked up, her eyes pleading. She had very dark eyes, almost as dark as the cloud of hair that curled around those warm shoulders. Gold flakes glinted in her eyes and in the strands of that dusky hair, sparkling like the dust on a jeweler’s work table. What in blazes did she want from him? Other than the obvious. And he knew for a certainty that she wanted something. What woman did not?

  Normally, he cared little for the feelings of others, other than for the amusement it provided him to watch them act out their follies. But she had piqued his curiosity with her approach. How delicious it was not to know exactly how this encounter would progress. Seduction had long ago become such a predictable game. Enjoyable, but oh so predictable.

  “Your coat now,” she said, her tone more urgent and her glance straying for an instant to the door.

  He smiled at her naiveté about gentlemen’s fashions, and said, his tone affable, “It generally takes two footmen to ease me out of it.” Her gaze came back to him and her round chin jutted forward with stubborn purpose, and so he added, “But that is not going matter to you, is it?”

  She rocked back on her heels, and commanded, “Turn ‘round.”

  Her tone pricked him, and for an instant, his eyes narrowed with a flare of anger.

  No one ordered an Earl of St. Albans—not even the King, for the King was mad and the Prince Regent far too in debt to St. Albans to do more than be grateful for the discreet loans that kept the Prince in luxuries.

  She shrank back a little before him, and he forced his cursed temper to cool. He had not drunk so much as to lose control of himself. He never drank so much. And he was not about to forfeit this delicious, dusky lady by frightening her with the dark edge of his own damnable self.

  Besides, she was indeed giving him a full night of novelties. When was the last time anyone had dared order him to do anything? So, where he defied princes, he would obey her. For now.

  Giving her one of his better smiles—the one calculated to charm any woman—he turned. “Will this do,” he said, allowing only the slightest of sarcasm to shade his tone. He waited to see what she might dare next.

  Her breath, hot and sweet, teased the back of his neck as she reached around him to grasp his coat collar. Her breasts brushed his back. She pulled away to strip his coat down, so it pinned his arms. Panting and muttering curses in a tongue he did not recognize, she pealed the garment off him and tossed it aside as if it were a rag. His waistcoat went with it, and the ruby buttons winked up at him like demon eyes.

  He spared a brief regret for his coat, which now lay in a wrinkled, ruined heap. He had rather liked that particular shade of midnight blue, but he could get another. Naked ladi
es—at least ones this comely and intriguing—were rather more hard to come by.

  In his shirtsleeves and pantaloons now, he decided he had done with what she wanted.

  He turned in an instant, catching her in his arms, feeling her stiffen and hearing her gasp, but he carried her down with him, falling into the depths of the feather mattress, trapping her beneath him.

  The sheets, worn to threads, tore under them, and his hands tangled in her hair and her garments and the bed linens. She smelled of wild roses and some spice that stirred his pulse. Her shift dragged lower onto her shoulders, revealing sweet curves and soft skin. Against her low-riding corset, her breasts rose and fell with rapid breaths that feathered across his face. Her pulse skittered in her throat, and her hands pressed up against his chest, fingers splayed wide, as if somehow that would stay him for even a moment.

  He smiled down at her. They were now firmly in his domain and he would dictate the rest of the night.

  “Now, my sweet intrigue. Time to see if you strip as well as you strip me.”

  Eyes enormous and flashing, she pushed against him, muttering something in that foreign tongue of hers. He did not understand the words, but a curse was a curse in any language. He smiled at her protests. They would not last for long.

  He lowered his mouth to hers.

  A pounding cut across his intent and he hesitated, a frown tightening his face. He started to turn towards the door and the noise, but the lady’s fingers wrapped into his lawn shirt. She dragged his mouth down to hers.

  He forgot the pounding outside for the pounding inside as blood coursed through him, hot and heavy and leaving him light-headed. He had no room in his mind for anything but the beseeching demands being made.

  Her teeth bit at his lower lip, and her tongue soothed what she had bitten. Twenty years of practiced seductions vanished in a hot flash of raw desire, going up like dry powder touched by a spark. He fit his mouth over hers, demanding more, clashing with her, devouring her, tasting every curve of lip and tongue, exploring every hollow and probing until he pulled a soft moan from her.

  Closing his hand over her breast, he released her mouth and sought the taste of the skin on her neck, on her throat, on the valley between her breasts. She sighed, or was it a ragged pull of breath? And then the door crashed open behind them.

  The lady squeaked and dove under the tousled covers, wiggling out from his loosened hold.

  St. Albans growled, anger cooling his passion of a moment ago. Slowly, he rose on one elbow, his movements measured and intentionally languid—his controlled moves kept his temper at least somewhat in check. With the pulse pounding in his clenched jaw, he locked a narrowed stare on the intruders.

  Three men crowded the threshold. St. Albans inspected them. An aged, balding, scrawny fellow—the landlord. A vacant-eyed young edition of him—the son. And a gentleman in a purple coat, his face pinched and lined, his silver hair worn long and tied back in the style of last century, with a too-fastidious air about him.

  St. Albans recognized him at once, but he took the course of deliberately insulting the man by not acknowledging that fact. After all, facts had never mattered to any Earl of St. Albans. And he had a personal dislike for Francis Dawes, Lord Nevin. There was still a score to settle between them.

  For a long moment, St. Albans simply stared at the trio, his fury for this interruption quivering inside him. He sent the unspoken words quite clearly to them: if he had to rise, they would regret it. Deeply.

  The landlord, in a nightshift hastily stuffed into half-buttoned breeches, glanced about wide-eyed, taking in the scene. He stuttered an apology and began to bow himself out. Lord Nevin ignored him, pushing forward as if this was his house and he carried the authority here.

  Conceited, overbearing hypocrite, St. Albans thought, his patience with this farce thinning.

  “There’s a thief loose,” Nevin said, his narrow face pulled tight as he stared down at St. Albans with disdain. “We are searching all the rooms.”

  St. Albans half expected the man to drag out a handkerchief and put it to his face, as if he smelled something offensive. Instead, Nevin gestured for the landlord and his son to move forward.

  With the smallest of movements, St. Albans turned his stare to the landlord, and asked in a deadly sweet voice, “Do you mean to accuse me of harboring a fugitive?”

  A chorus of denial burst from the landlord and his son, and both men shifted nervously on their feet, glancing from St. Albans to Nevin.

  “Then why do you enter my room, startling my lady?” St. Albans asked, his voice softening as his anger began to fade. Interruptions were always such bores.

  “A Gypsy girl broke into my rooms,” Nevin said, red-faced now, his small mouth pulled down and the lines on his face deepened with determination. “I will have her caught and up before the law.”

  He came forward a step, an emerald ring flashing fire on his left forefinger as he moved.

  “You certainly will not if you are dead, sir.”

  The older man hesitated, uncertainty clouding his gray eyes. “Dead? Is that a threat, you...you...”

  “That, sir, is plain speaking. My usual habit for dealing with intruders is to shoot them. So far I have made an exception in your case, out of consideration for the lady. However, my consideration for anyone has its limits.”

  Nevin huffed as if he did not believe this, but he also did not take another step forward.

  Watching the fellow, St. Albans wondered if perhaps Nevin had not heard that the Earl of St. Albans never bluffed. Their paths in Society crossed little enough that Nevin might be unaware of anything more than the gossip—most of it true—that St. Albans had shot three men. One in a fair duel, and the other two not. Just in case, St. Albans shifted.

  Moving his hand out from under the lady beside him, he slid it under his pillow. However, his fingers did not find the curve of his pocket pistol. He felt nothing. No smooth mahogany stock. No chill of silver filigree. Just bare, worn bed linen.

  Annoyance flared again inside him, and quickly died as the novelty of the situation caught his fancy. So the lady in his bed had no use for diamond stickpins, but she had one for loaded pistols. He could not help the quirk that lifted the corner of his mouth. Oh, she really was a delight. He simply could not afford to let these louts ruin his evening with her.

  “Get out,” he said, already starting to turn back to where she cowered under the covers with only the dark curls of her hair peeking out from the bed linen.

  Nevin hissed out a curse, but the landlord was already muttering about how the thief must have slipped down the back stairs, and those Gypsies were probably already miles down the road.

  Hearing the desperation in the man’s voice to leave, St. Albans glanced back at the trio. “Oh, go find your own woman elsewhere, Nevin. And leave me mine.”

  Fury blazed in the older man’s eyes. His mouth pulled into a tighter sneer. “You...you disgust me.”

  “Oh, for...go and be disgusted elsewhere, unless it is that you have a fonder taste of watching sin.”

  Nevin glanced once at the form concealed by the covers. The emerald ring glinted again as his fingers clenched and loosened. He swung around and strode out, his back stiff as a poker.

  The landlord began another set of ducking bows, pushed his gawking, sleepy son out before him, and left, pulling the door shut behind him.

  St. Albans waited until he heard the click of the broken latch before he swung out of bed. Dragging the wooden chair forward, he secured the chair-back under the knob.

  He turned back to the bed.

  As he had expected, his Gypsy had sat up again and now she pointed his own pistol at his heart. The silver glinted in the firelight as her slim hands quivered with the faintest tremble. It was very faint, but enough to make him cautious. His pistol had a rather light trigger, and he did not care to tempt a nervous woman. It would probably be a blessing to the world if she shot him dead, but odds were that she’d only maim, and
he had seen just how cursed painful a bullet could be.

  No. That fate did not interest him.

  Crossing his arms, he leaned against the wall. “My dear delight, pray do not spoil the evening by becoming predictable. A shot will only bring them back, and you can hardly want that beautiful neck of yours ruined with a hangman’s rope. Besides, I can entertain you far better alive than I can dead.”

  Her wide mouth pulled down, and she said in that teasingly cultured, throaty voice, “I do not have to kill you—only wound you.”

  St. Albans smiled. “You had best aim to kill, sweet desire. I honestly do have the devil’s temper, and unless you shoot me dead, I cannot vow to show you anything but my worst side.”

  Glynis hesitated. The grim certainty in his tone sent a shiver along her skin. She did not want to see his worst side. She did not think she would care much for it. And she did not want to shoot him. She did not want to shoot anyone, in fact. Drat him for being right, anyway. A pistol report would only bring back the others. She ought to have heeded the cards. But if she had not come, Christo would have. And he had not her light touch, so it had had to be her.

  At least she had seen the box. As they had heard, Francis Dawes traveled with it, keeping it close to him. She had almost touched the dragon carved upon it, but she had had no time to do more. So now she must get back to Christo and lay new plans. Better plans.

  Only this green-eyed devil stood in her way.

  Lowering the pistol, she eyed him cautiously. She kept her fingers wrapped tight around the cool feel of polished, deadly wood. She did not trust this gaujo, with his steady gaze that seemed to look into her, and his cold voice, and his too-hot touch. Her lips still tingled from that kiss he had taken. Of course, she had offered herself. She had to own that. But she had not expected what had followed.

  Thinking only to befuddle him, and to hide herself, she had pulled him to her. And then a storm of fire had swept her into a spinning world of heat and sensation. He had done that to her. How? How did he know how to do such things to a woman?