Temptation & Twilight

“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.”

“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 prattling 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 purulence 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 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 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.

“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 understatement. He was starved for her.

He groaned, wiped his palm along his unshaved face. He was damn hard, sitting before Sussex while thinking lurid thoughts of the duke’s sister. He really was an unrepentant rake to debase the innocent sister of his friend with his lascivious dreams and erotic wishes.

“What’s with you?” Black demanded of the silent duke. “Are you ill?”

For the first time, Iain took in Sussex’s haggard appearance, and felt some measure of pleasure. His Grace looked nearly as worn as he did this morning.

When he and Black had barged into Sussex’s study not more than ten minutes before, they had roused the duke from his sleep on the couch. Sussex had nothing to grumble about; he had not been shot in the shoulder. It was then that Alynwick recalled he had some unfinished business with his friend.

“What the devil d’ye think ye were doing, fobbing me off at Grantham Field?” he asked indignantly, his anger getting the better of him and allowing him to slip into his brogue. “Ye were supposed ta be me second!”

“No,” Sussex growled impatiently, “one of us was supposed to be your second, and because you showed up at the Sumners’ musicale drunk and itching for a fight, I had to bodily remove you from said musicale. Ergo, I was not able to perform as your second, since I wanted to shoot you my goddamn self!”

“I wasna drunk,” Alynwick grumbled, wishing he could forget about the scene he’d created at the Sumners’. “Itchin’ fer a fight, aye, but no’ drunk.”

“Careful,” Black said with some amusement, “your cultured English accent is giving way to your heathen Highland one.”

Black was hardly helping. And the bastard seemed to be taking an extraordinary amount of enjoyment out of it all. Iain rarely allowed himself to fall victim to his brogue. All the more evidence that something was ruling him, and it was not the coldhearted calculations he was notorious for.

Sussex’s steel-grey eyes settled on him once more. “Surely you did not believe that it was the thing to do to be your second after the stir you caused at the Sumners’? Everyone saw what happened, and how I had to remove your arm from Sheldon’s throat!”

“Get at yer point, ye windbag,” he snapped, hating the earl’s name being mentioned. Iain had purposely tried to forget that Elizabeth had been in that room hanging on to the arm of another man. And by the looks of things, bloody well enjoying herself.

“My point, you infuriating brute, is this. We are not supposed to be friends, or even acquaintances, in the eyes of the polite world. We’re to pretend that our own private circles do not cross, so no one will suspect that we are acquainted—in ways we have all vowed never to reveal. And then you stroll in and force my hand, making my sister the object of ridicule and gossip, and you wonder why I didn’t come and perform as your second? The reason, you Highland ninny, is simple—because no one would believe it! No one would think it plausible that we were out for a pint, met up and I just merrily agreed to travel at dawn to some godforsaken farmer’s field to aid you in putting a bullet hole in someone, when not four hours before you were importuning my sister and nearly killing the Earl of Sheldon!”

Black’s gaze volleyed between them, then he groaned as the truth of Sussex’s revelations sank in. “Alynwick, you didn’t. Good God, you did, didn’t you?”

Iain was not chastised, and more to the point, he was ready to fight again. “You didn’t force me away from anything,” he sneered. “I allowed you to tear me off that piece of trash.”