The Wild Wellingham Brothers: High Seas To High Society / One Unashamed Night / One Illicit Night / The Dissolute Duke

Her.

She crept down the corridor and across the stairs to the landing on the first floor.

Asher’s rooms.

A spike of panic nearly had her turning away from the heavy door, but she made herself stand still until the fear had passed and then pressed on silently. Opening the door, she turned the key in the lock as she shut it behind her. It was dark inside and the glow from a fire in the grate of an adjoining room threw shadows over everything. A quick glance at the moon through the windows gave her a rough timing. Around three o’clock. She stood still until she had her bearings and listened until the scrape of a quill upon parchment drew her attention. He was writing at his desk? Her heart began to thud and the thin cotton shift she wore stuck to the moisture building across her skin. But she would not waver.

‘Who’s there?’ His voice was close, husky, and she could not quite find it in herself to answer.

Emerald.

Beau’s daughter.

Judas.

A chair scraped across parquet and then he was in the room, shirt-tails pulled from his trousers and wearing no cravat. Even in the lack of light she could make out the thick wedge of bandage beneath his shirt.

Was it too soon? Six days since the attack.

She placed her arms by her side and made herself relax.

‘Emma?’ A whisper of disbelief was underscored by soft puzzlement as his eyes came to rest upon her gloveless fingers. And, as if to give himself time, he asked a question.

‘What happened?’

‘They were burnt.’

‘When you were cooking?’

Smiling at his assumption, she knew that she could not give Asher even one more lie. But there was something that she could give him. Something precious.

Herself.

Lifting her hands to the ties at her bodice, she unlaced the ribbon and simply stepped out of her shift, nipples puckering hard in the sudden cold.

‘Lord.’ Asher breathed in, and the sensual haze in his eyes took the breath from her body in one heavy hit.

‘You once suggested a dalliance and I turned you down. I have come to think that was a mistake.’

She cursed the shiver that ran through her words and desperately wondered what was supposed to happen next. The growing thickness of his manhood was plainly seen, though she could not quite bring herself to lean down and open his laces. No, whilst she always swam in the nude and slept in the nude and was rarely hampered by society’s penchant for undergarments, the pleasuring of a man was something she had only seen at a distance in the brothels of many a dockside port.

Wetting her lips with her tongue, she tried to remember the less bold moves of the doxies who haunted the drinking houses between Savannah la Mar and Kingston and with precision ran her hand across her stomach and lower, gently swaying her hips in the way Molly’s girls did in the Golden Hind, a favourite drinking hole of her father’s.

And now what?

A sudden fright consumed her. Would he be gentle? Worse, would he refuse her?

Asher saw the panic in her eyes before she closed them, turquoise bright and shaded by some emotion he could not quite fathom. What game did she play at? Would someone discover them and insist that he do the right thing by her and offer marriage? Marriage? To a woman who posed as a lady, acted the harlot and had the body of an angel. His eyes skimmed across her breasts. Her waist was tiny and the long length of her legs gave her a grace that was…breathtaking. Lord, even at the salons of the select courtesans in London she would be exceptional, the tattoo on her breast and the scar on her thigh adding layers of mystery.

Lady Emma Seaton? Nothing about her quite added up but the sum total of all that she was drove him to the edge of reason.

He felt like locking her up at Falder where no other man would ever touch her again—she was his woman, damn it.

His woman?

The sheer possessiveness of the thought egged him on and he felt his rising lust as a power.

‘Come.’ He did not move at all, but waited as she walked forward into his arms, his erection hard against her stomach, pressing, eager, ready. When he shrugged out of his shirt, she touched the bandage gently, the pale gilt of her curls whisper soft against his cheek.

‘Is it sore?’

Shaking his head, he removed his trousers and reached out to the curve of her waist and then lower.

Emerald felt the first push of his fingers in a place no man had touched before. Careful. Warm. Certain.

So this was it.

This was what she had heard of for ever.

‘Asher?’ She breathed his name as a quicksilver pain pierced her inside.

She would not stop him.

Payment.

Repayment.

Her repayment.

The guilt torn from her very soul made her still.

‘Open for me, sweetheart.’ The command was whispered and underlined by a quick movement. And when she did, the shards of gold in his eyes glowed against a darker brown. Triumph, conquest and elation mixed with desire.

The thick-cut pile of an Aubusson carpet beneath her back was warm as he laid her down and opened her thighs, his sex seeking an entrance, finding the pathway.

‘I have not—’

He covered her mouth with his own and took away the words, his tongue mimicking the quiet thrust of his hips and her whole world exploded into pain. And then he was still. Desperately still.

‘Lord. You’re a virgin!’ Rising above her, sweat beaded his brow and upper lip, the lines of his face softer now as tenderness stretched across desire. She tried to still him by holding her hands across his back, the firmness of muscle cut by ridged scars.

‘Ahh, sweetheart. Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

The message was plain as his hooded glance sharpened, refocused, and she made to move out from underneath him.

‘No, Emma. Give it a moment and the pain will pass.’ He moved just slightly.

‘It hurts.’