The Duchess Diaries: The Bridal Pleasures Series Read online

  “Your Grace!” a sultry voice called out from the bordello’s upper window. “Have you turned bashful all of a sudden? Or would you like me to meet you down there?”

  He quickly closed the diary and stepped out of the carriage, ignoring his footman’s faint smile. There was nothing subtle about Gabrielle Spencer. She sold sex for a living and considered herself worth the price she demanded. Should he take her to his house for the first night?

  They had promised each other nothing, except that tonight he would make a formal offer for her exclusive services as a courtesan and companion.

  A footman escorted him up a private staircase, bypassing the other visitors, and into a candlelit antechamber. Too late Gideon realized that he had the diary tucked under his arm. There was nothing to be done for it.

  “Gideon,” Gabrielle said in welcome, wrapping her arms around his neck before the footman was through the door. She pressed herself against him with an uninhibited enthusiasm that might have aroused him if Charlotte Boscastle’s diary had not stood between them like a brick.

  She laughed, looking down, her large brown eyes luminous. “Did you bring that for me?” she asked, sliding her hand down his neck. “I promise you that I can perform any act in your book.”

  “You absolutely could not.”

  She smiled wickedly. “How much would you care to wager?”

  “At the price you charge I doubt I can afford to wager at all.”

  She shook her head. “You are wound tightly tonight. What can I do to relax you?” She reached down for the diary. “Are there secret vices inside this book that I can indulge?”

  He lifted her hand from the diary. There was no denying her appeal. “Some secrets aren’t meant to be shared.”

  “Even between lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “I found the house I want,” she said absently. “It’s close to yours and convenient for entertaining. And I have a list of my shopping needs. May I show it to you before we settle down?”

  “If you like.”

  “Wait here,” she whispered. “I have bought the most wickedly designed garments you’ve ever seen. There’s sherry on the sideboard already poured.”

  He helped himself to a drink and sat down on the tufted silk chaise, flipping idly through a few more pages of the diary until he saw his name in an entry.

  He sat upright, choking on his swallow of sherry. His eyes watered as disbelievingly he read:

  The duke’s kisses rendered me helpless. I could not bring myself to resist him. He would not have allowed me to escape even if I’d summoned the strength to do so. I was incoherent by the time he dragged me down before the fire—

  Hell’s bells, he thought. When had this happened, and why had it slipped his memory?

  He opened a page that was marked with a long-stemmed red rose. The rose had been preserved, but the ink on the page appeared to be relatively fresh.

  Her most recent entry?

  He strained to read in the poor light.

  The Ball

  Tonight the Duke of Wynfield asked me to dance. I resisted, not only out of duty, but because I knew that if he held me again, I would never be able to hide my passion for him.

  There was not another man at the ball who made me tremble. When he approached me I had to restrain myself from…

  Dammit. He squinted. What an inconvenient place for an ink smudge. He’d never know what Charlotte’s unrestrained self had wanted to do with him.

  He glanced at the clock in the corner. Gabrielle was taking her sweet time.

  Was she making him wait to heighten his desire? To let him know that until he paid her price she was still available to other men?

  He didn’t like to wait.

  He didn’t particularly like visiting a brothel to formalize an association, either. Nor was he proud of himself for reading another woman’s diary. He ought to stop. But he found he couldn’t.

  He asked me to dance, but I offered him more.

  He accepted and made me his in every way a man can claim a woman.

  “My goodness,” Gideon murmured, shaking his head. “Who would have guessed it? The schoolmistress has a hankering for more than academics.”

  His in every way a man can claim a woman? Did she understand what she had written? Was there more?

  He quickly turned the page.

  The Truth

  He might have expected me to fall at his knees in gratitude for the small attention he paid me. If he did, he hid it well. It was obvious Devon put him up to this embarrassment, and it was obvious that he had to force himself to converse with me. His eye wandered around the room at every woman who passed.

  Gideon frowned. That was unflattering, as well as unfair. He’d only been pretending to look around the room so that he wouldn’t seem to be staring at her. Sometimes a gentleman could not win.

  He read on.

  And he’s rude to the footmen, condescending. He orders them about and assumes his wishes will be immediately fulfilled. He does not express his thanks and talks in a condescending tone…

  He snapped the book shut.

  Had he forgotten to thank the footmen for his champagne? How criminal of him. He treated his own staff well. Or did he?

  Well, so much for telling both sides of a story. It seemed Miss Charlotte Boscastle couldn’t decide whether he was the darling or the devil of her dreams.

  He set aside the diary, trying not to look as it fell open again to a random page.

  The Past

  Betrayal and a Broken Heart

  His name was Phillip Moreland and he was the first boy I ever loved. I thought he loved me; he drove his cart to our house every Saturday afternoon, to see me, or so I believed, pouring tea. Then I caught him kissing the maid in the garden.…Actually, they appeared to be engaged in another act, the nature of which I am too much a lady to describe…Days later when I confronted him, he calmly defended himself by calling me “a giantess with big teeth.”

  Gideon burst into laugher. If she was a giantess, the boy must have been a gargoyle.

  Interesting woman. Heaven help her if this diary fell into another’s hands.

  He’d try to put her out of his mind for the rest of the night.

  And the first thing in the morning he would have his butler return it to her with a dozen red roses and his wishes for an eventful, if invented, life.

  If there were other inflammatory entries in the diary, and he felt certain there were, they hadn’t been meant for anyone to see. An honorable man wouldn’t read a lady’s secrets. A scoundrel would—and use them to his advantage.

  She was infatuated with him, and he pitied her for that. What would she think if she knew he had been reading her memories in a house of Venus?

  He didn’t want her to know.

  As a friend of her family, he was obligated to spare Charlotte any embarrassment. Not that he was to blame for her imagination or Harriet’s carelessness.

  “Gideon,” a provocative voice said above him. “I’ve been standing here forever. I had no idea that you would prefer reading over me.”

  Neither had he.

  She crossed the room to the couch, gently descending onto his lap and slipping her fingers inside his neck cloth. In her other hand she held a list of items to be bought that would probably bankrupt him. “Why do I feel that I don’t have your full attention?”

  “I—”

  “It’s that book,” she said with a pout. “You haven’t taken your eyes off it all night. I’m going to throw it out the window.”

  “No.” He sat up. She reached down. “Leave the damned thing alone.”

  “Why don’t we burn it and make love in front of the fire?”

  “I’m not burning a book.”

  “It’s the book or me.” She slid out of his lap.

  He smiled. “That is a very easy choice.”

  She waved her list under his nose. “I’m happy to hear it. I don’t like being ignored.”

  He stood abrupt
ly. “I don’t like ultimatums.” And he turned before she could find her voice, the diary under his coat once more, the attraction he felt for Gabrielle dying an unmourned death.

  There was a deeper passion between the pages of Charlotte Boscastle’s diary than he would find in this house.

  Charlotte whirled around from the window and flew across the room to embrace Harriet. “Thank goodness you’re here. I’ve been frantic for you to return.”

  “I rushed back as soon as I was given your message. What in the world is wrong?”

  “Please tell me you put my diary in a safe place. Please.”

  “All right. I put the diary in a safe place.”

  “Where?” Charlotte asked, nearly collapsing in relief.

  Harriet frowned as if she were reviewing the evening’s events in her mind. “We were in this room when you were writing at the desk.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “And…?”

  Harriet looked blank.

  “And what, for the love of creation?” Charlotte demanded, flinging her hand in the air. “What happened to the diary?”

  The color drained from Harriet’s cheeks. “Oh, God. I hid it in my cloak and took it with me. I thought you’d gone off with the girls; the front of the desk had dropped open, and I was afraid it would fall into the wrong hands.”

  “But it didn’t,” Charlotte said. “Because you put it in a safe place.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Where is it?” Charlotte asked through her teeth.

  Harriet winced. “I left it in the duke’s carriage.”

  “The duke being your husband, Griffin, I hope and pray?” Charlotte said, giving Harriet an encouraging smile.

  Harriet shook her head. “My husband is in Brighton. I’m talking about the other duke. The one who’s made you lose your wits.”

  Charlotte looked aghast. “Not Wynfield?”

  “I’ll lie,” Harriet said quickly. “I’ll swear it was my diary. I’ll throw myself at the duke’s mercy.”

  “What if he reads it before we find him?” Charlotte asked, aghast at the thought. “Do we even know where we can find him?”

  Harriet hesitated. “He was going to meet his new mistress at Mrs. Watson’s house the last I saw of him.”

  “What have I done, Harriet?” Charlotte whispered. “What demonic power overcame me that I turned tender encounters into torrid half-truths? Why was I not content to tell the truth? Why, you ask?”

  “Well, I really don’t.”

  “Because I am a Boscastle, after all, and passion is like a poison in my blood that, despite all efforts to the contrary, makes itself known.”

  “You’ve lost a diary, Charlotte. It’s not as if you gave birth to a royal heir and forgot where you put him.”

  “You don’t have a notion of what I’ve written. What if he reads it?”

  “Your stories are sweet and charming.”

  “The diary is different.”

  Harriet scoffed. “What man, really, would choose reading a lovesick lady’s journal over a courtesan’s company?”

  “I have to get it back tonight. He can’t read it.”

  “Then I will have to help you.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll break into his house. He won’t even know we were there.”

  Chapter 6

  Nick Rydell was a professional burglar and street thug who operated his business from St. Giles. His name carried weight in the underworld, and he was proud of the crimes he committed. Until tonight. He didn’t know what had come over him when the lady sitting across from him in her squeaky carriage had offered him a job and he’d accepted. Spite, that was what had gotten him going. He’d been thinking like a girl.

  His client looked as if she were on her way to a tea party in Bedlam, wearing a hat that reached the carriage roof and thinking herself all stylish, he was sure. He supposed her coin was as good as anyone else’s. Still, he’d have turned down the lay outright if Lady Clippers, or Clipstone, or whatever the hell her name was, hadn’t confessed that she knew of Nick through his previous association with his former partner. Harriet Hoity-Toity. The name poisoned his blood like bad gin. He hated how it made him feel. But that didn’t stop him from craving another taste of it.

  “Why didn’t you ask ’arriet to do the job if you and she are such good friends?” he said, surveying her hat through one half-opened eye. The damned thing looked like a chimney with smoke pouring out of the top.

  “That person and I are not friends. It is an insult to decency that she has ascended in society.” She shook her little fist in his face. “It’s an outrage that I have been reduced to consorting with convicts as a means to justice. You promised me that I would have that diary in my possession at the end of the ball.”

  He glanced at the younger woman in the droopy maid’s cap who sat slumped next to the miserable bat; Millie was his current lover, and he ought to have known that she wasn’t quick enough on her feet to send into a fancy mansion. “I ’eard. I don’t need a sermon to apprise me of the situation.”

  “The situation?” she said, her voice quavering. “This is much more than a situation.”

  “Calm down, lady. Let’s go over it one more time. Millie missed a chance to collect a certain object that, for reasons that are none of my never mind, you wish to acquire.”

  Lady Clipstone muttered under her breath.

  “My old friend the duchess appears to be in possession of this object,” Nick continued. “And the duchess was last seen in the Duke of Wynfield’s carriage, which was witnessed coming and going from a famous place of pleasure.”

  “It was the footman who threw me off,” Millie said from out of nowhere. “And then ’arriet and that Lady Jane.”

  “Millie,” he chided, leaning forward. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Lady Clipstone inquired, shrinking into the corner as if he were an infectious agent.

  “That’s easy,” he said. “I’m gonna track down my old business partner and dig straight to the root of this matter. What is at the root of this, by the way?”

  “Revenge,” Lady Clipstone said.

  “Revenge? No? Between you and ’arriet?”

  “Not Harriet, you…” She composed herself. “It is between me and Harriet’s mentor.”

  “And this mentor wrote the diary?”

  “No, no.”

  “Well, then, who did and what’s it to you?”

  Lady Clipstone’s face pinched. “Why should I trust you with my reasons?”

  He laughed. “Lady, you shoulda asked yourself that question before you commissioned me for this crime.”

  She sighed. “I have no one else to enlist. Do you want to know why?”

  Nick winked at Millie. Information was always useful, and oftentimes it came in handy for a little game known as blackmail. “Tell me,” he said somberly. “If you’ve been mistreated I might be able to avenge you.

  “I don’t want anyone’s throat slit.”

  “Course you don’t. That would be murder.”

  “And that costs a fortune,” Millie said.

  Lady Clipstone wavered. He waited.

  “I have no husband,” she said.

  He shook his head in sympathy.

  “That…that pretender of pretense stole him from me!”

  “You poor thing,” Millie said, actually sounding as if she understood.

  Lady Clipstone gave a sniff. “You have no idea how important that diary is to me.”

  He nodded agreeably. The silly bat wasn’t bad-looking when she closed her trap. “I do understand, madam,” he lied, feeling a passing twinge of curiosity about the contents of the diary. “This is a delicate matter.”

  “You see,” Lady Clipstone explained, twisting her hands over and over until Nick wanted to smack her. “Charlotte’s cousin, Emma Boscastle, stole my one true love from me when we were in boarding school together.”

  Nick sat up. “Your l
over was another woman?”

  “No, you half— No. Viscount Lyons lived nearby at our school. I saw him first, and then he saw Emma.”

  “Who’s Emma?” Millie asked.

  “She is the lady who founded the academy,” Lady Clipstone said bitterly. “She was my best friend. We planned to open a school for young ladies together. And now look how things have turned out for me.”

  “What did this viscount of vice ’ave that made both of you into enemies?” Nick asked, frowning as if he gave a toss.

  “Manners,” she snapped. “But he’s dead now.”

  “That’s good,” Millie said.

  Lady Clipstone glowered at her. “No. It isn’t. Emma went on to marry a duke. And what do I have?”

  Nick blew out a breath. “Revenge?”

  “Not yet. No. All I have is a struggling academy and a useless lummox of a nephew who sprawls across my receiving couch in a food-stained shirt and wrinkled trousers, begging me to give him a few pounds, which I do to get rid of him.”

  “Bloodsucker,” Nick said. “I know the type. But what I don’t know is ’ow you came to think this diary makes a damn bit of difference, if you’ll pardon the parlez-vous.”

  “I’m clever. Like you.”

  Nick nodded. “I got that right off.”

  “One of Emma’s students defected. She told of the shocking liberties taken at her academy. She thought it might be recorded in Charlotte Boscastle’s diary. Emma had trained Charlotte to assume the responsibility for the academy before she left. And she’s always seen writing in that confounded diary.”

  “Liberties? Of what nature, may I be so brash as to inquire?”

  “Secrets of sexual misbehavior that would paint the school in shame.”

  He blinked. “Secrets, eh?”

  She lifted the curtain, looking nervous. “Wicked things,” she whispered. “Improper. The Boscastles are worshiped like demigods. It seems the lower they stoop, the higher they rise in social estimation.”

  Nick nodded. He supposed he could blame them for taking Harriet from him.