The Wedding Night of an English Rogue Read online

  She took a breath.

  And she’d thought that India was a dangerous place? She felt an unexpected urge to run from the ballroom and hide. Russell had convinced her that she could step back into Society and survive, but she suspected he was wrong. Anyway, he already showed ominous signs of becoming an absentee spouse. She was beginning to wonder if she was destined to spend the rest of her life alone while he set off proving his valor. He had always felt inferior in the haut ton, aware of his humble origins. Nothing Julia said seemed to bolster his belief in himself. He was insecure and arrogant at the same time. So flawed and human.

  But he was also one of the few men in the civilized world who wanted to marry a scandalous widow. And they had known each other for ages.

  Almost as long as she’d known the blue-eyed devil whirling her around the ballroom.

  The dance ended.

  She took another breath of relief and glimpsed Audrey Watson smiling at her from across the floor. Audrey’s gaze drifted to Heath and lingered. She was not the only female guest present to gaze at him in wistful longing. Apparently, understandably, he had developed quite a following himself in the beau monde.

  It was too easy to blame him for what had happened years ago. Even now she was not sure whether she had instigated that first kiss, or whether it had been him. She wondered how she would react if the opportunity arose to relive that memorable afternoon. Would she prove to him, to herself, that she was wiser? She would never know. The chance to recapture that time was gone.

  He led her over to her aunt. She turned decisively. It could not continue. It had been wrong of Russell to ask this of Heath, wrong to place him in an uncomfortable position. The temptor’s hand was at work here. The past could not be resurrected.

  “I release you of your obligation,” she said in an undertone.

  He stared at her, his face impassive.

  “Did you hear me?” she asked, her voice low with emotion. “We cannot do this. It . . . brings too much back, at least for me.”

  He nodded, his blue eyes glittering with dangerous flames. “I understand. And agree.”

  And although he watched her for the rest of the ball and escorted her home, he did not murmur more than a few words to her again.

  Chapter 6

  Heath took a hansom cab to Russell’s leased lodgings after making sure that Julia and her aunt had safely arrived home. When no one answered his quiet knock, he hesitated, then took the liberty of letting himself into the town house.

  He assumed that Russell had already retired in anticipation of tomorrow’s early journey to Dover. Both of them observed an officer’s discipline to this day. If this were not a matter of urgency, he would not intrude.

  He stood at the bottom of the stairs, debating how to proceed. He disliked getting Russell out of bed, but on the other hand, he couldn’t allow him to think that Julia had a protector in Heath when she did not. Russell would have to make another arrangement, whether he wanted to or not. Heath was willing to risk his life for his country. Risking his heart was a different matter. He saw no point in pretending to himself that he wasn’t still drawn to her. Why place temptation in his path? He had been through enough torture in his life.

  There was a light burning in a room upstairs. The rest of the house was absolutely dark, cloaked in silence.

  He walked slowly toward the stairs, his senses alert, his brow furrowed in thought.

  He found it odd that the front door had been carelessly left unlocked.

  Odd that not a single servant stood duty when Russell was allegedly being hunted by an assassin. Had he already gone?

  He heard muted laughter from a room upstairs, a woman’s unfamiliar voice.

  A prickle of foreboding slid down his spine.

  He proceeded cautiously up the narrow staircase.

  He heard Russell’s rough voice responding to the woman’s laughter. He could not make out the words, but it was definitely not a hostile exchange. He debated turning around. The thought of Julia unprotected was suddenly stronger than propriety.

  A door stood open at the end of the hall. For a moment Heath did not move, not believing what he saw. A slender woman dancing on the carpet, her slippers held loosely in one hand while with the other she tucked a pin into the pale blond curls that spilled over her naked breasts.

  “Lady Harrington,” he said with a faint smile. “How nice to see you again. All of you.” His cool gaze traveled from her incredulous face over her flushed, unclad form. The slippers dropped to the floor. She snatched her pastel tissue dress from the rumpled bed to cover her nudity. She needn’t have bothered. He wasn’t the least bit interested.

  She gave a horrified gasp and darted past him, disappearing in a blur of pink flesh down the stairs.

  He let her go. The bedroom door behind her was still open. He pushed it wide and saw Russell standing at his desk, bare-chested, a sheaf of papers in one hand, a pistol in the other.

  “Damnit, Lucy,” he said in annoyance. “I told you I had to sleep. What have you forgotten now?”

  “Perhaps her virtue?” Heath replied, leaning one shoulder up against the wall. “Her marriage vows?”

  Russell looked around, the papers falling in disarray on the desk. “What the devil, Boscastle?”

  “Sorry,” Heath said without inflection, staring at the disordered bedsheets on the floor. “I had no idea you were entertaining. I came to tell you I can’t do what you asked of me. I won’t take care of Julia.”

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” Russell said, sounding desperate, embarrassed.

  Heath returned his appraising stare to Russell’s face. He had no sympathy for this. “What does it look like?”

  “I’m going away. A man has certain needs, and Julia is rather . . . reserved about the art of love. You won’t tell her, will you?”

  “Why should I?” And when had Julia become reserved? Reserved did not describe the Julia who had writhed under him on a library carpet, the woman who had left him panting with lust, with a longing that had never been fulfilled.

  “This is the first time—”

  “Shut up, Russell.”

  “I say, there’s no need to be nasty. You aren’t exactly a monk, are you?”

  “Put your shirt on.”

  Russell reached casually for the white lawn shirt thrown over the chair behind him. “What are you doing here anyway? I told you to keep an eye on my fiancée.”

  “So that you could play on a clear field? That doesn’t seem fair.”

  Russell began to button his shirt, his scowl black. “How the hell did you get into my house?”

  “The door was unlocked. Rather careless for a man who is supposedly being hunted by an assassin.”

  Russell stared at him in disbelief. “My butler didn’t try to stop you?”

  Heath straightened, realizing his instincts had been right. Both he and Russell employed only servants who had been personally trained former soldiers and had proved their bravery on the battlefield. “No sign of him.”

  Russell strode toward the door, his face dark with alarm. “Then something has happened. He’s never failed me before.”

  Three minutes later they found the butler and two footmen gagged, bound, and beaten in the pantry. Their assailant had been masked, and none of the men had heard his voice, or could describe him, having been taken off guard.

  “Could it have been Auclair?” Heath asked as he and Russell searched the rest of the house.

  “Of course not,” Russell snapped. “He’s obviously hired a thug to play hell with me.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the enemy, and it is no secret that I intend to destroy him. I should not have to explain that to you.” He fingered the edge of his eye patch, his voice thick with emotion. “This is exactly why you are needed. You know London. You know Julia, at least well enough to watch over her.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I witnessed what Auclair did to you in Portugal. I found you half d
ead, a raving lunatic tortured beyond human endurance. How could you have forgotten how many of our men he killed? Or that he enjoyed cruelty?”

  “I didn’t,” Heath said curtly. “Are we going to look for the man who broke in here or not?”

  Russell shoved his arms into his greatcoat. “I’ll take care of that part. I want you to go to Julia’s house. And stay. Please, Heath.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Don’t question me. Do it.”

  Heath left St. James’s Street in a dark, unsettled mood, wondering how the hell he would handle the situation. Of course what Russell had asked him to do was logical; there was justification, and Heath might have done it anyway had he been given time to make his own decision.

  But it all came back to Julia, who had dismissed him hours earlier. Not out of any maliciousness but a common sense he had to admire. She had recognized the danger between them, the attraction. She had gained self-knowledge, a quality he found very beguiling.

  He stood outside her town house for several minutes, allowing his feelings to cool, to settle, like ashes from a smoldering fire. He had enjoyed seeing her again tonight, but he was not sure he cared to repeat the experience. He disliked the challenge to his self-control, disliked not knowing how he would react to her.

  She had always made him feel . . . well, she made him feel strongly. He had not yet decided if this was a state to be desired. Certainly his instinct to protect her warred with the unholy lust that she reawakened in him. An attractive, sexually appealing female who could become a trusted friend. Could there exist anything more dangerous in the world? How disconcerting to realize at his age that he could not always predict the next twist on the path. Well, wasn’t that what made life interesting?

  Lady Dalrymple was asleep in bed when he announced himself at the door of Julia’s town house in Berkeley Square. The elderly butler who answered his sharp knock refused at first to let Heath in. He changed his mind when Heath explained the situation, that Lady Whitby needed to be on guard against the man who had broken into Sir Russell’s home and beaten his domestics.

  “I say them Frenchies are not to be trusted, my lord,” he called down the hallway after Heath. “We should have taken their entire country prisoner.”

  “Splendid idea,” Heath muttered. “I wonder why no one ever thought of it.”

  “I don’t trust that Napoleon,” the butler added, placing his mottled hand on the hall stand to steady himself. “I say we should have—”

  Heath spun on his heels, walking backward. “Where is Lady Whitby?”

  The butler blinked. “Upstairs in her bedroom, my lord, reading. She enjoys reading late at night. But you don’t think that anything—that anyone—” He swallowed hard. “Sir Russell wanted a footman put outside her door, but Lady Whitby wouldn’t have it. Said it would give her nightmares. Said—”

  “Too much,” Heath finished under his breath. “Lord help me, is this what I have trained for?”

  He ran up the stairs, two at a time, and strode straight to the room where a glimmer of candlelight showed beneath the door. It was unlocked, an oversight for which he would take her to task. Julia was lying across the bed on her stomach, her face buried in what was clearly a very engrossing book.

  The first thought that entered his mind was that she was alive, obviously unhurt, unaware that she had a visitor, unaware of the attack on Russell’s servants.

  The next thing that drew—and held—his attention was the potent sensuality of her body, the rise of her well-shaped backside under her nightrail, her sleek, muscular legs exposed to the thigh, her ankles crossed. In that unguarded pose, Julia could have brought most men to their knees. He stood frozen, fighting a surge of sexual desire in a silent if brutal battle. He could not understand his own response. His fascination with a woman who belonged to his friend. Where was the sense in this?

  Her hair had lighter glints than he remembered; her arms and shoulders were becomingly burnished a pale gold, but then she had spent years in India. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn she had defied convention and not shunned the sun as a proper Englishwoman should. Julia being Julia, he wouldn’t be shocked if she had swum half naked in a river with man-eating tigers every day. He could take a bite of her himself, could join her on that bed and let his male instincts take over. A tremor of unadulterated temptation rocked him.

  His heart was beating hard. As much from the relief of finding her unharmed as from how her unstudied sexual appeal stirred his blood. He found it far too easy to imagine removing her simple nightrail. To picture himself running his hand over her curves, pinning her strong body beneath his and finishing what they had begun years ago. Reserved? Was that how Russell had described her? Not the woman who had gasped at Heath’s illicit kisses, who had allowed him the intimacies they had shared. His groin tightened; he remembered too well how she had tempted him. She would never believe him if he admitted how he’d felt about her. He did not believe it himself, or know what to make of it.

  The image of their past encounter dissolved as she rolled without warning onto her side. The temptation lingered, moved to the back of his mind to haunt him later. Her long red hair tumbled down her around her shoulders. Her gray eyes narrowed into bright, dangerous pinpoints of emotion. He blinked, his attention refocusing.

  She was holding a gun in her hand. Pointed at his chest with unflinching accuracy. He drew a breath. Julia shooting him again was not the part of their history he wanted to repeat. Sex and laughter, yes. A pistol wound, no.

  “It’s me.” He said the first thing that came to his mind; Julia did have a reputation for shooting men, and the third time was said to be a charm. “For God’s sake, Julia, it’s only me.”

  She lowered her hand, staring past him to the door. “What has happened?” she asked. “Is Russell with you? Why did you burst in here like this?”

  “Your fiancé is fine. His butler and footmen were assaulted tonight while Russell was . . . packing his bags.” Packing his baggage, he should have said. He wouldn’t tell her. He would not be the messenger of bad news, or she would kill him on the spot. He had absolutely no intention of getting any more involved in this than was necessary. Or so he told himself.

  She drew her nightrail down over her bare knees, a little belatedly to do him much good. He’d already seen enough of her delectable body to keep him awake the rest of the night, to resurrect all his latent demons and desires. “Then why are you here?”

  He frowned at her. God, she had given him a good scare with that gun. The woman deserved her reputation. “Russell sent me to make sure you were safe.”

  “Do you think I’m in any danger?”

  He met her gaze. He wasn’t about to insult her intelligence with a lie. Nor did he care to explain to her exactly how cruel, how insane a man Armand Auclair was. “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps I should leave London.”

  “Perhaps. There is not always safety in a crowd.”

  She slid to her feet. She looked younger with her hair down, defenseless, although with that pistol in her hand, she was not, and for that he was actually glad. As long as she didn’t point it at him again.

  “Thank you,” she said, her eyes suddenly full of her familiar mischief, the color returning to her cheeks. “What a competent bodyguard you are, Boscastle.”

  He felt a tight sensation in his chest, a stirring of . . . what? Apprehension? Affection? Or sheer sexual attraction, the devilish sort that toppled kingdoms and destroyed careers, that made bloody fools of its victims? In a thousand years he would never have believed himself vulnerable to its snare. How blithely arrogant he had been. “Thank me for what?”

  She grinned, and the sensation inside him deepened, heated, spread. He did not know how to fight it. He did not even know what it was. “For coming to my rescue.

  “Ah, yes.” She stared at him with an arch smile. “Rescued from reading. How shall I every repay you?”

  “I’ll think about it. Let me see that g
un.”

  “Here.” She held out her hand. “Be careful. It is loaded.”

  His eyes widened in surprise as she handed him the weapon. “Where did you get this? It’s a Manton flintlock dueling pistol.”

  “My husband gave it to me.”

  He glanced up appraisingly. “Your husband?”

  “He was gone a great deal.”

  “This is a beautiful piece, Julia.”

  “I know.”

  He stared down into her face. It came as a shock to realize how close to each other they were standing. Had she closed the distance, or had he? He could not tell. It was almost as if they were magnetized, drawn together against will and common sense. He could see the tiny mole on her throat, and lower, the rise of her full breasts. A woman in full bloom. A woman who belonged to someone else. His blood heated as if in rebellion at the reminder. Why did she have to be so damned alluring?

  “Look, Julia, I—”

  She leaned forward and stunned him by kissing his cheek. He did not move, not a muscle, but every sense, every blood vessel, every part of him reacted to the lush warmth of her lips. He did not show it. He did not show her how suddenly he ached to take her in his arms and teach her a thing or two about teasing. It astounded him, the raw-edged power of his desire for her. That years could pass, and she could break through his guard without even trying. She had gotten under his skin. He thought he’d recovered, God help him. He had hoped himself over her.

  “Dear Heath,” she murmured as she drew away. “You are too honorable for your own good, I fear.”

  Honor was the furthest thing from his mind. She had no idea of the things he had been forced to do since they had last met. He had killed men. He had walked away from women who wept and begged him to stay.

  He could walk out of this house right now and tell Russell to go to Hades. His career would probably end, not that he’d seen any action lately. He would miss the danger, the excitement, the distraction from ordinary life. Still, he had more than enough money. He should probably look for a wife, beget an heir or two. He really did have a choice. He did not have to torture himself. He could hire another man to take his place. He stared at her, trying to read her thoughts. God help them both if she touched him again.