Page 2 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

“Unleashed?” Charlotte asked, startled. “Is that the word that you used?”

“Just look for yourself.”

Lord Wolverton stood rather helplessly in the center of the female circle looking…like a man desperate to escape. It was an image one could hardly reconcile with his reputation as a professional mercenary.

At the moment, however, it was not Lord Wolverton whose conduct deserved criticism, no matter what his past. It was the three girls encircling him with all the subtlety of milkmaids on the common green. Erupting into raucous giggles. Fluttering their fans and eyeing his lordship as if they had forgotten every subtle precept Emma had hammered into their young heads.

She swept forward, forcing herself not to look at their gentleman victim. “Girls, may I have a word with you at the table?”

Three pairs of ivory fans snapped to attention. Chastened by the voice of she whom her own family called the Dainty Dictator, they dutifully trudged toward the table before which Emma waited.

“I shall say little.” She gazed at their downbent heads. “Until later. For now you should be congratulating the newlywed couple and, one dares to hope, setting your aim on achieving a similar state for yourselves.”

“But he’s a duke’s son—”

“Silence. He is notorious, and—” Emma broke off in consternation.

Girls being girls, she feared she would only whet their female curiosity by adding details of the man’s adventurous history.

It was her opinion that most young women harbored a secret attraction to forbidden gentlemen. Not that Emma had ever been so afflicted in her past. As the sister of five Boscastle brothers, she had observed one too many wicked males at work to harbor any romantic illusions about marrying one.

“There are only three of you,” she said suddenly. “Someone is missing. Where is Miss Butterfield?”

“She ate too much lemon syllabub, Lady Lyons. She ran upstairs and said she was going to be sick.”

“At a wedding?”

“Disgusting, isn’t it?”

Emma grimaced. “I’ll give her a few moments to recover. And then we shall all make a quiet departure.” She cast a covert glance about the room for Sir William. He seemed like such a decent gentleman, a little dashing but mature and a man of principles. Surely he had not gone without a proper farewell. But then perhaps he’d tried and she had been too distracted to notice—

Distracted.

She looked up hesitantly, into the hooded eyes of the man standing across the elegantly spread table. Normally she would not meet a man’s regard long enough to make an assessment. But what a remarkable face he had. In an expert glance she took in his well-tailored cutaway gray silk coat and the black pantaloons that molded a pair of long, muscular—she blinked in disappointment.

Was the man wearing riding boots, to a wedding? And had he just pressed the heel of his hand down on the table beside the plate of herbed sausages? That would never do.

She tsked to herself, turning away before he could notice her. Too late.

“I beg your pardon,” he said over her shoulder. She had to admit he had a deep, beautiful voice. “If you just said something to me, I didn’t quite hear it.”

Much ado about nothing.

A decade had not changed the dreary rituals of English Society.

Having escaped the voracious debutantes that Heath had warned him would attend the wedding, Adrian had wandered over to the table and the graceful-looking woman who stood on the other side. Heath’s younger sister, he thought.

A safe haven in a sea of insincerity. The Boscastles had committed too many sins themselves to cast judgment. Adrian felt free in their midst to speak his mind, to be himself. They poked fun at pretense, and they were always joking, having one another on. A man could breathe around the Boscastles.

When the young lady rather shyly smiled back at him, he put his hands behind his back and pretended to examine the wedding cake. His gaze lit on the row of candied violets adorning the top tier.

“Comfits,” he said. “I haven’t had a comfit since I was five. My mother used to sneak them to me at Christmas. Afterward she’d pretend the cook had forgotten them again and she would send back to the kitchen for more.”

He glanced around. Then he reached up to pinch one from the cake. A slender white-gloved hand buttoned all the way to the elbow descended upon his wrist like a guillotine.

He grinned playfully. “Sorry. I didn’t know they had your name on them.”

She stepped around the table to show herself. Not that there was a great deal of her to show, but what Adrian observed seemed more than appealing.