Page 23 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

Heath sighed. “You were defending my sister. There’s no need to apologize for that.”

Adrian regarded the other man with a scowl. “Except that I bollixed it up. The true offender sneaked away, and I fainted at your sister’s feet like a girl. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m of a mind to finish what I started. Where does Sir William reside?”

Heath shook his head. “Drake and Devon were already planning to have breakfast with him when Emma pleaded for mercy. She’s not as scandal-prone as the rest of us. Let this go for her sake.”

“I don’t need anyone else to stand in for me,” he said heatedly. “I could have challenged him myself. Or not.”

Heath laughed. “Actually, friend, I’m afraid you’re not quite capable of even standing by yourself, let alone fighting a duel.”

“Damn it all to hell,” Adrian said mildly. “Are you going to insist I stay?”

“I think you need another spoonful of that sedative.”

“I think I should take the whole bedeviled bottle.”

Chapter Six

Emma ascended the flight of stairs in what had become a reassuring nightly ritual. Heath had generously reopened the uppermost floor of his town house as a private dormitory for her boarding pupils. For a brief time, her younger brother Devon had also allowed her the use of his home for her school, but Heath could provide more spacious lodgings, and as he and his wife Julia traveled often, this was a more convenient arrangement. Naturally, Emma hoped one day to settle into a proper place for the academy. Now that her siblings had found their own loves, well, it was time. She hoped that by the end of the summer she would decide on a country locale.

For once the thought of her pupils and their fresh, hopeful, sometimes impertinent, faces failed to rally her fighting spirit. She had betrayed them with her lapse tonight. She had become that most hideous of all society entities, a hypocrite, and perhaps she would become something even worse.

She dared not put a name to it. However, what was done was done. The most perplexing thing was how easily she had lost herself in sensual pleasure. She had not realized herself capable of such physical enjoyment.

She paused on the threshold of the tidy atticchamber to gather her wits. There were thirteen girls now. Enough, she thought distractedly, for a witch’s coven. Truly they did brew up enough mischief to befuddle their headmistress.

Four other young ladies who lived outside London had made applications to the academy in the last fortnight alone. One of her current students claimed royal ancestry. Another was betrothed to a cousin of a French marquis. Mademoiselle’s parents, naturally, wished to give their daughter’s deportment a certain flair before she took residence in Burgundy. To be entrusted with the improvement of young gentlewomen who would influence the world was a duty sacred to Emma’s heart.

That an acquaintance from her own school days, Lady Clipstone, had become her archenemy by setting up her own struggling academy only a month ago made Emma all the more determined to succeed.

And now, after today—tonight—

What of her indiscretion? The unspeakable event that she was supposed to pretend had not happened.

I’m dying of desire for you.

Desire. For her. An unbidden smile crossed her face.

She knew what others said of her. The Dainty Dictator. Mrs. Killjoy. No one would believe she was the woman who only a half-hour ago had all but succumbed to a mercenary’s seduction. Not at all herself, and yet, well, she had been herself. Her veins bubbling with all the wretched passion of her Boscastle ancestry.

To think she hadn’t been different at all. She might end up even worse, in fact, than her brothers. At least they sinned openly and made no excuses for it.

Emma had committed her transgression in secret. Or so she hoped. At any rate, she would be less forgiving of herself than anyone in her family should her conduct be brought to light. She had been a hard judge of her brothers’ misdeeds. Perhaps they really were all cut from the same cloth.

A soft snore erupted from the bed of one of her sleeping pupils. Sighing, she walked slowly across the room.

She should have guessed the restless girl was her newest student, Harriet Gardner, a charity case from the gutters of St. Giles. Emma had asked herself at least a hundred times since the fateful day she’d taken the flame-haired Harriet under her wing, why she had been possessed of the notion to help a street urchin who swore she would never be reformed.

She was very afraid it had to do with some maternal instincts that, try as she might, would not be denied. And the fact that Harriet, at seventeen, had been preened by her family to enter a life of larceny and prostitution. Emma’s heart ached for her. What chance did a girl like that have in London? Her plight both touched and challenged Emma, for she had learned that there were some trouble-bound souls who would not be helped.

As expected, it was Harriet who emitted the offensive snores, her thin white fingers curled around the cudgel she slept with every night. Emma bent over the bed to remove the weapon from the girl’s fist, then stopped.

Who knew what horrors Harriet confronted in her dreams? Or had faced in life? If the girl needed a stick to enable her to sleep, Emma supposed, as she straightened, it could be allowed for a few more days at most—

“Effing fancy-man,” Harriet shouted, sitting bolt upright in bed with her cudgel raised. “Gimme back my guinea, or I’ll bash you into pig guts!”

Emma blanched, then swooped down to wrestle the cudgel from the girl’s fists, whispering, “Harriet, Harriet, wake up! It’s only a dream, my dear.”

Then, even more gently, she added, “You’re safe in this house, do you hear? There are no”—her tongue stumbled over the word—“effing fancymen, only friends.”