Page 25 of The Devilish Pleasures of a Duke

“You’d be flippin’ wrong then,” Harriet retorted with a sly grin. “I’m like a little mouse, I am, all over the place.”

Emma stared at her in chagrin. “Well, whatever it is you imagine you have seen or heard, I trust you will keep it to yourself. You must concentrate on your lessons, Harriet.”

“Would I bite the ’and that feeds me?” Harriet scoffed. “Not bloody likely, is it?”

Emma released her breath. “I hope not.”

“I’ll stick by you thick ’n’ thin, Lady Lyons.”

“How fortunate for me,” Emma murmured, turning to the other beds. How in the name of heaven would she turn this troublesome girl into a lady?

“You keep that chin up tomorrow, Lady Lyons. Don’t let ’er knock you down.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Emma asked through her teeth.

“That mean Lady Clipstone—once she gets a sniff of scandal, and that Wolf is a scandal if ever I saw one, well—” She swiped her hand across her throat. “The end.”

Emma narrowed her eyes. “Do you think I am that easily beaten?”

Harriet slid under the coverlet. “Not with me on your side. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Do we have a deal?”

“I’d as soon make a deal with the devil, Harriet. But—if I must shake your hand to earn your trust, then I shall do so.”

Harriet waited another fifteen minutes before she swung her bare toes to the floor and began to awaken the rest of the girls. “All right,” she announced whilst the other twelve yawned at her in resentment. “Who’s game for tonight’s entertainment?”

Miss Lydia Potter crossed her arms across her prominent bosom. “My idea of entertainment is not running down a damp alley to peer into another brothel window.”

Harriet looked down her nose in scorn. “Who wants to see Lady Lyons’s duke and defender in the flesh?”

One by one the other girls ceased their chattering to gaze upon Harriet in uncertain awe. “What do you mean?” one of the prefects demanded.

“I mean exactly what I said,” she countered. “Is anyone game? Or are you too afraid to have a good look at the sort of man you’re all aspiring to marry?”

A discordant female voice invaded his pleasant drift of dreams. For an instant he thought it was Emma again. He fought through his drugged befuddlement to respond to her—giggling at the foot of the bed? Surely that was not her making that ungodly noise.

He groaned in an effort to answer her. Finally he opened his eyes to stare up at a gamine-faced girl whose evil grin awakened him to full consciousness like a bucket of salt water splashed upon his face. Her hand was in the process of peeling away the bedcovers.

“Demon’s spawn!” he shouted in annoyance. “Where is my sword? I’ll cut off your damned little head!”

The girl danced back beyond his grasp. In disgust he noticed the group of young females gathered behind her at the door, watching him in wide-eyed shock.

He lurched into a stand, weaving several feet across the floor with the bedclothes wrapped around his legs. The girls backed away with gasps of fear. Emma, he soon perceived, was not among this group of silly, gasping females, and suddenly, as a black dizziness overcame him, he wondered whether he was still dreaming.

“Be gone, you plaguesome imps!” he growled, sweeping his hand across the air in a menacing gesture.

“So that’s what a duke looks like,” one of them boldly whispered. “I never guessed they grew them so big.”

So big? Were his improper body parts showing? He had strangely lost sensation from the waist down, but it appeared he was still wearing his drawers beneath his robe. His feet felt like slabs of stone.

As if through a haze, he heard their muffled shrieks of terror, watched them scatter into the dark like timid mice. The gall. Intruding on a sleeping man only to shriek in fright as if he had instigated this humiliation, and him as helpless as a…what had she called him again? A butterfly.

He made an ungainly effort to chase after them, at the very least to tell them off. But the dose of sedative Heath Boscastle had insisted he swallow would have put a weaker man to sleep for a minimum of three days. In Adrian’s cast-iron system it would remain potent only until morning. It slowed him now.

He bellowed once more on principle to demonstrate his wrath, then stomped back to the bed. His head throbbed mightily. His limbs felt clumsy and uncoordinated.

In the morning, perhaps, he would recover sufficient strength to pursue the impertinent mice and inform them he was not a man to trifle with. But not until after he had found Emma Boscastle alone and apologized for the offense he had given her.

Not that he was truly sorry for what had happened, to be perfectly honest. Their pleasant inter-lude had been the only bright spot in his gloomy return to England. She was quite possibly the only human being, certainly the only woman, who had displayed a genuine concern for his welfare with no thought of what she would receive in return. He’d always had a strange weakness for a woman of sharp wit.