“I have heard,” he murmured, “that some of the rooms in this house have been designed with seduction in mind.”

“So the rumors go.”

His thumb stroked from her ear to her chin. “The family has been invited to stay for a private supper after everyone else leaves.”

She disregarded the inner voice that warned her of impending pleasure. “Then you’re obliged to stay.”

“I won’t stay unless you stay with me,” he said stubbornly.

“How old are you, your grace?”

He sketched his thumb along the bumpy lace that bordered the tops of her breasts. “What difference does it make?”

She had to smile. “Not much to a person who’s accustomed to having everything go his way. Why did you come to London if all you wanted was to be alone?”

“I never said I wanted to be alone,” he said with a cool smile. “I only ask to be able to choose my company.”

“Some of us aren’t allowed even that.”

“Then you should never have let me touch you, Harriet. I cannot look at you now and not ache.”

“That’s life in London.”

His mouth hardened. “Don’t you know what happens to young women who wander off in the dark?”

Her laugh was bittersweet. “Better than you ever will.”

He swallowed hard. “I don’t want to imagine that part of your life.”

She laid her head back against the wall. A relentless hunger slowly pervaded her body. A craving he had awakened and only he could appease. “Aren’t you afraid to be alone with a man who might have murdered his brother?” he asked in a low, lilting voice.

“Are you making a confession, duke?”

His mouth curled in a smile. He took a step, and suddenly his free hand locked around her waist. A wave of faintness washed over her. Before she could draw another breath, he had trapped her between his hard body and the wall.

She felt the steel length of his phallus pressing through her thin dress and petticoat to her belly. Her woman’s place moistened at his unabashed sexuality. She had a notion what it meant. A prelude to a more intimate act. “I would very much like to be alone with you,” he whispered in her hair.

She wanted it to happen, here, now. The desire that flooded her veins silenced all her common sense. She wanted him more than air or dignity. His blue eyes flickered to her face. His nostrils flared. He knew.

He drew his hand up slowly between their bodies and unlaced the front of her gown before she could take another breath. A rush of bracing air stung her breasts as he caught a fistful of silk and tugged. His dark head lowered. She felt her will dissolve. His tongue teased back and forth at the tips of her breasts until she was shaking with the sharpest need she had ever known. If he didn’t stop, she would slide to the floor.

“Harriet,” he whispered, looking up into her face. “Harriet, please, I need you.”

She stared down into his eyes, falling into a darkness so endless she could barely hear his voice. “No,” she said, her voice clear and distinct. “Not this time. Have a temper if you like.”

He took a long breath. Still in a haze, she watched as he pulled her bodice back over her swollen breasts, relacing the ribbons with a look of burning regret. Then he lowered his head once again and branded her mouth with a kiss.

“If your door is ever left unlocked at night, I shall assume it is an invitation.”

She smoothed down her skirt. He backed away. They returned via separate doors to the ballroom. Her mind took forever to recover. In fact, it wasn’t until after the marquess’s private supper party began that she realized there was no lock upon her bedchamber door to discourage the duke’s advances.

Chapter Twenty

He danced the last dance of the evening with Constance, his sole intention to throw the scandalmongers off his true scent. He realized too late that he and Harriet could have made a more discreet return to the ballroom and that certain conclusions would be drawn. Did the duke find his aunt’s abigail more desirable than one of Society’s own? Such speculation amused the ton.

Constance found nothing amusing in his behavior and did not hesitate to say so. “This was meant to be our night.”

“Was it?” he asked in surprise.

“I thought our engagement might be announced.”

“Did you?” He noticed Harriet standing behind his aunt, their expressions of mutual disapproval rather delightful.

“My father has already had papers drawn for the wedding.”

“To my late brother, perhaps. But not to me.”

She smiled thinly, walking the steps of the last set as if they were opponents on a dueling field, not on a dance floor. “Your grace is too honest.”

He bowed in relief as the dance ended. “And, you, my lady, are only so in the moonlight.”

For a moment she appeared not to understand what he meant. But then she gave a slight nod, not bothering to lie. “At least I do not engage in affairs with those beneath my station. Lord Hargrave is merely a friend.”

He walked beside her to the supper room, Constance calling back farewells to the other guests who had not been invited to stay. Her dark hair lay tightly coiled upon the whitest skin, aside from Edlyn’s, that he had ever seen. Her eyes shone like cold, distant stars.

She paused without warning, people crowding all around them. “You may kiss me now.”

“But everyone is watching.”

“I know. Just kiss me and be done with it.”

The thought held as much appeal as did a wasp sting. But since when did a Boscastle male refuse an offer to indulge a lady?

She tilted her face. “On the cheek. Lips closed.”

He stared down at her. She looked for all the world as if she were awaiting a guillotine to drop. “Why don’t we just shake hands and go from there?”

“If his grace does not pay me court tonight, the papers will report that we have become estranged.”

“Estranged? Before we are even properly engaged?” He laughed. “What a complicated world is London’s Society. I admit it does not interest me at all.”

“Your brother had an instinctive respect for the roles one must play. Your instincts, I fear, are far less refined.”

“And that is why you fear them?” he asked curiously.

“What I fear is that you shall make fools of both of us, your grace.”

“And if I do not care?”

She regarded him with contempt. “Ours is to be an arranged marriage. Whether you care or not is irrelevant.”

If Griffin had ever felt the slightest interest in pursuing a match between them, even for the purpose of breeding heirs, it dissipated. Disregarding the fact that his male parts did not exactly dance in her presence, he was repulsed by the unfeeling ease with which she was as willing to share his bed, his life, as she had been his late brother’s.

It was a well-known fact that a Boscastle could not survive without passion. Perhaps if Griffin had never come to London, he would have lived the rest of his days denying what his ancestry had ordained.

Perhaps he would never have met a woman with hair the color of a pagan bonfire and a spirit disciplined enough to becalm the beast he was afraid he had become.

Harriet slept late and not well, dreaming of a young duke who abducted her from her warm bed in a flying chariot and carried her into darkness. Her teeth chattered like a skeleton’s. It was perishing cold up in the clouds, despite what the poets might claim, and the duke had turned a deaf ear to her objections. Harriet’s dream counterpart was less impressed with romantic gestures than she was with practical matters.

She reached through the mist for his cloak, pulling it off the duke’s broad shoulders with a cry of shock. He was nude beneath, his chest and torso as hard and beautifully sculpted as the statues in the marquess’s garden. A work of art, Lady Hermia Dalrymple would announce when the girls at the academy took out their sketchbooks. The human body should reflect the hallowed perfection that its creator had intended.