Sins and Scandals Collection: Whisper of Scandal / One Wicked Sin / Mistress by Midnight / Notorious / Desired / Forbidden

“Exactly,” Garrick said. “So with no work and a reputation destroyed, no freedom to attend all the academic events that you currently take for granted, nothing to do with your time …” He let the sentence hang. Her life, he knew, would be an utter desert. She was too unconventional to conform and it made her vulnerable.

He waited while she thought about it and saw in the widening of her eyes that she had reached the same conclusions.

“You would take away all the things I value.” She looked stricken. “My work, my interests—” She broke off. “Damn you,” she said with feeling. “As if it was not sufficient to rob me of everything once.”

Garrick hardened his heart against the pain and disbelief he could see in her eyes. “It is your choice, Lady Merryn.”

She stood up so abruptly that the table rocked and the champagne glass almost toppled to the floor. “I think it is time that you left, your grace.” She waited, drawn up as tall as her diminutive stature allowed. “I should have guessed that you would sink lower than I had could ever have imagined,” she added.

“I’ve only just started,” Garrick said. “You will have to broaden your imagination to keep up.”

“Oh?” She raised her brows. “If I refuse to concede, what then? Kidnap? Abduction? Marriage?” She smiled faintly. “I doubt you could get away with murdering two members of this family.”

“The marriage option interests me more than the murder one,” Garrick said.

She laughed. “So that you could bar me from testifying against you?”

“No,” Garrick said. “So that I could make love to you.”

The air in the room seemed to heat and catch fire. Merryn’s eyes dilated in shock. She gave a gasp. A pink flush mantled her cheeks and she turned her back on him, hunting feverishly now for her slippers, the need to escape him evident in the tension enveloping her slim figure.

“You have outstayed your rather tenuous welcome, your grace,” she said. “If you will not leave, I will. I should return to the ball anyway. My sister will be wondering where I am.”

“A conventional excuse to escape,” Garrick said. “I would have expected something more imaginative from you. Besides—” he took a breath, looked her over from shining fair hair to bare toes “—you cannot go back to the ballroom looking like that.” His voice dropped. “You look far too disheveled. People would talk. You look as though we have already been making love.”

Something flared in her eyes. Her lips parted. She looked innocent, frightened but also bewitched.

Garrick knew that he should not touch her. It was one thing to use whatever advantage he could to persuade her to give up on her quest. It was quite another to take the step of seducing her. Her innocence and her openness fascinated him, she called to every one of his long-buried rakehell propensities, but even he was not such an unscrupulous bastard that he would deliberately ruin her. Merryn Fenner was the last woman he could ever have. Twelve years ago, after he had taken her brother’s life and destroyed so many other lives as a consequence he had sworn that the only way to redeem himself was through duty. He had given up his hard living. He had turned his back on those who had predicted that with his wife dead and so spectacular a scandal attached to his name he would go back to his debauched ways with a vengeance. He had proved them wrong because after Stephen’s murder and Kitty’s death, strength of character was the only thing he had left, the only thing that could save him. He had served his country and he had tried to atone for his past failings. And now what tarnished honor he had left did not permit him to pursue Merryn Fenner, innocent, untouched, a woman who had already been cruelly hurt. He could not be such an unmitigated scoundrel. Even so the temptation grabbed him by the throat.

Just this once …

He knew he was lying to himself even as he kissed her. If he tasted her response just one more time he would not be able to let her go.

He bent his head and his lips met hers.

That night in his bedroom it had been no more than a brief caress. At the library he had kissed her with ruthless intent. This time he did not hurry to force a reaction. This time he courted a response from her, teasing her lips until they parted to allow his tongue to slip into her mouth, tasting her, drawing out the pleasure. He felt her tremble and slid his arms about her to hold her still.

It was a thousand times more potent than Garrick had ever imagined. Her lips were soft and yielding beneath his, offering the sweetest of surrenders. Her tentative response, the hesitant way she touched her tongue to his, tempted him to deeper intimacies. Suddenly Garrick wanted to make love to her here and now, throw her down on the bed or take her on the rug before the fire, he who had not behaved like that with a woman in twelve years and had thought he never would again, the Duke whose emotions were ice-cold and whose only passion was for books and dry documents.

He deepened the kiss, plundering her mouth now, desire leaping to wild desire, passion laced with tenderness. He slid a hand into the bodice of the rose-pink gown and felt the curve of her breast against his palm, small and soft, the nipple tightening against his fingers. It was shattering, hardening his arousal to painful proportions. She made a sound deep in her throat, and her body seemed to quiver beneath his caress. Feral possession ripped at Garrick and set him gasping. He was within an inch of losing control and ravishing her body as fiercely as he took her mouth.

He fought a brief, violent struggle for self-control and let her go, stepping back.

And then he saw her face and almost dragged her back into his arms. There was a dreaming unawakened expression in her eyes and a little smile on her lips as though she had just discovered something new and so fascinating that she was enchanted by it.

It was there for a second and then reality smashed through her pleasure banishing the look of a princess in a fairy tale. Horror was etched on her face and she pressed her fingers to her lips as though to scrub the kiss away.

“No,” she said. “Oh, no, not you!” And she turned and hurried away from him, her stockinged feet making a soft slapping on the floor that seemed to emphasize her agitation.

Garrick understood what she meant. If he had had a choice she would have been the last woman in the world he would have wished to be so attracted to. It was impossible. It was madness. And yet it seemed he had no choice.

MERRYN DID NOT STOP running until she had reached the sanctuary of the library. Halfway down the stairs she realized that she was running toward people, not away from them, but with Garrick in her room there was only one other place to go that could give her solace.

There were plenty of guests in the hall. She fled past them, seeing their faces, curious and speculative, hearing the titters of laughter.

“Lady Merryn is such an original … Running into the library with her hair down and no slippers …”

Damnation, this time it was her shoes she had left with Garrick Farne. First her book, her spectacles, her underwear … Soon he would have sufficient of her possessions to equip a whole room.

She braced her forearms on the table in the library—such a pretty room, designed to a yellow floral pattern by her sister Joanna—and stared at her face in the mirror facing her on the wall. She was horrified by what she saw there. Long blond strands of hair snaked about her face. Her cheeks were flushed a warm pink. Normally she had very little color. From childhood she had been accustomed to people commenting on her disparagingly as “an odd, pale little thing …” She had not minded particularly. She had always thought looks were overrated. What use was it to be beautiful, unless to make a good marriage? People had spoken approvingly of Joanna and Tess because they were such pretty girls, as though that was the most important thing in the world. Merryn, with her reading and the stories in her head and her imaginary friends, thought it was better to be clever than beautiful, though that did not mean that sometimes she would not feel a tiny bit jealous … Jealous of Tess’s charm and dimples, jealous of Joanna’s thick golden-brown hair and vivid eyes … Jealous of the admiration and approval that was withheld from her because she was different.

But now, looking in the glass, she saw that her face had all the color and vivid animation it had previously lacked. Her hair was all disordered profusion. Her eyes glittered with a fierce light so deep and blue, her mouth looked soft, pink and stung with kisses. She pressed her fingers to her lips again. She remembered her words to him at the Octagon Library:

“I have never been kissed before …”

Well, she had now. Wildly, passionately, pleasurably kissed by an experienced rake. She had been kissed until her entire body had risen to Garrick’s touch.

It felt as though she could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers. An echo of primitive heat and tension clenched her stomach. The kiss at the library had shocked her, so brief and ruthless. This one had seduced her. It had been strange, something so far outside her experience, new and different. But it had also been so much more than that, a world she wanted to explore, a hunger awakened, a fierce desire stirred. She knew she would never be the same.

She backed away from the mirror and sat down heavily in one of the armchairs. How was it possible to feel like this? She had spent twelve years hating Garrick Farne with a clear, cold passion. Then she had met him and that cold hatred had become confused by a different sort of passion. Disgust and despair shredded her. She did not understand how she could so betray herself and all that she believed in. Yet she was still trembling from Garrick’s kiss even as she despised herself.

She tried to tell herself that she would have responded in the same way to any man. She knew she lied. The thoughts cluttered her head, falling over each other. She ruthlessly demolished every justification with plain fact, too honest to deceive herself.

It would not have been the same with any other man. Two years ago, James Devlin, cousin to her brother-in-law Alex, had made his admiration for her very clear. He had even tried to steal a kiss and she had rejected him. Dev was a wickedly handsome man, charming and dangerous. Many young ladies would have adored being the object of his attentions. Yet his handsome face and elegant address had left her completely unmoved. She had not for one second burned for him as she burned for Garrick Farne. Garrick intrigued her as no man had ever done.

Garrick Farne had killed her brother.

It was hopeless, shameful. She would not, could not, allow herself to be drawn to Garrick. She did not understand how it could possibly happen. And yet she knew that there had been an affinity between them from the first moment that they had met. She could try to pretend that it was no more than a physical attraction, perhaps, although she knew little about such things and understood even less. But no matter how little experience she had, she would still know she lied. What she felt for Garrick was no mere infatuation. It was deeper than that. She lost herself when she was talking to him; he challenged her, he intrigued her. For a little while at least he made her forget who he was and what he had done.

She felt unutterably confused. Garrick had shown himself ruthless that night, as dangerous as she had feared, threatening to blackmail her, exposing her weaknesses. But her greatest vulnerability was her susceptibility to him. At the library he had exploited her attraction to him. Tonight—she trembled at the thought—he could have ravished her, taken her there and then, tumbled her on the pristine narrow bed in her spinster room, and she would not have stopped him. He had been a rake. He knew exactly how to provoke a response from her body. She shook harder as she thought of his mouth on hers, his hand against her breast. He could have seduced her, ruined her. She wondered why he had let her go.

If it were not so foolish, she would have said it was because he had some shreds of honor left. Her instinct told her it was so but surely her instinct must be mistaken.

Merryn shook her head to dispel such disturbing thoughts and went over to the bookshelves, taking a book down, a copy of The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. It was a beautiful volume, bound in leather, the pages smooth beneath her fingers. She started to read, concentrating on the words, willing herself to forget Garrick. Books were her friends. They never failed her. They soothed, cheered, distracted and encouraged her. She had used them to help her through the worst moments of her life and to celebrate the best. But tonight they could not save her. The words danced before her eyes. She could not concentrate. Her mind was full of Garrick, of his voice, his touch. Her senses felt inflamed. She was bewitched.

After ten minutes she put the book aside, baffled and upset. The ball was still in full swing but she was tired. She wanted to go to bed. She hoped Garrick had gone or she really would be obliged to call a footman and have him forcibly ejected, no matter the scandal.

She hesitated outside her bedroom door, aware of the shivers of anxiety and anticipation running up and down her spine, but when she opened the door the room was empty. Her slippers lay just as she had kicked them off.

Something caught her eye—her journal, sitting not on top of the pile of books at her bedside but on the cushion of the chair Garrick had taken. She grabbed the book. A sheet of paper fell from it.

His writing was bold and strong, as she might have imagined.

“Love and war are the same thing and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as the other.”

Cervantes. She smiled a little, despite herself, as she recognized the quotation. She had been harboring notions of war and revenge for years. She knew nothing of love.

Then her eye fell on the second line of writing.