Chapter 20

G od, he despised the peerage.

He despised their idea of entertainment.

Their high and mighty attitudes.

Which is perhaps why, in the midst of the Duchess of Argyll’s latest after-dinner-party games, he found himself looking frequently at the door for a sign of the absolutely only person in this bloody residence who felt the exact same way he did.

“You seem distracted, Mr. Latimer,” the duchess whispered.

Lachlan quit his search for the woman whose company he wanted and looked instead to the woman he’d spend the rest of his days with.

His gut clenched into vicious knots.

The Duchess of Argyll leaned up and whispered close to his ear. “I shall take your silence as a ‘yes’, then, Mr. Latimer.”

He grunted. “I didn’t take yours as a question, Your Grace.”

“No,” she remarked. “I suppose it wasn’t.”

As other guests enthusiastically threw themselves into the game at play, Latimer folded his arms at his chest and, for the duchess’ benefit, stared at the ridiculously trite action taking place at the front of the room.

With a low, throaty laugh, the duchess settled long, cloying fingers upon his upper thigh.

“Oh, now you’re just pretending,” she whispered.

Wholly unmoved, he made a discreet attempt to free his leg.

The duchess tightened her grip and leaned up and in, pressing her large breasts against his sleeve.

“Do you know your former friend, the current Duke of Argyll attempted to seduce me? He spoke of the forbidden: me bedding my stepson and he bedding his dear stepmama,” she said throatily, rubbing herself against him like a cat in heat. “I rejected him, of course, but not before I teased him with a promise of what would never be—he and I, as lovers.”

“Teased him?” he drawled.

The duchess lifted her lust-filled gaze to Latimer’s and blinked confusedly. She’d been so lost in her licentious imaginings, she’d forgotten Latimer’s presence.

“You know what I mean,” she purred.

“Do I?”

The duchess giggled. “You’ll make me say it, you dear man. I ensured he got hard and remained that way.”

The lofty peeress was so smug in her place over Latimer in this world and their arrangement, she didn’t think anything about openly lusting over Latimer’s mortal enemy.

A muscle ticked at the corner of his right eye.

God, how he abhorred her and all these depraved, lofty bastards.

The duchess tapped her fingers rhythmically upon his leg to grab his attention.

Her eyes twinkled. “You needn’t worry; there is nothing between me and the current Duke of Argyll.”

Not yet.

As cunning as arrogant, she’d mistaken his silent disgust for jealousy.

Undoubtedly, the duke and his ‘dear stepmama’ would, at last, bring their years of unslaked lust to a culmination after the duchess married Latimer. On the contrary to her wrongly drawn conclusion, Latimer couldn’t muster a shred of rage, or, for that matter, even the slightest hint of annoyance at that certainty.

He’d never feel anything remotely close to possessive about this woman.

There was, however, a young lady who the mere thought of her with another seared in Latimer’s veins like a poison in his blood.

And there would be someone noble and respectable to take her for his wife.

No, it’d be one of the gentlemen here, now…

Latimer did a sweep of the gentlemen who’d been brought forward as potential bridegrooms for Livian to choose from.

Flaring his nostrils, he fought to slow his breathing.

A task that, as he looked about at the men who’d potentially be Livian’s husband, became a task to rival Atlas’s overhead hold on the earth.

Each one, current members of Forbidden Pleasures—and of a certain few, eventual members of The Devil’s Den—Latimer knew each man’s vice.

Lord Forfar would strap Livian spread-eagled, face down upon a four-poster bed, and whip her until crimson crisscrossed stripes marred her satiny soft flesh.

The echo of her imagined cries—not of pleasure, but sorrow flooded his mind. They threatened to drive him beyond the point of insanity.

Sweat slicked his skin. No! He’d sooner kill the bastard than let her marry one such as Forfar.

Which left who as a potential groom…a fellow like Wakefield?

Lord Wakefield, who’d teach her to use her mouth on him the way Latimer hadn’t and would now spend every last of his waking days on this earth, aching of, dreaming of.

Latimer knew best how to pleasure Livian. As much as she’d spoken about wanting a partner in her husband, she would want to be a partner in that same man’s bed. The Cyprians fought with each other to have exclusivity of Wakefield as their lover, because of how generous and skilled and gentle he could be or rough as they wanted him to be—

An acrid taste filled his mouth.

In Livian, the earl— any man—would find his every dream come true, and more, in the arms of his young wife.

An animalistic growl exploded from his chest, just as the room erupted into cheers at the latest completed game of charades.

As the swell died down, the duchess made soft, soothing, sounds. “I really did upset you, Mr. Latimer.”

He glanced at the place she looked.

At some point, he’d fisted his palms so tightly he’d punctured the skin. Pinpricks of blood seeped through his knuckles and ran down the sides of his hand.

Fuck. I’m losing control.

What would the mercenary shrew say if he admitted he’d nearly gone mad in public from the thought of not her, but Livian, with another?

“You needn’t be so angry,” she said softly, attempting to loosen the death hold his fingers had upon the palm of his hands.

One small slip of a spirited, otherworldly beauty had shaken Latimer as he’d never been—as he’d never wanted to be—or, for that matter, believed himself capable of.

If he were to construct an empire to shatter his former partners, the last thing he could afford was to be a stark, raving lunatic with absolutely no self-control.

Latimer ignored the woman whom he’d come to this godforsaken event to make his wife.

Keeping his eyes forward, he drew his hand out from under the Duchess of Argyll’s and withdrew his handkerchief. Latimer pressed that black fabric against the crimson remnants.

“No need for that, Mr. Latimer,” the duchess said quietly, while the assembled guests decided amongst themselves on their next parlor game.

She pulled her glove off and took Latimer’s improvised bandage. The white of her satin twisted with Latimer’s black and slithered to the floor where they lay in a tangle of light and darkness.

He stared at those scraps at their feet.

Latimer and Livian. That is what the warring cloths represented—

The duchess pressed her immaculate palm to Latimer’s blood-stained one.

“As I said, you needn’t worry.” A feral light gleamed in the lady’s eyes. “I have no doubt, Mr. Latimer, when we are married, you will keep me so sated and filled every night, that I will not even be able to think of any other man, but you.”

Sophisticated and worldly, any man would long to claim the beautiful duchess.

That was, any man, other than Latimer.

“We’re both aware if we go forward with a union, ours will be primarily a business arrangement,” he said evenly.

The duchess trilled another sultry laugh. “Are you suggesting the sort of arrangement where we do not share one another’s beds , Mr. Latimer?” She wrapped her hands about his arm and whispered into his ear. “That you haven’t thought about taking me?”

The prospect soured his stomach.

When he didn’t respond, an unbecoming splotchy blush filled her taut cheekbones. “Do you expect me to believe…you do not desire—?”

The other guests, at last, and loudly, settled on a new parlor game, saving Latimer from any further haranguing.

With everyone drawn vigorously into the latest one, the duchess renewed her wheedling.

“I see.”

A memory slipped in of a time when a different woman spoke those words.

“And what is it you think you see, Your Grace?” he said flatly. “What exactly is it you think you see, ‘darlin’?”

The duchess flashed a smile. “You fear I’ll betray you with Argyll.”

Like a praying nun in church, Livian folded her hands. “You, Lachlan, are afraid to speak with me.”

“Sweetheart,” he drawled. “I’m not afraid of anyone.”

“I didn’t say you were afraid of me,” she clarified, “but rather, you are uncomfortable around…”

The duchess’ cloying affected tones robbed Latimer of the rest of his remembrance. “Legends swirl about the Duke of Argyll’s prowess,” she purred in a useless attempt to incite Latimer. “I trust knowing he wanted me in his bed does increase your excitement with mine and your arrangement, Mr. Latimer?”

“Argyll beds so many women it’s a wonder his prick hasn’t rotted off.”

The Duchess of Argyll laughed; the throaty sounds of her amusement blended with the raucous crowd who’d at last managed to correctly guess the two women prancing about were, in fact, cats.

“We have that in common, do we not, Mr. Latimer? Our loathing for the current Duke of Argyll.”

That was the only thing they had in common.

Unlike Livian, who knew something of struggle and being an outsider to the peerage and—

“You and I are very similar, Mr. Latimer,” the duchess inaccurately noted from the corner of her lips.

“Are we?” he asked evenly. Quarreling with the woman who’d secure his position in the next great gaming empire was hardly a promising start to their future.

A suggestive glimmer entered her eyes.

“Is there, perhaps, some other fun we might sneak off in search of for ourselves?” she invited.

He opened his mouth to issue a polite declination when another clamor filled the room; all the guests present openly deciding who should be the first chosen for the newest parlor game.

His gaze caught on the Earl of Wakefield, who’d been just as distracted and disinterested in the night’s entertainment.

“Her Grace!” a young woman cried, followed by a flurry of like cries, clapping hands, and stomping feet. “You must be first!”

Glowing under the sudden adoration turned upon her, Lady Argyll touched a palm to her chest, and gracefully demurred. “As your hostess, I mustn’t.”

Bloody fabulous. The duchess was as tenacious as poison i—

“Ah, but I say as our hostess, you must lead us in Blindman’s Bluff, Your Grace.” The Duke of Roxbury’s deep, commanding voice cut through the noise and silenced the room.

At that moment, with all eyes on the commanding bachelor duke, Lord Wakefield climbed to his feet and quit the parlor.

Latimer cursed under his breath and contemplated his move.

The duchess, mistaking the reason for his annoyance, slanted a coy glance at Latimer, and then sailed gracefully to her feet. “If you must insist, Your Grace.”

As she slipped out from the aisle and made her way to the front of the festivities, more accolades and clapping met her every step.

With the grasping peeress thankfully gone, and the room conveniently preoccupied, Latimer stood and went in search of Livian.