Page 15 of Duke with a Lie (Wicked Dukes Society #4)

“ Y ou’re scowling again.”

Aubrey turned to Kingham—King, as he was better known to friends and foes alike—who was annoyingly observant, particularly when Aubrey didn’t want the arsehole to be. “Scowling suits me.”

They were seated in the dining room after the ladies had withdrawn, the table a sea of strewn, emptied glasses, the epergne still resplendent with bursts of sweetly scented flowers.

He had watched Rhiannon go, annoyed that the minx hadn’t even so much as looked in his direction for the whole of dinner.

“Your expression is somewhere between someone-pissed-in-my-brandy and I-just-stepped-in-dog-shit,” King continued, unperturbed by his nettled reaction.

“No one has ever pissed in my brandy, nor have I stepped in dog shit,” he growled. “So I fail to understand how you would have the slightest inkling of what such expressions would look like upon me.”

“An educated guess,” King drawled, lighting a cheroot.

“What he’s trying to say is that you look like you want to bloody well throttle someone,” Riverdale offered quite unhelpfully.

“I do,” he told his friend in a dark tone. “It’s you.”

Thank Christ Whit had run off after the dessert course had been complete.

King had offered something about Whitby wanting to shag the woman who had created the fancy cream ices they’d all enjoyed, which suited him fine.

Aubrey hadn’t the heart to face his friend, knowing what he’d done earlier that day.

His hand.

On Rhiannon’s cunny.

It had been soaked and hot and sleeker than silk. Fucking paradise.

Don’t think of that now, you bloody imbecile , he cautioned himself.

“Why should you want to throttle me ?” Riverdale demanded, sounding hurt. “I’m not the one who said you were wearing an expression that was somewhere between I-just-stepped-in-horse-shit and someone-shat-in-my-port.”

“It wasn’t I-just-stepped-in-horse-shit,” Aubrey corrected. “It was I-just-stepped-in-dog-shit.”

“Did you?” Riverdale raised a dark brow at him. “I wasn’t aware there were any hounds in residence here at Wingfield Hall.”

“You’re deliberately misunderstanding me,” he growled.

“I’m not misunderstanding a thing. I daresay you’ve said it all wrong.”

“And no one shat in my port,” he continued. “That doesn’t even make sense. Who would shit in someone’s drink?”

“A villain of the worst sort.” King shuddered dramatically, then took a puff on his cheroot.

“You said someone pissed in my brandy,” he pointed out to King, irritated. “He hasn’t even got the right spirit.”

“Are we truly quibbling over something so nonsensical?” Riverdale yawned. “How tedious.”

“You see? This is precisely why I want to throttle you,” Aubrey bit out. “You’re terribly fucking vexing.”

“I’d rather be fucking vexing than for my fucking to be vexing,” Riverdale quipped, raising his glass of wine.

Aubrey stared at him. “Yet again with the proving-my-point bit.”

“Where have you been lately, Richford?” King asked. “You’ve been scarcer than Whitby at this little fête of ours thus far.”

“Chasing skirts,” Riverdale answered for him.

Something within Aubrey bristled at Rhiannon being referred to in such a dismissive, derogatory fashion.

He wanted to smash his fist into his friend’s jaw, which was absurd because Riverdale had no notion that it was Rhiannon whom Aubrey had been chasing.

And if anyone deserved a fist to the jaw, it was Aubrey himself for daring to debauch Whit’s innocent sister.

“I’m not chasing skirts,” he snapped, thinking about Rhiannon flirting with the scoundrel at her side during dinner.

Some jaded Lothario, he was sure of it. One who would just as soon lead her into a dark room and lift her skirts for a quick shag than pleasure her.

The very notion made him murderous. He told himself it wasn’t his responsibility to watch after her.

That if she had chosen to spend all of dinner dancing her attention on some roué, he should thank heaven for the mercy that had been shown him.

But he couldn’t.

Because he didn’t like it.

Rhiannon deserved so much better than some unappreciative rake who wanted to empty his ballocks.

Someone like him.

His lip curled with self-derision.

“Would you care to explain just what you were doing yesterday following the woman in the pink dress about then, if you’re not chasing skirts?” Riverdale chortled.

“Don’t speak of her,” he growled, hating that his friend had noticed Rhiannon.

Good God, Riverdale hadn’t lusted over her, had he?

If so, he wouldn’t have been the only one.

Nearly every man on Rhiannon’s half of the table this evening had been ogling her creamy, plump breasts in that positively lewd dress she’d been wearing.

A beautiful woman clad in a gown that hugged her figure and accentuated her curves in all the right ways like that should be outlawed.

“Seems to me you’re smitten,” Riverdale said.

“I’m nothing of the sort.”

He wasn’t smitten with Rhiannon, damn it. He couldn’t be. He was bloody well trying to protect her from herself, that was all.

Was that what he had been doing when he had lifted up her skirts and touched her hot, glorious quim?

He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and had to admit to himself that no, it hadn’t been.

Fuck. He was everything that was reprehensible. But he wasn’t smitten with her. The Duke of Richford wasn’t capable of something so maudlin. He bedded women. Pleasured them. Walked away and left them with a smile. That was bloody well all.

“If you say so,” King said. “Who are we to argue?”

Aubrey could offer nothing to that question.

So he sat at the table and stewed, wondering if Rhiannon had returned to the safety of her bedchamber yet.

Praying that she hadn’t run off with some silver-tongued devil who would take her virginity and break her heart. He tapped his fingers on the table.

“He’s horrid company this evening,” Riverdale said to King as if Aubrey weren’t sitting there between the two of them with fully functioning ears.

He pinned his friend with a pointed glare. “I can hear you, you know.”

Riverdale grinned. “Of course you can. How else am I to tell you that your dark mood is quite ruining my good cheer?”

“What you need,” King intervened, “is one of my potions. I’ve a new one that’s just the thing.”

King’s concoctions were notorious. No one knew precisely what was in them, but they were excellent for a diversion when one needed it.

And perhaps Aubrey did need it. Rhiannon was driving him to distraction.

Why did he have to make her his problem?

Why could he not have ignored the fact that he had noticed her yesterday?

It was only the second day of looking after her as if he were a governess and she were his rebellious charge, and look at how he’d failed.

He had touched her cunny.

But he hadn’t made her come.

His rakehell soul mourned that loss. Some drunken idiot had interrupted before he’d been able to accomplish that glorious feat.

“I’ll try your potion,” he grumbled. “Give me enough to drown a whale.”

“That would kill you, and we can’t have that,” King told him seriously, finishing his cheroot and extracting a small bottle from within his coat.

“Kill me? What the hell is in this potion of yours?”

King smiled. “The blood of virgins, the bones of saints, that sort of thing.”

“You’re mad,” he said without heat.

“Being sane is so bloody boring,” King said with a shrug, casting an imperious eye over Aubrey. “Are you wearing an embroidered waistcoat?”

“Yes, I am. What of it?”

“The embroidery is a bit much, don’t you think?”

Aubrey frowned down at his choice of waistcoat for the evening. “No, I don’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have worn it, now would I?”

“Hmm,” was all King said, looking unimpressed.

“Not all of us can be arbiters of fashion,” Riverdale said.

“And makers of poison,” Aubrey added.

“It’s not poison,” King countered, looking affronted. “Not in a small dose anyway.”

“How reassuring.” But Aubrey took the bottle his friend offered just the same.

He needed oblivion.

He needed to forget all about the golden Siren who had been tormenting him the past two days.

“Save some for me, old chap,” Riverdale groused.

Aubrey lifted the bottle to his lips.

And in short order, the rest of the night turned into a hazy blur, which was just the way he had wanted it.

He fell asleep dreaming of jasmine-scented breasts on a Gorgon who would make his cock fall off if he met her gaze and an octopus whose tentacles were fashioned from riotous golden waves of hair. The tentacles wrapped around him and told him he was a scoundrel but they loved him anyway.