Page 2 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

His touch lightened at once, searching and soothing. He lifted the foot from the ground and Lucy dared to put her hands on his hard shoulders as though she needed him to help her balance.

Perhaps she did. Her head swam with his nearness. His touch. His care.

“What have you done to yourself, Lively?”

Her surname, spoken in that chiding, caressing tone. Lucy had to swallow back tears, suddenly.

Men referred to each other in a friendly way using last names, and when the Rogue used hers, it made her feel…not as if he saw her as a man, but as if he saw her as an equal. A person, her own person, in a way that ladies were rarely allowed to be.

She didn’t know if that was what he intended. Probably he only meant to tease her. Lucy only knew that when he said it, she melted. Every time.

If only she knew his name in return.

Someday , she promised herself. For now, she would be content with this moment.

“I thought you had places to be,” she reminded him, unable to resist the goad. “Important places.”

“I do.” But he didn’t let her go. Instead, he looked up at her, his shadowed gaze fathoms deep and dark as the night around them.

Drunk on his presence, Lucy leaned more of her weight on his broad shoulders, savoring the sinewy toughness of his muscles.

“Go ahead and leave me here,” she suggested. “I’ll be fine.”

His fingers tensed around her ankle. As if he didn’t know he was doing it, the sides of his thumbs had begun slow strokes up the front of her shin, just above the laces of her kid boots. “I should.”

But he wouldn’t. Lucy was almost certain.

Once he started touching her, she hoped he might find it difficult to stop. The prospect sent a thrill of mingled exhilaration and nerves jangling through her.

“Damn it, Lively,” he sighed again, with a rueful smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “There will be hell to pay for it.”

For a moment, Lucy considered feeling guilty about ensnaring him to stay with her. But then she remembered that whatever business she was keeping a notorious highwayman from was undoubtedly dangerous and illegal. He was better off here, surely.

Heart racing, Lucy adopted the air of shameless, brazen confidence her sister so excelled at. Catching his dark eyes, she reached down and drew her skirts up…up…up until the curve of her calf was revealed all the way to the lacy hem of her fine lawn drawers. “If the price is too high…”

Heat flared between them. His jaw hardened to marble and his fingers skimmed higher up her legs, drawing trails of fire along her trembling thighs.

“What’s a little more hell,” he rasped, and stood to catch her to him for a kiss.

They crashed together in a blaze, his kiss rough and seeking out at once the most tender, secret places in Lucy’s mouth. His teeth nipped sharply, his tongue stroked insistently, and Lucy realized with a frisson of excitement that she had finally teased and tempted him past all reserve.

He had kissed her before. Sweet, almost courtly kisses, in keeping with the gentlemanlike manner that never failed to make her heart flutter. But no matter how she’d tried to provoke him—and Lucy had tried —he’d never touched her with anything less than perfect restraint.

Until now.

Tonight is the night!

Excitement and desire and apprehension swirled together in Lucy’s belly as he lowered them to the ground.

Her head felt too heavy for her neck to hold up; when the Rogue’s lips nipped sharp, sparkling kisses into the soft skin under her jaw and down the side of her throat, Lucy let it drop back over his supporting arm.

Dizzy sensation overtook her. She blinked and couldn’t tell if the stars wheeling before her eyes were hanging in the sky or brought on by his hungry mouth. Lucy clutched at his shoulders.

She was ready. Wasn’t she?

The hand that wasn’t supporting her upper body had returned to toy with the hem of her drawers, just above her knee. Lucy experienced the strange, contradictory urges to squeeze her legs together and to simultaneously let them fall apart. She didn’t know what to do.

And then it abruptly didn’t matter, because as though he was so attuned to her that he’d sensed her momentary hesitation, he stopped.

Mere inches from the open seam at the apex of Lucy’s thighs, his hand stopped.

A breath that sounded too much like a whimper escaped Lucy’s throat. She struggled to lift her dizzy head and found him staring down at her with his face entirely cast in shadow.

His chest heaved with one great breath, and then he was gone. Off her, standing up, stepping back, and Lucy said, “No!”

“What am I doing?” he muttered, so low she didn’t think she was meant to hear. “Damnation.”

You’re supposed to be ravishing me! Lucy wanted to cry out, but he so very obviously was not about to ravish her.

Embarrassment was beginning to creep in. She reached down to twitch her skirts over her legs and curled her feet under her with a shiver.

The ground was cold and hard. Funny, she hadn’t noticed before.

He paced away from her, one hand running over the top of the scarf that still concealed his hair above his masked face. His movements were quick and agitated, devoid of his usual lethal grace, and Lucy couldn’t bear it.

Clambering to her feet, she reached out to him, only to see him whirl and cast a narrow look down at her completely uninjured ankle. Oops.

Caught out, she tried a charming smile that seemed to have the exact opposite effect of what she wished.

His face, what she could see of it, went hard and implacable. Distant as the moon and twice as cold.

“I trust you can see yourself home without further incident,” he clipped out, already striding toward his stallion, and Lucy couldn’t believe it had all gone so terribly wrong.

“Wait, please,” she begged, running after him, but he paid her no heed.

She caught him just as he reached Dante, her fingers tangling in the trailing ends of the scarf.

When he shook her off impatiently, her clinging grip tugged hard enough to nearly dislodge his mask.

Lucy’s breath stuttered in her chest as he turned on her with true fury. He grabbed her wrist like a snake striking, making Lucy startle and drop the fabric.

“Do not,” he snarled, his voice low and throbbing with intensity. “Don’t. Ever.”

“I-I wasn’t,” she stammered, but he shook his head and turned back to set his boot in the stirrup.

Vaulting lightly into the saddle, he stared down at Lucy for a long moment. “No one can know who I am. Do you understand that? Can you understand the ruin you would cause if you— Christ. What am I doing here? I should already be leagues away.”

Wretched, Lucy cried, “But when will I see you again?”

A muscle worked in his jaw. “You won’t. This is over.”

“You don’t mean that.” Lucy’s heart was raw and swollen in her chest. “You can’t. You know me. You know my name—you kissed me!”

“I’ve kissed a lot of people.” Cool. Remote. Pitiless.

For the first time, Lucy wondered if the gentlemanly restraint she’d admired and sought to overcome had been something else all along.

Indifference.

The thought gouged her in a very tender spot, the part of her that had been shocked and dismayed to find that none of her so-called friends from her old life had truly cared anything for her once she was stripped of the wealth and rank of being a duke’s beloved youngest daughter.

But her Rogue had never been like that, a pained voice whispered in Lucy’s mind. He had seen her, so clearly, when no one else did. He’d cared.

He cared still. He must.

Tilting her chin up, Lucy met his gaze defiantly. “You like kissing me best.”

For a moment, the air between them shimmered with the crackling tension Lucy loved about their encounters. He wanted to smile, she could tell.

“What I like doesn’t matter,” he finally said. “You’re a child. Go home, little girl. It’s past your bedtime.”

The words were like an open-handed slap to the cheek, shocking and humiliating in equal measure.

Lucy wanted to shout that she wasn’t a child, she was fully nineteen years old—but she was, as it happened, mature enough to realize that nothing could make her sound more like a mewling infant than that.

“You can trust me, you know,” she said instead.

He smiled faintly. Not unkindly. “I can’t trust anyone.”

“I wasn’t trying to unmask you,” Lucy insisted, sticking to her point. “But if I did, I would die before I betrayed you.”

The Rogue showed no outward reaction, but his mount stamped the ground restively, as though sensing his rider’s turbulent emotions.

“Go home and grow up, Lively.”

Frustration gripped her by the throat. Stalling for time, Lucy broke his gaze and lifted a hand to pet at Dante’s velvety black nose.

“Careful, he’s a bad-tempered bastard, known to bite—” the Rogue started, then broke off when his stallion lowered his massive head to butt gently against Lucy’s shoulder while she laughed and stroked him.

“Horses love me,” she told him. “Likely because I’m so sweet. Like a lump of sugar.”

The memory of the moment when the Rogue had tasted her for himself seemed to arc between them like lightning.

“I must go,” he said abruptly. His voice was hoarse.

Gathering all the courage she’d absorbed from watching her older sister charm, seduce, and browbeat her way into getting everything she ever wanted, Lucy met his stare directly. “Must you? I wish you would stay. I wish you would allow yourself to admit what you want. What we both want.”

The man she wanted more than any other she’d ever met or heard of glared down at her as though he wanted to either strangle her…or eat her up. Lucy shivered, possibilities unspooling before her like the silver ribbon of open road through the downs.

For a moment, the barest instant, she thought she finally had him. Then his expression darkened and his hands tightened on the reins so suddenly that Dante reared up in protest, forcing Lucy to stumble backward.

“What I want is for you to leave me alone,” he snarled in a harder voice than he’d ever used with her. “No more of these midnight rides, little girl. No more schemes, no more false injuries, no more bloody picnics. You stay away from me.”

Heart constricting, Lucy watched as the Rogue pulled his stallion’s head around and urged him to a flat gallop as soon as they reached the road.

They took off down the highway as though the devil was at their heels, and Lucy followed them with her eyes until the blackness of the night swallowed him up.

She’d pushed him too far this time, she thought in despair. At every one of their other meetings, he had been…not biddable, but indulgent. Amused and intrigued, maybe even tempted. But tonight was different.

Tonight, Lucy had gone after what she wanted as boldly as she knew how—and he’d turned her away. And though she didn’t know this man’s name, she knew enough about him to understand that no matter how tempted he might have been, he meant what he said.

He was through with her.

Lucy indulged in a stormy bout of tears that left her with aching eyes, a stuffed nose, and a clear head.

You’re a child. Go home and grow up.

Inescapably, Lucy thought of another man who had mocked her youth and dismissed her as though she were nothing more than a babe needing her nursemaid.

She shook her head sharply to clear the Duke of Thornecliff from her thoughts. He had nothing to do with what was between Lucy and her Rogue.

She might never be the kind of woman who could tempt a man beyond reason, who could inspire the kind of passionate love she dreamed of. Lucy wasn’t seductively flirtatious and sumptuously curved like her sister, Gemma. Nor was Lucy serenely warm and womanly like her friend, Bess.

Lucy was too tall. Too skinny, with no curves to speak of, and a tongue tart enough to make more than one young gentleman wince when he saw her coming across a ballroom.

She was too impulsive by half and she’d read far too many novels to ever be able to settle for anything less than a grand passion.

But as far as her age went, well, that was a solvable problem. Time would, eventually, take care of it for her. All she had to do was wait. And then…try again.

“I’ll stay away from you, somehow. I’ll grow up, my Rogue,” she whispered to the wind. “Then I’ll come find you. You’ll kiss me again. And this time…you won’t stop.”