Page 22 of Scoundrel Take Me Away (Dukes in Disguise #3)

For the second time that night, a large hand clamped around Lucy’s arm—but this time, though it burned like a brand, she had no desire to shake it off. She let Thornecliff tug her back against the broad, hard planes of his chest.

“You think I risked nothing,” he said, low and ragged in her ear.

His hot breath on the side of her throat sent shivers racing down her back and legs.

“Au contraire. I risked my membership in this very club. Because if he had tried to take you away from me, I would have torn the entire building down, brick by brick, to get to you.”

Dimly, Lucy was aware of the discreet withdrawal of the club’s majordomo, leaving them alone in the club’s entryway. But most of her attention was focused on the man holding her against his body, his arms like bands of steel wrapped around her.

It should have felt caging, confining. She should have wanted to claw her way free—but she didn’t.

Lucy stood in the circle of his arms, in the shelter of his body, and burned for more.

“I still can’t believe you played cards for me,” she said, unable or unwilling to let it go. “Mathematical probabilities or not, you could have lost.”

“No, I couldn’t have.”

Arguments rose in her chest, but before she could give vent to them he’d whirled her to face him. Her breasts crushed against his shockingly tough musculature. Her nipples tightened in a rush of sensation that was echoed by a throb of heat lower down.

When Thornecliff gripped her chin and angled her face up to his, she couldn’t help it—her lips parted in anticipation of his kiss. Everything in Lucy ached for it, even knowing that anyone could come upon them at any time.

But he didn’t kiss her. He stared down at her, his eyes—those blank, black pools she’d thought so emotionless—wild with wanting. With need. With a frank, possessive desire that Lucy responded to by melting and softening against him.

“There was no way I could lose,” Thornecliff murmured, ghosting the words across her cheekbones, nosing them along her jaw. “Because I stacked the deck before I handed it to Chicheley.”

All the air went out of Lucy. It was unthinkable for a gentleman to admit to cheating at cards. Like defaulting on a debt, it was a matter of honor—most gentlemen of the Ton would consider suicide preferable to being known as a cheat.

Reminded all over again that Thornecliff was a man entirely and unrepentantly without honor—or, at best, a man with his own idiosyncratic code of honor—Lucy managed to bleat out, “But you—you expected to be the dealer! Chicheley dealing must have ruined whatever plans you had when you fixed the deck.”

“I knew he would demand to be the dealer.”

Lucy’s head was spinning. Partly from Thornecliff’s revelations, but even more from his nearness. She attempted to gather herself, her brain revolving swiftly past every single moment in the card room and viewing it all from this new angle.

Thornecliff had orchestrated the entire game, from start to finish. He had played them all.

Including her.

“You couldn’t have given me some sort of sign?” she grumbled, trying to pretend she wasn’t curling her arms around his neck. “I would have passed an easier few minutes if you’d let me know what you had planned.”

For the first time that entire evening, Thornecliff looked surprised. He even went so far as to allow his brows to lift. “Were you worried? You shouldn’t have been.”

“I know that now!”

“You knew it before.” Thornecliff stared down at her, gaze intense. “I told you. I never play a game unless I’m certain I’ll win.”

Lucy couldn’t help it. She had to kiss him.

* * *

At the last possible moment, Thorne recalled that he’d decided not to kiss Lucy while seducing her, lest she actually prove herself able to recognize The Gentle Rogue by his kiss.

He hadn’t reckoned with how much more difficult it would be to avoid being kissed . Especially when every nerve in his body was straining toward her.

He managed to turn his head to the side to avoid Lucy’s kiss. It took more willpower than he liked to admit.

To mask the motion, he fastened his lips to the delicate hinge of her jaw. That was no hardship.

She was unbearably sweet there, the skin soft and fragrant with something like candied citron. Tart, juicy, sweet but with a bite to it.

He wanted to take a bite out of her.

From the way she molded herself to him, Lucy wouldn’t mind. Her pulse fluttered frantically under his mouth. Thorne couldn’t believe he was getting hard just from this, a little light petting and kissing in a semipublic setting.

What the fuck was wrong with him?

Temptress that she was, Lucy tossed her head back to give him unfettered access to her throat, and of course Thorne took it. Because he’d never been offered an advantage he didn’t immediately seize.

Her back was supple beneath his palms, arching to bring her closer still, and Thorne groaned. When her legs shifted restlessly, he pressed that advantage too and instantly slid one of his own thighs between hers.

She parted around him with a shivering sigh and a clench of her hands on his shoulders.

He imagined he could feel the heat of her core through the layers of fabric separating them.

She writhed closer, shuddering at the intrusion of his hard thigh against her softness, and Thorne was overcome by a ferocious need for more of her.

Backing her toward the wall of the antechamber, Thorne buried his face in her silken hair and worked his thigh between hers until she squirmed and gave a shocked little moan into his shoulder.

She was so open and honest in her responses, nothing calculated in her at all. Her natural sensuality was like opium in Thorne’s veins, enveloping him in a haze of pleasure and sensation and greedy grasping for more .

As if echoing his thoughts, Lucy breathed, “More. I need…more.”

Thorne was on fire. His prick was an iron bar grinding into her lower belly and when she hitched her hips higher, chasing her peak, he almost thought this would be enough to pull his own from him.

Like a callow youth with his first doxy, he was about to spend in his trousers.

Clenching his jaw, Thorne pulled back far enough to stare down at Lucy’s flushed face. Lips bitten red and hair mussed, she was a vision of loveliness that made his erection throb.

Her dark brows were drawn together in a little frown. Her eyes were closed.

Was she thinking of someone else? Was she thinking of… him ?

The Gentle Rogue. Thorne hated him with a sudden, visceral intensity that made him feel deranged.

He’d hated himself before, but never quite like this.

Shutting off his brain, Thorne slid one hand around the back of Lucy’s slim neck and let the other trail fingertips down the expanse of her creamy bosom to cup her breast through the bodice of her gown.

She shuddered, eyes fluttering open, and Thorne felt a stab of satisfaction when she hazily focused on his face. To reward her, he deftly tucked his fingers inside the bodice and found the taut, straining bud of her nipple.

Delicately, with finesse, he pinched. She shook. His mouth watered; he wished there were two of him, so that he could keep his thigh where she wanted it, while also getting his mouth on the firm roundness of her breast.

There are two of me, he thought deliriously, so maybe next time The Gentle Rogue should join us.

Damn it. He pressed his face into the side of her head to ward off the madness.

It worked better to focus on Lucy, on stoking her desire higher and higher, alternating rhythmic squeezes to her nipple with the insistent thrust of his thigh against her melting center until Lucy’s cries took on a sharp urgency that sang through his blood.

Her head dropped back, supported by his hand, and he stared at the long line of her beautiful white throat and felt the slight weight of her breast in his palm and let her ride his thigh to a shivering climax that he experienced with a satisfaction so visceral it almost registered as an orgasm of his own.

He held still while she shook in his arms, while her limbs lost the stiffness of climax and took on the languor of sated passion. His own desire, yet unsatisfied, was a peripheral concern that threatened to become a more central battle when Lucy raised her head and gave him a slow, sleepy smile.

Thorne had the sudden, devastating realization that she would let him have her. She would let him fuck her, right here, right now, if he pressed her.

He was going to have to be the one to stop them. Because they were in public, and the majordomo, or a footman, or a club member, or Rook himself was going to pass through the antechamber at any moment, and Thorne would be damned before he let anyone see Lucy this way.

Thorne told himself to let go of her. To lift his head from the feast of her flesh, to drop his hands from her sweetly arched spine. To step away from Lucy.

He couldn’t.

His body, which he had trained to do exactly as he wished in all circumstances so that he could never again be rendered helpless, absolutely bloody refused.

Paradoxically, the shock of that, the disorienting wrongness of not being able to force his hands to stop touching Lucy, startled him into letting her go.

Genuinely shaken, Thorne stared down at her dreamy, half-lidded eyes as they blinked fully open.

She was so beautiful, he thought helplessly, and had to grind his jaw to keep the words from spilling out. What was wrong with him?

Think of the plan , he reminded himself doggedly, finally convincing his feet to move back a pace, then another, until he and Lucy were no longer pressed together. Her arms slid reluctantly from his shoulders to hang loose at her sides.

The plan. Seduce Lady Lucy Lively as himself, without kissing her or resorting to cheap theatrics. Have her and be done with her—knowing all the while that she’d prefer to be with The Gentle Rogue instead.

The plan was going pretty well, he thought bleakly as Lucy bit her plump lower lip around an almost shy smile.

“That was…” She shook her head. “I don’t have words for what that was.”

Unspeakably foolhardy? Unbearably risky?

Heartbreakingly perfect?

He’d been silent for too long. That little frown knit her brows once more.

“Thornecliff?”

“Gabriel.” His own hoarse voice shocked him. What was he doing? He didn’t know, only that he couldn’t bear for her to keep calling him by his full ducal name.

There was a reason he’d chosen long ago to go by a shortened version, but he didn’t want her to use the same name used by all his various toadies and bootlickers, dandies who emulated him and salacious ladies who wanted to be seen on his arm.

So he gave her his real name and waited to see what she would do with it.

Her expression cleared. “Gabriel,” she repeated softly, and a warm, glowing feeling spread through his chest.

Was that…happiness? God.

He offered her his arm once more, moving like an automaton, and this time she took it. In silence, they swept from the gaming hell and out into the damp, fog-choked London night.

She would fall. Sooner rather than later, unless he missed his guess. And, as he’d told Lucy earlier, Thorne never missed. He didn’t guess. He calculated the odds—and if they weren’t in his favor, he arranged matters such that they were.

He ought to be happy. He ought to be purring with satisfaction at the new softness in Lucy’s gaze when he bent over her hand to kiss it farewell at the door of Ashbourn House. He ought to be reveling in the thought of how easy it had been to take a woman who hated him and make her want him.

Except it hadn’t been easy. And as Lucy slipped past the butler and disappeared into her brother’s house with one last, searing backward glance over her slim, white shoulder, Thorne knew…

The plan was fucked.

Because there was absolutely zero chance that he would be able to have her once, twice at the most , and then forget about her.

As his carriage rumbled away from the curb, Thorne sank into the squabs, absently palmed his angry, neglected cockstand, and brooded about what to do. Where to go. How to save himself from the trap he only now felt closing around him.

He needed a new plan.