Elizabeth Beacon - The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle

‘All the more so for being mine,’ he replied softly.

‘Possessiveness, it’s the curse of our sex,’ Rob taunted, and Charles wondered if he wasn’t yet truly forgiven for trying to win Rob’s lady off him, although he’d been as blithely ignorant of who she really was as her husband had been at the time.

He had admired Caro’s refusal to sit back and meekly accept that their arranged marriage was an abomination to her husband, and her ingenious campaign to win him to her bed by foul means when fair ones must fail, since Rob had vowed never to share any room with his wife after their wedding. Rob had danced to the seductive and scandalous new courtesan Cleo Tournier’s tune without a clue that she was his unwanted and despised wife, and Charles decided vengefully that he was glad he’d helped her tame the one-time rake now watching him as if he was a specimen on a pin.

‘You could be right,’ he replied calmly enough.

‘Be careful what you’re at,’ Rob warned him silkily. ‘Miss Courland isn’t up to the games you play and she’s far from unprotected.’

‘She needs no protection from me,’ Charles replied shortly.

‘Have you undergone a sea change then, Charles?’

‘A permanent one,’ he replied, gaze steady on Rob’s challenging one.

‘Good God, I think you really mean it.’

‘I do.’

‘It’ll provide me with an interesting diversion to watch you try to achieve that aim then,’ Rob said with a grin that almost made Charles wish them both twenty years younger, so he could treat him to the appropriate punch on the nose. ‘I don’t think Miss Courland will be easily persuaded you’re not a wild sea-rover any more,’ he warned with unholy delight.

‘I’m beginning to agree with you,’ Charles muttered darkly and stared broodingly at the quirky old garden he’d acquired with his new property.

‘Sometimes the chase is all the more worth winning when it seems nigh impossible,’ Rob said, softening his challenge as he sent a significant glance at his lady, who’d led him a fine dance before letting her husband catch her just as she’d planned all along.

‘I’m planning a change of lifestyle, not abject surrender,’ Charles protested uneasily.

‘And sometimes there’s victory in defeat, although that’s not a concept I expect a grizzled old sea dog to understand.’

‘Since you talk in riddles, no wonder I can’t make head or tail of them.’

‘You’ll see,’ Rob said with an irritatingly superior smile and turned back to the fascinating spectacle of his wife like a compass to the north.

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