Nicola Cornick: Mistress by Midnight

She also had an enormous desire to be a Duchess and he was in extreme danger. He eased away from her beneath the sheets. She wriggled voluptuously in pursuit.

“Where is your chaperone?” he demanded, breathlessly. “I cannot believe that Mrs. Roach would countenance this—”

“I’ll send for her if you desire a threesome.” Harriet’s narrow green eyes glittered like a feral cat. “Darling Garrick, shall we celebrate?”

“My father’s death is hardly a matter for celebration,” Garrick said. His mind was spinning. “Harriet, no—”

“On the contrary.” She had thrown one thigh over him now and was pinning him down. Her moist warmth seared him through the sheet. “We are all absolutely thrilled that he has died,” she said. “Why pretend? And now you and I can have our own, very special little reunion, Garrick.” She slid a hand down over the bedcovers until it met his erection. “Oh, good, you have started already.”

She wriggled down upon him, simultaneously pressing her lips to his. “Brandy,” she murmured. “Delicious.”

She, in contrast, tasted a little sour. Garrick felt as though he was being smothered by a cushion. He groaned in protest. Harriet seemed to interpret this as enthusiasm. Her hands were all over his naked chest now, her lips clinging to his, her thighs gripping him through the bedcovers. In a moment she would surely slip under the sheets, slide down on top of him, and then …

And then there would be the most almighty scandal and Harriet Knight would be Duchess of Farne and his life would be ruined a second time over.

To have one unfaithful wife could be construed as a misfortune. To have two would be worse than careless. He did not want a wife with fashionable morals. He did not want a wife at all.

Suddenly Garrick was very awake and very sober. His body might desire Harriet—it could be very indiscriminate at times—but his mind most certainly did not. He had had enough of mechanistic, emotionless couplings and he was not going to be trapped into marriage via another one.

“Harriet, no.” He took her arm and pushed her away from him with more force than finesse. She gave a little bounce and a squeak as she tumbled from the bed onto the floor.

“You do me too much honor,” Garrick said smoothly, leaping out after her and scooping up her negligee. “I understand your need for comfort after the shocking death of your guardian. I am privileged beyond measure that you thought to give me your virginity—” God forgive him for two lies in one short sentence “—but I cannot take such a sacrifice. You are distraught.”

He wrapped the gaping beauty roughly in the diaphanous material and gave her a shove toward the door. But Harriet was stubborn.

“I shall tell Mrs. Roach,” she said, glaring. “I shall tell your mama. I shall tell everyone that you seduced me.”

Garrick shook his head. “I don’t think you will, my dear.” There was steel in his tone now.

She stood staring at him for a moment. Garrick wondered what she could see in his eyes. Was it the coldness of a man who had long ago ceased caring?

For a moment Harriet looked frightened.

“Damn you, Farne,” she said. Garrick shrugged. “If you wish.” Harriet whirled around and slammed out of the door. Silence settled again.

It was then that Garrick heard the sneeze.

UNDER THE LARGE tester bed, Lady Merryn Fenner lay with her face pressed against the dusty floorboards. She had been trapped for a half hour. In a short but varied career working for the private investigator Tom Bradshaw she had never been in a situation quite like this one. She had never been caught before.

Merryn had been reading when the Duke of Farne had entered the bedroom and had had a bare few seconds to take cover. She had hoped to escape when he fell asleep. Then the woman had come in. Merryn had heard the husky seductive tones, seen the robe fall to the floor, felt the bedsprings give and had known she was in for a thorough education in a matter in which she had previously been in almost total ignorance.

She had rolled over, pressing her face against the floor, eyes screwed tightly closed. She had shoved her fingers in her ears and prayed that Garrick Farne’s ardor would be both quick and exhausting, that the lovers would wear themselves out swiftly and fall into a sex-induced stupor. The sounds and the movements she could not quite block out had made her feel very hot and bothered. She could feel her body radiating a warmth that was part embarrassment but also something else infinitely more disconcerting. Her clothes felt tight and restraining and she wanted to squirm. It was most odd.

Then she had inhaled a cobweb and the harder she tried to hold back a sneeze the more it tickled her before it burst out with explosive force.

Oh, dear. There was no escape now. That would have disturbed even the most ardent lovers.

Sure enough, a second later, someone reached down, grabbed her arm and dragged her from under the bed. She was hauled roughly to her feet. Eyes watering, another sneeze threatening, she drew herself up to her full five-foot height.

How to explain? No, forget the explanations, how to escape?

“My bedroom seems an unconscionably popular venue tonight,” the man before her drawled.

Garrick Farne, best friend to her brother Stephen. Her brother’s murderer …

Merryn shivered. Once—pitiful to remember now—she had had a schoolgirl crush on Garrick Farne. He had been like a god to her, a creature who inhabited a different world. While Merryn and her sisters had lived a circumscribed life, educated at home, their existence bounded by the village of Fenridge and their parents’ immediate acquaintances, Stephen and his friends, including Garrick, had studied at Oxford, gambled their patrimony away in London, lived, according to the gossip, for women and drink and vice. Oh, how she had lapped up that scandal. It had all sounded frightfully exciting to a thirteen-year-old girl who had never traveled farther than Bath in her life.

Garrick had never noticed her, of course. Why should he? Merryn had two beautiful elder sisters who drew all the eyes, all the attention and all the compliments. Besides, Garrick had been betrothed from the cradle to Kitty Scott, the daughter of his father’s political friend and ally; it was simply a matter of when Kitty and Garrick wed, not if they wed. Kitty was a beauty, too, the toast of the town. Which was no doubt why Stephen had fallen in love with her, too …

A shock ran through Merryn now, like lightning, like recognition, setting her shaking as though she had an ague. Garrick Farne. His name had become a byword for evil in her family, a murderer, a man who had ruined her life and those of her father and her sisters. While he had been abroad, in exile, it had been just about possible for her to put him from her mind, to ignore, if not forget, the events of that hot summer so many years ago. Then, fifteen months ago, Garrick had come back, back to a society that instead of trying him for murder had welcomed him like a hero; back to be lauded as the most handsome, wealthy and eligible nobleman in the ton.

In contrast it seemed to Merryn that no one remembered her brother Stephen at all. He was gone, irrelevant, forgotten. They had not one single memento of him left, for every picture, every possession, had been swallowed up to pay off the debts when their father died. The Earldom of Fenner was extinct, the family lands lost while Garrick Farne was wealthy, titled and, most importantly, alive . Garrick’s return to England had sparked something within Merryn, awoken all those unbearable memories from the time that Stephen had died, and suddenly the past was real and painful to her once again, as raw and ragged as when it had first happened.