Sara Bennett by Lessons in Seduction Read Free Book Online Page B

soft sinful lips, had taken the shine off them.
    He didn’t like to admit it, and he certainly didn’t understand it. He had realized who she was almost at once, but had pretended to mistake her for one of Madame’s girls. He had set out to embarrass her, to frighten her with his attentions into catching the very next stagecoach northward. The last thing he needed now was this added complication. But he had seriously misread her character. Instead of putting her off with his mauling, it seemed he had lain down a gauntlet, and he had little doubt that she would eagerly pick it up. In hindsight, he should have allowed Hodge to send for the constables.
    The encounter had left him feeling baffled and irritable. Not least because what had begun as an attempt to frighten her had turned into something else entirely. One moment he had been playing the rake, and the next he had forgotten everything in the need to have her beneath him on Aphrodite’s chaise lounge. That loss of control wasn’t something that had happened to him recently, in fact not since he was a randy lad first discovering how different girls could be.
    He sent his carriage on ahead of him and waved off the offer of a link boy to light his way. Tonight he preferred to walk through the quiet streets of London, alone with his own thoughts. For the last year it seemed to Oliver that he had been on a journey to nowhere—a hellfire journey through the stews of London. He had let it be known that his life had ceased to matter, that he did not care what happened to him, and that he was a threat to no one.
    The truth was, since his brother Anthony’s death, he had stopped feeling anything much, apart from the single-minded determination that drove him toward a goal that was yet to be achieved. Pleasure, well yes, sometimes there was that, and sometimes it helped. The heat of passion in a woman’s arms, the rush of gratification when he won at cards, the sharp excitement when his horse came first in a race. There was some pleasure to be found in those things, but it never lasted long. Strangely, before Anthony died, he had believed the life of a rake might be quite nice, but now he longed to draw a halt to the charade. Perhaps he was growing old, because he found himself dreaming of quieter, more mundane pursuits.
    But for now Oliver must carry on existing in this barren winter landscape.
    “So, what did you expect?” he asked himself savagely. “That this would be easy?”
    Of course not, but he hadn’t thought he would feel so alone.
    Although that wasn’t quite true; he wasn’t entirely alone. Lady Marsh, his only living relative, was aware of the plot. Oliver had a feeling that she would have stood by him whatever he did.
    Lady Marsh, widowed and with no children of her own, had never made a secret of the fact that she wanted Oliver to marry and create an heir as soon as possible. Without an heir there would be no one left to carry on the Montegomery name, and no one to whom to leave her considerable fortune. Lady Marsh, with her stern eyes and ramrod-straight back, believed a young man of birth and breeding should make his mark upon the world in ways other than drinking and gambling and pleasuring himself on unsuitable women.
    She wanted Oliver to marry and have a son and to make a proper life for himself. It was a rare month that passed by without her reminding him of it, and lately it had been twice or thrice a month that she had harangued him. The last time remained fresh in his mind.
    “Your father, my brother, was a rascal, Oliver,” she had said, her eyes so like his, boring into him. “And yet for all that he had a brain. He could have used that brain to make something of himself, to do something . He didn’t. Such a waste. He was dead at forty, killed when his horse took a jump and he didn’t. And for what? For a ridiculous wager. Don’t let the same thing happen to you.”
    “Anthony was the one who grew up expecting tomarry and produce an