All the Ways to Ruin a Rogue (The Debutante Files #2)(8)

Her mouth popped wide in a little o. Those eyes of hers traveled over him, missing nothing. She looked everywhere. Especially there.

Those big brown eyes of hers grew larger yet. She looked for so long and so intently that his cock stirred. He knew he should have felt a stab of embarrassment as he grew before her eyes. Or perhaps not. This was Sodom, after all, where all manner of illicit activity happened before all manner of audience. Nothing was too shameful. Nothing private.

His response to her irked him. The stroke of her gaze shouldn’t make him randy as a green lad. Any other female, fine. Only not her.

“Gor,” a woman clucked from the crowd. “I wouldn’t mind a ride on that.”

Fire lit Aurelia’s cheeks.

She had failed. She might have won the wager, but he was the victor. She had planned to embarrass him and failed. Satisfied, he sank down in his chair.

The crowd dissipated around them. The men hastily redressed and retreated, but he remained where he was, naked in the chair, holding her gaze for a moment.

“Not so cockless. Am I?” he queried lightly.

“You’ve proven that well enough,” she replied evenly, the color in her face becoming less red and more pink.

“Do well to remember it in your spinster bed tonight,” he flung out. “Or perhaps someday you will wed and have but a puny rod to take between your thighs. You’ll think of me often then, will you not?”

“You’re vile.” She surged to her feet and started past him, but he grabbed her wrist, squeezing the delicate bones in his grip. She looked down at him, her brown eyes luminescent within her mask.

He rolled his thumb against the inside of her wrist, feeling her pulse flutter there as wild as a moth’s wings. “Don’t ever come here again.”

“You do not command me.”

“But that is what you need. A strict hand to lead you.” His gaze raked her. “Look at you. Look where you are.” He waved a hand about them.

“I command myself.”

“Do you? Very well, then,” he sneered, flinging her from him as though he could not stand the feel of her a moment longer. “Next time I’ll let any manner of man take you upstairs and claim your virtue. If, in fact, you’re still in possession of it—”

His words hit the mark. A stricken look crossed her face before disappearing and giving way to a cheery smile. “You forget yourself, Camden. You did not rescue me. It is you who lost the wager to me.”

Still wearing that bright smile, she turned away, her hips moving in a way he had never noticed before, swaying as she took small, tight steps in her black gown. A gown that he suddenly envisioned wadded up in a ball at the foot of his bed. That would be one way to command her, he thought, watching hungrily as she disappeared through the crowd of Mrs. Bancroft’s sitting room. Indeed, he could command her in his bed. Beneath him. If he didn’t find her so detestable, that would be the perfect place for her.





Chapter 2

One year later . . .

“Come, Aurelia. Must you dawdle? Usually you are the one urging me to make haste, but here you sit staring into space with half our guests gathered belowstairs.”

Aurelia feigned an innocent expression and met her mother’s blue-eyed gaze through the dressing table mirror. She had been lost in one of her drawings—a depiction of Lord Edderton with the body of an octopus manhandling several young girls whilst munching iced biscuits. She had been on the receiving end of his attentions once, during her first season out, and decided to make him the subject of one of her caricatures when she spotted him up to his old tricks a few evenings ago.

Edderton would not be the first to find himself featured in one of her notorious caricatures. What happened all those years ago with Camden, however accidental, had led her to this vocation. Cockless Camden. She winced, knowing she was to blame. His caricature had started it all, however inadvertent. It was talked about for years and had earned her his eternal enmity.

True, she did the drawing in a fit of impulse, but she had not meant it to be discovered. She couldn’t change that day, but she hoped using her talent for good, to give those without a voice a voice . . . perhaps it was atonement of some sort. Now her sketches appeared all over London. They turned up at balls, the opera, the dressmaker’s shop. She deliberately deposited them in the most public place. For the edification and titillation of the ton.

She adjusted her weight on the bench in front of her dressing table, hoping her skirts hid the pad from view. She’d barely had time enough to shove her sketch pad beneath her before Mama stormed into the chamber. It wouldn’t do for the Earl of Merlton’s sister to be unveiled as the artist responsible for the ribald cartoons that poked fun at so many members of the ton.

“Go on without me, Mama. I’ll be down directly.”

Mama gave her a lingering look before nodding. “Very well.” In a whisper of amber-gold skirts, she turned and left Aurelia alone in her chamber.

Aurelia returned her gaze to her reflection. Her dark eyes stared back at her pensively. She looked nothing like her fair-haired mother. Or her brother, for that matter. With her dark eyes and hair and skin, she looked more like a foundling her family had adopted into its fold. The bloodlines of her Spanish grandmother ran strong and true within her—a fact that did not win her much favor among the ton. Even her mother bemoaned her swarthy looks, though she had never been so unkind to voice such criticisms openly. No, she was more discreet than that. Instead she constantly supplied Aurelia with various powders to help dim her countenance.