Jillian Hunter - The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife

“Are we taking my carriage or yours?” he asked as he walked out the front door, where the two blue-eyed brothers awaited him.

“Neither,” Drake said, staring up at the cloudy sky. “We’re walking.”

Shoulder to shoulder, the Boscastle men owned the streets. Only a fool would cross a member of the legendary brood and hope to escape unscathed as well as with all his teeth intact.

Still, more fools come out at night than do stars, and it was only a matter of time before the boys ended up at a low-stakes silver hell, where Lord Devon not only lost his proverbial shirt but sheepishly realized he didn’t have a sixpence on his person to pay up.

The other player, who was not only missing a few teeth but had obviously never heard of the Boscastle family, reached across the table to grab Devon by the lapels of his double-breasted gray frock coat.

Devon’s hand shot up and caught the man’s wrist in a paralyzing hold. “Ask him to pay,” he said, grinning in Griffin’s direction. “He’s a duke.”

The man spat a stream of spittle on the table, shaking his wrist as it was released. “Dook, my arse.”

The clink of glasses, the rattle of dice, and uninhibited conversation ceased. Lord Drake Boscastle looked up from his hand of cards with a half smile. The guard who stood at the iron-grilled door turned in expectation.

Griffin bestirred himself from his private musings of bedding Harriet and glanced around the smoke-filled den. For a moment he wondered if some bawdy toast was about to be made in his dishonor. But suddenly the player who’d beaten Devon lifted a stool over his head.

“Be ye deaf, boy?” he shouted at Griffin. “I said, ‘Dook, my arse.’”

Griffin smiled, rolling up his sleeves. “I could do that.”

And so he did, with Drake and Devon at his back joking that this hell was nothing compared to what they would go through when they returned in a disheveled state to their wives.

Griffin tore off his coat, flung it into a leering face, and threw a punch at another. “If this is your idea of a bachelor party,” he said with a laugh, “I bloody well hope I wake up tomorrow for my own wedding.”

Drake upended a table as the last of three entry doors splintered open and the guard yelled, “Raid!” The den swarmed with bludgeon-armed Bow men who had only yesterday been on Griffin’s side. Gamblers scrambled for secret passageways, their cards and dice boxes swooped up before Griffin could even find his coat.

“All right.” A club prodded his ribs. “Party’s up. There’s a penalty for illegal gambling, as if you didn’t know.”

“Oh, for the love of God. I’m the Duke of Glenmorgan.”

The constable shifted his gaze to the two other men leaning idly against the wall. “Right. And those would be your duchess and her hairdresser, I suppose?”

Who would have dreamed that the wicked Duke of Glenmorgan would learn everything he needed to know about love in a gaol cell, from one of London’s premier rakes? A helpless audience, he slumped on the hard wooden bench he shared with Devon’s lanky frame, while Drake paced and waxed philosophical in the dark. Griffin felt his skull throb with what might evolve into the worst hangover of his life. At least he would meet Harriet on the morrow with all his teeth.

“I will give you only one piece of advice,” Drake said, pausing as if he were about to reveal the mystical powers of the Holy Grail. “It is something that Grayson, our Marquess of Scoundrels, once confessed to me during a family crisis.”

Devon thumped his head against the wall. “Here we go.”

Griffin shoved his foot into Devon’s back. The gaol had not been built that could house three Boscastle men at the same time.

“‘Love is horrible, Drake,’” Drake quoted. “‘Horrible,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it happen to you.’ And then, in the next breath, I vow, when I had just escaped into the hall, he said, ‘I was wrong. Don’t listen to me. Love is a wonderful thing.’”

“Indeed, it is,” said the mordant voice of Sir Daniel Mallory, to the accompanying rattle of keys in the prison door. “And let it not be said that those of us who sacrifice our lives in the name of justice would ever dare obstruct its path.”

It was to have been a private wedding.

If both parties had obeyed the protocol set down by the stone-faced senior footman, Weed, the nuptials might have taken place in the secrecy befitting the ritual of holy matrimony. At nine o’clock that morning, to the distress of those who observed tradition even if it killed them, a horde of aristocrats and street people alike jostled elbows for a coveted place at the ornamental gates of the Park Lane mansion.

Lord Sedgecroft’s well-trained staff might have dispersed the crowd had the future duchess not appeared at an upstairs window a few minutes before the ceremony to shake her wedding veil in victory.

“Wish me luck,” she whispered to the blur of faces. “I’m in love with everyone today.”

The ceremony went off as planned, with another duchess-Harriet’s personal creator, Emma Boscastle-dabbing away tears of pride at appropriate intervals, with a delicate brush of a white-gloved hand. Never before had the academy produced such a perfect diamond from the dust.

The girls of the elite school watched their beloved Miss Harriet and her handsome duke exchange vows in an enrapt silence. The male guests, including Harriet’s half brothers, whistled and stamped their feet in irreverent disregard for what no man should put asunder.

The Marquess of Sedgecroft gave the bride away. Harriet thought of her father for only a moment. God only knew when, or if, she would ever see the old louse again.

Still, in his way, Jack had proved that he loved her and taught her to stand up for those she loved.

Harriet abandoned the rules of etiquette on her wedding night and let her instincts lead her where they would. Gone for the evening, if not for the rest of her life, was the dependable companion who had been forced to stay in the background and disregard her personal needs. From the coffin of her former being rose a young duchess who shivered in delight as her husband divested her of her wedding garments.

Thus beheld by him in her rawest state, Harriet could hardly be expected to fade into the background. And as to disregarding her personal needs, the duke seemed devoted to encouraging just the opposite. She doubted he would leave an inch of her not completely kissed and conquered before he was done. His tapered fingers made a leisurely study of her back, stroking across her bottom, then sweeping up again to her breasts. She would have expressed her enjoyment quite eloquently had he not rendered her too aroused to articulate a sentence.

Indeed, he paid her unclad form such tribute that she became impatient for the chance to return the favor. At length, with one arm wrapped around the bedpost, she brought the other up to the hair knotted at her nape and pulled out all the pins.

He drew back.

The dark flare in his eyes acknowledged her desire to participate. She unwound her arm from the post and brought her hands to his chest. His eyes widened in pleasure.

“I have never let a woman undress me before tonight,” he confessed as she went to work on his coat, waistcoat, neckcloth, and shirt.

She smoothed her fingers over his well-muscled chest. “And I never knew you were a champion archer until the breakfast party.”

He bent his head, his kiss leaving her dizzy and breathless. “It’s a damned good thing you didn’t walk past me as I took aim.”

He caught her hand on its way into his waistband. “I shall take care of that. Lie down, my love, and let me gaze at you while I do it.”

She reclined back on the bed, grateful that this was his suite and there were no hideous decorations on the headboard to wake up to in the morning. She still couldn’t believe she would sleep beside him and see his face whenever she opened her eyes.

She could see far more than his face right now, and her heart pounded at the beauty of his lithe virility. In fact, the warm reality of his body filled her with a wonderful desperation. She parted her thighs without prompting as he slid up the bed between her legs. His mouth grazed her soft white breasts. Her nipples darkened and stiffened instantly. With nary a thought to propriety, she reached up and allowed herself full knowledge of her husband’s amorous skills. The world fell away as she applied herself to unparalleled midnight pleasures and acts of creation that were anything but polite.

She hooked her legs over his backside. He groaned, slipping his hands under her rump until the head of his erection pushed deeply into her passage. She ran her hands down his back and felt his beautiful body tremble.

“‘Fear not,’” her wicked husband quoted as he possessed her in the throes of uncontrollable passion, “‘that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete.’”

Great God! What a scene has just taken place!… I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself… It is true we shall be monsters… but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 in three volumes (not as a single novel) and became an instant bestseller. Thirteen years later Mary Shelley admitted authorship and confessed to the public that her groundbreaking novel had been conceived one rainy summer in Geneva during a competition against three other novelists to produce the best ghost story.