The Devil in Her Bed (Devil You Know #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,9
as he made the one-story drop onto the balcony into a crouch, his chest fought a strange difficulty drawing in the requisite air.
The balcony afforded him an unrestricted view of the countess through the large window of the modiste’s top-floor dressing room. She stood amid her two roguish cohorts, improbably outshining them both.
And, brazen thief that she was, she’d taken his breath away.
The self-named Red Rogue Society consisted of three uncommonly lovely redheads with a penchant for mischief and all pastimes generally agreed to be masculine.
Lady Alexandra Atherton, archeologist, bluestocking, and the recent Duchess of Redmayne might have widely been considered the beauty of the infamous trio, but to call her dark-mahogany hair “red” was rather generous, and her features were much too perfect to be interesting.
The voluptuous Miss Cecelia Teague was about to marry the fierce and uncompromising Lord Chief Justice, Cassius Gerard Ramsay. So, though she might be as sweet and decadent as her strawberry lips suggested, a brilliant mathematician, and now the wealthiest businesswoman in London, her intelligence was forever in question. Ramsay, the surly Scot, wasn’t the cold, impeachable character he presented to the world.
At least not where Miss Teague was concerned.
Despite their distressing connections to recent investigations of his, the Ladies Alexandra and Cecelia were no longer of any interest to the Crown nor to the Secret Services. He had no reason to be following them anymore.
But he had to see her again.
The Countess of Mont Claire.
If only to prove to himself that she was real.
A gentleman would have looked away as the lady continued to undress, slipping her skirt and bustle from her lean hips to pool at her feet. He wouldn’t salivate at the sight of her long legs and curse the shapeless drawers that covered her backside as she bent to help the seamstress gather her discarded clothes.
The Devil of Dorset was no gentleman. Indeed, he was a voyeur by trade, lethal in both the back alley and the bedroom. He could steal the spotlight at any soiree and hold an entire audience in the palm of his hand, manipulating their every emotion and whim. He could assassinate in a room full of people, and no one would remember what he looked like.
He was a ghost. A chameleon. A shade of a man whose sole vocation in life was to be both notorious and invisible.
He pulled that ability about him now and stood against the summer sun blazing over the rooftops with only an alleyway between them. If the women looked in his direction, they’d be blinded.
Francesca was as much of a ghost as he. The world had presumed her dead after Mont Claire had been razed to the ground. But she’d risen from the ashes somewhere on the Continent, claiming to have suffered days of unconsciousness due to smoke inhalation. The story went that a Romani woman had spirited her out of Mont Claire in time, and the child had regained consciousness at a country hospital some counties away.
The Devil of Dorset had learned along with the rest of London about her impossible survival. She’d attended some finishing school on Lake Geneva and subsequently gallivanted with her fellow spinster friends across half the globe by the age of twenty-five.
He squinted through the window as Francesca apparently refused tea, punch, or champagne in favor of a strong scotch. Her gold hat lay upside down on a settee where she’d tossed it. Uncovered, her coiffed hair glinted with a ruby sheen, upswept to uncover the long, graceful curve of her swanlike neck.
The Red Rogues, indeed.
In a few short months, the Countess of Mont Claire had become the most notorious of them all. She’d famously fucked her way through half the available men in the ton and twice again the married ones.
His fingertips twitched. Fists curled. An indulgent outward showing of a growing inner turmoil.
He wanted to break every finger that profaned her. Rip out every tongue that’d tasted her. Unman every sod who’d taken his pleasure inside of her.
And that was why obsession was dangerous. Wrong.
This had to stop.
And he knew it wouldn’t.
The Countess of Mont Claire’s return to England had been quiet, at first. The engagement soiree and subsequent wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Redmayne, a few other intimate dinner parties and social gatherings. Just enough to cause a stir, and rarely far from the sides of her two compatriots.
How she collected so many lovers was a miracle and why, a mystery.