.

action. She was well made there, he supposed, but already he’d tired of it. Strumpets never could hold his attention.

      “Won’t you come back to bed and play with me?” she said, her voice coy, yet her tone holding just a hint of cloying desperation. “I’ll let you be as naughty as you desire.”

      “I doubt you could handle that. My sort of needs would make you swoon.”

      “In ecstasy, I’d wager.”

      “In shock.”

      He shared a secret grin with Sutherland, his valet. Iain supposed he should be rather mortified that his servant was here in this room of utter debauchery, witnessing such a thing while assisting him with dressing. But it was habitual for his valet, who had been with him for decades. Sutherland had witnessed one sort of debauchery and debacle after another. Besides, the lady lounging on the bed rather fancied the whole idea. She had been the one to suggest the activity, after all. She had a fantasy, she’d admitted to him, of lounging naked in his bed, watching his valet assist him with his toilette.

      Iain was all for fantasies. He had a few very special and intimate ones of his own—so deeply personal that he wouldn’t dare share them with anyone, except perhaps the lady who always featured in them. Those were for his own private pleasure, when he was alone and could indulge himself without interruption.

      He didn’t really relish this particular fantasy. However, the lady seemed to be enjoying herself, and that was the objective. He needed her cooperation.

      “It really is scandalous how handsome and magnificently built you are,” she murmured as she studied his body in the mirror. “The gossip spread by your past lovers certainly wasn’t embellished. I think magnificent a rather bland word to describe you, and what you possess below the waist. Monstrously marvellous is what I call it.”

      “My dear, I am a Highlander. We are brawny lads built for hard work, both menial and more pleasurable tasks.”

      “Then put me in a carriage to Loch Lomond and gift me with an entire clan!”

      She giggled, and his brow arched as he slipped his arms into the sleeves of the shirt Sutherland held out.

      “Oooh.” She sighed dramatically. “If only I hadn’t met Larabie first, I might now be Lady Alynwick, and what is it the Scots call the laird’s wife?”

      What the devil made her think she would be the one, after a long—very long—list of lovers? He would never marry. Never. And certainly, he would never think to marry someone like her. He was jaded, but he wasn’t cruel. The women he cavorted with were no more interested in a lasting liaison than he was. Which made them infinitely good choices. It was a mutual, if unspoken agreement: all parties were in it for themselves. Women for pleasure and the notoriety and novelty of sharing his bed, and him for a relationship born of convenience, and to assuage his animal’s needs—of which he seemed to have more than his share. Another sin, no doubt.

      “Oh, come now, my love, you give the impression that you are emotionally unavailable. But I know the truth,” she pressed.

      “Do you? So you’ve realized that I am not ‘unavailable,’ but vacant. Completely, emotionally empty—which means, of course, that I am ‘available’ to no one.”

      “How your disdain for the world and everyone in it arouses me.”

      “We make a good pair, do we not? Everything we touch turns black.”

      Her gaze raked over him from head to foot and he felt as though he were being devoured, his statement of how he saw them completely missing its mark. “Oh, you might act that way now, Sinclair, but I assure you, when I want something enough, I get it. And I want you … very much. Available, unavailable, vacant—it matters not. I want to possess you.”

      He heard Sutherland’s grunt, which meant he was either smothering his amusement or enjoying himself at his master’s expense. Either way, Iain glared at his valet while buttoning his own shirt.

      “You’ve already had me, luv,” he murmured silkily. “Be content with that.”

      “Contentment eludes me. I peaked three times tonight, and already I want more. I have learned that I’m rather insatiable when it comes to your skill in the boudoir. You truly are a master of lovemaking.”

      No, not lovemaking, but fucking. He hadn’t made love in years.

      “Oh, I’ve already done myself in, haven’t I? I married Larabie when I should have waited another month till I met you. Perhaps you’ll remedy that tonight when you’re duelling my husband over my honour.”

      Iain winked at her while Sutherland wrapped the pale green and sky-blue plaid of his Sinclair kilt around his lean waist. The lady nearly swooned at the sight, which made her forget all that nonsense about possessing him. No woman possessed him—ever.

      “And Highland dress to fight for me, my lord? You make my head spin.”

      His was spinning as well, and not in a pleasurable way. Reaching for the Scotch, he drained it in one long swallow, emptying the tumbler. He motioned for Sutherland to refill it, which the faithful retainer did while Iain saw to his kilt.

      If he was going to die tonight, he wanted to meet his maker in the clothes that best suited him—Highland dress. It was a bit elaborate for an old-fashioned English duel, but it fit him. He was an outlandish character, forever scandalizing the English peers with his brutish Scottish ways. He’d never fit into this world of delicate manners and anaemic pleasures. It was not his way. He was not delicate, not polite and his sexual desires were anything but staid. When he fucked, he didn’t want to remember to be gentle and soft. He wanted to lose himself in the woman, be taken to a place where no god or devil dwelt—no demons, no memories, just unspeakable pleasure. During that rapture, he wanted to say the words in his own way, to lose all control and let the cultured English accent that his father had literally beat into him fall away, leaving his Highland brogue to whisper in the woman’s ear. He couldn’t hide his more amorous emotions behind his English accent. That accent was cool and mocking, designed to disguise what he was feeling, giving him that devil-may-care aura. When he talked thus, he sounded like his late father, a pompous prat with little concern for anyone, which strangely enough enthralled the ladies.

      Hell, Iain could barely remember a time he felt that much at ease to let himself go. In the bedroom he was always calculating, every move a choreographed dance. He didn’t lose himself, and most definitely had never been transported to his imaginary plane of pleasure on the wave of a fierce climax.

      “Shall I wait here for your return, my love,” she asked, “or will you come ravish and debauch me in Larabie’s bed?”

      Iain smiled at that and watched her in the mirror as he belted his kilt with the little leather strap and buckle. “A wicked creature you are. Have you no shame, Georgiana, mussing up the earl’s sheets with another man’s body?”

      Her smile was scheming as she sat up and came to her knees, unashamed of her nudity and the fact that there was another present in the room with them to witness it.

      “Very little, I’m afraid. You’ve stripped me of any decency I might have had.”

      “Indeed?” he asked before taking another drink.

      Her eyes were glittering. “You’ve stripped me of many things with your immoral ways, my lord. I fear being bad with you is really rather addicting.”

      “Rather like Scotch,” Sutherland grumbled as he knelt to fasten Iain’s clan pin to the kilt.

      “Watch it,” he growled, “or I’ll slam my knee into your nose.”

      Sutherland, immune to his moods and taciturn disposition, merely ignored the threat and squelched a grin.

      “Well, my dear?” Iain inquired as he slipped his dirk into his woollen sock. “Do I pass muster?”

      “Indeed you do. I see that the story one hears about