The Devil's Match (The Devil DeVere #4)

The Devil's Match (The Devil DeVere #4)

Victoria Vane



Dedication

My heartfelt thanks to my family during the four crazy months of this writing frenzy, and to the great people at Breathless Press, most notably publisher, Justyn Perry, cover artist, Victoria Miller, and my wonderful editor, Tara Chevrestt, all of whom believed in this fabulously fun series and made it all possible.





Prologue





Woodcote Park, Epsom, Surrey, 1778





After hours spent in a restive and fruitless battle with his conscience, he went to her, creeping into her bedchamber in the quietest hours that hovered between the blackest night and the first rays of dawn. When he dropped his dressing gown and slid between the sheets, she reached for him with a wordless moan. He answered with his lips pressed against her warm skin. “You did not come to me.” He busied his mouth on her neck, intent on firing the heat of her lust.

“I couldn’t. It would not have been decent,” she whispered.

“Will you turn me away?” he asked, but her body’s response already provided the answer before she spoke the words. “You know I cannot.”

He peeled back her night rail, giving his hot tongue access to the valley between her breasts. “It was torture thinking of you in bed alone and wanting, no, needing the feel of your body beneath mine, engulfing myself in you as your sweet passage sheaths me. I thought I would go mad.”

She clenched his hair, urging him to a swollen nipple, arching into him with a sensuous greed he adored. One fierce jerk rent the offending garment, freeing her bounty for his full ministrations. He ravenously feasted on her lush mounds, kissing, biting, laving until she writhed beneath him. “Kiss me, Ludovic,” she cried.

He possessed her mouth with slow deliberation, their hot breaths mingling and tongues tangling, stroking, and sucking in mimicry of sex.

The pungent scent of her desire permeated his senses, feeding his hunger. She clutched his head, then his shoulders, and moved to his buttocks. He felt her damp thighs tremble as he parted her nether lips and stroked a finger through her wetness. She reached for his throbbing cock. “Please, Ludovic. I want you.” She moaned, exhorting him to claim her, inciting his need to possess her to near urgency. His heart slammed against his chest with her reply, but still, he held back, relishing the delicious self-torture of anticipation.

“How?” he asked. “Tell me how you want me.”

“I want you in my hands. In my mouth. In my sex,” she answered his most decadent wishes aloud, and the words flooded him with a dark and delicious desire, causing his lustful fever to spike another hundred degrees.

He emitted a husky laugh. “You are a greedy one. But how could I ever deny you that which I also yearn for?” He wanted to fill her in every possible way and be overwhelmed by the sights, scents, and sounds of simultaneous pleasure. He withdrew his hand from between her thighs and stroked that same damp finger over her mouth, watching in fascination as her tongue darted out to taste her own salty essence. He licked away the rest and kissed her again, slow and deep. “The taste of your arousal is the sweetest nectar to me. It fills me with the urge to pound into you and never stop.”

He skated down over her breasts, capturing a nipple, hard and pink, drawing it into his mouth, and suckling. He guided her onto her side, exploring her hips and belly with his hands and lips, moving in a worshipful caress down her body until reaching her mons. Shifting also to his side, he wrapped her thighs over his shoulders and then guided her head to his straining cock.

“Now,” he said, his tongue thick with excitement and expectancy, “I’m going to love you with my mouth and drink in the proof of your passion even as you swallow my own.”

Shuddering at the sublime sensation of her lips enfolding him, he dipped his head into her mound, giving a long, lascivious stroke, parting her dewy folds with his tongue, licking and lapping her juices while she teased and suckled the head of his cock. He blazed a trail with his tongue to the tight slit of her sheath, following with his fingers. He plunged them into her, and she wildly bucked against his mouth while he worked her sensitive bud.

He wished he could immerse himself in her like this forever, but their time was too bloody short. There was only one answer to what faced them on the morrow, but he forced it from his mind, refusing to think of anything now beyond the mindless ecstasy of mutual gratification and the explosive release already tightening his bollocks. Her wetness, her taste, her sounds of pleasure muffled by his cock filling her mouth combined with the slick friction and sultry, sucking sounds were insanely erotic and sublime. With her first racking shudders came a powerful, vibrating moan from her mouth through his shaft...and he was lost.





Chapter One





DeVere House, Bloomsbury, 1783





Viscount Ludovic DeVere sprawled indolently on his Turkish divan, pulling on a hookah while a voluptuous redhead serviced him with her decadent mouth. Eyes at half-mast, he lazily surveyed the scene of oriental decadence that could have been stolen from an Ottoman sultan’s seraglio—the myriad hues of silk draping the walls and ceiling, the vivid Turkish rugs and cushions that scattered the floor, the writhing shadows created by the luminous glow of brass lanterns.

Through the purple-blue haze of smoke and incense, his boon companions engaged in various and sundry acts of pleasure with the half-dozen women he’d engaged for an evening of debauchery, and Ludovic realized he was bored out of his senses. He’d been this way for days—restive, edgy, and irritable—as if his life had become suddenly unbalanced. He also recognized with even greater self-annoyance that the marks of his discontent had commenced upon a certain person’s arrival in London, a circumstance that aggravated him beyond measure.