Her Reformed Rake (Wicked Husbands #3)(83)

What a sodding joke. What a lunatic he was. Perhaps he ought to retire from the League anyway, just on account of his own stupidity. He was useless. Foolish. How could he look any of his fellow League members or his superior in the eye again, knowing what he’d done in allowing this scrap of a woman to control him and lay him low?

Delilah, he thought. She was his bloody Delilah.

“The truth,” she said at last, shattering his thoughts, her voice quiet but as decadent as velvet to the senses, just as it always had been. Her lashes swept up, and her gaze met his. That vivid, vibrant, clear green seemed to see straight through him. “I’ve told you nothing but the truth already. You ought to know that, Sebastian. Just as you know that I was engaged to marry Padraig McGuire in New York City. But he came here for good reason.”

Ever perceptive. He could own that she was intelligent. Far too intelligent, for that matter—and wary and cagey—for her own good. Her skills as an actress, however, outshined any other gift she had, even her undeniable beauty. Her protest that McGuire had visited her for good reason almost seemed genuine.

He didn’t deny that he was aware of her relationship with McGuire. Why pretend? “Did you not think that word would reach me? That I wouldn’t hear of your frequent, private visits with a particular gentleman? That I wouldn’t then take it upon myself to gather information about who it was that my wife felt the need to spend time with in my absence?”

Private visits with a Fenian plotter. Had they discussed plans for laying bombs and then fucked? Christ, he wouldn’t think of it now. He ought to hate her for what she’d done. And yet, somehow he couldn’t.

Daisy’s gaze didn’t waver from his. Aside from the hitch in her breath and the thumping of her heart that he could feel against his chest, she appeared the perfect picture of calm and elegance. “Of course I knew word would reach you, or at least I hoped it would. What would you have done in my place? I’d been abandoned by my husband with no friends or family to speak of, and you certainly didn’t answer any of my letters or even bother to send word inquiring after me. You disappeared with just a terse note. Everything I tried failed—no one knew where you’d gone or when you would return. So I decided to attempt to lure you back here by creating so much scandal that you’d have no choice.”

There was his brazen actress once again, returning from the ashes of the broken creature she’d wanted him to believe her to be. How bold of her to suggest she’d privately received gentlemen callers in his absence in order to win him back to her side. My God, she lied so swiftly he almost wanted to believe her.

His fingers tightened on her wrists. Her gaze fastened on his, alert and searching. He allowed her nothing, keeping eyes and his expression both cold as the diamonds she wore at her throat. “You expect me to believe that you took lovers so that I would return to you?”

“Of course not.” She tugged at her wrists, attempting to free herself. “Sebastian, release me.”

He wasn’t inclined to listen to her demand. The beast inside him had been caged for too long. He didn’t ease his grip. Instead, he lowered his face closer to hers, until her scent flooded him. By some miracle of self-restraint, he refrained from burying his face in the honey-gold strands of her hair. But as he observed her now, he wished he’d taken the pins from her coif before leaping upon her.

“Am I meant to thank you for bedding a string of lovers, including your former betrothed, in my own home?” he seethed. The last words emerged as a roar.

“No!” she shouted back at him, turning her weak attempt at escaping him into a full-scale battle. She writhed and bucked beneath him, trying in vain to free her wrists. But all her efforts trapped her more snugly beneath him. “Listen to me, Sebastian.”

But he was beyond listening. And in truth, her thrashing like a feral cat only heightened his arousal. Each jerk of her body made the most pleasurable friction against his cock. Her breasts strained against him, her mouth so near to his that he could almost taste her. Her body fitted around him, her lush curves melting into his hardness and angles. A perfect fit. Even half mad with anger and lust, he could still feel the rightness of her beneath him.

Such a bloody shame that the one woman he wanted most in the world was the same woman he’d be sending off to prison along with her lover. First, however, first he would take what was his. What had always been his. And he would take her so fiercely that she would never forget in all of her days that he was the man who had claimed her, body and soul.

“Keep moving about like that, madam, and see what happens,” he warned her, his voice ragged and low, saturated by the tumult of the moment. Dichotomies plagued him. He wanted her, but hated himself for his weakness; she was beautiful, but she was a bloody criminal, an enemy of the Crown. His enemy. The woman who had betrayed and deceived him.

She went still beneath him. “You still don’t believe me.”

“Of course I don’t believe you, buttercup.” Slowly, he slid her wrists along the bed until they were both held captive above her head. He leaned back to survey his handiwork. She was like an offering before him, breasts outthrust, face flushed, succulent lower lip caught between her teeth.

He wanted to bite her there too. To nip her just enough to give her pain without drawing blood. She needed to pay for what she’d done, for the harm she intended to inflict upon innocents by aiding and abetting Padraig McGuire and her father. For what she had done to him, infiltrating his mind and body as thoroughly as opium. Fury ravaged him, mingling with lust.