Good God, Riverdale hadn’t lusted over her, had he? If so, he wouldn’t have been the only one. Nearly every man on Rhiannon’s half of the table this evening had been ogling her creamy, plump breasts in that positively lewd dress she’d been wearing. A beautiful woman clad in a gown that hugged her figure and accentuated her curves in all the right ways like that should be outlawed.
“Seems to me you’re smitten,” Riverdale said.
“I’m nothing of the sort.”
He wasn’t smitten with Rhiannon, damn it. He couldn’t be. He was bloody well trying to protect her from herself, that was all.
Was that what he had been doing when he had lifted up her skirts and touched her hot, glorious quim?
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and had to admit to himself that no, it hadn’t been.
Fuck. He was everything that was reprehensible. But he wasn’tsmittenwith her. The Duke of Richford wasn’t capable of something so maudlin. He bedded women. Pleasured them. Walked away and left them with a smile. That was bloody well all.
“If you say so,” King said. “Who are we to argue?”
Aubrey could offer nothing to that question. So he sat at the table and stewed, wondering if Rhiannon had returned to the safety of her bedchamber yet. Praying that she hadn’t run off with some silver-tongued devil who would take her virginity and break her heart. He tapped his fingers on the table.
“He’s horrid company this evening,” Riverdale said to King as if Aubrey weren’t sitting there between the two of them with fully functioning ears.
He pinned his friend with a pointed glare. “I can hear you, you know.”
Riverdale grinned. “Of course you can. How else am I to tell you that your dark mood is quite ruining my good cheer?”
“What you need,” King intervened, “is one of my potions. I’ve a new one that’s just the thing.”
King’s concoctions were notorious. No one knew precisely what was in them, but they were excellent for a diversion when one needed it.
And perhaps Aubreydidneed it. Rhiannon was driving him to distraction. Why did he have to make her his problem? Why could he not have ignored the fact that he had noticed her yesterday? It was only the second day of looking after her as if he were a governess and she were his rebellious charge, and look at how he’d failed.
He had touched her cunny.
But he hadn’t made her come.
His rakehell soul mourned that loss. Some drunken idiot had interrupted before he’d been able to accomplish that glorious feat.
“I’ll try your potion,” he grumbled. “Give me enough to drown a whale.”
“That would kill you, and we can’t have that,” King told him seriously, finishing his cheroot and extracting a small bottle from within his coat.
“Kill me? What the hell is in this potion of yours?”
King smiled. “The blood of virgins, the bones of saints, that sort of thing.”
“You’re mad,” he said without heat.
“Being sane is so bloody boring,” King said with a shrug, casting an imperious eye over Aubrey. “Are you wearing an embroidered waistcoat?”
“Yes, I am. What of it?”
“The embroidery is a bit much, don’t you think?”
Aubrey frowned down at his choice of waistcoat for the evening. “No, I don’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have worn it, now would I?”
“Hmm,” was all King said, looking unimpressed.
“Not all of us can be arbiters of fashion,” Riverdale said.
“And makers of poison,” Aubrey added.
