Page 16 of Sir Durham’s Disarming Asset

Zephora Butler was his responsibility. Had been his charge. His to save from all harm. She was meant for a younger man, not a grisly creature. She merited a pleasant man, graceful, honorable, and rich, not a gruff merchant who knew the streets and rough dockhands. Not a creature who searched out French agents and killed them with impunity.

Yet he saw her awareness of him as a man. Potentially her man. Oh, he knew the look of a woman’s need. He understood desire, the urge to mate—and women. He was no schoolboy, but a man who had had countless women. Enjoyed them. Needed them. In many cases, paid them, too. He knew how to seduce a woman, bare her breasts, suck her nipples and lick her navel. He knew how to stroke her and lure her, entice her with his fingers and his tongue. He knew how to take a woman against a wall and on his desk. How to thrill her so that she came once and wanted more again, and then again. He had thought of new ways to have his beautiful Lady of the Winds, but he would not take her.

And he wanted Zephora Butler. He rubbed a fingertip across his lips, wiping away the raw need of her in his mouth. He remembered her bruised and starving body. But now she was no longer that. She was…heaven help him, perfect for him. Shorter than he, the right height. Proud as he, a sassy opponent. Smart-mouthed, she would give as she got.

He hung his head, hands on his hips. Why did his body not obey his rejection of this need for her?

She was too much, and yet he fantasized she was his alone! Naked in only her pristine skin, her freckles on her nose and dusted down her cleavage. Her breasts full, pointed mounds. He had felt them swell against his arm and his chest tonight. Had she felt his response?

He swung around, staring at the ceiling.

How he would hold each sweet mound, one by one, lick and suck them. He would make her so happy, so thrilled, that she would never wish to leave his bed. And he would make her stay. With all the ways he knew to make a woman groan for him, scream his name, he would delight her as no other man would dare or even know how to take her.

He could have her tonight, tomorrow, always. Walk down to her room and take her in his arms like the swain he wished to be only for her. He could make her wish to fall in love with him, but that would be so unfair. So unkind to her. She thought of him as the best man, the wisest man for her.

But she saw him that way only because he had saved her from the pits of hell.

He knew his worth, who he was. He was no fit lover for a twenty-two-year-old girl who deserved a man who would fall in love with her for her many charms.

Not for her fortitude or her stubbornness or her pride.

No. Zephora Butler was not for him. Not as his lover.

Not as anything other than his friend.

*

Standing in her soft muslin night rail and slippers, Zeph considered the healthy expanse of her bed. To have a man there—correction, to have Rafe there—would be a challenge to her. She had promised herself, even as Vaillancourt’s men took her away, that whatever they did to her, she would overcome it. She was young, but she was no fool. She lived among powerful French men, while many Frenchwomen like Hortense and Caroline Bonaparte had to bow to men’s wishes. Her friend Cecily, Countess Nugent, had warned her about the possibility of threat from unlawful actors, bullies, men without rules. Zeph had anticipated, were she alone and apart, that someone might rape her. And they had.

She gulped and strode to her bed to sit on the edge.

Since the days in Bordeaux with Rafe, she had become aware of herself and her physical condition, had noticed she did not have her monthly courses. Prior to her incarceration, she had always been able to count the exact number of days between them. They had not returned. The guards in that hellhole of a prison would be proud of themselves. If Vaillancourt knew, he would sneer with that all-too-charming face of his.

“Come back,” she urged herself as she lay down and punched her pillow. “Defy them.”

She grinned at her resolve and pushed her fears of never having a lover or a child down deep into her guts.

Rafe had taken, today, to calling her endearing names, darling and sweetheart. She would eat, sleep, take the sun and the sea, and rebuild herself. She would continue to become healthy, spirited, gay and appealing, as once she had been. By hell or high water, she vowed, “I will become a luscious sweet creme pastry for myself.”

Then we shall see if one special man will ever again call me his dear.

Chapter Five

September 10, 1806

“I plan to return to London soon with Zephora.” Rafe announced this to his three colleagues with a prick of fear. They were two lords and a man who ruled in the rough neighborhood of Seven Dials.

Seated around his desk in his study, the three were his best friends who had worked with him for years, on government policy with William Pitt, then prime minister, and with espionage activities. Together, they had saved Lord Carlisle’s wife, Giselle, from capture by French agents here on the southern coast. They had removed the threat of retribution to Lord Halsey’s new wife, Inès, by taking her brother Luc from his prison. They had also helped their Irish rascal, Dáire O’Neill, save his own beloved from capture and harm. All three had arrived together in Brighton yesterday in response to Rafe’s need. “I am so pleased all of you have come here to me so that we can prepare for that.”

Rafe thought Zeph ready to face the ton. Picking and choosing carefully the hosts and hostesses whose homes she would enter, Zeph could take her time, too. It was vital she become accustomed to meeting strangers who had no intention of harming her. As for others who would, Rafe had his friends here in preparation for that.

“Whatever you want, Rafe. We are at the ready.” The Earl of Halsey had been the one who led their rescue mission to Paris, a tall fellow with brown hair and a carefree manner of joy about him now that they had survived the rescue…and that his pregnant wife remained healthy through their weeks-long ordeal. The journey had been dangerous. The outcome, unpredictable. The chance of capture by French gendarmes was great, the prospect of prison high.

Originally, Halsey intended only to save Inès’s brother Luc from prison. But consulting with a Parisian fellow whom Inès had known to be a great help to other Englishmen and women in need, Halsey and Rafe had sought out a lady who was influential in French Society—and a friend of Josephine Bonaparte. Countess Nugent, a longtime resident of Paris and once a mistress of the old Duc d’Orleans, was also the aunt of Augustine, Lady Ashley, and guardian of that lady’s friend, Amber, Lady Ramsey. The countess had asked them to save a young woman sent to the Conciergerie by the same man whom many in Paris hated, René Vaillancourt, the deputy to the hated minister of police, Joseph Fouché.

Clive, the Marquess of Carlisle, smiled at Rafe from his seat. “What is it you need?”

Dáire O’Neill—a black-haired, black-eyed Irish devil—was the most powerful man in the rough-and-tumble Seven Dials. He commanded a group of talented men and women who worked the underbelly of London, Dover, and, many said, Calais as well. “Anything,” he offered.