Zachary Black: Duke of Debauchery. Кэрол Мортимер

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       Chapter Two

      ‘Remove the veil.’ Zachary looked down grimly at the young woman he had just seconds ago dropped unceremoniously on top of the covers on his four-poster bed. The lit candelabrum he had placed on the bedside table allowed him to see the way her petticoat and the skirt of her black gown rode up and revealed slender and shapely ankles. Catching him looking, she hastily pulled the garments down again. Unfortunately that concealing veil had remained irritatingly in place. ‘Now,’ he ordered uncompromisingly.

      Georgianna looked up warily through her long lashes at her towering adversary as she scrabbled further up the bed, as far away from the ominously threatening Duke of Hawksmere as it was possible for her to be. ‘I have no intentions of removing my veil.’

      ‘Are you in mourning?’

      Was she? Her father had certainly died in the past year, but even so that was not her reason for wearing the veil.

      ‘If you have to think about it, then obviously not,’ the duke dismissed coldly. ‘Remove the veil. Now. Before I lose what little patience I have left,’ he added warningly.

      Georgianna’s response to Hawksmere’s dangerously soft voice was to sit up straighter in the lush pile of snowy white pillows at the head of the four-poster bed. ‘You cannot treat me in this high-handed manner.’

      ‘No?’ His tone was low and menacing. ‘I do not see anyone rushing to your rescue.’

      Her cheeks flamed with heat as she continued to look at him from beneath lowered lashes. ‘That is because you told your groom... Because your servants now think...’

      ‘That I am continuing to play my part in your erotic fantasy and am now ravishing you?’ Hawksmere completed derisively.

      ‘Yes.’

      The duke gave a grimly satisfied smile. ‘And can you tell me truthfully that you have never had such a fantasy? That you have never dreamed,’ he added, sensually soft, ‘of a swashbuckling pirate carrying you off to his ship before having his wicked way with you?’

      Of course Georgianna had once had such fantasies. What young and romantic girl had not dreamed of being carried off and ravished by a wicked pirate, or perhaps a dashing knight, who would then fall instantly in love with her and keep her for ever?

      But she was now twenty years of age and felt much older than that in her heart. Nor did she have any faith left in romance and love. She knew only too well that the reality did not match up to the fantasy, that the wicked pirate or the dashing knight invariably had feet of clay.

      ‘Those are the daydreams of silly young girls who do not know any better,’ she dismissed flatly.

      ‘And you do?’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ she assured with feeling.

      Hawksmere’s lids lay heavy over his eyes as he smiled down at her mockingly. ‘In that case, might I suggest you stop behaving like the ridiculous heroine in a lurid novel and remove your veil?’

      Georgianna did not see that she had any choice in the matter when the duke was so much bigger than she was and could so obviously force her to his will if he so chose. And his mocking assertions earlier as to his reason for bringing her to his bedchamber meant she could not expect to receive any assistance from Hawksmere’s servants, either.

      She had, Georgianna now realised, placed herself completely at the duke’s mercy.

      And those cold silver eyes, and the uncompromising set of his arrogant jaw, confirmed that this man gave no quarter, to man or woman.

      She slowly raised her shaking hands to where the pins held the veil in place. ‘You will not like what you see,’ she warned as she slowly began to remove those pins.

      Hawksmere raised dark brows. ‘Are you disfigured in some way? From the pox, perhaps?’

      ‘No.’ She sighed as she placed the pins on the night table beside the candelabrum of three flickering candles.

      ‘Ugly, then?’ he dismissed uninterestedly. ‘Something my bedchamber СКАЧАТЬ