Notorious by Nicola Cornick

with the door handle and then she was inside the room, shaking, feeling sick, but he was here now, waiting for her, smiling.
    He put back the veil from her face, took her coat and bonnet from her. “Here, take this…” He pressed a cup of wine into her hand and it was sweet and heady and she started to feel better. He kissed her. That was better still.
    “You were very brave to come here.” He sounded amused. “You deserve a reward…”
    Still kissing her, he drew her down onto the bed. When she finally opened her dazed eyes he had already stripped her of all her clothes and she was lying naked on the top of the vivid orange coverlet, her hair loose of its pins spread about her.
    “Are we not to play cards tonight?” she asked. It had been a part of their arrangement, cards first, lovemaking later when she lost. She always lost.
    He sat back on his heels, the same wicked amusement in his dark eyes, and she saw beyond him the faro table prepared for several players.
    “This time we’ll play later,” he said. He touched her hair. “How pretty you look,” he added lightly,whilst she ached for one word of love from him. “I have a treat for you here.”
    Chessie’s eyes widened as she took in the rack on the wall of the room. Whips, crops… She gulped, imagining the sting of the leather crisscrossing her flesh. Would he ask that of her? Would that be her fate if she lost tonight?
    She saw him lift the most extraordinary carved wooden object, which he now brought close to her face until its smooth curves kissed her lips.
    Somewhere in her deepest heart Chessie knew that this was his reward, not hers, but she closed her mind to the thought just as she closed her eyes as she felt the dildo trace a cool path over the slope of her breast and down, to dip between her thighs.
    She did not see the watchers behind the screen.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    “F RAZER ,” D EV SAID TO his valet as he sat before the shaving mirror, “did you ever do anything particularly stupid when you were young that came back to haunt you years later?”
    He was in his set of rooms in Albany, preparing for the night’s entertainments. Albany was the most exclusive bachelor residence in London where neither women nor musical instruments were tolerated. Dev had been allocated his chambers because he was the cousin of Lord Grant, the famous explorer, and because he was betrothed to an earl’s daughter. He could not afford them, of course. Like everything else in his life they were paid for by the future promise of Emma’s fortune.
    He felt the razor pause at his throat and immediately regretted asking the question when he was in so vulnerable a position. It was not that Frazer’s hand was unsteady despite his advancing age. It was more that he was never very comfortable with another man’s knife at his throat, an understandable reaction after a street brawl in a Mexican port a few years before.
    “What have ye done, Mr. Devlin?” Frazer asked, after a moment. He always forgot to call Devlin “Sir James” and Dev never bothered to remind him. He had inherited Frazer as valet from his cousin Alex Grant who had said that Dev needed the former Navy steward, with his dour Scots spirit, to keep him on the straight and narrow. Since Frazer had known Dev when he was in short coats there was no fooling the man.
    “Nothing,” Dev said. “Not for nine years, anyway.”
    Frazer ignored him. “Have ye gambled away another thousand or two, perhaps?” He persisted. “Seduced a lady—or someone who isnae a lady? Set up a lightskirt in keeping?” The razor touched Dev’s throat and he swallowed hard. The soap was running down his neck now. He was probably sweating it off.
    “Frazer,” he said, “you wound me.” It was an image that was likely to become literal as well as figurative if this carried on. Dev shifted in the chair. “You know that I have lived an irreproachably chaste life these past two years,” he said. No doubt that accounted for