Sins by Penny Jordan Page A

showed off her narrow waist, cinched in with a wide black patent belt. On her feet were a pair of high heels, and her handbag was from Hermès. Her hair, newly done that morning in a beehive, looked as delicate as spun glass, and she had outlined her lips in a soft pink lipstick. She looked, she had decided before leaving her bedroom, totally delectable and she had already visualised the photograph of her that would appear in
Tatler
and the words that would accompany it.
    ‘Lady Emerald Devenish is tipped to be
the
débutante of the season. Her ball will be held in her late father’s London house in Eaton Square, and HRH The Duke of Kent will be attending along with his mother, Princess Marina.’
    The invitations had already gone out, and Emerald knew exactly what kind of speculation that wording beneath her photograph would give rise to. In the languageof gossip columns it was tantamount to a pre-engagement declaration, but of course if anyone were to accuse her of exaggerating the situation she would simply pretend not to know what they meant.
    The photographer was disappointingly short for a man who featured so often in the gossip columns as a man about town and a flirt, but Emerald had no more interest in him as a man than she did in the uncouth Australian. He was simply a means to an end.
    ‘Indeed not.’
    Lew had been furious when his lunch date–a pretty young wife whose husband hated town and preferred to remain on their estate in the country–had refused to play ball, pretending that she hadn’t realised why he had suggested they had lunch together or what he had had in mind for the rest of the afternoon. But now the clouds that had darkened his temper had lifted. This girl was, if anything, even prettier than Louise, and unless he was wrong, far more sensual. One could always tell. They had a certain look about them that had nothing to do with experience. It shone from them like a special luminosity on the skin or like a definite scent on the air that surrounded them. This girl, a typical virginal deb on the outside, would on the inside be a positive volcano of passion. Teaching her to enjoy her sexuality would be like eating hot chocolate sauce on cold ice cream.
    ‘You’d better come up to my studio,’ he told Emerald. Without taking his gaze from her face, he added to Dougie, ‘Please see to it that I’m not disturbed for the rest of the afternoon.’
    Dougie’s heart sank.
    Well, why should he want to stop him? If she wanted to make a fool of herself and lose her reputation with a man who was known to be lethal, then why should he care?
    Because if he was this duke, then she was family, that was why, and it was his duty to do what he could to keep his family and its name safe. Girls like this one married men to whom the virginity of their bride was almost as important as their lineage and their wealth, and all because of that important first-born son–and it had to be a son. Once the line was secured they didn’t seem to mind who their wives slept with, or so it seemed to him. He was not saying that he agreed with such practice; he didn’t really agree with hereditary titles either, if he were honest, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist. He was proof of that. One day an ordinary farmer back in Oz, the next a duke!
    But perhaps he should go and see this Mr Melrose before he went round acting like some kind of saviour of the family name and reputation.
    Lew loved his work every bit as much as he loved sex, and so taking photographs of Emerald before he seduced her was no hardship. In fact, photographing girls was the best part of his seduction technique, one that excited and aroused him as he watched them becoming excited and aroused at the thought of the lens of his camera capturing their beauty and freezing it for eternity. And then, of course, there were all those little touches as he showed them how he wanted them to pose for him, directing them, rearranging their limbs, caressing