Four Times a Virgin (Irresistible Aristocrats Book 2)

  191

  Four Times A Virgin

  By

  Suzi Love

  Dedication

  To all the people who kept me going

  while I pursued my dream of becoming an

  author, I'm truly grateful to all of you.

  Special thanks to my family and friends

  and all my fellow romance writers

  from around the world,

  especially the Unicorns and Sultry Scribes.

  Copyright

  Four Times A Virgin

  Published by Smashwords 2014

  Copyright by Suzi Love 2014

  Edited by Tessa Schapcott

  Cover by Anna Scheuringer

  eBook ISBN: 9780992570408

  Print ISBN: 9780992570415

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  form or by any electronic or mechanical means,

  including information storage and retrieval systems--

  except in the case of brief quotations

  embodied in critical articles or reviews--

  without permission in writing from the author

  at Suzi@SuziLove.com.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions,

  organizations, events, or locales in this novel

  are either the product of the author's imagination

  or, if real, used fictitiously.

  The resemblance of any character to actual

  persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  For more information on the author and her works,

  please see www.SuziLove.com

  Prologue

  1820, December 1st; Monthly Report to Maximus Meacham,

  Duke of Stirkton, from Mister William Gibbons:

  ….deep guilt drives your search for these women but please remember, your grandfather died barely three years ago. Until then, your hands were tied. Our current tally is five established in trade, ten compensated, five deceased, and nine relocated onto your various estates. If the girl selected for you in Dorchester was, in truth, a titled lady, she most likely married and left the district. Our chances of finding her are slim…

  1821, February 1st; Missive to Bill from Max:

  .... apologize for using our slight blood relationship to pressure you into starting this search. Our quest to locate these women has revealed the extent of my grandfather’s degradation, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wished you’d been born into any family but this one. I’d like you to live with me in London, once these debts are repaid and honor has been restored to our family. You’re more than my closest relative. You’ve become a friend, perhaps my only friend. In six months, on my thirtieth birthday, I will marry …

  Chapter One

  1821, April 1st; Duke of Stirkton’s residence, Mayfair, London

  “You want me to be your mistress?” The Countess of Dorchester’s sculpted brow rose in an exaggerated show of disbelief.

  Being the object of someone’s ridicule might be a novel experience for Maximus Meacham, Duke of Stirkton, but it wasn’t one he cared to repeat, even if the woman laughing at his proposal spoke like a queen and looked like a goddess. Max brushed an imaginary speck from the sleeve of his evening jacket and pretended he couldn’t see her half-hearted attempts at smothering her chuckles with her gloved hand.

  “And I’m to be at your beck and call for precisely one month?”

  He looked up and caught her inspecting him from head to toe. When her gaze lingered around the area of his groin, his muscles contracted, his body heated and his bollocks tightened. He turned away. If the Countess knew that her one lingering appraisal of his manly assets could turn a cold and controlled duke into a lustful male, he’d lose control of their situation and his years of planning would amount to nothing.

  The Countess would take what she’d come for: his grandfather’s lists, and his fantasy of having her as his lover—even for four weeks—would evaporate faster than his dreams of a happier new day had, when his grandfather had thrown open his bedroom door each morning and berated him for failing to arise and greet the dawn.

  He glanced sideways. His breath seized and he mentally revised his description of her beauty. With porcelain skin, auburn curls, and emerald eyes that hinted at a Scottish lineage, the Countess had grown into one of the most stunning women he’d ever laid eyes on. Max’s comparison was based on intimate knowledge of some of the most exquisite women in England. Not even his imagination had done her justice, and he’d spent many long nights picturing how she’d look when, or if, they ever found her again. Wondering if she’d aged gracefully, or more importantly, if she’d lived disgracefully after he and his grandfather had turned her young girl’s life on its head? Though his fantasy woman had carried a girlish countenance and had worn significantly less clothing than this girl who captured his attention in an ill-lit room at a country inn.

  He risked another look at his unexpected visitor. This lady wore a gown that wrapped her body as closely as a lover’s arms, and he knew from the pile of bills he paid to whichever modiste that month’s mistress preferred that the Countess’s outfit would have cost a pretty penny.

  While he snatched quick and gentlemanly looks at the Countess’s face and dress style, she continued her own perusal. Her study of him and his entire body was so slow and intense that he felt his skin heat and prickle.

  As the Duke of Stirkton, he was well accustomed to being watched. Young pups copied his dress style. Toad-eaters mimicked his behavior in futile attempts to ingratiate themselves into his life. Conservative groups applauded his somber public behavior, while cartoonists ridiculed his straight-laced demeanor and suggested he take a mistress. Or two.

  Whichever way people viewed him, no one had dared ridicule him to his face. Until this evening. The Countess had side-stepped his butler and marched into his drawing room as if an unannounced call upon an unmarried duke was something she did regularly. Max had informed her, in great detail, of the extensive search he and his cousin had undertaken to locate her and the other women. She’d huffed and rolled her eyes. Normally, his month-about- mistresses gleefully accepted his proposal because sharing a duke’s bed for a month would set them up for the rest of their lives. Apart from the financial benefits, he was a generous lover. One benefit of his abnormal upbringing had been an early and full education into what women wanted in a bed partner. Until the Countess had laughed at him, he’d never had reason to doubt his sexual prowess. In the brief time she’d been in his house, she’d challenged several of his beliefs.

  “It’s the ideal solution.” And something he needed. “I will help you search my grandfather’s boxes by day and, in exchange, you’ll make yourself available to me in the evenings.” Max waited, unsure what to expect. An odd situation for a man who prided himself on reading adversaries as easily as he tallied the accounts.

  “Ah, I understand.” She nodded, and the crimson curls artlessly dangling from the knot on her crown bounced around her shoulders and settled on the bare flesh exposed above the fashionable square-cut of her evening gown. “You’re jesting.”

  His body’s acute, and for recent times, abnormal physical response, distracted him. He envied those curls and their freedom to touch her lightly-tanned skin. “I never jest.”

  “You’re seriously asking me to play your courtesan for this month?” She walked around him, tiny circling steps meant to disconcert him. “Me?” She threw her arms wide in a theatrical gesture. “Act like a common cyprian? A demimondaine squeezed in between business meetings. Or, in our ca
se, between boxes of files.” She waited for his nod. “But why?”

  “Why not?” Max’s compulsion to provoke this woman, the girl selected for him in Dorchester and whose name had eluded him for eight long years, was childish. Ridiculous behavior for a man taught from birth that Meachams exhibited the same haughty arrogance as the Royal Family, no matter the circumstances. Yet he’d tried to discompose the Countess from the moment she’d arrived and faced him, toe to toe. He glanced at the ornate clock on his mantle. Twenty minutes had passed in a flash. He feared blinking in case the erstwhile Lady Carina Woods vanished as swiftly as she had from the Dorchester inn, swept away in an elegant but discreetly blackened carriage.

  Now, the widowed Countess looked cool, calm and more magnificent than any of his dream manifestations. Even while looking at him as though he was an escapee from Bedlam.

  “What you’re proposing is ludicrous.”

  “To the contrary, my proposal is serious, sane, and expedient.” Though he knew his idea sounded insane when voiced aloud. “Before I agree to your searching through my grandfather’s documents, I need your agreement to my terms.”

  He was a fool, an obsessed idiot who’d been thrown into confusion at her unannounced arrival and hadn’t taken his usual time to prepare his argument. The moment she’d set foot in his house, a life-time of training had been forgotten as he’d scrambled for ways to secure her attention and her promise. By habit, he glanced towards the portrait holding pride of place on the long wall. He shivered when his grandfather’s eyes, blue and as cold as arctic ice chips, stared back at him. The late Duke had controlled every step of Max’s growing years and had taught him, with the aid of his riding crop, rules that must be followed so the family name and reputation would continue, unsullied by weakness or doubt.

  Max’s first sexual experience had been on his fourteenth birthday, another lesson, with the woman selected, instructed and paid for by his grandfather. Max’s tutelage in ducal dominance in the bedroom had been scheduled on his calendar alongside accounting lessons, because Augustus had believed that regular sex was a messy yet necessary part of a duke’s life in the same way food ensured a man’s physical wellbeing. Max was trained to control his sexual responses, harden his heart and view a woman’s body as a means to an end, while his companions were employed on a rotating monthly basis. If their month passed with no complications, each courtesan was well compensated. Women were to be scrutinized for cleanliness and sensuality with the same objectivity a duke was expected to give to the side of mutton or slab of beef served by his chef each night. But after years of searching for this particular woman, Max feared that adhering to those rigid Meacham rules would be as impossible as disobeying Augustus had been when he was a child.

  “A proposal? You issued a ducal command.” The disappointment in the Countess’s statement drew his gaze, and his thoughts, back to her. “And you believed I’d accept as if I was a well-trained whore. You may be accustomed to women rushing to do your bidding, but I’ll never again be ordered about by a man.”

  Her hands-on-hips stance demonstrated her rejection of him better than any words, yet he couldn’t stop imagining how her hips would feel under his hands instead and if his fingers would stretch to touch the edges of her femininely-rounded stomach. She’d spread her feet wide beneath a dazzling sea-green gown, and he wondered if her legs were long enough to wrap his waist if he held her up against the wall beneath and pounded into her softness. With her height, her legs would drape nicely over his shoulders, he decided, while he took her in every way he’d dreamed of for so long.

  “You’re a widow. An experienced woman.” He raised an eyebrow, daring her to contradict him. “Surely I’m not the first man to ask you to be his mistress?”

  The rational part of his mind argued that contracting her as this month’s pleasure was a sound business decision. His irrational side wished she’d protest and declare herself as innocent as the night they’d met. “I’m reputed to be a decent lover. I can give you what you need.” He ran his gaze suggestively over her curvaceous lower body and up to her plump breasts, barely confined in a tight-fitting satin bodice. Lady Dorchester made an unladylike sound, somewhere between a grunt and a growl. Good! Only fair that the Countess feel out of sorts, considering the turmoil her unexpected appearance had caused him.

  “Really?” She matched his deliberate appraisal of her offerings with one of her own and, predictably, his body reacted with surge of lust.

  “The attributes of the women I choose each month matter little to me,” he said, addressing the wall again. “Though I have a preference for hair like yours--red and vibrant.”

  “I prefer to think of my hair as auburn.”

  He turned to study her hair and smirked at her sensitivity over its color. If he was a poet, he’d say it reminded him of a fiery summer sky. But he was a hot blooded male, who’d rather tell her to spread her locks across his pillows and her naked body across his silk sheets. Or even better, insist she trail her hair across his naked chest each time she rose and lowered on his erection.

  Naturally, he couldn’t say any of those things so he rebuked her sarcasm with some of his own. “Auburn?” He shrugged. “Going back to my proposal, a month together should suit nicely, because it will take you a few weeks to fully search my grandfather’s files and this way I’ll have you close by for whenever the mood strikes.”

  “Oh, how romantic.” She clutched her hands at her chest. “I fear that being too often in your company will overwhelm my delicate female senses.” She made another ineffectual attempt at smothering her laughter. “Although as you’ve pointed out, your terms would mean that I’d perform as a courtesan and I’d be on hand, or under hand, and I’d have you, in hand.”

  “How droll, my lady,” Max said evenly, despite feeling a little wounded. “And excellent use of the double entendre.”

  “I beg your pardon for my flippancy,” she said, without showing the least bit of remorse. “But your assumption that I’d topple into bed with a man I’ve only met twice is arrogant, galling and insulting.”

  His training hadn’t prepared him to deal with an independent and contrary woman, as he was accustomed to deference, not defiance from women.

  “As you’re against marrying again and my wedding is some time away, becoming lovers is an expedient solution. I was selected as your first lover, so it seems fitting that I shall be your last.”

  “You misunderstand.” She shook her head and several loose curls lifted and flew. “Though I’ll never marry again, I’m young and wealthy and able to please myself when it comes to sexual liaisons.”

  Carina’s plans to have sex with other men disturbed Max, because he’d clung to an image of her as an innocent girl who needed his protection in the same way she had in the Dorchester inn. Imagining her spreading her hair across the pillows of some unknown man, or men, made his jaw clench until his teeth ached.

  For three years he’d waited to make amends, and yet, in half an hour, Carina had tossed every one of his long-held beliefs and pent-up yearnings back in his face. Not that he blamed her, because demanding sexual favors from a young countess wasn’t something he normally did. But she’d marched back into his life and he had no intention of letting her walk out again until a few things were resolved.

  “Neither a husband nor a man is necessary to relieve a woman’s bodily cravings,”

  he said casually, while he watched for signs of betraying emotion.

  A whip’s sting on his grandson’s bared buttocks had been the old Duke’s favored way of teaching Max about women’s needs and wants, and though he didn’t consider himself an expert, he did understand the tricks women used to manipulate men and appease one of their cravings: an unrelenting desire for wealth. He knew, to the penny, the cost of extricating himself from one of his monthly companions if she refused to leave his cottage.

  Though much of Augustus’s sex education had been strange and useless, Max had learned how to detect human flaws,
especially in women, and to use this knowledge to his advantage. However, he couldn’t fathom Carina’s wants and needs.

  The Countess wasn’t cowered by his status as women of the lower classes usually were, and nor did she bend over backwards to ingratiate herself as females from the higher echelons did. To the contrary, her emotionless responses to him and his suggested arrangement both frustrated and maddened him. He felt out of his depth already and had no idea how to save himself.

  “Nevertheless,” she said, waving a casual hand between them, “a generous lover can provide a woman with more intense pleasure than she can give herself, alone in her bedchamber. I imagine that some men could provide the same thrill that you presumably derived from deflowering virgins at Madame Laverne’s on each of your birthdays.”

  He stiffened. How did she know where he’d been initiated into fornication? She’d arrived tonight seeking access to his grandfather’s journals, so he’d assumed she knew little about his life with his grandfather, or about the girls purchased for him twice a year, as regular as clockwork. Underestimating the Countess could prove a costly mistake. She might have come here for reasons other than needing some information from his grandfather’s papers and he, as a wealthy duke, had good cause to suspect everyone’s motives.

  Surreptitiously, he began his ritualistic exercises. Tightening and releasing the fingers on both hands was a relaxation technique he’d learned years earlier to hide distress and never allow thoughts or emotions to be seen.

  Adopting his ducal voice, he repeated the dictum taught to him with the aid of a whip-thin birch rod on his fingertips. “Ridding those girls of their virginity wasn’t meant to be a pleasure, for them or for me. If Meacham money wasn’t used, then another man would have paid to be their first. My grandfather believed that regular sexual relief allows men to concentrate on their estates and finances, rather than be governed by the whims of an aroused prick.”