Claiming the Courtesan

Where the hell could she have gone? Why in the name of all that was holy had she left him? Had she really abandoned him for another lover?

Casting around desperately for clues to her disappearance, the duke thought back to what he knew of the woman who had shared his bed this past year. Surprisingly little, he realized.

Now, futilely, he wished he’d taken the time to find out more. But he had been so lost to his physical passion that he’d never paused to explore more than her body.

He turned sightlessly back toward the house that had witnessed some of the few happy hours of his adult life. With evening closing in, it loomed before him. Dark. Lost. Forsaken.

If that treacherous slut thought she had left the Duke of Kylemore similarly bereft, she’d learned nothing during their liaison.

And if she imagined she had eluded him with her lies and her midnight flit, she was wrong about that as well.

“Damn her,” he whispered into the encroaching night. “Damn her to hell.” He could no longer bear to be here, where Soraya had been and now so abruptly was not.

The empty house seemed to mock him as he mounted his horse. Ignoring the animal’s snort of protest, he wheeled around and galloped for London in a furious clatter of hooves.

He rode hard. He rode blindly. He rode without a care for the fine horseflesh between his thighs. And all the time, his mind beat out a rhythm of the chase.

Soraya, Soraya, Soraya.

Only when he was back in Town did necessity force him to ease his breakneck pace. When his horse nearly trampled a woman crossing the street, he took a deep breath and hauled on the reins.

He shook his head to clear it and looked around at the twilit city. How strange that life should continue normally for other people when his own world had changed so irrevocably in the space of an afternoon. Around him, shopkeepers closed up, children played with hoops and tops and dolls, families took the late spring air. All perfectly usual. All things he’d seen ten thousand times before.

His attention focused on a pair of sweethearts poring over a shop window. A tall young man and a pretty blonde girl.

How he hated them. How he wanted them dead.

And he wanted them to scream as they died.

A woman in a stylish bonnet moved past them, a small woman with a trim waist and a fashionable air. A woman who moved with a peculiar grace.

His breath caught in his throat.

He flung himself from the saddle. In this crowd, he had a better chance of catching her on foot. And by heaven, he meant to catch her.

The woman turned the corner out of sight.

Soraya had underestimated him indeed if she’d thought he wouldn’t find her so close to home.

Without a thought for his horse, he set off at a run. He treated the people in the street as so many inanimate obstacles, hurling them out of the way without excuse or apology, not pausing when he recklessly knocked a child’s hoop flying or sent a puppy skittering out of his path. Only one thing mattered—that the traitorous strumpet didn’t escape him.

As he rounded the corner, he slipped and almost fell. When he steadied himself against the rough brickwork, the jade was ahead of him, looking for all the world as if she was enjoying a pleasant evening’s stroll.

Oh, she would pay for what she’d done to him. She would pay with everything she had to give. And then he would demand more. And she didn’t even know her short-lived bid for freedom had ended.

How delightful. How he would laugh when he saw her face.

His lips curved in a wolfish smile as he contemplated his inevitable triumph over the presumptuous baggage.

He dived forward and grabbed her, not caring how his fingers bit into that slender shoulder. The woman gasped and turned.

But he already knew.

“I beg your pardon?” she snapped in outrage.

Kylemore’s hand dropped away as an awful weight settled on his heart. This was not Soraya. Soraya was too clever to risk discovery after what he now recognized as all her planning.

“I was mistaken, madam. My apologies. I thought you were someone else.”