Games of Pleasure Read Free

laugh, dismayed at how bitter it tasted.
    Just that: Ryderbourne. With the assumption that anyone would then know exactly who he was. Even though his was only a courtesy title, as the elder son and heir of the Duke of Blackdown his precedence was just below that of a marquess. His given name, if she remembered correctly, was Laurence Duvall Devoran St. George, but he was known as “Ryder” to his friends.
    The select handful of friends!
    He was only whispered about by the amusing young gentlemen who whored and drank and gambled away both youth and fortune. A proud scion of St. George, slated to become one of the most powerful peers in England. Why be surprised if Lord Ryderbourne carved a rarefied path of his own?
    Miracle had occasionally seen him from a distance in London, of course, fawned over like royalty. He did not look so different now, even soaked to the skin. Lean muscles bunched and coiled as he bailed. Though his green eyes remained wary and cool, he was as attractive as they came.
    So the Fates laughed as they spun their webs and decreed nothing but more trouble! Miracle would far rather have been rescued—if she had been destined to be rescued at all—by a grizzled old fisherman with a comfortable wife.
    Fortunately, since they had never moved in the same circles, Lord Ryderbourne was unlikely to recognize her.
    The keel scraped on shingle. The horse stopped, fetlock deep in surf, and shook itself like a dog. The duke’s son tugged on his salt-ruined boot and sprang from the boat. His feet splashed as he waded to the horse and rubbed its black neck. The gelding blew through its nostrils and shook itself again. The duke’s son untied the rope from his mount’s tail, then strode away over the shingle to retrieve clothes he must have abandoned there earlier.
    The horse waited, watching him.
    He returned to hold out a heavy cloak. He had shrugged into his jacket and donned his hat. He seemed impervious to the chill rain.
    â€œWho did this to you, ma’am?”
    Miracle ignored the cloak and stared at the ocean. Whitecaps reared ever higher beneath lowering gray clouds. In spite of that odd moment of incipient hilarity, her heart felt numb, as if she were desperate. Goose bumps rose on her arms.
    â€œNo one did anything, my lord. There was an accident.”
    â€œYou’ve been beaten.” His voice resonated: rich and deep, with a piercing intelligence. “You’ve been robbed of your clothes and cast adrift. By whom?”
    She shook her head and shivered again, worried that she might do something hideously inappropriate, that she might laugh out loud or break into bawdy singing.
    He threw the cloak in a belling sweep to land about her shoulders, then held out one hand.
    â€œNever mind. I’ll get you to shelter.” His mouth was set in the imperious lines of habitual command. “Come! You will die of cold.”
    Miracle clutched the front of his cloak in both hands. “If I only had oars, I would row right back out there.”
    His eyes darkened, like the glass-clear shadow in the trough of a wave. “You planned to take your own life?”
    â€œOh, not deliberately.” She suppressed the mounting impulse to laugh. “However it might appear, I’m not so melodramatic.”
    â€œNeither am I. What’s your name?”
    There was insistence in it. He would not leave her alone. He would feel obliged to be gallant. There was not much she could do about it. So in defiance of fate, Miracle met his gaze and told him her third lie.
    Her first falsehood had been to cling deliberately to a few more moments of blissful oblivion when she had regained consciousness in the boat, looking up at him through slitted lashes before she had been forced to acknowledge him at all.
    Her second lie had been to deny that she’d been thrashed.
    The third was the name that now spilled without thought from her tongue, though it was not one she had ever