One Night of Sin Read Free Page B

that he required, for even more than gambling, Alec loved sex, relished sex, lived for sex. It was love that he avoided like the plague.
    Drumming his lips thoughtfully with his fingertips, he mentally riffled through his long list of sophisticated ladies and love-starved Society wives who regarded a wild, sweaty night with him as the high point of their year.
    Perhaps.
    But he was even bored of the pleasant sport of cuckolding his betters, and that was a very bad state of affairs. The thought of another meaningless rutting with some hard-eyed harlot threatened to bring back his “mood.”
    He would have never admitted it aloud, but whores as a breed made him uncomfortable ever since his own lucrative arrangement with Lady Campion some months ago; fallen women pricked, he supposed, what little conscience he still possessed.
    He had laughed about his services to the wealthy baroness at the time, even bragged about it to his mates—she was delightfully insatiable and, better still, made his gambling debts go away. Their scandalous arrangement had raised eyebrows, but he had gotten away with it, of course. He was Alec Knight. He always got away with everything.
    Unlike his recently exiled friends, Lord Byron and Beau Brummell, one felled by scandal, the other by debt, Alec had fought for and kept his golden throne as a ruling prince of Society in spite of everything. It was style and money and class that made the man, after all, hardly virtue.
    His family also had been scandalized at his brazen affair with the infamous baroness, but they should’ve expected something like this when the clan’s patriarch, Robert, the Duke of Hawkscliffe, had cut off his funds in a final attempt to bring their wild baby brother to heel. Well, Robert giveth and Robert taketh away, Alec thought, but he refused to be controlled by his family’s wealth. No, with his expert bravado, he would never admit to a whit of repentance for having played the stallion for Her Ladyship.
    And yet, somehow, these days, it wasn’t so easy to look in the mirror. Not when he knew damned well that his wickedness had cost him a fair slice of his self-opinion and the esteem of the only girl who had ever meant a thing to him.
    After twenty years of unswerving devotion, dear, steady Lizzie, his younger sister’s best friend, had forsaken him for his old schoolmate Devlin Strathmore, with a final warning to Alec, her former idol, that he had better change his ways before he ran his whole life aground in pure self-destruction.
    Well, there was nothing to be done for it now. Lizzie was a good girl, better off with Dev, and that was that.
    Besides, as Alec cared for her like a sister, their flirtation had always felt slightly incestuous to him: Even a sinner like him had to draw the line somewhere.
    Propping his elbow on the ledge of the carriage window, he lifted his hand with a heavy motion and wiped away some of the wet fog on the glass with the heel of his fist.
    Strathmore was best for Lizzie. Alec had accepted that. The pair were perfectly suited and very much in love; the viscount was prepared to love her in a way that Alec had barely dared contemplate. He had not liked losing to his rival, but he had, of course, behaved like a gentleman in the end. How could he do otherwise? Deep down, he knew he was not good for Lizzie. He suspected he was not good for any woman, since he seemed much too capable of driving them insane.
    He preferred not to think about it. He only knew that, ever since their wedding, the newlyweds’ bliss only seemed to underscore his deep-seated ennui; their irritating joy somehow made the hard glitter of his high life look like fool’s gold.
    Resting his cheek on his hand, he stared out into the jet-black night when he suddenly spotted two figures on horseback in the rain. He perked up slightly with his usual dangerous curiosity.
    The riders were coming up Oxford Street from the opposite direction, and he took note of them because they were