Seducing the Rake (Mad, Bad and Dangerous Heroes) Read Free

the fabled Chinese book, or was this whole search a maniacal game devised by her father’s cunning enemies?
    He had enough of them, Midnight knew. She remembered the Portuguese merchant who had never forgiven her father for tricking him out of a cargo of stolen ginseng. And there was the Frenchman who had absconded with the accumulated artifacts of a whole season’s digging in the islands off the South China coast. She and her father had come close to losing a boatload of remarkable Han jades before they discovered the man’s treachery.
    The Frenchman had lost three teeth in the fight that ensued. His back would wear the mark of her father’s cold lash forever, she suspected.
    Had one of them kidnapped her father for revenge?
    She had no answer, though she had thought of little else since the news of her father’s kidnapping had reached her three months before. Hard on the heels of that had come the first anonymous note ordering her to search for the sole object that would buy her father’s freedom.
    The price was a book worth a man’s weight in jewels. Diamond-encrusted and bound in gold, with illustrations designed to kindle the jaded appetites of an emperor who had tasted every pleasure and possessed every treasure among the four seas.
    The pillow book was said to be a thousand years old, each exquisite page detailing a different path to erotic pleasure. And that book was the only way to buy her father’s release.
    Midnight frowned. Misbegotten son of a turtle! Where was the accursed book?
    The bed creaked, interrupting her musings. The earl muttered hoarsely and rolled to his side. A hard bronze thigh slid from the white linens. His long fingers flexed, cupping the pink-tipped breast only inches from his face.
    Sighing, Germaine snuggled closer.
    Dear heaven, not again! Had the two been taking Siberian ginseng for stamina?
    Caught between fury and an unsettling curiosity, Midnight slipped along the wall toward the door. Her cloth-soled slippers moved in silence. She was halfway down the corridor when she heard a low curse.
    “Damn it, Germaine, it’s freezing in here! Did you leave another window open downstairs? You’ll have every cutthroat and gallows-bird in London in the hall. “
    Clothing rustled. Midnight darted to the window, raised the pane and slid one foot onto the roof.
    The curtains tossed about her head, blanketing her head and hitting off her vision.
    “Got you, you little beggar!” Hard fingers seized her shoulders and hauled her back over the windowsill. “Thought it was all bob, did you?”
    Her breath flew out in a whoosh as she was yanked backward and crushed against a wall of muscle.
    Hot, straining muscle.
    Wildly she twisted, trying to fight free of the hard fingers digging into her wrists.
    “Bring a candle, Germaine!”
    Down the hall silk rustled. “I-I’m coming.”
    Midnight closed her eyes, trying to forget that her captor was wearing only the thinnest of dressing gowns.
    Wildly, she struggled to pull free, but her focus and training were lost. She grappled blindly, trying to ignore the pressure of his naked chest and then his powerful thigh.
    She had to focus .
    Dear heaven, she could not let him discover her identity!
    Catching a long breath, she went completely slack, not resisting when her captor’s hard thighs pinned her to the wall.
    “Give up, do you? Damned good idea, unless you want your arm broken. What did you take, you little thief? Silver? One of Germaine’s bracelets?”
    Deftly, impersonally, hard fingers probed Midnight’s silk-clad thighs and plunged beneath the waistband of her loose-fitting trousers. Her breath caught when one hand eased lower, tracing her flat, tense belly.
    Catching a ragged breath, she struggled to remember some of the more pungent expressions she had learned at that little waterside tavern near the wharfs back in Macao. “Eee, what yer bloody doing to me?” she blustered, twisting wildly. “Take yer bleedin’ ‘ands off ‘r