Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
EPILOGUE
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Prologue
“Tristan… oh, my God. If we’re caught…”
Gwendolyn Pierce was staring up at me with her wide, soulful eyes and her pretty pink lips all agape, her heart beating so hard if I listened closely, I swore I could hear it. I was close enough to feel it, too, pounding through the thin fabric of her camisole, making her pert nipples quiver against my chest.
I’d caught her in her nightclothes, a modest ensemble of flannel pajama pants and a lacy top with no bra underneath. The latter clung to her small frame, the full, tender globes of her breasts outlined in delicious shadow.
I slid my fingers up along her ribs, returning her gaze, the bare skin of my chest grazing her trembling arms. “Nobody needs to know, Gwennie. It’s just you and me.”
Gwen took in a sharp breath, and for a moment, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t call me that,” she whispered, but trailed off when I began inching her cami up her stomach, revealing more of her pale skin than was appropriate, given who we were to one another.
Gwendolyn was my stepsister. And I was her stepbrother, and heir to a duchy. We were both hot and barely past eighteen and pumped full of hormones. We were dangerous. A scandal waiting to happen.
And I wanted it to happen. I was sure Gwennie did, too. No matter how hard she’d dug her heels in about adapting to British culture—something her mother had insisted upon, accent and all—my stepsister couldn’t shake that rebellious nature of hers. She wasn’t meant for the aristocracy. Then again, neither was I.
“We can’t,” she breathed. God, I could taste her on my lips. She tasted like desire, betraying her words, which came out almost like a squeak. It made my cock hard to no end. She was such a little mouse, but I got the feeling she would turn into a wildcat in bed, once somebody popped that sweet cherry of hers.
Somebody who would, hopefully, be me.
“We can,” I insisted. “See?” And I ever-so-lightly brushed the pad of my thumb over one of her nipples.
“God!” she hissed a little too loudly, and I leaned down to cover her mouth with my own, to stifle the seductive sounds dripping from her mouth. Gwendolyn turned her face away at the last second, panting hard as I teased the nub of puffy, sensitive flesh beneath the fabric of her shirt.
“Let me do this for you,” I whispered in her ear. Her back arched, forcing her hips against my hard-on. “I want you so badly, Gwennie. And I know you want me.” I took one of her hands and placed it on my cock; in response, it lurched toward her, desperate for more contact, so full of want and need that it physically hurt. “Do you feel what you do to me?”
“Tristan,” Gwendolyn said, her doe-like eyes somehow growing even wider. “You’re… pierced? Down there?” She touched the surgical steel embedded in the head of my cock.
“Do you want to see it?” I asked her, shivering as she stroked it. Oh, God, I wanted her to keep going, and to never stop.
“I…” She looked up at me through her lashes, her gaze so curious, so full of wonder. “Um…”
“Come on, Gwennie. Live a little.”
“I can’t,” she said, pushing me away by my chest. My dick slipped from her hand and I groaned. “Not like this, Tristan. Not… here. When you’re only doing it to make your father… our father… mad.”
I leaned against the pantry shelves and rubbed my face, trying to scrub away the frustration boiling in my nuts. When I looked at Gwen again, there was such sadness on her face. I thought that, even in the darkness, I could see the glint of tears in her eyes.
I realized then that, for her, this was so much more than youthful desires. I realized that she might even have feelings for me—genuine feelings, ones that transcended a mere compulsion to be naughty. For me, this was just a passing interest, one of many I’d had since I realized girls didn’t actually have cooties—well, most of them, anyway.
I wanted to fuck Gwen and get her out of my system. She wanted to fuck me, too, but then she wanted to live happily ever after. I was not the man to do that with. She needed to lower her expectations.
And why not? Everyone else had.
“I see,” I sighed, shaking my head. “Bloody hell, Gwennie. I thought you were an adult now. That you’d grown up a bit. But you’re still clinging to that Mickey Mouse, lovey-dovey horseshit, aren’t you?”
Gwendolyn blushed. “I just want it to… mean something. Is that so wrong?”
I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t a Disney movie, Gwennie. You’re not a princess, Gwennie, regardless of who your mother married. And I’m not your Prince Charming, your knight in shining armor, or whatever the hell else you expect me to be. But I am hot, and I am good in bed, and I am willing to teach you a few things you can use to snag a husband later on in life. It’s a good deal, love. You should take it.”
I waited, my cock thrumming to the beat of my heart as Gwendolyn stared at me. Only this time, there wasn’t a war waging behind those pretty eyes. She wasn’t struggling between propriety and desire. This time, she was hurt. Pissed. Shocked that I’d ever speak to her that way.
Good. Somebody had to bring her head down out of the clouds.
“You’re an asshole, Tristan,” she whispered. “A real prick.”
“Royal prick,” I corrected her. Then I shrugged. “Anyway, the offer stands. You know where to find me.”
I opened the pantry door and stepped out, leaving Gwen huffing and puffing behind me. This was exactly why I didn’t go for the innocent types. They always wanted something they couldn’t have, something I couldn’t give. They watched too much TV and read too many books. Real life wasn’t The Princess Diaries. Real life was more like The Bachelor, where you ended up with someone based on prior arrangements and how good they were in the sack—after you’d test-driven all your options, of course.
This was the reality check Gwendolyn needed, and I was confident she’d come after me. After all, I was leaving for Afghanistan tomorrow, a newly enlisted member of Her Majesty’s Royal Army. She wouldn’t let me go off to war without something to remember her by—she was, as I’d said before, a romantic.
I chuckled and shook my head. Virgins…
Chapter 1
Four years later…
It was a well-known fact that driving your own car in London was, above all things, a very poor decision. Even among the aristocracy—who seldom touched the wheel of their own vehicles, save for an odd sense of personal enjoyment—you never drove yourself through the streets of London town. In fact, such a thing was widely accepted as the key to a stress-induced heart attack—or at least, a minor brain aneurysm.
I, thankfully, had never needed to worry much about the perils and stresses of London traffic aside from a slight sense of inconvenience, what with the readily available use of my own driver on hand.
That might have sounded snobbish, but to say that I ever took dear Franklin for granted would have been a gross injustice—I prized that man almost as much as my own family, sometimes even more. In fact, if it were to be put in order of people I could count on more, it would be my beloved Franklin who would have to sit squarely on top, my own parents residing somewhere abysmally lower. It wasn’t uncommon for women such as myself to have a—shall we say—distant affect
ion for their parents, but my feelings about my family often bordered between apathy and sheer disdain—and that was on a good day. I grew up with all of the perks of a wealthy upbringing, as well as the minimal parental appreciation.
The life of a young woman living among the upper echelons of British society was, without a doubt, one of privilege and often a great deal of to-do that hardly seemed to mesh with the modern age. For instance, many among the aristocracy still scoffed at the idea of work, aside from a few select professions: lawyer and politician being the most agreeable to the senses of the “old blood.” Men were, more often than not, still expected to hold down respectable careers while women were expected to take up one or more charities to help boost their popularity among the people. I, being only the stepdaughter of a lord, was afforded certain freedoms, most of which came from not bearing the name of his house upon my shoulders. The greatest of these freedoms, I felt, was the simple option of actually choosing my own profession, something few of my fellow members of the nobility shared.