A Summer Seduction (2 page)
—
Affaire de Coeur
“A beautifully written charmer.”
—
Publishers Weekly
Also by Candace Camp
A Lady Never Tells
A Gentleman Always Remembers
An Affair Without End
A Winter Scandal
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Candace Camp
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ISBN 978-1-4516-3951-3 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-3954-4 (eBook)
For
Ernest and Mary Elizabeth Spurlock
1944 – 2011
Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following after you…
Ruth 1:16
My thanks go out to all the usual suspects: Abby and the great team at Pocket, Maria and the great team at Maria Carvainis Agency, and most of all to my own team here at home—my husband, Pete, and my daughter, Anastasia Hopcus. I couldn’t do it without all of you. You deserve a fuller recounting of all the ways you’ve helped me, but that, I’m afraid, would make another book.
Special thanks to Mikey for gracing our lives. You helped me through fifteen years of writing books, and even worked your way into two of them. This is the first one in a long time without you, and you are sorely missed.
H
er body was warm and
yielding in his arms, her mouth sweet beneath his. The very air around them was electric with promise. A breeze touched his skin, sending a shiver through him, and in the distance, there was a low rumble of thunder.
“Jocelyn,” he murmured, his arms tightening around her, and at that instant, she turned and slipped away from him, laughter trailing over her shoulder.
Alec started after her, his body thrumming with need, the thrill of the chase rising in him. She was white and silver in the moonlight, her gown fluttering behind her, dark gold hair streaming like a flag. Airy as a dream, she darted between the stones, always just out of his reach. He turned a corner, and she had vanished. He realized with a chill that the stones around them were grave markers.
Then her arms wrapped around him from behind, and her scent teased at his nostrils. Alec turned to her and claimed her lips, his hands sinking into the thick mass of her hair. Heat flared through him, his body hard and eager. She
pressed up into him, her soft breasts flattening against his chest. He wanted her. Ached for her.
He lifted his head and gazed down into the huge amethyst pools of her eyes. Her alabaster skin gleamed in the moonlight, her thick black hair twining around his fingers. And in that moment he realized that she was not Jocelyn at all.
“Damaris!”
Thunder rumbled, and Alec jolted awake.
He lay for a moment, disoriented, the room unfamiliar, before his groggy thoughts gathered and he recalled that he was in an inn on his way to visit Lord Morecombe. Soft summer air wafted through the open window, stirring the sheer curtains, and thunder sounded again, low and distant. Alec’s body still surged with lust. Was it for Jocelyn, he wondered, or for Damaris?
Letting out an impatient sigh, he sat up and swung his legs out of bed. It didn’t matter. Either way, it was folly. Jocelyn’s place now was in the graveyard. She had never been his, not really. As for Damaris… His thoughts turned to the attractive young widow who was Lady Morecombe’s good friend. Hair thick and black as midnight… wide, expressive eyes of a deep blue, almost purplish hue, a distant look of cool amusement in them… an enticingly curved body that seemed to beckon a man’s hand.
Alec shook his head, as if to dislodge his thoughts. However alluring the lady might be, Damaris Howard was not for him. He had not, he reflected, made the best of first impressions upon her, storming into Gabriel’s house six months ago
and launching into a fistfight with him. He had compounded his sins by being rude to the lady, flatly refusing her offer to show him the way to the village. Pride was a failing of his—an overweening pride, some might say—that disdained help as equally as it did pity or contempt.
After that inauspicious beginning, Mrs. Howard had regarded him with a prickly politeness that bordered on disfavor. That fact would not have stopped him from pursuing her, of course, for Alec Stafford was not a man to avoid a challenge. But she was a lady and, what was more important, a friend to Thea, one of the few people Alec respected, which meant that Damaris was not a woman with whom he could casually tumble into bed. And Alec was not foolish enough to be interested in a woman in any other way. Whatever mawkish feelings of love and marriage had once glimmered in him had died with Jocelyn.
He shoved away from the bed and strode to the window. The sheer curtain billowed out, brushing over his naked flesh, and he shivered once again, just as he had in his dream. There was no moon in the sky; it was growing close to dawn and the sky had begun to lighten.
Sleep, he knew, had been thoroughly chased off, so he turned away and began to pull on his clothes. It was less than a day’s ride to Chesley, where Gabriel Morecombe now lived with his new wife and the baby boy they had adopted. If he set out now, he could reach the village by midafternoon.
By the time the sun came up, Alec was well down the road. He stopped for breakfast and to rest his mount, but as the
miles passed and the village of Chesley grew closer, his pace quickened and his stops were more and more infrequent. He was not sure where the restlessness that had plagued him the last few months had come from, but it was becoming more and more familiar. It seemed as if no place contented him for long now. After visiting Chesley for young Matthew’s baptism, he had returned home to dutifully escort his sister to London for the Season. A month later, boredom had sent him ricocheting back to Northumberland. But, unlike in the past, he had not been content at Castle Cleyre either. The days had seemed long and empty, the nights dull, until finally he had decided to return to the city early, making a side trip to visit his friends the Morecombes along the way, as if he had not just visited them in February.
It was odd behavior, he knew, but perhaps a man just grew bored when he reached a certain age. Or perhaps once Jocelyn had been found and he had been freed from his long, uncertain period of waiting, he simply no longer knew what to do with himself.