Free The Duchess Diaries: The Bridal Pleasures Series by Jillian Hunter

dark eyes danced. “It is if both people intend to play.”
    Charlotte held her breath as he placed his large hand on her shoulder, moving her toward the bed. Where was Harriet? What if one of the servants had apprehended her?
    “This is really accommodating of you, Charlotte.” He bent his head to her neck. “How did you guess that I needed a woman in my bed tonight?”
    Harriet had searched in all the obvious places—she decided that the diary wasn’t in the house. Why would a man like Wynfield bother hiding it in the first place?
    She walked down the stairs in thoughtful silence. Theduke seemed capable of being an arrogant bastard, as all gentlemen in lofty positions could be. But he was a man’s man. He’d attended the ball to please the Boscastles, and then he had gone to Mrs. Watson’s to please himself.
    Harriet closed her eyes as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She could hear Charlotte in the bedroom, her search apparently as fruitless as Harriet’s had been. She pictured the duke sitting across from her in his carriage. She’d concealed the diary inside her cloak. And then she had completely forgotten it.
    That was the last time she had seen the diary.
    In the carriage. Which meant that she would have to wait until he came home. Perhaps she could appeal to his higher instincts, although a man who had just come from a house of Venus wasn’t liable to be in a moral mood. She could hide in the carriage house and check when he went inside. But she couldn’t hide with Charlotte, who caved at the first sign of danger.
    Not that this was a dangerous venture compared to Harriet’s past larks. In fact, she would search the duke’s study and then tell Charlotte that the best solution was to simply explain to Gideon what had happened. And hope that he hadn’t disposed of the diary without realizing what it was.
    Charlotte would be mortified, but she would live through it. She had a good head on her shoulders. She was stronger than she realized. It was a pity, in a way, that the duke wasn’t drawn to a lady like her. In Harriet’s mind they made a lovely couple.
    Nick Rydell had worked the streets of Mayfair ever since he could remember, but his proudest moments ofthievery had been training Harriet Gardner and her half brothers to commit larceny. He and the boys still collaborated from time to time and reminisced about their crimes and how it wasn’t the same without Harriet. That girl had been born to housebreak. She could see like a cat in the dark. She could walk like a whisper through a house full of people, pinching all the silver, and no one would notice until the morning.
    Millie was jealous of her, because Nick had made no secret of the fact that she would never be the born criminal that Harriet had been. “You can’t blame ’er for givin’ it all up, Nick. The rats, the police, the stench of the gutters, to marry a duke. You’d ’ave married ’im yourself if you’d been asked.”
    Tonight he fancied Harriet’s company; he missed her talent for housebreaking, her rude mouth, and her blazing red hair. He had always been able to impress the other girls in St. Giles. But not Harry.
    He’d taken a risk and called out a favor from a cabdriver who owed him. Then he’d waited across the street from the duke’s residence for him to come home.
    He waited so long that he deplored the waste of a night’s work. Still, while he’d been waiting he’d taken the opportunity to burglarize the town house straight opposite the duke’s.
    To his delight he’d recognized Harriet’s small carriage lurching to a halt at the corner of the fancy square where the duke lived.
    Nick scaled the garden wall, taking out a spyglass from his jacket to watch Harriet and her fair-haired companion tiptoe through the duke’s back gate.
    Did Harriet have a late-night assignation with the duke? Wasn’t the one she’d married enough to pleaseher? And who was that fetching lady who’d accompanied her in Harriet’s