Seduced by the Scoundrel

  Introducing Louise Allen’s

  most scandalous trilogy yet!

  DANGER & DESIRE

  Leaving the sultry shores of India behind

  them, the passengers of the Bengal Queen

  face a new life ahead in England—until a

  shipwreck throws their plans into disarray …

  Can Alistair and Perdita’s

  illicit onboard flirtation survive the

  glittering social whirl of London?

  Washed up on an island populated by ruffians,

  virginal Averil must rely on

  rebel captain Luc for protection.

  And honourable Callum finds himself

  falling for his brother’s fiancée!

  Look for

  RAVISHED BY THE RAKE

  August 2011

  SEDUCED BY THE SCOUNDREL

  September 2011

  MARRIED TO A STRANGER

  October 2011

  from Mills & Boon® Historical

  ‘You could become my mistress.’

  ‘Your mistress?’ For a moment Averil did not seem to understand, and then her whole body went rigid with indignation. ‘Why, you …! You don’t think I am good enough to marry, but you would keep me for your pleasure!’ She wrenched round. ‘Let me go—’

  Luc shifted his grip, afraid of hurting her, too aroused to release her. She thudded against his chest and he held her with one hand splayed on her back, the other in her hair, and kissed her. It was wrong, it was gloriously right, it was heaven. She tasted of wine and fruit and woman and he lost himself, drowning in her, until she twisted, jerking her knee up. If not for her hampering skirts she would have had him, square in the groin. As it was her knee hit him with painful force on the thigh and he tore his mouth free.

  About the Author

  LOUISE ALLEN has been immersing herself in history, real and fictional, for as long as she can remember, and finds landscapes and places evoke powerful images of the past. Louise lives in Bedfordshire, and works as a property manager, but spends as much time as possible with her husband at the cottage they are renovating on the north Norfolk coast, or travelling abroad. Venice, Burgundy and the Greek islands are favourite atmospheric destinations. Please visit Louise’s website—www.louiseallenregency.co.uk—for the latest news!

  Previous novels by the same author:

  VIRGIN SLAVE, BARBARIAN KING

  THE DANGEROUS MR RYDER*

  THE OUTRAGEOUS LADY FELSHAM*

  THE SHOCKING LORD STANDON*

  THE DISGRACEFUL MR RAVENHURST*

  THE NOTORIOUS MR HURST*

  THE PIRATICAL MISS RAVENHURST*

  PRACTICAL WIDOW TO PASSIONATE MISTRESS**

  VICAR’S DAUGHTER TO VISCOUNT’S LADY**

  INNOCENT COURTESAN TO ADVENTURER’S BRIDE**

  RAVISHED BY THE RAKE†

  *Those Scandalous Ravenhursts

  **The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters

  † Danger & Desire

  and in Mills & Boon® Historical Undone! eBooks:

  DISROBED AND DISHONOURED

  Author Note

  Once I had chosen the treacherous seas around the Isles of Scilly as the setting for the wreck of the Bengal Queen, right at the end of her three-month voyage from India, I knew I had to go there to experience the islands for myself.

  The heroine of this novel was going to be washed ashore on one of the uninhabited islands—but which one? On the Scillies small boats take the place of cars and buses, and I spent a happy week in the sunshine—criss-crossing from island to island, waving at seals, walking on sand so fine it was exported for use to blot ink in the eighteenth century. Finally I chose St Helen’s, with its tiny old isolation hospital—a perfect base for the mysterious and dangerous man who will rescue Averil Heydon when she is washed, naked, onto the beach at his feet.

  While I was there I was privileged to see the wonderful pilot gigs racing—their speed and the distances they can cover have not been exaggerated in this book. However, I have taken liberties with the Governor of the islands at the time, whose name and family are entirely imaginary and bear no resemblance to the real Governor.

  Dedication

  With happy memories

  of a wonderful week on the Isles of Scilly

  and the kind staff in the tiny library

  Seduced

  by the Scoundrel

  Louise Allen

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  Chapter One

  March 16th, 1809—Isles of Scilly

  It was a dream, the kind you have when you are almost awake. She was cold, wet … The cabin window must have opened in the night … she was so uncomfortable …

  ‘Look ‘ere, Jack, it’s a mermaid.’

  ‘Nah. Got legs, ain’t she? No tail. Never got that. How do you swive a mermaid if she ain’t got legs?’

  Not a dream … nightmare. Wake up. Eyes won’t open. So cold. Hurt. Afraid, so afraid.

  ‘Is she dead, do yer reckon?’

  Uncomprehending terror ran through her veins in the dream. Am I dead? Is this hell? They sound like demons. Lie still.

  ‘Looks fresh enough. She’ll do, even if she ain’t too lively. I ‘aven’t had a woman in five weeks.’

  ‘None of us ‘ave, stupid.’ The coarse voice came closer.

  No! Had she screamed it aloud? Averil became fully conscious and with consciousness came memory and realisation and true terror: shipwreck and a great wave and then cold and churning water and the knowledge that she was going to die.

  But she wasn’t dead. Under her was sand, cold, wet sand, and the wind blew across her skin and wavelets lapped at her ankles and her eyes were mercifully gummed shut with salt against this nightmare and everything hurt as though she’d been rolled in a barrel. Wind … skin … She was naked and those voices belonged to real men and they were coming closer and they wanted to … Lie still.

  Something nudged her hard in the ribs and she flinched away, convulsed with fear, her body reacting while her mind screamed at it to be still.

  ‘She’s alive! Well, there’s a bit of luck.’ It was the first speaker, his voice gloating. She curled into a shivering ball, like a hedgehog stripped of its prickles. ‘You reckon we can get ‘er up behind those rocks before the others see ‘er? Don’t want to share, not ‘til we’ve had our fill.’

  ‘No!’ She jerked herself upright so she was sitting on the sand, her arms wrapped around her nakedness. It was worse now, not to be able to see. She dragged her eyes open against the sticky sting of the salt.

  Her tormentors stood about two yards away, regarding her with identical expressions of lustful greed. Averil’s stomach churned as her instincts recognised the look. One man was big, with a gut that spoke of too much beer and muscles that bulged on his bare arms and calves like tree trunks. The one who had kicked her must be the skinny runt closer to her.

  ‘You come along with us, darlin’,’ the smaller one said and the wheedling tone had the sodden hairs on her neck rising. ‘We’ll get you nice and warm, won’t we, ‘Arry?’

  ‘I’d rather die,’ she managed to say. She dug her fingers into the wet sand and raked up two handfuls, but it flowed out of her grasp. There was nothing to use as a weapon, not even a pebble, and her hands were numb with cold.

  ‘Yer, well, what you want don’t come into it, darlin’.’ That must be Jack. Would it help if she used their names, tried to get them to see her as a human being and not just a thing for their use? She struggled to get her terrified brain to work. Could she run? No, her legs were numb, too, she would never be able to stand up.

  ‘Listen—my name is Averil. Jack, Harry—don’t you have sisters—?’

  The big one swore fou
lly and she heard the voices at the same time. ‘The others. Damn it, now we’ll ‘ave to share the bloss.’

  Averil focused her stinging eyes along the beach. She sat on the rim of sand that fringed the sea. Above her a pebble beach merged into low rock outcrops and beyond that short turf sloped up to a hill. The voices belonged to a group of half-a-dozen men, sailors by the look of them, all in similar dark working clothes to the two who had found her.

  At the sight of her they broke into a run and she found herself facing a semicircle of grinning, leering figures. Their laughter, their voices as they called coarse comments she could barely understand, their questions to Jack and Harry, beat on her ears and the scene began to blur as she closed her eyes. She was going to faint and when she fainted they would—

  ‘What the hell have you got there?’ The voice was educated, authoritative and rock hard. Averil sensed the men’s attention turn from her like iron filings attracted to a magnet and hope made her gasp with relief.

  ‘Mermaid, Cap’n.’ Harry sniggered. ‘Lost ‘er tail.’

  ‘Very nice, too,’ the voice said, very close now. ‘And you were about to bring her to me, I suppose?’

  ‘Why’d we do that, Cap’n?’

  ‘Captain’s prize.’ There was no pity in the dispassionate tone, only the clinical assessment of a piece of flotsam. The warm flood of hope receded like a retreating wave.

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘Tough. This is not a democracy, Tubbs. She’s mine and that’s an order.’ Boots crunched over pebbles as the sound of furious muttering rose.

  None of this was going to go away. Averil opened her eyes again and looked up. And up. He was big: rangy, with dark hair, a dominant nose. The uncompromising grey eyes, like the sea in winter, looked at her as a man studies a woman, not as a rescuer looks at a victim. There was straightforward masculine desire there, and, strangely, anger. ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘No, leave you to freeze to death, or, no, don’t take you away from your new friends?’ he asked. He was like a dark reflection of the men she had come to know over the past three months on the ship. Tough, intelligent men who had no need to swagger because they radiated confidence and authority. Alistair Lyndon, the twins Callum and Daniel Chatterton. Were they all dead now?

  His voice was hard, his face showed no sympathy, but for all that he was better than the rabble on the beach. The big man had his hand on the hilt of a knife and her rescuer had his back to him. ‘Behind you,’ she said, ignoring the mockery.

  ‘Dawkins, leave that alone unless you want to end up like Nye.’ The dark man spoke without turning and she saw his hand rested on the butt of a pistol thrust in his belt. ‘There’s no money if you’re dead of a bullet in your fat gut. More for the others, though.’ He raised an eyebrow at Averil and she nodded, lured into complicity. No one else was touching a weapon. He shrugged out of his coat and dropped it over her shoulders. ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘No. T-t-t-too cold.’ Her teeth chattered and she tightened her jaw against the weakness.

  He leaned down, caught her wrists and hauled her to her feet as she groped with clumsy fingers for the edges of the coat. It reached the curve of her buttocks, she could feel it chafing the skin there. ‘I’ll carry you,’ he said as he turned from raking a stare over the watching men.

  ‘No!’ She stumbled, grabbed at his arm. If he lifted her the coat would ride up, she’d be exposed.

  ‘They’ve seen everything there is to see already,’ he said. ‘Tubbs, give me your coat.’

  ‘It’ll get all wet,’ the man grumbled as he pulled it off and shambled down the beach to hand it over. His eyes were avid on her bare legs.

  ‘And you’ll get it back smelling of wet woman. Won’t that be nice?’ Her rescuer took it, wrapped it round her waist and then slung her over his shoulder. Averil gave a gasp of outrage, then realised: like this he had one hand free for his pistol.

  Head down, she stared at the shifting ground. The coats did nothing against the cold, only emphasised her essential nakedness and shame. Averil fought against the faintness that threatened to sweep over her: she had to stay conscious. The man she had hoped would be her rescuer was nothing of the sort. At best he was going to rape her, at worst that gang of ruffians would attack him and they would all have her.

  Last night—it must have been last night, or she’d be dead of the cold by now—she had known she was about to die. Now she wished she had.

  The sound of crunching stones stopped, the angle at which she was hanging levelled off and she saw grass below. Then her captor stopped, ducked, and they were inside some kind of building. ‘Here.’ He dropped her like a sack of potatoes on to a lumpy surface. ‘Don’t go to sleep yet, you’re too cold.’

  The door banged closed behind him and Averil hauled herself up. She was on a bed in a large stone-built hut with five other empty bed frames ranged along the walls. The rough straw in the mattress-bag crackled under her as she shifted to look round. There was a hearth with the ashes of a dead fire at one end, a wooden chair, a table with some crockery on it, a trunk. The hut had a window with threadbare sacking hanging over it, a few shelves, the plank door and a rough stone slab floor without so much as a rag rug.

  Rather be dead … The self-pity brought tears to her eyes. The room steadied and her head stopped swimming. No, I wouldn’t. Averil knuckled the moisture out of her eyes and winced at the sting of the salt. The pain steadied her. She was not a coward and life—until a few hours ago—had been sweet and worth fighting for.

  An upbringing as the pampered daughter of a wealthy family was no preparation for this, but she had fought off all the illnesses life in India could throw at her for twenty of her twenty-two years, she had coped with three months at sea in an East Indiaman and she’d survived a shipwreck. I am not going to die now, not like this, not without a struggle.

  She must get up, now, and find a way out, a weapon before he came back. Averil dragged herself off the bed. There was a strange roaring in her ears and the room seemed to be moving. The floor was shifting, surely? Or was it her? Everything was growing very dark.

  ‘Hell and damnation.’ Luc slammed the door closed behind him. The sprawled naked figure on the floor did not so much as twitch. He picked up the pitcher from the table, knelt beside her and splashed water on her face. That did produce some reaction: she licked her lips.

  ‘Back to bed.’ He scooped her on to the lumpy mattress and pulled the blanket over her. The feel of her in his arms had been good. Too good to dwell on. As it was, the memory of her sitting like a mermaid on the beach with the surf creaming around her long, pale legs was enough to keep a man restless at night with the ache of desire.

  He poured water into a beaker and went back to the bed. ‘Come on, wake up. You need water—drink.’ He knelt and put an arm behind her shoulders to lift her so he could put the beaker to her lips. To his relief she drank thirstily, blindly. Tangled dark blond hair stuck to his coat, bruises blossomed on lightly tanned skin. Long lashes flickered open to reveal dazed hazel-green eyes and then closed as though weighted with lead.

  Then her head lolled to one side against his shoulder, she sighed and went limp.

  ‘Nom d’un nom d’un nom …’ This was the last thing he had planned for, an unconscious woman who needed to be cared for. If he put her into the skiff and sailed her across to St Mary’s and said he had found her on the beach, just one more survivor of the shipwreck last night, then she would be safe. But what if she remembered? Her seeing him did not matter: he had a cover story accepted by the Governor. But he had been with the men and was obviously their leader.

  Luc looked down at the wet, matted tangle of hair that was all he could see of her now. She sighed and snuggled closer and he adjusted her so she fitted more comfortably against him while he thought. She was young, but not a girl. In her early twenties, perhaps. She had not been addled by her experience; her reaction when she warned him about Dawkins told him that she had her wits about
her. In fact, she seemed both courageous and intelligent. What were the chances that she would forget all about this or would dismiss it as a nightmare?

  Not good, he decided after a few more moments holding her. She might blurt out what she had seen to anyone when she regained consciousness and he had no idea who he had to be on his guard against, even in the Governor’s own household. Even the Governor himself.

  His prudent choices were to leave her here with some food and water, lock the door and walk away—which would probably be as close to murder as rowing her out to sea and dropping her overboard would be—or to nurse her until she was strong enough to look after herself.

  What did he know about nursing women? Nothing—but how different could it be from looking after a man? Luc looked at the slender figure huddled in the coarse blankets and admitted to himself that he was daunted. And when she woke, if she did, then she was not going to be best pleased to discover who had been looking after her. He could always point out the alternatives.

  She had drunk something, at least. He would tell Potts to cook broth at dinner time and see if he could get that down her. And he supposed he had better wash the worst of the salt off her and check her for any injuries. Broken bones were more than likely.

  Then he could get her into one of his shirts, make the bed more comfortable and leave her for a while. That would be good. He found he was sweating at the thought of touching her. Damn. He had to get out of here.

  Luc stood on the threshold for a moment to get his breathing steady. He was in a bad way if a half-drowned woman aroused such desire in him. Her defiance and the intelligence in those bruised hazel eyes kept coming back to him and made him feel even worse for lusting after her in this state. Better he thought about the problem she would pose alive, conscious and aware of their presence here.

  To distract himself he eyed the ships in St Helen’s Pool, the sheltered stretch of water bounded by St Helen’s where he stood, uninhabited Teän and St Martin’s to the east, and Tresco to the south.

  That damned shipwreck on the reefs to the west had stirred up the navy like a stick thrust into an anthill. Even the smoke from the endless chain of kelp-burning pits around the shores of all the inhabited islands seemed less dense today. They must have searchers out everywhere looking for bodies and survivors. In fact, there was a jolly boat rowing towards him now. If she had been dead, or unconscious from the start, he could have off-loaded her on them. But then, if his luck was good, he would never have been here in the first place.