My Winter Rogue: A Regency Holiday Collection by Eaton Jillian

Author:Eaton, Jillian [Eaton, Jillian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Will was bored.

After nearly a decade of debauchery it was going to take more than a dinner party to rouse his interest. Thinking otherwise had been a fool’s errand. Then again, he’d been feeling like a bloody fool ever since he had resumed his duties as earl and heir.

I am not long for this world, his father’s letter had said. Come home, William. Accept your title as your birthright. Grant an old man his dying wish.

Dying, Will thought with a snort as he leaned back against a wooden pillar and swirled his glass of amber colored brandy before raising it to his mouth. More like living to the age of one hundred. His father was healthy as a horse and stubborn as a mule. The letter had been a ploy – albeit a rather clever one – to bring his son to heel and it had worked marvelously. For the first time in eight years Will was not spending Christmas in an opium-induced haze at some brothel, but at his family’s estate in the country. An estate he stood to inherit once his father really did kick the bucket which, by the look of him, wasn’t going to be anytime soon.

Lord George Prescott, sixth Marquess of Ware, was not a feeble man, even at the advanced age of three and sixty. Broad shouldered and bull headed, he’d driven his son away with his constant demands for perfection. Their relationship had always been a volatile one and it had finally exploded on the day Will graduated from Oxford.

His father had wanted him to return home at once and take on the full responsibilities of earl while Will had wanted a year – or five – to travel the world and experience life not as a nobleman and son of a Marquess, but as a red-blooded man with wild oats to sow. Needless to say neither father nor son had been willing to compromise and in the end Will had spent the last eight years traveling the continent, indulging in every wicked vice one could possibly imagine, and going out of his way to infuriate his father as much as humanly possible.

Now he was back; the prodigal son returned. And he was bored out of his bloody mind. The only bright spot in an otherwise dull and trivial evening had come from the unlikeliest of sources: a dark-haired chit with gypsy eyes who had been completely and utterly immune to his considerable charms.

Or rather almost immune, he thought with the hint of a smile as he recalled how her cheeks had flooded with color when he closed his fingers around her bare wrist. She was an innocent if ever there was one, but there had been no denying the heat that had sparked between them. Heat that had confused her even as it commanded Will’s attention.

When was the last time he’d felt a lick of fire in his blood when he touched a woman? When was the last time he’d felt genuine need? Not just lust, not just desire, but a need so deep it sang in his bones.

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