Excerpt of Property of the Viscount by Louisa Crane

Caroline emerged from a long, hot bath to find Rexton standing before the cheval mirror in his shirtsleeves, tying his long, voluminous white cravat. The nearly empty gin bottle stood open on the dressing table next to him.

David Childe, Lord Rexton, was a singularly complicated man—erudite, yet dissipated, ruthless yet generous, and indecently beautiful. She wished he didn’t fascinate her. She very much wished she hadn’t lain in that steamy, rose-scented bath until her fingertips shriveled, revisiting in her mind the sight of him relieving his pent-up lust by his own hand. Never had she imagined that she might find such a thing arousing, yet the very memory of it had excited her passions to an almost excruciating degree. She might have resorted to slaking her lust as Rexton had slaked his, had she not forgotten to lock the bathroom door. The prospect of him walking in on her as she pleasured herself was too mortifying to risk.

He eyed her reflection in the mirror, his gaze lighting on her damp hair, her fresh-scrubbed face, the gilded steel slave collar, and her breasts, their contours all too apparent beneath her thin silken wrapper. He met her gaze, and for a fleeting moment she saw a glimmer of heat in his eyes before they went cold and opaque, as if a shade had been pulled down over them. He’d been much the same yesterday, except for that brief moment of rapport in the bathhouse.

“Shall I choose my own clothing, my lord?” she asked.

“Is that not what I told you to—shit!” He yanked at the knot he’d just made, unwrapped the cravat, and flung it to the floor. “Shit, shit, shit.”

He’d sworn liberally in her presence since yesterday afternoon, as if she’d somehow been demoted in his mind from lady to trollop.

Caroline picked up the cravat, which she folded just to have something to do while Rexton paced across the room and back again, the balls of his hands pressed against his forehead. “Do you have a headache, my lord?”

“No. And I don’t recall giving you leave to speak.”

Since yesterday, he had demanded that she keep her counsel even in private. He sank into a red leather chair, leaned forward on his elbows, and scrubbed his hands over his face. Perhaps, she thought, it would lighten his mood if she were to say what she’d wanted to say to him ever since she woke up that morning.

“My lord, if I might just—”

“Shut up!” He bounded up from the chair and stalked toward her until she felt one of the urn-shaped bedposts at her back. Hovering over her, flushed with fury, he yelled, “Can’t you just fucking shut up?”

Say it. Just say it. It will help. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said tremulously, twisting the cravat in her hands.

He looked at her as if she were mad. “Whatever for?”

“I know that you bought me as a kindness, to keep Lord Dunhurst from having me.”

“Has it occurred to you that he may have been right when he accused me of buying you just to spite him?”

She shook her head, which held strangely wobbly on her neck; her hands were trembling. “You did it for me. You want people to think you’re cold and uncaring, but you can’t hide your true nature. You have a good heart, a compassionate heart.”

“This is all the heart I’ve got,” he said, holding up the Master’s Pendant that hung around his neck. “It’s all the heart I want. And if you think otherwise, you’re a fool.”

“Then, I’m a fool, because I know what’s in here.” She pressed a hand to his chest, a wall of warm, solid flesh beneath cool linen. “I can feel it beating. It’s the most real and vital part of you.”

“Can you feel this?” Seizing her hand, he pulled it downward, molding it to his sex through his trousers. “This is a damn sight more real and vital than that lump of meat in my chest.”

Caroline tried to pull away, but his grip was far too strong. He pressed it harder to his member, which swelled and stiffened as he rubbed her palm up and down its length. She turned her head and closed her eyes, trying not to think about what she was doing, what he was making her do—and how it was making her feel, to be touching him this way. The arousal she’d felt in the bath came rushing back with breathtaking force.

Rexton seized her by the chin and jerked her head around to face him. She opened her eyes and saw his eyes, black and hungry and so close that she felt as if the sun had winked out, turning day into night.

He said, “I’m not what you think I am. The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

He reached for the sash that secured her empire-waist wrapper.

Bewildered by this sudden turn of events, she instinctively tried to push him away. Rexton captured her hands, raised them over her head, and snapped the wrist cuffs together through one of the handles on the urn.

He untied the sash and whipped open the wrapper, leaving her naked and exposed. With one hand, he kneaded a breast; with the other, he unbuttoned his trousers. The shock of his hot, rough palm on her bare flesh made her sex throb wildly. Being bound was a relief, just as it had been during the Inspection of the Slaves. This would happen with or without her cooperation; she was helpless to resist.