Read My Dangerous Duke for Free Online

drinking?
    Well, she could sober up while he concluded matters with the smugglers. She was a bed warmer; let her warm his bed until he got through here.
    Then he would join her, and they would have some fun.
    He still couldn’t help wondering, though, why she had stared at him so strangely … as though she was scared of him. Those big, green, haunted eyes. Even now, he found himself perturbed by her strange, disquieting allure, plaguing him with equal parts desire and uneasiness.
    Maybe her possible mission as a spy for the smugglers had suddenly seemed too difficult for her once she was in his presence. Most people realized on sight he was not to be trifled with, but surely she did not think he would ever hurt a woman.
    True, there was the old family curse that might claim otherwise about the men in his line, but surely she didn’t believe in that rubbish.
    At least he liked to think it was rubbish.
    If she was nervous of his size, she needn’t have feared that, either. He knew how to safely wield the oversized weapon with which Nature had endowed him.
    Perhaps she had never been bedded by an aristocrat before, but if that was the case, she had better get used to it, he thought cynically. She’d soon find out that dukes had the same base needs as any other blackguard.
    Forget her, man. There’s work to be done! You’ll join her soon enough. With that, he dismissed her from his mind, refusing, as ever, to let a woman distract him. They were objects of pleasure, a favorite hobby, the reward for a hard day’s work, and nothing more.
    He stood as Doyle’s men brought in the troublemakers, some of them cursing and struggling as they were marched in. He maintained a stony silence until Caleb had bullied the miscreants into line.
    “These are the lads behind it, Yer Grace,” Doyle said at last.
    Resting his hands on his hips, Rohan searched the faces of the guilty men for a long moment with a brooding stare. Scanning the line of angry, resentful scowls, he took note of Pete and Denny Doyle, Caleb’s nephews.
    Each about twenty years old, these two alone seemed resigned to their fate. The other four looked prepared to start fighting again.
    “Take them to the dungeon,” he ordered his black-clad contingent of personally trained guards.
    “Yes, sir,” said trusty Sergeant Parker. He and his men took the shipwreckers from the chastened smugglers, answering their curses and attempts to writhe free with a rough bit of muscle.
    Rohan watched as his soldiers marched the villains out of the great hall in chains.
    There now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? he almost said to the remaining smugglers, who were to be spared. But when he looked at them again, he saw they were distraught, faced with their mates’ doom, and he managed to curb his sarcasm.
    Hopefully, this would at least scare the rest of them back into relatively good behavior. The hall was silent after the guilty had been marched off to the dungeon.
    That, God knew, was one place not even he would have wanted to spend a night, not after some of the weird phenomena he had witnessed down there.
    Flesh-and-blood enemies were one thing, but even the most invincible warrior could not battle vengeful apparitions.
    He refused to say much to anyone about his occasional brushes with the dead around this haunted pile. His brother agents back in London were fond of ribbing him for his superstitions, but he shrugged off their laughter.
    He knew what he knew. None of them came from cursed bloodlines, after all. In his circumstances, a man did well at least to pay attention to such things.
    As if on cue, a burst of howling winter wind slammed the castle, like the Alchemist himself unleashing some dark new spell. Rohan shrugged off the chill, but such eerie thoughts made him all the more glad they had brought him the girl. On so foul a night, it would be good to have a warm body beside him in bed. And beneath him, and on top of him …
    He cleared his throat, eager to get his