The Pleasure Seekers Read online

  “Who are You?” Bliss Asked.

  “Who do you want me to be?” His head dipped to her throat, his silky hair teasing her cheek as he inhaled slowly. “Flowers and fruit. Roses, orange, a hint of vanilla. And heat. Why are you so hot?” The question was spoken in a husky whisper that turned her inside out.

  “Because it’s very warm in here.”

  “No, it’s not. In fact, the breeze coming off the ocean is cool.”

  All Bliss felt was him, encompassing her without having laid a finger on her. “Your name. What is it?”

  “If I tell you, will you let me kiss you?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll kiss you anyway.”

  The Pleasure Seekers

  The critics adore

  Melanie George!

  Acclaim for

  The Art of Seduction

  “The sex scenes are great, the secondary characters interesting, and the resolution satisfying.”

  —Booklist

  “The delightful characters, sensual and fun plot, and witty dialogue are all hallmarks of Ms. George’s charming romances.”

  —Romantic Times

  …AND PRAISE FOR HER

  PREVIOUS NATIONAL

  BESTSELLING FICTION

  “[A]n expert storyteller…. [A] memorable, fast-paced tale that puts Melanie George on your must-read list!”

  —Romantic Times

  “It’s a winner, with one of romance’s feistiest heroines and most alluringly brooding heroes.”

  —Booklist

  “Melanie George writes hot, steamy historicals with characters that leap off the page with spunk and spitfire.”

  —Bridges Magazine

  “A treasure, a triumph, a treat for the heart! [T]ender, witty, and utterly charming…. Ms. George just keeps getting better and better.”

  —Old Book Barn Gazette

  “[P]aradise found!”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Sparkling wit and charming characters.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  Also by Melanie George

  A Very Gothic Christmas

  by Christine Feehan and Melanie George

  The Art of Seduction

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2003 by Melanie George

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-7434-9360-5

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Part One

  England

  “Cautious, very cautious,” thought Emma;

  “he advances inch by inch, and will hazard nothing till he believes himself secure.”

  Jane Austen

  Prologue

  There were things a man sometimes had to do that he wasn’t particularly proud of. The day Caine Ballinger sold his soul to a woman for her pleasure, he’d taken the final step in his descent into hell.

  One

  The sleepless soul that perished in his pride…

  William Wordsworth

  “Come on, damn it.” Sweat beaded on Caine’s back as he thrust into the woman beneath him, her customary mewling sounds making bile rise in his throat. He wanted to be done with her so she would leave.

  She was always ravenous for sex when she woke up, which was why he normally made himself scarce, but she had caught him unawares, climbing into his bed late last night after he had drunk himself into a stupor. He had come awake abruptly when she mounted his morning erection, for which he very nearly throttled her as he pushed her to her back.

  “Oh, yes, Caine…that’s it,” she panted, her face wreathed in ecstasy. Olivia Hamilton, widow of the late Marquis of Buxton, and now Caine’s patroness, was building toward her climax. “Now, Caine. Now.”

  Her legs gripped his flanks like an industrial clamp, urging every ounce from him, whether he wished to give it or not.

  She tossed her head back and moaned. A stream of bright sunlight slanted across her neck, showing the fine lines of her advancing age, which she claimed to be forty, but which he suspected was closer to forty-five. But she could have been twenty-five and it wouldn’t have made his duty any easier. Fitting punishment for a man who had once been so immersed in a world of sin that he’d earned the nickname Vice from his comrades-in-debauchery. What a perversion of fate, to have been trapped by his own immorality.

  Outside, the crisp snap of a gunshot signaled the start of the morning’s fox hunt and the beginning of yet another weeklong house party, where he would hang on the fringes while England’s most dissolute peers descended upon Northcote Hall. People he had once ignorantly called friends, in a home he had, in another lifetime, called his own.

  Northcote had belonged to Ballingers since the fourteenth century, surviving sieges, the uncompromising elements of the Devon coastline, and a fire that had nearly gutted it a hundred years earlier. But it hadn’t survived Henry Ballinger. His father.

  The earl had been a good man, but distracted, the death of his wife pushing him deeper into his own world, his business ventures faltering until debt covered his head, and his son’s head upon his death. Caine had barely escaped with the shirt on his back when he had learned how far-reaching the devastation. The entail on Northcote had lapsed. There had been no way to save it from the auction block, leaving an empty title as his sole inheritance.

  Two years his father had been dead, his broken body found upon the rocks at the base of the cliffs. The last step in Henry Ballinger’s march toward self-destruction was his inability to pay back the money loaned to him by the wealthiest nobleman in the region, Edward Ashton, Duke of Exmoor. There were many defeats the earl could accept, but not when it concerned a debt of honor. In that, his fall from grace had been absolute.

  And so began Caine’s own descent, his mind increasingly consumed with a growing hate, certain that his father would still be alive if the duke had given him more time to pay. Exmoor had pushed his father to his death as though the duke’s hand had been on his father’s back.

  Since then, Caine’s life had become a hellish purgatory, turning him into a man without a soul, without a conscience. He had nothing—nothing but the silent, impotent rage that kept him rising day after day, instead of taking his gun and putting a bullet through his brain.

  Olivia whimpered beneath him, conveying that he was being too rough with her. But even that wouldn’t make her leave. It wouldn’t end this insanity, or change his circumstances. Or bring back the life he had once taken for granted.

  “No, Caine,” she begged when he began to pull out of her, his timing a near science.

  She cursed his cruelty in tormenting her, which gave him a perverse sense of satisfaction. She may have a hold over him, but he had something she wanted badly. Eight inches of it.

  His lack of cooperation was only a momentary annoyance, however, as she arched her hips up to draw him in and stroked her sex until she came, her muscles convulsing around his shaft, trying to wring his seed from him. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He always wore the rubberized French letter to protect himself from impregnating her. One seed swimming upstream, and she’d have him in a choke hold for t
he rest of his life.

  His duty complete, Caine rolled off her, letting the breeze from the open window cool his anger and his overheated body. Summer had finally settled in, banishing spring’s chill to the hours before dawn.

  The smell of the white jasmine that grew in abundance around the house drifted into the room, bringing with it the only vivid recollection Caine had of his mother. She had died when he was four years old, but the haunting fragrance taunted him with brief flashes of memory, of an ethereal figure with a sad smile.

  “Caine,” came the impatient voice of the new lady of the manor. “Untie me.” She tugged on the red silk scarves securing her wrists to the bed posts.

  Caine didn’t bother to look at her. “No.”

  “Blast you, Caine! Untie me now.”

  He had tied her up for his pleasure, not hers. It kept her from touching him. “I think I’ll ring for the maid,” he said, reaching for the bellpull.

  “Don’t!”

  Caine’s hand hovered around the black silk cord. “Why not? The girl might discover a whole new appreciation for you, especially after you docked her a day’s wage for spilling a cup of tea.” Olivia reveled in her petty cruelties; it was the only thing that gave purpose to her life.

  “She deserved it, the clumsy twit. I should have fired her on the spot.”

  “Your constant belittling made her nervous.”

  “Stop making excuses for these incompetent servants. You’re always taking their side. One would think you cared about them.”

  Caine didn’t want to think his actions were motivated by anything other than a desire to prod Olivia. She needed these little doses of humility, though it rarely took the edge off the bitch she was when not lying flat on her back.

  “I don’t care about anyone,” he drawled. “You of all people should know that only too well.”

  “That’s because you have no heart.”

  “True. But it’s not my heart you want, is it? Now, you might want to close your thighs.” His fingers wrapped around the bellpull.

  “Someday, Caine, you’re going to push me too far…and then I’m going to burn your beloved house to the ground.”

  Caine’s hand curled into a fist. He had already been the recipient of her spite, as one by one she systematically destroyed the paintings of his ancestors that had hung in the portrait gallery for centuries. The few that remained now moldered in the attic.

  “I see I have your attention,” she said. “Good. Now untie me.”

  With a snarl, he loosened her bonds. Rolling away from her, he clasped his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about the depths to which he had fallen; the single, fatal character flaw that had caused him to barter his body and soul.

  “That was not well done of you, my lord,” his unwanted bed partner chided as she rubbed feeling back into her arms, the pampered, spoiled princess of doting parents and a moronic husband who’d had the good sense to die.

  “You got what you wanted, Olivia. Now leave me in peace, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re a mean brute, Caine, but utterly delicious.” She slid her palm down over his stomach, the tip of her forefinger circling the head of his penis, now free of the condom.

  He gripped her wrist and brought it down hard on the mattress. “Leave off,” he growled.

  “Don’t be angry with me.”

  “I told you not to come to my bedroom.”

  “But you didn’t come to me, and I needed you.”

  “So find another bedmate for the night.”

  “You’re the only one I want.”

  Caine snorted. “You don’t actually believe that delusion, do you?”

  “Please, Caine. Stop barking at me.” She sidled closer to him, her gaze running over his naked body. “Let me make it up to you.”

  Caine knew what she was going to do and told himself to stop her. He couldn’t stand her, yet his body blared for some kind of fulfillment.

  Her warm breath whispered across his rigid flesh a moment before she took him into her mouth, her blond hair teasing his groin. She was mocking him, knowing how bitterly he resented it when she did this.

  She cupped him, massaging with expert fingers as her wet mouth slid further down his shaft, sucking hard, increasing its dimension as much as he tried to hold back the stirrings of his treasonous body.

  Her lips closed tighter around him, her tongue toying with the crest, nursing just the head before going deep, her hand pumping the base as her mouth took in as much of him as she could manage, the suction building along with the speed, the pressure expanding in his loins.

  On the verge of spewing his seed, she mounted him, her moan a husky contralto as she took the fully aroused, unprotected length of him inside her body.

  Caine immediately wrenched her off him. “Damn you!”

  Anger flared in her eyes as she leaned back against the pillows, her rouged nipples showing dark against the pale outline of her body and the blue satin sheets behind her. She looked like she wanted to hack him into little bits. But knowing she would get nowhere by inciting him further, she switched tactics, her lips curving into a pout, which for some godforsaken reason she thought worked on him.

  “Why must you deny me? You know how much I want a child, yet you hold on to your precious seed like it’s gold. I have money. I could give a babe all it desired: a governess to tend its dirty nappies, a wet nurse to offer up a tit when it’s hungry.”

  “But no last name—unless you’re suggesting marriage, and of course there is the fact that you don’t possess an ounce of moral fiber.”

  “As though you do,” she retorted. “Vice is your virtue. You’re as conscienceless as they come.”

  She was right, of course. Vice had always been his stock-in-trade. “Don’t you have guests to entertain?” he remarked pointedly, rising from the bed and grabbing his trousers from the floor. Shoving his legs into them, he stalked to the window.

  Not surprisingly, she ignored his cue to depart. “Give me a child, Caine. Alfred was unable to do his husbandly duty. It’s unfair, I tell you. Who shall take care of me when I’m old?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  “Every woman should have a child of her own.”

  “We’ve been through this before. The answer is still no. You may hold my finances, but you won’t hold my future.”

  “How horrible of you to say such a thing. Haven’t I given you everything you want? The finest clothes, pin money for your gambling, the cellar stocked with your favorite liquors, and my body to warm your bed. What else could you want?”

  The one thing he seemed destined to live without, Caine thought bitterly.

  “I try to be understanding of what prompts you to behave so cruelly. I know things have not been easy for you.”

  “Do not patronize me,” he warned.

  “Fine. Since you wish to be frank, and have raised the issue of your circumstances, let’s discuss them, then. The cold truth is, I do hold your future in my hand.”

  His gaze snapped over his shoulder, the fury on his face making her flinch. “Don’t doubt that I could find another patroness.”

  “But could you find one who owns your ancestral home?” she said with a taunting lift of her eyebrows. “Northcote obsesses you, Caine. It runs through your veins like a drug and you can’t exorcise it. Now it belongs to me. I will get what I want eventually. I always do. So why not stop fighting it?”

  Caine shut her out, knowing he was trapped by his own demons and unable to break free. Damn her for a soulless bitch, for tossing his weakness in his face.

  His gaze centered on the sea beyond the cliffs. The turbulent blue-green water of the Bristol Channel mirrored his mood, waves cresting with white foam as they crashed thunderously against the jagged rocks that rose hundreds of feet high.

  Despite the ghosts left to haunt him, this was home, his solitary link to the world he had once known. Northcote was his identity, his safe harbor, and without it he felt
unanchored, adrift. Olivia had called it his obsession, and it was. He couldn’t just walk away, no matter how much it ripped at his pride to submit to her sexual demands. He couldn’t relinquish this last piece of his life.

  Caine heard her rise from the bed and move toward him. “Though you deserve to be banished for your less-than-lover-like behavior,” she said in a sultry voice, “I can’t seem to send you away. You’re very hard to resist, my lord.” She wrapped her arms around his waist, her breasts flattening against his back as she purred, “And so very well endowed.” Her hands slid over the front of his trousers.

  His fingers closed around her wrist with just enough force to make her whimper. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Please try to be civil today. You’ll scare off my guests with that black scowl.”

  “As if I give a damn. You know how I feel about having those barracudas here.” He hated being paraded about as her stud.

  “I enjoy these gatherings. This place is as lifeless as a graveyard, otherwise.”

  “If you don’t like it here, then why did you make your dearly departed, cuckolded husband buy it?”

  “Because I found a wicked sort of pleasure in its tragic history. People throwing themselves off cliffs in despair. How very dramatic.”

  Caine tensed, her intended barb striking true. “Shut up.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m sorry. That was your father, wasn’t it? I had forgotten.”

  “You’re a vicious bitch, and you damn well know it.” Christ, he had to get out. He was suffocating.

  As he turned from the window, he caught a glimpse of two riders. The duo burst from the woods at breakneck speed, performing the most reckless of maneuvers as they raced toward the house.

  When the lead horse attempted a perilous leap over a crevice, Caine’s attention focused on the rider. Female. An idiotic female who was taking unbelievable risks with her life and that of her mount.