Page 1 of When the Scoundrel Sins

PROLOGUE

Mayfair, London

April 1816

Eyes widening, eighteen-year-old Annabelle Green stepped back from Quinton Carlisle, against whose hard front she’d just so scandalously pressed herself. She brought her hand against her lips. Swollen, hot, wet…Oh heavens, he’d beenkissingher.

Dear God, she’d let him!

She bit back a groan of self-recrimination.Let?She’d practically jumped into the scoundrel’s arms to be kissed.

“Annabelle?” he asked softly with concern. The noise from the Countess of St James’s crowded ball barely reached them beneath the thick rose bower at the rear of the garden, where dark shadows cocooned them together.

She stared at him, for the life of her not knowing what to say. A few minutes ago, she’d slid out the library terrace door to escape the crush of the party, to take a short turn around the garden. To give herself a few minutes of peace when she wasn’t the object of whispers and laughter from the other ladies at the ball who thought she was overreaching. She was only a lady’s companion, after all, with no real right to wear silk and jewels or to dance with eligible gentlemen.

But she’d come across Quinton Carlisle in the shadows. And then she’d found herself in his arms, being given the most incredible kiss imaginable.

“Are you all right?” he pressed. From the expression on his shadow-darkened face, he was just as bewildered as she was.

“You—you kissed me,” she whispered around her fingers, still pressed to her mouth.

“I certainly did.” A devilish grin quirked at this lips. “And you kissed me back.”

“I did not!”

He arched an amused brow at that wholly obvious lie.

Annabelle groaned. It hadn’t been only a kiss, either. It had been a full-out embrace, eager and hungry, with nibbles and sucks and wandering hands—

“I’d like to do it again.” He stepped forward to close the distance between them. His hot gaze dropped to her mouth. “Very much.”

Her hand fell away from her lips, not to encourage him but because she was utterly confused. What on earth had come over them? “But we don’t even like each other!” she squeaked out.

Well, he didn’t likeher, at any rate.

He was Quinton Carlisle, for heaven’s sake. She’d known him since she was ten. He had a quick smile that always set butterflies swirling in her belly and a golden handsomeness she was certain would have made Adonis jealous. One of London’s most charming scoundrels, he turned the heads of bored society widows and wives everywhere he went, even at just twenty-one. Belle would have had to be dead or eighty not to be attracted to him.

But he was also the bane of her existence. He never seemed to tire of teasing her, just as he had since they were children. They were friends, certainly, but this season he seemed to take great delight in angering her until flames could have shot out of her head. While she might have fantasized about him, he certainly never gave a second thought about her.

Until tonight. When his arms had been around her. His hard body had pressed against her soft one, and his lips had played over hers, teasing kiss after kiss from her until she thought she might explode from the throbbing ache he spun through her.

Oh, what a delicious mouth he had! No wonder all those women in thetonpractically threw themselves at him. When he knew how to kiss like that, why would they care about his reputation as one of the wild Carlisle brothers?

ButBellecared. Her reputationalreadyhung by a thread, simply because of who she was. Nothing but the homeless daughter of one of Lord Ainsley’s former housekeepers whom he and Lady Ainsley had pitied enough to take in, a penniless companion whose mother was dead and whose convict father was serving in prison. Despite Lord and Lady Ainsley’s attempts to bring her into society’s graces, not one person inside that ball tonight was willing to accept her. And all of them let her know it, too. Repeatedly.

Now she’d put even that tenuous position into jeopardy. Heavens, how could she have gotten herself into this situation? With Quinton Carlisle, no less! Her head swam with it.

“But I do like you, Belle,” he corrected in a deep and husky voice.

Then her head practically whirled itself right off her neck. He…likedher?

His mouth hovered just above hers, close enough that she felt the heat of his breath shiver across her lips. “I can show you how much if you don’t believe me.”

She pressed her hand flat against his chest to keep him away, although her traitorous fingertips curled into the brocade of his waistcoat to keep him right there. “Why did you kiss me like that?”

He lowered his head, to briefly bring his lips to hers. Yet that kiss was so much more than a peck. It held promises of all kinds of wicked things he’d do to her if she let him…all kinds of deliciously tempting things. “Because I wanted to.”

He grinned at her in the shadows, then leaned in to kiss her again, this time with clearly more in mind than a mere touch of lips—