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  SENSATION

  THEA DEVINE

  BRAVA BOOKS

  2004

  In the captivating Satisfaction, USA Today bestselling author Thea Devine introduced the Galliard brothers—men who like their pleasures and take them

  as they come. Now, meet Kyger Galliard, a man who has suppressed every need and desire in service of his family. Finally free to immerse himself in all

  the seductions of a city steeped in sin, there isn 't a temptation he won't try, a decency he won't flout, or a woman he won't use...until he meets Angilee.,.

  UTTER DESPERATION

  Angilee Rosslyn, Southern American debutante, has been brought to London by her ruthless father to make a profitable marriage to the Viscount Wroth. Titled though he may be, the Viscount is a pig. Desperate for a way out of the marriage, the headstrong Angilee hits on a brilliant solution: she will pay to be deflowered. And who better to be the agent of her downfall than the notorious Kyger Galliard?

  UNCONTROLLABLE DESIRE

  Want. Need. Desire. It's all the same thing to Kyger, spending his nights drowning in sex and sin. He's instantly intrigued by Angilee—by her beauty, her determination, her body....One night of white-hot passion together only whets his appetite, and soon he's arranging for clandestine meetings in the midst of London's social whirl, falling deeper under her spell, even as he realizes the danger they are in...

  UNQUESTIONABLE DANGER

  Now, in a world of smoke and mirrors, where secret rooms hold bold pleasures no good man should witness, Kyger must walk a tightrope to discover who is an enemy, who is an ally, and who really is involved in a diabolical secret society he has sworn to destroy. But his best chance to accomplish his mission hinges on his using the sensual and luscious Angilee---- a woman he'd do anything to protect—as his unwitting pawn...

  Prologue

  London, at a session of Parliament Early March 1897

  "There he is." The voice was barely above a whisper.

  The Sicarian nodded. He didn't need to look; he knew the man. He knew everything about the man who was generally con­sidered the logical successor to the prime minister.

  The man was Anthony Venable, a charismatic young man who had all the perfect attributes of an up-and-coming leader: youth, recklessness, a fresh voice, and a superlative and majestic confidence that could even have been called autocratic; there was not a jot of humility marring his moral stance—he knew exactly what was right for everyone and who could provide it.

  He was so very good looking women fell all over him, dowa­gers and debutantes alike; and he was as plumed and polished as only a man can be who has the kind of inherited wealth with which to indulge himself.

  In addition to that, he had gotten major monetary support from some very prominent politicians who saw in him the future of the country and had pushed him right up into the House of Commons where he performed with a deceptive ease as if he had been standing for years. No one questioned why such a minor player had garnered such impressive backing.

  It didn't matter; his impact was immediate and absolute. They immediately nicknamed him the musketeer because of the sweeping philosophy of change he continually advocated in his rich, urgent, persuasive, and sometimes haranguing voice: control of everything in the hands of the few, and control of the country in the hands of one elected leader.

  He would be the overseer of it all. It wasn't something said out loud. It was tacitly understood what he wanted, and that he was the one who had all the answers; they had only to elect him to make the decisions, elect him to take control, and all the free­doms they coveted would be theirs.

  No one saw that under that mask of elegance, wealth and charm, there was a charismatic zealot running amok, seducing the adoring crowds who hung on his every word.

  They were listening intently now as he spoke from the podium in the House of Commons in his deep, hypnotic, compelling voice. They loved him. Everyone loved him. Devoured every snippet of gossip about him. Followed every line in the paper that bore his name. Thought they were his next best friend, that he had their best interests at heart, that he wanted only to give them a perfect life in a perfect world.

  Look at how he had formed a consulting party, to give the populace a forum to express their opinions and make them feel they counted. That was Tony Venable. He had a way of making everyone feel that he was listening, that he heard.

  He was the right man for the moment: he would listen, he would act, he would lead.

  He was special, extraordinary, the kind of political creature who comes along once in a lifetime.

  He had the crowd in the palm of his hand. Anything he wanted, and he wanted much, they roared their approval.

  But he did not have the approval of two, the watcher and the Sicarian, who were seated in the shadows of the viewing boxes that day.

  And that was most important of all.

  "He has gone beyond," the watcher said.

  The Sicarian nodded. "He will be stopped. Soon."

  Nothing more needed to be said. Their doctrine demanded it. Their discipline was to obey.

  Two days later, Tony Venable was found dead on the floor in his library, a bloody little cut in the shape of a fishhook on his bare chest, and his fingers curled around a letter opener, as if he had tried, with just this puny object, to fight off his murderer.

  The public was outraged. It couldn't be true. They wouldn't believe it. The murderer must be caught. Soon. Now.

  And it was the watcher and the Sicarian who were the first, most public and most vocal, in demanding that justice must be done ...

  Chapter One

  Sometimes a man had to live between yesterday and tomorrow, because in the present, he had no future. Sometimes he had just to let himself go and immerse himself in sex, submerge himself in sin, and submit to every base instinct he had kept suppressed in the name of civility, restraint and common decency.

  Sometimes, it felt really good to just surrender his body to the pure physical demand that he had ruthlessly kept in check every day of his life.

  And that was just one reason why Kyger Galliard found him­self sprawled naked on an ermine-covered platform, wallowing in the carnal excesses of Bullhead Manor, a tight rubber ring around the base of his ramrod penis while one after the other, beautiful naked sirens slithered in, just as he had ordered, and mounted him. Just one hot, tight tunnel after the other in which to sub­sume his desire and his pent-up, inexhaustible lust. He had turned into Lujan, he thought suddenly. The thought jolted him. The unholy irony of it. Given the right circumstances, he had become his brother, after years of being his brother's keeper. Only he wasn't feckless, reckless or dissolute. All this dissipation had a purpose, and it wasn't just pleasure.

  Even though pleasure definitely was at the top of the list of reasons why he was at Bullhead Manor.

  Except, he was getting bored stiff with all these bouts of fuck­ing in hot holes with no faces, and nothing to distinguish any of the women but their willingness to spread their legs.

  That just had never been his way, and with nothing to restrain him or contain him, he still found it hard to conceive of how Lujan had spent years similarly occupied to no avail.

  Yet here he was at Bullhead Manor, naked and willing, his penis raring to go.

  And Lujan had put him here. Good God. The door opened. Goddamn—not another one.

  Absolutely another one, just as he had ordered. He wondered if someone was keeping score. He wondered what the women talked about after they left him, after they left any of the patrons upon fulfilling all their perverse desires.

  But he shouldn't be thinking about these things when a ripe naked woman was crawling into the room, her backside undulat­ing with each movement, her breasts swinging, her nipples tight, her desire
to please him thickening the air like smoke.

  He should be thinking about the gnawing need in his groin, and the almost instant gratification that would take all of five minutes. No need to please the ladies. Just the need to fuck and spew and ready himself for the next one.

  He felt her now, hot and close, her breathing steady, heavy, simulating the need and desire that neither of them felt.

  Up onto the sumptuous platform she came, sliding her body up over his like a piece of fine silk, draping herself over his hips, his belly, and angling herself for the optimum penetration of her hot pulsating core onto his staff.

  He braced himself for the hot slide of her wetness encompass­ing him. And just like every other time, the initial excitement, the lure of free, unfettered sex caromed wildly down his conscious­ness into an almost mechanical pumping response where his penis took over, his mind disengaged, and the race to culmination became primal, instinctual, and tinged, in the end, with a body-suffusing disappointment.

  His penis was all there, as if it had a mind of its own, and had given itself over to as much hard fucking as it could stand in the wake of years of denial. He calculated he had spilled enough semen to fill a punch bowl, to fill as many women as could fill this room for two dozen days, enough to spawn a half dozen devils in hell.

  But these women weren't the woman. The one who was mis­tress of Waybury House, the one who now nurtured the son she had spawned by his brother's seed. The one with whom he was still hopelessly, futilely in love. Goddamn.. .

  Jesus. .. Jancie... He had to stop thinking about Jancie. A year and a thousand miles' distance from her hadn't cooled his fire. And now he was fifty miles too near, with an amorphous mission too close to home that was not nearly distraction enough to keep her far from his thoughts.

  And drowning in sex was not the antidote for him. He supposed that Lujan had thought it would be. He'd been away too long, but he never thought he had any other choice but to leave.

  He had needed to get away from Jancie, from the tentacles of the past, from the betrayals of their fathers that left both men dead, the mystery of his baby brother's disappearance solved, and a fortune in diamonds in his, Jancie's, and Lujan's hands.

  After that, there just was nothing to do but leave. Trying to make things work was fruitless. He ran—from the past, from un­requited desire, from responsibility, and from a love that couldn't be. Jancie had made her choice, and Lujan wanted her, with all that entailed, after a lifetime of indiscriminate debauchery spent in part at Bullhead Manor.

  And Jancie had forgiven Lujan everything and taken him back, in spite of all that.

  What an irony that he'd wound up here, in Lujan's stead. Lujan, only better—words he'd heard all his life, laughable now. Not that much better when you got to the bottom line. Sex was sex, and no man, no matter how principled and austere, could withstand it. Not even he was immune, and it was God's joke that he had always thought he was.

  And over and above that, there was the blasphemy of thinking about his brother's wife instead of this luscious piece of tail riding him like a champion steeplechaser; he had no more feeling about it, or her, than he did about the next stranger on the street.

  But his penis was rampant with the building, engorging feeling of letting go, yielding to a force all on its own, pushing and pumping to reach exaltation.

  It took no little time—no need to hold back, to need, to feel, to care. Just get it out, get it over and get on to the next one.

  She rode him high, arching her back, cupping her breasts. Her nipples were hard, tight, luscious little buttons that she pulled and tweaked with her whore's expertise whenever she caught him looking at them.

  Did she feel? Did she care? No, she wanted only to arouse him, ride him and bring him to a frothing flood of come.

  No time at all to accomplish that now. It didn't take more than just the thought. .. immediately, he felt his lower torso seiz­ing, lifting, all his energy gathering for that one last hot hard drive to oblivion.

  It came like a gunshot, one hot gut-wrenching blast that left him boneless, breathless, and as uncorked as a bottle of cham­pagne. And it was so unexpected, he almost spun out of control.

  Not quite, though. He was a man who prided himself on being in control. And even in the wake of that cataclysmic spending, where he felt every last eddying swirl of pleasure down to that tight rubber ring, there was still a part of him standing outside and watching everything, a little amazed, wholly detached and analyzing it all.

  The whore was waiting, still astride his penis, with his penis— she had made certain of this—still as deeply embedded within her as when she first mounted him.

  There was more to come.

  She smiled at him knowingly, her fingers still busy squeezing and playing with her nipples, watching his expression, seeking his eyes, shimmying her hips to arouse him all over again.

  Just what he was paying for. A hot body to make him come any which way she could. But for one moment, he had felt some­thing else, something deeper, something outside himself, and in­side, simultaneously.

  He ruthlessly pushed it away. This was something he didn't want to feel when he was pounding away inside a body he'd paid to occupy.

  Because he knew it for what it was—that shocking moment of recognition that he could Jose himself in someone he loved. It was not a gift to be given to a whore.

  "My lord," she whispered. Her voice was husky as fog, on the edge of impatience.

  "Come again," he invited, because that was his mission, his message.

  She smiled again, that smug knowing whore smile, and lifted her hips, and began her whore's dance all up and down his iron bar of a pole.

  Up and down and around and down .,. too easy to get lost in sensation and want nothing more.

  Just now, just now—it was enough. This was a most experi­enced courtesan, whose hands were everywhere on her body, en­ticing, arousing, fondling and feeling every place he would want to, if she would let him.

  And as he raced toward the finish, she slapped his flanks, and tweaked his nipples, and pumped him ferociously in and out of her bottomless sex, and he had no choice at all but to submit, succumb, and surrender.

  It was not the same. It just was what it was. The spume, the pumping aftershocks of semen releasing. The feeling of deflation. The sense of the whore sinking down deep against his chest for a moment, her hands moving over his breast, her finger tracing lightly against his skin.

  He felt depleted at last. The air was thick with sex and scent. He felt foggy and groggy with this last release; there was some­thing sweet in the air, something seductive, that he could sink into with much more abandon than a wanton's body.

  So perhaps he was imagining things—he didn't know precisely when she removed herself from his penis; he thought he felt her fingers sliding off the ring because there was a sense of relief from the constriction; he thought he heard her whisper something sibi­lant ... something that sounded like the word seven. For certain he felt her fingers drawing on his skin—circles, lines, numbers?— all over his chest, around his nipples, and down his belly.

  ... Seven .:. Seven hours? Seven minutes? Seven days? No, he'd dreamt it in the aftermath of all this hotbox sex, his penis fi­nally drained and sapped of all desire, all need, all primal re­sponse, and him wholly asleep before she even removed herself from the saddle of his hips.

  .. .seven .. .

  As many days as he had been at Bullhead Manor. As many or­gasms as he had in a hour. As many years as it would take to for­get the thing he most wanted to remember.

  The scent was luscious; it permeated everywhere. It smelled like roses and something matte and familiar. It crept over him like a blanket, and he felt comforted and sublime.

  He was done here for now, he thought in that netherworld where he was skirting the edge of a deep unconscious sleep and yet awake enough to have a cogent thought. The death of a minor but coming member of Parliament just didn't seem to have any­thing to
do with sin, sex and the perversions of Bullhead Manor.

  He was free ... untethered, floating free, finally free—of re­sponsibility, duty, penury, pestilence, possibilities, pretenses, per-verseness. His seven deadly sins released into the heavens like so many hot air balloons ... drifting away from him, leaving him wholly and completely free ... and alone, suddenly ... for how long he didn't know—the whore had vanished like fog, leaving him alone ... him, his sins, his conscience—alone ... oh, good Lord, please—

  "I want him."

  The three words blasted into his consciousness, the voice se­ductively feminine with an unrecognizable accent so patently out of place at Bullhead that it was as jarring as a headache, and worse, it was too close and very adamant.

  "I want him."

  "Madam—" Soothing tones, leading her away, explaining he was a privileged customer whom one did not demand to fuck out of hand.

  "But want him. .."

  "Yes, madam..." Conciliating tones. Everything and any­thing was possible at Bullhead. Everybody knew that, especially the spoiled bitchy women of wealth who had the wherewithal to buy anything in their world.

  But this was a dream, of course.

  Immediately there was a knock on the door, and a shadowy figure slipped in. "My lord." Hushed tones. "If I may—the lady would like to try you. She says she will pay."

  Kyger levered himself up onto one elbow and eyed himself. He wasn't wholly at half-staff, it seemed. But since it was a dream, of course he could get primed and potent in a minute—for money.

  Nice dream.

  He shrugged. "Send the body in."

  "Most accommodating."

  "Definitely my strong suit," he murmured. Who was this unc­tuous dream-person—the ringmaster directing the circus? God, it was a circus, and he was the lion tamer, the tightrope walker, the clown.. .

  He fell back onto the bed and closed his eyes. Another sweet scent came wafting at him. A rustle of skirts. A presence in the room, a body sinking down on the platform next to him.

  A woman's hand stroking the ermine, brushing up against his flanks, her fingers tentative but firm—too real to be a dream, but what else could it be?