Lost in Pleasure

London, 1816

Richard, Earl of Kilcreggan, longs for the thrill of the unpredictable—but nothing prepares him for the sudden appearance of a beguiling woman in his library. As a man of science, he’s intrigued by her story of time-travel. As a man of passion, he cannot resist their smoldering desire.

Thoroughly modern Errin McGill never dreamed a wish for romance would land her in Regency London—and face-to-face with the most attractive man she’s ever imagined. But her fantasy man and the sensual pleasure he offers is decidedly real…

Lost in Pleasure

Marguerite Kaye

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Copyright

Chapter One

Kilcreggan House, London, 1816

Richard, the third Earl of Kilcreggan, picked up his newly delivered package of books, crossed his legs, clad in tight-fitting pantaloons and polished leather boots, and settled into his favourite wingback chair. Amongst the bundle was a new German edition of Gauss, but as he idly flicked through the uncut pages, the book he had been so eagerly awaiting failed to hold his attention.

The library, his favourite room, was located at the back of Kilcreggan House, which itself stood on the south corner of Cavendish Square. Sash windows looked out onto the garden where Richard kept his treasured telescope, made to one of Mr Herschel’s designs. Much of the library’s wall space was taken up by glass-fronted bookcases, but a large mahogany cabinet with a rosewood veneer stood in the corner by the fireplace, its innumerable drawers containing the most prized of Richard’s specimens—butterflies and insects, semi-precious stones, fossils, and a plethora of other curios he had amassed on his extensive travels. His famed exotic botanical specimens, also collected abroad, were cultivated at his country seat in a number of expensively heated custom-built succession houses. These featured in the background of the painting that hung above the mantel.

Richard’s portrait, by the renowned Scottish artist Henry Raeburn, was, even he conceded, a good likeness. It depicted a tall man with a darkly brooding face, too forbidding to be considered classically handsome, but arresting enough to be unsettling. Mr Raeburn had captured the earl’s air of amused detachment, as if the sitter took neither the portrait nor himself too seriously. A volume of Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia was held open in his hands but his golden-brown eyes gazed out intently at the viewer, something that Richard’s friends and family found so disconcerting that he had been forced to move the portrait from the dining room, in which it had originally been hung. ‘Can’t eat with you staring over my shoulder like that, my dear fellow,’ his friend Nick Lytton had joked.

Richard drummed his fingers on the frontispiece of a volume of poems. He was bored. No, not just bored, he was malcontent, though it pained him to admit it, for there was no logical reason to be so, and he was a man who valued logic above all else. Getting to his feet, he strode over to gaze out of the window. He was in no mood to be convivial, he had no urge for intellectual debate, and even the thought of whiling away an afternoon making love to a beautiful woman roused in him little more than mild ennui. Despite the endless opportunities with which his acknowledged charm and considerable wealth presented him, the pleasure he derived from lovemaking was becoming ever more unsatisfactory, leaving him spent but not sated. The sense that there was something vital missing from his life nagged at him.

He sighed heavily. Nick Lytton insisted that what he needed was a wife. Nick, who had for years forsworn matrimony, had recently been felled by a beautiful French heiress and had now become a staunch advocate of the married state. Richard was not persuaded. Love was a transient illusion, a trick of nature designed to ensure the continuation of the species, nothing more. There was no such thing as eternal love, nor such a woman as the perfect mate. Richard had never even come close to being mildly infatuated, never mind beguiled. Now, at six-and-thirty, he considered himself pretty much immune to emotions of that sort. As a man of science, he held that to be an entirely appropriate state of affairs.

Outside, the rain started to fall, the kind of soft grey drizzle that enveloped one like a damp blanket. It matched Richard’s mood perfectly. He pressed his forehead against the windowpane and closed his eyes. There was much to be said for the reassuring predictability of science, but sometimes, just occasionally, it would be nice to experience the thrill of the unexpected.

London, the present.

Errin McGill pushed open the door of the small junk shop in Camberwell and paused, as she always did, to drink in the familiar evocative smell of old wood, mildewed books and damp upholstery. She loved this place, so much so that she always made it her first port of call on her regular buying trips from New York, though she rarely purchased anything here. Errin’s wealthy Manhattan clients demanded the very best, which meant genuine antiques in mint condition, without any of the scratches and signs of wear and tear that Errin herself preferred, for they gave each piece a provenance, a personality. But her rich clients weren’t really interested in history. They wanted ‘authentic’ period rooms, unsullied by evidence of real age. If antiques could somehow be injected with botox serum, that’s what her clients would have her do to them.