by Eloisa James
“I’m learning,” he said. “I have a great deal to learn.”
“What do you mean?” They were approaching a large hedge, from within which emerged the sounds of an orchestra tuning its instruments.
“Handel is inside,” Rees said, steering Helene toward an arch cut in the shrubbery, “likely shuddering at the sounds around him. I’m afraid that the Vauxhall Orchestra is not going to achieve fame any time soon.”
“But what did you mean by learning?” Helene persisted. “Are you thinking in a musical sense?”
“No,” he said. And showed no inclination to continue.
Helene let him seat her on a marble bench before the statue, and then said, “Honest to goodness, Rees, you must be the most frustrating conversationalist alive! What on earth did you mean by that comment?”
“Something Tom said to me.”
Rees sprawled out next to her on the bench, muscled thighs clearly outlined by snug pantaloons, his arms carelessly flung on the back of the bench. Helene quickly looked away from his legs. The very sight of them—and the memory of him standing over her in the pasture, quite unclothed—made her feel hot and prickly.
“Yes?” she said encouragingly. Unfortunately, her gaze had alit on his hands, and that made her think of the way his fingers curved around her breast, and the way he bent his head to the same place, kissing her almost—almost reverently. She shifted uneasily in her seat. It was mortifying to be looking forward to Rees’s daily bedding. That couldn’t be the case. She must be delusional.
“Well?” she snapped, suddenly irritated. “Either you’re learning or you’re not. Out with it!”
He turned to her, distinctly amused. The dimples in his cheeks had deepened and there was laughter in his eyes. Other people might have called his face expressionless, but she—
Helene took a deep breath. “Rees?” she said between clenched teeth.
“My father handily arranged his sons into two categories,” he said, dropping his head back so that he could look up into the wilderness of black tree limbs curling into the night sky above them. “I was the sinner, and Tom the saint.”
“Well, that seems fairly acute of him,” Helene said a bit snappishly.
“Yes, but I begin to think I am less of a reprobate than he believed,” Rees said. “I find it rather tedious, to tell the truth, Helene.”
“Sinning?” she asked, disbelieving.
“Yes, sinning. And I begin to think that Tom is finding the saintly life just as tedious,” Rees continued.
“Well, I certainly don’t see any sign of your finding your life tedious!” Helene said, and then wished she could take the words back. He was watching her, so she carefully examined Handel’s booted, marble toes.
“I don’t find it tedious when I’m with you,” he said suddenly.
Helene had to suppress a smile. “We hardly engage in sinning,” she pointed out.
“That’s just it,” he said, and his hand began tangling in the little wisps of hair at the back of her neck.
Helene looked straight ahead, unable to turn her neck and see his expression.
He stood up, and his tone was utterly normal, as if he hadn’t said something that turned her world upside down. “Shall we take a promenade?”
Helene rose and took his arm. They walked for a time in silence until he said, “I didn’t mean to bring our conversation to a standstill with a disconcerting revelation. Lord knows, my father was probably right.” There was something tired in his voice that made her stumble into speech.
“Do you think that—that you might, that some of your actions during our marriage might have been due…” her voice trailed off.
“No question,” he replied. “I eloped with you rather than get married in a proper fashion, in order to irritate my father although I’ve only recently come to understand this. And Helene, sometimes I think your exit in a coach and the Russian dancers who then graced the dining room table were directed to the same man.”
Helene bit her lip. “We were not happy together, and that had little to do with your father.”
“I was a bastard about it, though,” he said. “I had no idea how to talk without being insulting. No one in my family simply talked. We still don’t.”
There was something in his crooked smile that made her heart ache, so she tried to think of a light, clever thing to say. And came up empty. “Shall we turn here?” she finally asked, in desperation.
The walk into which they turned seemed much dimmer than the one they had traversed; the gaslights strung in the trees were few and far between now, and shadows stretched like sleeping beasts across the path.
“This is Lovers’ Walk,” Rees said.
“Oh,” Helene said faintly. They walked on, until they hadn’t met anyone for at least ten minutes. The din of the Gardens proper seemed very far away now, and the orchestra couldn’t be heard at all. Suddenly there was a popping noise and great flowering bursts of color splayed over their head.
“We can watch the fireworks from here,” Rees remarked, pulling her into a little recessed alcove graced with a marble bench.
He sat down next to her and bent his dark head back to watch lights burst and tumble in the sky. Helene watched him instead, until he turned and met her steady gaze.
“I haven’t bedded you today,” he said, in an absolutely conversational tone, as if they were discussing the weather.
Helene gasped and looked quickly down the path. “Don’t say such a thing out loud!” she scolded. “What if someone heard you?”
“So what?” Rees grinned. “I’ll bet I’m not the only man thinking hungrily about bedding his wife.”
Helene’s face was hot. He was hungry for her. That was an…interesting thought. No one had ever been hungry for her before.
Rees took off her loo mask and pushed back the hood of her cloak. The night air felt like a caress on her cheeks. Over his shoulder the London sky flew with sparks, as if the great fire of ’66 had come again, as if a conflagration of huge proportions had seized the sky and was making kindling of the clouds.
Helene had made up her mind that pushing off her hood was the only intimacy Rees was allowed. It hadn’t passed her notice that her husband took to marital intimacies in the outdoors like a duck to water. She certainly wasn’t going to add to the dismal reputation of Vauxhall Gardens by allowing herself to be intimately handled in Lovers’ Walk.
At first he just kissed her. But could one call it just? Something about the way his tongue plunged into hers made her body burn to be near his. Yet when his hand strayed treacherously close to her bosom, Helene pushed him away. He kissed her so hard that at first she didn’t notice his hand stealing up her leg, trailing a delicate, fiery caress toward her knees, and only belatedly squealed and pulled away. He followed her, and somehow she ended up half lying on the bench, with him laughing over her, pulling her cloak open and trapping her arms.
“It’s only your cloak, Helene!”
“We’re in public!” she said, struggling. “Anyone could see us.”
“No one has come this way in a good ten minutes.” His eyes were black against the sky and the feeble gaslight.
She licked her lips and the heavy droop of his eyelids suddenly became even more pronounced. “One could almost suppose you think that I haven’t noticed what you’re—you’re doing,” she managed. For one large thumb was rubbing over her nipple in a way that made her legs tremble.
“Do forgive me if I have disconcerted you,” he said tranquilly, taking his hand away. Her nipple stood out against her light gown, and their eyes met as she glanced down. “I wouldn’t like to do anything that you didn’t enjoy, Helene.” His voice was as low as a cello, and as seductive too.
She opened her mouth, but couldn’t lie. His smile was pure wickedness. And the sigh that came from her lips when he put his hand back on her breast was pure delight. Yet Helene did not lose sight of her initial thoughts on the matter.
“This is all very well,” sh
e said—or rather, gasped—some time later. “But you are not going to bed me in Vauxhall Gardens, Rees, you are not!”
“I’m not bedding you,” he said. He had rearranged herself and him so that she was lying across his lap, her body laid like a feast before him. One hand held her tightly against his chest, but the other—
The other wandered. From her breast, with an increasingly rough stroke that made the breath catch in her throat and her body arch toward him. To the sleek line of her leg, skimming under her gown, walking his fingers up her thigh so slowly that she started shaking all over and had to hide her face in his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” she moaned.
“Just playing,” he said, and it seemed to her that his voice was more strained than it had been.
“With what?” she managed, with a fair degree of logic. For his hand had reached above her garter now, and he was swirling little circles on the skin of her thighs.
“With your body, Wife,” he whispered into her neck.
“And what if someone comes by?” she demanded.
But he was bending over her and just as his lips captured hers, his fingers slipped into the sweetest space of all. He swallowed her cry with his mouth, and the next, and the next…Quieted her struggles with his body. For it didn’t seem to him that she really knew what she wanted.
“No,” she cried sharply, “you mustn’t…” but her voice disappeared into a wave of pleasure that coursed through her body. He could see that well enough.
“If I hear anyone coming,” he told her, “I’ll simply drape your cloak over you.”
“No!” she said tremblingly, but he tried a little flick of his finger, and was rewarded with a squeak of delight, and after that she stopped worrying about passersby, other revellers not enthralled by fireworks.
It took a bit of experimentation. Rees had never given much thought to women’s pleasure. They were there; he was a rakehell, a take-what-you-want-and-leave type of man. He’d known that since he was a youngster. And nowhere in the training of a rakehell did it say anything about touching women for their pleasure.
Nor did it say anything about allowing one’s own body to burn with a fierce fire without respite, or feeling oneself shaking with passion—and all from touching a woman.
Not any woman. From touching Helene.
Her face was tipped back in the crook of his arm now, so that every time she came to herself enough to protest, he could swoop down and silence her with his mouth until she succumbed again.
In the first year of their marriage, he told her, with an edge created by his own sense of rage and failure over the whole business of bedding a wife, that her body must be unable to experience women’s pleasure. And so warring in Rees’s soul was a battle between passion and self-loathing. For Helene’s cheeks were tipped rose and her eyes unfocused; her willowy body had turned to plush in his hands, and she was urging herself against his hand, murmuring incoherent things, her breath as ragged as his own.
But, as he said, he was learning.
It took a while, but finally he thought he had a rhythm, a pace, a cadence like a waltz that seemed to drive her farther and farther from logic, and more and more into an incoherent series of little breaths that were like the most beautiful music he ever heard in his life, a medley of “Rees! No! Yes!” and “Oh, oh—” and finally, “Rees!” And then she arched against him, her body shaking in his arms. Rees buried his face in her hair. Self-loathing stopped warring with passion, and was replaced by something infinitely more tender, and more terrifying.
For Helene, it was as if a crescendo—a whole fanfare of trumpets—took over the sweet, arching sounds of a concerto and blew free and clear in the air, the sound tearing to the utmost ends of her fingers, again and again, music crashing over her head so that she was utterly lost in its grip and Rees’s warm steady body was her only fulcrum in a spinning world.
And for the Earl of Mayne, who rounded the turn in the path a split second before, recognizing immediately the moonlit gleam of Helene’s hair, and then just as suddenly the silver gleam of said moonlight on a slender leg, and finally, with a bitter blow that he felt to his chest, realizing that his Helene, his countess as he had imperceptibly started thinking of her, was shaking in the arms of her husband.
That same husband for whom she felt only mild friendship.
He turned without a sound and walked away, the black sweep of his cape sending stray leaves on the path into a lackadaisical spiral in the air.
Honesty is overrated.
Rage, on the other hand—rage has a good deal to be said for it. Rage coursed through his body with a black inevitability that left a bitter taste in his mouth. She was no more than a woman, like all the rest: faithless, dishonest. No more knowing in her understanding of men and women than any other woman.
Worse, actually. Taking her pleasure wherever she found it, apparently. Masquerading in society as a virtuous matron while she stole off to her husband’s house to enjoy whatever attentions he had not given to his resident doxy.
With a faint objective edge, Mayne realized that he was literally shaking with rage. You’re a bit out of hand, he thought to himself.
It’s only a nuisance, that’s all.
Another woman…just another woman. Nothing new there. And if she was rather more devious than many of the ladies he had bedded, that was hardly something for him to grieve over.
He was almost back to the Chinese Pavilion when he saw Lady Felicia Saville prancing toward him, waving her fan and chattering to one of her more foolish friends. Lady Felicia was notorious for two things: her unhappy marriage and her waggling tongue.
His pace slowed to that of a panther.
“Oh, Mayne,” Felicia called, as they came into sound of each other. “Your sister awaits you at the Pavilion, sir.” But he was moving toward her with a concentrated light in his eyes that she had only seen directed at other women. Felicia gulped. Could it be that Mayne—Mayne!—was finally going to approach her? She had quite despaired of the idea, and yet sometimes she felt as if his lovers were an exclusive gathering to which she had not been invited. And Felicia loathed that idea.
She turned to her friend Bella. “Darling,” she said behind her fan, “do make an excuse to return to the Pavilion, will you? As a dear friend?”
Bella looked at her sharply and then at the earl, walking toward them with a little smile on his beautifully cut lips.
“Only if you visit me first thing in the morning!” she said, fluttering her fan as if a sudden tropical breeze had blown through London.
“Without question,” Felicia said. She lowered her fan and smiled at Mayne. He didn’t seem to notice Bella drifting away, slowly so that she could catch Mayne’s greeting.
“I feel as if I never saw you before,” he said, and his voice was dark and suggestive. “Do walk with me, Felicia.”
“Into Lovers’ Walk!” she said with a titter. “Dear me!”
But he tipped up her chin and brushed a kiss across her lips. “Only if you quite, quite wish to,” he said, as his mouth came down to hers.
Mayne found it rather disappointing that when he strolled past the secluded little bench where the deceptive countess and her hell-born husband had been, they had disappeared, and so missed the sight of Lady Felicia Saville clinging to his arm, her cloak thrown off and her bodice slipping to the point of indiscretion.
There was a disappointing lack of revenge about it. He wanted to see Helene’s eyes widen; he wanted her to know—absolutely know—that he had decided she wasn’t worth waiting a month for.
He wanted her to know that he had never believed her in the first place. Never. He’d known immediately that it was all a Maygame, that talk about mild friendship. He had never believed her. He wasn’t taken in.
Yet it wasn’t until he was rather expertly, if with a dismaying lack of interest, sampling Lady Felicia’s charms, that he realized just how to make Helene Godwin understand that he never, for a moment, believed
her nor considered waiting for her to leave her husband’s house.
“Felicia,” he said, his voice as syrupy smooth as devil’s broth.
“Yes?” she said, her voice quite steady and clear. Alas, Felicia was finding the famed Earl of Mayne rather less enthralling than she had been led to believe. But there you are. Reality, particularly when it pertained to men, was always rather disappointing.
“I heard the most dismaying piece of news today,” he said into her ear, easing her bodice back over her breast.
“No, what?” Felicia asked, instantly revived.
So he told her. As her eyes grew bigger and bigger, he brought her to her feet and brushed a few spare leaves from the back of her cloak, and then they began their stroll back toward the lightened areas of the Gardens.
For Mayne understood as well as anyone that his duty, that evening, was to accompany Felicia wherever she wished to go, whispering intimately into her ear, and making it quite clear to all her acquaintances that she was one of his chosen lovers.
And Felicia didn’t have to think twice to know what her duty was, since it came as naturally to her as breathing. She almost began trotting in her haste to return to her friends.
“I just can’t believe it!” she kept saying, half to herself and half to Mayne. “I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
Garret Langham, Earl of Mayne, smiled down at her. Had she the perspicuity to notice it, she would have seen a murderous gleam in his eyes.
No one crossed Mayne.
No one.
Thirty-two
Mother Is a Relative Term
“I’m just not certain that we should have brought Meggin,” Lina said quietly, as she, Tom, and Meggin climbed out of the coach onto Halcrow Street the next morning. “What if this is a disappointment?”
“If Mrs. Fishpole is here, she’ll wish to see her,” Tom said again. “And look at Meggin!”
Meggin had been like a child transformed, ever since they told her after breakfast that they were going to find Mrs. Fishpole. She was dressed in an enchanting little pinafore and gown, with a pelisse to match. She was clutching Lina’s fur tippet, even though it was far too warm for that sort of clothing. But it wasn’t her external appearance that mattered; it was the way her eyes were glowing and her little body was rigid with excitement.