“Good?” he asked.
Silence. Looking down at her face, he was unable to see her at all as his shoulders blocked the light of the torches. He thought her head was tilted back in ecstasy and thus continued to pump inside her.
He’d been correct about his own stamina. He lasted barely a minute in the delicious tightness of his goddess. Then with a guttural cry of pleasure, and a whispered name—Jenny—he spent inside the mysterious sprite.
Leaving another kiss upon her mouth, he drew back, stood up, and began to fasten his trousers. To his consternation, she lay there, unmoving.
“Are you well?” he asked after a moment, remembering when he’d asked the same to another young miss earlier in the evening, a simpering simpleton who couldn’t even speak to him—the opposite to this passionate creature.
His words spurred the lady into movement. Hastily, she lowered her skirts and took his outstretched hand, letting him assist her from the divan.
Then a strange expression crossed her lovely features, visible again in the moonlight now they were standing. She looked down, and he did the same before realizing she was feeling his warm seed as it leaked from her.
“Luckily, you have so many layers, no one shall be the wiser,” Michael advised. “You can float back into the ballroom and continue to dance with what I’m confident are your many, many suitors.”
“But…” she trailed off.
Was this delightful morsel having a moment of regret? A bit too late! He drew out his flask and took a sip. As a gentleman, he offered it to her.
She looked from the silver flagon to his face.
For the first time, he felt a twinge of regret. On second glance, she seemed a bit young for this game, but she had to know the rules and the consequences of a tryst in a dark garden. Why else had she let him have his way with her? He certainly wasn’t her first.
“I’m sorry if your pleasure was not complete,” he said, thinking perhaps his swift climax had robbed her of her own ultimate satisfaction. There was nothing he could do about that now.
Still, she said nothing, and he was growing weary. His sated body yearned for his own bed and a long night’s sleep.
“I bid you farewell, dear goddess.”
He turned from her, took a few steps, then looked back.
Why was this willing temptress with her plump, kissable lips suddenly looking so damned shocked and teary-eyed?
As he met her gaze, she opened her mouth and found her voice at last.
“Can you possibly mean to simply walk away?”
Ah, he understood. She wanted the promise of something more. She was a society miss, after all, even if one who enjoyed sharing a naughty assignation away from prying eyes.
“I may attend a few more balls this Season. Look for my name on the guest list, and we can enjoy ourselves again. I’ll try to last longer next time, my sweet.”
Offering her a smile, he winked and took his leave.
Chapter Two
Three years later, 1852
Juniper Hall, Surrey
Ada left her son’s room, always thankful how quickly the little boy could fall asleep. Her dear Harry. And this was their last night in her parents’ country home. Undoubtedly, he would miss his doting grandparents until they met up again in London.
Making her way back to her own bedroom, she glanced over the trunks filled with her clothing and considered whether she’d forgotten anything. With her capable maid having worked diligently, it appeared her chamber was cleared of all her personal effects, except her nightdress and robe laid out for the night.
Ada could finally relax after weeks of preparation. Downstairs, her parents waited in the parlor, so they could spend a last evening before her move to Town. To spare her mother, she and her father would try not to discuss the stock market, their shared passion.
She would greatly miss them, but, as usual, as she thought of her move to London, a thrill of excited anticipation tickled her spine. Her own home, at last.
With her accumulated wealth, she’d purchased a townhouse on Belgrave Square. She might have chosen the locale because of its close proximity to two parks in which she could ride and Harry could play, or because it was not too distant from her parents’ townhouse, which they occupied about six months out of the year.
However, there was another more attractive reason for choosing the spacious neo-Classical home. For though Lord Vile—as the ton had so aptly nicknamed the viscount Michael Alder—didn’t live there, he frequented it. Everyone who read the scandal sheets knew he’d had two paramours from among the fifty residences of the square, and was currently keeping company with a widow only two doors down from where Ada would soon reside.
She intended to be the next on his list.
Not only would Ada finally be mistress of her own domain, she intended to become Lord Vile’s mistress as well, with the fine distinction of being the woman he kept company with but never bedded. It was the only way she could think to capture his black heart.
How blessed she was her parents had not disowned her after the disastrous breach of sanity three years earlier. Instead, they’d shown incredible generosity. She knew no other parents who would have behaved with such benign kindness.
The alternative, being cast out to fend for herself and her unborn child, would have likely ended in an intentional final swim in the Thames. For Ada had not been prepared to go to a seedy house for unwed mothers, if she could even have found one that wasn’t truly a front for a brothel.
The idea of Harry being born as the child of a prostitute could still cause Ada to shudder.
Instead, her mother, Kathryn, had enveloped her in love, and adored her grandson as soon as he made his way into the world. Her father had decided finance and commerce were a “damn sight safer” for his only daughter than so-called civilized society. Thus, James Ellis indulged her interest for stocks and trade, teaching her what he knew as a broker in good standing at the London Stock Exchange, having always paid his yearly £5 license fee, on top of his £105 entrance fee, and his £22 subscription. To his credit, he’d never had a default penalty placed against him from all the trading he’d done, and thus, he’d been reelected each year on Lady Day in early April.
When her parents left her alone in Surrey for their London residence, most days, Baron Ellis was on the floor of the exchange at Capel Court. When they were with Ada at Juniper Hall, her father kept up with the markets through the trade reports and the general newspapers.
Not only had he taught her, he’d also listened. As it turned out, Ada had a head for investing. Even better, he had let her invest through him.
In three years, with a singularity of purpose, she’d become a wealthy woman in her own right, while helping her father to grow his own wealth. Eventually, when her brother inherited, he would benefit, too.
Sitting in her father’s study together, poring over one of the intriguing reports of the Select Committee on Joint Stock Companies, they shared a like-minded friendship rarely seen between father and daughter. The only time they ever fought was if James yet again asked who his grandson’s father was.
“Ada Kate, tell me the scoundrel’s name and I’ll run him through or shoot him in the heart, or would if he had one,” her father promised.
His strong words in no way enticed her to reveal anything about Michael Alder.
She wasn’t protecting the rogue. Not at all. Alder could dance with the devil for all she cared. She was protecting her beloved father, who might find himself run through or shot in a duel as easily as being the victor.
And most importantly, she was protecting Harry St. Ange, as she’d named her baby in the church records directly following his birth. He would not grow up a bastard, the result of an unbelievably stupid moment in which his mother mistook his father for a decent human being.
A terrible misjudgment of character.
It took little more than a quiet moment to snatch her thoughts back to that horrid night. Shocked to find him at the
end of the path, her obsession, Ada had become wool-headed almost instantly. Then his lips had seemed magical as he pressed them to hers. If she were ever to relate the tale, which she would never do to a single soul, she would have said it seemed one minute, Michael Alder’s lips were on hers making her feel wondrous new sensations, and the next, he was raising her skirts, and… giving her Harry.
She could not regret her boy. Nor the life she’d created since that fateful night. Unable to reenter the ballroom with her hair tangled and her gown in disarray, she’d slipped out through a cast iron gate in the brick wall and found her parents’ carriage in the long line. Once inside, she’d begun to shake and hadn’t felt warm again until her mother, having eventually been summoned by the footman, took her stunned and sobbing daughter home, got her bathed, and tucked her into bed.
Her disgrace had been obvious, but her parents’ love had been stronger.
In the weeks that followed, her folly had become even clearer. Far from being the noble viscount she’d envisioned, Michael Alder had already been given the moniker of Lord Vile by the ton for his drinking binges and his treatment of the fairer sex, including preying on debutantes when he wasn’t satisfying himself with whores.
Or so the gossips reported in the papers. If only she’d read them prior to that night instead of the stock reports!
She wasn’t his first ruined maiden, nor, apparently, would she be his last.
Now, from an elegant home in London, she would live as a mother, a widow as far as anyone knew, and a businesswoman, which no one would ever know. She was simply Mrs. St. Ange, a baron’s daughter, no longer grieving a husband lost at sea two years earlier before her baby was even born.
And without anyone’s assistance, except perhaps her old and dearest friend, Lady Margaret Cambrey, Ada would exact revenge upon the vilest nobleman in London. If her father had suspected her motive for returning to London, undoubtedly, he would never have let her out of his sight.
*
“There you are, old chap.” The voice had Michael coming out of his reverie, thinking of nothing more important than whether to see his paramour that evening. At White’s having read the papers and drunk enough tea to float an armada, he was ready for billiards and brandy. Perhaps a hearty meal first.
He smiled at seeing Lord David Hemsby, an old acquaintance from Eton with whom he’d renewed a friendship after he’d stopped slumming in filthy nameless pubs and gin palaces and returned to his rightful place at the gentlemen’s club.
Of course, Michael still drank far too much, though switching from low-class gin to more refined drink of his peers, French brandy. And still, he refused to speak to his parents, who’d sent him into the foul abyss from which he’d barely emerged. And, of course, he avoided any marriage-minded misses who foolishly hadn’t yet been scared off by his hard-earned reputation as a reprobate of the first order.
After a certain garden tryst with a woman whose face he couldn’t quite recall but whose floral scent haunted his senses, he’d stopped going to the Whitechapel doxies. They never smelled like anything except gin or frying oil. Instead, he kept company with upper-class widows and genuine Cyprians with all their learned charms, and the occasional nobleman’s wife, if one happened across his path. The latter was a rare treat, a titillating adventure that had nearly got him killed twice.
His life was playing out as he’d expected it would after the treachery of his broken engagement.
To his dismay, following a dinner with Hemsby, his evening was ruined by the appearance of the Earl of Alder.
Bloody hell! What could his father possibly want after all this time?
David excused himself to find amusement elsewhere. Brandy in hand, Michael stared across the table from the man he hadn’t seen in years.
His father’s hair was streaked with gray, a few more lines under his eyes, nothing remarkable that would indicate he’d suffered the loss of his son’s respect.
“Come now, you’ve been nursing this grudge long enough. I’m not getting any younger,” George Alder said. “You’ll be head of the family within a decade if not sooner.”
Sooner the better, Michael muttered under his breath. Then he instantly regretted thinking it. He didn’t wish his father dead, simply in another city, preferably another continent.
“And your mother wants to see you,” his father added, as if they were discussing a weekly visit. “This estrangement hurts her, though she knows you’ve stayed in contact with your siblings, at least.”
Rolling his eyes, Michael signaled the waiter for another drink. He didn’t care to discuss his missives back and forth with his younger sister and brother. In fact, he didn’t care to discuss anything with the earl.
“Is there anything else? Frankly, you’re boring me,” Michael said, hoping his tone dripped with the professed boredom. “I’m well-aware you’re aging. We both are. As for the ‘grudge’ as you call it, did you ever consider that maybe you ruined my life’s happiness, and now I simply don’t give a damn what happens to you or the earldom?”
“Balderdash!”
Michael waited. Then he waited some more, staring into his father’s golden-brown eyes, the mirror of his own. Nothing more followed.
“That’s it?”
The waiter set down another glass of brandy before him and removed his empty one.
His father clucked his tongue. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
Picking it up, Michael shook his head. “No, not nearly.” He sipped, then sipped again. “If I understand you correctly, you wish me to return to the bosom of the family? Forgive and forget? Go give Mummy a peck on the cheek?”
“Don’t be insolent.”
“I’ll be any way I like. I’m a grown man.”
“Then start acting like one,” his father quipped, “instead of a truculent child.”
“Nothing you say can bother me.” Though, in truth, he felt like hurling the contents of his glass at his father’s face. “You took away the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. And you did so in such a cowardly way no one even knew it wasn’t my doing. Imagine how I felt finding out you broke it off for me after telling me she was the one who ended our arrangement. If I’d known sooner, I would have gone after her and married her.”
His father drummed on the highly polished tabletop. Then he signaled for the waiter and ordered his own brandy.
“I will speak plainly. We couldn’t afford for you to marry her. It was ridiculous enough for you to consider a baron’s daughter. However, your mother and I were willing to consider it when we thought her father had some money. He didn’t have a shilling, as it turned out, and that was the end of it.”
“That was the end of it,” Michael repeated. “For you and Mummy. It wasn’t for me. I loved the girl.”
His father shrugged.
“I loved her,” Michael insisted. “Don’t sit there like a cold fish. What if someone had snatched Mummy away from you?”
The earl sipped his brandy, gazed into the tawny liquid, and then back at his son.
“Then I would have done my duty to the house of Alder and married another woman with your mother’s charms and an equal dowry. I love your mother, but I would have found someone else to give me an heir, and she would have found another man to wed her. I certainly wouldn’t have moped around, fallen headfirst into a bottle, and begun a campaign of carousing that makes your name and the word libertine nearly synonymous.”
“Shall I tell Mummy you believe her so easily replaced?”
His father’s expression tightened.
“Ah, I thought not. As pragmatic as you believe her, I don’t think she’d enjoy knowing she was merely a fat purse and a breeding cow,” Michael concluded.
His father slammed his glass down and stood. “How dare you? You impertinent cullion!”
Michael nearly yawned to complete the farce, but he restrained himself. With other nearby gentlemen’s interest perked and watching the scene unfold, his father
might jump over the table and try to throttle him. He would fail, but his aging sire could have an apoplectic fit in the process. Not a good thing at White’s. It could tarnish his membership after all.
“Very well,” Michael said, his gaze locked with his father’s. “Why are you here?”
A few long moments went by. Eventually, the earl looked around, stared down anyone still audaciously looking at their table, and then resumed his seat.
“We are going broke.”
Taking in his father’s words, Michael considered them. He cocked his head, waiting, wanting more information.
The earl sighed. “The family accounts are low and not replenishing with the small holdings we have. We sold the house in France last year and the hunting lodge at Dunk’s Green this past winter. Still, I find our situation grows more precarious. As I said, we are going broke.”
Michael had rather liked the house in France. Right on the sea. Pity.
“Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, Father, but you are going broke. I have money from Grandfather. Plenty of it, in fact.”
Did he have plenty? He wasn’t truly sure, though it seemed to him he’d lived frugally these past years. He must have saved a lot by not avoiding any events of the past Seasons. Ticket prices for balls and soirées weren’t cheap. Indeed, if he recalled correctly, the last time he’d attended an event, it had been with the fervent desire of running into his delectable garden goddess again.
When he hadn’t found her after two or three attempts, he’d given up. There were too many marriage-minded ladies at those events anyway. It had been much more enjoyable to cozy up to a lonely widow in her luxurious townhouse. They never needed much in the way of expensive things, more desirous of his company than any sparkling bauble.
True, he’d spent some good sterling on the Cyprians, who liked to be kept in an elegant manner and given expensive gifts. And then, there was his penchant for fine brandy.
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