by Lynne Barron
“So we know that your mother was also in London,” he agreed, settling back in the water and closing his eyes.
“She was enjoying her first Season.” Her husky voice wrapped around him, mingled with the slow caress of her fingers over his hand to lure him into a comfortable lassitude.
“How do you know it was her first Season? It might have been her fifth or sixth, or even her tenth,” he murmured. “She might not have been a party to Society’s entertainments at all, but rather a servant or shopkeeper.”
“Lady Hastings would hardly have befriended a shopkeeper,” she replied, the fingers of one hand wrapping around his wrist while the others twisted between his, curling over his knuckles before continuing to the tips.
Henry opened one eye to find her head bent over his hand. She lined up their palms as if to measure the fit and he was struck once more by the delicacy of her long, slender fingers and the near translucency of her pale skin.
“I suppose we must assume your mother was a gentleman’s daughter else Mother would not have befriended her.” Henry laced his fingers with hers, wrapped them over the soapy back of her hand and she lifted her head to gift him with a slow smile. “Still, they might have been longtime friends. Connie might have been a married lady or a widow.”
“Except your mother had her portrait painted,” she replied.
“I’m afraid I don’t comprehend the significance,” he said, caught by the gentle curve of her lips and her eyes, more lavender than blue in the dimly lit room.
Georgie blinked and let out a soft hiss of breath. “Good gracious. Have you never seen the miniatures scattered about Lady Hastings’ apartments?”
“Georgie, I can count on one hand the number of times I have entered Mother’s rooms,” he explained. “And I certainly never poked about in her personal effects.”
“There is no poking about required,” she countered. “They are everywhere, on the desk, on the mantel, on the walls. Twelve in all.”
“Mother moved into her Portman Square house as soon as I’d reached my majority, taking nearly all of her possessions with her.”
“But when you were a boy? Did you never visit her bedchamber?”
“As I said, on one hand.”
“And when she returned to Hastings Hall with you last year?” she persisted.
“I cannot remember visiting her rooms.”
“Not once?”
“Mother did not invite anyone into her private domain.”
Dropping her gaze and placing his hand on the rim of the tub, she scooped up the soap once more and set about creating a cloud of suds, seemingly focused on her task to the exclusion of all else.
Seconds ticked by, seconds Henry measured by the beat of his heart as he strove to battle an incomprehensible sadness mingled with confusion and some other emotion he could not identify, one that had him feeling as if he’d somehow lost his way.
Georgie tossed the soap back into the water and set to work lathering his arm from wrist to elbow, the only sound in the room the pelting of the rain against the window above the sink.
Disconcerted by the silence, wishing he might change the subject but knowing there was more to the story, Henry finally said, “I suppose you’d best tell me about the portraits.”
“Each year, at the beginning of the season Lady Hastings took a debutant under her wing.” There was a new hesitancy to her voice, a stilted quality to her words. “Presumably to shepherd them through the perils of a first Season.”
“That hardly sounds like my mother,” he replied wryly. “She wasn’t one to extend herself toward another out of the goodness of her heart.”
“Yes, well, children often do not see their parents as they truly are,” she murmured, peeking up at him through her lashes as she leaned forward to lather his upper arm and shoulder. “No more than parents see their children with true clarity, or husbands and wives their spouses for that matter.”
“Too true,” he replied, shifting about in the tub so that she might reach his neck, smiling as she followed the unspoken command and trailed her fingers over the column.
“Whatever Lady Hastings’ motivations may have been, she invited Connie into her sphere and had her portrait painted to add to her collection. The portraits and the ladies who sat for them became known in some circles as the Angels.”
“Your mother was one of the ladies who consoled my mother in her time of need,” he whispered with a smile, finding an oddly comforting symmetry in the otherwise tawdry tale.
Georgie reached for the soap again and brought it up to his chest where she swirled the bar about in a desultory fashion, seemingly lost in her thoughts.
Not so Henry.
His thoughts were concentrated upon her movements, upon the drag of her thumb over first one nipple then the other, the glide of her fingertips over his collarbones, the brush of the heel of her hand over his belly.
Cock twitching, Henry closed his eyes once more the better to enjoy her ministrations.
“To be sure, I cannot imagine how my father, a sheep farmer from Loch Canon with nary a shilling to his name and only a distant connection to the aristocracy, seduced the lovely lady,” she continued, her voice low and sultry. “But seduce her he did.”
“A libertine of the worst sort,” he teased as she released the soap and allowed it to slither down his chest into the water.
“Or the best, depending upon one’s perspective,” Georgie replied with a breathy laugh. “When my father returned to Scotland he left the lady in a delicate condition.”
“He simply abandoned her?”
The sound of wood scraping over stone reverberated around the room and Henry opened his eyes to find her scooting her stool toward the end of the tub.
“Lift your leg, my lord,” she purred.
Henry complied, raising his leg up and over the rim as she retrieved the floating bar and set about working up a lather once more.
“My father was unaware of Connie’s condition when he fled from Town just ahead of his creditors,” Georgie said, lifting his foot. “It wasn’t until after I was born that she wrote to him. By the time he received the letter I’d already been placed with the Grahams.”
“Where do the Grahams live?” he asked, watching as she bent his foot back, her nimble fingers stroking between his toes and over and around his heel.
Christ, he never would have imagined his feet were so devilishly sensitive but the feel of her hands on him had his balls tightening and his shaft rising in the warm water.
“River’s End,” she answered without looking up.
“Right, a rather rickety estate,” he replied, smiling when her tongue came out to press against her top lip as she concentrated upon her chore. “But where is River’s End?”
“Somewhere nearby.”
“Nearby to Idyllwild?” he asked in surprise.
“Nearby to whichever of your mother’s properties the ladies retreated when Connie’s condition became apparent.” Georgie looked up then, her gaze drifting over his face.
“What makes you so certain our mothers retreated to one of my family’s estates?”
“I had already guessed it by the fact that when Lady Hastings brought me to the Grahams she was traveling in a carriage with your family crest on the door,” she explained. “And her diary confirmed it. She wrote of taking her darling angel to one of the family properties, to a small house in the country where the neighbors were unlikely to recognize her as she’d never before visited the area. But I’ve journeyed to each and every estate your family owns and learned absolutely nothing.”
“That is why you were in Somerville,” he muttered as the riddle of her appearance at his mother’s funeral was solved. “And why I found you in Deerfield yesterday.”
“You aren’t going to lambast me yet again for luring you into my clutches for nefarious purposes, are you?” she asked with a grin.
“Even I would not be so foolish.”
“You are hardly foolish,” she argued. “I read o
f Idyllwild in your mother’s diary and came to investigate. And you are correct, I was in Somerville in hopes I might learn something of my past by visiting hers.”
“Mother has never stepped foot on Idyllwild land, nor would she take an unwed woman expecting a child to Somerton Hall, to her childhood home,” Henry pointed out.
“I was desperate.” Georgie trailed her hands over his ankle and around his calf and shin to his knee. “I’d just come from Hastings Hall where your butler told me of your mother’s passing.”
“Over tea,” he added, surprised anew that his butler would invite an unknown lady into the hallowed halls of the ancestral estate.
“A lovely fellow, Crotchety,” she replied, leaning forward to reach his thigh, one long braid falling over her shoulder to trail in the water. “As the household was in mourning, I could not tour the house and the servants did not travel into the village where I might meet them to question them. With nothing else to do, I journeyed to Somerville in hopes I might hear some gossip in the village. I have found that funerals tend to loosen tongues as people reminisce about the dearly departed.”
“Instead I found you on the village street and lured you into my clutches.” Henry reached for her braid, lifting it from the water and wrapping the end around his fingers.
“For your own nefarious purposes,” she teased.
“My purposes were hardly nefarious,” he argued.
“I might have been an innocent,” she pointed out. “A naïve lady unable to resist your seduction.”
“I don’t recall seducing you.”
“What would you call that nonsense with the buttercup? And your wandering hands and lips? All that ribald talk and the attempts to corner me in one alcove after another?”
“I hope that if I ever set out to seduce a woman I can do better than that,” he replied with a frown. “I do know the way of it, the poetry and flowers and flattery.”
“Henry, you seduced me.”
He met her eyes and saw the truth of her words.
“I was seduced by your passionate kiss in the hall, by your joy and amazement when I took you into my mouth, by your boyish wonder when I teased you about pleasuring myself in your bathing room, by your uncontrolled passion when you pinned me to the wall.”
“Huh, imagine that. I seduced you without even realizing it.”
“I don’t need to imagine it. I was there and it was better than all my fantasies rolled into one.” She tossed his word back at him with a grin.
“Surely you’ve been seduced before,” he replied.
“Not that I recall.” Georgie rose to her feet with the stool in one hand and circled around the tub. She sat again and, without a word, held out her hand.
Lowering his soapy leg into the water, he gave her the other.
“So the lovers who preceded me, you seduced them?”
“For my own nefarious purposes.” She took up the soap and gifted the second appendage to the same treatment, beginning with his foot, her slippery fingers gliding over his arch and between his toes.
“You seduced Jacob, the son of a physician of the Hebrew faith? How did you know how to go about it?”
Georgie laughed softly, her eyes sparkling. “Men are simple creatures. It takes little to lure them into mischief.”
“But you were a virgin.”
If he had blinked just then, Henry might have missed the expression that crossed her face, surprise and perhaps chagrin, before she ducked her head.
“Jacob was not your first lover,” he murmured as the reality of that bit of knowledge seeped into his mind.
“I never said he was,” she replied, her lower lip inching out into a frown as her hands circled his ankle and trailed up his leg.
“But who—”
“Land sakes, my lord, surely we aren’t going to trade tales of all of our past lovers, are we?” Smiling, she tickled the back of his knee as she peered up at him. “Goodness, your bath water will be cold before we get through the first dozen of yours.”
Henry smiled at her teasing and pushed aside his curiosity, only too willing to drop the subject lest he be forced to admit that he would be hard-pressed to remember the names of his first dozen lovers, let alone the tales that went along with their encounters.
As soft hands caressed his leg and inched along toward his groin, Henry settled back against the rim of the tub and allowed his eyes to wander over the lady.
The steam from his bath had brought a rosy glow to her pale cheeks and caused a few wayward strands of hair to pull free of her braids, creating a soft fringe of bright coils around her face. With her tongue poking out between her teeth and her eyes cast down so that her long lashes hid the humor and sensuality that shifted within their lavender depths, she looked the picture of a young innocent girl.
“You can eye me like a sugared plum all you like,” Georgie drawled without looking up. “You shall not have me until I’ve finished bathing you and you have eaten your breakfast.”
“I distinctly recall you promising to keep one or the other warm for me,” he reminded her.
“I must see to your care and comfort, my lord. I wouldn’t want to have you collapse atop me as I doubt I would have the strength to roll you off.”
“I rather thought I might introduce you to the pleasures to be had astride.”
“To be sure, I’ve never learned to ride,” she teased, lifting her head to gift him with a grin that was pure mischief. “Who better to teach me than the reigning master?”
“I’d like to master you,” he tossed back, enjoying her quick wit.
“I’ve suspected as much,” she purred. “If you are a very good boy and finish all your breakfast I just might let you.”
Chapter Sixteen
“With your hair in plaits and wearing that gray dress you remind me of one of the maids who worked at Hastings Hall when I was a boy.” It was an off-hand observation, delivered without much thought as Henry shifted his chair back from the kitchen table.
“Do I now?” Georgie looked over her shoulder as she finished drying the last of the breakfast dishes. “And what was this maid’s name?”
“Becky, no Betsy. Betsy Parker.”
“Did Betsy chase you about, begging for your kisses?”
“Didn’t I just wish.”
“You chased her around, did you?” she teased, tossing the cloth beside the sink and turning around to face him.
“Only in my imagination,” he replied with a laugh. “I was something of a late bloomer so by the time I appreciated Betsy’s charms I was the earl and dallying with a servant was strictly forbidden.”
“But you wanted to do a bit of dallying with her.”
“In my head I had her on her hands and knees so often I could barely look at her without blushing,” he admitted a bit sheepishly.
“Hmm, did you now?” she asked, her eyes gleaming. “Was this Betsy a shy girl?”
“Hardly.”
“Ah, so she was a hussy, was she?”
“I don’t know that she was a hussy but she was certainly a tease,” he replied. “According to my man Davenport, the gossip belowstairs was that she liked to torment the footmen until they were hot and bothered, only to laugh and flit away before they could see the deed done.”
“And you wanted to be the man to finally take what she’d been flaunting,” she mused.
“Only in my most lurid imaginings,” he replied, heat searing up the back of his neck. “I certainly never considered acting upon my impulses.”
“It seems to me you have left a number of impulses unacted upon throughout your years of debauchery.”
“I’ve acted upon quite a few since I’ve met you,” he tossed back with his best leer.
Georgie pulled her bottom lip between her teeth to chew on one corner while her eyes traveled over him where he sat sprawled in his chair in nothing but a pair of well-worn trousers and he felt her gaze on him like a warm breeze, setting his heart racing and his cock twitching.
“Will you excuse me?” Spinning away, she grabbed up the dishrag and started for the door.
“Where are you off to?”
“I’ve some dusting to see to in the parlor,” she called back as she pushed open the kitchen door.
“Dusting?” He bounded to his feet. “What happened to bath, breakfast, lovemaking?”
If Georgie made a reply it was lost as the door swung shut.
Henry hesitated long enough to wonder if he would ever understand what made the Scots lass tick before following her into the hall and beyond to the parlor where he found her bent over a table plying her rag.
“You needn’t clean my house,” he said as he paused at the threshold, his eyes sweeping over her bottom lifted in the air and her hips gently swaying with each swipe to the cloth.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, my lord,” she said, shooting a startled glance over her shoulder before ducking her head over her task once more.
“What’s come over you?”
“I’m that sorry I haven’t finished this room, Lord Hastings.”
“Stop that,” he barked, annoyed by the use of his title and the sight of her behaving as a servant.
“I’ll be out of your way in a jiffy.” She must have found a stubborn spot of dust on the gleaming wood judging by the manner in which she scrubbed the surface, her bottom wiggling to and fro with the motion.
“Georgie, drop the damn rag and step away from the table.”
She dropped the cloth and spun about. “My name’s Betsy, my lord, but I don’t expect a great man such as you to remember all of your servants’ names,” she replied, dipping into a clumsy curtsy and sweeping her gaze over his chest.
And then Henry understood, barked out a laugh even as his balls tightened and his cock hardened beneath his trousers.
Peeking up at him through her lashes, she held her obeisance. “You may call me Georgie if you like.”
Feeling a bit foolish, he entered the room. “Dusting, you say?”
“If it please you, master…that is your lordship?”
“Master will do just fine,” he answered, liking the sound of the word rolling off her tongue.
Henry ambled into the room on bare feet to take up a stance in the center of the Turkish carpet and crossed his arms over his chest in his best lord of the manor pose. “You may continue.”