Midnight Pleasures

by Eloisa James

  Sophie swallowed. It was too late for her to admit to a fluent knowledge of Welsh.

  But Patrick mistook her fleeting expression of alarm. “It’s quite all right, sweetheart. The whole country speaks English. And anyone who doesn’t had better learn.

  “And they might want to start boning up on their French as well,” Patrick added. “Some people think that Napoleon will launch a force from Brest and swing right around Cornwall, land in Wales, and attack England from the back side.”

  “Oh, Bonaparte.” Sophie was having trouble concentrating on foreign affairs, given that Patrick had cut another orange slice in half and was tempting her lips with it. The sharp smell tickled the inside of her nose.

  “Not to worry about him. The Lark is one of the fastest ships on the ocean. We can outrun whatever fleet Napoleon has in the channel. All he really has are flat-bottomed boats, anyway.”

  “Is the Lark a Baltimore clipper?”

  Patrick gave her a surprised, encouraging look. “Yes. It has a V-shaped hull, sharp-built to cut the waves.”

  Sophie grimaced at him, irritation cutting through the sensual haze he was weaving with his orange slices. “Don’t you think I can read?” She said it mildly enough. “The Times has been talking of the shipyards in Fells Point for five or more years!”

  Patrick absentmindedly ate the orange slice he had intended to give her. “I don’t know much about proper English ladies. My mother died before I grew up, and since then—” He shrugged. “I haven’t spent much time in England.”

  “I know,” Sophie broke in, “and since you have been here, you haven’t spent time with ladies!”

  Patrick chortled. “Actually,” he said teasingly, “it’s not that they weren’t ladies, just that they weren’t the ‘proper’ sort of ladies.”

  He grinned. He liked this whipper-sharp bride of his, with her tart tongue and longing eyes. Patrick moved over and pushed Sophie back against the railing, fitting the front of his body against hers like a jigsaw puzzle.

  Sophie looked up at him, a sweet wistfulness in her eyes. “Have you been to fourteen countries, then?”

  “At least,” Patrick replied.

  “How I would love to travel,” Sophie said longingly. “I would go to the Orient.”

  “What do proper ladies do all day long?”

  Sophie’s mind was clouding again. “They … they go on calls and leave cards.”

  “That sounds remarkably tedious. What else?”

  “They shop.”

  “Why?”

  Sophie gasped. Patrick was unmistakably moving his hips against hers, just slightly.

  “Patrick! What if someone sees you?” She couldn’t see anything around his body.

  “There’s nothing to see,” her husband replied comfortably. He had braced both his hands on the rail on either side of her. “What do proper ladies buy when they shop?”

  “Oh, bonnets and gowns,” Sophie said vaguely. She was really at a disadvantage in this conversation, given that she generally summoned Madame Carême to her own house. It was hard enough finding time to work.

  Patrick had stopped teasing her and was looking down with a bit of puzzlement in his eyes. “Are you saying that you go shopping every day?”

  “I don’t,” Sophie said guardedly. Then she remembered that Patrick was a rake. No matter how much he was pretending to be ignorant, he knew everything about ladies and their pursuits—after all, he spent all his time chasing them, didn’t he?

  “What else is there to do?” Her eyes glinted provocatively at him. “As you well know, a lady’s greatest devotion is reserved for a new suit of clothing.”

  “Is that so?” Patrick drawled. He pushed forward with his hips again, causing a melting warmth to flood Sophie’s stomach.

  Work! Suddenly she had a deep pang in her heart for what she had given up for this marriage. Somewhere deep inside, she was not reconciled to the idea of becoming the sort of matron whose idea of work was a visit to Bond Street. Not that apparel was to be ignored, naturally, but there was such a thrill in assembling fragments of language until a sentence unfolded before your eyes.

  Patrick looked down at her, a bit puzzled. What was there in the description of a lady’s day to make Sophie’s eyes turn so bleak?

  “Would my very proper wife wish to retire below and take a bath?” He brushed a butterfly kiss on Sophie’s brow. “Because her very proper husband should have a talk with his captain.”

  Sophie’s eyes lit up. “That would be marvelous,” she said with utmost sincerity.

  With some reluctance, Patrick backed away from her body. “Off you go, then.”

  Once inside the master cabin, Sophie dispatched a greenish-looking Simone to fetch a tub of hot water, then paused, her back against the heavy walnut door.

  The room was spare but luxurious. Every piece of furniture was bolted either to the wall or to the floor, except for the dining-room chairs, which could be hooked over a rail attached to the wall when the weather became stormy.

  And she was alone. She hadn’t been alone since the morning before she married Patrick. With a sigh, Sophie drank in the silence.

  Then she moved quickly away from the door as Simone entered, directing two young crew members who were hoisting large buckets of steaming water. Without further ado, the brass bathtub (nailed down in a corner of the room) was filled with water, scented with cherry blossoms, and her maid was sent back to bed, whimpering and clutching her stomach.

  Sophie lay back as water lapped deliciously at the sore parts of her body. She stayed there for a long time, thinking over the night before. There’d been no time to think … and she had so much to think about.

  For instance, what on earth was she to do about Braddon? His scheme was impossible. More than unlikely, it was inconceivable that a horse breeder’s daughter could fool the ton into thinking that she was a member of the French aristocracy.

  Sophie had seen her mama at work, picking into shreds the gentility of the daughter of a merchant. A young lady might be docile, beautiful, and have gone to the same school as Sophie. It wouldn’t matter. Eloise and her friends were the most precise judges in the world. They would dissect the girl’s conversation, the way she waved a fan, the bend of her eyelashes, and detect the bad blood coursing through her veins.

  It’s absolutely impossible, Sophie thought glumly. She’d simply have to persuade Braddon to discard the idea. Eloise would see through an impostor in a second. Let alone an impostor who was really a horse trainer’s daughter. No, Braddon must give up hope of marrying his Madeleine.

  Finally Sophie woke out of her half-daze, realizing that the bathwater had become a cool caress. She stood up and wrapped herself in a towel. Without allowing herself to think too much about it, she retrieved the book of Turkish grammar from where she had carefully hidden it.

  With a sigh of pure happiness she sank into a study of Turkish verbs. They were remarkably interesting, the way they changed depending on who was speaking. “Seni seviyorum,” she whispered to herself. “I love you. Seni seviyor. He loves you.” Sophie shook her head, shrugging off that dream. She turned to more mundane sentences.

  She was consciously disobeying her mother—and it felt wonderful. No wonder Braddon thought she, Sophie, could train his Madeleine to be being a proper aristocrat, she thought drowsily. She had been drilled by the queen of aristocratic leaders, the Marchioness of Brandenburg. What Eloise didn’t know about proper behavior wasn’t worth knowing.

  Guiltily, Sophie scooted her grammar book down beside her in case Patrick suddenly walked into the room. Depend upon it, her mother’s voice said sternly in her memory, no prudent man will ever accept a wife who knows more than himself.

  Sophie sighed and thought of Patrick’s teasing confession that he was able to speak only poor French. Her mother was undoubtedly correct.

  Poor Eloise! She had spent years trying to talk Sophie out of her passion for languages. Eloise had probably fought Latin the hardest. “
Latin is as unfeminine a decoration for the inside of a woman’s head as a beard is for the outside,” she had protested, her lips white with fury. But George had stood up to his wife, and consequently Sophie’s mornings had been filled with the conjugation of verbs.

  Sophie’s grin faded as she remembered what most of her mother’s admonishments added up to. Eloise’s favorite statement was “Young women need only study how to find husbands.” Braddon’s Madeleine would truly have to study if she had a hope of carrying off his scheme. Sophie dismissed the plight of Braddon and the horse trainer’s daughter, pulling up her grammar book again. With luck she’d have time to get her mind around the complications of the past tense before Patrick returned.

  When Patrick let himself into the stateroom, he expected to find an irritable wife waiting for him. Everything he knew of women had led him to believe that newly married wives were never to be left alone, particularly when one has rudely separated them from the pleasurable pursuits of taking tea and shopping. He had been absent three hours, discussing the sea currents around the tip of Cornwall and the crew’s lack of a second mate.

  He felt a mild surge of shame for his uncharitable thoughts when he found Sophie sitting in an armchair, looking sweetly peaceful, wrapped in a silky negligee. His surge of shame was followed by a surge of something else. Lord, but he’d married a beautiful woman! Sophie’s hair fell in glistening honey-pale curls about her shoulders and down her back, still damp from her bath. Her eyes looked mulberry black in the candlelit room.

  “Where’s your maid?” Patrick’s voice sounded rough even to his ears.

  Sophie looked at him in surprise. “Simone is suffering mightily from mal de mer. I sent her off to her cabin for the night.”

  Patrick swallowed. He knew Sophie must be sore, far too sore to continue the kind of activity they had carried on that morning. He walked over and dropped to a crouching position next to her chair.

  Sophie smiled. She was filled with overlapping pools of happiness. Marriage was possible, even wonderful, and she’d mastered the Turkish past tense. Buried in her memory was an unspoken sentence: “Seni sevdi: I loved him.”

  Deliberately she leaned forward, allowing the diaphanous silk to fall open at her neck. “Do you know, Patrick, that there’s no English equivalent of déshabillé?”

  Patrick’s eyes darkened to an ink smudge below his eyebrows. “My French is getting worse by the moment.” His breath warmed the skin on her neck as he pushed the negligee open with kisses. “What does déshabillé mean?”

  Sophie gasped. “Undressed, or half undressed, although it can also be a négligé.”

  Patrick’s lips were trailing lower.

  “Oh, woe is me …” His voice sounded half muffled. “My clever wife has thrown another foreign word at me. What is a négligé?”

  Sophie giggled, her hands running up and down Patrick’s muscled shoulders. “As if you haven’t bought a thousand négligés in your lifetime!” she said saucily.

  At that, Patrick’s lips stilled and he raised his head, looking into her eyes. “Why is it that my own wife insists that I am an old roué, a libertin?”

  Sophie gasped indignantly. “Your accent is perfect! You’ve been shamming it!”

  “Je ne suis pas un libertin, et je n’achèterai plus de négligé pour une femme qui m’est pas ma propre femme. Translate that, O clever wife.”

  Sophie pouted. “You are claiming not to be a libertine, and promising that you will never again buy a negligee for a lady other than your wife.”

  Patrick was about to insist on the point, but his eyes were drawn to Sophie’s lips. “Lovely Sophie,” he whispered huskily. “Ma belle, ma mariée.”

  Sophie closed her eyes. It was unbelievably erotic, hearing Patrick speak French. She had been raised speaking French and hadn’t learned English until she was six years old. In many ways it was the language closest to her heart. But she never thought to be able to make love in it.

  Suddenly her heart was beating thunderously. She opened her eyes, leaned down, and nipped her husband’s lip. He responded with a growl, capturing her lips and pulling her forward so she half fell into his lap.

  “Embrasse-moi, mon mari,” Sophie breathed.

  “Anything, ma belle.” In one swift movement Patrick came to his feet, holding his wife in his arms, and moved over to the marriage bed. They fell under the twisting vines and cherry-red flowers as if they collapsed into a flowering grove in the depths of India.

  Below deck, no bell rang, signaling dinner to be brought to the master cabin. In the kitchen of the Lark, Patrick’s French chef, bribed at enormous expense to accompany him on this trip, became first surly and then hysterical.

  “It’s entirely ruined, my lovely dinner.” Floret looked around tragically. The soup still waited in a silver tureen. The roast would be salvageable, but his masterpiece, the trout, was beyond recovery.

  Patrick’s sturdy first mate, John, shook his head. “It’s a bit fancy, but all right,” he said, with his mouth full of trout au court bouillon.

  At that Floret broke into tears, to John’s disgust.

  Sophie’s maid stayed gratefully in bed, suffering through one hazy attack of seasickness after another. To Simone, the fact that her mistress had no need of help to get undressed was a gift from God. Finally Simone took a dose of laudanum and became even groggier.

  “She’ll be sleeping in a state of nature,” Simone muttered to herself with an unsteady giggle. “His lordship has that sort of look about him.”

  It wasn’t until long after the Lark was dark and quiet, with no one awake but the first mate at the wheel, that Patrick and Sophie slipped out of the cabin and made their way to the kitchen.

  They found asparagus soup waiting in its tureen; even better, they found champagne floating in a pool of melted ice. The dinner buns had gone hard, but that was all right. They sat side by side on the kitchen table (it was too bothersome to remove the chairs from their nighttime position strapped to the wall). They drank the soup and dunked the hard dinner rolls into champagne.

  They sat so close that their legs pressed together and Sophie’s hair, falling in unruly waves down her back, brushed Patrick’s shoulder.

  It was a feast fit for the gods.

  Chapter 15

  I won’t do it, Braddon. I won’t do it.” Back in London, the Earl of Slaslow was employed in the task that had obsessed him since the Lark left its moorings, two weeks previously. He was pleading with Madeleine.

  “What on earth will it hurt to try, sweetheart?”

  Madeleine didn’t even look up from where she was sweeping a curry brush over Gracie’s round, hard sides. “It’s not proper. You are asking me to lie.” Her mouth was set in as firm and stubborn a line as Braddon’s family had ever seen on his face.

  He rolled his eyes, not for the first time. “Don’t you see that it’s a small lie in service of the greater good?”

  “The greater what?” Madeleine’s French accent became more marked when she couldn’t understand something.

  “The greater good,” he repeated lamely. “It’s a phrase that means … well, that it’s all right to do a small wrong in order to obtain a larger right.”

  “That’s not what French philosophers say,” she snapped. “Monsieur Rousseau says that les bons sauvages, those who are truly innocent, do only good.”

  Braddon dismissed the alarming signs of learning that Madeleine liked to throw at his head in moments of tension. He dared to reach out and stroke her cheek. Lately she had been like a tyrant and wouldn’t even let him kiss her. At the moment, for instance, she had edged around the stall so that Gracie’s bulk stood between them.

  “Please, Maddie. Please. I want you to be my countess,” Braddon whispered. “I want you to have my children. I don’t want to leave your house at night and return to mine. I want you to live in my house. Don’t you see, I want you to be my wife, not my mistress!”

  “You can’t have everything you want,” Madele
ine muttered, but her face was softening. Braddon could see it. And her hand wasn’t moving as briskly over Gracie’s side.

  He looked at the neck of Madeleine’s starched white fichu and gulped. He longed to plunder the sweet flesh that flirted modestly behind her lace scarf.

  “Only for three weeks, Maddie. In three weeks I can meet you at a ball, be swept off my feet, and we can marry by special license, the way Sophie and Patrick did. After we’re married, no one will think twice about your past. You will be the Countess of Slaslow, and no one questions a countess.”

  For the first time, Madeleine looked torn, rather than adamantly set against the idea.

  “I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she muttered, leaning her forehead against Gracie’s warm belly. “I am not an aristocrat, Braddon. I’m only a simple horse trainer’s daughter.”

  He scoffed. He could smell victory. “Since when do simple horse trainers quote Rousseau and Diderot? Your father owns more books than he does saddles!”

  Madeleine raised her head and looked straight into his eyes. “I am educated, Braddon; I can read. But that doesn’t make me a lady. What do I know about dancing and, and all those other things ladies can do? I know how to splint a foreleg, but I don’t even know how to embroider!”

  Braddon scowled fiercely, ducking under Gracie’s neck and forcing his large body into the space at the back of the stall, next to Madeleine. “Don’t talk about yourself that way, Madeleine! You are more of a lady than most women I know. That embroidery business is all poppycock. My sisters couldn’t do it worth a fig. My mother wailed about it endlessly. None of ‘em learned to play the spinet or the harp, and Lord knows they’re terrible singers. That’s not what makes you a lady.”

  Madeleine looked at him imploringly. “You simply don’t understand, Braddon. What about my clothing? I don’t have the right gowns, and Lady Sophie is so elegant.” She had read about Sophie in The Morning Post, which always carefully detailed where she had been, with whom, and, sometimes, what she was wearing. The very idea of meeting her was terrifying, let alone the idea of Lady Sophie teaching her how to be a lady.