“I want you to beg,” Lottie whispered. She bit him gently. A jolt shuddered through him.
“You’re punishing me.” Ethan’s blue eyes were narrowed to a fierce glitter. “Release me, Lottie—”
“This isn’t about punishment,” Lottie said. “You said that you wanted me.”
“I did,” Ethan said through gritted teeth. “I do.”
“Then…” Lottie’s hand brushed his erection through the material of his breeches and he jerked once again against the ties that held him. “Then there is no difficulty, is there?” she finished.
Ethan swore again. “How do you know how to tie knots?” he demanded. “No woman knows how to tie knots.”
“I do…” Lottie said vaguely. She felt wonderful. Triumphant and feminine and very, very pleased with herself. She set her hand to the fastening of his breeches and felt him tense. The buttons came free and his cock sprang out, hard, hot and aroused. She deliberately did not touch it.
“You can’t do this,” Ethan said. His eyes glittered. His jaw was tense. He shifted restlessly on the bed.
“I am doing it,” Lottie said. “Always we play by your rules, Ethan. Well, not this time.”
Once again she leaned in to kiss him, her hair falling about them like a soft waterfall, and Ethan turned his head fiercely to capture her lips but already she was withdrawing from him, licking her way down his body, teasing with her tongue, exploring every hard line and contour of his body.
There were two scars on him. She had noticed them before. One was a shallow slash across the ribs. The other looked like a deep saber cut to the leg that must have taken months to heal. Even now the skin was puckered and uneven. Lottie rested her hand below it aware that it was probably too raw and sensitive to be touched.
Ethan opened his eyes and looked directly at her. Beneath the shimmer of desire in his eyes she saw something else, something so vulnerable that her heart seemed to stop for a moment.
“The Battle of Busaco,” he said. “I almost died.”
“I’m sorry,” Lottie said. She hesitated. “You don’t have nightmares?”
The glitter in his blue eyes intensified. “Sometimes.”
Lottie kissed him with gentleness and compassion and he responded to her hungrily. Her world tilted and teetered on the brink. She could feel that Ethan wanted to hold her. He needed her. That was no pretense. It was in the way that he lifted his body toward her, straining at the bonds that held him. It was in the desperation of his touch as his mouth met hers.
“Release me,” he whispered against her lips.
“No.” Lottie drew back, smiling. “A good try, Ethan, but I am not so softhearted.”
Ethan cursed. The sweat stood out on his brow and the ravenous gleam in his eyes deepened to a fierce blue. “Then touch me.”
“In my own good time.”
She was tormenting him but she was tormenting herself, too. The low sweet ache of desire in her belly was like a tightening spiral. She wanted to take him inside herself but they both had to wait. Instead she ran her hands over him, loving the feel of his skin, the heat of it, the roughness of the hair that ran in a line down below his navel. She bent her mouth to his cock and licked the tip. He gave a harsh groan. She took him and tasted him and felt him harden further beneath the slide of her mouth. Her senses were spinning with the scent and the flavor of him and his moans of pleasure filled her ears and drove the tense need inside her to fever pitch.
She raised her head. Ethan was lying still within his restraints now, his hard powerful body so taut with desire that he looked ready to explode. Lottie straddled him again, sliding down so that his erection was nestling between her opulent breasts now. He felt the yielding softness of her cradling him and a deep shudder shook him. He groaned aloud.
Carefully Lottie began to ease herself backward and forward, his taut cock squeezed between the softness of her breasts, her nipples brushing his stomach. Ethan’s breath came in a harsh gasp now, his face fierce with arousal.
“Don’t come,” Lottie whispered, slowing the movement to the gentlest of strokes. “Don’t come before I give you permission.”
Another groan was wrenched from his as he struggled in his bonds. “For pity’s sake, woman, where did you learn such wickedness?”
“I told you,” Lottie said. “I practiced. I have always been an apt pupil.”
She released him, arching over him now, allowing the tip of him to touch her intimately, drawing away when he thrust upward to try and enter her more deeply. She saw the flash of frustration in his eyes again as he strained against the ties, and then she took him deep inside her, meeting the drive of his body with the pulse of hers again and again, hearing him cry aloud, over and over, as relief and desire and anger fused into one blinding sensation that drove them both over the edge into the darkness below.
Very slowly Lottie became aware of reality again. The room was quiet, filled with candlelight and the dying embers of the fire. Outside an owl hooted in the wood. The house creaked and settled. She looked at Ethan. He was unmoving, his eyes closed, his breathing still a little ragged. The silk was hopelessly tangled about his wrists. She reached up to unfasten the knots.
“Ethan?” Suddenly, as the silk slipped through her fingers, she felt a little wary.
He rolled over so suddenly that she cried out. His arms went about her and he bent his head to her breast, taking her in his mouth. The pleasure swept her again like the drag of the tide and she cried out in shock and delight as the echoes pulsed through her body. His mouth gentled on her and the sensation softened into the sweetest aftermath of bliss.
Ethan pulled her close, dropping kisses on her hair.
“Are you angry with me?” Lottie whispered, reaching up to press her palm to his cheek. In the candlelight she saw the shadow of his eyelashes against his skin, so spiky and hard, yet so soft that her heart did an odd tumble. Strange that it should be that one small thing that pushed her over the edge into love and yet she could no longer deny it. She had wanted to keep her distance, to protect herself, and yet this act that had torn away Ethan’s defenses had also shattered her own.
“Very angry.” But something had changed between them. Lottie could not name it but she could feel it. There was humor in Ethan’s voice and no undertow of anger at all. He sounded on the edge of sleep. “I would show you how angry I am,” he continued, “if I had any energy left. But that—” his tone changed “—was like nothing I have ever experienced before.”
He drew her closer and Lottie rested her cheek against his chest and listened as his breathing changed and he fell into sleep. This, she thought, was like the intimacy of their first night in London. There was tenderness in the way that he held her so close. For a little while at least, here in his arms, she could succumb to the illusion of loving and being loved in return. For there was no doubt that she loved him. Her heart was spilling over with happiness, so full and fulfilled. And for once she would stave off all thoughts of the future and simply accept it. There would be time and plenty for regrets in the morning.
WHEN ETHAN WOKE, the bed was cold and empty and Lottie had gone. He sat up, shaking the last warm dregs of sleep from his mind. He felt bereft and alone in a way that he did not really want to analyze. It was odd, he thought, that he needed Lottie to be there. He never needed anyone. It was his need for her that had made him so furious at her treachery and betrayal. He had not wanted Lottie to deceive him. It had hurt to know that his enemies had bought her, that her desire for money was stronger than her loyalty to him.
Such vulnerability to his feelings for Lottie was deeply disturbing.
Shrugging off the unwelcome thoughts, Ethan eased himself from the warmth of the bed and walked across to the dresser. He washed in the water from the jug, wincing a little at its cold sting. His body felt unfamiliar in some way, not aching exactly but physically tired, worn out with pleasure. His mind too felt cloudy, returning once again to the question of where Lottie had gone. She could
not be far away, he thought. She had nowhere to go. Despite her defiant words the previous night and her even more defiant actions, she was dependent on him for a roof over her head and indeed for money, the thing that had always mattered to her the most.
He drew on his clothes and walked over to the window, where the morning light was strengthening with each moment. Downstairs he could hear Margery crashing around in the kitchen. The rather unappetizing smell of bacon was wafting on the air. The church clock was chiming seven and he could see Lottie now, down in the orchard, picking apples and placing them in a basket at her feet. She was dressed in an old, faded gown with an apron over the top and a ridiculous mobcap on her head that should have made her look like an old maid but for some reason seemed to make her look even more young and pretty than usual. She looked up at the window and he saw her smile and she waved to him. The smile, the wave, the open uncomplicated pleasure in her eyes… Something shifted in Ethan; something warm and sweet, something that felt infinitely dangerous.
Ethan drew back from the window. He did not want to return to his Spartan room at The Bear. He wanted to stay with Lottie, to spend the day with her, to talk to her, take her driving, maybe even take a picnic out into the fields. This vision of domestic bliss simultaneously attracted and appalled him. Hell, he found he was even prepared to endure Margery’s inexpertly cooked English breakfast with cold eggs and congealing bacon fat, if he could sit across a table from Lottie and simply look at her. There was no explanation for this weakness in him, but he did not like it and he was not going to succumb to it. He ran down the stairs and went out into the street without saying goodbye. He felt guilty. And then he felt annoyed with himself for feeling that way. This was becoming intolerable.
The streets of Wantage were starting to fill up with the market traders setting up their stalls. A few drunkards littered the shop doorways. The Bear Hotel was not locked but the night porter was still asleep. Ethan did not wake him. He trod softly up the stair, taking care to avoid the treads that creaked, and entered his room.
All was exactly as he had left it the night before and yet Ethan knew, as soon as he stepped inside, that someone had been there. Once again he felt that brush of gooseflesh over his skin and the sense of being watched. He checked methodically through all the drawers and cupboards, looking for the slightest hint that someone had been searching for something. He knew what they sought. He knew they would not have found it.
Finally, reassured that everything was exactly where it should have been, he sat down at his desk to compose a letter.
He had been writing for less than two minutes when he heard Mr. Duster, the Parole Officer, hammering on all the doors, shouting that a man had been found murdered at the inn at Lambourn Cross and demanding to know where all the French prisoners had spent the night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LOTTIE SAT AT HER ESCRITOIRE and looked at the pile of correspondence that the day’s post had brought her. The first letter was from Mary Belle Ormond’s brother John, a young gentleman who prided himself on the style of his linen cravats, asking for advice on how to get the points to stand up correctly. The second letter was from a Miss Butler, asking whether or not she should elope with one of the parole prisoners. A third was from the doctor’s wife with an enquiry about the best way to remove damp spots from kid gloves and yet another, worded with such circumlocution that Lottie could barely understand it, appeared to be from a widow asking how to find a lover who would be better in bed than her husband had been.
“I do not wish to die in ignorance,” Lottie’s correspondent had written, “and I do wonder if you might recommend someone to me, Miss Palliser. I am able to travel to London,” she had added, “if the choice there would be greater.”
Lottie pushed the pile to one side with a bad-tempered sigh as Margery entered with tea and arrowroot biscuits.
“Blue-deviled, ma’am?” Margery asked sym pathetically.
Lottie was more than that. She had spent the morning lying to Mr. Duster, the Parole Officer, on the subject of Ethan’s whereabouts the previous night. As soon as Duster had stepped over the threshold of Priory Cottage he had looked around nervously, as though the evidence of sin, whatever that was, should be apparent for all to see. Margery had shown him into the parlor and its neat respectability seemed to have made him even more uncomfortable. He had perched on the edge of a chair as though expecting something scandalous to occur at any moment.
The only scandalous thing that had happened was that Lottie had perjured her soul by swearing that Ethan had been with her all night. And Ethan had not even thanked her for it. Instead he had sent a message that he would be dining that day at Letcombe Park and would see her on the morrow. Lottie had been furious.
She shredded her quill pen between her fingers with quick, angry tugs. She had no future with Ethan. She knew it; how could it possibly be otherwise with a renegade Irish prisoner who had promised her nothing? And yet that had not prevented her from falling in love with him. She had known it the previous night when she had seen the scars on him and looked into his eyes and seen his nightmares reflected there. No longer were they a man and his paid mistress who met merely for mutual pleasure and avoided any other intimacy. Something had changed between them, and those flimsy barriers she had placed about her heart which had been under siege from the first night in London, those had given way and she had been forced to let her love for him flood in. It had always been an unequal battle anyway; Lottie knew she fell in love very easily, seeking a closeness she desperately craved, wanting to build something she had never had.
Ethan did not share her feelings.
She had been so happy when she had woken that morning. She had waited for Ethan in the garden until her basket was full of apples and her bare feet were cold with the dew. Then she had gone back inside the house to find that he had left without saying goodbye. In the night he had held her close but in the morning he had not wanted that intimacy and she understood then that he never would. So once again there was a man and she loved him and he would leave her. It was a pattern she knew all too well.
She thought of the way Ethan had walked away from her that morning, deliberately rejecting the intimacy of their night together. Ethan would never trust her and he would certainly never love her. And tonight he was dining with the local gentry, a French prisoner who was nevertheless accepted in society because he was rich and titled, nominally if not very actually a gentleman. After all, the war could not last forever. Whilst she, the cousin of a Duke, moldered away here on her own, cast out and disgraced.
Last night she had promised Ethan she would not sell him out to her brother. This morning, alone and rebuffed, lonely, heartsick, she saw matters a little differently. Who was the fool here, if she did not look out for her own interests? She grabbed her quill and wrote a few slashing lines to Theo:
Dearest Clarissa, news at last! It may interest you to know that last night there was a murder….
Five minutes later, angry with Ethan, even angrier with herself, she threw down the shredded quill and looked at Margery, who was bustling about the parlor opening the windows to the afternoon sunshine and plying her feather duster to great effect.
“Margery,” she said, “pray go and prepare a bag for me, if you please. I am going to London.”
Margery’s mouth fell open. She put the feather duster down slowly. “London, madam?” she said, as though Lottie had mentioned a trip to the moon. “Why would you want to go to London?”
“Because I can,” Lottie said defiantly. What did it matter if she hated London now that the Ton had turned its back on her? Damn Ethan Ryder. He might be accepted to dinner at Letcombe Park, but he could not travel more than a mile out of Wantage without permission of the parole officer, whereas she could come and go as she pleased. And go she damned well would. The idea started to take hold and grow inside her. She would go shopping and send all the bills to Ethan. She would attend the theater, perhaps even go to a masked ball if she cou
ld arrange it. There was plenty of money to take with her. Ethan had been exceptionally generous with her allowance. She would make a stir and cause a scandal. That should please her neglectful lover.
A little smile curved her lips. She lived for pleasure and there was precious little to be had in this godforsaken town.
“London,” she repeated. “And pray call me a carriage from the livery stables, Margery. This time I shall travel in style.”
ETHAN STOOD IN THE SHADOW of the refreshment room doorway of Gregory Cummings’s town house in Grosvenor Square, sipping a glass of very fine champagne and watching Lottie as she chatted animatedly with a gentleman in a green domino. He had recognized her immediately even though she was cloaked and masked. What Lottie was doing at a masquerade ball at her former husband’s home was anyone’s guess, Ethan thought. Only she would have the sheer audacity to walk out on him and then walk in here and mingle with Cummings’s guests, hiding the secret of her identity behind the anonymity of a scarlet domino and a matching bejeweled black silk mask.
Not that Lottie was hiding, precisely. The candlelight caught the sparkle of the rubies each time she turned her head with those expressive gestures Ethan knew so well. She had on scarlet gloves and a huge ruby ring that fractured the light into a hundred rainbows. Ethan wondered where the ring had come from. Perhaps he was paying for that as well as everything else.
On Lottie’s feet were tiny high-heeled scarlet silk evening slippers. She drew all eyes. She looked ravishing. Her companion certainly appeared to think so, pressing closer with gallantry as he tried to coax her into divulging her identity. Ethan itched to intervene, take the man by the throat and toss him aside. He stayed where he was, watching. He and Lottie would have a reckoning soon enough.
He had been furious when he discovered that she had left Wantage and gone up to London. She had left no note for him and no word of explanation; there was nothing but Margery’s confused statement that madam had decided she wanted to visit Town, because she could, because she was bored and lonely, because he was away entertaining himself at some house party or dinner from which she had been excluded. Ethan was not sure if his fury had sprung from frustration that Lottie had the liberty he lacked and was displaying it ostentatiously in his face, or a rather more disturbing fear that she had left him for good. On reflection he had decided that it seemed unlikely she had traded him in, for she had left almost all her clothes behind and Ethan suspected that were she to decamp, Lottie would take with her every last thing she could fit in a portmanteau, whether it belonged to her or not.
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