“Really, Miss Bennet, visiting a brothel can’t be the worst thing that’s happened to you since you came aboard my ship.”
She felt for her dagger under her dress and found it where it always was. Comforting and cold. “That’s true enough, I suppose. I shall accompany you.”
“Well, thank heaven for that,” he said, offering her his arm.
Together, they left the ship on a boat together. He rowed. She stared at the mass of boats and the lanterns. She was nervous.
When they reached their destination, he tied up the boat, climbed out, and helped her out as well.
She straightened, smoothing out her skirts, and when she turned, she came face-to-face with a fat Chinese woman, who was wearing a low-cut gown, her ample bosom mostly uncovered.
“Mr. Snow!” said the woman delightedly, clapping her hands together. “I thought it was you.”
“Snow?” said Elizabeth, arching an eyebrow.
Darcy grinned. “That’s right. Archibald Snow, at your service.”
The woman furrowed her brow. “I thought it was Arthur.”
“No, Archibald,” said Darcy firmly, still smiling. “And it is lovely to see you again Miss Chen.”
“Oh, you call me Li, I have told you before,” said Li. She turned to Elizabeth. “And this must be Mrs. Snow, of whom I have heard so much. I told you to bring your wife someday so that I could meet her.” She offered Elizabeth her hand. “Your husband is the most honorable man, never touch any of my girls.”
Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “My—my husband?”
Darcy shrugged at her.
“Follow me, follow me,” said Li, turning and going inside. “I have a lovely spot for you both.”
Darcy stepped close, speaking in her ear. “I’m sorry about that. She’s the one who decided I had a wife. I never even told her that.”
“Why is your name Snow?”
“Not so loud,” he said.
Li turned. “You come, yes?”
“We come,” said Darcy, dragging Elizabeth along with him.
Li led them through a drawing room where Chinese girls in even lower cut bodices—some with their breasts completely exposed—were lounging on couches and sitting on men’s laps.
Elizabeth couldn’t stop staring. She was electrified by the sight of it all. It was horrifying. It was oddly enticing. It was utterly disgusting.
They emerged in another room, this one smaller and swathed in silks and gauzes, muting the lights. There was a low table surrounded by cushions.
“Sit,” said Li. “I will bring you food.”
“Thank you,” said Darcy. “This is lovely.”
Li smiled again and left the room.
Darcy settled down on the cushions and gestured for Elizabeth to sit next to him.
She put her hands on her hips. “What is going on?”
“Oh, you know I never give my real name anywhere. That wouldn’t make any sense, now would it? I don’t need to go broadcasting who I am. Sit down.”
“Why does she think I’m your wife?”
“Well, as I said, she got it in her head that I must be married on one of these trips, and I decided it was easier to let her think that.”
“Why would she get that into her head?”
“Will you sit down?”
She sighed. She sat. “Why?”
“I suppose because I never wanted to spend time with the women here. My men always partook, but I was happy enough with food and wine. Oh, and a bit of opium, of course. Having someone else tend the lamp for you is much more convenient than doing it yourself.”
Elizabeth raised both eyebrows. “So, you come to a brothel, but you don’t actually visit the women here?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I can’t see why you’d behave that way.”
He shrugged. “You wouldn’t think so, I don’t suppose.”
“Well, it’s not because you’ve any regard for the women here, that I’m sure of,” she said. “You would have killed me if I hadn’t begged you not to.”
“Oh, now is that fair, Miss Bennet?” He made a wounded face. “I have protected your honor and beheaded my cook for you. I really don’t know why you insist on thinking I’m a monster.”
“You are a monster.”
He smirked, running his fingers over the tablecloth. “Yes, well, this is a monster who has no desire to get random women with child. Unmarried pregnant women tend to do such dreadful things.”
Elizabeth furrowed her brow. What was that all about?
“Let’s not speak of this anymore,” he said, and he didn’t sound quite as cavalier as he had earlier.
Li hurried back into the room with a pot of tea and some small glasses with no handles. She poured tea for them, smiling. “You make lovely couple. I am so happy to see you both together.”
“Oh, thank you, Li,” said Darcy, drinking some tea. He turned to Elizabeth. “Darling, you must tell her how pleased you are to be my wife, how much you love me.”
Elizabeth glowered at him. “You are always full of surprises,” she said.
“She is a beauty, this one,” said Li. “You lucky man.”
“Yes, I think so.” He looked at her appraisingly.
Elizabeth found herself flushing, heat rushing to her face. He wasn’t supposed to do that, to look at her that way. She felt uncomfortable. She reached for the tea and took a big gulp.
“You can’t keep your hands off her, I am sure.” said Li. “Kiss her all the time?”
“All the time,” said Darcy. “Absolutely all the time.”
Elizabeth wanted to hit him. Hard.
Li lifted her chin. “You kiss her now? You two are happy, yes?”
Elizabeth’s lips parted in horror. Surely, Darcy would never do such a thing. Why, to kiss a man that a girl wasn’t engaged to, it was tantamount to ruin.
But Darcy simply smiled, leaned over her as if it were nothing, and pressed his lips against hers.
The kiss was like nothing she had ever felt before. Darcy’s lips were surprising pliant and soft for the kind of man he was. They touched hers, and then pulled slightly away, and she found she was disappointed at their absence.
And then his lips found hers again, and there was a little more pressure this time, a sweet urging to allow him access to her mouth.
She parted her lips.
The touch of his tongue against hers. A whirling sensation, like bright lights and movement and being sucked inside a vastness, a goodness, a delightfulness—
He broke the kiss, pulling back. His brow was furrowed, and he looked troubled.
She touched her bottom lip, feeling the absence of him there.
Li clapped her hands together. “Ah, yes. You two are very in love. I can tell.”
Darcy cleared his throat. “Indeed.”
“I go to get your food,” said Li, smiling at them. She ducked back out of the room.
Darcy fiddled with his tea cup. “Sorry about that. One of the first things you must understand about swindling is that you can’t back down from selling the untruth. You must act exactly as if you were the person you say you are.”
Elizabeth sniffed. “Well… well, you must never touch me that way again.”
“Of course not.”
She was happy that they were sitting down, though, because a strange weakness seemed to have stolen over all of her limbs.
* * *
Elizabeth paced in her room back on the ship. She had been trying to sleep, but she couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss, about how nice it had been, about how it had made her whole body wake up in a way that she hadn’t even quite known it could wake up.
It wasn’t as if she had never been kissed before.
Well, she had never been kissed by a man. Like that.
But she had kissed her family members as a small girl. Even now, when she saw her nieces and nephews, she would kiss their foreheads or cheeks.
She had not realized how different kissin
g a man could be. She had not understood that there was so much more to it than… than…
Oh, dear.
The worst of it was, that was the only kiss she was ever going to have.
Because she was never going to get married, and so she would never have a husband to kiss that way. She would never be a part of a real happy couple dining under the smiling eye of a Chinese madam—actually, that was a very rare situation, wasn’t it?
But the point was, she was a washed-up spinster who had no prospects. And now, she’d been kissed by some pirate, a wretched man who murdered people and kept her captive and protected her from the men who had tried to molest her, and—
What did the protection matter?
He was still horrible. And he should never have kissed her.
Never.
But, oh, oh, she wanted him to do it again.
No. No, she definitely did not want any such thing. That was quite out of the question. He was a scoundrel. He was too wicked for words. She would never let him kiss her if he tried again, and she had told him not to do it, and—
Why had she told him that?
What did it matter, really?
She was a washed-up spinster with no prospects. If she wanted to go about kissing wicked men on the mouth, letting them stick their tongues in her mouth, then who would really object? As a young woman, she had belonged to her father, who hoped that she could find a good marriage and then he would pass her over to her husband. Then she would belong to him.
But she was not to have a husband. She belonged to no one.
“I belong to myself,” she whispered into the darkness. “And if I want to kiss Mr. Darcy, then I jolly well can.”
But, of course, she didn’t want that.
Not at all.
* * *
Darcy stood on the deck of the ship, staring out at the paper lanterns that lit up the perimeter of the group of Flower Boats, where all of his men were.
For the first time, he was truly tempted to join them.
He couldn’t, of course. Then he’d be leaving Miss Bennet alone on the ship.
And Miss Bennet was the very reason he was tempted.
He picked at the edge of the railing absently. It had to have been that night when she was nearly ravaged, when he saw her bodice cut open and one of her breasts…
He never allowed himself to think long about the sight of it, because he was ashamed of himself, but he had noted that it was perfectly shaped, topped with a tiny pink, puckered nipple, just the size that would fit nicely in his hand.
Yes, it had to have been that.
He hadn’t touched a woman’s bare breast since…
Oh, God, since before Georgiana’s death. After all that, he’d lost his taste for the sordid business.
He choked.
Not that he’d ever ruined a woman of gentle birth, like his sister. No, there had a been a few—very few—London whores who’d always seemed too thin and somewhat bored by the entire activity. He couldn’t stand the thought of the whores either, though.
He knew that bad things befell women of all classes who fell pregnant out of wedlock, and there might be no recourse for them.
No, he was not going to be responsible for anything like that. He had sworn off it.
He only had to think of coming home to Pemberley, his sister’s belly underneath her skirts, her wide, frightened eyes when he raged at her…
Oh, dear God. He had handled all of it so badly. He was patently bad at deciding things for women.
Case in point?
Kissing Miss Bennet earlier. He could have gotten out of that easily, telling Miss Li Chen that proper British men didn’t kiss their wives in public in whorehouses. She didn’t know anything about British culture. She would have simply apologized and let the matter go. She wouldn’t have even been suspicious.
And for that matter, what if she had been? There was no skin in the game in the ruse that he and Miss Bennet were married. It wasn’t as if he was trying to pull off a dazzling swindle in which thousands of pounds were on the line.
When it came down to it, he could have disabused Li of the notion that he was married if he’d liked. Her opinion of him, whether or not she thought he was a liar, didn’t matter.
No, there was a perverse part of him that had taken pleasure in making Miss Bennet uncomfortable. And he had enjoyed kissing her.
He must have some pent-up desires for her because of seeing that breast…
That was all it was.
But Lord, kissing her…
It had been too long since he’d kissed a woman, he realized. It had been too long, and he had forgotten about the way it felt to have a woman’s body so damnably close, all of her soft skin and curves right there, begging to be stroked and squeezed.
Not that he could do such a thing to Miss Bennet.
Well, actually…
He turned away from the railing, arching an eyebrow in thought. Actually, he was in exactly the kind of position in which he could do such a thing to Miss Bennet, and there would be no consequences. The men all probably thought that he was, anyway. That was the only way they could rationalize the fact that he had killed some of them for the attempt on her virtue. They thought he wanted her all to himself.
And if he wanted, he could have her.
She couldn’t stop him.
But his stomach turned in distaste. As much as he understood the wildness that got in the mens’ heads about women and sex, he couldn’t understand an appetite for forcing them. There was something monstrous about the idea, something that went against the very nature of the universe.
To his way of thinking, women had been made weaker than men, and it was the duty of men to keep them safe by virtue of their greater strength. Using such strength against a woman was villainy writ large. It was worse than murder, because it was so cowardly.
He pushed the thought aside.
He remembered the way Miss Bennet had opened her lips to him earlier. She hadn’t offered much resistance, despite her protestations.
Possibly, he could convince her…
Ah, but that was just as bad as forcing her in the end, wasn’t it? Maybe that was even worse, because he was manipulating her to allow him to do something to her that she wouldn’t welcome.
It’s exactly what Wickham did to Georgiana, he thought, bile rising in his throat.
Hadn’t she said that she never wanted him to touch her in that way again?
It was a long voyage back to India, but he was just going to have to bear it. Once he got Miss Bennet back in the hands of solid English folk, she’d be safe enough, and he could stop worrying about her. Until then, he just had to keep her safe from himself.
CHAPTER SIX
As the voyage wore on, Elizabeth found herself looking forward to seeing Darcy, and not only as a break in the monotony of her day, which was not nearly as horrid as it had been, now that she was free to roam all over the ship.
Back then, she was happy to see anyone, but now she had run of the place, and she spent her days going as she pleased. She had an afternoon habit of reading to a good portion of the crew, many of whom were illiterate. They were enraptured by the books she read them. Their favorite was Robinson Crusoe thus far.
It was odd how it had come about, she mused. She had been reading one day on the deck, basking in the sun. One of the men had approached her shyly. He had asked what she was reading and told her that he couldn’t read. However, he was intrigued by reading itself, wondering what was contained in all those sheafs of paper.
She had consented to read aloud to him, and he had been delighted.
As she read, more and more men gathered.
The next day, they all came back, asking for more of the story.
And so it went. Now it was tradition.
Sometimes, she even saw Darcy step in at the back of the group. He would regard her with his dark eyes as she read.
She had formed a bit of camaraderie with the men, who were all kind to
her now, none of the leering lust in their eyes that she had seen at the beginning of the journey. So, when she saw Darcy, it wasn’t as if she was starved for conversation and company as she had been before.
Still, she looked forward to seeing him.
It could have simply been because conversation with Darcy was more familiar than conversation with the men, who didn’t have the same frame of reference as she did. Darcy knew the same social circles as she did, and he was able to talk of the same things as she.
Sometimes, they spoke of England.
“How long have you been away?” he asked one night as they shared dinner in his cabin.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t any idea how long I’ve been on this ship with you. It feels like quite a long time.”
“Well, how long were you gone before you boarded this ship?”
“Let’s see… it was six months on the journey from England to India by ship, and then I was there for at least a year, and then I was on the return ship for nearly two weeks. So, it’s been a while.”
“You miss it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course,” she said, but she wondered at the truth of the statement. Honestly, being on the ship recently, standing out on the aft deck and gazing at the ocean stretching out behind them, the wind in her hair, on her face… And spending her days as she liked, not following the strict protocols of mealtimes and such, it was all very refreshing. She did miss England. She must. She knew that.
And yet, when she thought of what waited for her there on her return, she wasn’t the least bit excited for it. She would go back to being passed about amongst her sisters. Perhaps she would help to care for her nieces and nephews. And life would be gray and dull and sedate. She would have very little to look forward to, just the drudgery of the day-to-day.
She turned to him. “Do you miss it?”
He considered. “Yes, of course I do. It’s only that I… well, I don’t miss all of it, I guess. There’s something about life on a ship, being free out here…”
“Yes,” she said.
And they smiled at each other.
“But this can’t last forever. I must go back at some point. Once I’ve replaced the fortune that I lost, then I’ll go back to England, and I’ll have to be a proper gentleman.” He made a face.
The Dread Mr. Darcy Page 6