A Notorious Ruin

by Carolyn Jewel

  “I’ll win her from her current lover. I promise you.” Niall finished his wine. “Then we shall see. I’ll put a sparkle in her eyes and set her up in London.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Praise every star in the heavens, she was home. All the way from Bartley Green she’d alternated between outrage and soul-shattering despair, between fists clenched and ready to fight and blinking away tears. Yes, she was home, and she raced up the front stairs and burst inside and there stood the footman, eyes wide at the heat of her entrance.

  It was all she could do to greet him with any degree of calm. She let go of her mantle too soon, and the servant had to make a hasty grab to prevent the garment from falling to the floor. “Oh,” she said. “Clumsy of me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Ma’am,” the footman said.

  She stood there, a stone, a wall, a fortress while inside she died at the horrible possibility that he’d heard the talk, too. Servants heard all the gossip.

  He gave her a half bow, and he was so guileless. Surely. Surely, he had not heard what they were saying? Not so soon. The strain of feigning serenity near broke her in half. The stairs were a thousand miles away, but she managed to cross the distance without tears or worse. She climbed the stairs, and before she’d reached the first landing, the toe of her slipper caught in her gown and she heard a ripping noise.

  She caught herself from a fall and then stared in dismay at the hem of her gown. Four inches of lace dangled from her hem. Thank goodness this had happened at home, in relative private, for her luck in such matters guaranteed that despite any care she took, she would trip on that strip of lace at the moment most likely to do some innocent soul a public harm and humiliation.

  She bent down, grabbed the lace, and yanked. The edge of the strip of lace cut into the side of her hand. She adjusted her grip and realized that if she stayed crouched as she was, anyone who came along would trip over her. She bent to get a firm grip on the bit of lace.

  There was a satisfying tearing sound when she yanked, but, unfortunately, the result was an even longer strip of dangling lace still attached to her hem. She fisted her skirt near the point where she wanted the lace to rip, got a firmer grip on the material and yanked. Another tearing sound floated to her, but that was the actual hem of her skirt tearing, not the lace coming free.

  “Blast and may the devil take you!” Too much lace dangled to think even a dozen cleverly bent hairpins could hide the defect. While she wished the dratted lace would simply vanish, the light changed. Because, she realized, someone had come up the stairs.

  Captain Niall gazed down at her, half bemused, she rather thought. Let him think she did not matter at all. “Oh. It’s you,” she said.

  “Yes. It is I.”

  Lucy smoothed out her expression. She knew better than to let any man see enough to guess her thoughts. She released the lace and her skirts and stood. Aware of the now lengthy strip of lace still attached to her gown, she curtsied. “Captain.”

  “Mrs. Wilcott.” Thrale thought highly of him, and that was something. Lord Thrale did not give his good opinion easily. She did not dare move any more than was absolutely necessary.

  “What, may I ask,” he said with a crooked smile full of charm, “are you attempting to do? Murder your skirt?”

  “I wish I could.” She was no stranger to finding herself in an awkward place, and she was safe behind the facade she’d perfected. He could no more know her thoughts than the man in the moon.

  He stared at the floor and that long strip of lace, and, no doubt, the place where her hem was torn. “I’m happy to murder it for you. Shall I?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Let’s go in here, shall we?”

  He meant a closet used by the staff to store trays and glasses and other detritus was five feet to her right. She headed for the room. Half a step inside, she trod on the lace and pitched forward. He caught her before she crashed into the sideboard that took up most of the room. The surface was cluttered with empty and half-empty crystal, the china cleared from the luncheon she’d missed, silverplate, and the remains of plates of food. A tray of mostly empty goblets and champagne flutes projected far enough off the edge that she was fortunate her clumsy entrance hadn’t knocked them over entirely.

  He went down on one knee and drew a penknife from an inside pocket of his coat. Her gaze followed him, and she mentally retreated from the moment. She focused on the sideboard across from her and counted goblets. The distraction sufficed.

  “Mrs. Wilcott,” he said in a droll voice.

  “Mm?”

  “Lift your foot? You’ve trod on this bit here, too close.”

  “Yes, of course.” She lifted her foot. Her skirts moved when Captain Niall took hold of the trailing lace, and Lucy lifted her foot at the same time Captain Niall applied pressure with his penknife, and she lost her balance. For half a second, all was well. And then it was not.

  Disaster came too fast to recognize. All she knew was that she was falling.

  His hand shot up and captured her upper arm and though she tilted horribly to that side, she momentarily stopped falling, and she believed the danger was over.

  Gravity continued to pull at her, and her balance vanished, and then his grip shifted and so did her balance and she was falling again, all so unexpectedly, and he brought up his other hand.

  “Have a care!”

  “Oh!” She landed on her side, and hit her head on the side of a chair stacked with plates. The chair shot across the floor toward the sideboard. The collision rattled the goblets. She attempted to right herself to no avail.

  Captain Niall’s fingers tightened on her arm, painfully, but he laughed as he caught her. “There’s a love.”

  She froze at the tone of his words. The way he spoke was not mere flirtation. They were replete with expectation.

  There’s a love.

  He did not move. He ought to have. He ought to be asking if she was injured, if he ought to call a servant. He ought to have already brought them to their feet. His arm shifted around her.

  “You’ve not injured yourself have you?” he asked.

  She meant to say, yes, I am quite all right because, miraculously, this was true. She’d not been injured in her fall.

  But Captain Niall looked at her, and his gaze held hers, and his arms tightened around her, and he said, “Shall we, then?”

  She pushed at his shoulders, hard enough. More than hard enough, thank you, to give him his reply.

  He stood, and that relieved her anxiety. He brushed at his trousers and then held out a hand to help her to her feet. He did not release her. “Later?”

  “Forgive me, I’m not sure I understand what you mean.” She gave him her brightest smile.

  “You are a beauty, there’s no one can deny that.” He looked her up and down. “I could drown in your eyes. Die over your sweet lips.”

  “That is absurd. Please do not say such things.” She moved away, and he followed.

  “I watched men lose their heads over you last season. You were cold, so cold, despite your smiles, and I saw them and watched their fates, and thought there’s a woman no man will have however hard he tries. I did not, you may have noticed.”

  “I thank you for that.”

  “Patience, they say, is its own reward.” He took something from his trousers’ pocket and pressed it into her hand and folded her fingers over the object. “Tonight, then. I await you with baited breath.”

  Lucy opened her hand.

  A key.

  There’s a love.

  What safety she’d found at home crashed around her, became dust in her mouth, ashes in her throat. She lifted her head. “You are mistaken.”

  Captain Niall returned her look. “We’re dining here tonight, is that not correct?”

  “What has that to do with anything?”

  “I’ll retire early. Midnight?”

  “Whatever you’ve been told…” Her voice shook. “Whatever you heard, sir, you were w
rong to believe it.”

  “Jack Wilcott says different, doesn’t he?”

  Mrs. Glynn was right about her. Once ruined, always ruined.

  She dropped the key on the floor and walked away.

  CHAPTER 29

  Lucy sat in her usual place at the river, aware that this was a morning when Thrale took a breather. Roger lay at her feet. She had not come here in order to waylay him. A lady, a true lady, would never permit the slightest appearance of impropriety. A lady would change her habit of the past three years and find another place to walk her hound in the morning. She had tried valiantly to live a well-regulated life, safe from gossip and rumor. For what?

  During her time in London, she had observed the ways in which couples met and, often, paired off. One went where the object of one’s desires would be. And here she was, where Thrale would be when she might have walked to a different spot to avoid him. As he might do. Thrale had adopted a routine that intersected with hers, and neither had he changed his habit.

  She peered into the water and watched the eddies and whorls. The ripples carried a leaf in circles and there was the flash of a fin. Birds called and chirped and sang. If she were to watch the field, she would sooner or later see a hare or a deer, and she would hope that Roger slept through the appearance. He’d be after a rabbit in a flash, and there’d be no stopping him until he had exhausted himself.

  Thrale made his appearance, and her heart leapt because she had time, before he saw her, to study him unabashedly. He kept an even pace as he approached her section of the river. He was stripped off to his shirt, with a sash run under the flap of his breeches and tied off at the side.

  He walked to her and gave Roger a pat on the head when the dog sat up. “I am not fit for company.”

  “No,” she said in a low voice. She reached for the sash at his waist. “You are not.”

  He smiled, and that smile darkened when she loosened the knot. He covered her hand with one of his. “Not here in the open.”

  “Where, then?” She cupped him, pressed her palm against him, savoring the hard length of him

  “My room.”

  She kept a hand on him, and part of her was astonished that he wanted her, a man like him. They could be lovers. She could be the perfect lover, and once she’d removed from Bartley Green, well, they would see. “Very well then.”

  Twice on the way back to The Cooperage, he stopped to kiss her; short, crude kisses, and both times she worked her hand between them. What a heady sensation, to have him kiss her like that, to put her hand on his parts and hear him groan. They got to his quarters via the rear stairs. She stayed in the back corridor long enough for him to put Roger into the care of his valet and dismiss the man until such time as Thrale called for him. Only then did she come in.

  He closed the door and pushed her back against the wall there and kissed her the way he had outside, a rough, lingering invasion of her mouth with his tongue. She drew away and got a hand on the knot of the sash that held up his breeches, and he said, “Hell, Lucy.”

  “Sit.” She pushed him toward a chair and he, one hand holding up his breeches, backed up.

  “I’m not decent.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder and pressed down. “Thank goodness.”

  He laughed as he sat, almost a growl. “I need a bathe.”

  “You do.” She studied him. He was magnificent with his clothes in disarray, and his hair unruly, and his breeches threatening to fall away from him. “Well. My lord. I’ll bathe you, then.”

  “Will you now?” His voice stayed low and rough.

  “Best take off your shoes and stockings.”

  “I shall, ma’am.” He did, with fair speed, too. She took a sharp breath and walked to the basin. “Should I come over there?”

  She splashed water into the bowl. She didn’t care about being proper or being a lady, she wanted his arms around her, his mouth, his body, she wanted to feel that shiver of arousal at the sight of his face when he moved in her. “Perhaps you ought to.”

  With a hand holding up his breeches, he joined her.

  She eyed him. “Peel off your shirt, too.”

  He obeyed instantly, and she stared. Devil had been a bigger man, but Thrale’s torso was no less a living anatomy lesson. She drank him in and gave in to all her wicked, ruinous inclinations. She wanted to touch him. Kiss him. Run her hands over him. She touched the middle of his chest.

  He went still.

  “Dear God,” she whispered. His skin beneath her fingers was warm and damp. “You are flawless.”

  His gaze on her darkened, and he dipped his head for a kiss. She rested a palm on his chest. Hot skin. Damp. Lord, the muscle there, the breadth and heft of him. Hard muscle under his skin, a man who could easily overpower her and do her harm. If he wished.

  He retreated when she gave him a push.

  At the basin, she dampened one of the cloths and wrung it out, then went to him. The former Miss Lucy Sinclair, innocent, silly, and vain, might never have existed. She was Mrs. Devil Wilcott, and a ruined woman, and as such, there was no reason not to surrender to base urges.

  She started with his face, and he turned his head to one side and then the other. Slowly, she worked her way down his torso to the top of his breeches, then moved behind him to do the same to his back. “You have a new bruise.”

  “One of Johnson’s young men gave me a proper ribber yesterday.”

  “You returned the favor, I hope.”

  “The claret flew. His not mine.” He meant he’d hit the other man hard enough to draw blood. He turned enough to see her. “I told him if he went easy on me, I’d show him I meant business. They do, those fighters who need the prize money; they’re afraid to hit a gentleman hard enough to bruise. But Johnson was there and made it clear I was his student.”

  “He’s an excellent instructor.”

  “I’m better now, with what you taught me. They take me more seriously. Even Johnson.”

  “As they must.” She tapped his upper torso. “Turn, my lord.”

  He didn’t though. His eyes turned to steel. “At first, he thought I was soft. I let him have a punch or two, let him think I thought he’d hit me hard. Then here.” He feinted an uppercut that touched beneath her arm pit. “Hard. And then again, and again. Johnson mocked him for being afraid to hit like a man, and then we had a proper go. You should have been there, Lucy.”

  “I wish I had been.” She ran the cloth down the length of his spine, and he turned his back to her while she dawdled and admired that broad expanse of muscle and sinew.

  “There’s a battle tomorrow, more an exhibition, I suppose. Private, but there will be prize money offered for those who need the enticement.”

  “At the Academy?”

  “No.”

  There was something in the way he made the denial that piqued her interest. “Where, then?”

  “Emmer’s Field.”

  “That’s nowhere near town.” She rested a hand on his back. Emmer’s Field was between two woods. Not a large clearing, but one that afforded a measure of privacy. “Will you be fighting?”

  He torqued his upper body to look at her. “Eight in the morning. Keep Roger at The Cooperage, and you might contrive not to be seen.”

  She kissed the center of his back. His skin, damp from her washing of him, was warm. Her mouth followed the flare of his shoulder muscle. “I’d like to see you.”

  “Would you?”

  She nipped his shoulder. “Very much, my lord.”

  “Then, madam, you shall.” He dropped his breeches and stripped off his small clothes. “At Emmer’s Field.”

  She touched him with reverence, that spot above the curve of his behind. Fighting had shaped him, those morning breathers up the hill had made him hard and lean, and her body responded to that. Her hand slid along the curve of his backside. She ran the cloth over the rest of him and with much admiration of the backs of his thighs.

  She walked in front of him and did the
same, and the silence between them turned thick with anticipation. She sank to her knees before him and washed his stones, gentle. Her insides turned to jelly, and she’d not felt this way since before Devil died, this soaring, hungry need to touch a man’s body, to have him surrender to her.

  Once more she dipped the cloth in water and wrung out it. He was hard, and the shape and heft of him was so perfectly, wonderfully male. She washed his privy member, careful, so careful to avoid the tip no longer covered by his foreskin. When she was done, she dropped the cloth in the basin.

  He extended a hand to help her up, but she ignored the offer and stayed as she was. She curled a firm hand around him and moved her fingers upward. He sucked in a breath.

  “I have decided, my lord, that I do not care what you think of me. I want to adore your cock.”

  “I exist for your pleasure alone, I assure you.”

  “You do. Just now, you do.” She looked up and into eyes the color of fog. He was without a stitch of clothing. She ran her fingers from his sternum, which was as high as she could reach from her knees, to beneath his navel, then around to the edge of his hip. “You are the loveliest thing I’ve seen in some time.”

  “For you. I am for you now.”

  “A most beautiful prick.”

  “For you,” he said. He took half a step forward. “To do with what you will.”

  He was different from Devil, she already knew that. A different man, a different soul. They met differently, and that changed the pleasure. The thought of making him come apart put a sharper edge on her arousal. She bent, breathed in and kissed the crown of him. A lick, then another, and with that the deep satisfaction of feeling the clench of his thighs as he steadied himself.

  She drew away, still holding him with a hand and stretched for a chair with the other. He understood her intent, for he reached and brought it close. He sat, legs spread. She fellated him, and learned him, and there was nothing much better than that moment when she felt his release, the pulse of his climax, the shudder that went through him, the hiss of his breath, the way he gave in to pleasure.