He and Carmalina were the last to rise and as their gazes locked, he knew he was in for a battle.
“There are so many things you might have told me about earlier,” she said in that blunt way of hers once the others were out of earshot.
“Would you have still sat down next to her if you had known?” It was a mistake to presume what she referred to.
Carmalina rose, threw her linen on the table and slammed her hands down on her hips. “Why did you not tell me that to stay here would cause more furor, signore? I asked you this same question and you did not answer. In fact, your uncle made it sound only slightly immoral. Let us not even start on the present company.”
He suddenly felt defensive of his actions and his friends and gave the wrong reply. “Anything for the scandal.” No sooner had the words passed his lips did he long to take them back.
“Si, signore. Anything for the scandalo.”
He didn’t like the way she said that. He especially didn’t like the way her eyes flashed fire, her mood going from congenial to smoking fury in a the space of a short breath. He also worried about the way she slipped into Italian. She hadn’t done that before with him.
As Justin followed Carmalina from the room, her irritated stomps clicked on the polished tile and he enjoyed the swish of her backside even though he should have considered a plan to thwart an Italian woman. English anger he could handle, had handled many times, but he’d seen how obstinate Carmalina could be.
Anything for the scandal. The carelessly spoken sentence bounced around in his mind as he took a seat and drank from the glass of scotch Newberry handed him. He was an idiot. Everything had been going so well and he had to go and ruin it. Again.
“Are you going to sing?” Esmeralda asked Carmalina excitedly, her hands clutched so tight around the glass she held, Justin was nervous it would crack.
“Assolutamante.”
Shit.
“Do you know much Italiano? Or perhaps you would like something in French?”
“French would be easier,” Esmeralda told her. She obviously hadn’t picked up on the dangerous undertones yet.
Justin shivered from the sudden cold.
“Very well, French it is.”
“Do you want the fortepiano or some kind of accompaniment?” Justin asked. He was only being polite but she silenced him with that look of hers that would kill him on the spot had it a sharpened edge.
“You think I cannot sing without it?” she asked, angrier than the moment called for.
“Not at all. Please, continue.” If his guests hadn’t picked up the radiating fury she emitted then they were either drunk or blind.
When she opened her mouth, Justin was immediately transported back to the first time he’d seen her. She’d been so exotically alluring. How could he have resisted even then?
Her voice seemed slightly different to him now but he was so caught up in her beautifully hypnotic sound, he didn’t pay attention to interpreting the words.
Until he caught one particular word, and then another and another.
The vixen was singing a bawdy tune about a sailor and his tavern wench. He caught a few more words about a kitchen table, a haystack in a barn… Ankles by her ears.
The others were clapping their hands and laughing. Clearly he was the last to catch on.
The more she sang, the pinker she got. She was trying to match his earlier stupidity and was doing a marvelous job of it. “Mounted like a—”
“Enough!” Justin stood and gave Carmalina his best imitation of an aristocratic silencing stare. First thing in the morning, all of London would be agog with the news that his mistress entertained his guests by regaling them with a depraved song about a sailor who couldn’t keep it in his trousers. Gone would be the reputation she still held as a talented opera singer.
“I’m sure Carmalina is having a joke with us all. How about an aria or a sonnet? In Italian?”
Fire still flashed in her eyes, the color in her cheeks high and she looked like she wanted to march across the room and slap him to the ground.
“I believe I need some air,” Esmeralda complained, swaying on her feet as she stood.
Suddenly with a flurry of activity, the madam of a brothel, and an equal on scandal’s unsteady ground, had taken the focus from Carmalina and shed it upon herself. Justin threw her a grateful nod but didn’t attempt to intervene.
Carmalina could do with the air also, and a moment to compose herself.
* * *
After dropping Esmeralda onto the closest stone bench in the side garden, Carmalina paced, her skirts snapping every time she turned to stomp back the other way.
She knew she shouldn’t but she was just furious enough to let some very choice words drop from the end of her tongue, and seeing as though the other guest’s Italiano was very poor, she didn’t have to hide what she said behind flowery sarcasm.
“Un bastardo.”
Suddenly she remembered Esmeralda had been feeling faint so she put aside her insults and dropped next to her, the cold stone a welcome relief to her heated fury.
“Are you feeling better?” Carmalina asked.
“Are you?” Esmeralda countered.
“I am fine.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You are not feeling faint?”
Esmeralda chuckled. “I have never felt faint for a second in my entire life and I will not start now. However, it is a woman’s prerogative to feign dizziness as a way of saving oneself from doing something one may regret.”
Carmalina certainly wouldn’t have regretted singing the song she had learned in the theatre. After all, Justin was the one who’d said it was all for the scandal. She’d actually begun to think they were getting somewhere, that the man he was indoors with her was a man she could fall in love with. And then he went and ruined it all with his insensitivity.
“Porca miseria,” she mumbled beneath her breath.
“You don’t know him very well, do you?” Esmeralda asked as she stared off into the darkness.
“Non, and sometimes I don’t want to.” Her words were childish but she was still so furious. The biggest part of the scandal, she now knew, wasn’t about them being seen in public or the ton knowing he slept with an opera singer. It was that he had moved her into his home. She should have asked more questions of Oliver when she’d had the chance. She knew it wasn’t usually done; she just hadn’t known it was never done.
“Justin never does anything he doesn’t want to, and he always remains in control.”
“Why does it mean so much to him?” Carmalina asked. “Why not run away and never look back? Start again afresh and find a woman to love?”
Esmeralda laughed again, only this time the sound held no humor. “Justin wouldn’t know love if it smothered him to death. I’m sure he’s told you about his family?”
“Yes. After meeting his mother, I am not surprised he wants to be rid of them all.”
“Have you met his father?”
Carmalina shook her head. “Not yet.”
Esmeralda shuddered. “Be glad. He is a man I wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alleyway.”
Carmalina didn’t answer. She got back to her feet and resumed her pacing.
“Why are you here?”
Carmalina stopped so suddenly she nearly toppled over. She hadn’t expected anyone to ask her that. “I had no choices left. Justin offered me a way to survive for a little while longer.”
“So you don’t care for him?”
She thought about that for a moment. She cared but she didn’t yet know how much or in what capacity. Confusion was a constant state for her. “He is a man and I am a woman.”
“That just tells me there is lust between you. Any fool could see that.”
Could they?
“I want you to know that if you are ever desperately in need, find me and I will assure you a position.”
Carmalina’s jaw dropped. “I-I couldn’t… I wouldn’t…” she stamm
ered.
“Not for that.” Esmeralda’s high-pitched giggles, so opposing to her figure and looks, cut through the night. “You could sing. I am thinking of branching into gentlemen’s entertainment rather than the kind you only get behind closed doors. You would be my first and best act.”
She turned the offer over in her mind. It wouldn’t be respectable work, but it would give her control back over her own life. She would be able to tear up the contract she had with Justin and take back her destiny.
“That is not going to happen.” Justin’s voice was as cold as ice as he emerged from the shadow of a climbing rosebush. He had a way of moving about undetected until he wished to be seen.
“Eavesdropping?” Esmeralda asked, getting to her feet. It didn’t take her long to disappear back in the direction of the drawing room doors, not waiting for an answer.
That left Carmalina, still furious but considerably calmer now she knew she had an option, and Justin, furious his supper guest had tried to steal his mistress.
“You do not own me, signore.”
“Not yet, bella.”
“I will not let you do this to me. You should have told me from the beginning.”
“I wanted my scandal and I would have done almost anything to get it. And you knew. Do not pretend you didn’t know something was amiss. What is this really about?”
Carmalina wouldn’t hold her breath to wait for an apology, but he had spoken in past tense and that alone was of interest to her. Did he claim defeat? What would that mean for her? For him?
“Would have done almost anything?” she asked.
Justin huffed and dropped down on the bench.
“I begin to see that some things are bigger than parentage and scandal.”
“Such as?” Waiting for him to continue was like waiting for grass to grow.
“I’m sorry I said that before.”
That wasn’t at all what she expected. “I beg your pardon?”
“No, Carmalina. I beg yours. I behaved like an oaf and you don’t deserve it. I don’t know what came over me.”
“No, I don’t deserve it.”
When his eyes met hers in the dark, anguish filled them, with guilt and sadness close behind.
“Can you forgive me?”
“I’m not sure I should.”
Justin rose from the bench and walked farther into the garden. Carmalina followed, almost losing him in the darkness.
“Do you think you could touch the moon, bella?”
Autumn leaves crunched beneath her delicate slippers but when she stopped, the silence was marked only by the distant cry of a night bird. She peered through the near naked branches overhead, looked at the moon. It was big and bright; only a thin cloud of smoky haze blurred the edges. They both knew she could never touch the moon.
“That’s how I feel some days,” he continued. “I want this so badly but I have trouble explaining just how much it means to me. Being separated from my family seems as futile as stretching out an arm and trying to pluck the moon from the sky.”
“Why do you persist?” She didn’t want to belittle him or his actions but eventually there would come a time when he would have to reveal his true purpose.
“Because this is my life, dammit. Don’t I have the right to walk the earth of my own free will?”
“Then leave.”
“I can’t do that.”
“And why not?” Carmalina threw her hands in the air. “Start over. Make your life what you want it to be.”
Justin threw his head back and yelled to the sky, “It’s not that simple!”
“It seems the only person who makes it too hard is you. You don’t want to be cut off, you wish for revenge.”
“Revenge would mean I would have to care if they hurt as much I did. I simply want to be free.”
“You’re lying to yourself, running away from the truth.”
“Is that what you did, bella? Did you run away too?”
Carmalina considered the question he had neither denied nor confirmed. She had run away. Fled from the memories, from her failures, from the crippling sorrow every time she’d thought about Antony’s life and how short it had been. Most of all, she’d fled from his family. They didn’t want her in their lives. She didn’t bring a title or connections with her. She didn’t even have any money. They knew as well as she there was no way she carried his child. The fatal stone hurled by Antony’s mother would have been to make good on her threat of having the Church annul their marriage.
That, she couldn’t bear. So, yes, in a way she’d run, but not for the reasons that Justin wouldn’t. She sighed. “Mine is a long story.”
“Will you tell it all to me one day?”
The way he asked implied they had that much time together, but they didn’t. She had to change the subject or risk her thoughts turning more morbid than they had already.
“Do you know, I was just offered a very lucrative position in a house of ill repute?” She felt his gaze in the moonlight, heard his intake of breath. She’d startled him and within a moment he had her by the shoulders, his grip biting into her skin. Carmalina decided to put him out of his misery before he got it into his head to shake her. “Of course, I have a contract with someone else at the moment.”
“You do?” His voice held all the surprise mirrored in his eyes.
“I have contracted myself to a beast with bad manners and a heavy weight upon his shoulders.”
“Why do you not tear up this contract with the monster?”
“Because even though I have fallen and am still falling, I have principles. I shall not break the agreement because the lion is no gentleman.”
“He is a lion now?” Justin put his arms around her and pulled her close.
“He has ferocious appetites. He thinks every woman is his for the taking and struts around like a king. Lion is an apt description.”
“Hmm, I think I like the sound of it. Will you call me Your Majesty or Your Highness?”
“You do have an enlarged head. How do you know I was talking about you?” And with a playful swat, Carmalina twisted free of his hold and ran off in the direction of the rose garden.
There came a groan behind her and then heavy footsteps as he gave chase.
When an arm snaked around her middle, Carmalina let out a shriek and before she knew it, she was on the ground. Justin’s weight pinned her into the soft, damp grass but she didn’t mind. She rather liked it.
“It seems the lioness is no match for the powerful predator.”
Carmalina didn’t like being compared to a lioness. She was his mate for the moment, but she would never be his mate for life. Rather than argue, she threaded her fingers through his hair and pulled him down so she could kiss him. Distract him.
From the moment their lips touched, Carmalina forgot all else. Their dinner guests, the damp grass beneath her back, all talk of scandal and, most importantly, she forgot she was supposed to be angry with him.
Heat and desire raged between them until she silently begged him to end the torture, to tumble her in the garden like a fishwife. Each time he ground his pelvis into hers, she lifted to meet him, the pressure he applied setting the stars to shine brighter.
“I don’t want to have you like this,” Justin growled as he licked and kissed her jaw and neck.
“Lions do it in the open. Why can’t we?”
“You’re getting wet.” And with those words, she found herself in the air. But then Justin was beneath her, the dew soaking his coat instead of her thin gown.
Carmalina straddled his hips, her skirts hiked up to her knees. Justin reached under her froth of petticoats and the next thing she knew she was lowered onto his hard length. The thrill of being caught, of the new position, all were so erotic and wicked, she was hopeless but to follow his lead.
Carmalina choked on a gasp when his grip tightened on her hips, urged her to ride him much the way she would a horse. She soon found a rhythm, his sharp hip bones digging into her bo
ttom, added to the heightened senses that at any moment one of their guests would come searching for them.
It all became too much. Justin held her firmly against his body as he plunged up and into her over and over, the only sounds their harsh breaths and the muffled slapping of skin against skin under yards of fabric. He didn’t let up for a second, didn’t give her time to grow accustomed, to learn and acknowledge this new and exciting experience.
The explosion in her body was over sooner than it had begun, her heart racing in her ears and the tips of her fingers tingling.
Carmalina felt completely boneless as her passion-filled world started to right itself. From the corner of her eye, she saw a small rat dart from one bush to another, heard an owl hoot and in the distance, a dog’s lonely whine. The air became chill on her exposed skin but where they were still joined, she was hot. Hot and a little sticky.
“I don’t suppose we could sneak back inside without anyone noticing our absence?” she asked hopefully.
Justin chuckled, and the movement vibrated through his chest to where she lay, her cheek to his shoulder. “I don’t think so. They expected us to have a row.”
“We did.”
“That wasn’t a fight.”
“Have you noticed whenever we disagree on something, we argue and then we have sex?”
Justin nipped her ear. “We shall have to argue more often.”
Carmalina remembered his words of apology from earlier. “Did you mean what you said?” she asked, once again holding her breath.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think it was a great matter.”
She sighed. She hadn’t been talking about that. Obviously when he’d said some things were larger than parentage and scandal, he hadn’t meant to call a halt to the follies.
“Do you forgive me?” he asked as he kissed the top of her head.
“How can I stay angry at you?” she replied with a wriggle of her bottom. His length hardened inside her, ready for more.
“For God’s sake, woman. Do you want to be on your back in the garden all night?”
“I could think of worse ways to spend the duration of the evening.”
“I have a better idea. How about you faint and I’ll carry you inside and tell everyone you aren’t well. Then I will carry you upstairs and we can continue in warm comfort.”
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