Lady Notorious

by Theresa Romain

  “That must be it.” Lady Deverell smiled prettily. “I regret that I did not make your acquaintance then, Mrs. Benedetti, but here we are now. A friend of Northbrook’s, you know, must be a friend of mine. We must have a comfortable coze and not let all these men distract us with their wagering.”

  My brother has seen you bare and screaming for help, Cass thought unkindly. And then, justifying the unkindness: and you left him on the ground, injured, for someone else to take away.

  But all she said was, “Of course, my lady.” With Gerry and Cavender there, she could say little else.

  Cases were solved when one recognized a pattern and anticipated what would come next. And Cass recognized the pattern of the ton as a whole. There was surface gilt, the trappings that spun like Catherine wheels to draw one’s attention to their brightness. Beneath that, everything was the same: worry. The women who ran society were worried. They had money and leisure but nothing to do of significance, and they were one party, one plan, away from facing their own lovely inconsequence.

  She recognized it, because she felt it herself. That growing sense of dread, the feeling that something was not right.

  The worry that nothing she did mattered, or even could matter, just as if she were a real lady of the ton.

  * * *

  By the time Cass extricated herself from Lady Deverell—that lady leaving only to return to the main house and dress for dinner—she was completely done in. How could so much gossip contain so little helpful information? Though with those men there, who would not leave, Cass couldn’t mention the tontine, or ask for information about them. All she could do was inquire after Lord Deverell, and that nobleman seemed hardly to interest his wife.

  Cass shook her head, hoping to clear it. Then, catching a liveried servant at random, she asked for directions to her bedchamber and requested a supper on a tray.

  Once she had eaten, she cleaned her teeth and washed her hands and face and felt like a human again. She knocked at the door to the room beside hers, hoping the servant had been correct and that George’s room was between hers and Ardmore’s.

  Indeed, it was George who answered the door; a George with coat off and shirtsleeves rolled up and cravat undone. “Oh, hullo,” he said carelessly. “Want to see what I’ve set up in here? I’ve been very clever.”

  Cass entered a room that must have looked much like her own before a marquess with a fondness for chemical experiments got to it. Where Cass had a small bureau, a writing desk, and a washstand, George had pushed all of these together and somehow got a plank of wood to lie atop them.

  “See?” He gestured. “A space to work.”

  The larger of his two cameras reposed on the makeshift table. Around it were different sorts of paper in dark sleeves, plus the familiar noxious compounds in amber bottles. “My father asked if I wanted to dine at the great house,” George said, “but I had a tray brought up. If we’re to be here all weekend, we’re going to work. Just as I promised you.”

  He grinned at Cass, and it was impossible not to grin back. “You did promise that,” she recalled. “You said I wouldn’t enjoy myself a bit.”

  “And you might not. See, sun darkens these salts so much.” He shook a little bottle at her. “I cannot stop the process once it begins, and then I’ve nothing to show but a sheet of wasted silver and blackness. Salted freshwater slowed the process, but not enough. Will sea salt be different?”

  She stifled a laugh. “I cannot say, but of course you must try it. Though whether or not I enjoy myself probably doesn’t depend on the fate of your experiment.”

  “Philistine!” he teased. “Everyone should care. What if this is the trial that ends in success?”

  When he spoke with such enthusiasm, she wanted to do unaccountable things, like trace the lines of his face. And when he looked mussed and rumpled and careless, she wanted to see him all the more undone. Cravat untied. Hair disordered. A little sweaty, as if he’d been exerting himself, and could be easily persuaded to do far more.

  Her mind was a cesspool.

  And he respected her, and he would not pursue.

  Respect. God, it was heady stuff. George respected her, and the notion made her want to climb in his lap. Hold him close to her heart.

  Or more.

  “I think,” she said, “I’m ready to go to bed.”

  He looked at the window, where sunset was only beginning to streak the blue sky with color. “Are you? I suppose you’ve never traveled so far in one day. It’s quite usual to be—”

  “George. No. I don’t want to go to sleep yet.” She waited a moment, until the significance of her words struck him, and his brows lifted.

  “Exactly,” she confirmed. “I want you to take me to bed.”

  Chapter Eleven

  She’d thought he would be interested in the suggestion. Eager, even.

  Instead, he eased around her, shut the door, and whispered, “I can’t do that! You work for me.”

  It was rather adorable.

  “But you want to?” Best to be clear about the matter.

  He groaned. “Don’t torture me. I’ve wanted nothing else since you—”

  “Asked you to unbutton my clothing?”

  He raked his hands through his hair. “No, ever since you put your hand over my mouth as we hid at Deverell Place. I put my tongue to your palm, and for a second I thought I’d gone insane, and then I knew I was completely sane because I’d got a taste of you.”

  She blinked several times. “Well. That decides it. Now you have to take me to bed. Wait one moment. I have—ha!” She’d found the tiny hidden pocket in her gown, one too small for a reticule but just the right size for a folded banknote. “Here. The five pounds you’ve paid me. I’m returning my wages. Now you’ve unhired me and I don’t work for you anymore, and you don’t have to have any ethical concerns.”

  George looked as if he wanted to laugh or throttle her, or perhaps both at once. “That is for work you already did. Put it back in your pocket.”

  She shrugged. “Then give me change for the amount I’ve earned and keep the rest.”

  Laughter won. Chuckling, he flung himself onto the foot of the bed and tugged at her hands. “Cassandra Benton. It seems as though you’d like to pay me to sleep with you, and that I’m not worth very much.”

  “What?” His hand had folded around hers, around the banknote. “I’m trying to accomplish the opposite. As if an amount so small as five pounds could make me yours, or you mine. I hadn’t thought of there being money between us, but you did. I’m trying to remove it.”

  He shut his eyes. “Keep the money. If you must remove something, let it be your clothing.”

  Nothing could have convinced her of his desire better than his reluctance to look at her. The sight of her was a power that he could allow only in pieces.

  You once said I was plain, she thought, but she did not say it. She knew he didn’t see her as plain now. Probably not beautiful either, but as something she liked better. As Cass, her own and only self.

  She stuffed the five pounds back in its hiding place, then locked the door and shoved a chair under the handle.

  “I like a woman who’s thorough,” George remarked. He was watching her move about the room, eyes bright with interest.

  “You’ll have to help with my clothing,” she reminded him. “You know I can’t undo the buttons myself.”

  His mouth curled. “You torturer. I should like nothing more.” He took her shoulders in his hands, turning her about so that her back was to him.

  She faced the wall beside the door, the sunset making dancing shadows of them on the painted surface. Her shape melded with his, their shadows larger than life. Already joined, already one, moving together.

  “I never meant to tease you,” she said. “Last time I really was trying to save trouble for the servants. And this time . . .” She swallowed as his hands tugged at her clothing. Surely he didn’t have to rub around quite so much as he unbuttoned it. “You can do
whatever you want with me.”

  “Can I really?” He sounded mildly pleased, as if she’d offered him extra sugar for his tea. “I could strip you bare, then?”

  Her thighs clenched. “Yes. You can strip me bare.”

  His fingers spasmed on her arm, then continued guiding the sleeve down its length. “I could kiss every mark the seams of your clothing and stays have left on your skin?”

  She shivered at the gentle rake of cloth and fingertips, then stepped out of the fallen gown. “Yes. You can kiss them until all the marks are gone.”

  He coughed a little, tugging now at the laces of her stays. “And . . . I could take you atop me? Watch you as you rode me?”

  “Yes. To the peak.”

  Under his breath, he cursed. “Oh, I’ll see you get to the peak.”

  Each knot untied, each button undone, was erotic. Like a dirty word in her ear. A hand at her breast. Knees between her thighs, spreading them.

  She slid her feet along the floor, wishing for him to spread them farther apart. There seemed no end to her garments; the stays, finally, were undone, and she was still in her shift and stockings and shoes, and her hair was all pinned up.

  His hands fell away from her. From behind her, his voice was quiet. “I wish the camera obscura could capture you thus. I do not think my memory will do this moment justice in the future.”

  “What, dressed in a strange combination of garments?” She turned to face him. The look on his face caught her by surprise in its naked wonder.

  His smile was faint. “You, all the colors of the sunset, with warm light washing over you through the window. I have never seen any sight I like so well.”

  He sounded serious, and she wasn’t quite sure how to handle him when serious. She wasn’t sure how to handle herself when he was serious. So she kicked off her shoes, crouched to unroll her stockings, and then straightened up and clambered onto the bed with him.

  “Now what?” she asked. “Do you want my shift off as well, or do you want to look at me in the sunset some more?”

  “Both,” he said shortly, and his hands were not gentle as he tugged the thin linen over her head. “You said I could do whatever I wanted with you. Do you still mean it?”

  “I mean it,” she said, kneeling on the bed and wondering where to place her hands. “I trust you.”

  “You’re not the chattiest woman I’ve ever met. Yet somehow everything you say is exactly right.”

  “A little more of that, and you’ll have me thinking you care,” she said lightly.

  A little more of that, and she’d begin to care herself.

  She’d been in lust before. She’d been infatuated. She had admired men in fashionable clothing at the theater; when she was barely a woman, she’d stripped a handsome young man of his regimentals and given him her virginity. Eagerly, passionately.

  Though she’d come to his room on an impulse, what she felt for George wasn’t like that unthinking animal urge. It wasn’t a burst like a firework. It was more like a candle flame. It was warm and steady and lasting, so that she hadn’t even realized how much she had come to rely on it. Without it, the world around her wouldn’t be the same anymore. Nothing would be as bright. Soon, she would not be able to do without it. Already she was unable to stay away, a moth to that little candlelight. Unwinking and irresistible.

  She let her hands fall where they would, then turned her face up to his. “Whatever you want.”

  His smile was wicked and sweet and full of dark promise. “Well, you’re already stripped bare. So next . . .”

  He crawled up onto the bed with her, still dressed in trousers and shirtsleeves, though he’d tugged off his boots and shed his cravat and waistcoat. Gently, he pressed at her shoulders, guiding her back flat to the mattress. He bent over her then—to kiss her breast? She drew in a sharp breath, anticipating . . . but no, it was a kiss at her ribs, tender and slow. His eyelashes flicked against her skin as he kissed her like that, all along what she realized was a line her boned stays had left upon her skin.

  “Every mark,” he murmured. “You said I might kiss every mark on you.”

  “All of them.” Though each of his kisses was small, there were so many of them, and she was beginning to wiggle into them, to wish them unending even as she longed for more.

  He found the mark at her side then; she could tell by the jolt through his body, the interruption of the seductive rhythm he’d set. “This is not from your stays.”

  “No. That one’s a scar.”

  “From what?” He stroked the jagged line of it; she knew it to be darker than the rest of her skin, and slightly raised and puckered. “If you want to tell me.”

  “Certainly. It’s nothing shameful. I shot at a man who was assaulting a woman, and he didn’t like that, so he came at me with a knife.”

  George’s head snapped up, his eyes blue pools of shock. “Cass!”

  “What?”

  “You could have died!”

  “But I didn’t. And he didn’t keep hurting that woman, either. And now I’m fine.” But she’d lost a great deal of her pleasure in her work as a Runner, knowing it could end her life.

  She’d been fine, yes, but she hadn’t quite been the same afterwards.

  “You are much more than fine, I believe.” George traced another scar, a faint crescent on one of her forearms. “And this? Dare I ask?”

  “Oh, that one is shameful. Charles tripped and broke a cup, and I cut myself picking up the pieces.”

  “How symbolic,” he said. “I think we should move on from the kissing of the markings, don’t you?”

  “Whenever you wish it.” Her voice was not quite steady now that his hand, rough and broad, had begun to skate over her skin.

  “Your legs are trembling. Do you wish it, too?”

  By way of answer, she parted her legs, making a wide vee of them for him to settle between. Then she sank back and waited for him to join her. It could not be soon enough.

  “Too subtle,” he said. “I’ve no idea what you want.”

  She let her head roll to one side. “George. Are you ever serious?”

  From the sounds at the foot of the bed, he was now struggling out of his remaining clothing. His shadow on the wall was purple, the sunset now warming the room with ruby light. “Yes. Sometimes. But it’s terribly hard to be serious.”

  “I know,” she said, watching his shadow move. “Because then you have to allow that something really matters to you.”

  She’d warned Charles against just for now and I’ll think of it later. But if there could be no later—and for a duke’s heir and an unofficial Bow Street Runner, there couldn’t be—then she was going to seize the just-for-now. People like her couldn’t afford to pass up chances for pleasure. If she waited for something to be perfect, she’d wait forever.

  Huh. Maybe that was why Charles did the ridiculous things he did, like climbing trellises and seducing their employers. Maybe they were two sides of the same coin, as always, and where she’d grown cautious with scarcity, he’d grown reckless.

  And then George climbed into bed and tucked himself behind her, and her only thoughts were of him. His warm bare skin, the faint scent of orange oil and a gunpowdery scent that meant he’d been messing with one of his picture-making powders. The hard lines of his muscles and the crisp hair over his chest and abdomen. She felt all this, sensed all this. She experienced.

  “You really matter to me,” he said, then kissed her neck, bared by her pinned-up hair.

  “You stole my words.” She was forgetting how to make words be sentences.

  “Do you mean that I matter to you, too? Or that I pilfered what was a terribly good turn of phrase?”

  She’d meant the second. But now that he suggested it: “Both,” she said.

  “One word, and she slays me,” he said quietly. Still holding her against him like a nestled spoon, he lifted his head to kiss her cheek, her brow, then her lips.

  They sipped at each other, slow and y
earning, letting tongues brush. His hands traced the shape of her waist, her hip, her breasts, and she ached for more. His feet tangled with hers, and then at last, his knee came between hers. Encouraging, she slid her leg over his, letting his thighs hold up her leg. She was against him, above him—and in a moment, she was around him, as he took the hint and drove forward into her wet depths.

  It was slow like this, each thrust like a hill to climb and slide down. She could have lasted forever, falling under the spell of his cock, his hands plucking at her nipples, his warm breath tickling her ear. His kisses at her neck, stubble abrading the skin. She surrendered, liquid in his arms, pleasantly close to a climax, drifting ever closer.

  “But you were to ride me,” he said, after a few minutes of this delicious melting together. “I want to see you above me, wild and powerful. Do you want that, too?”

  She loved to ride atop. Slipping from his embrace, she coaxed him flat on his back, then rose above him on her knees. The mattress was a soft cradle; his cock was a thick, hard promise, erect and flat against his abdomen. She took hold of it at the root, easing it perpendicular to his body, and he hissed his pleasure.

  Scooting forward to just the right place then, she positioned herself above it. Found her entrance with his tip, then folded herself over his body and let her own weight drive him deep, deep within her until he was fully seated.

  His fingers clutched at the coverlet; they’d never even pulled it back. His neck was corded, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut.

  “Are you close?” she asked.

  “Not at all. I don’t even like it,” he ground out.

  “Then I’d better find something to do that you like.” She reached a hand back to stroke his bollocks. They were high and tight, and at the touch of her fingers, he shuddered all over.

  “Cass.” He sounded strangled. “Just ride. Please. I want you to find your pleasure.”

  Ah. Well. If he put it so nicely, who was she to refuse? She eased herself up, kneeling astride him still, and kept her weight on her straightened arms. Thus could she work her hips up, letting him slide almost free, then grind down in a deep, firm stroke. He took her hips in his hands, guiding her on, helping support her weight. Sometimes his tongue found her lips, her nipples. Sometimes his hands clenched, hard, into the softness of her rear.