Surely Nicholas could not want a similar sort of behavior from me ... Could he?
'Twas almost unthinkable, but he was a man. Yesterday, in one of her secret, wistful meanderings through her husband's rooms, she had discovered the admission ticket to the bawdy house. Protruding from an envelope, the gleam of silver had caught her eye. Though she had chastised herself for intruding upon her husband's privacy, curiosity had nevertheless compelled her to extract the thinly pressed metal billet. The size of a playing card, the entry ticket had appeared innocuous enough at first. Embossed on the surface were the words "Get Thee to The Nunnery".
Turning the ticket over, her jaw had dropped. The crude image depicted an unclothed woman with enormous breasts genuflecting in a mockery of prayer. A date of admission had been inscribed beneath the figure. A sudden ringing had exploded in her ears as she had realized Nicholas was planning on attending this den of inequity the very next night.
Sheltered though she was, Helena had heard whispers about the infamous club. The Nunnery was rumored to be an expensive gaming and bawdy house where the classes mingled. During the weekly masquerade, peers of the realm hob-nobbed with merchants and solicitors and whoever else possessed sufficient coin to drink, gamble, and enjoy the company of the exquisite demi-monde. Even more shocking, according to her friend Lady Marianne Draven, certain married ladies of the ton frequented the masquerade as well.
"When one is disguised, one's true nature is unleashed," Marianne had said, with an indifferent wave of her fan. "After all, the need for amorous diversion is not the sole province of men. What is sauce for the gander and all that."
Helena knew she had risked all—her pride, her very reputation—to come tonight. She had thought in her love-addled mind to beg Nicholas to reconsider consorting with a whore; for her, the pain of a shattered heart would far surpass the physical pain she had experienced during their wedding consummation. She would do whatever he wanted to lift the fog from his eyes, to feel again the warmth of his affection. Fierce longing surged through her to be the kind of wife Nicholas would want. She would do anything to have him love her again. Anything.
And, she reasoned now with renewed determination, learning to please her husband in the bedchamber could not differ much from learning any other skill, could it? If she felt confident in anything, it rested in her aptitude as a pupil. She prided herself on being a student with good sense. Had not her tutors always commented on her quickness in acquiring proficiency in various subjects, from French to watercolors? Why, much to the amazement of her piano instructor it had taken her only a fortnight's practice to competently render a tricky passage of Master Bach's fugue in C-minor.
So, too, could she learn to be a wife.
All she required was instruction. Or, at the very least, the benefit of careful observation.
Emboldened by hope and desperation, Helena edged out of her hiding space and peered around the desk. With her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she could make out the lines of the furniture and—Heavens!—the soles of the woman's feet waving madly above the back of the settee. The figures themselves hovered below her line of vision. How could she observe and remain hidden at the same time? As she pondered the dilemma, she noticed the heavy velvet drapes to the left of the seating area. The curtains hung from ceiling to floor, and there looked to be voluminous layers of drapery behind them. Deep enough to conceal even several persons.
Perfect.
Only one task remained: to reach the curtains undetected. Helena ran her palms against the loose material of her tunic and felt the rustle of her petticoats. Her stays, too, restricted her movement. They would have to go. After several minutes of struggle, she managed to release the strings that bound the layers of undergarments to her and eased out of them like a butterfly shedding its fragile skin. Hoarse cries provided the perfect cover.
'Tis now or never.
She took a deep breath and crawled toward the curtains, her skirt barely a whisper against the carpet. With each movement forward, the distance seemed to lengthen. She expected discovery at any moment, an angry voice or a hand to halt her progress. Still, she crept onward with blind determination. By the time she slipped into the safety of the velvety folds, her palms were clammy, and her body shook with nervous excitement.
Then she bumped into a hard, warm object.
Her breath froze in her throat. As she thought to scream, a large hand clamped over her mouth while another trapped her at the waist. She was rendered immobile. Shock warred with a horrifying realization.
She was not alone.
"Be still or we risk discovery," a familiar voice whispered in her ear.
If possible, her heart thudded even faster.
"Do you understand?" His voice was so low she could barely hear it, but she would know those deep masculine tones anywhere. The mixture of dread and relief made her giddy. Slowly, she turned her head around and looked up into orbs of fathomless darkness. Nicholas. In the silvery moonlight from the windows behind them, she could see that he had removed his mask. Shadows obscured the details of his face, but she could make out the granite set of his jaw, the tight line of his lips.
She held her breath, waiting for her husband's reaction. What would he say to encountering his wife at such a time, in such a fashion?
"Do you understand?" he repeated as quietly as the last.
Numb with shock, she nodded.
Merciful heavens, he does not recognize me!
He released her, and belatedly she reached up to touch her cheek. She felt the feathery shell of the mask securely in place. Her fingers wandered to the profusion of brassy curls—red, she'd chosen, to disguise her own straight brown locks. Likely the paints, too, retained their concealing power. At the start of the evening she'd dipped her brush into the tiny copper pots with a liberal hand to complete the disguise. She'd felt a thrill of excitement peering into the looking glass. No one would recognize the demure Lady Helena in the brazenly red lips, smoky eyelids, and darkened lashes. No one would look at the water nymph with shamelessly red hair and scandalously low décolletage and see the Marchioness of Harteford.
Apparently not even the Marquess of Harteford himself.
TWO
Nicholas Morgan, the sixth Marquess of Harteford, slowly released the luscious baggage in front of him. He forced himself to count to ten in his head to cool the fire in his blood. To forget the softness of the skin beneath his palm but a moment ago, the delicate un-corseted waist he had circled with an arm, and the plush rounded bottom that had wriggled enticingly against his groin.
Unbelievable. He'd never accounted himself a prurient man, but now, for a second time in a month, he found himself reduced to a morass of raging animal desires. The first instance had been his wedding night; his loins had been fired by his beautiful, virginal wife—who, as it turned out, wanted nothing to do with him. Now, he felt his frustrated passions channel toward a ladybird, who might be beautiful—it was difficult to ascertain in the darkness—but who certainly had little to do with virginity.
Agony twisted in his chest, not for the first time since his marriage. He had always told himself that being raised in the stews did not necessitate acting like an undisciplined beast. Not that a blue-blooded upbringing was any guarantee of gentlemanly conduct: the sire he had never met, the former marquess, had been a famed debaucher. Nicholas himself was living proof of that. For most of his life, he'd believed himself the cast-off bastard of a whore. The truth concerning the legitimacy of his birth, when it had been delivered by a somber-looking solicitor a year ago, had turned his world on its end. It still hadn't righted itself.
His marriage only threw him further off balance.
I'm not good enough for Helena. I should never have married her.
Yet from the first moment he had laid eyes on her, he'd been held in her thrall. He'd first spotted her four months ago, at a ball as tedious as all the rest. Having made the obligatory rounds, he'd been intent upon escape when he noticed her. She had occupied a chair at t
he back of the room. At first glance, he might have missed her altogether, for her loose, putty-colored gown bore an unfortunate resemblance to the drapery beside which she sat. Moreover, she slumped in her chair, her shoulders curving inward like folded wings. It appeared that she wished to withdraw into herself so fully that she might disappear altogether.
Yes, he might have overlooked her completely, had she not turned her head at that very moment. His breath had caught when her gaze collided with his. Her wide tilted eyes, the color of sunlight reflected on a garden pond, had held an expression of infinite sadness. An expression which, for some unfathomable reason, wrought a twin ache in his own heart. He had waited for her expression to change, that infinitesimal shifting of muscles that always occurred when he was recognized. The curl to the lip, the slightly raised brow that bespoke volumes.
Son of a whore. Dirtied by trade.The Makeshift Marquess.
To his astonishment, Helena's gaze had remained open and guileless, and a shy smile surfaced on her lips. When her eyes had shifted downward, it had been with dainty acquiescence rather than haughty dismissal. All at once, he had been struck by a great many details about her: the fullness of her mouth, the Madonna-like curve of her cheeks, the delicately shaped foot that swung invitingly from beneath the heavy fortress of her dress. Then he had become intrigued by the manner in which she sat apart from the other young ladies, not a prodigious hothouse bloom nor yet a desperate wallflower. Rather, she was some furled, exotic breed, a mysterious bud poised to yield its passionate secrets. For the first time in his life, he had been gripped by a longing so intense that it dwarfed his reasoning.
Despite knowing better, he had sought an introduction and courted her, the only daughter of the Earl of Northgate. His path had been cleared by way of his fortune. Northgate, for all his venerable titles, lived in dun territory; the profligate gamester could not afford to turn down the generous settlement accompanying Nicholas' suit. With determined propriety, Nicholas had wooed his betrothed, to persuade himself as much as anyone else that he could be worthy of so fine a lady. He had taken Helena on chaperoned strolls in the park. They'd danced no more than twice at any ball. He'd made polite conversation with her family over afternoon tea, forcing down tiny watercress sandwiches drier than sand.
After every proper encounter during their courtship, Nicholas had returned to his chambers, rigid with want of her—in every way that was not decent. The carnal desires he kept carefully hidden in her presence shattered through the dam of his control. Lying in his bath, he would palm his rampant cock as he pictured her. Steamy images of her on her stomach, her luscious hips draped over pillows so that her pussy canted upwards, spread and waiting for him. She would be looking back at him, her big eyes soft and glowing with lust and adoration.
Please Nicholas, she would beg. Please take me.
In his fantasy, he would take his time teasing his impatient girl. He'd finger her silky cunny until she purred with pleasure. Then, kneeling between her thighs, he would do what he had never done before, what he had never wanted to do until he met her. Aye, from the first he'd wanted to put his mouth on her forbidden flesh, to taste this part of her that must be as sweet as all the rest.
He would eat her until she cried out her first release. Only then would he move over her, entering her with such slow precision they could both feel inch by burning inch his possession of her. There would be no doubt that he belonged there, buried all the way into her womanly core. With her eager, sweet entreaties in his ear, he would make love to her, teasing her with slow playful nudges, appeasing her with deep silken thrusts.
As the water rippled with his desperate strokes, his fantasies grew baser, more intense. Sometimes, he would stop, plunged to the bollocks in her trembling heat. He would moisten his fingers with her juices and explore the lovely crevice of her buttocks until he found the secret pucker. He would slick that delicate rim until it flared with excitement. Gently, he would ease his finger into her nether passage even as his cock throbbed in the sheath beneath.
At that moment, he would feel her entire body receiving him: his cock, his finger, his very soul. There would be no escaping his possession of her, or her of him. For surely, as she pleaded to be thoroughly fucked by her ill-bred husband, loving it, loving him, he would fall only deeper under her spell.
Truly, he was the worst kind of bastard. He had no right to touch his wife with hands dirtied in the gutter and capable of unspeakable sins. Moreover, newly joined to the ton as he was, even he understood that true gentlemen did not slake desires of the flesh in their wives' well-appointed bedchambers. No, they preserved their wives' delicate sensibilities and found the sort of woman who would embrace this baser side of life. For if Helena ever knew, ever suspected this animal side of him ...
Nicholas shuddered, recalling the revulsion and pain he'd seen on her face on their wedding night. He had never made love to a lady before. In the past, his sexual exchanges had functioned with one purpose in mind: to slake his physical needs. But that night, it had been his wife trembling in innocence in his bed. She had lain as rigid as a board, as still as death itself. He had fumbled to make things as quick and least distressing as possible for her, but it had not been enough.
To this day, her screams of pain tortured him. How could he have hurt her so? Were ladies so very different from the sort of females he'd known in his past? In those brief moments, she had seen through the fragile skin of nobility to the depraved beast that he was. The shame of it made his bones ache. Surely, she despised him. She would never want him to touch her again.
To spare her, he had to find a way to ease his torturous longing. The daily—nay, thrice a day—sessions of frigging himself were, unfortunately, not the answer. Stroking his own cock somehow frustrated him more and served to inflame the already assiduous desire for his wife. When he spewed his seed, he felt only a fleeting physical release—and no relief at all from the aching, bone-deep loneliness.
Thus, he'd come to terms with another solution. No longer able to deny the needs of his flesh, Nicholas had sought out an appropriate venue. The Nunnery, known equally for its depravity and its discretion, had seemed as good a place as any to indulge his sinful appetites. But tonight, as he'd scanned the opulent masquerade, he'd seen naught of interest. He'd danced with several doxies nevertheless, telling himself that he simply needed to fuck a woman—any woman—to relieve his lust. But the rubbing of their breasts against his chest, the coy undulation of their hips against his thigh had brought no fire to his loins. A particularly bold brunette had gone so far as to whisper her skills with a certain flogging technique in his ear. He had felt nothing.
Despair had slowly taken over, and he had roamed to an empty room above stairs. Alone in a winged armchair, he'd thought of the only woman who mattered: how pink her nipples must be, how he would tease them with his fingers until she begged for him to suckle her tits ... and instantly his sex sprang to attention. With a sigh, he'd given in to the richness of his fantasy, undoing his trousers with hands that became soft and white and tipped with perfect oval fingernails. He'd sought solace in the way those hands gripped his cock, urging the blood to rush to the stretched dome already slickening with seeped seed.
Except solace was not to be his, not even in this. Because moments later, the door had opened and instinctively he'd leapt from the chair to the nearest shelter. Bad enough that he'd already been branded the Makeshift Marquess by the vicious sticklers of the ton—he could only imagine the repercussions of being caught in this particular solecism. So that was how he, Lord Nicholas Harteford, found himself behind curtains, trousers undone, hiding from an amorous ménage à trois intent upon fucking until dawn or one of them expired from overexertion.
Having an aversion to closed spaces, Nicholas had felt cold sweat prickle his brow as time ticked away behind the smothering thick velvet. He had resisted, but his mind began the inexorable slide down the dark tunnels of his past. The choke of soot filled his throat, and he felt the urg
e to gasp for breath as an airless passage closed around him. A sudden scuffling sound had him tensing against the wall. He expected to see the terror of his dreams, the bearded face, the menacing grin—
Instead, he found himself discovered. Not by the screwing threesome, but by a light skirt. A doxy who appeared out of nowhere, whose scent of orange blossoms and spring leaves banished the dank odors of his memories. Whose plump arse and creamy breasts tempted his hands beyond comprehension. Lust shot through him like a geyser, instantly dislodging the panic.
Verily, his life was fast becoming a farce.
Unable to avoid the reality of his situation any longer, Nicholas studied his partner in hiding. After her initial shock at finding company behind the drapery, the nymph scrupulously avoided making eye contact with him. She appeared absorbed by the scene beyond the velvet; only her profile was revealed to him. Her feathered mask concealed much of her face, but he would guess delicate cheekbones accompanied the piquant point of her chin. In the faint moonlight, he could not make out the color of her eyes, but they appeared huge and luminous, seductively framed by dark, sweeping lashes and smoky eyelids.
And her mouth ... he could see its generous bottom curve, how it jutted out in saucy welcome. Even in the dimness, he could tell that it had been painted red. A siren's red. Luscious and ripe, a cherry for the tasting. The fruit of her lips trembled, and he realized she was engrossed by the activities visible through the slit of drapery. The naughty little minx. Reluctant amusement mingled with burgeoning arousal as he angled his head forward, so that he, too, could catch the sex play.
Illuminated by candlelight, a slim brunette writhed on her back as one of the men, a stocky, sandy-haired fellow, drove eagerly between her legs. She appeared to be participating with great enthusiasm from the way her slender legs encircled the man's hips and drew him in deeper with each thrust. Beside her on the carpet, a blonde man lay naked on his side. His erection flared crimson within the ardent clasp of her hand. He bent his head to sample her apple-sized breasts.
Her Husband's Harlot Page 2