Mary Balogh

by A Counterfeit Betrothal; The Notorious Rake

  “It is coming back,” she said after a few minutes, her voice shaking. “It can’t be, can it?”

  “But it is,” he said.

  He stood with his back to her until the storm came close again, and then he stepped over the bench, lifted her from the table, and sat with her, his back to the open side of the shelter.

  But this time she was less mindlessly terrified. She was tired, with the pleasant ache inside that came from a good loving. She did not think such thoughts, only felt such feelings. He held her head against his shoulder, and she closed her eyes and drifted into a state that approximated sleep—as far as one could sleep in a crashing thunderstorm.

  It stayed overhead for a long time, but when it moved off this time, it went to stay. And eventually the rain stopped, too.

  “Well,” he said, looking down at her light slippers, “the paths are going to be rather muddy, but at least we can move out of our prison house. I profoundly hope that my carriage is still waiting for me.”

  He carried her along the narrower and muddier path despite her protests, and they walked side by side, not touching, along the main path. She needed her hands to hold his coat in place about her shoulders. He had insisted that she wear it, though he must be cold in his shirtsleeves, she thought.

  His carriage was still waiting, one of three. It seemed that they had not been the only ones trapped by the storm. He helped her inside, gave some instructions to his coachman, and then climbed in to take his seat beside her.

  2

  THE CARRIAGE HAD TRAPPED THE EARLIER HEAT OF the evening and not lost it during the storm. Lord Edmond Waite settled gratefully into the seat beside Mary. It was chilly outside in only shirtsleeves—and a somewhat damp shirt at that.

  He looked across at her. Huddled inside his evening coat, she looked even smaller than she was. He felt all the unreality of the moment. Lady Mornington, of all people. And not only was she seated in his carriage, alone with him, his coat about her shoulders, but she had cuddled on his lap and given passionate kiss for kiss. And she had made love to him on the table as fiercely as he had made love to her.

  Lady Mornington! He felt rather like laughing—at the whole bizarre situation, perhaps. At himself.

  Lady Mornington was everything he had always most shunned in a woman. She was independent and proud and dignified—not that she had any reason to think herself above people like himself. It was common knowledge that she had been Clifton’s mistress for years until he had dropped her quite recently. Or until she had dropped him—in all fairness, he did not know who had put an end to the liaison.

  And she was an intelligent woman, one who liked to surround herself with artists and brilliant conversationalists. Her literary salons were highly regarded. The woman was a bluestocking, a breed he despised. He liked his women feminine and a little mindless. He liked his women for his bed.

  He had always looked on Lady Mornington with some aversion. Not that he knew the woman, he had to admit. But he had had no desire to know her. She was not even physically desirable. She was smaller and more slender than he liked his women to be. There were no pronounced curves to set his eyes to roving and his hands to itching. And she was not pretty. Her dark hair was short and curled—he liked hair to be set loose about his arms, to twine his hands in, to spread over ample breasts. She had fine gray eyes. That had to be admitted. But they were intelligent eyes, eyes bright with an interest in the world and its affairs. He far preferred bedroom eyes. And then, the woman must be thirty if she was a day.

  He had not been pleased to discover that Lady Mornington was one of Mrs. Rutherford’s party to Vauxhall. Or the Hubbards, for that matter. He had not expected any fellow guests of high ton. He was still smarting from the ton’s censure over his jilting of Dorothea—the iceberg. Not that they had been officially engaged, of course. But everyone had been expecting it, and the obligation had been there. He could not deny that.

  And he was still nursing a broken heart over Felicity’s desertion. Beautiful golden-haired Felicity Wren, whom he had wanted for years, even before she was widowed, and who he had assumed was his earlier in the year, though she had teased him with a pretended preference for her faithful hound, Tom Russell.

  She would not be his mistress. Finally he had had to realize that she really would not be. But by that time he had been too deeply infatuated with her to give her up. Instead he had jilted Dorothea and gone off to elope with Felicity. For her sake he had been willing to behave in a manner that even for him was dastardly.

  But she had sent Tom Russell to the place where she had agreed to meet him. Tom Russell to announce that she was to marry him within the week—from choice. It was to be a love match. And Russell had looked at him with all the contempt of a man who has never given in to any of the excesses of life, and had offered to fight him if he were not satisfied.

  He had declined the honor, and had returned to London to lick his wounds, to face the collective scorn of the ton, to drink himself into oblivion. And to find himself a new mistress, someone to help him forget all that he had lost in Felicity.

  “You are warm enough?” he asked Lady Mornington, looking down at her.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said. “Would you like your coat back?”

  “No,” he said. “Keep it about your shoulders.”

  He had always wondered what Clifton had seen in Lady Mornington, since it was as clear as day that Clifton could have had just about any female he had cared to cast his sights on. But he had chosen the plain bluestocking Lady Mornington and had remained with her for what must have been five or six years.

  He had his answer now. Beneath the plain and demure image she presented to the world, Lady Mornington hid a wild and earthy sexuality that had taken him totally by surprise earlier and had all but robbed him of control despite the extreme discomfort of the tabletop, which had not been quite long enough to accommodate their legs.

  Of course, he thought, the woman had been quite distraught with fear of the storm. He had never seen anyone so beside herself with terror. Perhaps her behavior had been atypical. Perhaps her usual performances in bed were as passive and as decorous as he would have expected of her. He looked at her again and thought with some unease of the instructions he had given his coachman.

  “Is that thunder again?” she asked, her knuckles tightening against the edge of his coat.

  “It is very distant,” he said. “I don’t believe it will come over again. Though of course I have been known to be wrong before.”

  She looked up at him, and her eyes lingered on him before being lowered again. Was she looking at him with as much amazement as he was looking at her? He still could not quite believe the reality of what was happening. Devil take it, he had taken her walking only because their eyes had accidentally met when she was sitting a little apart in the box and he had felt that it would be unmannerly to leave her sitting there.

  He did not like the woman, or she him, without a doubt. They had nothing whatsoever in common. They had not even been able to sustain a polite conversation during their walk. They had nothing to say to each other now.

  The carriage drew to a halt and the coachman opened the door and set down the steps.

  “Where are we?” she asked as he vaulted out onto the pavement without the aid of the steps and turned to hand her out.

  “At my house,” he said. The words were true, strictly speaking, though it was not his home. It was the house where he lodged his mistresses, when he had one in keeping, and where he brought his casual amours when he did not. It was in a quite respectable part of London and the staff he kept there were above reproach and were paid well to keep their mouths shut.

  He was ready to sneer and climb back into the carriage with her if she protested. But after a moment’s hesitation she took his hand and descended to the pavement and looked up in some curiosity at the house. He blessed a very distant flash of lightning.

  He led her up the stone steps and through the door, which a manserva
nt was already holding open for them, and into the tiled hallway. He took the coat from about her shoulders and handed it to the servant. She looked quietly about her.

  “You would like some refreshments?” he asked her.

  She brought her eyes to him and they rested on him for a long moment. “Tea, please,” she said.

  Lord Edmond nodded to his servant, took her arm, and led her upstairs, deciding to forgo the formality of leading her into a salon first. He had done that once with Felicity and had never got her beyond the salon.

  “You will wish to refresh yourself,” he said, taking her into the bedchamber and across it to the door leading into the dressing room, which was decked out with all the conveniences a woman could need. “Your tea will be brought to you here. Come back out when you are ready.”

  “Thank you,” she said, stepping inside the dressing room and allowing him to close the door behind her.

  He expelled his breath. She could not possibly have mistaken his intent. An imbecile would have understood it, and Lady Mornington was no imbecile. And yet she had made no resistance at all.

  Was she still caught up in leftover fright from the storm? Did she need a man to help her live through the night? Or was she missing Clifton as he was missing Felicity? Or did she feel perhaps that she owed him some debt of gratitude for the comfort he had undoubtedly brought her at Vauxhall? Or did she fancy him—did she derive some sort of sexual thrill out of consorting with a rake?

  He stripped off his shirt and pulled off his boots. After some consideration he left his pantaloons where they were.

  And as for himself, why had he brought her here? Lady Mornington was as out-of-place in this house as an angel would be in hell. He smiled grimly at the simile and glanced about him. All the hangings of the room were red. For the first time he rather regretted the vulgarity. He glanced up at the scarlet draperies beneath the canopy of the bed.

  Why had he brought her here? To find out if the passion would still be there now that the storm had gone? To console himself for Felicity? To revenge himself on a scornful society with one of its most respected hostesses—respected despite the fact of her amour with Clifton? To punish himself with the scorn he had expected from her when the carriage drew to a halt outside?

  He did not know.

  She was still fully clothed when she stepped out of the dressing room and closed the door quietly behind her. Her hair had been freshly brushed. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked very small and slender and respectable in this room. Her eyes looked curiously about the room and then came to rest on him. She looked him up and down, though there was no notable contempt in her eyes.

  “Your tea was brought up?” he asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said.

  Come here, he was about to say to her. But he swallowed the command and crossed the room to her. She watched him come. An opportune and distant flash of lightning lit the room for a moment.

  “It is far away,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He set his arms loosely about her, found the buttons at the back of her gown, and began to undo them. She stood still, her eyes on his chest. When he had finished his task, he lifted the gown off her shoulders with the straps of her chemise, and down her arms. Both rustled to the floor, and he stooped down on one knee to roll down her silk stockings. She lifted her feet one at a time while he removed them with her slippers. And she took a step away from her clothes.

  She was pleasingly proportioned even if she was not voluptuous. Her breasts were small, but firm and prettily shaped. Her waist was small, her hips wider, her legs slim and well-shaped, though they were not long. He cupped her breasts in his hands and set his thumbs over her nipples. He kept them there until they hardened, and then stroked them. She raised her chin sharply and closed her eyes.

  He lifted her up and carried her to the bed. He stripped off his remaining clothes before joining her there.

  He explored her mouth with his tongue, and she surprised him by responding with her own so that he was able to entice it into his own mouth and suck inward on it.

  “Mm,” he said. “How do you like it, Mary? Do you have any special preferences?”

  She opened her eyes and regarded him as if she was thinking carefully of her answer.

  “Slow,” she said eventually. “I like it slow.”

  He kissed her openmouthed again. “With lots of slow foreplay?” he asked without lifting his mouth from hers. “Or is it the main event you like to be slow and long?”

  Again the pause before her answer. “Both,” she said.

  He gave her both, imposing an iron control on his body. It was not easy. After the first couple of minutes, once his hands had gone to work on her as well as his mouth, she gave herself with a wild abandon. But she gave herself not only to be loved, but to love. Her hands moved on him, and her mouth and legs and body, with as much eroticism as his on her. Except that she had the luxury of two separate climaxes, one before he mounted her and one after, before the final shared cresting as he spilled his seed in her.

  Well, he thought, removing himself from her after a minute or two of total exhaustion and settling her in the crook of his arm as he drew the blankets up over them, he would never again be able to look at Lady Mornington and see her body as sexually unappealing. And he would never look at her again and be a little afraid of her as an intelligent woman somewhat beyond his touch. Intelligent she might be. But she was also an all passionate, uninhibited, feminine woman.

  Strange, he thought. He had been in search of a new mistress for several weeks. And finally he had found her where he had least expected. Lady Mornington! It was almost laughable.

  He followed her into sleep.

  She woke him twice during the night, once when the storm moved briefly overhead again, and he turned her over onto her back once more and mounted her without foreplay and loved her swiftly while she held him close. And again when dawn was beginning to light the room. She was standing beside the bed, touching his arm. She was dressed.

  “My lord,” she said, “I wish to go home if you please.”

  “Edmond,” he said, laughing.

  She turned her back on him and walked unhurriedly to the window as he threw aside the blankets and stepped naked out onto the carpet.

  She was unwilling for him to accompany her home. “I would be obliged for the use of your carriage,” she told him, “but there is no need for you to come, too, my lord.”

  But he insisted, of course, and they sat silently side by side during the drive to Portman Place, not quite touching, looking out at the early-morning streets, still partly wet from the downpour of the night before.

  “At least no one will be complaining of dust for a day or two,” he said.

  “No,” she agreed. “It will be the mud.”

  That was the extent of their conversation.

  He stepped down from the carriage at Portman Place and handed her out as his coachman rang the doorbell.

  “Thank you,” she said, looking up at him. If she was embarrassed by the appearance of a curious servant in the doorway to her house, she did not show it. “Good day to you, my lord.”

  He held her hand for a moment longer. “I shall do myself the honor of calling on you this afternoon,” he said.

  She hesitated for a moment, looking down at their hands. “Yes,” she said at last, looking up into his eyes again. “I shall be at home.”

  He raised her hand to his lips before releasing it.

  MARY WAS USUALLY an early riser. The morning was too exhilarating a part of the day to be wasted in sleep, she always told anyone who was startled to discover that she frequently walked in the park at a time of the morning when only tradesmen and maids exercising the family dogs were abroad. But it was mid-morning when she awoke on the day following Vauxhall. And even then, when she opened her eyes and saw her cup of chocolate looking cold and unappetizing on the table beside her bed, she would have gone back to sleep if she could.

  But
she could not. She lay on her stomach, her face buried in her pillow, and remembered. And felt quite physically sick. She wished it could all be written off as a dream—as a strange, bizarre nightmare. But she knew that it could not. There was that unmistakable, almost pleasant aching in the passage where he had been and worked. There was the tenderness of her breasts, which he had touched and fondled and sucked and bitten. There were the dryness and slight soreness of her lips. And somehow there was the smell of him on her arms and in her hair, and the taste of him in her mouth.

  No, it had been no dream. Vauxhall had been real. The storm had been real. And he had been real.

  She sat up and reached over to the bell rope to summon her maid. She had to have a bath and wash her hair. If only it were as easy to wash him out of her memory and out of her life, she thought as she swung her legs over the side of the bed.

  She cursed the thunderstorm for the first time. Without it she would have arrived safely back at the box, having had a quite horrid time walking with him, and she would have been able to part from him with the fervent hope that she would never have to be in company with him again.

  But the storm had happened, and it had come at just the worst possible moment. The memory of it had her gripping the edge of the bed in blank terror for a moment. Never since that dreadful night in Spain had she been forced to live through a storm out-of-doors—or as near outdoors as to make no difference.

  “A bath, please,” she said when her maid appeared in the room. “And some tea, Rachel. No, no more chocolate, thank you.” Her stomach revolted at the very thought.

  Dear Lord, there had been no one to cling to but him. And she had clung, desperately and mindlessly. And she had been so intent on climbing right inside him that eventually he had climbed right inside her—with her full consent and cooperation. Indeed, she was very much afraid that she had given him little choice.