A Reckless Desire

by Isabella Bradford

  No wonder she’d spent the night tossing and turning and burying her face in the pillows in despair. She would try to explain to him that what mattered most to her was her chance to act, but the damage was done. She might not be experienced with men herself, but she’d seen enough at the playhouse to know that once men were granted a favor by a woman, they’d expect it again, and more besides.

  That, really, was her choice after last night. For the sake of becoming the actress he’d promised, she could let him continue what last night had begun, and be his mistress until he tired of her. There’d be no shame in it for her. In the eyes of the public, such an alliance with a high-placed nobleman was to be expected, even envied, and would likely be advantageous in creating her allure as a popular actress. Even bearing his illegitimate child could bring certain advantages, and no stigma in the theatrical world. She was sure Rivers was the kind of honorable gentleman who would acknowledge and support a bastard child, which would in turn bind him closer long after his love for her was spent.

  But she knew herself well enough, and she knew the personal consequences of such a path. A mistress would never be the same as a wife. When she left here, she’d have the training and chance to succeed on the stage that he’d promised, but she’d also have a broken heart.

  Now she sat alone in the back parlor where Rivers took breakfast and waited for him to come downstairs. On the cloth beside her teacup was the copy of Hamlet that he’d given her, with the ribbon marking the passage she’d already learned. She’d been sitting here nearly an hour, not wanting to miss him. Over and over, she’d rehearsed what she’d say, a carefully chosen speech that had nothing to do with Ophelia. All she could do while she waited was sip at her tea, and pray he’d listen, and understand.

  She started when at last the parlor door opened and he joined her. She slipped from her chair and curtseyed silently, waiting for him to speak first. He was dressed for morning in the country—a red waistcoat, fawn-colored buckskin breeches, and a blue frock coat—and not for riding, so at least he’d no intention of escaping from her on horseback. But he looked every bit as uneasy as she did herself as he motioned for her to return to her chair.

  “Good day, Mrs. Willow,” he said, using the false name he’d concocted for her. “I’ve told you before that you needn’t curtsey to me whilst we’re here. The Lodge is not so formal a house as that.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” she murmured as she perched on the edge of her chair, her hands folded in her lap. Her rehearsed little speech hung awkwardly unspoken as she waited for the proper opportunity to begin.

  He poured his own tea—another example of the Lodge’s informality—dumped two spoonfuls of sugar into the cup as well, and stirred it with a clatter of silver against porcelain.

  “I trust you slept well,” he said, concentrating on the steaming tea to avoid meeting her eye. “No, you needn’t answer that. If you slept even half as badly as I, then you passed a most miserable night.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said. “That is, I likewise passed a most miserable, horrible night.”

  He sighed and sipped at his tea, grimacing from its heat.

  “Then that makes two of us,” he said. “We both know the reason why, too, so I suppose there’s no use in ignoring it any further.”

  “No, my lord,” she said faintly. Now would be the time to begin her speech, now, now, yet her usual gift for memorization had fled.

  “No.” He cleared his throat. “Given your, ah, unusual upbringing in the theatrical world, I suspect you do not have the usual, ah, delicacy regarding men and women, and what occurred last night between us.”

  “I’m not like Magdalena,” she blurted out, and flushed. “That is, I’m not as…as…”

  “As much a mercenary?” he suggested, and smiled wryly. “I don’t believe any other woman could rival your cousin in that arena. But while they say that blood binds kin together, I’ve never once thought of you and Magdalena in the same light.”

  She nodded cautiously, but said nothing more. That remark could cut two ways. Her heart was racing with uncertainty, and for another precious moment she wanted to cling to the hope that he’d meant to flatter her, not Magdalena.

  “Indeed, indeed,” he said, the kind of empty, meaningless word that gentlemen said when they were at a loss for something of more substance. Could his thoughts be as unsettled as her own?

  “Yes, my lord,” she said softly. “Indeed it is a tangle.”

  He let out his breath with relief. “A tangle, yes. I know you’ve forbidden me any further apologies, which is a complication. But when I say that you differ from Magdalena, I mean to say that you are a better, more honorable woman than she will ever be. What happened between us last night—”

  “It should never have happened, my lord, not at all,” she said as firmly as she could, even as her heart fluttered with the great compliment that he had just paid her. “The hour was late, and at that hour things will happen that will be regretted by day.”

  He placed his teacup deliberately on its saucer, tapping the rim lightly with his finger. “I don’t regret kissing you, Lucia. Not one bit.”

  Sharply she drew in her breath, taken aback. “You don’t, my lord?”

  “I don’t,” he said evenly, looking up at her. “What I do regret, however, are the circumstances that make it both unwise and unacceptable for me to kiss you again, as I would like.”

  This was very nearly what she’d planned to say herself. Relief swept over her, but mixed with her own regret, too.

  “That is very true, my lord.” She was glad he sat on the other side of the table, where he couldn’t see how her hands were twisting together in her lap. “If I am to become the actress I wish to be, I must make certain—certain sacrifices. I don’t want things to be the way you said, unwise and unacceptable.”

  “Indeed,” he said solemnly, that empty, hollow word again. “Then we are agreed, yes?”

  “Another agreement,” she said wistfully. “We’re good at that, aren’t we?”

  “It’s for the best,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure it was. “We shall proceed this morning as if last night had not happened.”

  “Because it didn’t, my lord,” she said, though she could not quite keep the sadness from her voice. “Leastways, not that I recall.”

  “Nor I,” he said, a shade too heartily. “Which is just as well, considering how much work we have before us. What you did with the passage last night was first-rate, but there’s an entire play for you to learn, and we’ve less than six weeks in which to do it.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said. “I am ready to begin whenever you please.”

  He didn’t answer, his blue eyes studying her so intently that she felt her cheeks grow warm. He’d looked at her like this last night as well, when she’d told him he was the only one who believed in her, and just before he’d kissed her.

  “It cannot be otherwise, my lord,” she said softly. “No matter what we might wish, it cannot.”

  He sighed, and looked down, and whatever spell had been cast between them was broken. He pulled another copy of the play from inside his coat and opened it on the table, pressing the pages flat. “Then let us begin with the first scene.”

  Dutifully she opened her own copy, and bowed her head over the pages even if her eyes failed to make out the words. She’d gotten exactly what she’d wished, and what was undeniably for the best.

  So why, then, did she feel as if she’d lost?

  —

  For Rivers, the next two weeks were simultaneously the most rewarding of his life, and the most frustrating. The rewarding part came from all he was able to accomplish with Lucia. Although he’d entered this wager assuming that he could be a most excellent tutor, he hadn’t realized how much more important it was to have an excellent student.

  Lucia was every teacher’s dream: she was clever and quick, as ready to ask a thoughtful question as she was to give an answer to his. She was acutely aware of how
much she had to accomplish in a limited number of days, and she worked feverishly hard on whatever he assigned. He wondered if she ever slept, for she always seemed both to have been long awake before he rose and after he’d said good night and retired to his own rooms. He knew because there were some nights when his thoughts were too busy for sleep, and he would go walking with Spot, and while every other window in the Lodge might be dark, there would still be candlelight shining from her corner of the house.

  She learned her lines without flaw, and she’d improved her diction, her mannerisms, her posture. As her confidence grew, she stood straighter, with more and more presence when she entered a room. She’d outdone Garrick’s instructions for a natural approach to the point that she’d practically become Ophelia, and he was almost as proud of her as she was of herself.

  There were, however, several grave areas that needed improvement. While she was very good at playing scenes in the drawing room, she had difficulty projecting her voice and making her gestures grand enough to carry to the farthest seats of a playhouse. She occasionally became so enraptured by her lines that she stood immobile, and forgot to add the gestures that would bring her part to life. The hint of her Neapolitan accent was charming, but the working-class-London accent that accompanied it remained a sizable challenge, and though Rivers continued to correct the most egregious and broad-voweled examples, she still would not convince anyone that she’d been born a lady in the royal court of Denmark.

  But of course the single greatest challenge had nothing to do with her acting, and simply everything to do with her. Ever since they’d agreed—and wisely, too—that what had happened that night in his room must never happen again, he had perversely thought of doing exactly that, and much more besides.

  It didn’t matter that she had behaved in a manner that was completely without fault, a model of propriety. The smallest things about her enticed him: a tiny wisp of hair, escaped from her cap and dancing free against the nape of her neck, the huskiness of her laugh over some canine foolishness by Spot, the way she’d tip back her head to watch the swallows wheel in the sky above the stable, or how her eyes would brighten whenever she smiled at him. She might not have been born with a dancer’s rhythm, but the grace was effortlessly there in every beguiling twist and turn of her neatly curving figure. If her hand or arm grazed his by accident, he felt as if he’d touched a burning coal.

  He knew she felt the tension, too. He’d seen the unabashed longing in her eyes when she looked at him, and heard the little catch in her breathing whenever they touched, and the small bursts of temper that she’d show during a difficult session he guessed were due more to the frustration of their situation than to any mere words—even words by Shakespeare.

  It all combined to make working closely with her day and night the greatest delight and the greatest torment. And then, on the Tuesday morning of the third week, came the lesson that changed everything.

  They were in the green parlor as usual. Most of the breakfast things had been cleared away, but both his coffee and her tea remained in case of necessary fortification. Likely they would need it, too, for once again her vowels were presenting their mutual torment.

  “Cake, not ‘cyke,’ ” he corrected for what seemed like the millionth time. “Can you truly not hear the difference?”

  “Ca-a-a-yke,” she said, beginning well but sliding backward into the murkiness, her face screwed up with the effort.

  His expression darkened. He would not see this entire project destroyed by a piece of cake.

  “Cake, Lucia,” he said. “C-a-a-ake.”

  “Ca-a-a-yke,” she said.

  He sighed. “C-A-A-AKE.”

  “Oh, blast your infernal cake!” she cried, sweeping dramatically from her chair to stalk across the room. She stopped at the window, arms flailing dramatically toward the flowers, while Spot rose and left Rivers’s side to go stand by her in sympathy. “Not one person in all the playhouses in London will be as picky as you are, my lord, nor so provoking, either.”

  At least she had her grand gestures correct this morning. “Lucia, please. Histrionics such as these accomplish nothing.”

  “Vowels be th’ very trial, don’t they, Spot?” she said to Spot and pointedly not to Rivers, crouching down beside the dog. “We don’t care nawt for them, an’ t’the very divil they may go.”

  “What was that, Lucia?” Rivers said, startled. It wasn’t what she’d said that surprised him, but the way she’d said it. She’d spoken exactly as the Yorkshire stable boy who was responsible for washing Spot did, imitating his accent flawlessly and without a hint of her own.

  “Did y’hear something, Spot?” she said to the dog, whose tail whipped happily at the attention, and perhaps the accent as well. “I dinna, did you?”

  “Lucia, look at me,” Rivers said. “Why is it you can copy Ned’s accent so perfectly, and yet cannot grasp the proper voice for Ophelia?”

  She rose, and slowly turned as he’d bidden.

  “Why, my lord?” she said, still cross. “Perhaps it’s because I can hear Ned every day, which isn’t the way with noble Danish ladies, least not that I’ve seen.”

  “That is not the point,” he said, refusing to let her distract him. “If you spoke like a lady from the Danish royal court, no one in London would understand you, either.”

  “Now there’s the problem, isn’t it, my lord.” She grandly flung her arms open. “And isn’t it what I’ve said all along? If they don’t know, how can they care?”

  “Because they’ll want you to sound like a lady,” he insisted. “And you do so have an example to copy. Forget the vowels and everything else. Just imitate me.”

  “You, my lord?” That surprised her, and her eyes widened. “Oh, my lord, I couldn’t do that. It would be wicked rude of me.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” He joined her at the window, determined to discover if the key to correcting her speech could really be this simple. “I’ve spent my entire life around the royal court and amongst the people there. Copy me, and you’ll have Ophelia’s accent exactly right.”

  She gazed up at him, doubtful. “You are certain of this, my lord? You will not be angry, or take insult?”

  “I give you my word that I shall not,” he said. “Go on. Prove to me you can do it.”

  “Very well, my lord.” She took a deep breath and turned her back to him, the way she always did when composing herself to perform.

  While she did, he realized he was holding his breath, and pointedly let it out. He really didn’t know what to expect, given that it was Lucia.

  He hadn’t long to wait. When she turned around, she’d squared her shoulders and made her chin jut up. She’d puffed out her chest, which was made all the more noticeable by how she clasped her hands behind her waist, and somehow she looked down her nose at him, a rare feat considering how much taller he was than she.

  “Do it,” she said, pitching her voice gruff and low. “I expect nothing less from you. Come along, come along, don’t tarry.”

  He stared at her. The effect was uncanny, and also disturbing. What was he to make of this miniature female version of himself?

  She raked one hand back through her hair, ignoring how the gesture pulled her hair half-free and scattered hairpins, and scowled darkly.

  “Don’t make me wait any further,” she said. “What do you wish of me in return? Damnation, I’ve already given you my word as a gentleman.”

  “I can’t possibly sound as pompous as that,” he exclaimed. “Am I really so vastly righteous?”

  “Vastly righteous,” she repeated with the exact same inflections.

  He grunted. “You’re grumbling and growling like a wild beast.”

  “That’s how you sound, my lord,” she protested, reverting to her own voice and accent. “You promised you wouldn’t—”

  He could see the uncertainty flash across her face, for deep down she understood the importance of this. It was one thing to make a jest of him, but quite another
to do this seriously.

  “I shall try, my lord,” she said slowly and carefully. “Is this better? Do I sound as you wish me to be?”

  “More,” he said, barely containing his excitement. “ ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ ”

  “ ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ ” she said, and grinned. “That’s it, my lord, isn’t it? I can tell by how you’re looking at me. That’s what you wanted?”

  “I believe it is, Lucia.” Gone were the flattened vowels of Whitechapel, and in their place were the fulsome, rounded ones of St. James’s Square. It wasn’t quite perfect, but close, very close, and with another week’s worth of practice, she’d be able to fool any playhouse audience. “It is.”

  She yelped with joy and impulsively threw her arms around his shoulders to hug him. Automatically he pulled her close, unable to resist holding her the way he’d been so desperately longing to. Her breasts crushed against his chest, exactly as he’d remembered, and her waist was small and her hips rounded and her mouth was only inches away from his and damnation he must not do this.

  Reluctantly he disentangled himself from her and set her down, and apart from himself.

  “You are, ah, to be congratulated, Mrs. Willow,” he said deliberately. “You have succeeded beyond my highest expectations.”

  “I’m sorry, my lord, I didn’t mean to do that,” she said in a breathless fluster as she smoothed her hair. “Our arrangement and all.”

  “The arrangement.” He cleared his throat momentously, and felt like a fool for doing so. “Of course.”

  “Oh, of course, my lord,” she said, making no more sense than he had. “I was—I was overcome.”

  Overcome: well, that summed it up, didn’t it? Knowing she felt the same as he did wasn’t helping his composure one bit. Her cheeks were flushed and her kerchief had slipped just enough that he could see how rapidly her breasts were rising and falling above the stiffened edge of her bodice, and he must not think of this.