by Mary Balogh
He was wearing his black opera cloak. He removed his silk hat and gloves with careful deliberation before turning to look at her. When he did so, Jane found herself gazing at the Duke of Tresham—that stranger from her past. The dark, cold, cynical, and surely inebriated Duke of Tresham. She smiled.
“Upstairs!” he commanded with cold hauteur and a slight jerk of his head in the direction of the stairs.
“Why?” She frowned.
He raised his eyebrows and looked at her as if she were a worm beneath his foot.
“Why?” he asked softly. “Why, Jane? Have I mistaken the address, by any chance? But my key fit the lock. Is this not the house at which I keep my mistress? I have come to avail myself of my mistress’s services. I need a bed in order to do that comfortably and her person on that bed. The bed is upstairs, I believe.”
“You are foxed!” she said, matching him in coldness.
“Am I?” He looked surprised. “But not too foxed to find my way to my mistress’s house. Not too foxed to climb the stairs to her bed. Not too foxed to get it up, Jane.”
She flushed at his coarseness and stared at him while her heart felt too like a leaden weight to be capable of breaking. But it would break, she knew, once this night was over. Fool! Oh, fool, not only to have fallen in love with him, but to have dreamed that he had fallen for her too.
“Upstairs!” He pointed again. And then he nodded. “Ah, I have realized the reason for your hesitation. I forgot to say please. Please go upstairs, Jane. Please remove all your clothes and hairpins when you get there. Please lie on your back on the bed so that I may avail myself of your services. Please keep your end of our contract.”
His voice was colder than ice. His eyes were as black as the night.
She had no good reason to refuse him. It had never been part of their bargain that he must love her before she would grant him her favors. But she felt suddenly disoriented, as if a week—the most precious week of her life—had just been erased without a trace. As if she had dreamed it. As if he had never become her companion, her friend, her lover. Her soul mate.
When all was said and done, she was merely his mistress.
She turned and preceded him up the stairs, the candlestick held high, her heart turned to stone. No, not that. A stone felt no pain. She blinked back tears. He would not see such a sign of weakness in her.
Never!
“I have come here, Jane,” he said a few moments later, standing inside the door of her bedchamber, his expression quite inscrutable—except that there was something about him that spoke of inebriation and threatened danger, “to be entertained by my mistress. How are you going to entertain me?”
It felt again as if the past week had not been. If it had not, of course, she would have found nothing particularly offensive in his words. There was nothing offensive in them. She must not respond as if she thought there were. She must simply forget the past week. But she hesitated too long.
“You do not have a headache, by any chance, Jane?” There was heavy irony in his voice. “Or your courses?”
Her courses were due within the next few days, and she had been feeling a justifiable anxiety about them. But she would not worry before she must. She had known the consequences of such a liaison from the start. There was even a clause in the contract that dealt with children of their affair.
“Or are you simply repulsed by me tonight?” he asked, looking more dangerous than ever with his eyes narrowed on her. “Are you going to exercise your prerogative, Jane, and send me off to hell, my lust unsatisfied?”
“No, of course not.” She looked at him calmly. “I will be pleased to entertain you, your grace. What else do I have to think of and dream of and plan for during all the long hours when you are not here, after all?”
“It is reassuring to discover, at least,” he said as he strode toward her and the bed, “that you have not lost your saucy tongue, Jane. I would certainly not enjoy you meek and submissive on your back. Now, what sensual delights can you dream up for me?”
She had learned a number of skills during the past week and a half. She had learned not to be shy of her own sexuality or his. It was clear that he really was going to wait for her to entertain him. He took up a stand beside the bed, his feet apart, his hands clasped at his back, and gazed at her with raised eyebrows. It was more than a little disconcerting and very definitely upsetting in light of what she had hoped their next encounter would be like.
She undressed slowly, teasing him with tantalizing glimpses of naked flesh, a little at a time. She folded each garment and turned to set it down on a chair. When she was naked, she lifted her arms and drew the pins from her hair one at a time until it cascaded about her. She smiled. Perhaps after all she could tease him out of his embarrassment over last evening—if that was what this abrupt change in him was all about.
He was still wearing his cloak, but he had thrown it back over his shoulders. He made no effort to hide the telltale bulge of his arousal pushing at the tight fabric of his evening knee breeches. Yet he did not move. His expression remained impassive.
She undid the buttons at his neck and let his cloak fall to the floor behind him. But in doing so she brushed against him and discovered something she had not known before—that there was something erotic about being naked with someone who was fully clothed.
“Sit down,” she invited him, indicating the bed.
He raised his eyebrows, but he sat on the side of it, bracing his feet apart, setting his hands behind him on the bed, supporting himself on his arms.
“You are learning wicked lessons that I have not taught you, Jane,” he said, watching as she unbuttoned his breeches and freed him of their silken confines. “What do you have in store for me? Mouth play?”
She knew instinctively what he meant. And though with her mind she thought it disgusting, she knew with her body that it would not be so. But she did not believe she could do it, even so. Not yet. Not unless the time should ever arrive when they could come together as lovers rather than as man and mistress.
She took him in her hands, caressed him, stroked him while he watched what she did with narrowed eyes. Then she knelt astride him on the bed, placed him at her entrance, and bore down on him. She stayed upright, her spine slightly arched backward, her fingertips on the satin of his evening coat at his shoulders. She looked into his eyes.
“Good, Jane,” he said. “Entertaining.” But he still did not move. He was long and rigid inside her, but he did not move. She could smell liquor on his breath.
He had taught her to ride. But she had done it before while he lay flat and she had leaned over him. And he had ridden with her, stride for stride. They had both labored toward the ultimate pleasure.
Tonight he sat still and watched her with his dark, dangerous eyes.
She was slick and wet and pulsing with desire. She would have liked nothing better than to feel him respond in more than just simple arousal, to have allowed him to lead the way to completion. But he would not do it. There was a darkness in him that she could not seem to lighten. He was still punishing both himself and her, she thought, for what he must see as the humiliation of his disclosures the evening before.
She kept her weight on her spread knees and calves. And she rode him. Not as she had done before, inner muscles clenching and unclenching to the rhythm of ascent and descent. There was a certain defense in such motions, a certain control over the rising and cresting of passion—at least until the final moments. This time she moved without defenses, her inner muscles relaxed, no barrier against the rigid hardness onto which she impaled herself time and time again as she rode the rhythm of sex. She arched her spine more, tipped back her head, closed her eyes, and braced her hands on his silken knees behind her.
She tried to show him with her body that she cared, that she would withhold nothing from him when he needed her. And despite his strange, bleak mood, she sensed that he did need her.
She did not know for how many minutes she continu
ed while he remained hard and motionless. But desire became a raw ache, and ache became indistinguishable from pain before finally—ah, blessedly—his hands came to her hips and clamped there so unexpectedly hard that her rhythm and all her control shattered even as he thrust urgently and repeatedly up into her, pumping past the barrier she had deliberately not erected. She could hear herself sobbing as if she listened to someone else a great distance away. She heard the growl of his climax and felt the hot gush of his seed.
Union. Ah, the blessed union. He would be consoled now. They would lie together, warm and sated, and talk. She would reassure him and he would be Jocelyn again instead of the dark, dangerous Duke of Tresham.
Tomorrow she would be able to confide her own dark secrets to him.
She was panting and damp and chilly with perspiration. She still straddled him on the bed, her legs wide and stiff. He was still embedded in her. She lifted her head and smiled dreamily at him.
“Vastly entertaining, Jane,” he said briskly. “You are becoming skilled indeed at your profession. You are beginning to be worth every penny of your salary.” He lifted her off him, turned her so that she sprawled on the bed, and got to his feet. He began to button himself up again.
He might as well have hurled a pitcher of ice water over her.
“And you, of course,” she said, “have always been a master of the veiled insult. I perfectly well understand that this is what I am paid to do. You do not need to remind me just because you let down your guard last evening and embarrassed yourself by telling me things you deeply regret telling.” She pulled the bedcovers up to cover herself. Suddenly she felt very naked indeed.
“You are insulted, Jane,” he asked her, “to be told that you are remarkably skilled in bed? I do not often pay that compliment, you know.” He was throwing his cloak about his shoulders.
“I am insulted,” she told him, sitting up and holding the covers to her breasts, “that you would think it necessary to degrade me, your grace, with this talk of skills and salary. I am insulted that you are ashamed of having confided in me merely because I am a woman and your mistress to boot. I thought we had become friends—and friends do talk to each other. They do confide in each other and share their deepest secrets and their deepest wounds. I was mistaken. I should not have forgotten that you pay my salary for this.” She indicated the bed with one sweeping arm. “And now I am tired. I have been working hard earning my living. Kindly leave, your grace. Good night.”
“Friends confide in each other, Jane?” He was glaring at her quite intently, his eyes very black. For a moment she felt frightened. She thought he was going to lean over and grab her. Instead he made her a sudden, ironically deferential bow and strode from the room.
Jane was left cold and trembling and lonelier and unhappier than she had ever been in her life before.
AS HE MADE HIS way home to Grosvenor Square, Jocelyn’s mood was black indeed. He now thoroughly despised himself—a satisfyingly familiar feeling, at least. He felt as if he had raped her—though he had approached her in very much the way he had been accustomed to approaching his mistresses in the past. And he despised her. She ought not to have allowed him within touching distance of her tonight, but in fact she had serviced him like an experienced courtesan.
He hated her for lulling him all week into a belief that he had found a friend, a soul mate, as well as a damned good bed partner. For somehow inducing him to lower all his defenses, to share with her everything that was his most secret self. For somehow keeping him from noticing that she received but gave nothing except her body in return, that there was nothing reciprocal in their relationship.
She had taken his trust but had kept herself well hidden behind the position of mistress and the alias of Jane Ingleby. Yet she had dared just now to lecture him on the nature of true friendship.
She had taken everything from him, even the love of which he had thought himself no longer capable.
He hated her for fooling him into hoping that after all life was worth living. For stripping away all the comfort of the hard cocoon inside which he had lived for ten years.
He hated her.
He could not even think of her as Sara.
She was Jane.
But Jane Ingleby did not exist.
He could feel the satisfying beginnings of a headache as he neared home. If he was fortunate, he would have the distraction of a colossal hangover by morning.
FROM HIS POSITION IN the shadows of a darkened doorway across the street, Mick Boden watched, first as the Duke of Tresham strode off down the street and then as the light in what must be the bedchamber of the house was extinguished. The house was clearly a love nest—the duke had let himself in with his own key, stayed long enough for a prolonged mount or two in that room where the candlelight had appeared just after his arrival, and had then stridden off homeward, looking well satisfied with himself.
It had been a long day. There was no point in hanging about any longer. It was scarcely likely that the mistress would emerge from the house to gaze after her lover, or even appear in the window since she had not done so in order to wave good night to him.
But she must come out sometime—probably tomorrow to go walking or shopping. All he needed was a glimpse of her. At least then he would know if the duke’s fancy piece could possibly be Lady Sara Illingsworth, alias Miss Jane Ingleby. Mick Boden had a certain intuition about the female occupant of that house, and during his years as a Bow Street Runner he had learned to trust his intuition.
He would come back in the morning, Mick decided, and watch the house until she came out. He could set an assistant to such a mundane task, of course, since there were other courses of inquiry that he really should pursue, but his curiosity and even a certain respect for the woman had been aroused during his long, frustrating search for her. He wanted to be the first to see her and the one to apprehend her.
20
OCELYN MISSED HIS USUAL MORNING RIDE IN THE park. He was too busy dealing with a fat head and a queasy stomach and a valet who opened back his curtains on bright sunshine and then appeared surprised to discover that his master was lying in his own bed, the sunlight full on his face.
But Jocelyn would not allow himself the luxury of nursing a hangover and terrorizing his staff for too long. There were things to do. Fortunately he had had a chance to talk with Kimble and Brougham the evening before. The same could not be said of the Earl of Durbury, who never appeared in public—just like his niece or his cousin or whatever Lady Sara Illingsworth was to him.
The man was still in town, though, and still at the Pulteney, Jocelyn discovered when he called there in the middle of the morning. And willing to receive the Duke of Tresham, though he might have been puzzled by the request. They had never had more than a nodding acquaintance, after all. He was standing in his private sitting room after Jocelyn had first sent up his card and then been escorted up by the earl’s man.
“Tresham?” he said by way of greeting. “How do you do?”
“Very well, I thank you,” Jocelyn replied, “when it is considered that I might at this moment be lying in my bed at home with my throat slit. Or in my grave, more like, since Lady Sara Illingsworth has been gone from my house for longer than two weeks.”
“Ah, yes, have a seat. Let me pour you a drink.” The Bow Street Runner had clearly reported to the earl recently, then. “Do you know where she is, Tresham? Have you heard something?”
“Nothing, thank you,” Jocelyn said of the drink while his stomach churned unpleasantly. He availed himself of the offer of a chair. “You must understand that when she was in my employ she dressed the part of a servant and used an alias. She was a mere employee. It did not occur to me when she left to ask where she was going.”
“No, of course not.” The earl poured himself a drink and sat at the square table in the middle of the room. He looked disappointed. “Those damned Runners are not worth a quarter of what they charge, Tresham. Devilish incompetent, in fact. I have been
kicking my heels here for well over a month while a dangerous criminal runs loose among an unsuspecting populace. And for three weeks of that time she was at Dudley House. If I had only known!”
“I was fortunate indeed,” Jocelyn said, “to escape harm. Murdered your son, did she? My condolences, Durbury.”
“Thank you.”
The man looked distinctly uncomfortable. So much so, in fact, that Jocelyn, gazing keenly at him while giving an impression of almost bored indolence, drew his own conclusions.
“And robbed you to add insult to injury,” he said. “Having spent three weeks at Dudley House, Lady Sara must be well aware that it is full of costly treasures. I have been apprehensive since learning her identity yesterday morning that she might attempt a burglary and murder me too if I am unfortunate enough to stumble upon her at the wrong moment.”
The earl looked keenly back at him, but Jocelyn was long practiced in the art of giving nothing whatsoever away with his facial expression.
“Quite so,” the earl agreed.
“I quite understand your, ah, ire,” Jocelyn said, “in having had a mere female relative—and a dependent one too, I daresay—cause you such personal pain and expose your authority to such public ridicule. If I were in your shoes, I would be waiting as impatiently as you for her capture so that I could put my horsewhip to effective use about her hide before the law takes its turn. It is the only way with rebellious women, I have heard. I would mention two things to you, though—my reason for coming, in fact.”
The Earl of Durbury looked unsure whether he had just been insulted or commiserated with.
“I have questioned some of my servants,” Jocelyn explained—he had done no such thing, of course, “and they assure me that the nurse I knew as Miss Jane Ingleby had only one small bag of possessions with her at Dudley House. Which leaves a question in my mind. Where has she hidden the fortune in money and jewels that she took from you? Has the Bow Street Runner you employ thought of approaching the search from that angle? Find the treasure and there will surely be a clear trail to the woman.”