The Courtesan's Secret

by Claudia Dain

  Ruan was older than both Penrith and Dutton by some years; in fact, Louisa thought it highly likely that Ruan was older than Sophia Dalby, which, in some lights, made him seem as old as Adam in a very fallen Eden. In terms of these highly undesirable verbal exchanges, he was more than a match for both Penrith and Dutton combined.

  It was patently obvious that both Dutton and Penrith were aware of it. Penrith took it in stride. Dutton was stumbling.

  In all her months watching Dutton’s every gesture, reading every forkful of food for nuance, she’d never seen him behave so oddly and so awkwardly. She couldn’t have been that far off in her estimation of him; something was definitely wrong with him and she couldn’t understand what it was.

  More strangely, she couldn’t summon the interest to actually puzzle it out.

  “I’ve heard that there’s a new play starting at the King’s Theatre,” Amelia said softly, clearly trying to set the course of their conversation back on the proper track, as it were.

  “This has nothing to do with plays,” Dutton said, staring at her from across the table, “and everything to do with wagers.”

  Oh, bother. Did everything in Town have to do with wagers?

  “You should watch what you say, Lord Dutton,” Mr. Grey said ominously. Louisa cast a quick glance at Grey; he looked as ominous as his tone of voice, but then, given that he was an Indian, he had the unfortunate tendency to look ominous for no cause whatsoever. It was likely a helpful quality in the forests of New York, but it had far fewer uses here.

  Dutton looked at Mr. Grey and swallowed, his mouth compressed into a firm line.

  Well, perhaps looking ominous was not a bad trait to possess on any continent.

  “I would speak with you, Lady Louisa,” Dutton said in a quietly intense tone of voice. It was most appealing. She could honestly report that she had never before heard Dutton speak so intently and so, dare she say it, passionately to anyone before for any occasion. She was slightly titillated, but only slightly, an important distinction and one she would make to Blakes if she found herself required to do so. “Alone, if you will allow it.”

  If she would allow it? She’d been trying for two years to get Dutton to speak with her on any topic and in any surrounding. Now, he was desperate to speak with her and alone?

  Could life ever surpass this moment?

  Apparently, her thoughts were written all over her face, which was indeed unfortunate, for Amelia said, “I should think that very unwise, Louisa.”

  Of course, it was unwise and if she were not already completely ruined, she should not have even contemplated it. But she was ruined. And she was going to marry Blakes, unless her father refused, which he would not do, as her father was far from being a fool and any father would be more than pleased to marry off his daughter to the man who’d ruined her, so that was not even worth bothering about.

  She could admit that she’d only given it a cursory examination as to wisdom or folly, but in that brief scan of facts Louisa decided that she had absolutely nothing to lose by meeting with Dutton in another part of the house and almost everything to gain . . . namely, a chance to be alone with Dutton and to hear him speak to her on whatever urgent matter he’d invented to be alone with her.

  Yes, she had absolutely everything to gain.

  So, for the second time during the course of a single dinner, Louisa Kirkland excused herself and left her dinner to get cold upon the table. She left the red reception room as discreetly as possible, which was hardly discreet at all as everyone in the room could see her, and see Dutton leave a few moments after her, and watch Lord Henry Blakesley watch with an unreadable, but very interesting expression on his face, and then watch Sophia Dalby, who was rather famous for her outrageous remarks, whisper something to Lord Henry when Louisa and Dutton had been gone for more than a few minutes, which clearly prompted Lord Henry to leave his seat at table, to the outward display of annoyance from Molly, Duchess of Hyde, which Henry blatantly ignored, as everyone considered right as Louisa was to be his bride and Molly was only his mother.

  And the final thing that everyone noticed, before things went completely to the dogs and a loud scuffle was heard from behind at least two doors, was that Sophia Dalby was smiling like the cat who ate the cream.

  Eighteen

  NATURALLY, Louisa had not intended to find herself alone in the Hyde House dressing room with Dutton.

  Of course not.

  How she had got there was still something of a mystery to her. She suspected it had a great deal to do with the air of mystery and concern which Dutton had thrown all over her like a wet cloak from the very minute she met him alone in the blue reception room. Alone, except for a stream of footmen and maids hurrying back and forth with the next course for dinner, but they hardly counted when a woman’s reputation was in the wind.

  Facing Dutton, alone, in the semidarkness wrought by the application of three candles in a rather nice silver candlebra, was seeming less and less interesting an encounter and more and more a foolhardy one. It was not to be ignored that Dutton was a very seductive man with a habit of success at dalliance.

  She had, in fact, ignored that to a slight degree when allowing Dutton to lead her into the dressing room, he claiming that they were too likely to be intruded upon in the blue reception room, in the yellow drawing room, or in the music room, which had all been far more likely meeting places. She wasn’t quite certain how Dutton had managed to get her into the dressing room, but the fact that she now found herself there did explain in large part his success at dalliance.

  “You cannot marry Blakesley,” Dutton said, his blue eyes appearing to lovely advantage in the candlelight, his hair falling, as it was wont to do, seductively over his brow in an almost poetic arch. “Not because of a stupid wager I made when more than half drunk.”

  He took her hand in his. She allowed it. How long had she dreamed of the touch of Dutton’s hand?

  Oddly, it did not move her as much as she had expected.

  Perhaps if she removed her gloves . . . but she could not think of a way to get them off without seeming forward. Not that women who met with men in dressing rooms should have to worry about seeming forward.

  She knew she was being ridiculous, but that didn’t seem to help. She was still firmly on a course toward being not only ridiculous, but a disgrace to the Melverley name, which likely explained why she did nothing to remove herself from the dressing room.

  Melverley had done more than enough to rub the gloss of respectability off his title; could anything she did make it worse?

  She couldn’t think of a reason not to find out. Again, she was already ruined. There was simply no place further to fall.

  Dutton clearly understood that, which would explain why he had insisted on meeting her in the dressing room. She’d already been in this very dressing room with Blakes . . . although, put that way, it was entirely possible that being cloistered in a dressing room during a dinner at Hyde House with two separate and distinct men would do more than considerable damage to her reputation, ruined or not. There was being ruined in the normal sense of the word and then there was being scandalously ruined. Being ruined was bad enough; she didn’t suppose she should allow scandal to be attached to it.

  “How kind of you,” she said, determined in that instant to exit the dressing room. “I do know of the wager, of course. Blakes was most clear about it. But thank you for being so concerned, Lord Dutton. I do appreciate it.”

  “But he shouldn’t have told you of the wager,” Dutton said, laying his arm across the doorway into the yellow drawing room, blocking her. It was a very large dressing room, really a smallish room decorated very simply, but even so, it was extraordinary how a man, a large man at that, could, by casually rearranging himself, make a room seem very, very small, and the doorway completely inaccessible. “What honor in that?”

  “What honor, Lord Dutton, in making a wager about a woman and her pearls?” she said stiffly.

  “
But they are my pearls, Louisa, and I was trying to find a way to give them back to you.”

  “I suppose just giving them to me would have been too simple.”

  “Simple, yes, but isn’t that how Caroline got herself ruined in a single evening? I was trying to spare you that.”

  Yes, well, she had become ruined anyway, so it seemed a ridiculous argument now and entirely off the point. The point being that she still wanted her pearls. Besides, making a woman the subject of a bet on White’s book did not seem at all a route destined to keep a woman from ruination. Men never did see these things as clearly as a woman did. They were obviously hampered by the inescapable fact of being men.

  “And now what’s to become of my pearls?” she said, taking a step backward.

  There was another door out of the dressing room, one which led into the gold bedroom, a room gilded from top to bottom in a magnificent and tasteful display of endless wealth. At least she hoped the Blakesleys possessed endless wealth as she had no wish to marry a man destined to become a pauper or, worse, have to delve into trade.

  “Is that truly all you care about?” Dutton purred, his blue eyes going quite dark and sensual. Yes, she understood sensual; after kissing Blakes, how could she not? “The wager concerned more than that, or didn’t Blakesley tell you the whole of it?”

  Which, naturally, made her wonder if he had.

  Which clearly meant that Dutton was nearly smoldering with the desire to be the one to tell her.

  Anytime a man smoldered with desire, particularly as it was Dutton, she did feel it was best to let him proceed. Men who smoldered should be given every opportunity and every latitude.

  Of course, she’d just made that up, but it did seem apt.

  “I am as certain he did and you are clearly certain he did not,” she said, eyeing him closely. “Perhaps you should tell me and then, when we have decided what is to become of my pearls, we can leave this dressing room and return to dinner. I cannot think that Blakesley would approve of our meeting like this, in such surroundings. You are a man of some reputation, Lord Dutton, as I’m certain you are aware.”

  She was quite pleased with herself, both her delivery and her choice of words. Of course, she had borrowed a good deal of it from a play she’d seen last year, but she was more than convinced that she was a better actress than Sally Bates, who had played an innocent miss with, considering the size of Sally’s bosom, an unsurprising lack of innocence.

  “I want to apologize first, for making the wager. It was most ill-considered.”

  Given the smolder in his blue eyes and the way his hair was, again, falling in a cascade over his beautifully formed brow, she was inclined to forgive him.

  “It certainly was,” she said in rather a more breathy way than she had planned to do. Her performance, which it surely must be, was slipping. Just as Sally’s bodice had in the second act.

  “I never should have put you in such a precarious position,” he said, taking her hand in his again, though he still managed to block the door. She wasn’t at all certain how men did that, become so ominously large whenever they chose. “Though I could not have anticipated that they would end in your marriage to Blakesley.”

  Well, of course, who could have?

  “Not when I suspected that you had some small measure of feeling for me,” he finished.

  She hoped he’d finished. This was becoming most dreadfully awkward. She didn’t know quite what to say, and no play she’d seen seemed to cover it. She clearly needed a French play for this.

  “You must know that I hold you in the highest esteem, Lord Dutton,” she said. It seemed safe enough and had the advantage of being the truth. “But I fail to see what that has to do with this ill-conceived wager.”

  “Only that it encompasses the parameters under which the wager was set. You see,” he said softly, kissing her hand, which moved her not at all. Gloves, again. She truly had to find a way to remove her gloves if this attempt at seduction on Dutton’s part had any hope at all of moving her. Was she a wanton or not? It seemed rather more urgent than not that she find out. “I thought that, even in possession of the pearls, that you would prefer my company to his. But that is not so. Or is it?” he said, taking the problem from her completely by sliding his fingertips into the hem of her glove and stripping it softly down her arm until it bunched at her wrist. He leaned down, that shock of hair falling forward and tickling her, just before his mouth kissed the inside of her wrist at the point where her blood ran blue.

  She gasped.

  He tugged, and she stumbled a step nearly into his arms. He pulled her glove from her, finger by finger, starting at the thumb and ending at the little finger and kissing her wrist and arm on the delicate and sensitive underside until she was gloveless, breathless, and speechless.

  Yes, the glove had been the problem all along.

  Dutton’s mouth most definitely knew its way around a woman’s wrist.

  “Lord Dutton,” she managed to say. She probably should have kept silent; he’d seemed more than content with her wrist, until she’d reminded him that she had a mouth.

  “Louisa,” he said, his voice as soft and urgent as she’d imagined on so many nights. Of course, she hadn’t imagined the dressing room. “Forgive me. I had no thought that this would lead to marriage with a man you cannot love and little respect.”

  His words entered her ears at about the same instant as his mouth touched her lips. It was an extraordinary combination and one she didn’t like in the least. His mouth was pleasant enough, she supposed, certainly nothing in line with Blakesley’s rather torrid approach. As Blakesley’s future wife, she was almost proud to note that Blakesley’s kiss was a cannon fire to Dutton’s slingshot. In fact, after a moment or two of tolerating his attack upon her, she was astonished to realize that she was bored.

  Bored.

  If she didn’t already know that kisses could be something else altogether, she might have been shattered by disappointment. But there was Blakes and his mouth and, now that she paused to consider it, his rather more intense blue gaze and sharply amusing wit and lovely form, for she had felt small parts of it while kissing him . . . and what exactly did Dutton mean by saying that she couldn’t love or respect Blakes?

  She started speaking before she’d fully managed to push him off of her, which was a huge help in dissuading him in continuing to assault her.

  “I must insist that you refrain from speaking so of Lord Henry,” she said, trying to pull her limp glove out of Dutton’s hand and keep him off of her in the same motion. It was less than successful as a maneuver. She had so little practice at these sorts of things and, truly, in Blakesley’s case, she’d been pushing toward Blakes and not away from him, an entirely different proposition. “He, of course, has my love. Do you imagine I am the sort of person to kiss a man I do not love and intend to marry?”

  Dutton looked down at her glove and then up at her with one brow cocked.

  “You cannot possibly compare the two!” she said rather more hotly than was seemly, though she was probably long past worrying about seemly now. “I kissed Blakes and you kissed me! Surely you can see the difference.”

  “Not precisely,” Dutton said.

  At which point he looked entirely like a man intent upon kissing her again; she’d had experience of two now and was becoming, not immodestly, something of an expert on that particular look.

  It was a point of good fortune for her that, as Dutton was moving to back her up against the wall, literally, he left his “post” at the door, which swung open with a bang of violent noise that made Dutton turn and her jump. And who was standing there but Blakes, looking like the wrath of God in a sapphire blue damask waistcoat, who took a quick succession of slicing looks at Dutton and her and her bare arm and her glove in Dutton’s hand, and said, “Swords at dawn?”

  “Swords at dawn,” Dutton agreed, bowing to Blakes and then returning her glove to her with a smile of what should have been regret but was not. />
  And then, before she could catch a full breath to explain to Blakes how she had wound up in a dressing room, their dressing room, with Dutton, Blakes said, “If you wanted to take off your clothes, Louisa, you should have told me. I’m more than happy to oblige you.”

  That was the point when she thought that it, perhaps, had not been good fortune at all for Blakes to show up when and where he did.

  Nineteen

  “YOU are not going to duel with him,” Louisa said, because it seemed wiser to speak of something else, anything else, but the removal of her clothing.

  “Not now, no,” Blakes said. “Now I am going to remove some of your clothes and, in the process, remind you most forcefully, that you will be marrying me.”

  “Of course I am to marry you,” she snapped. “No one thinks otherwise.”

  “Don’t they?” he said. “I wish this room had a lock,” he mused softly. “I do think Ashdon would have appreciated a locked door as much as I do now.”

  She swallowed heavily and slid on her crumpled glove. Everyone knew what had happened within this room less than a week ago to Sophia’s daughter Caroline; she had been thoroughly ruined and forced to marry the Earl of Ashdon the very next day. Why, it was all anyone could speak of still, though, aside from being ruined, everyone did admit that Caroline had looked rather delighted to have been ruined by Lord Ashdon.

  There was something to that, surely.

  “I think we should go back to dinner,” she said. “Now.”

  “Because I spoke of locked doors?” he asked softly. “Don’t worry. I shan’t let anyone in to see you, locks or not.”

  “Lord Henry,” she said firmly. “This is most inappropriate. And you seem to have got the wrong idea entirely about what, that is, about how I . . . how Lord Dutton and I . . . that is to say,” she said hurriedly against the rising anger in Blakesley’s eyes, “we were speaking of you!”

  “How reassuring,” he said drolly. “And your glove?”