A Sinner without a Saint

by Bliss Bennet

  Even worse, Dulcie would be hurting Sibilla, and Polly, too, to achieve his self-interested ends.

  The muscles of Benedict’s entire frame pulled tight. No, he could not allow any man, no matter how captivating, to hurt the only two women for whom he had a care.

  Nor to steal away an art collection that by all rights should belong to the nation.

  Especially if that man were Sinclair Milne.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dulcie hummed as he strode the pavements of early morning Mayfair, an amusing little ditty he’d heard at the theater the night before, about a young carpenter torn away from his lady love by a cruel press gang. Been quite distraught, the poor lad had, when he’d finally returned, only to discover another chap warming his girl’s bed.

  Shaking his head, he tapped his walking stick against the iron railings fronting a Mount Street townhouse in time to his humming. Gullible fellow, that carpenter. Far better to keep one’s distance from emotional entanglements, particularly those of a romantic sort.

  After doffing his hat to a passing milkmaid and grinning at her reddening cheeks, Dulcie broke out into full-throated song:

  “Oh! Sally Brown, oh! Sally Brown,

  How could you sarve me so?

  I’ve met with many a breeze before,

  But never such a blow.”

  Now, if only Peregrine Sayre would finally declare himself to Sibilla Pennington and her family, Dulcie, too, would be as free as the young carpenter. Teasing Per with his sham courtship of the chit had proven vastly amusing, but it was more than time for Dulcie to move on to other challenges. Alas, Per had proven surprisingly behindhand in his own wooing, in spite all of Dulcie’s prodding and maneuvering. Still, he’d stand Per in better stead than the carpenter’s lover had stood him, keeping up the deception until his friend finally took the bit between his teeth and claimed la Pennington for himself. Hadn’t he even risen at this ungodly early hour to attend a meeting with his father and Lord Saybrook to discuss marriage settlements, just to preserve the ruse? If Per and Sibilla did not name their firstborn Sinclair, well, he’d certainly have something to say about it.

  With a jaunty whistle, Dulcie crossed Mount Street and made his way down Berkeley Square. But as he drew closer to Pennington House, raised voices began to drown out his own tune. Housemaids arguing over who would have the privilege of delivering the morning paper to the master? Footmen come to fisticuffs over the smiles of a passing wench? Saybrook should keep his domestics in better order.

  Even worse, the front door to the townhouse stood wide open, with not a servant in sight. Dulcie poked in his head. “Lord Saybrook? Father?”

  No one answered.

  Down the passageway, he could just make out a group of liveried servants all clustered about a doorway. The entrance to the room from which the clamor spilled, no doubt.

  Dulcie closed the street door behind him, then stepped past an open-mouthed scullery maid and elbowed his way between two footmen juggling for best position outside Pennington House’s morning room. Today, though, the room seemed better suited to a theater than a fashionable home, a theater featuring a Restoration-era comedy on the bill. Theo Pennington, Viscount Saybrook, stood pressed against an armchair, being harangued by his great aunt and by another, older man, each trying to shout down the other. The remains of a broken vase—thrown by one of the disputants, or knocked over during the fracas?—lay scattered about the lush Turkey carpet. And there, his own father, edging carefully away from the feuding trio, backing towards a sofa far too delicate to hold his hefty bulk. A sofa by which stood Sibilla Pennington and Peregrine Sayre, their hands tightly entwined.

  Dulcie smiled. If they were openly billing and cooing in front of her family, then Per must have formally paid Sibilla his addresses.

  He stepped closer to the happy couple, eager to offer his congratulations and to discover the cause of the current to-do.

  “Better not let Dulcie catch you in it, unless you don’t mind being the butt of his witticisms for the next fortnight or two,” he heard his father say as he reached his side.

  “Don’t let Dulcie catch you in what?” he asked. “Would be a fair treat, it would, to catch someone else out for a change, rather than always being caught out myself.”

  “Ah, but it’s you who have been caught, or will be, if Saybrook and I have anything to say about it.” His father’s lips lifted in a satisfied smile. “In parson’s mousetrap, that is. So glad you saw fit to attend the discussion of the settlements.”

  “The settlements?” Per asked, his voice ripe with belligerence. “What settlements?”

  Dulcie raised an eyebrow. Was he the only one who noticed how closely Per and Sibilla stood? How Per’s hand tightened on hers at the earl’s words?

  “Why, the marriage settlements, of course,” his father said. “Saybrook may be a bit of an inebriate, but he’s no fool. Won’t be giving his sister to Dulcie here without wrapping up the financials, all right and tight!”

  Beside him, Sibilla Pennington gave a startled squeak.

  “Ah, I do beg your pardon, Miss Pennington,” his father said, blinking. “Didn’t see you there, my girl. Fancy-dress party, did Saybrook say?”

  Yes, now that he looked more closely, Sibilla and Per, as well as her great aunt, all appeared to be in no little sartorial disarray. As he lowered his quizzing glass from Sibilla’s outlandish dress, he caught the expression of alarm she flung at him, but he only shrugged. He’d already done enough to push her and Per together. Besides, it would be far more amusing to watch them try to get out of whatever tangle they were currently in than to meddle in it himself.

  Before he could find a comfortable chair from which to observe the melee, another commotion rose, this one from out in the passageway. Dulcie’s breath caught at the sight of Benedict Pennington, his dark hair gloriously ruffled, his tall figure encased in a smock spattered with paint, stalking into the room.

  “What in hell is going on in here? This racket’s like to raise the dead! How can I concentrate on my art with such a clamor?”

  Dulcie started. Benedict had always been such a shy, quiet creature. Where had this demanding, belligerent man come from?

  A voluptuous woman, one obviously naked beneath her loosely tied dressing robe, trailed behind Benedict, her unbound hair hiding most of her face. Dulcie crossed his arms over his chest. Now that he was grown to manhood, did Benedict’s ardor lay in another direction?

  He pushed himself away from the wall against which he’d leaned, both eyebrows rising. “Art, is it? Or perhaps we distract you from a more . . . passionate endeavor?”

  Benedict scowled, his nostrils flaring. But then, following the direction of Dulcie’s gaze, he caught sight of the woman who had followed him. “Damnation, Sally! I told you to stay put!”

  Benedict’s face turned an utterly charming shade of crimson. Always prone to blushing, young Benedict had been, especially when the boys at school debated the relative merits of female bodily charms. At the time he’d assumed it was because the boy had not found such bodies as compelling as the others did. But perhaps it had only been inexperience.

  “But Benedict! Up all night we’ve been, and me insides growling’ like anything!” the blowsy woman protested. “Can’t a girl ‘ave a bite to eat?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll call for some tea, just go back to the studio!”

  Benedict tried to lead the woman towards the door, but she snuck under his arm and strolled back into the room. “Must be a bite ‘o something ‘ere, wot wif a crowd like this . . .”

  As the woman looped her hair behind her ears, Dulcie’s stomach dropped. Lined and drooping, that face, yes, but still, the same bright eyes, the same cheeky smile. No, it couldn’t be—

  “Lord Sin!” the woman cried, throwing herself at him.

  Reflexively, Dulcie’s arms rose to catch the rounded bundle before she could bowl him completely over. Sally—not Brown, as in the song, but Goodman, if his memory served—his one s
orry attempt to take a woman as mistress. What was she doing here, at Pennington House? And calling him by that ridiculous pet name for all to hear?

  “Sal?” he said, squeaking like an out-of-tune fiddle. He cleared his throat and deepened his voice into its usual drawl. “Is it truly you? I thought you’d returned home to marry your village smithy?”

  “Yes, and many a ‘appy year we ‘ad of it, Sinny, which was more than you’dve given a girl such as me.”

  Dulcie felt his own blush rising as Sal slapped him playfully on the back. No, he’d never really been able to muster the ardor to please any woman, not even one as bounteously endowed as the younger Sal had been.

  “But then the poor fellow up and died on me, and it t’warn’t any good,” Sal continued, clearly aggrieved. “Not with none of the blokes back home with more than a few pennies to their names! Come back to town, I did, ‘oping to make me fortune. Been modeling for Mr. Pennington, ‘ere, but ‘ard work, that is!”

  Dulcie turned a wary eye to Benedict. He’d been painting female nudes? How unexpected.

  Now even his ears began to turn red. Jerking his eyes from Dulcie’s, he stepped toward his model. “Ha! Rather be back out on the streets, would you, then, Sal?”

  But Sal ignored her employer, turning instead to run a seductive hand down Dulcie’s cheek. “Wouldn’t want ter set me up again, now, would you, Sinny, like you done afore? Right easy job of it I ‘ad then, eh?”

  Benedict stumbled back a step, a pained, vulnerable expression passing over his face. But then something in him seemed to harden. With a snarl, he pulled Dulcie free of Sal and shoved him to the wall. “Set her up again? Do you mean to tell me you once kept Sal as a mistress?”

  Dulcie swallowed, inexplicably aroused by the feel of Benedict Pennington’s now taller, broader frame pushing against his own. He’d always taken the role of erastes, the dominant partner, during his trysts with men, never eromenos. Why should being manhandled suddenly set his senses aquiver?

  “How could you lie about a thing like that, you false cur? How could you?” Benedict whispered, his expression pained.

  Lie? He shook away the unwonted physical response and racked his brain. As far as he could remember, he’d never said a word to Benedict Pennington about keeping, or not keeping, a wench. What could the fellow mean by it?

  Before the man could shove him straight through the wall, his sister laid a hand on his arm. “Benedict, please! I thank you for your care of me, but there’s no need to take on so. You’ll hurt the poor man! And it no longer matters. About the mistress, I mean.”

  Dulcie gave his head a rapid shake. Yes, Sibilla Pennington had vowed never to marry a man who had kept a mistress, hadn’t she? But somehow, he did not think that her brother’s agitation over the matter stemmed from Dulcie’s minor lack of candor about his past peccadilloes. Had the boy been nursing his calf-love for Dulcie all these years, even unto manhood? With his tousled hair and his breath sawing in and out, he looked as if he’d been rutting with Dulcie rather than on the verge of pummeling him.

  Although with some men, the two were not all that different.

  Would they be, with Benedict?

  He restrained a shudder as Benedict’s heavy hands slowly slipped from his body. With deliberate care, Dulcie brushed away the wrinkles in his coat and fluffed up his crumpled cravat, paying no attention to the squawking of Sal as she turned and rushed towards Lord Saybrook and the others. He was still far more intrigued by the glowering Benedict, who shoved his body between Dulcie and his sister.

  “Well, it seems as if your quest for an eligible parti is doomed to failure,” Benedict said, still staring poignards at Dulcie. “Even Dulcie, whom we had thought to be a veritable paragon of virtue, at least as far as the voluptuary arts were concerned, has paid for the companionship of a female. No political man, no man in all of London, it would seem, can claim never to have sheltered a mistress.”

  “I can,” Lord Milne exclaimed. “I’ve never kept a woman! Other than Lady Milne, of course.”

  Thank the heavens for his father, always a half-step behind in any conversation. “Yes, Pater, but that’s nothing to the point. You’ve already married, and I don’t imagine Mother would take kindly to talk of divorce. Miss Pennington needs a bachelor without a mistress, a personage so rare in our times that his price must be far above not just rubies, but sapphires, diamonds, and even gold.”

  “What does it matter whether a man has a mistress or no?” Per asked.

  Dulcie’s eyes lit. Forget allowing the fellow to do this for himself. It was time to finish this, once and for all, and free himself from Benedict Pennington’s too-disturbing gaze.

  He laid a companionable arm along Per’s shoulder. “Because Miss Pennington has vowed to marry only a man interested in politics and uninterested in keeping a mistress. To be proven by his having never even once adopted the practice so common to those of us of the male persuasion. I fear the poor girl is doomed to a long, lonely spinsterhood. I, for one, have never heard tell of such a rare beast.”

  Dulcie hurrahed under his breath as Per shrugged free of his arm and took Sibilla’s hand in his own. “I have never kept a mistress,” he said, gazing with besotted ardor into the chit’s eyes.

  “Louder,” he whispered, giving his friend a hard nudge.

  “I am a man without a mistress!” Per shouted.

  Praise the heavens! Or praise St. Raphael, patron saint of courtship, although he doubted Per and Sibilla had remained as chaste as the saint would have wished. But at least the two seemed finally to have admitted to each other, as well as to her family, that they were going to wed.

  As much as he enjoyed being the center of attention, such a day rightly belonged to Sibilla and Per, not to him. And now that he was no longer required to pay homage to anyone in the Pennington family, he was free to turn his attentions to other important matters—such as to Polly Adler and her grandfather’s collection of art.

  Besides, the strange combination of anger and vulnerability on Benedict Pennington’s face was making his entire scalp prickle.

  After one last quick glance at Benedict, Dulcie beat a hasty retreat.

  “Dulcie, Father wishes to speak with you.”

  Dulcie paused by the front door of Milne House and slapped his gloves against his thigh. Damnation! Did anyone have as bothersome a sister as he? Wilhelmina, arms crossed and foot tapping, stood by the door of their father’s library, a chiding expression more suitable to an aged spinster than a lady of five and twenty marring her countenance.

  “Tut, tut, Mina,” he said with a warning shake of his head. “Making up tales? You know quite well Father has no such wish to speak with me.”

  In fact, he and his father had been deliberately avoiding one another, ever since that delicious—or disastrous, depending on one’s point of view—scene at Pennington House more than a week ago. Father so hated going to the trouble of chastising him, especially knowing how little Dulcie was wont to listen. And Dulcie, for all his heedless ways, truly did not enjoy disappointing his father. He’d much rather contemplate the memory of Benedict Pennington pushing his body to the wall. But the ghost who had once seemed to appear around every corner had been markedly absent from Dulcie’s typical haunts of late.

  “Perhaps he does not,” his sister agreed. “But Father will do his duty as head of this family. Besides, he promised Mama.”

  Dulcie gave an exaggerated sigh and threw his gloves onto the console-table by the door. Lord Milne may be a powerful voice in the House of Lords, but in this house, his lady would always have the last word.

  “Very well, Mina. But I’ll not have you listening outside the door.”

  His sister sniffed. “As if I would ever stoop to such dishonorable machinations. Besides, Mama and I have already discussed the most suitable ladies, now that Miss Pennington has chosen another.” With a toss of her blonde head, Mina flounced down the passageway.

  Heaving a real sigh this time, Dulcie pus
hed open the library door.

  “Oh, Dulcie. Yes, come in, come in, and close the door behind you, if you will.”

  Dulcie pasted on his most affable smile. “Father, is it true that Sir Peregrine has resigned? Do you require my help in finding a suitable replacement?”

  “What?” Lord Milne asked, patting the piles of books and papers about him as if the solution to taming his recalcitrant heir might be found among them. Poor soul, he looked rather lost without his trusted secretary to put the right note in his hand at just the right time.

  “A new secretary, Father. Now that Sir Peregrine is to marry, and accept the patronage of Lord Saybrook?”

  “Yes, indeed. Ha. As if any intimate of yours would deign to take employment. But no, that is not what I wish to speak with you about. Please, take a seat.”

  Dulcie dropped into a chair in front of his father’s broad desk and swung his booted foot. “I believe Sir Peregrine and Miss Pennington will be very happy together, do you not?”

  “Oh, yes, yes indeed. But do you bear him no ill will? Stealing away the very chit you yourself had been courting!”

  “My amor propre does still reel from the blow. Yet who am I to stand in the way of the course of true passion? If only I, too, might experience the rapture of the first kiss of love.”

  “Rapture is all well and good, but what is more important in a wife is her connections,” his father said, completing missing his Byronic allusion. “As well as her ability to give you heirs. Your mother has told me of several likely young ladies—devil take it, where is that list?”

  His father’s casual mention of heirs knotted Dulcie’s stomach. Seeing his putative mistress again after so many years had served as yet another reminder of his inability to bed a woman. How hard he’d tried, and how embarrassingly he’d failed, to summon any desire for the buxom Sal. Or for any other woman of his acquaintance. Lattimer Leverett may be able to sport with lord and lady alike, but Dulcie’s ardor remained painfully dormant in the presence of the female form.