The material gave suddenly and the air touched the skin of her back, a shocking counterpoint to the warmth of Ben’s hands as they caressed her. He eased the dress away from her and bent to kiss her bare shoulder, his hair brushing her skin. His hands lingered, stroking her gently. Then the gown crumpled to the floor and Catherine’s stays fell away, leaving her standing in nothing but her shift and her stockings.
Ben moved away from her and she turned to look at him, watching with fascination and awe as he tore his shirt off to reveal a strongly muscled chest and broad shoulders. His skin was golden in the candlelight and the sight of him stole the last of her breath. She felt fearful for a moment, afraid of the barely restrained sensuality that she could see turning his hazel eyes dark with passion. The intensity of the awareness between them seemed to hang on the air like lightning. It was too late to change her mind now but she found she did not want to. A part of her was afraid but the stronger part was excited, too, drawn to him and to the warmth and promise of his embrace.
He picked her up and placed her on the bed, following her down into its softness. His fingers were busy in her hair—she had not pinned it up, merely confining it with a ribbon that he now pulled free. She heard his breath catch as he spread her hair across the pillow and raised a strand to his lips.
“You are very beautiful.”
No one had ever called Catherine beautiful before. She had not even thought of the word and of herself as having any connection. She started to smile in wonderment but Ben dipped his head and kissed her, and suddenly the gentleness was gone and his kiss was hungry and demanding. Before Ben, no one had ever kissed Catherine, and she had certainly never dreamed of such an embrace but now she recognized it instinctively as a statement of possession. She made a soft, sweet sound against his mouth and heard him groan in response.
His lips left hers and brushed her throat with a feather-light touch.
“Catherine…Kate…”
Her heart jumped to hear that name on his lips. She had not been called Kate for so long. It belonged to a past time, a time of warmth and love, a time she had lost. Now it felt as though she might regain it. She savored the thought for a moment but then forgot it as she felt his hands on her shift, drawing it over her head, discarding it.
She was naked. For a moment she felt too exposed, too apprehensive, but his mouth was at her breast and she forgot everything else in the splintering sensation of need that consumed her whole body. She arched upward to the demand of his lips as he suckled, flicking with his tongue at her nipple until it was so hard and sensitive that she could scarcely bear the feeling. She writhed beneath his hands, her own sliding down his back until they reached the barrier of his breeches. The material felt smooth to her fingertips but she wanted to be rid of it, wanted to touch him. The instinct no longer startled or shocked her. She was driven by pure need now and no sense of shame or convention could restrain her. When he left her for a moment to remove the remainder of his clothes, all she wanted was to have him back, skin to skin, his nakedness against hers.
He lay back down beside her and she opened dazed eyes to look at his body, now revealed in all its hard and muscular perfection. She was not entirely ignorant of the male physique—in the past when Withers had held her and tried to kiss her she had been aware of his arousal and the thought of what it had meant had sickened her. Now, however, she could not resist stretching out a hand in awe and curiosity to touch Ben. He felt silky soft but when she ran her fingers tentatively along his erection he caught her wrist in a grip that made her gasp.
“Not this time,” he said, “or I shall disgrace myself. I want you too much.”
Not this time…
Catherine trembled to think of doing it again. Her mind was a dark spiral of sinful, erotic thoughts that clamored for release. Ben slid one palm down over her bare stomach until it reached the soft hair at the top of her thighs. As though he sensed the last shreds of her uncertainty, he leaned over and kissed her again, wooing her to relax and open to him.
The muscles low in Catherine’s belly jumped and contracted as he caressed her. He stroked her thigh with slow persuasion and she parted for him, and then he was touching the moist hot core of her, slipping inside. Catherine moaned. It was exquisite but it was not enough. It was nowhere near enough.
With a sudden movement, as though he could wait no longer, Ben rolled over and pressed her thighs more firmly apart. Catherine opened her eyes. There was a look on his face that she recognized as a mirror of the emotions within her, a look of vulnerability and hunger and desire that turned her heart inside out. And then he took hold of her hips and she felt him thrust inside her and the penetration was sharp and uncomfortable and almost made her cry out. Catherine’s exquisite pleasure dissolved into pain far more quickly than she could ever have imagined.
She lay still, half her mind grappling with the discomfort and the other half reeling from the sudden, cold realization that she had lost her virginity. How could such pure pleasure turn into such disappointment? It seemed most unfair. All the thoughts flew through her head in a split second and then Ben moved slightly, and this time she did catch her breath on a gasp of mingled pain and frustration. She felt him go very still.
“Damn it to hell—”
He was not thinking she was a courtesan now. The weight of his body on hers was withdrawn, he moved away, and suddenly Catherine felt sore and lonelier than she ever had done in her life before. The stark contrast with what had been happening a moment ago was too much to accept. The emptiness flooded back into her heart. For one dreadful moment she thought she was going to burst into tears as everything she had longed for seemed to vanish from before her eyes. All the intimacy, all the warmth, all the comfort she had thought she could find seemed a hollow sham and suddenly she was no more than yet another foolish debutante who had been betrayed by her own naiveté and her desperate search for love.
Love. She could not bear the thought now of how close she had come to thinking herself in love with Ben Hawksmoor when the truth was that she did not know him at all. She had been desperately attracted to him and had mistaken her fascination for something deeper, something he did not, had not ever, reciprocated. She had thought he had a tenderness for her beneath that practiced charm. Now she realized that he was every bit as cynical and ruthless as he had appeared. The humiliation of the deception she had played on herself burned her throat with tears.
She tried to slip from beneath the covers but he was too quick for her, catching her arm and pulling her back over to face him.
He looked utterly furious and she quailed at the rage in his eyes.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said coldly. “You do not run away from me now, Miss Catherine Fenton. Not until you tell me what the devil that was all about.”
BEN RELEASED HIS HOLD on Catherine’s arm, swung himself over the edge of the bed and searched rather irritably for his clothes. He felt tired and no longer aroused, although his body felt cheated. That made him still angrier. He was furious with Catherine but he was far more furious with himself. Without the dangerous seduction of desire to sway his judgment, he could see perfectly well that the girl in his bed was a virgin; or at the least she had been until he had made love to her. Her eyes were wide with apprehension and shock now. She held the sheet right up to her chin and she was biting her lip in a gesture that made him want to kiss her. That feeling alone, after what had just happened, was enough to irritate him almost beyond measure.
The anger and frustration slammed through him again in a physical wave, as it had done earlier in the evening when Tom Bradshaw’s message had arrived in the middle of the ball. Despite the presence of his guests, he had stepped aside to read it at once. It was too important not to.
There had been various pieces of information in the letter relating to Algernon Withers; dates, places, details of relatives, his fortune, his business interests and a warning that he was involved in some very crooked dealings indeed. Bradshaw had noted Wither
s’s mistress as one Emily Spraggett, a raddled old doxy who no doubt catered to Withers’s lowest desires. At the time, Ben had been briefly amused, remembering what he had told Bradshaw about coveting Withers’s mistress. No doubt the man would think him even more depraved that he already did.
And then his eye had fallen on the next lines that Bradshaw had written:
Lord Withers is betrothed to a Miss Catherine Fenton, daughter of the merchant Sir Alfred Fenton. It seems that he and the Fentons are involved together in criminal dealings although at present I do not know the extent of these because they keep close counsel. I also believe Miss Fenton to be a fashionable impure who may have been involved with Mr. Clarencieux. Certainly he was engaged in an affaire with a lady late last year thought by my informers to be Miss Fenton, and this would be a link between Clarencieux and Lord Withers. More information when I have it. Yours, Bradshaw.
Ben had been possessed by a blistering fury when he had read those words. He knew that it was not unknown for the daughters of the merchant class to become cyprians if they thought it would profit them. However, the thought of Catherine being betrothed to Algernon Withers and he acting as some sort of complaisant procurer was distasteful even to a man of Ben’s broad experience. Worse was the suggestion that she had been involved in a love affair with Ned Clarencieux. Withers must have known. Probably he had orchestrated it. The thought of Catherine implicated in Withers’s criminal dealings, as corrupt and venal as he, caused a red mist to rise before Ben’s eyes. Something had snapped in his mind then. He thought of Catherine flirting with him and no doubt laughing with Withers afterward over every little detail. Perhaps they planned to use him and bring him down as they had Ned Clarencieux. He thought of the way Catherine had clung to him at Newgate when Clarencieux might well have been swinging on the end of that rope because of something that she and Withers had arranged between them. Bradshaw had implied as much and his intelligence was the best in town.
The desire had flooded back into him, sharper than ever before, to take Catherine and use her and throw her back to Withers in contempt. It would be an uncivilized revenge, but one that they both thoroughly deserved.
The anger had been enough to send him storming out of his own party. And then he had seen Catherine, there in his house, and he had been astounded at her brass-faced audacity and had lost his temper and his self-control comprehensively for the first time in as long as he could remember. He had acted out the game then by the rules she set, playing along with her pretense at hesitation and modesty, and all the time intending to confront her once they had made love and he had slaked his need for revenge.
Only it had not been like that. The hell of it was that she had seemed so sweet and so innocent that he had all but forgotten his original intentions in the bliss of making love to her. Until he had taken her virginity and realized in that one terrible, catastrophic moment that Miss Catherine Fenton was not, in that respect, at all what he had thought her to be. She could not be the fashionable impure that Bradshaw had claimed.
“I did not realize that you knew my name.” Her voice was very quiet.
Ben swung round on her, his anger—with her, with himself—so great that he could barely keep his voice from shaking.
“I knew who you were all along.”
He saw her close her eyes briefly and open them again, and the pain that shimmered in them made him feel vaguely sick.
“I do not understand,” she said. “If you knew I was no courtesan, why—”
“Why did I treat you like one?” Ben shrugged. “You threw yourself at me so I took you. How was I to know you were still a virgin? You have behaved like a whore since we met.”
He heard her catch her breath and thought for a moment that she was going to cry but she did not. He admired her for that. He also knew that he was blaming her when he was at least partially culpable. He had believed her to be a cyprian but only because he had wanted to believe it. He should have recognized from the first time they had met that she was a lady of quality, an innocent, but he had overridden that instinct in his desire to bed her.
He thought about what Bradshaw had said in the letter, implying that she was implicated in all Withers’s unscrupulous schemes.
“Did Withers make you play the whore for me?” he asked, deliberately cruel. “Was it part of his plans?”
Her eyes went blank with shock. “Of course not! I do not understand what you mean—” She broke off, her face bleak with disillusionment. “I see,” she added after a moment. “That is what you think of me—that Lord Withers and I had some plan afoot?”
“Withers threatened me,” Ben said. “And you are his fiancée, and involved in all his business dealings, so I understand.”
“You understand incorrectly.” There was temper in her voice now. “I know nothing of Withers’s grubby dealings, nor do I wish to.”
So she had been innocent of that as well. How could Bradshaw have been so wrong? Damn, and damn and damn it all to hell and back.
Ben picked up his crumpled shirt and shrugged himself into it, then drew on his breeches.
“Then I hope,” he said bitingly, turning back to look at her, “that you have another, particularly good explanation for this situation, Miss Fenton.”
Her head was bent, the soft fall of chestnut hair hiding her expression from him. Ben remembered the silken slither of it through his fingers and almost cursed aloud. Hell, it had been months since he had bedded a woman and now that he had broken his self-imposed celibacy, it was to find that the knowing courtesan he thought he was seducing was nothing but a virginal debutante.
Conscience flicked him. He tried to ignore it. It was the first time in years that his conscience had troubled him at all. He had almost forgotten that he had one.
“If your aim was entrapment I fear you have chosen the wrong man,” he said. “You will have to make do with Lord Withers. I never offer for debutantes regardless of what I have done to them.”
In truth he never offered anything to any woman, debutante or otherwise. But this was the first time he had seduced an innocent.
He saw the color drain from her face at his words. “I did not seek to entrap you, Lord Hawksmoor,” she said. She looked down her nose at him, which struck Ben as rather comical. There was a dignity about her despite her lack of clothing that only served to emphasize that she was a lady.
“I had heard that you never do the decent thing, so why should you start now?” she said. “Besides, you are the last man on earth I would choose to marry. You are far from ideal.”
Ben could not argue with that. “Then if you were looking only for some excitement to boast about to your debutante friends and it went too far—” He broke off. The look on her face told him she was not the type to go foolishly seeking adventure and then cry about it later. She had too much character for that.
“You are far out in your assumptions,” she said, “and I owe you no explanation.”
“Yes you do!” Ben moved suddenly, grabbing her arms. The sheet slipped, revealing the upper curves of her breasts. He tried not to look. He could not help himself. Her skin was pale and soft and he felt the same shocking desire for her that had possessed him earlier. He let her go as quickly as he had grabbed her.
“You used me to relieve you of your virginity,” he said slowly.
Her lashes flickered. “It was not like that. I did not intend…” She stopped, then raised her chin. “I should like to get dressed now, if you please.”
It did not please him. He wanted to keep her there, naked, in his bed but he knew he could not. He stood up and made a slight, ironic gesture.
“Please do so.”
She glared at him with defiance in her dark eyes. “Kindly turn your back.”
Ben laughed. “A pointless exercise in modesty.”
She held the sheet scrunched beneath her chin and her gaze was dangerous. “Please do as I ask.”
Ben shrugged and turned away. His senses seemed unnaturally alert.
He heard the rustle of the bedclothes as she put them aside and caught a flash of her pale nakedness out of the corner of his eyes. He could tell she was dressing as quickly as possible. He knew she wanted to be away from him and the thought flayed him alive.
“I cannot do up my top buttons,” she said, and at last he heard a hint of something approaching despair in her voice.
Ben turned around. The effect of her dressing herself without a maid was naturally haphazard and she looked adorable. He realized it and felt annoyed all over again. From the start he had wanted her with an emotion more complicated than mere lust. He should have recognized his danger and left well alone.
“Come here, then,” he said.
She came, reluctantly. He brushed the tousled hair away from the nape of her neck and set to fastening the remaining buttons. When his fingers touched her skin accidentally, he heard her quietly gasp and the anger dug into him again like a spur. Could she not bear for him to touch her now? He finished and caught her by the arm, spinning her around to face him.
“A moment. You will tell me why you came here tonight.”
Their eyes locked.
“No,” she said after what seemed an hour to him. “I cannot. I will not.” She turned away to pick up her domino and her hair fell forward, shielding her expression from him once again, shutting him out. His frustration mounted.
“I do not understand,” he said.
She turned back and for a moment Ben thought he saw a flash of pain in her face beneath the defiant smile.
“You do not need to understand, Lord Hawksmoor,” she said. “You made no promises and I asked for nothing. And we will not see one another again. I swear I will not seek you out.” She slipped the domino about her shoulders. “It was no more than a mistake, and a disappointing one at that. Good night.”
A disappointing mistake.
Lord of Scandal Page 11