She looked down at his expression, his eyes closed, mouth open, enjoying the feel of her as much as she enjoyed him. The soft skin of his neck beckoned to her and she leaned forward to kiss him there even as she lowered herself another inch.
“For God’s sake, Maggie, you’re torturing me.” Everything within her cried out in alarm and she stilled, but he wasn’t having any of that, his hips pushing upward trying to complete the motion she had started.
“Who’s Maggie?” she managed to say.
He laughed and kissed her ear. She turned her head in irritation.
Then she felt his teeth tugging on the silk of her mask.
And that’s when she knew that he knew.
He’d managed to pull her mask half off. Irritated, she yanked it off the rest of the way.
“How long have you known?” she demanded, trying to ignore the slow thrust of his hips.
“A couple of days,” he admitted, grinning. “I was embarrassed at first that I didn’t recognize you.”
“You tricked me,” she accused. But she didn’t move. She stayed where she was, with his cock still filling her. There were too many conflicting emotions for her to decide which impulse to follow: anger or relief.
“Maggie, sweet, if anyone should be furious, it’s me. You’ve known for weeks and kept me in the dark. I simply wanted to see you again.”
Just as she had jumped at the opportunity to see him as well, as Amphitrite, without feeling she had to suffer the consequences. Could she really blame him?
“Maybe you’d better untie me, Maggie.”
She shook her head. That at least she was clear on: it was better to keep him in her power. Just to prove it, she rose over him and then slid back down.
His pained groan was music to her ears. “All right then. I was thinking we could wait, until after Miss Coswell is married and continue on where we were.”
Wait? Maggie considered the idea, her body stilling. Waiting meant being with him, meant allowing herself to love him for just a little bit longer. Until one of them decided to break off the affair and start the heartbreak all over again.
“But here with you, Maggie,” Oakley was saying. He really shouldn’t move his hips like that, not if he wanted her to concentrate. “I know that would never do.”
Never do? Suddenly Maggie wanted it. She wanted to be with him for even the briefest moment more because, as Diana had said, this was her life.
“I want to be with you now.”
“Oakley,” she sighed, starting to lift herself off of him, but he bucked his hips against hers and her body answered the call to pleasure. She slid back down, moaning as he filled her again. She wanted now too, but she’d have to tell him it could only be later. Later was something, after all.
“I want to be with you always,” he continued.
She might not be the best stepmother in the world but she had to do her duty by the poor girl. After all, both Livvie’s mother and father were dead, and she only asked that Maggie not ruin her chances at a marriage.
“Dammit, Maggie, you’re not listening to me,” Oakley exclaimed. He tugged on the cravat violently, the headboard creaking from the strain.
She blinked and refocused on him.
Finally!
“What I am trying to say is…” Oakley stopped, the emotion stuck in his chest. He stilled beneath her, breathing deeply. “What I’m trying to say, Maggie, is that I love you and I don’t want to spend another day worrying about whether I’ll get to see you or not or whether I’ll ever find someone who makes me feel the way you make me feel.”
“What did you say?”
Surely she had heard him. She couldn’t be asking him to repeat all of that?
“Maggie, I’m asking you to marry me.”
She said nothing. She merely stared down at him with those eyes that looked more amber than brown.
“I love you,” he repeated, just in case, just to make certain she understood.
“I love you too,” she said, but she looked confused and sad, as if she were going to cry.
“You do?” Her look so belied her words that Oakley feared the sharp joy burgeoning in his chest.
She nodded. Then her lips quirked up into a little smile and Oakley wanted to wrap his arms around her.
“Dammit, Maggie, would you please untie me?”
She laughed and reached for the knot, sliding off of him, her chest hovering over his face. The soft flesh of her breasts hung above him, beckoning, and he lifted his head to lick one pink nipple.
She sighed, staying where she was despite finishing her task. He reached down to grasp her hips. He savored the feel of her skin under his hands as if he had never touched her before.
Then he rolled her onto her back and covered her with his body.
“Maggie?”
“Yes?” She looked up at him, her smile now lacking any of its previous sadness. The lingering tightness left his chest.
“I love you.”
“So you said,” she agreed, but she was grinning now.
He settled himself between her thighs and slowly slid back inside her body. She wrapped her thighs around his and pulled him in deeper. He could have come right then, but he held back.
“Maggie?”
“Yes?” Her head arched back; her hips were moving to match his.
“Will you, then?”
“Will I what?” she whispered. He groaned at the feel of her hand on the inside of his thigh. There was no doubt in his mind that she was torturing him.
He pulled out till just the head of his cock touched her drenched folds. He resisted the upward search of her hips, teasing her instead with short, shallow pumps.
“Oakley!” she moaned her complaint.
“Tell me,” he demanded, laughing.
“Tell you what?” She gasped, but she was struggling to hold back her own laughter.
He bent his head to lick at the sensitive skin of her neck.
“Oakley!”
He waited, nibbling at the lower lobe of her ear.
“Oakley!” Her hands pulled at his hips and he couldn’t stop himself. He followed the movements of her hands and finally thrust in deeply. She met his movements with equal force, her breath coming faster, her body trembling.
“Tell me,” he demanded again, grinding himself against her to stimulate her clit. The soft cries grew louder and he retreated, holding back once more, knowing she was on the edge.
“Yes,” she cried in frustration, her hands grabbing again at his hips, insistent. Triumphantly, he thrust deeply and gave her what she wanted. “Yes, yes, yes!”
PART III
Roses Are Rouge
Chapter One
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
It was nearly pitch black in the narrow, shrub-lined walk, and as far as Diana could tell, Lord Simon Donavan wasn’t anywhere about. He had said this particular walk, had specified the seventh tree from the entrance but there were no trees, per se, in this row, only tall shrubs that continued in a long unbroken line.
As she’d made her way down the dark walk she heard moans, male and female. Worse, she heard the scurrying of rats in those damn hedges.
She should never have agreed. How could she have imagined that making love in a rat-infested garden would be fun? If she even ever found the man.
Of course, she had been bored. She slid damp curls back into place as she lounged in her ridiculously uncomfortable chair. With July almost over, the last pitiful throes of the London season twitched around Mayfair, and only the Lords most dedicated to Parliament remained for the final fortnight.
Despite that, she was surrounded by friends: Maggie and her new husband, Oakley, Earnestina and Lord Ashburton, Lord Simon. Maybe that was the problem. She had grown rather bored of Simon. It wasn’t that he wasn’t handsome or droll enough. He simply only pleased her in the most superficial of ways.
So when he leaned over and whispered that she should meet him, the flicker of interest at such a novelty g
uided her answer.
Where was he?
This was ridiculous. Diana turned around and headed back the way she had come, toward the distant lights, toward the rest of her party.
She bumped into the man, not Lord Simon, before she even knew he was there: a shadow that broke away from the hedges and caught her by the waist, swinging her around till she was dizzy.
“What have I here?” The stranger had a thick northern accent and the walloping scent of gin on his breath. His hand came in contact with her chest, with the rather exposed expanse of breast that her stylishly low-cut gown and helpful corset revealed. “A tasty treat.”
“Not for you, sir,” she returned with a exasperated sigh. She was used to drunken men with wandering hands. She pulled away from his grasp.
His arms didn’t budge. If anything, they tightened around her.
“Let me go before you regret it,” she warned.
“The only thing I’m thinking I’d regret is letting a piece like you get away.” Then his head knocked into hers, his mouth finding her cheek, slobbering on her skin.
This was too much. Even for Diana’s high tolerance. She lifted her knee sharply.
And found herself twisted around before she met her target, her back pressed against him and her face pushed into the bushes. Twigs scratched at her forehead and neck. She struggled to move but couldn’t.
The man’s arms were brawny and thick like a pugilist’s.
Trapped.
After five years of marriage and two years of widowhood, Diana Blount knew she could handle anything that came her way. She could defend herself with the ivory-handled pistol from Bunney’s that she usually carried or the knife that was often strapped to her leg.
Unusual for a lady perhaps, for the wife of the now dead Sir Roger Blount, but not so unusual for the proprietor of an exclusive club catering to the sexual proclivities of the haute ton.
Not that Diana would ever call herself a madam; she was merely the secret heir to a house of sin, a place of decadent pleasures: Harridan House.
Tonight, the gun was in her reticule left at the supper box and the knife, no matter how her fingers gripped the fabric of her dress, remained firmly out of reach.
Tonight, she had to admit, she may have gotten herself in over her head.
So she resorted to the weapon of heroines in Radcliffe’s gothic romances: she screamed.
Chapter Two
Really, Jas, you should come up to London more often,” Elizabeth Throckmorton said.
“We always have a devil of a good time when you’re here,” her husband, Daniel, agreed.
Jason laughed. It was good to be in London, to see his old friends. How long had it been? One year since the funeral. Funerals. Two years since he’d so unexpectedly inherited the baronetcy and become Sir instead of plain Jason Blount. Solvency was good. Three years since he’d left London abruptly for the country with a new wife and new responsibilities and hardly any finances of which to speak.
Too long. After three hard years of changes, he rather thought he was a new man. A harder man.
Tonight, however, strolling through Vauxhall Gardens in the company of old and true friends, half drunk on brandy, he felt as if he were thirty again. By the pricking of his thumbs, something was going to happen.
Then he heard the scream. High-pitched, desperate. A woman’s voice.
He stopped in his tracks and looked around. It was as if he was the only one who had heard it.
The Throckmortons and his other companions, Dick Morrison and Ogden Seymour, stopped a few steps away and looked back at him inquisitively.
“Didn’t you hear it? A scream?”
Morrison shook his head. Daniel as well.
“It’s probably one of the whores having herself a good time down the dark walks,” Seymour suggested.
There were no more screams, but that didn’t settle Jason’s unease.
“Not a good time,” he corrected. “I’ll meet you back at our box.” Unsure what he expected to do but certain he had to do something, he took off down the nearest path, in the direction he thought he’d heard the scream.
The sound of struggle was unmistakable, even though the woman’s cries were muffled now. He could just make out the misshapen shadow of their bodies, pressed against the hedge.
He grabbed the large, rounded shoulder of the assailant and pulled hard, his fist swinging around fast to meet the man’s face. Or what he assumed to be the man’s face. It felt rather like an ear.
With a roar the man lunged at him and Jason dodged the lumbering shadow, his fist making contact with the soft flesh of the stomach.
He knocked the air out of the man and, not waiting for him to recover, grabbed the woman’s arm.
“Come, let’s get away before he recovers his breath,” he urged, guiding her forward, toward the main thoroughfare.
Only when they reached the lighted, crowded path did he stop and turn to look at the woman he’d saved.
And his own breath caught in his chest.
The woman before him, whose face was scratched and red, whose hair was disheveled, whose dress was wrinkled and dirty—whose breasts heaved and pushed against the meager constraints of her bodice as she tried to catch her own breath—was none other than Lady Blount. Diana Blount. Wife of the late baronet, bane of his peace and cynosure of his most carnal dreams.
She recognized him in the same instant and her face flushed.
She was angry at him?
Which made him reassess the situation, his own ire growing. Only Diana Blount would be involved in the feigning of pain to increase pleasure.
“My apologies, Diana. I thought I was coming to the aid of a woman in need. I didn’t intend to ruin an assignation.”
He turned abruptly on his heel, furious for more reasons than he could even name.
Her hand on his forearm stopped him. Gloved, yes, but the soft weight burned through all the layers, scorching his mind.
“No! Don’t you dare go. Please!” He turned back to look at her, to her wide-eyed expression that now looked very little like anger. “Please Jason, escort me back to my friends?”
Her hand on his arm shook. In fact, when he studied her more closely, he realized she was trembling all over.
It occurred to him that perhaps he had been wrong.
Chapter Three
They walked in silence back to the boxes. She was grateful for his help, grateful he didn’t ask why she’d been in the dark walks to begin with or make any other disparaging remarks about her morality and choices.
She simply savored the calming strength that flowed through his arm to her.
Odd that this man should be the one to save her from rape, to have the power to soothe her merely by his capable and protective presence.
Diana still remembered the first moment she’d ever seen him—in the lawyer’s office at the reading of her late husband’s will. He was so very English, the wavy thatch of golden hair coming to a peak on his forehead, his lips full, his eyes the pale grayish blue of the sea on a winter morning. Jason Blount was tall and slender and oh-so-proper in his Sunday-best country clothes.
He’d greeted her kindly and graciously, with the sort of gentlemanly regard that she had felt so infrequently during her married life.
When he bent over her hand, she shivered at his touch and wondered what he would be like in bed. She couldn’t help that thought; it was what she’d been trained to think.
Behind him his wife, still plump from a recent pregnancy, looked on rapaciously, until the lawyer requested that she leave the room.
Then, the solicitor revealed the existence of Harridan House and to whom it was bequeathed.
“Impossible!” Jason had cried. “What was he thinking? Lady Blount can hardly run some sort of depraved club. Sell the damn thing as discreetly as you can, or let’s simply close it down.”
“Quite right,” Mr. Jarvis, the solicitor, agreed. “Not a fitting thing for a young woman. I tried to dissuad
e Sir Roger but he was a man set in his ways.”
Diana had listened to the men discuss her for several more minutes as if she weren’t there, as if she didn’t have a say in the whole matter. The pure arrogance of the man, that he would think in inheriting the baronetcy, he had inherited the right to dictate her actions.
In that one furious moment, Diana made a decision that set the course of her life.
“I’m not selling,” she had said, quietly but firmly.
The men kept talking as if she hadn’t said a word, discussing the value of the property that Harridan House inhabited.
“Excuse me, Sir Jason, Mr. Jarvis,” she interrupted, louder this time. “I have decided not to sell the club. My husband entrusted it to me for some reason, sentimental or other, and I intend to honor his wish.”
That’s when Jason’s benevolent gaze turned to judgment, and in his eyes she was brazen, wanton, sluttish. All words she had been called before, but somehow, seeing it in this man’s eyes, made her angry. Furious. Incensed. Hurt.
Over the next few days, he tried to convince her, to make her see how dangerous this choice was. He came to her at her London townhouse, which, thankfully, was not entailed. His wife, kept ignorant of all the proceedings, did not accompany him. The townhouse was still draped in black crepe.
He was so very handsome walking in from the snow, his hair windswept and damp.
Under different circumstances, she would have been inclined to make him her lover. Instead, she wanted to shock him, to play with him, taunt him.
He had no power over her.
“Why did you marry him?”
“Why?” Diana turned, surprised at the question. “You were the poor relation till he died, wouldn’t you have if our places were switched?”
“I didn’t marry for money.”
“For love?”
“You can’t keep that place,” he said derisively, but she noted he didn’t answer her question and some little hitch inside her released.
“That club is my livelihood, thanks to Roger. It is also what he made me, fit for nothing else.”
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