Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  His boots echoed on the floor. “Devil take it, Miracle, don’t faint on me!”

  He caught her as she swayed. For a moment she was too weary not to lean into his strength—not to listen to the steady beat of his heart, not to inhale his night-dark scent straight into her lungs—yet she forced herself to push him away. His hands fell to his sides as he stared down at her.

  Miracle sat down on the bed and hardened her heart to tell him the one more lie that would send him away forever.

  “I don’t want to be with you. I never did. I made a trade, that’s all. Anything else that you believe happened between us was only playacting on my part and foolishness on yours. Go home, Lord Ryderbourne! I don’t want you.”

  Silence flooded the shadows. Absolute quiet flowed over the rug on the floor, eddied up into myriad tiny crevices, filled the jug on the washstand. As if pain had been poured like liquid crystal into the air, the hush filled her ears until she heard only the unbearable beat of her own heart.

  “No, of course, you would not want me,” he said at last. “I apologize if I assumed otherwise.” He bent to pick up the drover’s hat and cloak. “So what the devil do you plan to do now?”

  “Disappear, if only you’ll let me.”

  “How?”

  “I shall walk to Derbyshire, where I have other resources, then leave the country.”

  “Doing whatever it takes?”

  “Yes. Whatever it takes. Unless you’re prepared to call in the law right now and see me hanged, you cannot stop me.”

  “I can,” he replied. “But I won’t.”

  Clouds had spread over the sky outside, blotting out the faint starlight. Miracle groped for the tinderbox on the bedside table and lit a candle. An illusion of warmth flickered over his face. His long shadow stretched out behind him. Her heart pounded heavily.

  He strode back to the table and set down the hat. Coins clinked, sparkling in the candlelight as he spilled his purse onto the wooden surface. “Here’s my gold. Though—as you so correctly surmised—you don’t need to earn it. Buy a horse. Ride to Derbyshire like the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon.”

  “I don’t want your money,” she said.

  “For God’s sake!” His gaze pierced as he looked up. “Rogues already stole your first mount. You were lucky not to be killed or raped into the bargain. You were desperate enough after that to be willing to prostitute yourself to any stranger, even when there was every chance that some of those travelers downstairs would have appropriated your favors for free—share and share alike!”

  “Yet they didn’t,” she said. “I know men. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Only too clearly.” He strode toward the door. “You played with those drovers’ emotions as if they were your fools.”

  “All men are my fools.”

  “So take the money! If you need further help, send a message to Wyldshay. I assumed a responsibility for you when I dragged you from Brockton Bay. That’s not your choice. It’s mine.”

  Shadows rushed as she stood up, as if flocks of vultures swooped about her ears. “How dare you hunt me down like this and try to bully me? I will not be obligated to you. I will not take your gifts, nor your money.”

  “But you will!” The cloak swirled as he turned back from the door. “Though, if you insist, you can earn it!”

  His boots pounded as he flung aside the cloak to stride up and seize her by both arms. His eyes raged, without tenderness, without caring, as he pulled her against his tall body. Miracle snarled up at him and laughed.

  His mouth ground down onto hers in genuine fury. His tongue plunged without mercy, as if trying to force her to reject him. Anguish and loss scorched from his lips.

  An answering rage at all of her hurts fired as if canisters of grapeshot exploded behind her eyes. She wrestled with tongue and teeth and lips, biting, crushing, until pure carnal lust roared its mean triumph. Kissing, kissing, hot and moist, like a demon. His erection reared against her belly, heavy and demanding. Heat flooded her groin.

  Yet he pulled away, his eyes like pits, and opened his hands. The flush of desire still glossed over his cheekbones, but he dropped his head to stare down at his clenched fingers.

  “I must beg your pardon,” he said. “I’ve never done such a thing in my life. I didn’t mean—”

  Miracle stopped his words with one finger. Hot tears scalded down her face—as if she were being purified in a crucible, leaving nothing but a core of pure gold. His scorching desire and agony plummeted into her soul. Without making any conscious decision she reached up and kissed him again, allowing her lips to open under his as a flower opens, welcoming and tender, allowing him full measure and returning it.

  He succumbed in a heartbeat. She knew it in her mouth, in her bones, in her ache of regret at the inevitable anguish of it. His kiss eased and caressed, like a seductive whisper rippling over her lips. With ever more delicate flicks of her tongue, she deepened her surrender, until the pain in her heart melted like crystallized honey liquefying in the sun.

  Lord Ryderbourne was the loveliest man she had ever met. He would not hurt her, even if she deserved it. He could not easily abandon her, even if she drove him away. She could not fight him with her body. Neither, obviously, could he fight her. The bed waited behind them. Yet he was far too ready for self-sacrifice, and she had suffered men’s obsessions before.

  Gently, gently, she broke the kiss, then touched his swollen lips again with one fingertip.

  He took a deep breath, the power of the deep-night ocean shining in his eyes.

  “I promise that I will never again trade either gold or anything else for your professional favors,” he said. “I did not come here intending to importune you or seduce you, and certainly not to force my attentions—That’s not the bargain I would strike.”

  “I never thought for a minute that it was.”

  The candle guttered. He strode to the table and began to gather the coins into neat little piles.

  “I will not be like all the others,” he said.

  Miracle walked away to the window. A soft rain pattered on the glass. Outside was nothing but darkness and damp.

  She set her palm against the cold glass. “You were different, Lord Ryderbourne. You are different, though it changes nothing.”

  “If that’s true,” he replied, “it changes everything.”

  “Because we were such perfect lovers for one strange night out of time?”

  “If you like. I certainly think that should allow you to call me Ryder, at least.”

  “As your friends do?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  She digested this in silence for a moment, before she turned back to face him. “At least you understand now why I cannot take your money?”

  “You cannot travel to Derbyshire alone and penniless.”

  “Yes, I can.” Miracle forced gaiety into her voice. “After all, I’ve been alone and penniless before.”

  “You imply quite correctly that that’s something I can hardly imagine.” A wry self-derision crept into his voice. “But what the hell’s the point in tearing out a man’s heart if you won’t even accept his protection?”

  She could not bear it, though she owed him her life. “Whatever we shared,” she said gently, “it wasn’t love.”

  “Ah! Very probably not. What the devil do either of us know of love?”

  “Not much, perhaps, which is why—though we may seem to have a talent for invoking the splendid ache of lust—we shan’t complete the bargain that we made downstairs, and why you are now going to go home.”

  His heels rapped as he paced the room, from the bed to the shabby dresser and back. He would realize in a few minutes that she was right. With regret, perhaps, with a soft grief at the ways of the world, but he would know that there was nothing more he could offer her—and then he would leave.

  Yet he stopped by the bed to pick up the slipper. The ribbons flowed like water through his fingers.

  “You believ
e that Hanley followed me to the White Swan?”

  “I don’t know. After I left you in Dorset, I could hardly travel unseen. He would have received reports—”

  He flung up his head, nostrils flared. “You think he’s sent spies after you?”

  “Yes, I’m sure that he has.”

  The slipper folded like a crumpled white rose. “And you still expect me to go home?”

  “If you refuse to leave now from some misplaced sense of gallantry, I’ll reject it. There’s no earthly reason why you should stay for yourself. You have no real duty toward me.”

  He strode off again, back and forth, like a caged lion. “No, of course not. My clear duty is to find a suitable bride. Throughout the last Season, London was filled with fleets of young ladies in full sail, all flying every flag for my attention. I’m expected to choose the most tolerable of them and marry her.”

  “Then you should go back to finish courting whichever lady most takes your fancy.”

  “No,” he said. “I should come to Derbyshire with you.”

  She was incredulous, stunned into silence, though her pulse leaped into startled life, like a pheasant whirring up from a hedgerow.

  “But you can’t,” she said at last. “You can’t simply walk out of your life.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “You’re mad,” she said. “A madman! There are a million other answers.”

  He dropped into the chair, arms on thighs, hands clasped between his knees. Candlelight smoothed his skin to warm bronze. His shadowed jaw betrayed where he needed a shave.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You wouldn’t survive for a day.”

  His eyes gleamed, as a cat’s gleam green in the dark, as he glanced up. “Are you offering me a challenge? I promise to keep up with you.”

  “On the drovers’ roads and packhorse trails? On foot?” Panic began to flutter in her gut. “And what happens every night?”

  “That’s not why I want to do this.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I need to do it, before my life is given up entirely to all those inescapable obligations. I had already realized it in London during the Season, I think. The yearning for something unknown has been like a fist crushing my mind. If I cannot save you from your fate, perhaps you can at least save me from the horrors of my immediate future.”

  “From all those young ladies who’d like to become duchesses?”

  “I’ll still return to marry one of the handful who’s qualified to become a duchess. It would be disastrous to any female to marry me otherwise.”

  “You’ll find the right lady. There’s no sin in being young and untried.”

  “Of course not. Yet there’s something so brutal in the game. How can I even trust my own judgment when I’m such a damned golden prize that even the most innocent of females will deceive and scheme just to ensnare me? The rest is . . . I don’t even know. Perhaps you represent the means for something else entirely—for an escape without associations of cowardice, since I’ve told myself that your care is my duty? I don’t know. Only know that I’m not doing this from lust.”

  “Then you will do it to demonstrate how very little you know yourself? You are indeed doing it from lust, Ryder, but you intend to nobly suppress your desires. Meanwhile, I find you—”

  “No! Don’t!” He cupped both palms over his ears in mock outrage. “Don’t! Of course, I desire you! But why the devil must we act on that? Men aren’t beasts.”

  “It didn’t seem so just now,” she said dryly, “when you kissed me like a savage.”

  He stood up and strode closer to her. “Which is only grist to my mill. That won’t happen again.”

  “So now you reject what happened between us at the Merry Monarch?”

  “I don’t reject it. I just want my memory of that night to remain unsullied, with no past and no future. I didn’t know then why you felt you had to seduce me. Perhaps that ignorance lent a certain purity to our exchange. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t trade that memory for the base coin inevitable between a courtesan and a gentleman.”

  She brushed both palms over her cheeks. “You were only the recipient of my professional services.”

  “Yet I would prefer not to be so again in the future.” He turned away to pick up the slipper. The ribbons entwined about his long fingers, as if they would knot themselves into mysteries. “Does such restraint seem absurd to you? You think this simply the romantic impulse of the moment?”

  She felt as if he were slowly tearing her in two, like tissue rent inch by inch in careful, precise little movements. To have been offered the protection of a duke’s son at any other time in her life would have seemed like the answer to a prayer. Now she knew only that she owed him his freedom.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Then understand this: I’m telling you something truly fundamental about myself. I’ve never been promiscuous. I’ve never frequented bawdy houses, or dodged from bedroom to bedroom in my friends’ country houses. In spite of the expectations inherent in my position, I would prefer to marry a lady I could love. You’ve told me what you are and what you expect. Now I’m telling you what I am and what I expect. I will escort you to Derbyshire. I will prevent Hanley from doing you any harm. But not because I want your sexual favors in return.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because you’re my responsibility and because I want to go.”

  “So insanity runs in your family? I’ve heard many things about the St. Georges, but I’ve never heard that. Yet I can’t prevent your coming with me, can I?”

  “No, you can’t.” He thrust the slipper into his pocket and retrieved his cloak from the floor. “That bed seems clean and free of fleas. I suggest you climb between the sheets and go to sleep.”

  “While you keep celibate vigil?”

  His lips curled with a very faint derision, but only at himself. “In purity, in holiness, in prayer?” He wrapped himself in the cloak, propped himself in the hard chair, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course. Yet if Hanley breaks into this room, I shall shoot him.”

  She gulped down her fear. “In spite of all your precautions, you think he might find us here?”

  “No, but two of my men are watching the place anyway. We’re certainly safe here till morning. Then I’ll go back to the White Swan to make sure of him.”

  “So you’ll shoot him there?”

  He laughed. “I shall simply bump into him in the hallway to tell him that the trail has gone cold and that I’m going back to Wyldshay. He’ll find me a bitter and disappointed man. A few stray hints will then send him off on a wild-goose chase. Meanwhile, my coach may travel home without me.”

  “By then I’ll be gone,” she said.

  “I’ll catch up with you—and not on foot. That makes no sense at all. I’ll buy you a pony before I leave, then the drovers will accept that our pact was fulfilled.” His grin made him seem younger, almost merry. “To be tarred and feathered sounds like a most unpleasant procedure.”

  “You don’t know which route I plan to take.”

  “There’s another drovers’ inn about ten miles north of here: the Duke of Wellington. Wait for me there.”

  She did not believe that he really meant any of it. Or at least, he might think that he meant it now, at this moment, but in the clear light of day, once he had returned to his own world, once he had tasted again all the luxury that he was used to—

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll wait till midday, but no longer.”

  “Then let’s get some damned sleep!”

  His eyes closed. His long legs stretched out in front of him. His boots alone were worth a small fortune.

  Miracle snuffed out the candle, stepped behind the screen, and slipped off her dress. The sheets smelled of soap and sunshine. The innkeeper’s wife must be a proud housekeeper. How would that worthy lady react if she knew that the Duke of Blackdown’s heir was sleeping in the hard chair and not in
the bed with the harlot he had purchased?

  Ryder could probably throw Lord Hanley off her trail, at least for now, and her heart eased at the thought. Yet she had no faith at all that—if he really came with her—he’d be able to keep the rest of his promises.

  His dark figure had almost disappeared into the shadows, though a faint luminosity glistened on his thick hair. His breathing became steady and even.

  A small, insistent pulse of pleasure beat in her blood as she watched him beneath her lashes. He had seized her in his hands to burn ferocious, angry kisses into her mouth. Then they had exchanged kisses of exquisite delicacy. She had known him naked and erect and feral with passion. They had talked about the stars. They had laughed and flirted over a dining table. He had saved her life. He did not intend to ever touch her again.

  Yet the craving and the desire were not only his, they were hers, too. Whatever happened, it was going to be a difficult journey, with an ending full of pain.

  The base coin inevitable between a courtesan and a gentleman—

  Hugging the blanket to her chin, Miracle turned away to face the darkness. She had been right to begin with, though the idea gave her no joy at all.

  Not Sir Lancelot, the unfaithful. Sir Galahad.

  SHE turned in her sleep, her face shadowed like an ivory carving. Thoughts raced—thundering herds of duties and preconceptions and only half-understood motives, flocks of impressions beating sharp wings of yearning—while Ryder’s blood drummed in his veins.

  What did he know of professional courtesans? His affairs with women had been few and discreet, mostly with society’s most glamorous widows, where money was never exchanged, only nice little droplets of guilt. When he married—as of course he must—his wife would eventually become a duchess. Once she had produced an heir, they would not expect to be faithful to each other, though appearances must always be maintained. Whatever happened, he must marry a lady who had been raised and trained for such a role, someone like Lady Belinda Carhart.

  But not yet!

  Not yet!

  There are a million other answers. God! The heavens glittered with other answers, like stars.