Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  For God’s sake! He was jealous? Of what? That Miracle was free with her favors? She was a member of the muslin company. She had never pretended anything else. She had been Hanley’s mistress, and perhaps Dartford’s and . . . God! The list was probably endless. Asterley? Lindsay Smith?

  A knife slowly scored along the inside of his belly and carved a path of dull pain through his gut.

  To resent it was insane, yet he was damned if he could sleep, knowing she was with the bright-eyed Sam.

  As the camp settled into quietness, Ryder crawled unseen from the wagon and stalked away. Dark trees loomed, sheltering the inky eye of a small pond. With a similar blackness in his heart, he paced along the muddy bank.

  He almost walked right into a wooden stile that blocked an opening in a hedge. His mouth full of bile, and the blade still gouging, he clenched his hands on the top rail and stared up at the remote brilliance of the night sky. Cloud veiled the horizon, but directly overhead a few stars glimmered brightly enough to penetrate the haze. The most brilliant must be Vega, heart of the Lyre.

  Ryder stared blindly at its remote purity for a few moments, then closed his eyes. Was he simply putty in the hands of a ruthless temptress? For whatever high-minded reasons he kept concocting for this flit like a renegade across England, there was really only one: his fascination with a woman.

  “I think I can just make out Altair,” Miracle said softly. “The star that marks the eye of Aquila, forever flying home along the Milky Way. And see, there in the wing, is a star that grows brighter and dimmer every week, as if it smiled and frowned at us in turn. I don’t know if it has a name of its own.”

  He spun about, choked. She stood in the shadow of the hedge, her face a pale glimmer surrounded by a cloud of black hair, as lovely, as treacherous, as any dryad from myth.

  “Damn you!” he said. “Damn you!”

  “Ah,” she replied. “Condemned unheard, like Desdemona?”

  “The wrong play. We’re acting out a farce, not a tragedy. But if I’m to be cast as the fool, may I not play a little, as well?”

  “Only at the risk of getting burned.”

  Rage flared painfully in his skull. “You’re the one pouring oil on the flames.”

  “Am I? Then, by all means, let’s burn!”

  She laughed in open defiance as she stepped into his arms, all softness and welcoming female curves. Her back bent, pliant beneath his hands. Her neck and jaw slid perfectly into one open palm. Mad with grief, Ryder tipped back her head and crushed his mouth down onto hers, as if desire could negate the void of resentment.

  Her tongue met his in a velvet embrace, hot and generous. He groaned into her mouth and thrust her up against the stile. Her arms wrapped about his neck. He ground his pelvis against hers, his erection mocking his resolutions. Her fingers strayed into his hair. Her scent tormented. When he broke the kiss in an agony of self-reproach, she sighed as if her heart were breaking. Ah, Miracle!

  “It’s all right,” she said softly. “It’s all right to be consumed by fire. I know that you think you’re in love with me.”

  “Do you?” Desperately he searched her face. “But what if it’s true, Miracle?”

  Her gaze was soft, and open, and candid. “I know. Men often think so. But this time perhaps I think I’m in love with you, too, my dear fool. It’s all right. We’ll get over it. But now we are here and hungry and we want each other. There’s no need to deny ourselves.”

  He was past argument. He was perhaps past quite comprehending everything she had just said. She wriggled back to prop herself on the stile with her feet supported by the steps, then pulled him forward between her legs.

  Ryder dropped his head to nuzzle her warmth through the thin fabric of her dress. Buttons snapped open beneath his seeking fingers. Cotton and linen slid away. Her naked breast, warm and round and smooth, exactly fit his palm. Her nipple hardened, responding to his hungry tongue.

  Almost frantically he tugged up her skirts. Her thigh was satin delight, female and soft beneath his palm. His thumb strayed over curls and dampness. The intensity of his arousal almost overwhelmed him: that pulsing surge of desire and pleasure and hot anticipation.

  He raised his head to kiss her again, little kisses over her collar-bone, all the way up her long throat to her ear, over her lovely jaw to the compliant promise of her lips. Kissing back, she wriggled against him and unfastened the flap of his trousers. Her fingers cupped his naked flesh with blissful honesty, unambiguous and skilled. Her tongue ravished his. Her arms slipped about his neck. He lifted her in both hands so that her thighs wrapped about his waist. She rocked her pelvis against his, and moist, indulgent heat encompassed his erection.

  He moaned against her mouth. She tipped her head back and slid down. He thrust hard, dropping his head to her shoulder as his arms supported her weight, suckling the fascinating curves of her neck and earlobe. He felt scorched by her stunning generosity, that she was brazenly working for his pleasure: the male ecstasy, impetuous and direct.

  Miracle felt so right! So damned, bloody right! He reveled in her loveliness and her munificence, every fiber and sinew dedicated to loving this one woman with all the confusion and tenderness that was tearing him apart.

  He cried out when his powerful contractions obliterated his awareness. Strong tremors ran through his blood like aftershocks. Gasping for breath, he laughed for sheer joy.

  He opened his eyes to see a matching rapture flood Miracle’s face, transforming her for that instant into the embodiment of everything he longed for. Carrying her with him, he sank to both knees, then lay back on the grass. Warm and soft, she sprawled on top of him, panting gently in his ear.

  Her lips pressed tiny kisses over his jaw. Almost as if she loved him. Almost as if she was moved, as he was, to the soul.

  An aching tenderness burned in his blood, as if this intensity of contentment could scorch away all doubts. He smoothed her hair away from her ear, then ran a hand down her fluid spine, reveling in each curve of soft flesh.

  Slowly, slowly, the world eased back into focus. The haze had thinned. The Milky Way cast its long silver net across the heavens, catching stars like fish.

  “Did you make love with him, too?” he asked at last.

  She pushed up on one elbow. “With pretty Hamlet?”

  Ryder nodded, unable to articulate more. She rolled aside to rearrange her skirts. Swallowing the agonizing sense of loss, he sat up and put his clothes to rights, also.

  “Would it make any difference, if I said that I had, or had not?” She scrambled to her feet and stared down at him. “Would you believe me?”

  A sudden bitterness threatened to wipe away all memory of joy. “Of course, Sam could never have afforded your fee, could he? So I suppose you did not.”

  Miracle longed to smooth the thick hair back from his forehead. She wanted to massage his broad shoulders, hunched now in reproof. Instead, she looked away, before she, too, touched him with overwhelming tenderness as well as passion.

  She had never made love like this before in her life. Physically, yes, of course. But to feel that a man had flooded her barren womb with gathered starlight? That a lover cared so deeply for her pleasure? That he might really believe that he loved her?

  God help her that she was so desperately, painfully in love in return! Even angry, even hurt, Ryder was only passionate and caring—and more magnificent than he knew. She felt terrifyingly vulnerable, as if fate must demand an inevitable retribution for her foolishness. She no longer knew how to protect him, or herself. She no longer knew any way to save them both from disaster. Meanwhile, it was doing him no kindness to pretend to be worse than she was.

  “I don’t always get paid,” she said steadily, even if it wounded him. “If I choose, sometimes I have sex with a man simply from fancy.”

  He stiffened for a moment, but then he stood up with arrogant carelessness and stretched. “Then why have you insisted all along on my paying you?”

  She was sh
ivering, though she wasn’t cold. This was, perhaps, more than she could bear. “Maybe because you can afford it.”

  To her immense surprise, he laughed. “Not anymore, Miracle. The footpads took everything, remember? I was proved to be a veritable Miss Molly, as charged.”

  “It was an insult, that’s all.”

  “Of a particular kind.” His voice was dry, almost amused, with no self-pity, though colored by a certain inherent self-condemnation.

  “They meant nothing by it,” she said.

  He sat down on the stile steps, his expression lost in shadows. “They meant something very exact by it, as you well know.”

  She spun about. “Is that what you tried to negate just now? The charge that you’re effeminate, a sodomite? It’s obviously nonsense!”

  He tipped his head back, throwing his profile into perfect relief. “I’m just stating the facts as I see them and drawing the rational conclusions. This wasn’t the lesson that I hoped to learn from this journey, but it’s hard to avoid. Stripped of the power of my position and judged as men generally judge each other, I have very little to offer. I don’t resent it, but Jack could have fought off those footpads with his bare hands and laughed while he did it.”

  She wasn’t even sure where to begin. “They had pistols and knives and the advantage of natural brutality,” she said. “I would rather you were a live man than a dead hero, Ryder. I’m traveling with you, not your brother.”

  “Not by choice!”

  “Why do you think your brother’s prowess—or lack of it—matters a damn to me? When you provoked Tom into taking your jacket, do you think I didn’t realize that you were delaying deliberately? That I didn’t hear the horses coming and guess exactly what you were doing? You saved our lives!”

  “Yet Jack would have stopped to reload his pistols at the first opportunity and thus avoided all the rest before it even began.”

  “You couldn’t reload right away. It was vital to escape Hanley as quickly as possible.”

  “I was careless. Which brings home another truth that I’ve been rather desperate to avoid. As you surmised from the beginning, I’ve never traveled before without an entourage of armed servants. No footpads or highwaymen would ever try to stop a St. George’s coach. If—in spite of my warnings to you—I felt invulnerable, that shows an insufferable arrogance, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps you’re just in the habit of too much analysis.”

  He reached out to catch her by the hand, then spun her to sit on his thigh—like a lover. “No, don’t try to diminish the importance of this, Miracle. I was staring death directly in the face. Not only mine, but yours. I hadn’t realized quite how much this adventure had begun for me simply as something of a game. When Tom threatened you, it became only too real. I owe you an apology for that.”

  “Yet you outwitted them in the end, and you rescued me from Lord Hanley.” She laid her head on his shoulder and leaned back into his arms. “At that moment I knew that you wore three stars at your belt. I knew Sirius the Hunting Dog might run up from the hidden sky to trot forever at your heels. I don’t care if your brother has two heads and five arms and the strength of Hercules himself. You’re my Sir Galahad.”

  His lips pressed softly on her forehead. “If I am, what this stile witnessed just now has certainly cost me the Grail. Not a very good example of godly purity! Yet it was only chance that I wasn’t entirely helpless against those footpads. And as a lover, I’m doubtless less skilled than any of the men in your past—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “Don’t say that! That’s not what’s at issue.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She reached up to kiss him again, quickly. “I didn’t make love with Sam, Ryder. Not because he couldn’t pay me. Not even because he in fact shares his bed with Rosencrantz. But because I’ve pledged myself only to you since this journey began, even if I break my heart over it.”

  He sat in silence, rubbing his cheek against her hair. The small rustles of the night whispered across the field.

  “And mine,” he said at last. “Jealousy would seem to be another surprise gift of this journey. I felt almost mad with it, another sin caused by lack of faith.”

  “It was natural enough in the circumstances.”

  He drew her close, keeping her warm and safe in his embrace. “You think I had any rights to such an ugly emotion?”

  “No one has a right to jealousy, though all of us feel it eventually. People don’t own each other. Just as duke’s sons don’t fall in love with ladies of the night, females who have neither hearts nor souls.”

  He buried his face in the curve of her neck. His lips touched just below her ear. “That’s a bloody barbaric statement, Miracle. Though I’ve no idea what to do about it, I’m in love with you. It’s neither minor nor trivial for me to say that.”

  She pulled away from him and stood up. If a woman ran full tilt toward a cliff, how could she complain when she plunged over the edge? Every bit of fluff knew exactly what her protector’s protestations of love really meant. After all, she had heard them before.

  “But even if it’s true, you can only be in love with a fantasy. You don’t really know me.”

  “That can be rectified.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He leaped to his feet and strode off a few paces. “How you can say that you have no heart, when it’s so obviously not true?”

  She glanced up at his careless male beauty, trimmed in starlight. “It is true, because it has to be. We ladies of the night content ourselves with a farce, a play at love, a clearly limited barter of the body’s natural bounty in exchange for room and board, a few gifts, and perhaps a little educated company.”

  “Yet what a cold-hearted arrangement for something so profoundly warm and human! I want to give you so much more than that.”

  “Yes, I do believe that you think that you love me at the moment, Ryder. But in the end, every protector tires of his mistress and walks away. ‘I’ll give her a pretty bauble,’ he’ll say to his friends, even when it’s a damned diamond necklace.”

  “I’m aware, of course, of the social expectation in such situations.” His tone was restrained.

  Miracle spun away, determined to hammer at the truth. “And of course she takes it, which allows him to salve his conscience—if he has one—with the belief that she was only after his money all along. After all, she’s a fallen woman, a soiled dove—ugh, what an obnoxious expression!—so obviously she’s mercenary and heartless at the core, without morals or values or even any real desire, except for money. That’s what your friends say and what you believe, too, Ryder, in your heart of hearts.”

  “I’ve never kept a mistress. I don’t know.”

  The force of his male power beat at her defenses, as if she stood unprotected in the path of a storm. “Yet you thought you simply felt jealousy? Deny, if you will, that the thought of my past repels you, however much you keep trying to ignore it. At heart you esteem only purity and innocence. Thus you agonize over your desires and drag guilt and moral superiority in equal measure into every erotic encounter.”

  “Perhaps.” He folded his arms and leaned back with careless arrogance against the trunk of a tall elm. “However, I began this journey prepared to learn something new. Did you?”

  She turned her back to gaze out at the dark, sleeping world. It was easy for any gentleman, even one so profoundly honorable as Ryder, to fancy himself in love with the lady of the moment. It was an absolute disaster for a harlot to allow herself to fall in love in return.

  “Why should I change? I’ve learned the truth about men throughout many bitter years.”

  “You would condemn all of society? And half of humankind?”

  “Yes, on the whole—simply for the hypocrisy of it all.”

  Ryder walked up to set both hands on her waist. She allowed him to do it, to use his warmth and strength to shield her from the cool air rising off the night grasses, even if he could not sh
ield her from herself.

  “If a female trades her body for money,” he said in her ear, “she can hardly complain when the world sees her as mercenary.”

  Miracle dropped her head forward and closed her eyes. “No, she can’t. So she’d better secure every bauble she can get, for one day she’ll no longer be pretty enough to attract another protector. Then, if she’s been too fine in her scruples, she’ll be an old woman begging at the side of the road. She may even watch as the man she once loved passes in his carriage, taking his respectable wife to the opera, where he once noticed a girl dancing and fancied her in his bed.”

  His breath faltered, as if his heart stopped for a moment. “Did you love any of those men, Miracle?”

  Her fingers gripped the damp wooden rail. “One or two of them, when I was younger. But believe it or not, there haven’t been that many. Even a member of the muslin company can sometimes pick and choose. I’ve been lucky.”

  He tipped her face up to his with one hand. “I think I understand—most of it, anyway. Yet, if the choice was yours, why did you pick Hanley?”

  Miracle turned her head aside, letting his fingers slip down to her neck, knowing that this duke’s son would condemn her in the end, knowing that he would then leave her, just like all the others.

  “Precisely because I knew that I would never fall in love with him. And, of course, he promised to be generous.”

  “You’ll never have to face poverty again,” he said. “I promise!”

  She pulled away and laughed. The summer night was too seductive. Because she loved him, she had told him the truth. It wasn’t fair to either of them. Time to retreat, to find a safer basis for their relationship.

  “And perhaps I’ll never have to face old age, either, if Lord Hanley catches up with me.”

  “He won’t. But there’s something else that’s been bothering me. Before our journey was so inconsiderately disrupted by Bruiser and his friends, you were telling me that Hanley had just accused you of stealing from him?”

  “Well, not exactly. But after I left the yacht, he searched my bags and I can’t imagine why.”