The Courtesan's Secret Read online

  “I’ve developed a fondness for this room,” he said.

  “I can see that.”

  “I’ve developed a fondness for doing certain things in this room.”

  “Only in this room?” she said, starting to laugh. “That could be a problem, don’t you think?”

  “Only if my parents object. And they’re hardly likely to do that.”

  “Oh, come now, Blakes. They certainly must dislike me . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked at the floor between Blakesley’s feet. The mood was broken, and they knew each other too well not to know who and what had broken it.

  “My father,” Blakes said, lifting her chin with his hand, “is fascinated by you, as am I.”

  “Oh, really, Blakesley,” she said, taking a firm breath.

  “You know my mother,” Blakes said. “It surely must be obvious the type of woman he prefers.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose that’s possible, but your mother—”

  “Is old friends with Sophia Dalby,” he interrupted. “You can’t think that any of this”—and he made an impatient motion with his hand—“was by chance? I’d love to know how they managed it between them. I can’t see how it was done, but I know it was done. We, dear girl, have been managed, and expertly. I wish I could resent them for it. But I can’t. Can you?” he asked in a soft whisper, his romantic heart laid bare.

  “Not at all,” she said softly in answer.

  But she did not look certain of anything, least of all his declaration; Blakesley knew all of Louisa’s looks and looking uncertain was surely new for her. Blakesley closed the distance between them, wanting to hold her, not wanting to see the empty ache flickering in her eyes.

  “What is it?” he said softly, his arms wrapping around her narrow waist in a solid coil of love and possession. “Don’t bother to lie.”

  “I never lie!” she snapped. “You ought to know that.”

  “Which I do, which is why you will tell me. What is it?”

  She sighed, her ribs expanding to strain against his arms. His arms would not release her.

  “My father was most exquisitely brought to heel, insisting upon our marriage,” she said, her voice small and tight, almost childlike. It was most alarming. “But what brought your father to heel, Blakes? And your mother? They have been opposed to me from the start, and no matter what history ties Molly to Sophia, your mother cannot be pleased to have me in her family. She has made that more than clear more than once.”

  “They were in this together, I tell you—”

  “Don’t be absurd, Blakes,” she interrupted, her voice snapping and breaking into threads of hurt. “No woman would arrange for her beloved son to marry me.”

  His arms tightened around her in concert with his heart. Darling, incandescent, violent Louisa, broken into bits by her father as a girl, she had refashioned herself into a woman who could withstand him. Yet she bore the scars, a tracery of brokenness, and they were what made her beautiful, like glazed and fired porcelain, gleaming in fragile strength.

  “She did,” he said simply. “She has.”

  “She hates me.”

  “How very fortunate that you did not marry her, but me.” Louisa squirmed in his arms, but he did not loosen his hold on her. He never would. “I love you.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Give me time,” he said, kissing the top of her flaming red head. “You will.”

  That silenced her. He would not have thought it possible. Clearly, declaring oneself as a hopeless romantic with the soul of a poet was the way to subdue Louisa’s will to fight. How he wished he had known that two years ago.

  “What do you love about me?” she said, her face buried in his shirt, hiding from his gaze.

  “You are entirely lovable,” he whispered into her flaming hair. “But I am not such a fool as to categorize your assets. You would run me to ruin if you knew how foolishly and completely I love you. No, a man must have boundaries.”

  “How arrogant you sound, Blakes,” she said softly, and he could feel her smile against his shirt, her back relaxing to arch into his. “I don’t think I shall tolerate arrogance from you.”

  “I’m quite as certain that you shall,” he said, smiling at the wall of the dressing room, of all things. “I know exactly how you shall be managed, Louisa. You shall enjoy it completely.”

  “You sound very certain,” she whispered back, pressing her hips against his.

  “I am certain of many things. For one, my parents are most pleased by you. For another, Melverley is an ass.”

  “Very certainly,” she said, leaning into him, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist.

  The silence encircled them, not an uncomfortable thing, and they clung to each other, which was entirely right. Still, one thought hovered. . . .

  “What of Dutton?” he asked, bracing his chin on the top of her head.

  Louisa jerked out of his embrace, her eyes flashing in annoyance. He was as charmed by her annoyance as he ever was. “Dutton? What has he to do with anything? Do you think me a fool, to have tasted you and somehow still hungered for Dutton?”

  “You did hunger for him.”

  “You will allow that most of the women of the ton find him fascinating,” she said hotly. Before he could answer her, she said, “You will admit that he is handsome and eligible and a rake.”

  “All the things a woman finds irresistible,” Blakes said flatly, not quite as amused as he had been.

  “Precisely,” Louisa said sharply. “Of course, he is very obvious about it, is he not? How could I have known that you were far more rakish than he could ever dream of being? I ask you,” she said, smiling crookedly up at him, “has Dutton ever ruined a girl at the Theatre Royal?”

  “Well,” he said slowly, starting to smile.

  “I mean, of course, a girl not already ruined in some other fashion by some other man.”

  “Then, no,” Blakes said solemnly, “I should say not.”

  “He certainly is jealous of you, Blakes,” she said. “I’m not a little afraid that you have set the bar entirely too high in the ways and means of ruining fine young girls, and what happens after that but that it becomes the fashion to debauch girls in dressing rooms and theaters? I daresay, you could well become legendary.”

  “I suppose I could live with that,” he said, pulling her into his arms and leaning down to kiss her as she ought to have been kissed five minutes ago. Silly man, he required so much prodding; she would have to work on that with him.

  He kissed her deeply, as was her preference, and her skirts were up around her waist without any prompting on her part, surely an improvement. He found her wet and hot and ready, and he did exactly as he ought to have done upon finding conditions so favorable.

  He debauched her beautifully.

  This time, she was able to wrap her legs around his waist, and not miss, and to kiss him and hold him to her without being restrained. Although, being restrained had its own pleasures, which she was certain she could induce Blakes to explore later. As things stood now, they were quietly debauching each other while their wedding guests waited beyond the door.

  Louisa was not unaware, for she did listen to interesting rumors as avidly as the next person, that Caroline Trevelyan had been deflowered in precisely the same manner less than an hour after her marriage to Lord Ashdon. Up against a door, a dining room door, as the story went, and witnessed to a strange degree by the Duke of Calbourne. Louisa, who could admit to a healthy competition with Caroline, had three dukes at her wedding and was being deflowered less than half an hour from the last words spoken at the marriage ceremony.

  By any measure, she had won. She had Blakesley, did she not?

  “IT does the heart good to see a man so well matched in his passions, does it not?” Sophia said to Molly.

  “There were times, I do confess, when I doubted that they’d manage it,” Molly said. “I should have known you would see it done.”

  Sophia and
Molly smiled at each other in true feminine understanding. Hyde shook his head, and said, “It was very much of a mess. I think the whole thing could have been handled without so much mud and blood all round.”

  “One must consider the combatants, your grace,” Sophia said. “I do think that it would have been highly unlikely for Louisa to walk straight into Henry’s arms. They both needed the proper motivation. How fortunate that Dutton was available and exactly the thing, not that he knows it, poor dear. I do think he has suffered a frightful blow to his confidence. And so well deserved, too.”

  “I can’t but think this has something to do with his father, Sophia,” Molly said softly, leading them gently away from Hyde, who, as a former general in the king’s army was not at all equipped to understand the brutality of warfare as women waged it. “Dutton had rather a bad name going for him, and Melverley”—she shuddered—“did and does do himself no good turn by being so often out in Society. The world would think better of him if they saw him less often.”

  “You are of such a suspicious frame of mind, Molly,” Sophia said sweetly, casting a glance over the room.

  The ceremony had taken place in the yellow drawing room, so touchingly symbolic, and, the sounds of passion being blissfully achieved coming to them from beyond the dressing room door notwithstanding, the party remained happily chatting until breakfast could be served.

  All were there, all who mattered at that precise moment in time. Her brother John, his sons, Lady Jordan and the children of her sisters, Melverley and the Duke of Aldreth, Amelia’s father, all the sons of Hyde, Markham. Lives entwined, the skeins twisting back twenty years and more, all seemingly content to let the past lie in shadow, quiet and still.

  But not Sophia.

  Sophia forgot nothing.

  It was such an advantage that they did forget. It made everything so much easier.

  “You had no thought of Melverley and Cumberland, no thought of Westlin and Dutton when you arranged for Louisa to be ruined by Hyde’s son?” Molly asked, her bright eyes alive with interest and no condemnation.

  Molly was an old friend and had been witness to much of it. But not all.

  No one needed to know it all.

  “They are well matched, are they not? She is ideal for him. Whether Melverley made her that way or God, I do not know and it does not pertain. She came to me, Molly, not I to her.” Sophia shrugged good-naturedly.

  “She is good for him,” Molly said. “What is more, he knows it. It takes little more for a marriage to thrive than that.”

  “And yet they have so much more,” Sophia said just as the faint sounds of muffled screaming could be heard from the direction of the dressing room.

  They sounded distinctly masculine.

  Well done, Louisa.

  It was not long after that, that Louisa and Blakesley reentered the yellow drawing room from the red reception room door. It would have been flagrant in the extreme for them to have entered from the dressing room door and, even though their courtship had been excessively public and extremely improper, some lines just had to be drawn. The line in their particular circumstance was at the dressing room door.

  It was completely charming.

  Melverley, upon seeing Louisa and understanding what had just occurred, nodded approvingly, which, of course, he would, and even went so far in his exuberance as to kiss Louisa on the cheek.

  Louisa looked extremely shocked.

  Eleanor, her fetching younger sister, looked appalled.

  Yes, well, that was understandable, surely.

  “You told him Westlin’s not her father,” John said, having come up behind her as silently as usual. As usual, she had heard him coming.

  “Of course. It made everything so much easier for Melverley.”

  “Melverley is her father,” John said.

  “Of course he is, in every way that matters,” she said, looking up at her brother in perfect accord. “The English have odd customs about bloodlines. He mistreated her, and her sister, because of Westlin and his constant boasting.”

  “How do you know that Melverley’s seed did not make her?” John said softly. They were speaking in near whispers in the far corner of the room, her nephews making a ring about them, a ring of defense to give them privacy in this far from private place.

  “Melverley’s seed makes nothing,” she said, watching Melverley, watching Eleanor. “Every rumor of his begetting a bastard, I have started.”

  “To protect them.”

  “It was little enough,” Sophia said. “’Twas mostly for Margaret, and she is gone. What is left but to see to her daughters?”

  “Westlin fathered Louisa,” John said. “Did she use him again to create Eleanor?”

  “No,” Sophia said. “Westlin was done with her.”

  “Then who?”

  Sophia looked at John and smiled. “Ask Mary.”

  Epilogue

  IT might have been because of the weather, which turned unseasonably cold and windy for April, but directly after the Kirkland-Blakesley wedding things quieted down considerably for that specific element of London’s population that did not enjoy quiet even when in the country, so how could they possibly be content in Town?

  Markham, John, and the boys had taken themselves off to Marshfield Park, the Dalby estate in Dalbyshire. It had been Young’s idea as he was the least interested in Town life and had required a respite of sorts in the woods and fields of Dalbyshire. She was completely certain that they were having a wonderful time and were likely stalking things right and left.

  Caroline and Ashdon were still at Chaldon Hall, likely giving no thought at all to the many things that needed to be done on the Curzon Street house in Town that Westlin had given them as a wedding gift.

  Sophia spent the time productively. She was still reinventing the white salon, and because the weather was so unpleasant, she was having the tradesmen come to her with their bolts and sample cases. The walls were to be covered in blush white damask wallpaper, which would look particularly well at night in the candle’s glow, and the furniture, which was to remain the same, would be recovered in moss green velvet. She was almost certain. Certainly there was no rush, and she was still considering when Freddy entered the white salon.

  “You have a caller, Countess,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

  “At this time of day?” she said. It was not yet noon. Far too early for callers. “I’m too busy at the moment, Freddy. I would like to decide about the fabric today or I shall never get it all done before the party I intend to give for Caro and Ashdon when they return to Town.”

  “When’s that to be?” he asked.

  “Before the end of the Season, surely. Caro will want to show Ashdon off and she simply can’t do that from Chaldon Hall. She will also want to say her good-byes to Markham and John and the boys before they leave for New York.”

  “And when’s that to be?” he asked, walking over to the bolts of fabric leaning against the window and looking them over.

  “I’m not quite certain,” she said. “I’m not at all sure that they’ve done everything they possibly could to make things interesting while in England.”

  “Things did get interesting,” Freddy said with a wry smile. “About that, one of those interesting things is standing in the foyer, waiting to see you. Lady Jordan.”

  Sophia immediately lost all interest in the various fabrics tossed about the salon and said, “How very interesting. I will see her immediately, naturally. Please show her to the yellow salon, would you? I shall be in directly.”

  Before Sophia had finished checking the order of her hair in the mirror, Freddy entered the white salon again. She turned from the mirror to face him in some surprise, when he said, “You have another caller, Countess. Lord Henry Blakesley. With a parcel under his arm like it’s made of solid gold. He made it clear that it’s for you.”

  “A gift?” Sophia said. “How lovely. Such a thoughtful man. I’ll see him immediately. Show him in here,
will you, Freddy? I think the disarray will charm him. And do see about providing Lady Jordan with some refreshment. A pot of chocolate, perhaps. I do seem to recall that she was very fond of chocolate.”

  Blakesley was shown in a few moments later, looking quite handsome in a pair of well-cut pantaloons and perfectly tailored coat of blue superfine. Marriage seemed to quite agree with him.

  And he had brought a gift. Could a man be more accommodating than that?

  She greeted him warmly, as she did routinely when a man brought gifts, but in this case, she was truly happy to see him. He looked spectacular and more content than she had ever seen him. It was so nice when things of this sort worked out so very well.

  “Lord Henry,” she said, eyeing him appreciatively, “how marvelous you look. Is that a new coat? It fits you to perfection. Are you seeing a new tailor?”

  “Yes, actually,” Blakes said. “Louisa insisted.”

  “She would,” Sophia said with a discreet smile. “Men are invariably better turned out once they have a woman to please. Married men, of any situation, are always better dressed than bachelors.”

  " ’Tis a wonder any of us ever get married, then, as slovenly as our natural habits are.”

  “Oh, a woman can see beyond a stained cuff, Lord Henry,” Sophia said as she sat on the sofa near the fire. “She sees what can be, with the proper effort and skill.”

  “How true that is,” Blakes said, eyeing her in his usual cynical way. She so enjoyed Blakesley; he never failed to grasp the point. “And hence my visit. You are a woman, Lady Dalby, with very much sophistication in exerting the proper effort and skill required for any situation I’ve ever heard of. I know that somehow, some way, you are directly responsible for . . . well, for Louisa.”

  The dear man looked most distressed, the emotion of the moment clearly more than he was willing to disclose. She quite understood. One did not romp about Town dribbling emotion here and there like a leaky pipe. It promised to lead to the most disastrous and unpredictable results, which clearly should be avoided at all costs.