Gayle Wilson – Regency High Society Vol 7: A Reputable Rake / The Heart's Wager / The Venetian's Mistress / The Gambler's Heart (страница 45)
Morgana sat up, holding the blanket across her lovely naked breasts. ‘Sloane?’
‘I am here, Morgana.’
She smiled when she located him in the room, a smile soft with sleep and gratification. ‘Good morning.’
He took three long steps to reach her side, put one knee on the bed and took her face in his hands, giving her a kiss with the sort of promise he had no time to fulfil. She flung her arms around his neck and tried to pull him down on top of her. His arousal came swiftly, hard and insistent. What would a few minutes hurt?
He obliged her, covering her with kisses, rubbing his hands over her smooth creamy skin. He felt like laughing out loud, an odd impulse in the midst of this crisis, but he did not care. She made him feel joyous. As if he deserved all the passion she had so innocently and wholeheartedly bestowed upon him.
He took her quickly, entering her with a force that made her gasp, but not with pain this time. His Morgana never did anything by halves. She joined his fierce pace, making intoxicating mewing sounds as her need escalated. When coupled with her like this, Sloane felt nothing like a gentleman, but everything like a man. So fast they reached the pinnacle. Together they plunged into an ecstasy of pleasure. Sloane’s landing brought him collapsing on her now damp skin.
‘Ah, Morgana, I was too rough. I am sorry.’ Surely he must have hurt her.
She reached up and caressed his cheek. ‘Not too rough,’ she murmured, making him want to take her again, right here, right now.
But he remembered his nephew’s letter. ‘I must go.’ He climbed off the bed and started to dress. ‘Do you wish me to see you home? Or you may stay in my bed as long as you like.’
She glanced towards the daylight streaming through the window. ‘I suppose I ought to go home. I cannot imagine what they will think.’
He came back to her and swiped his hand through the disarray of her hair. ‘They will think you spent the night in my bed.’
She gave a wan smile. ‘Yes, I suppose that is so.’
He stared at her, wanting her all over again, wanting to hold her spirit, so untamed and unafraid, inside him. She was the woman created for him. He had no doubt of that now.
As he pulled on a pair of trousers, he watched her climb off the bed and search the floor for her clothes. She donned her shift and positioned her corset. He walked over to tie it. When he finished he put his hands on her shoulders and leaned her against him.
He wanted more mornings like this, with lovemaking and easy talk between them, casual touching, ordinary life. She turned and smiled at him, picking up the neckcloth that he’d found folded in a drawer. She put it around his neck and tied it.
‘Morgana, I have been summoned to my father’s house.’
She looked up into his eyes. ‘He sent for you?’
‘No,’ he admitted, the despicable plan of his father filling him with anger and pain. ‘My nephew warned me.’
Her expression turned questioning.
He slid his hands down her arms, clasping her fingers. ‘Morgana, my father intends to ruin me by sending out a tale that you and I are lovers.’
Her fingers flexed tightly in his. ‘They have seen me come here?’
‘I do not know. It would not be beneath my father’s scruples to hire someone to do such a thing.’ He looked directly into her eyes. ‘I will convince him to remain quiet, but he is bent on seeing me disgraced. It will all come to naught, however, if you marry me.’
She went very still, the pupils of her eyes growing large. ‘What about Hannah?’
‘I have not offered for Hannah—’ he began.
She interrupted him. ‘She was to be your means of gaining respectability.’
‘Hang respectability. You and I will do very well together.’
Morgana slowly pulled her fingers from his grasp and took a step back. She looked at him long and hard, loving him enough to give him whatever he desired.
What he desired was respectability. He’d worked diligently to earn it, and now his father was about to snatch it away again. Through her. If the Earl was so bent on ruining Sloane he would have the house watched, how long before her secrets were known to the man? Even marriage could not erase the scandal of a wife who trained women to be courtesans.
She took a deep breath, like a dying person gasping for one last breath. ‘But I do not wish to marry you, Sloane.’
He flinched. It was almost imperceptible, but she caught it. ‘You… do not wish to marry me?’
Morgana made herself smile, trying to remember how Harriette Wilson looked when she turned on her charm. ‘Oh, no. I thought I told you I did not.’
His brows dropped and his voice became very low. ‘After last night, do you expect me to believe you would not desire the marriage bed?’
It was Morgana’s turn to flinch. She only hoped she hid it as effectively as he. To belong to Sloane, to make love to him, until death parted them was everything she desired. It was why she’d begged him for this past night. He must not pay by giving up everything he desired, merely because he had obliged her.
Morgana’s mind whirled with ways to convince him that she did not want him, though her soul ached for him even now. ‘Oh, I desire the lovemaking.’ She aped the light flirtatious voice of Miss Wilson. ‘Thank you so much for showing me that I would enjoy it. It quite informs me that I should like that part of a courtesan’s life.’
‘Morgana,’ he cried in a fierce groan.
She fluttered her eyelashes and went about collecting her dress. ‘Now do not lecture me, please do not.’ She put the dress on over her head and placed her back to him so he could fasten the buttons. ‘My mind is quite made up.’
‘You will not marry me?’ Another man might make this sound like a plea, but in Sloane’s voice it sounded like a pirate about to attack. He fastened her buttons with lightning speed.
She made her voice light. ‘Do not be absurd. You’ve no wish to marry me! Goodness! To think you would propose out of some obligation. You need not play the gentleman with me, Sloane.’
Her words wounded him. She saw it in his eyes. For a moment she wished he would strike her. The pain might distract from the wrenching ache inside her. But she knew he was too much a true gentleman to do so.
She picked up her stockings and balled them in her hands, putting her bare feet into her dancing slippers. He shrugged into his coat and ran a brush through his hair. Morgana put hers in a quick plait.
‘I will see you to the back entrance of your house. If we are careful, no one outside will notice you.’
It was a gentlemanly thing to do. He could have just opened the door and pushed her out.
‘Thank you,’ she said, failing to maintain her bright-sounding speech.
He did not appear to notice. He opened the bedchamber door and walked her down the stairs. She managed to put one foot in front of the other, although all she truly wanted to do was sink into a puddle of despair. On a table in the hall was her gold domino, folded neatly. He put it around her shoulders and pulled the hood up over her head. His touch was like a smithy’s tongs hot from the forge.
When they walked out of the door and through the gap in the garden wall, they did not speak. The silence spread through her like some wasting disease.
She had given him the means of retaining his hard-won respectability. She had given him a clear path to offer for a respectable wife—her cousin. But she’d hurt him. Not with her refusal of marriage. A man soon got over such a blow to pride. No, she’d treated him as if he were not a gentleman. That made her no better than his father. And it made her feel sick inside.
The door to her house was unlocked. He opened it for her and she stepped inside. She turned quickly to bid him goodbye, but he had already withdrawn. He did not look back.
The man wore a vendor’s apparel and carried a sack of brushes on his shoulder. He’d wandered around Culross Street since dawn, finally discovering a way to slip through the mews to a shrouded place where he could spy on Cyprian Sloane’s townhouse. Instinct told him to watch the back of the house. Instinct, and lack of success witnessing anything of consequence from the front.
It was too bad he could not watch the house next to Sloane’s where he’d briefly spied the pretty girls through the window. Sloane’s place was as quiet as a church cemetery.
Just as he was about to leave, Sloane’s door opened. There was the man himself, a woman with him. He walked her over to the other house and she entered it.
Morgana paused when reaching the door to the library. It was open a crack, and she could hear the girls’ voices and the reedy laughter of her grandmother, who undoubtedly found everything to be very lovely. Oh, to have her grandmother’s forgetfulness, to live in a present that was perpetually lovely. How much easier life would be. How much less painful.
The voices were not sounding happy, however. Katy’s shrill tones rose above the others. ‘We need Miss Hart! She will know what to do.’
Morgana glanced down at her hand, still holding her stockings. She stuffed them into a pocket inside her domino and stuffed her numbing despair along with them.