Willful Depravity

by Ingrid Hahn

  “I don’t feel like dancing tonight. Forgive me, Mother.”

  “When he asks you to marry him—”

  “When he asks me to what?” The hot jolt of shock could have fused the soles of Patience’s slippers right to the parquet floor. “Mother, I pray you, stop planning and plotting my life behind my back. I’m old enough to know my own mind.”

  Patience hadn’t been so horrified since the day that nasty Randall boy from next door had used his slingshot to hit a songbird from a rooftop. Mr. William Wilshire was whom her mother wanted for her? If Patience were feeling generous, she’d say he was a nice enough man who was probably (though not certainly) well intentioned.

  She and Mr. Wilshire had been acquainted since she was fifteen. Ten years. And he had not showed the slightest interest in her in all that time. Then, for nine and a half of those ten years, he’d not owed her parents three thousand pounds that he was believed to be unable to repay. Was Patience to be sold off for so little a sum?

  Oh no. Patience clutched at her throat. The picture in her head of them as a couple was a caricature. This was her life. She wouldn’t be made a joke of someone else’s.

  Until a moment ago, marriage for reasons other than love had been all well and good. It had been firmly theoretical. Now it was a definite possibility.

  Suddenly, Patience’s secret rendezvous with Ashcroft assumed greater significance. What was it the marquess had said of his shocking proposition? The best part of it would be the fucking?

  Patience’s heart started thudding, and heat rose in her face. “I’m sorry, Mother, I’m unwell. I need to go home.”

  “But we might not get another chance at a ball like this one.”

  “Please.”

  Her mother’s lips pressed together, but she nodded, saying nothing else. She took Patience to the foyer and had the carriage, borrowed for the evening from Mrs. Emery’s uncle, brought round. Before they set out, Mrs. Emery informed a servant to let Mr. Emery know they’d be returning home, but would be sending the conveyance back for him.

  Frances, the maid of all work, who had heavy brows and an upturned nose, met Patience in her room with a folded sheet of paper. Patience didn’t need to open it. It was from Elizabeth Wells, her dearest friend, and the only person in Patience’s acquaintance whose voracious reading equaled hers. About a year ago, after reading Mrs. Radcliff’s A Sicilian Romance and deciding husbands needed to be locked away in secret rooms instead of wives, they’d started The Haunted Tower.

  What had started as a lark on a chilly winter’s evening had taken over their lives in an unexpected fashion. Patience’s father had found their scribblings, read them, and asked for more. He’d started printing chapters as serialized pamphlets. And they’d never stopped.

  It couldn’t be said to be wildly popular—The Haunted Tower hadn’t quite taken London by storm—but the story had a devoted following. The earnings kept Patience and Elizabeth in pin money. Which, unsurprisingly, went almost entirely to the bookseller.

  Patience retired directly to her garret room and slipped Elizabeth’s passage unread onto the dressing table.

  Under the pitched roof, Frances helped Patience undress and unpinned her hair. While the maid brushed it to shining, Patience idly fingered the items at her dressing table for something she might use to slip inside herself when she was alone to better imagine it. If the busk of her corset were cylindrical instead of flat, it would have been perfect. Finding nothing, she sent the woman to bed and crawled into her own.

  What she had done tonight… She squeezed her eyes shut, searching her soul for regret. And found none. When she said her prayers, she often asked for the lascivious thoughts to be erased from her being.

  Tonight, she did not. She wanted to do a bit more sinning before she’d ask for forgiveness.

  She wriggled her shift up and bent her knees, opening her legs and reaching down, exploring her damp heat with new awareness of what was possible when people came together to seek out their pleasures. Her slick parts—her quim, the marquess had called it—were wetter than usual. She felt the different components. The spongy spot just inside her entrance. Each long petal-like bit. And the hard nub at the top. She pinched it and moaned, picturing the marquess’s head between her legs.

  She began working herself—slowly this time—setting a steady rhythm, but not rushing. With her free hand, she grabbed a breast and squeezed. She massaged the soft mound and pulled at a nipple to harden it, curious about every and any sensation she could induce.

  Her body clenched. She came again. Hard. For the second time that night, she soared on outstretched wings, spiraling at an unbelievable height over shimmering vistas. With a happy sigh, she sank back to earth.

  So long as she could do this to herself, she didn’t need the marquess.

  Patience rolled over and punched at her pillow. Absurd. Did she think she was fooling herself? The marquess could open whole new worlds to her. Worlds that she might never again have the opportunity to glimpse, if she were to pass up this singular opportunity.

  What if she was coerced into marrying Mr. Wilshire? She’d be stuck having to do wifely things in bed with him for the remainder of her days. If a man like Wilshire could even conceive of putting his tongue between a woman’s legs…

  Her thighs squeezed shut involuntarily. Mr. Wilshire, with his odd stature and clumsy awkwardness, wouldn’t be welcome to make the attempt.

  But accepting the marquess came with immense risks.

  She forced her eyes shut. Now it was time to sleep. Making decisions in the middle of the night was never a good idea, no matter how inane the question. She’d make her decision in the morning.

  Chapter Four

  The cheery breakfast room made a mockery of Patience’s inner turmoil. Her mood was ill matched with the midmorning sunlight streaming through the windows and staining the walls yellow. Even the street below their rooms was unusually tranquil.

  Biting her lip, Patience set Elizabeth’s new installment of The Haunted Tower aside. Her mind kept straying to the marquess’s proposal. If what she did was discovered, she’d be ruined in the worst possible way. Maybe women of higher birth had the luxury of acting like hoydens, but people like her had nothing if they lost respectability. The scandal would follow her forever. Stain her family. Affect her father’s business. Bring her mother to tears.

  Was it horribly selfish to even consider the proposition?

  All questions about what she wanted had evaporated overnight. She wanted to accept. But could she?

  She eyed her father, seated with his newspaper across the table. Not his own, but one of the many others circulated around London. He wrote and printed The Navy Man’s Review, a small journal reporting the doings of the English Navy. Dry stories full of odd tidbits that kept him endlessly fascinated. In times of war, he printed daily. In times of peace…

  It was a constant source of friction between her parents that he profited from war. When her mother pushed him to explore other subjects he might write about, he always claimed he was too old.

  Mr. Emery could have been her great-grandfather. Her parents had married late, then spent the first ten years of marriage without any hint that it was possible for them to become pregnant. They’d given up hope after five years. Then, without warning, when her mother was forty-two, she’d been doing her sewing one day and felt a fluttering low in her belly. To hear her tell it, she’d known immediately she carried life. Sure enough, four and a half months later, Patience had arrived.

  She was their only child. Their dearest thing. Their miracle. They’d repeated as much often enough as she’d grown.

  It was no easy weight to bear.

  If she had an ounce of shame, she’d be embarrassed by what she’d allowed Ashcroft to do to her last night. It would shatter her parents if they found out. Nice young females did not do such things.

  But no such sensation weighted her soul. Was she as wicked as that? The marquess seemed to think so. And liked
her the better for it.

  What if Patience wasn’t a nice young female?

  Patience’s mother entered wearing a light muslin gown printed with dainty flowers and said her good mornings to the occupants of the breakfast room. She set her own newspaper down by her place before fixing her plate at the sideboard. She had a certain look about her, remaining artificially cheerful and not quite meeting her daughter’s gaze.

  Mrs. Emery took her seat at the table, bright smile pasted on her face, then slid a surreptitious sidelong glance at Patience’s plate. Her mother’s smile pinched silent disapproval. Patience braced herself.

  “My dear, I have something I think you’ll like.” From between the pages of the gossip rag she read every morning, her mother withdrew a folded sheet of paper.

  Though she’d been expecting no less, Patience’s stomach went hollow. It never stopped hurting, no matter how many times her mother had tried this.

  At first, when Patience was much younger and thought her body was a problem to be solved, the rules of eating offered hope. After each failure, a new set of rules came into her life. Eat this, not that. Drink this, not that. Fish, no fish, fish at every meal and cod liver oil before bed. With each came the absolute assurance that this one would be the one to change her life. To make her normal.

  Heedless, her mother continued, her tone a little too bright. “A reducing regime. This one will work, I know it will. Mrs. Kittering gave it to me. She used it, and to excellent results.”

  Marvelous. Mrs. Kittering had given it to her and vouched for the efficacy. That meant Patience’s mother was discussing her daughter. Patience did not want to be the subject of conversation, least of all as a topic for others to show their compassion about her body—compassion she did not need, because there was nothing wrong with her. In her head she could hear what they said about her in such a gathering. Such a nice girl, your Patience, Mrs. Emery. Pity about her size.

  Her father’s attention had become preternaturally affixed to his plate. Nothing on earth could be half so interesting in half-eaten bread and preserves.

  Mrs. Emery slid the sheet toward Patience. “Do read it, my love. I’ve already spoken to Cook, so you won’t have to worry while you’re at home. You’ll only have to remember a few simple things when you’re dining in another home.”

  Another regime. To whom did Patience’s body belong?

  The question roused another. One pertaining to her virginity—the fact of her virginity, if no longer the spirit—rather than her size.

  “And then, who knows?” Patience’s mother looked at her plate, as if trying to appear casual about something that meant more to her than she could say. “Then perhaps it would be easier for you to stand up with Mr. Wilshire.”

  Patience took a luxuriously long sip of her chocolate, then took the sheet between two fingers. Slowly, she tore the paper in two, top to bottom. She turned it once and ripped it again. The ripping sound echoed through the room.

  Her father peered at her over his gold-rimmed spectacles. Wiry white hair that had thinned a bit over the years stood in haphazard curls upon his head. Not a spare ounce clung to his old bones. “Patience, was that really necessary?”

  She’d once believed that her body was a betrayal to her. What a horrible way to live, thinking such a thing—about herself, no less.

  There was nothing wrong with her. Nothing. Anybody who thought so was not worth her time. Not even if the person was her own mother.

  Patience set down the torn pieces and picked up her chocolate again with a happy sigh. “Yes. Yes, it was.”

  …

  The morning after the ball, a punishing two-hour training session at Angelo’s failed to purge Giles of his need. The exertion had been lovely, though it’d been no orgasm. But he had to do something to help him through the torment of waiting for Miss Emery to send her answer.

  In the north-facing studio of his Mayfair house—bachelor quarters were for bores—Giles wore nothing but shirtsleeves, trousers, and boots. Two years ago, he had fired his last assistant for drunkenness. Since then, he’d found grinding his own rocks and minerals was infinitely more satisfying, loving the process in equal measure to how much he hated it, and he had never bothered hiring another assistant.

  He was about to undertake the task when an unexpected guest barged into the cramped room. Giles glared at the intruder. “I’m going to have a word with that negligent butler of mine if he let you up here.”

  The man was in his midfifties, solidly built, and wore his displeasure of the world at large in his perpetually disdainful expression. He was His Grace Stephen Tobiah Warrington Hale, the Duke of Silverlund. And Giles would rather slice open his own cock than address the man as Father.

  “Always such a child, Ashcroft.”

  Giles waved a hand as if lazily swatting a pesky fly. “As you say.”

  The duke wandered to where one of the new paintings stood drying on an easel, his mouth turning down at the corners as he studied it. The picture showed one of Giles’s models in repose. He’d taken the sketch for what became the final painting a month ago. He’d tied the woman to his bedpost and slapped her ass while fucking her from behind. She’d had three orgasms before he was done, and he’d captured the afterglow of their boneless pleasure.

  What he needed now more than anything was to be given the honor of doing the same to Miss Emery.

  “You have talent. A shame you were born to be a duke. An even greater shame that you squander it on”—the man’s lips pursed, pulling down at the edges in distaste—“these things.”

  Lines had turned to grooves in his forehead and around his mouth. Perhaps Silverlund had once been handsome. It didn’t matter.

  The duke’s pestering wasn’t a recent development. When Giles had come of age, Silverlund had taken a renewed…oh, interest—for lack of a better word—in his son and heir. In Giles’s first seventeen years of life, the best the duke had done for his son was ignore him. There were some memorable exceptions, but for the most part, Giles had been left to his mother, his tutors, and his painting master.

  The intensity of the duke’s harassment, however—that was new.

  What wouldn’t Giles give for a return to the halcyon days of his youth? Anything to be left alone. “Tell me what you’re doing here so you can leave again. I can’t imagine anything here is more important than the card tables at your club or drinking the blood of innocents or whatever it is that comprises your…” He made a face of pure disdain. “…raison d’être.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  Giles brushed his hand through the air in an offhanded wave. “Ah. Lady Sophie. I quite forgot.”

  He didn’t ask his father’s forgiveness, because he didn’t want it.

  “You humiliated me. And the young lady in question is not feeling well disposed toward you. Ever since you’ve returned from the Continent—”

  “Ever since I’ve returned from the Continent for good, I’ve regretted being within a hundred miles of you because you won’t let me alone.” Giles had returned for his mother, the only inducement in the world strong enough to bring him back into the same kingdom in which his father resided. Since departing, he’d come back only once—before now, that was. His mother had taken ill. She’d recovered quickly, but he’d stayed, worried his leaving would rob her of health.

  After a year, he hadn’t been able to suffer his father any longer. This time, though, he wouldn’t let his father dictate to him where he would live his life, whether directly or indirectly.

  “We made an agreement. I agreed to allow you to leave Oxford to travel on the condition that you marry the girl of my choosing when you returned. Lady Sophie is the girl of my choosing.”

  “You’ve taken it into your head, Your Grace, that you will be able to pick the woman yourself and I’ll happily march up the aisle at your command. I agreed only to allow you to suggest women I might consider marrying.”

  “Were you drunk at the time? Because that was
n’t our agreement.”

  “Stone sober, Your Grace, which is always unfortunate when I must suffer your presence.”

  “You’re an embarrassment to your name. Cavorting with whom you please, when and where you please. By extension, an embarrassment to me.”

  “I’m grieved to hear it, Your Grace.” Giles’s tone was flat with indifference. He was restraining himself, but only because his mother had begged him not to break the duke’s hooked nose.

  “You don’t have to be. You’re too intelligent for your own good, that is plain enough, but you have discipline and drive.”

  “That’s news to me.”

  “They need be channeled in the right direction and—”

  “I’m perfectly happy with my direction, I’ll thank you.”

  “You aren’t your own master, Ashcroft. Think of what you owe to things greater than yourself. The family name, for instance. Or to your blood and your history.”

  “And you think I belong to you, I suppose?” Giles would sooner suck the boils on Satan’s icy worm of a prick than ever belong to his father.

  The duke’s tone went cold. “You haven’t heeded my warnings.”

  “Because there is not one twisted fiber of my black heart which could possibly be induced to care.”

  Giles didn’t fear many things. Certainly not Silverlund. The duke would have been far too gratified to have incited such an emotion in his son. Giles wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Neither would he ask what the duke’s true purpose was. Anything the man said would have been hogwash. Besides, it was plain enough. The duke was used to power. Control. It was the air he breathed and the sustenance he lived upon.

  “I heard about the ball. It’s all over town. The shame of your behavior doesn’t belong to you alone. It affects me.”

  For an agonizing moment, Giles only remembered Miss Emery, and he thought he was going to be sick. That was private. Intensely so. And he’d promised her he’d care for her reputation. If his word wasn’t reliable, he might as well have a limp rod. (Perish the thought.)