The Madness of Lord Westfall

by Mia Marlowe

  “Solanum dulcamara,” he said before the specimen with a five petal blossom whose purplish blue color had faded slightly over time.

  “It’s also known as bittersweet. The crofters on my father’s land consider it a weed, but I think it’s lovely all the same.”

  “It is.”

  “I have another name for them.” She didn’t know why she told him that. She’d never confided the notion to anyone. It was a silly little thing from her childhood, certainly not full of the wit and charm for which she was known, but “in for a penny, in for a pound.” “I call them God’s flowers.”

  “Because they’re the ones no one else wants,” he said as if he was finishing her thought.

  “Exactly.” She’d pitied the poor unloved plants when she was a child. Now that she was grown, she knew what it was to be the one no one wanted. Even after Lewis had died, her father had refused to see her. She’d defied him, and he’d never forgiven her for it. She was the weed in his garden. The earl had plucked her out with ruthlessness, root and all.

  Whittles bustled back in with the tea tray and made a great show of setting things up on the low table before her. Lord Westfall sat, quite properly, in the Sheridan chair opposite her. Nora was relieved when he did. It was a mistake to meet him in this room. If he continued to prowl around the space, poking into her special things, what else might he learn about her that she wasn’t quite willing to share?

  “I’ll pour out myself,” she said to her butler. “That will be all, Mr. Whittles.”

  Her butler eyed Lord Westfall for a moment, and then scraped a bow to her. “Very good, my lady.” He was too well trained to sneak another glance at her guest as he made his exit.

  “How do you take your tea, Westfall?”

  “I’d like it if you would call me Pierce.”

  She blinked in surprise. He seemed such a buttoned-up, formal sort of fellow. “Of course,” she said. Even though he’d told her his Christian name at the opera, he hadn’t invited her to use it. “I’m honored you would count me among your intimate friends.”

  “I have no friends, intimate or otherwise,” he said matter-of-factly. “No one but Vesta LaMotte calls me Pierce.”

  She bristled a bit. “And since she and I are similarly employed you thought—”

  “No, it’s not that.” He lifted a hand to forestall her indignation. “I never asked Vesta to use my name. She simply does it. I have no idea why. But I’d like to hear you say it. If you would.”

  “Very well…Pierce,” she said, slightly mollified. She was, it must be admitted, a fancy whore, but she was quick to guard her dignity. No one else would. “You may call me Nora.”

  “But that’s not your given name, is it?” He leaned forward. “You were christened Honora.”

  “How do you know that?

  “I am an associate of the Duke of Camden. He has means of acquiring information throughout England that I can’t even begin to fathom.”

  So he’d used his association with the duke to learn more about her. It made her uneasy. No one’s past would bear much scrutiny. Certainly, not hers, but Benedick would be pleased. It meant Westfall was on very good terms with His Grace and that made him much more valuable as an asset.

  “No one has called me Honora in years,” she said.

  “Then Honora will not mind if I take the name out of mothballs and give it a bit of practice. Will she?”

  He said the strangest things, but she rather liked them. She smiled her assent.

  “How do you take your tea?” she repeated.

  “I didn’t come here for tea, Honora.”

  “Oh.” She stopped in mid-pour. “Yes, of course, the orchids. Come.”

  She was a little disappointed that she wouldn’t be allowed to show off her skills with a teapot. There was something genteel, yet sensual, about preparing a perfect cup. Benedick loved to watch her stir in the lumps and add just the right amount of milk.

  “Ambrosia,” he’d say. “Just the way I like it.”

  But she reasoned that a good hostess falls in with the wishes of her guest so she abandoned plans to coax more information from Westfall over her brew. She might call him Pierce, but she’d continue to think of him as Westfall. It was safer.

  Allowing him close would give him the power to hurt her.

  She rose and guided him back down the elegant stairs to the ground level of her home. Then they swept through the beautifully appointed salon that, like her front parlor, was designed to over-awe visitors with the taste and wealth of her patron. There was nothing of her in either of those rooms. They were all Benedick.

  Without the quiet bustle of servants, the empty house seemed to breathe with them. The swish of her kid-soles on the floor was the sound of its soft inhalations, Westfall’s noisier footfalls its loud exhale. He held the back door for her, and they stepped into her small garden.

  The kitchen squatted to one side, detached from the house so as not to be a fire hazard, and the hothouse sat opposite it, across the small garden. Beyond a tall wall at the rear of the property, a stable housed her horse and provided a place for Benedick to park his equipage when he visited. A grassy patch ornamented by a pattering fountain and a granite bench was located between these three structures. It was a place where the lady of the house could take her leisure while servants worked around her on all sides.

  But now all her servants were gone. She didn’t know why it was important to her not to be under their watchful eyes. It was not that they weren’t paid well enough to be discreet. Benedick wouldn’t care that she had invited this man here. He’d told her she was free to pursue Lord Westfall. He’d even encouraged it since he believed it might lead to a closer association with His Grace, the Duke of Camden.

  But part of her didn’t want this visit to be about Benedick’s schemes. There was something about Lord Westfall—Pierce, she corrected, reasoning that perhaps she could think of him as that so long as she didn’t become maudlin about what it might mean that he wanted her to use his given name.

  She didn’t know what it was that drew her to him. His madness placed him on the furthest edge of her experience and so few things were. Perhaps that was why she’d arranged for this meeting to take place away from prying eyes. She sensed he’d be more comfortable with fewer people around, though why this should be, she couldn’t say.

  Her insides fluttered as she entered the hothouse with him dogging her steps. A tart, fresh smell tickled her nostrils.

  “Oranges,” Pierce said.

  “Yes. I have the cleverest gardener. He manages to trick a couple of small trees into growing and bearing year-round. The smell is heavenly, isn’t it?”

  “I prefer a mix of mint, lavender, and apple myself but yes, the scent of oranges is very nice.”

  She allowed herself a small smile. He’d almost given her a compliment. While most of the ton was dousing itself in heavy floral or musky scents, that unusual trio—mint, lavender, and apple—were the high notes in a fragrance her perfumer compounded specifically for her use. The process had cost Benedick the earth, but he always claimed it money well spent.

  “You’ll never be able to sneak up on me, my dear,” he had joked. “I shall always catch a whiff of you first.”

  Pierce looked around the hothouse at the plethora of exotic plants. “Lord Albemarle is very generous.”

  It was as if he knew Benedick had crossed her mind. “He gets value for his coin.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt.”

  Why had she said that? It wasn’t as if Benedick had ever taken her to his bed. Her value to him was measured in other ways, but she couldn’t betray him by telling Westfall what those were. Let him think what he would.

  A smile played about his lips, as if something had struck him funny.

  “Do you mind letting me in on the joke?” she said, wishing now that she hadn’t invited him. This was a mistake. She wasn’t ready to be with someone like this. It had been too long since she’d been with a man,
let alone someone as decidedly odd as Lord Westfall.

  “There is no joke. I was just thinking about orchids. People think they are parasites, you know, but they really aren’t.” He stooped and, from beside a begonia, he plucked a cankerwort up by its long root. “Most orchids actually don’t take anything from their hosts except a place to live and grow.”

  “I didn’t know that.” By those lights, she supposed she was Benedick’s orchid—a frilly spot of color on his arm, a mark of manhood for him and a source of envy among the bucks and dandies of the ton. She asked only her keeping in return—a place to live and grow.

  Lord Westfall didn’t meet her gaze often, but when he did, she looked away, feeling the heat of his eyes on her. There was something feral behind his cool gray irises. Was that madness flickering there?

  Despite his tightly controlled demeanor, even though the Duke of Camden had vouched for him, Pierce Langdon seemed a dangerous, unpredictable man. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but that raw edge excited her.

  “Of course, there is a possibility that the orchid will eventually harm its host,” he warned.

  She remembered that she considered herself the orchid in her relationship with Benedick. Perhaps she and Pierce were both dangerous. “How?”

  “By virtue of its placement. The orchid can weaken the host if its roots become too invasive.”

  No danger of that with Benedick. She wasn’t the clingy sort. She’d never harm him. He was too important to her. How would she support Emilia without him?

  “Who is Emilia?” he asked suddenly.

  “How do you—oh, of course, the Duke of Camden. He must have dozens of Bow Street Runners at his beck and call.” So His Grace had discovered her secret. Lord knew, her father had never cared enough to try. The weight of the burden grew the longer she carried it by herself. She still wasn’t sure having Westfall here wasn’t a mistake, but when she looked into his eyes, no madness leaped in them. She decided to trust him.

  “Emilia is my daughter.”

  He nodded with no hint of shock. “I thought so.”

  “My husband died in France before I could tell him I was going to bear his child. And since I had defied my father to marry, I decided not to return home.”

  “You mean you couldn’t return home,” he said simply and without pity. His words smacked more of understanding than sympathy. “I, too, know what it is to be pushed away by family.”

  So he did. At least her father hadn’t had her committed to Bedlam. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, I was not welcome at home.”

  “And your family still doesn’t know about the child.” Again his remarks that should have been questions sounded more as if he were simply rehearsing facts he already knew.

  “Why should I tell them? Once Emilia is old enough, they would probably only blame her for my shortcomings. After all, she is the walking, breathing evidence of my disobedience. I would never put her in that position.” Nora wandered along the narrow path between the raised benches covered with potted specimens. “At any rate, she is safe and well-tended where she is.”

  “And kept as far away from you as you can bear.”

  Tears pressed the backs of her eyes. What was it about this man? Every time she was with him, he either caught her crying or moved her to weep.

  “Emilia doesn’t need to be tainted by having a mother who…” she began.

  “Who loves her more than anything?”

  She was going to say, “Having a mother who is a whore,” but Pierce had reached inside her chest and pulled out the real reason Nora kept her daughter at a distance. She was a pariah. She couldn’t bear to taint her child with her sordid reputation. “How do you know so much?”

  “I know very little really,” he said, his voice husky. “But I want to know more.”

  “Well, the orchids are over there on the north wall and—”

  “Honora, I didn’t come for tea. I didn’t come for orchids.”

  “You didn’t?”

  He shook his head. “I came for you.”

  When I began confiding my thoughts to this journal I wrote that the defining moment of my life occurred when I was eight years old and I fell from a tree. I was wrong. It happened when I was thirty-two and I fell in love.

  Both events have had equally devastating effects upon my mind.

  ~from the secret journal of Pierce Langdon, Viscount Westfall

  Chapter Nine

  Pierce ached to take her right there on the cool stone floor of the hothouse, but he held himself back. It was bad enough to be labeled mad. If he was also discovered to be a rutting beast, they’d lock him up and never let him run free again, no matter how much the duke vouched for him. He had to go about this the right way.

  But what was the right way?

  “You said you’d never kissed a woman before that night at the opera,” Honora said.

  He nodded as he moved closer to her.

  “Then am I correct in assuming you have also never…been with a woman?”

  “I haven’t.” Not for lack of interest. Pierce might be put off by what was swirling around in women’s heads, but he was very much curious about their delectable forms. From the time he’d been about fourteen and his body first had begun to rouse and spill into his bedclothes by night in hopeless erotic dreams, he’d surreptitiously watched the women in his sphere. From the buxom chambermaid Lily, who had been known to have extremely light heels, to the vicar’s daughter whom he only dared look upon while everyone else’s head was bowed and eyes closed, he became a voyeur of the mysterious female. Both extremes of women found their ways into his wet dreams.

  But in the waking world, he didn’t dare approach either of them because of the disturbing racket of their thoughts. Until the Duke of Camden had shown him how to erect a barrier against another’s mind, he thought he’d forever have to rely solely on his own right hand for his body’s release.

  Now that he had a measure of control over how fast and how much information vaulted toward him from another’s head, he found he actually wanted to know what was going on in Honora’s mind. He lowered his shield a bit more.

  Amazingly enough, his inexperience seemed to excite her.

  “Would you like me to show you what to do?” she asked.

  “I think I can figure that out for myself,” he said as he continued to close the distance between them at an unhurried pace. She’d never know what that deliberation cost him. “If you don’t mind going slow.”

  Her breathing hitched. “Slow is good.”

  He opened himself more to her thoughts.

  Oh, God! He’s beautiful.

  That was so surprising it almost stopped him in his tracks.

  What is he waiting for?

  He didn’t want to rush. He wanted to savor. Each moment would be etched on his psyche forever. This was the first time he was going to bed a woman, and he wanted everything to be perfect for him and for her. Lovemaking was a journey. The last thing he wanted to do was miss something wonderful along the way because he was in too much of a hurry to reach the final destination.

  “We ought to go to my chamber,” she said abruptly and started toward the door. He caught her wrist, stopping her.

  “We will,” he assured her. Then he lifted her palm to his lips and kissed it. He drew little circles around the spot with his fingertip and traced each of her fingers. “You have lovely hands.”

  I have lovely other things, too. Don’t you want to see them?

  “I ache to see all of you,” he said as if she’d spoken aloud. It was a hard habit to break, responding to half a conversation he wasn’t supposed to have heard. He needed to be careful. She already believed him a bit mad. The last thing he wanted was for her to think him a freak, as well. He raised her hand to his mouth and suckled the tender skin of her inner wrist. “I want to taste all of you. I don’t want to miss anything.”

  Her lips fell slack at that.

  Touch me. Handle me. Know me
.

  So he did. While he kissed her, his hands went roaming. They slid down her back to cup her bum and snug her next to him. Oh, the feel of her soft abdomen against his hardened cock. He feared he might spend on the spot, so he distracted himself by listening to her thoughts.

  I ache so. Please God, let him know what to do.

  Her breasts were a revelation. He palmed them, kneading her soft flesh through the layers of her clothing. It helped that she wished he would. He even found her nipples, hard little buttons, under all that muslin and linen and thrummed them with his thumbs. Then he gave them a pinch, just the way she hoped.

  She groaned into his mouth. He didn’t think he could get any harder, but even his balls tightened at that sound.

  Oh, God, it’s been so long.

  That surprised him. He already knew from exploring her mind a bit that she and Benedick weren’t lovers in the traditional sense. She had no sexual thoughts about him at all. No memories, either good or bad, of his lovemaking.

  But for a woman with an unabashedly sensual reputation like Nora to be celibate was unthinkable.

  He searched her memories again and found a few fleeting recollections of past patrons. But the recollections were indistinct, shrouded in mist, as if she didn’t want to retain them and hoped they too would dissolve, like a mist, in the morning sun. Her memories of her husband were a little more vibrant, but Pierce didn’t want to violate those.

  It would be like spitting on an altar.

  She tipped her head back.

  Kiss my neck. Nibble along the tops of my breasts.

  He did so with great enthusiasm. She made such helpless little noises of need, he was inspired to undo the first few horn buttons that drew a line between her breasts. Then he peeled back the fabric so that more of her lustrous skin was exposed.

  How does he do that? Know what I need before I need it? The man is like magic.

  For the first time in his life, he was grateful for his gift.

  But his mind was so filled with her body, he had no room to spy out her thoughts. He decided to play fair and he pulled up his shield. Instead, he concentrated on the way she breathed, the way she smelled, the way she moved when he touched and sucked and kissed.