Trinidad West

by Cecily’s Secret

  “No peeping, or we’ll both disappear,” Lord Byron warned.

  He dropped a light kiss on her cheek and stepped back. Cecily’s eyes followed him across the small, secret room. It looked like she imagined a pasha’s private rooms would look, with rich red and gold fabrics covering the walls and piles of cushions on the floor. The only furniture was a small table that held a flask of wine and three glasses.

  Lord Byron lowered himself onto a pile of cushions and leaned back on his elbow.

  “I’m merely an observer tonight,” he informed Cecily. “Relax and enjoy yourself with my friend.”

  As if on cue, the man standing behind her began to knead her breasts. He pulled on her nipples and squeezed them just a little too hard, making her gasp. She watched Lord Byron’s face as he watched her writhing under the other man’s hands. His lips were parted in a half smile and he was breathing heavily.

  One of the hands on Cecily moved down to her belly. Fire flared between her legs.

  A movement caught Cecily’s eye and she watched transfixed as Lord Byron unfastened his pants and his erect cock sprang free. He wrapped his fingers around it and Cecily looked up to meet his eyes.

  “Make her come,” he said to the man standing behind Cecily. “I want to watch her come.”

  A dog barked and the crunching of wheels on the drive announced another bachelor arriving to be paraded in front of Cecily’s cousin Amelia. Cecily had stayed well out of the way of the guests since they started arriving late in the morning. Now she was biding her time, hiding in a forgotten corner of the garden until it was time to dress for dinner, when she would make her appearance and select her quarry.

  She nibbled on the apple she had filched from the kitchen on her way out of the house. Before she had been distracted by Byron’s appearance in her daydream, she had been savoring the scene she had been rehearsing in her mind since the day she learned of her parents’ duplicity. She would turn heads. She would fascinate. She would intrigue. And she would do it all to the man her parents were most likely to dislike. Her entrance at dinner would be grand but not so grand, of course, that she would outshine Amelia. That would never do. It would probably also not be possible, Cecily thought as she nibbled the last tiny bits of flesh from the apple.

  She sighed with happy anticipation and tossed the core over her shoulder. A masculine yelp caused her to jump to her feet.

  A tall man wearing an aggrieved expression and an alarmingly bright ensemble of yellow clothes appeared from out of the tangle that had overgrown the path leading to Cecily’s hiding place. He was brushing frantically at the sleeve of his immaculate coat.

  “Look at this! It’s ruined! Do you have any idea how long I had to wait after I ordered this fabric? It’s the exact yellow of the daffodils that used to grow in my mother’s garden.”

  Cecily’s tongue froze. She didn’t know whether to apologize, laugh, or tell this outrageous creature he would have been much better off if the fabric had never arrived. She stared in dumbfounded silence as he pulled a square of lace from inside his coat and began rubbing at his sleeve.

  “It’s useless,” he declared. “You’ve destroyed it.” Then he looked up and his jaw dropped.

  Cecily had never seen that particular combination of surprise and horror in a grown man and certainly never directed at her. It was the same sort of look she sometimes saw on Sebastian when their father surprised him with the knowledge of some escapade Sebastian was certain he had been perfectly discreet about.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said in a small voice, just as the stranger regained his composure.

  She reached out with one hand and touched the afflicted part of his sleeve with her fingertips. “I think it will be all right,” she said. “Truly, I don’t think apple stains.”

  The man stared at his sleeve where she had touched him. Cecily began to suspect he might be the imbecile brother of one of Amelia’s bachelors but he had an intelligent enough look in his eyes in spite of his seeming inability to engage in the socially required conversation about the weather. At the moment, however, that intelligence appeared to be clouded by something Cecily could not put a name to.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak and then shut it abruptly. The he stepped back and said, “Pericles Munk at your service, ma’am,” with a tidy little bow that contrasted oddly with his extravagant appearance. “My friends call me Perry.”

  Cecily smiled as she had been taught to do and held out her hand. “Cecily Bettencourt.”

  Perry took her hand and let go of it so quickly that Cecily wondered what he had been told about her. If he happened to know Sebastian, she would not have been surprised if he believed she had some dreadful contagious disease. That was the sort of joke Sebastian found vastly amusing.

  Now Perry was looking at his sleeve again and tugging at the ridiculous fringes of lace at his cuffs. Cecily had seen fops in London but none quite as outrageous as this one. She sat back down on the stone bench but that position put the front of his pants right at eye level and made her wonder if anything he had tucked away in there could be as impressive as some of the illustrations in Aunt Alice’s books. She had spent altogether too many late nights sitting in bed pouring over those books during her visit to London, with the result that almost everything she saw reminded her of them.

  Perry cleared his throat.

  “Since you have stumbled upon my little refuge, you might as well sit down,” Cecily said. “Are you one of the, um, the guests?”

  Percy sat down on the far end of the bench. “One of the prize bulls, you mean?”

  Cecily laughed nervously. “Oh I wouldn’t dream of saying such a thing,” she twittered in a fair imitation of all the young misses she had met—and despised—during her uneventful season.

  She looked down at her hands while Perry looked at her.

  “I very much doubt that,” he said at last, just in time to avoid making himself rude by staring too long at her.

  Cecily considered taking offense. It would be easy to do and it would probably get rid of the strange young man, but he only spoke the truth and the quiet of the garden had put her in a benevolent mood. The difficulty was, if she wasn’t going to take offense at what he said, how would she respond?

  A stray breeze lifted the loose hairs at the nape of her neck, and dead leaves swirled around her feet. She cast a sidelong look at Perry, who appeared to be listening intently to something.

  “I think you’ve found the perfect hiding place,” he said. “Out of sight of the house but close enough to keep an eye on things. You are hiding, aren’t you?” he asked, turning to look at Cecily.

  “Oh! Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. I just thought it would be easier to meet everybody all at once at dinner, so I’m avoiding them now.” She couldn’t tell him that she hadn’t wanted to meet any of them until after she made her grand appearance at Amelia’s ball.

  Perry gave her another assessing look. “Interesting. Easier to memorize a dozen names at once than one at a time? I’ll have to ask you tomorrow how it worked.”

  “Oh but I know the names already,” she said, eager not to appear too ridiculous. “Amelia and I went over the guest list yesterday and she told me everything she knew about each one. Oh dear! I suppose that sounded dreadfully mercenary.”

  Perry picked up a leaf that had fallen onto the bench between them and began tearing little bits off it. He said nothing, but the hint of a smile on his lips gave Cecily the feeling that he completely agreed with her.

  “I don’t recall seeing your name on the list,” she ventured after a silent moment. “I’m sure I’d have remembered such an unusual name.”

  Perry brushed the leaf dust from his hands and turned his full attention to Cecily. “I was added at the last minute. Thrown in for variety, I imagine,” he added with a brief flash of a smile.

  “You’ll certainly add that. Maybe we’ll both spice up the proceedings a bit.” She practiced an enigmatic glance on him, remembering about
the role she had set out to play. Unfortunately, he was gazing up at the tree overhead, so her glance was wasted.

  “I understand there’s to be some sort of assembly this evening,” he said.

  “Aunt Bea, that is, Lady Weldon, is calling it a country ball. The whole neighborhood’s been invited. I expect it will be unbearably dull,” she added, trying to sound jaded and sophisticated, “but one does learn to bear the unbearable, doesn’t one?”

  Perry’s brows came together and he turned his head slightly, as if to view her from a different angle.

  “Perhaps dancing will help alleviate the boredom,” he suggested.

  “I’ll dance, of course. One must at these country functions.” And my parents will throttle me if I don’t, she added to herself.

  “Then perhaps you’ll save a dance for me,” Perry said, looking at everything but Cecily.

  He stood up so suddenly that Cecily started. “Until this evening, then, Miss Bettencourt,” he said with another of those compact little bows that seemed so at odds with his extravagant taste in clothes.

  “Good day, Mr. Munk,” she said to his back.

  She felt pleased with herself as she watched him push his way through the overgrown shrubs, back toward the house. Her strategy was working. He had nearly lost his composure by the end of their conversation. He also clearly wanted to see more of her. If she had that effect on a fop, who was probably more interested in fabric swatches than women, what could she not achieve with a man who was actually in the market for a wife? The answer was clear. There was nothing she could not accomplish, including causing her parents to writhe in well-deserved misery.

  A person should always have a goal, Cecily decided later, while she was dressing for dinner. A light heart and a heavy sense of purpose had carried her swiftly through the afternoon. It even helped her sit patiently while Teresa poked pin after pin into her hair and then turned the stray wisps into artful ringlets.

  “And now the dress,” Teresa said, after circling Cecily three times to ensure that not a single strand of hair was out of place.

  Teresa lifted the dress reverently from the bed in the cozy corner room Cecily always stayed in when she visited Weldon House. The dress may have been Madame Fleuret’s crowning achievement to date. The warm peach color perfectly complemented Cecily’s light-olive skin. It was a color that not even the strictest matron could object to seeing on an unwed young lady, but the cut of the dress and the fall of the fabric would have pleased the raciest young widow.

  The dress clung deliciously above the waist and fell in long lines from the high waistline, giving Cecily that illusion of height that she so longed for. The cap sleeves were so minute as to be almost nonexistent. The neckline was lower than any Cecily had worn before, but not lower than her mother’s lowest neckline, which was important because Claudia had not seen this dress to give it her approval.

  Cecily looked at herself in the mirror and ineffectively tugged the neck of the dress up.

  “Was it this low at the last fitting?” she asked, eying the expanse of skin with uncertainty.

  Teresa reached around Cecily with a string of pearls and fastened it. The cameo that hung from the pearls drew the eye to Cecily’s partially exposed breasts.

  “As I recall, you asked to have it lowered to that level,” Teresa reminded her.

  She handed Cecily a pair of teardrop pearl earbobs. Cecily put them on obediently without looking away from the image in the mirror.

  “I hardly recognize myself, Teresa. Do you really think I can do this?”

  “There’s nothing to pull off.” Teresa made a minute adjustment to the skirt of Cecily’s dress. “You look stunning, so go downstairs, make your selection and watch you parents suffer.”

  Cecily walked to the bed. She wanted to flop down on it, but for the sake of the dress, she perched carefully on the edge.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t do this. I don’t want you to get in trouble with Mama. There’s still my old blue gown. I could wear that.” Cecily was up and pacing before she finished speaking.

  Teresa took Cecily by the shoulders and looked her in the eyes.

  “I’ll worry about your mother. You just go out there and have a good time.”

  Cecily sighed and nodded her head. “You’re right, of course. Teresa, how did you learn to be right all the time?”

  “I’ve learned to always act like I’m right, whether I’m certain or not. It fools most people.” Teresa patted Cecily on the cheek and stepped back. “Now it’s time for me to go help your mother dress. Don’t crumple that gown before it’s time to go down. Nothing will ruin the effect like wrinkles.”

  When Teresa had gone, Cecily wandered around the room a bit, studying the pattern of the wallpaper and fingering the curtains. From the window, she had an excellent view of the garden. The last of the day’s sunlight shone golden on the tops of the trees, casting a gentle autumnal glow on everything.

  Cecily sighed and turned away from the window. She kept glancing down at her cleavage, hoping it would stop feeling so uncovered. She could not shake off the lurking fear that when he saw her, her father would send her back upstairs to change into something more modest. She reminded herself that she was a twenty-four-year-old grown-up woman, entitled to wear whatever she wanted, but she could not quite convince herself.

  From the corner of her eye, as she paced past the window, she caught a glimpse of movement outside. She peered around the curtain to look. The man she had met earlier was walking alone in the rose garden and it was no wonder he had caught her eye, dressed as he was in a scarlet evening jacket and gold waistcoat. The lower half of him, at least, was clad in respectable black. She watched as he wandered the winding paths and wondered how her father, a man who hardly gave his clothes a first thought, let alone a second thought, would react to such a brightly plumaged creature.

  A satisfied little smile played across Cecily’s face. If her father reacted badly enough to Mr. Munk, he might be the perfect target for her to practice her charms on. She was certain her father would be livid at the thought of his daughter possibly becoming engaged to a fop. Such a man would never venture to dirty his hands with honest work, to say nothing of sheep, and Henry Bettencourt never had anything nice to say about a man who thought himself too good to do a bit of physical work.

  Cecily watched Perry break the tattered remnants of a late-blooming rose off its stem. He cupped the loose petals in his hands, then tossed them into the air and watched them fall. It seemed an odd thing for a grown man to do and Cecily liked him for it. In fact, she rather liked him, period, even though he was a fop of the highest degree. He was pleasant enough to look at, once you got past the distraction of the clothes, and she doubted even Amelia would deny he had lovely brown eyes. Despite the outfit he was wearing now, his lanky figure looked attractive and comfortable. Perhaps it would not be a bad idea at all to set her sights on Pericles Munk. She might be able to please herself and get her revenge on her parents at the same time.

  Somehow, when the storm broke, nearly blinding them with driving rain, Cecily and Perry became separated from the rest of group. They had turned their horses toward home, but Cecily could see they would probably get lost if they continued. Nothing looked like it had just a few minutes ago. The landmarks that should have guided them home all looked identical and rivulets of water were already flowing down the gentle slope of hill that the horses were picking their way down.

  When the little building came into view, Cecily cried out with relief. She was soaked to the skin and shivering and she could barely see Perry’s horse just a few yards ahead of her.

  They left the horses under the cover of a roof that extended out from one side of the house, probably built for just that purpose, and knocked on the cottage door, just in case it wasn’t as abandoned as it looked.

  No one answered. They were both shivering too hard by now to waste time with knocking a second time. The door was unlocked.

  It was no warmer inside the
cottage, but it was dry and it looked like whoever had abandoned the little one-room home had left it ready for their return, with a tidy pile of wood by the fireplace and kindling set ready to light on the grate.

  Perry ran a finger across a tabletop, wiping a clear line in the thick coat of dust.

  “Whoever it belongs to doesn’t appear to be coming back,” he commented. “Maybe I can light a fire so we can be comfortable until the rain stops.”

  He turned to look at Cecily, who was hugging herself to try to stop shivering.

  “You’d better get out of those wet clothes. You can wrap up in those.”

  He pointed to the little bed in one corner of the room and the pile of folded blankets on it.

  “Let me know when you’re decent.”

  He turned his back to her and gave his attention to getting a fire started, leaving Cecily to struggle out of her wet riding habit. Soaking wet, the rows of buttons at the wrists of the jacket weren’t easy to unfasten and by the time she moved on to the larger buttons that ran down the front, Perry had the kindling burning and was adding bigger pieces of wood onto the flames. The dress, with its wide neck, should have been easy to remove, but Cecily got tangled in the expanse of wet fabric. She emerged from it just as Perry stood up and turned around.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you must be done by now.”

  But he didn’t look sorry. He didn’t even look away from Cecily standing there in her wet underclothes. Even with the layers she still had on, she knew the way the wet fabric clung to her skin made her look nearly naked.

  After a long, frozen moment, Perry turned back to the fire and peeled off his wet coat and draped it carefully over the back of a chair. It was followed a few seconds later by his waistcoat and then by his shirt and Cecily found herself unable to look away from his bare back. She took a step toward him without even realizing it.

  “Are you covered up yet?” he asked.

  “Almost.”

  She pulled her petticoat over her head and dropped it on the bed with her dress but she was at a loss over what to do about her stays. No matter what direction she approached it from, the bow that held the stays closed was beyond her reach.