The Rogue's Wager (Sinful Brides Book 1)

by Christi Caldwell

  Oh how she envied the girl that uncomplicated joy. With her sister gone, and left alone with her own musings, Helena carried her book over to the window seat and skimmed her chipped fingernails over the gold lettering of Jean-Robert Argand’s name. Helena’s life was so much more like this man’s, a self-taught mathematician who’d managed the accounts of a bookshop, than the one she awaited.

  A man she’d been waiting on for several hours.

  Though, as it did involve numbers and she was everything precise where those digits were concerned, she’d counted seven waking hours. Or four hundred and twenty minutes. Or if one wished to be most accurate, twenty-five thousand, two hundred seconds.

  That was how long she’d been waiting for Robert’s visit.

  Which was . . . peculiar. She didn’t even like the gentleman. He was the man who’d gotten her sent off to the fancy side of London, and he was part of her plan to evade suitors for the remainder of the Season.

  Yet . . . Helena drummed her fingertips on the top of her book. If that were the case, why was she, in fact, sitting here waiting . . . for him? Why did you feel this great relief at Diana’s earlier words about the marquess? It didn’t make sense and she was, if anything, sensible.

  Only, you’ve never been truly sensible around this gentleman . . .

  From the night he’d stumbled into the private halls of the Hell and Sin Club, she’d broken one of the most important rules in approaching the drunken stranger. Then she’d returned his kiss and hungered for his embrace.

  Filled with a murky confusion, Helena returned her attention to the small leather tome. He was just a man. A man, who with his clever tongue, and even more clever lips, had proven himself the wicked sort she’d been warned away from. She firmed her resolve. And she would do well to remember as much when he came and delivered a hopeless dance lesson—all with the purpose of putting his hands on her body.

  If he came.

  Seated in her familiar window seat, Helena looked outside at the busy London streets. Her heart tripped a beat. As though she’d conjured him, Robert drew his powerful black mount to a stop. In a near repeat of yesterday’s visit, a young boy came forward, and he turned the reins over to the child.

  Swiftly lowering her feet to the floor, Helena jumped up. She ran her fingers down the front of her soft yellow skirts. Hideous color. Even she who didn’t know a jot about fashion knew that women with deathly white skin should never, ever wear those pale hues. Then, mayhap, that had been the duchess’s intentions?

  Not that it mattered. She began to pace. It hardly mattered what she wore in Robert’s presence. Theirs was an act. An adult charade, and nothing more.

  “His Lordship, the Marquess of Westfield,” Scott intoned from the doorway.

  Helena emitted a startled shriek, and knocked against the table, sending her copy of Argand tumbling to the floor.

  “My lord.”

  The butler gave her a pointed look and she flared her eyes. “Refreshments.”

  The old man gave a pleased smile. “As you wish, Miss Banbury.” His rheumy eyes sparkled with approval.

  Again, that sense of . . . belonging filled her. Sentiments she’d only known amongst her brothers. Feelings she’d thought she’d never know outside of the comfort and safety of her world.

  What is happening to me?

  Robert had bedded countless numbers of skilled widows and clever courtesans. Sometimes together. But never had he lain awake, hungering for something as innocent as a dance with the spirited Helena Banbury. That anticipation had only grown in his short ride over this afternoon.

  And by the lady’s flushed cheeks and parted lips, she was not wholly immune to him.

  “Shall we?” He held out a hand, and she darted her tongue out and ran it over the seam of her lips.

  “I-I do not think with the furniture there is space enough for a lesson.” He smiled at the regret in those words.

  “Indeed, there is not,” he concurred, and her expression fell. He offered her his elbow.

  She eyed his elbow a moment, and then looked to him. “What are you doing?”

  Robert brushed his knuckles along her sharp jawline. “Evading your maid, who is no doubt already being fetched.”

  The lady pressed her mouth into a flat line. “And I take it you are proficient in avoiding being discovered with women?” A slight edge underscored that supposition, telling all the same.

  The actuality of it was, he, in fact, was skilled in carrying out clandestine meetings and wicked assignations behind his host’s parlor doors. After the night he’d bore witness to Lucy’s treachery, he’d found a safe pleasure in all those meaningless entanglements. “I wish to dance with you,” he said quietly, and with no small amount of shock he realized his words did not come from the easy store of pretty comments and praise he had on the ready.

  Helena peered at him. Did she seek the veracity of his profession? He went still under her scrutiny, and then the lady rolled her eyes. “You needn’t play the rogue for my benefit. Where are we to dance?”

  It was perfectly reasonable for her to see falsity in his claims, and yet disappointment tightened his belly. Disappointment that, for the first time in twelve years he’d spoken without the intent of seduction, and Helena had seen nothing more. Plastering on a perfectly practiced grin, Robert slid her fingers into his sleeve. “Having hidden in these halls as a child, I’ve the benefit of knowing my way around with some familiarity.”

  Her lips twitched. “I expect you were troublesome.”

  “Oh, most,” he easily concurred, ringing a laugh from her, and he missed a step. Her face wreathed in a smile, and cheeks flushed from her contagious joy, she was a siren.

  Helena lifted her sparkling gaze, and some of the light dimmed. “What is it?”

  Unnerved, Robert forced a grin. “I was simply thinking of all my outrageous antics.” He neatly steered her down the hall, leading her on a twisting and turning path through the mammoth residence. Yes, the lady’s poor maid would need a map to locate her mistress. Robert grinned.

  “Tell me.”

  How direct she was. Where ladies prevaricated and spoke with deliberate words, she commanded.

  “Well, there was the summer party, I gathered sheets from all the guest chambers, knotted them together, and made a makeshift rope.” As a boy of eight, he’d believed his parents would, if not be pleased, at least appreciate that he’d not touched the linens on any of the beds occupied by their family.

  “For what purpose?”

  He grinned at her. “Why, I, at the ripe age of eight, I fashioned myself an explorer.” She giggled and again he tripped over his thoughts. Those carefree, innocent expressions of mirth, so common and practiced in other women, were as rare as a fire rainbow with this woman. Lest he kill that fleeting joy, Robert rushed the remainder of the story out. “I tied the sheets together and knotted one end around the balustrade that overlooked the foyer with the express intention of climbing down.” Robert spread his hands wide.

  She widened her eyes. “Surely it was not as high as—”

  “The duke’s foyer?” he neatly interrupted. “Higher.” His lips quirked. “I made it nearly three quarters of the way down.” Before his weight had pulled free the less than impressive knot he’d worked around the balustrade. “I suffered nothing more than a sprained arm, and a month’s long loss of dessert following evening meals.”

  Helena slapped a hand over her mouth, stymieing the amusement on her full lips. Her shoulders shook with the force of her laughter, and her mirth contagious, Robert joined in. He didn’t speak about his past, any part of it, with anyone. What was it about her that had called forth this particular memory?

  Unease rolled through him. This off-kilter effect Helena Banbury had on him was a sentiment he’d believed himself immune to after Lucy’s betrayal, and yet how easily she threw his thoughts and emotion into tumult? Eager to divert the discourse to safer grounds, Robert steered her to the back of the duke’s townhouse
and brought them to a stop beside the doorway that emptied out into the duchess’s prized gardens. An image flitted in his mind of who she would have been as a child of eight, a gangly girl, in all manner of mischief. “What of you, Helena, what were you like as child?” he asked as he pushed the door open. He took several steps before he realized Helena remained in the doorway.

  Gone were all hints of mirth. In its place was a dark somberness that sent a chill skittering along his spine. She forced a smile that stretched her cheeks. “I thought we were not to speak of the past.” There was an underlying thread of desperation that hung on that reminder, and a vise squeezed about his lungs.

  He’d no right to her secrets. But he wanted them all the same.

  “Come, your lesson, then,” he urged gruffly, and without hesitation, she drew the door closed, and stepped into his arms.

  “We’ll not bother with anything beyond a waltz,” he said quietly, angling her in his arms, and guiding her hand up to his sleeve. “This is most conducive.” He settled his hand on the small of her back, bringing her body closer. A hungering to cup her buttocks and drag her closer filled him.

  “Most conducive to what?” Her tremulous question hinted at her also weakening control.

  Robert lowered his mouth to hers so only a hairsbreadth separated them. “Why, for touching you,” he breathed. Her lashes fluttered and he guided her into movement.

  Her eyes shot open, and she stumbled against him.

  “You enjoy mathematics,” he said matter-of-factly, and Helena stared unblinking at him, promptly missing another step. “Think of dancing in terms of your calculations. Concentrate on the numbers.” He hummed a discordant tone that earned another of her elusive smiles. “Pay attention,” he rebuked. “It is a one-two-three—one-two-three,” he murmured. “Remember all the beats of the waltz are equal.” He guided her back. “You start with the right foot and you go back on the first step with the right foot.” He dipped his brow to hers. “Then side with the left and close right foot to left.” Angling her body closer still, he led her through the rhythmic movements.

  Cheeks flushed, Helena chewed at her lower lip, and missed a step.

  “Concentrate,” he whispered. “Think of the numbers, Helena. Think of the steady one-two-three.” They continued through the first stilted, then gradually smooth, movements, as their bodies together found the rhythm. “One-two-three,” he murmured, waltzing her around the duchess’s prize rose bushes.

  As the moments fell away, he moved his hand lower, to the small of her back, just above her buttocks, and her breath caught. “This is the touch,” he continued in low tones. “This is the one that any gentleman will see and know.”

  Her lips parted as she drew in a shuddery breath. “Know what?”

  “That you are mine.” In this game of pretend that suddenly felt all too real.

  The back of Helena’s legs knocked against a stone bench, forcing them to a jerky stop. They stood, bodies flush, their chests rising and falling in a matched, heavy rhythm. Robert moved his hand up, folding his palm about her nape, and angled her head up.

  Their lips met in a fiery explosion and on a low moan, Helena twined her fingers about his neck, meeting his kiss. He slanted his mouth over hers again and again, working his hands over her body, exploring the curve of her hips, and the small swells of her breasts.

  He dragged his lips away from hers and she cried out, searching for his mouth, but Robert continued his quest. With his lips, he explored the long arch of her neck, sucking at the soft skin where her pulse pounded, and then lower. He quickly worked the fabric of her décolletage lower, and worshiped the satiny expanse of flesh with his lips. “So beautiful,” he whispered. How had he failed to see it before, this beauty that would make sailors flail themselves against the rocks at sea. Her legs weakened, and he collected her to him, cupping his hands about her buttocks and dragging her close to his jutting shaft.

  “Robert,” she rasped, his name emerging as a keening moan. She parted her legs.

  Sitting on the stone bench, Robert settled Helena on his lap, and worked his hand up her skirt. “I’ve hungered for this since I awakened in your bed,” he growled, hating that even now, he didn’t recall the moments they’d shared because of his drunken state that night. He again claimed her mouth and slid his tongue inside.

  She boldly met that thrust and parry, matching the intensity of his kiss. His breath came heavily and he found the slick folds of her womanhood.

  Robert swallowed her sharp cry with his mouth, and proceeded to work her with his fingers, toying with her nub, exploring her. He slid a finger inside her channel and she stiffened about him. Then, with a long, agonized groan, she grinded into him, thrusting rapidly against his palm with her body, urging him to finish her.

  “Please,” she begged against his mouth, and that entreaty from this bold, commanding woman, drove him mad with desire. Increasing the pace of his strokes, he pressed the heel of his palm against the silky curls shielding her womanhood, and Helena’s body jerked. Then in a glorious display of sensual abandon, she tossed her head back and cried out, thrusting and gyrating, coming in long-rippling waves, and he rang every drop from her, until she collapsed against him, breathless and sweaty. Never more had he wished he were a rogue in the truest sense, because then this blasted sense of honor would not keep him from lying himself between her thighs and thrusting himself deep inside her hot, welcoming heat.

  Robert folded his arms around her, holding her against his chest until his heart slowed to a normal cadence. As they silently stood, and he righted her garments, a sense of panic pulled at the corner of his senses. Not since Lucy Whitman had a woman held this pull over him. And if he were not careful, with her candidness and bold ways, Helena had the power to shatter those well-constructed defenses he’d built in years past.

  Which would be folly, indeed, especially in a woman so determined to cloak herself in the shrouded mystery of her past.

  Not for the first time, questions about Helena Banbury whispered around his mind.

  Chapter 14

  Rule 14

  Never bind yourself to a man.

  For ten years of her life, Helena would awake, visit her office, open her books, and work through the accountings of her brother’s club.

  In the whole of those ten years, with the exception of that morning of madness with Robert’s invasion of her chambers, she’d never deviated from her safe, predictable routine.

  How vastly different one’s life could become in a handful of quick moments. Her mother going from beloved mistress of a duke to lover of a violent gang leader in London had been proof of that.

  And sitting here, on the stone bench in the Duchess of Wilkinson’s walled-in gardens, with her head tipped up toward the sun, after years of her safe morning routine, was now proof.

  It was not that she didn’t miss her work. She did. It was just . . . this new sense of discovering life beyond the Hell and Sin Club. In the immediacy of Ryker’s sending her away, she’d not seen past her own sense of hurt betrayal. How dare he simply turn her out? Not only because in doing so he’d devalued her role with the Hell, but also because it had proven his inconstancy in a sea of already faithless men.

  Helena angled her head back and the sun’s rays bathed her face in a warm, soothing heat.

  Mayhap this is why Ryker sent her here. Mayhap, he’d known that she needed to confront the life she could belong to outside of the Hell and determine where her place truly was. She absently skimmed her fingers over the puckered flesh on her opposite hand. The nicked skin, brutally and meticulously carved away, a testament to the truth that she could never truly belong here.

  She’d long ago pledged to never bind herself to a man the way her mother had, not with her flesh, nor her heart, and certainly not her name. Now she appreciated how very easy it was to make those very mistakes.

  “The marquess is waiting for you.”

  The Duchess of Wilkinson’s sharp tone brought Helena’s
head around. Robert.

  The harsh glint in the woman’s eyes quelled Helena’s initial rush of pleasure and she slowly came to her feet, warily eying the other woman. For her brothers’ ribbing about her inability to accurately read a person’s character, they’d proven wholly wrong. The unrestrained hatred in the duchess’s gaze contained a level of evil to rival the darkest soul in the Dials. Apparently that emotion knew no regard for rank or title. Nor would it send a woman of the duchess’s station all the way to the gardens to announce Robert’s arrival. Such a task would be reserved for a servant.

  “Your Grace,” she greeted, and started toward the doorway. A frown formed on Helena’s lips as the duchess pulled the door closed.

  The woman flicked a glacial stare up and down Helena. Peeling her lip back in a sneer, she said more powerfully than any words could her every thought on her duke’s by-blow.

  Helena didn’t care if the woman was a duchess, queen, or princess, she’d not be browbeaten. “If you’ll excuse me? Lord Westfield, as you indicated, is waiting.” She squared her shoulders, and used the additional four inches she had over the duchess to look down at the woman.

  “I do not want you here, Miss Banbury.”

  She stiffened.

  Well, that made two of them. Or it had . . . Four days ago . . .

  The duchess dusted her palms together. “Your mother was a whore,” the woman spoke with the same casualness she’d use if she’d remarked upon the weather. Helena schooled her features, while all the while rage slithered around. In living in the streets, you learned quickly that your enemies sought to uncover and exploit your weakness. If you revealed a crack, they’d slip in and destroy you. The older woman’s eyes disappeared within thin, narrow slits. “And with your wiles, you’ve stolen the attention of the marquess away from Diana. He’ll bed you, but he will never wed you.” Her voice shook with the force of her loathing.