“The last thing I said was ‘flirtatious.’”
“Ah, well. There you have me.”
He stroked her back some more, silent and there. Replacing the sore bits with tenderness, the lostness with the anchor of his body, with the stone beneath them and the slow sounds of water at their side. The scent of damp earth and a sky that was new over the old, old ground.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You can ask me whatever you want to know.”
“I admit, there is one thing about which I wondered.”
“Anything.”
“I know a courtesan is an entertainer and hostess, above all. But when you took a protector, your role must sometimes have taken you to the bedchamber.”
“It did.” Lord. She was such a hussy. Her face burned, yes, but her sex grew damp. Bedchamber, he said, and his hand kept up that slow trail over her back. He had taken her to his bedchamber—or she had taken him.
“How is it possible . . . ah, I shouldn’t ask.”
“Now you have to. You have me afire with curiosity.”
“Um.” She glanced at his face. Beneath his tan, his face had gone a bit red, too. “All right. How can one have intercourse with someone to whom one is . . . not attracted?” He asked it as a curiosity, a secret, forbidden question to which he had allowed his mind to turn in private moments.
She squeezed her thighs together. “If the occasion required . . . that . . . then I had to find a way in which that person attracted me, and I clung fast to it. Perhaps a man smelled nice, or perhaps he had a lovely speaking voice. Perhaps he was generous or kind. There is something to like about almost everyone.”
“Almost?” The slow, stroking hand paused.
“One time I changed my mind. The better I got to know that person, the more it became clear that there was nothing to like about him.” Randolph. His wealth and handsome face were but the means to an end: the growth of control.
Benedict was again stroking her back; now using a bit of raking nail that she could feel through her thin gown and light stays. “You are very clever,” he said. “To tease out the best way to be successful.”
“A necessity. When an unmarried woman lets a man put a part of his body into hers, she becomes worth less as a human being. Under the guise of being proper, people are obsessed with the intimate behavior of young women. Does that not seem remarkably vulgar?”
“Both vulgar and unfair.” He sighed. “I had not thought much about the matter, I admit. I grew from boyhood to manhood on a ship, and dainty ton ladies were never spoken of. A few officers were married, but most sailors thundered to port whenever they had the chance for”—he coughed—“virtuous works. And the women took as much benefit as the men, or so I thought.”
Ah, he made her smile at the most unexpected times. “And did you do the same?”
“I was a paragon of virtue, shall we say.”
Now she laughed. “As long as you left the ladies with as much benefit as you took.”
He stopped stroking her back. “I believe I did. Sometimes twice as much.”
She shot him a quick look; he was grinning, arms again folded carelessly behind his head. Her sex was wet now as she remembered . . . Yes. Twice. Those broad hands splaying her wide, that wicked tongue . . . oh, so wicked. Giving her pleasure after pleasure, asking nothing in return.
“I took my benefit, too,” she said. “Of a material sort, since the world had decided I was now worth less than when I had been proper. I remade myself as Charlotte Pearl—La Perle, but not the pure, driven-snow sort.”
“So dull and cold, the driven snow,” Benedict said. “I cannot blame you for wanting to be something entirely different. Did you get many jewels?”
“Sometimes.”
“A house?”
“Oh, above all a house.”
“Servants?”
“The finest. A household full. A lady’s maid just for my clothing and another just for my hair.”
“Will you ever return to them?”
“No.” The syllable came out faint, so she tried again, more loudly. “No. I let the servants go, and the house—for a multitude of reasons, I can’t go back there. I’ve a fortune I cannot touch.”
Besides her memories and her house, Charlotte had one other item left from her years of luxury and captivity: a necklace. Edward had given it to her to wear for that first nude sitting—and when art turned to an affair, he gave it to her for always. Again and again, she had posed for him while wearing it. Naked but for gems, a shackle about her neck worked in emeralds and diamonds.
She would eagerly have sold it, but it had appeared on canvas so many times that it was instantly recognizable as the necklace of La Perle. She couldn’t allow herself to be traced by Randolph, so she stuffed it into her trunk. Hid it within cheap woolen stockings.
Maybe if she’d broken it up, crushing the gold and ripping the stones free, she could have sold it.
Maybe she still would.
The breeze grew arrogant, teasing the wisps of hair about her face—and then it snatched off her lace cap.
“Oh!” She grasped for the scrap of lace, but the laughing wind carried it away—and Charlotte let it go and sat back down.
“Something amiss?”
“The wind took my cap. I must have loosened the pins when I took off my hat.”
“Do you want to chase it?”
“No. I don’t feel like dressing as a spinster right now.” She settled back, hoping his hand would again begin its slow comforting path up and down her spine. “I cannot sell my house,” she finished explaining, “without an intermediary. And any person involved in my affairs is a weak link. Too vulnerable. I cannot afford to keep the house, but even less can I afford to sell it.”
“Being a courtesan is not the sort of employment one can just walk away from, it seems.”
“No, it is not,” she agreed. “Nor is it the sort for which one can claim half pay.”
“Or a small stipend for being invalided and respectable?”
“Definitely not that.” She plucked a pin from her uncovered hair, then another. “No, it’s the sort in which many people think they have a claim on . . . everything.”
“Then maybe it’s not so bad to be Miss Perry. Or a mysterious treasure seeker with a veiled hat.”
Inside her boots, her toes curled. “It’s not so bad to be with you.”
He tutted. “Silver-tongued witch.”
She laughed. “I like you, Benedict. Everything I know about you, I like.”
Like was such a watery word for what she was beginning to feel.
But the Kinder Downfall poured by, endless and pure. Strong and lasting enough to crack stone and reshape the earth.
Maybe a watery word wasn’t so inadequate after all.
* * *
Benedict knew he ought to say something roguish and wry in reply, but he could think of nothing that would fit around the great lump in his throat.
Only a week ago, he had not known her. Now he could not imagine not knowing her.
Did she like him because he was here, and she was lonely? Or because he was himself, and she was falling for him?
As he was for her. As he never had allowed himself to fall before.
There was no room for a lasting romance in the future of a Naval Knight, who lived within the narrow strictures required for his pension. No romance at all for a pretended spinster aunt raising her niece.
One day, probably soon, they would have to part ways. He knew this.
He also knew that parting would hurt like the devil.
“The feeling is mutual,” he said. “Entirely, completely.”
He felt a little shy, adding these last words. He was accustomed to quick affairs of pleasure, then to moving along.
These conversations were different. Wanting to have them was different.
Not knowing when he’d leave—that was different, too.
She was taking her hair down; the long strands tickled his face, to
uching him with the faint scent of wintergreen. It was soft, whipping about and tickling his skin. He unfolded his arms and caught a few strands like a silk-spun spiderweb between his fingers.
He liked touching it, and being permitted to touch it.
The roughness of the air about gentle slopes reminded him of the land surrounding Edinburgh. Those rolling lowlands of Scotland, friendlier than the moors that stretched nearby.
“Tell me about this stone on which we’ve made ourselves comfortable,” he said. “Is it part of the ground, or did it fall?”
Charlotte lay down, tucking herself against his side just as she had, so briefly, in his borrowed bed in the vicarage. “I think it must have fallen as the Downfall wore it away. Great stones lie about here like a dropped tray of pastries.”
“I must get my similes from someone who has led a less luxurious life for the past decade.”
She laughed against the curve of his neck. “Very well, they are like fallen ice. They break in great cubes, and they shatter into shards.”
“You know ice well.”
“I have performed virtuous works in an icehouse.”
“A chilling thought—ouch! No hitting,” he protested. “That was a wonderful joke.”
“No joking,” she said, and climbed atop him. “Not now.”
He had been half-hard since lying down on this stone; now he was surely harder than it. “Not now,” he agreed, hips rolling up to meet hers.
He caught her about the waist, keeping her steady as she did . . . things. Wonderful things. First she undid the fall of his breeches and palmed him. Rolling his stones gently. Working his length with her hand until a hot drop leaked, eager, and trickled down the head of his cock.
“Back in a moment.” She lifted his hands from her waist and slid down—and she licked that hot little drop off of him and took him into her mouth.
Shite. Every muscle in his body clenched: toes curling, calves bunching, thighs tight. Even his scalp prickled. And she kept right on, her tongue a hot delicious sin, a sweet promise fulfilled. She pressed at a little spot below the base of his stones, and his hips jerked up with the shock of it.
“Sorry,” he groaned. He must have just jabbed her in the throat with his cock. “I can’t hold on—I—Charlotte, please. It’s too much. Let me love you.”
She stopped moving, though that marvelous mouth covered him. Taut. Tight. The moment vibrated; his breath came hard and ragged.
When she lifted her head, she blew cool air over the head of his cock, sending him into a shudder. “You want to . . . love me.”
He realized how it sounded—this dance that people did about the word sex. It was confusing when one’s feelings became involved, too.
And he realized what he wanted to say.
“Yes.”
With a soft sigh that left him wishing he could see every flicker of expression across her face, she slid up his body in a sweet abrasion. Rustlings told him she was bundling her skirts; then her knees were on either side of his hips, and she was guiding him within her slickness. It was a prayer and a blasphemy at once—God, God—to feel welcomed and wanted like that.
He struggled for words. “Do you need me to withdraw when I—”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I know what to do.” She ground her hips on him, linking them as tightly as two could be.
Again, he cradled her waist, pushing up into her hard and fast, sinking together. She rocked on his length, working herself into a wet fervor. Hard and fast, they clashed and loved and, yes, fucked, and he bore on relentlessly until her breath turned to moans and the moans shattered and she cried out her release atop him.
He came into her with a groan of pleasure, pumping slowly now as the final shudders rocked them and ebbed. Then he eased her down to lie on his chest, still joined below.
He was lying on a rock with a waterfall flinging chill mist on his face, and he cared nothing for any of that. “Good Lord,” he groaned after a long and luscious silence. “This is my favorite place in Derbyshire, too.”
He could feel the curve of her smile against his neck. How sweetly her head fit there, against his shoulder. How easy it was to hold her.
Too soon it was time for them to draw apart, to right their clothing and clamber down from the rock that had become Benedict’s anchor. He found his coat and hat and cane—but left them where they lay. He wasn’t ready to leave this precious space yet.
So he found his way to the edge of the stream created by the small falls—a step too close in his fuddled state, as he splashed one boot before drawing back. Crouching, he trailed his fingers in the shifting coolness. Some of the pebbles at the edge were sharp and new; some smooth and sleek with age.
His fingertips encountered one that was pleasantly solid, a tiny version of the slab on which he and Charlotte had lain. He held it up. “Charlotte, is this pretty?”
She had been struggling with her bonnet; he heard her toss it aside and tread toward him across grass and stone. “It’s pretty if it is nice to hold.”
As a matter of fact, it was nice to hold. Hefty and smooth despite its irregular sides. “Come now, have I found you a diamond? If I have, we can stop hunting for stolen gold sovereigns and live like kings. Or a king and a queen, to be more accurate.”
“I’m not sure I’d recognize a diamond uncut.” She crouched beside him, hair trailing long over his hand and kissing his wind-smacked cheek. “Ah, no. There goes our fortune. There cannot be diamonds of such size in England. Besides which, this is brown, though it’s got some lovely green streaks in it. Like a beryl.”
“What is a beryl?”
“A . . . sort of streaky stone. A cat eye, it’s sometimes called.”
She drew in a sharp breath.
“Ouch!” The stone had fallen from her fingers onto the tender space between his knuckles. “A—wait. What? It’s called a—oh, holy—”
“Shite,” she finished. “Exactly. Cat eye.”
“It’s a stone?” Benedict palmed the rock, clenching its contours as though this would help him understand. “A cat eye is a stone? ‘Cat eye’—what Nance said . . . I never thought of it being a thing.”
“You think Nance meant that the person who stabbed her had a beryl?”
“Would she know one when she saw it?”
Charlotte’s hand covered his clenched fist. “By the name ‘cat eye,’ maybe. She didn’t even know a guinea from a gold sovereign.”
He understood. “She’d be describing what she thought something looked like, not what it was truly called.”
“Like the dagger,” she said. “The one we gave to Lilac. Its handle held an emerald split down the middle.” Charlotte released his hand, then stood.
“It doesn’t make sense.” Benedict shoved himself upright in the slipping gravel at the chill water’s edge. “Why wouldn’t she have said the name of the person who stabbed her, if she knew it? If it was her lover?”
“The person was cloaked,” said Charlotte. “All she saw was the cat eye and the cloak.”
Benedict rubbed at his sightless eyes, then extended the stone in his palm to Charlotte.
“I don’t want it,” she said.
“I don’t either.” With a sideways whip of his wrist, he tossed it back into the stream. “If only everyone listened to voices as well as I do. We’d have all the problems of this village sorted out and a fortune at our fingertips.”
“If only everyone did many things as well as you do,” said Charlotte. She stepped closer, laying her hand on his chest. “But right now, you’re the only one I’m thinking of.”
“Am I, now?” His heart thumped heavily. “Have you a problem you’d like me to sort out for you?”
“I was hoping you would. Twice, even.” And she brought his hand to her breast.
Chapter Fourteen
Charlotte and Benedict returned hand in hand to the vicarage, a laughing triumph of sore limbs and pleasure-soaked senses. Soon, she knew, she would need to treat hersel
f with vinegar and brew some pennyroyal tea—a daily requirement for women in her profession.
But for now, she let herself feel. To feel what it was like to hold the hand of Benedict Frost, even knowing that holding him could not keep him with her.
Such a feeling hurt, like the skin that grew fragile beneath a scab. She felt thin and new and raw.
But it was not unwelcome after feeling so long calloused. So surfeited and lonely at once that nothing could give pleasure. Now as she walked, everything rubbed at her senses: the drift of her long skirts about her legs; her boots, heavy, the knife never yet slipped from its spot beside her ankle. Her breasts, her sex, touched as though they were wondrous. As though she were of infinite value.
Let me love you, he had said, and she had been startled into wishing he meant it literally.
Maybe Maggie didn’t have to be cared for, someday, by her spinster aunt. Maybe she could have an aunt and an uncle.
Maybe. Maybe. As she walked, Charlotte’s hair flicked long and unbound, dark and straight. Just as it had when she was a girl, and she lived on dreams of maybe and the vivid corners of the world that she wanted to see.
But she was not a girl now, and she knew better than to live on dreams. Silks and satins, jewels and mansions—dreams never turned out quite the way one expected. There was always a catch, even if one didn’t perceive it right away.
Sometimes it didn’t make itself known for years. And then, one day, when one dared to let heart-pattering emotion guide one’s steps, the catch would make itself known. And one would be caught.
That day was today, when Charlotte and Benedict returned to the vicarage and the first sight that greeted her, held in her father’s shaking hand, was a sealed letter addressed not to Miss Charlotte Perry, but to Charlotte Pearl.
* * *
In hindsight, Charlotte thought her father could have handled the matter with a great deal more subtlety.
“This—this—I did not know what to—well. Charlotte, you must take it!”
Charlotte’s mother and Maggie poked their heads out of Mrs. Perry’s study. “What has happened?” asked Maggie. “Did Captain come back into the house?”
Fortune Favors the Wicked Page 15
