by Gaelen Foley
So it was true.
Dolph stared at him in horrified disbelief until the footman snorted at him and closed the door in his face. He heard the lock slide home. He beat on the door, hollering, but no one answered. He staggered backward away from the house, across the pavement, into the middle of the street, where he threw his head back and howled in volcanic rage: “Belinda!”
Though the whole world was spinning sickeningly, he saw motion in the upper window. The curtain fluttered.
Panting with fury, the whites of his eyes wild and baleful, he fixed his stare there. The afternoon sun glared off the panes as the French windows swung inward and opened. Then she appeared—only somehow it wasn’t her—his bedraggled little Bel in her threadbare woolen cloak.
It couldn’t be her.
Dolph stared in awe at the beautiful courtesan stranger.
The woman in the window was a pale, elegant goddess. Her gleaming flaxen tresses were swept up in a sleek, sophisticated arrangement. She wore jeweled earrings and a rich gown cut too low for afternoon. The breeze billowed through her sheer long sleeves, sculpting her graceful arms as she placed her pampered hands on the windowsill and tossed a mocking twist of smile down to him like a thorny rose.
“Yes?”
“Belinda!” he bellowed in disbelief. “W-w-what have you done?”
She lifted her eyebrows coolly. “Sorry, I haven’t the full honor of your acquaintance. Au revoir.”
Though the words were polite, Dolph knew she had just delivered him the most direct and thorough cut a young lady could give. She started to shut the window.
“Belinda, wait!”
She laughed blithely at him then looked over her shoulder into the room behind her. “Come and see this poor Caliban in the roadway,” she called to her companions.
Two shadowy shapes of men came to the window, flanking her on either side.
Good God! Dolph thought, recognizing them. Argyll! Hertford! Those lechers were trying to seduce her! he thought. But they were powerful lechers, a duke and a marquis respectively, men of intellect and distinction. Dolph snapped his jaw shut to bite back a stream of curses, realizing he must watch what he said.
The Regent himself might be up there, for all he knew, or the royal dukes, or Wellington, for he could hear other people talking and laughing up in the drawing room.
“Belinda Hamilton,” he said through gritted teeth, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing in this place, but you had better come down here at once.”
She slipped her arms around both men’s shoulders and smiled brazenly at him. “I know exactly what I’m doing, Dolph. I’m entertaining some very charming friends, as our servant already told you.”
“I must talk to you!” he nearly wailed.
She laughed gaily, releasing the lords, who frowned at him in protective disapproval. She braced her elbows on the windowsill, then rested her flawless face in her hands with a smile of mock pity. “Poor Dolph, you look so distraught.”
“Belinda, for God’s sake, come down and speak to me.”
“You’re a boor, Dolph. What else is there to say?”
“This is unacceptable!” he screamed, throwing his head back.
Shutters and doors down the street opened and people looked out to see who was causing all the noise.
“Very well, I will give you a brief audience tonight at the party, but all I really want to hear from you,” she said sweetly, “is an apology. Now go away before you rouse the constable.”
With that she disappeared inside and closed the window.
Tears in his eyes, Dolph glared up at the empty casement, simmering, his mouth pursed in rage. He shouted for her again, but the glass panes merely reflected the blue sky back at him. Still barely able to believe her treachery, he spun around, jumped up into his phaeton and raced off down the street, his pulse thundering with the knowledge that this time, she had really bested him.
* * *
Bel’s heart pounded with satisfaction after the long awaited moment of initial revenge on her mortal enemy. She would remember the shock on Dolph’s loathed face for as long as she lived, but it was nothing compared to the suffering she had in store for him tonight.
“I told you they will soon be shooting themselves in the streets over you, Miss Hamilton,” Lord Hertford said with a chuckle as she rejoined their company.
Harriette, her sister Fanny, and their friend, the tres elegant Julia Johnstone, were scandal-mongering over tea with a handful of their favorites.
“Are you sure it’s wise to let that rabid fellow come here tonight?” asked the duke of Argyll, glancing with a frown toward the window.
“All the better to torment him,” Bel replied lightly as she took a round white tea cake from the tray.
“Cruel beauty,” murmured Hertford, watching her eat it.
Bel shrugged, gave him a nonchalant smile, and settled into her place on the sofa once more, tucking her slippered feet under her.
Harriette sat beside her, a petite but voluptuous woman in her early thirties, with auburn curls and fine dark eyes that gleamed with wit. “Watch yourself tonight.”
“I will, don’t worry.”
Perhaps it was rash to allow Dolph to come to the party, Bel thought, but she despised him enough to want him to see her in all her glory as the demimonde’s newest sensation. Let him choke on his rage. He deserved it. She would rub her new fame in his face. With a house full of her admirers and Harriette’s burly footmen to boot, there was not a thing he’d be able to do to her.
The amiable group resumed their conversation, but Bel was silent, nibbling her tea cake while her mind wandered back over the events of the past weeks.
On that April day when she had shown up on the Wilson sisters’ doorstep, Harriette had expressed an immediate disinclination to help an obviously well-bred young woman ruin herself. Fortunately, her more tenderhearted sister, Fanny, had been there and had prevailed upon Harriette to help her.
Amy, the mean-spirited eldest, had taken one look at Bel, bristled with jealousy, and flatly refused to get involved. Between Fanny’s pleading and Harriette’s penchant for contradicting Amy, Harriette had inspected Bel—her looks, her carriage, the extent of her learning. Declaring her not a total disaster, she had given Bel to understand that the courtesan’s trade was an expensive profession to break into when it was done right, chiefly because of the need to keep in step with their wealthy clientele. For example, she would need a supply of fine evening gowns and these had to be of the first stare. For a guarantee of twenty percent of the settlement from Bel’s future protector, Harriette had agreed to sponsor her entry into the demimonde.
Bel had been promptly settled into the Wilson sisters’ extra bedroom, where her first order of business had been to write a letter to her father explaining that she had been asked to chaperon a pair of her young ladies from the finishing school on a trip to Paris, now that the city was open to English visitors. She gave her letter to one of Harriette’s big, burly footmen, who had delivered it to the Fleet for her.
From that moment on, Bel the teacher had turned into the student.
Warming to her project for the profit, the lark of it, and the fact that Amy was incensed, Harriette set out to mold her into the perfect courtesan. Having cast off the old self that had been so brutally shamed and disgraced, Bel was more than willing to be shaped into something beautiful and new... and fearless and hard.
Never again would she go hungry. The fortune she’d earn would be her security. Why, Harriette got a hundred guineas for only a few hours’ dalliance and it didn’t always necessarily mean going to bed with her client. Sometimes the gentleman only wanted a dinner companion, someone to talk to. But the first thing Harriette taught her—the prime rule of the courtesan’s creed—was: Never fall in love.
To love a man was to be in his power and power, to a courtesan, was everything.
A courtesan, Bel learned, was far more than a bed partner or even a skilled seductress. She must be a sci
ntillating model of wit and gaiety, a connoisseur of pleasure to gratify all of a man’s senses, physical, emotional, and intellectual.
Aside from making the most of her beauty, she must be a pleasing entertainer, an able hostess, a sympathetic listener, and a discreet confidante. It helped if she was a bold and spirited rider able to turn heads on Rotten Row. She must keep abreast of the political issues that obsessed the men and that meant reading the Times every morning as well as the Tory journal, the Quarterly Review. The Whig journal, the Edinburgh Review, was optional. Even though it had been founded by one of Harriette’s lovers, the brilliant young Henry “Wickedshifts” Brougham, Harriette pronounced it too vexing and too hard to understand. The Tories had the majority, anyway.
She also had to learn how to invest her earnings, for a woman could not be a courtesan forever. Bel was mystified by the art of building wealth, especially after she heard that several of the grand, retired demireps like the Brazen Bellona and the famed White Doe had thousands in the funds. Never had she dreamed of a life of such untrammeled independence, for no wife, however respectable, owned her own money.
Harriette became her heroine. Harriette understood power.
Bel had not told her mentor of her ordeal in that dark alley. She had told no one. Indeed, she was convinced she had all but forgotten it. Only the nightmares still plagued her.
Halfway into the month of May, the world seemed full of endless possibilities as London grew crowded with dignitaries and war heroes, all flooding in for the Victory Summer. Bel had made her debut on the Town by attending the opera at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket with the notorious trio known as the Three Graces—Harriette, Fanny, and Julia.
Throughout the entire performance, while La Catalani wailed in the melodrama of misplaced love, Semiramide, the Cyprians’ theater box swarmed with men—old and young, handsome and plain, witty and dull, foreign and domestic, each one more grandly titled than the next, all paying homage to the Cyprians, sometimes in full view of their wives.
There were noblemen, officers, diplomats, poets, artists, pinks, dandies, and exquisites, Bond Street Loungers elbowing in next to high-minded men of science from the Royal Academy, and the one thing that they had in common was that all yearned for the sensual dream of voluptuous love that only a courtesan could give.
Wide-eyed with inexperience, Bel saw Harriette and the others treated like veritable idols, earthly embodiments of Venus herself. Harriette warned her to demand this homage as her due. It might seem haughty and rude, she had said, but it was the only way to be taken seriously. If she wanted to be seen as a prize worth having, she had to carry herself like one.
It was all a game, and Bel quickly learned to play it well.
There were several philosophies to choose from: Fanny found it easiest to devote herself to one well-chosen protector—in her case, Lord Hertford. Harriette frowned on this practice, for she didn’t trust all her eggs to one basket, having been burned before by Lord Ponsonby. Instead, she regularly entertained a handful of favorites, among them Argyll, Worcester, and Henry Brougham, who loathed his wife: Harriette loved to brag with an air of nonchalance that Wellington had once been in her thrall.
Bel preferred Fanny’s more modest strategy of finding one very agreeable protector to satisfy, but heeded Harriette’s warning about wives' jealousies regarding these exclusive arrangements. Taking all this into account, Bel forged one guiding rule for herself in addition to the courtesan’s creed of never falling in love: She refused to go under the protection of a married man.
Though this narrowed the selection considerably, oddly enough, Harriette concurred that her decision was wise. She wished she had followed that advice herself when she was younger, she said, for one could never rest too easy when one’s keeper had a jealous wife at home. Bel had no wish to make enemies.
Besides, this was one small way of reminding herself that, harlot or no, she still had some clear notion of right and wrong. Rich widowers were fine; unmarried young bucks would do, as well. But La Belle Hamilton refused to be party to adultery.
She had met countless numbers of prospective keepers at the opera. In the nights that followed, she had gotten to know some of them better at Harriette’s parties and at Vauxhall Gardens. The offers rolled in, directed to Harriette on her behalf, but although she still had met no one with whom she could imagine doing some of the shocking things Harriette and Fanny had described to her—all her erotic knowledge was theoretical to date. Indeed, she was hard pressed not to flinch when a man merely brushed past her in a crowd, nor to bristle with hostility if one presumed to take her hand.
Still, she pressed on in her reincarnation as one of the city’s glamorous scarlet outcasts, ignoring her misgivings, relishing the thought of the fortune that would be her security. Then no one could ever hurt her and her father again. She would be free, independent. No one suspected that she was a complete fraud, but she did not allow this thought to deter her. Carefully, she continued building her facade as the perfect courtesan, blithe and saucy and carefree.
Julia had declared her too picky, but Bel kept waiting for the right one. Wistfully, she clung to her vision of a knight in shining armor, though she feared she was seeking a needle in a haystack.
Somewhere out there the ideal protector was waiting for her, she mused in a faraway mood, removed from the buzz of conversation in the well-appointed parlor. The perfect lover who would lead her through her fears.
Someone she could trust. Someone she could kiss without revulsion. Someone gentle and noble and good.
When I meet him, she thought, I’ll know.
CHAPTER THREE
It was Saturday night after the opera and the Cyprians’ fashionable little townhouse was crammed nearly to the breaking point as Hawk made his way through the throng, feeling self-conscious and out of place.
The party was a garish kaleidoscope of feverish color and raucous laughter. He scanned the overheated salon for Dolph Breckinridge as he was jostled along through the inebriated, mostly male crowd. Somewhere a window must have been opened, for a cool, almost imperceptible ribbon of air threaded in through the crowd to trail against his cheek like a trace of sanity. He needed it at the moment.
He’d had no idea that when Dolph had spoken so longingly of his ladylove, this Belinda, that he had been talking about a demirep, for God’s sake. Nor had he expected to come back to Town and learn that half of male London had made a bid for the girl. Three full pages of wagers were logged in the betting book at White’s concerning who would win the incomparable Miss Hamilton for his ladybird.
Her kind had no morals, but Miss Hamilton, uniquely, could be said to possess a moral: She refused all offers from married men, Hawk had heard at the club. Such nicety of feeling, he thought dryly.
Gossip about Dolph’s making a fool of himself in the street that day over the girl had traveled quickly. Hawk had known the moment he’d heard about the incident that she was the key to getting his enemy under his thumb.
There was only one problem, however. Hawk knew nothing about demireps and how they liked to be wooed, for their philosophy of profit from lovemaking had always rather revolted the romantic nature that lurked beneath his straitlaced exterior.
All he knew was that it wasn’t the simple matter of flashing a fat purse before their eyes: Cyprians were not typical prostitutes. They had reputations of a sort to maintain, whims to be catered to, vanities to be stroked. A man was supposed to enjoy the chase and the hoops the elite courtesans made them jump through to win their favors.
Games and absurdity, he thought in disgust, heaving an impatient sigh under his breath. Even if this Miss Hamilton was as lovely as everyone claimed, he could never respect a woman who was no more than a glorified whore. Still, though his dignity was rather put off by it all, he was fixed enough in his quest to play along. He tried to look relaxed, but could scarcely hide his lordly disdain for the place and its resident harlots. His mother would have fit right in here, he thou
ght in contempt.
Just then, he happened across a trio of his acquaintances, who promptly exclaimed with hilarity to find him in this house of lust. They clapped him on the back and pressed a drink into his hand. Feeling sheepish, Hawk drank with them, barely heeding their half-drunken ramblings. Furtively scanning the room, his gaze suddenly happened across a large gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace. In it, he saw Dolph Breckinridge.
Coldfell’s nephew was tucked away in an alcove on the far end of the salon. At first, Hawk could not see the woman he had cornered there. Then Dolph dropped to his knees in pleading, and Hawk glimpsed her face.
His eyes widened; he froze; he stared. Abruptly, he tore his stunned gaze away before anyone suspected he was spying. His heart was pounding.
My God, she is an angel.
He forced a taut smile at his friends, gripped his wineglass so hard he nearly snapped the stem, and listened not at all to his companions’ boasting about their success at Gentleman Jack’s boxing studio.
A prickling sensation raced down his spine. He slanted another covert glance at the mirror and beheld the silvery gold vision of the elegant young courtesan, ruling from her alcove like a virgin queen of some arctic country. Celestial and yet sensual, Miss Hamilton stared straight ahead, ignoring her kneeling devotee in cruel serene beauty. Her face was expressionless, as though her delicate features had been carved from alabaster. She had fine-boned cheeks, an aristocratic nose, and a firm, willful chin. Hawk’s stare followed the graceful curve of her throat downward to her slender body.
Her white muslin gown had sheer long sleeves, a straight, pleasing neckline and a standing Elizabethan-style collar of Brabant lace that framed the back of her head. She wore her flaxen tresses piled and coiled in glorious chaos atop her head. Tendrils of it wafted like whispered secrets against the curve of her neck, precisely where he should have liked to taste her.
He quivered and forced his gaze away, his pulse hammering. Merely knowing she was expertly trained to pleasure a man in every way sent ripples of unrest down into the hollow well of his soul. God, it had been so long.
