by Mary Balogh
“But we will.” He guided her toward the dining room. “I shall come in the morning for our discussion, Jane. But first I will take you to a modiste I know on Bond Street. She will measure you for the clothes you will need.”
“I will wear my own clothes, thank you,” he was not surprised to hear, “until I am your mistress. If we come to an agreement on that point, then you may summon a dressmaker here if you wish. I am not going to set foot on Bond Street.”
“Because it will be known that you are my mistress?” he asked, watching her run her fingertips over the polished surface of the round dining table—it could be considerably enlarged to seat guests, but when dining alone with his mistress he preferred to be within touching distance. “You think that a matter for shame? I assure you it is not. Courtesans of the highest class, Jane, are almost on a par with ladies. Above them in some ways. They often have considerably more influence. You will be highly respected as my mistress.”
“If I become your mistress, your grace,” she said, “I will be neither ashamed nor proud. I will be taking the purely practical step of securing employment that will be both lucrative and congenial to me.”
He laughed. “Congenial, Jane?” he said. “You bowl me over with your enthusiasm. Shall we go upstairs?”
He wondered if she felt as passionless as she looked. But he remembered the two embraces they had shared and drew his own conclusions, especially from the one in the music room. She had been anything but passionless on that occasion. And even outside her room, after she had sung for his guests, there had been a yearning that he might have kindled had he chosen.
He was still in the doorway of the bedchamber when she, a few steps ahead of him, turned toward him.
“One thing must be made perfectly clear even today,” she said, her hands clasped at her waist, her chin lifted as if for battle, a martial gleam in her eyes. “If I decide to stay, everything in this house has to be changed.”
“Indeed?” He raised his eyebrows and his quizzing glass and took his time looking about the room. The wide, canopied, mahogany bed with its intricately carved posts was covered in brocaded silk, with the same silk pleated in a rosebud design on the canopy. The bed curtains were of heavy, costly velvet, as were the window draperies. The carpet was soft and thick underfoot.
All were a rich scarlet.
“Indeed!” she replied firmly, pure scorn in her voice. “This house is disgusting. It is a caricature of a love nest. I will not sleep in this room even alone. I will certainly not lie here with you. I would feel like a whore.”
Sometimes one had to take a stand with Jane Ingleby. The trouble was he was unaccustomed to taking stands since nobody had ever made it necessary before now.
“Jane,” he said, planting his booted feet apart, clasping his hands at his back, schooling his features into their most forbidding aspect, “I believe it is necessary to remind you that I am not the one being offered employment. I have made you an offer, which you are free to accept or reject. There are plenty who would rush to take your place here given half a chance.”
She stared at him.
“My mistake, your grace,” she said after a few silent moments, during which he had to concentrate hard not to shift uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I thought we had agreed to discuss terms. But I see you have reverted to that ridiculous posturing as autocratic aristocrat, whose will no sane person would even dream of crossing. You had better go and give someone else half a chance. I am leaving.”
She took one purposeful step toward him. Only one. He stood his ground in the doorway. She could try going through him if she wished.
“What is so objectionable about the house?” he was weak enough to ask her. “I have never before had a single complaint about it.”
But she was quite right, damn it. He had felt it as soon as he had stepped inside the house with her. It was is if he had been entering a strange dwelling and seeing it for the first time. This house was just not Jane.
“I can think of two words to describe it,” she said. “I could probably think of a whole dictionary full if I had more time. But those that leap to mind are sleaze and fluff. Neither of which is tolerable to me.”
He pursed his lips. Those two words perfectly described the house. He had had the sitting room designed for a feminine taste, of course, not his own. Or what he had imagined was feminine taste. Effie had always appeared perfectly at home there. So had Lisa and Marie and Bridget. And this room? Well, in candlelight it could always heighten his sexual desire. The predominant reds did marvelous things to the color of naked female flesh.
“It is one of my first conditions,” she said. “This room and the sitting room. They are to be redone to my instructions. This point is not negotiable. Take it or leave it.”
“One of?” He raised his eyebrows. “Tell me, Jane, am I to be allowed to write some conditions of my own into this contract of ours? Or am I to be your slave? I would like to know. Actually the prospect of being a slave has a certain appeal. Does it come with chains and whips?” He grinned at her.
She did not smile.
“A contract is a two-way agreement,” she said. “Of course there will be certain things that you will insist upon. Like unlimited access to my—”
“Favors?” he suggested when she floundered.
“Yes.” She nodded briskly.
“Unlimited access.” He gazed steadily at her and was gratified to see that the rosiness in her cheeks owed nothing to the redness of her surroundings. “Even when you are unwilling, Jane? Even when you have a headache or some other malady? You would agree in writing to act the martyr even if my appetites prove insatiable?”
She thought for a moment. “I imagine it would be a reasonable demand for you to make, your grace,” she said. “That is what mistresses are for, after all.”
“Poppycock!” He narrowed his gaze on her. “If that is the attitude with which you approach the liaison, Jane, I want none of you. I do not want a body to plow whenever my sexual urges are out of control. There are innumerable brothels I might use for such a purpose. I want someone with whom to relax. Someone with whom to take the ultimate pleasure. Someone to pleasure in return.”
The color deepened in her cheeks, but she kept her spine straight and her chin raised.
“What if you came here ten days in a row and I said no each time?” she asked him.
“Then I would consider myself a damnable failure,” he said. “I would probably go home and blow my brains out.”
She laughed suddenly and looked so vividly beautiful and golden amid the scarlet that he felt his breath catch in his throat.
“How absurd!” she said.
“If for ten straight days a man cannot entice his mistress into bed,” he said meekly, “he might as well be dead, Jane. What is there for him to live for if his sexual appeal is gone?”
She tipped her head to one side and regarded him thoughtfully. “You are joking,” she said. “But you are half serious too. Being a man is very important to you, is it not?”
“And being a woman is not important to you?”
She considered her answer. It was characteristic of her, he had noticed before, not always to rush into saying the first thing that came into her head.
“Being me is important to me,” she said. “And since I am a woman, then I suppose being a woman is important too. But I do not have a mental image of what a perfect woman is, of what other people look for in me because I am a woman. I do not slavishly pattern my appearance or my behavior on any image. I need to be true to myself.”
Jocelyn felt a sudden wave of amusement.
“I have never stood in this doorway before,” he said, “halfway across the room from a woman, discussing the nature of gender and sexuality. We should by now, you know, have consummated our intent to contract a certain relationship. We should be lying exhausted and naked and mutually satisfied on that bed.”
This time there was no other way to describe her face than to say she b
lushed.
“I suppose,” she said, “you expected that once you had got me here I would succumb to your devastating charm and the allure of this room?”
It was exactly what he had expected—or hoped for anyway.
“And I suppose,” he said with a sigh, “you will not allow me to lay one lascivious finger on you until this room looks like a monk’s cell. Go ahead, then, Jane. Give your orders to Jacobs. Do whatever you wish with my house. I will do my part and pay the bills. Shall we go back downstairs? I daresay Mrs. Jacobs has a tea tray ready and is bursting with curiosity to catch a glimpse of you.”
“She can bring it to the dining room,” Jane said, sweeping past him when at last he stepped to one side of the doorway.
“Where will you sleep tonight?” he asked, following her down. “On the dining room table?”
“I will find somewhere,” she assured him. “You need not concern yourself about it, your grace.”
He walked away from the house an hour later, cane and painfully scraped palm and all, having dismissed his town carriage earlier. He was eager to hear Marsh’s report from Ferdinand’s stable. It might be impossible to prove that any of the Forbeses had had access to the curricle. But all he needed was the possibility that the broken axle had come courtesy of one of them.
Then they would have the Duke of Tresham to deal with.
He wondered if word had yet arrived about the result of the race. Unusually for him, all he was really concerned about was that Ferdinand had got to Brighton safely.
He should never have suggested that Jane Ingleby become his mistress, he thought. There was something all wrong about it.
And yet his loins ached for her.
Why had the damned woman not simply tiptoed on past that morning in Hyde Park when she had seen that there was a duel pending, as any decent woman would have done?
If he had never set eyes upon her, he would not now be walking around with the curious sensation that either he or his world was standing on its head.
SHE SLEPT ON THE sitting room sofa. The color scheme and all the frills and knickknacks were in atrociously bad taste, but at least it was not as vulgar a room as the bedchamber.
While they had talked in that room during the afternoon, she had had lurid, uncomfortable images of lying tangled with him on the bed amid all that scarlet silk. She did not know what full sexual arousal felt like, but it must be something very like what she had felt then. What she had agreed to—or was about to agree to—had become appallingly real to her.
How could she be his mistress? she had asked herself, sitting upright on the sofa before lying down to sleep. She simply could not do it unless she felt something for him as a person. Did she? She did not love him, of course—that would be patently rash. But did she like him? Feel some affection for him? Some respect?
She thought of their endless verbal scraps—and smiled unexpectedly. He was a haughty, tyrannical, thoroughly irritating man. But she had the distinct impression that he enjoyed the way she stood up to him. And he did respect her opinions, even if he never admitted as much. The fact that she was alone tonight, their liaison unconsummated, was proof enough of that. And there was his strangely admirable sense of honor. He had faced Lord Oliver in a duel rather than call Lady Oliver a liar.
Jane sighed. Ah, yes, she liked him well enough. And, of course, there was the artistic, more sensitive side to his nature, which she had glimpsed that night in the music room. And his intelligence. And his sense of humor. All the many fascinating facets of his character that he kept carefully hidden away from the world.
And there was their mutual desire for each other. Jane felt no doubt that it was mutual. If she had been just any woman, any prospective mistress to him, he would have sent her on her way as soon as she raised the question of a contract. But she must remember—always, for as long as their liaison lasted—that it was only passion he felt. Sexual passion. She must never mistake the feelings of the Duke of Tresham for love.
It was not going to be easy to be his mistress.
Jane slept on the sofa and dreamed of Charles. Her closest friend. Her beau. Like someone from another lifetime. He was sitting in the rose arbor at Candleford with her, telling her about his sister’s new baby and telling her too how they would set up their own nursery as soon as they were able after her twenty-fifth birthday freed her to marry whomever she chose.
She awoke with wet cheeks. She had deliberately not thought of Charles after her flight from home. She had succeeded all too well. Why had she not thought of going to him now that she had the money with which to travel? Was he still at his sister’s in Somersetshire? Or had he returned to Cornwall? She could have found a way to reach him without being caught. He would surely know what to do, how to protect her, how to hide her if necessary. Most important of all, he would believe her story. He knew how desperately eager the new Earl of Durbury was that she marry his son. He knew how despicable Sidney could be, especially when he was in his cups.
She could still do it, of course. She had been paid yesterday before leaving Dudley House. She had not yet become the Duke of Tresham’s mistress. She could leave before he came back and avoid the necessity of giving up her virtue.
The very idea of such a fate would surely have brought on a fit of the vapors just a few weeks ago. Now, with surprising belatedness, she had thought of a decent alternative.
But the trouble was that she did not love Charles. Not as a woman should love her husband. Not as Mama had loved Papa. She had always known it, of course. But she had always wanted to love Charles because she liked him and because he loved her.
If she went to him now, if he somehow extricated her from the tangle she was in, she would be bound to him for life. She would not have minded just a few weeks before. Friendship and affection would have been enough.
No longer.
Was being the duke’s mistress preferable to honorable marriage with Charles, then?
It was a question Jane could not answer to her own satisfaction before his grace’s arrival in the middle of the morning. It was a question whose answer she recognized with some reluctance after she had heard his knock and had opened the sitting room door to see him step into the hall and hand his hat and gloves and cane to Mr. Jacobs. He brought all his energy and restlessness and sheer maleness with him—and Jane realized she had missed him.
“Jane.” He strode toward her, and they retreated into the sitting room together. “He won. By scarcely the length of his horses’ noses. He was behind a full length coming into the final bend, but he accelerated into it and took Berriwether by surprise. They thundered into Brighton almost neck and neck. But Ferdinand won, and three-quarters of the members of White’s have gone into mourning.”
“He came to no harm, then?” she said. “I am glad.” She might have commented again on how foolish such races were, but he looked so very pleased with himself. And she really was glad. Lord Ferdinand Dudley was a pleasant, charming young man.
“No. No harm.” He frowned suddenly. “He does not choose his servants wisely, though. He has a valet who does not allow for the fact that a man sometimes turns his head without warning while being shaved. And he has a groom who allows half the world into his stable and carriage house the day before a race in order to admire the tools of his master’s trade. There is no proving who arranged for Ferdinand’s death during that race.”
“But you suspect Sir Anthony Forbes or one of his brothers?” she asked him. She seated herself on the sofa, and he sat beside her.
“More than suspect.” He looked about the room as he spoke. “It is the way they work. I did something to their sister; they do something to my brother. They will be sorry, of course. I will deal with them. What have you done to this room?”
She was relieved at the change of subject.
“I have just removed a few things,” she told him. “All the cushions and a few of the ornaments. I have ideas for extensive changes to both this room and the bedchamber. I would not b
e needlessly extravagant, but even so the cost would be considerable.”
“Quincy will take care of the bills,” he said with a careless wave of one hand. “But how long is all this going to take, Jane? I have the feeling you are not going to allow me to bed you until everything is to your liking, are you?”
“No,” she said with what she hoped was suitable firmness. “A week should be sufficient once the order is given. I have spoken to Mr. Jacobs, and he says the suppliers will fall all over themselves to be prompt as soon as he mentions your name.”
The duke did not answer her. Obviously the truth of that statement was no surprise to him.
“Let us discuss this contract, then,” he said. “Apart from carte blanche to tear down my house and rebuild it, what are your demands, Jane? I will pay you a monthly salary five times higher than what I paid you as a nurse. You will have your own carriage and as many servants as you deem necessary. You may clothe yourself in as much finery as you wish with all the accessories and direct the bills to me. I will be generous with jewels, though I would prefer to buy those myself. I will take on full responsibility for the support and future placement of any children of our liaison. Have I missed anything?”
Jane had turned suddenly cold. Her own naïveté quite mortified her.
“How many children do you presently have?” Foolishly she had not thought of becoming with child.
His eyebrows rose. “You can always be relied upon to ask unaskable questions, Jane,” he said. “I have none. Most women who make their living by such arrangements as this know how to prevent conception. I assume you do not. You are a virgin, are you not?”
It took a great deal of fortitude to keep her eyes from sliding away from his very direct gaze. She wished blushes were as much within her control.
“Yes.” She kept her chin up. “There is one expense you do not need to burden yourself with. I do not need a carriage.”
“Why not?” He rested one elbow on the back of the sofa and set his closed fist against his mouth. His dark eyes did not look away from hers. “You will need to shop, Jane, and get out to see the sights. It would be unwise to rely upon me to take you about. Shopping bores me. When I come here, I will be far more eager to take you to bed than out for a drive.”
