Though her tone was gentle, her words nonetheless cut Hester to the quick. “What can you expect? I despise that man. Passionately,” she added for emphasis.
“Yes. I know. I must say, though, he seems a rather gentle sort of man. Very like his son.”
“Does he?” Hester rolled her eyes. “No doubt there are those who could find something good and gentle in even the most despicable thief or bully. Or murderer.”
“A murderer? Oh, come now, Hester. You will never deal well with this situation if you persist in such histrionics.”
“Histrionics? Histrionics! After that… that simpering display you just gave, you have the nerve to call my reaction histrionics?”
“I do not simper,” the older woman stated, her voice as mild as Hester’s was shrill. She laid aside her hat and reticule and removed her kidskin gloves. “Would you like tea as we continue this discussion?”
Hester huffed out an angry breath. “I don’t want tea. Nor am I of a mind to discuss that… that man.”
“I see. And what about the other one, that Mr. Hawke? Did you wish to discuss him?”
At Verna’s gentle, concerned look, all the fire drained out of Hester. It was impossible to stay angry with her, and really, Verna was not the source of Hester’s fury. So she told her—not the details of her night with Adrian Hawke. Just that she had done it, given her virginity to a man for no reason other than that she wanted to. No promise of marriage. No promise of love.
“At least in that part I am nothing like my mother,” Hester concluded. She hugged a fringed pillow to her chest. “I expect nothing from him, least of all love.”
Verna had listened to everything with an absorbed expression on her face. “I suppose that’s a good thing, not to expect anything from him.”
“Of course it is,” Hester said. Then, “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Oh, it’s only that strong emotions like love add another dimension to the physical act of making love. Something impossible to describe. Impossible to imagine.” She smiled and sighed. “Impossible to explain. You just have to experience it to know what I mean.”
Hester threw her hands up in the air. “Why are you telling me this? You who have always been the sensible one. Do you want me to turn into my mother, falling in love over and over again? Getting hurt every single time? Growing more desperate with each lover?”
“Your mother rejected more men than rejected her.”
Hester frowned. “That’s hardly comforting to hear.”
“My dear. I cannot say whether this Mr. Hawke is worthy of your love. Certainly he is a handsome, charming sort of fellow. And he’s clearly besotted with you.”
A sudden rattle of thunder heralded the onslaught of rain, angry pellets beating against the diamond-paned windows. Hester scowled at the blurred window glass. How well she knew that feeling of futility, the wasted time and energy of beating against that which you can never affect.
From the hall came a firm knocking. Hester and Verna both paused to listen as the housekeeper answered the door. A man’s voice, followed by the slip-slip of the old housekeeper’s slow approach. But Hester knew who it was, and by the smug expression on Verna’s face, so did she.
“Mr. Adrian Hawke,” the housekeeper said. Verna smiled and straightened her fichu. “By all means show him in.”
They both stood, but where Verna was calm and obviously pleased, what Hester felt was panic. “You have the heart of a procurer,” she hissed.
That only made Verna laugh. Not a procurer, she thought as she observed Hester’s reaction to the tall, rakish Mr. Hawke, and his reaction to her. Not a procurer but, rather, a cupid.
CHAPTER 18
Adrian insisted on seeing Hester home in a hired hack.
“No one would expect me to ride outside, given this storm,” he said when she protested.
“No one expects you to see me home at all.”
“I expect it of me.”
They stood on Verna’s front stoop waiting for a lull in the downpour before dashing for the vehicle. “If you refuse to let me ride inside with you, I suppose I’ll just trail behind, getting soaked to the skin.”
She looked away from his darkly smiling face. Just the mention of his skin, soaked or otherwise, conjured up the wickedest curl of heat in her belly.
“But there’s a more urgent reason,” he went on, leaning nearer and murmuring in her ear.
Though her heart felt as if it had already stuttered to a stop, Hester tempted fate further and glanced sidelong at him. “And what is that?”
His eyes searched hers, too hot, too intimate. Then he lowered that burning gaze to her mouth—her suddenly dry-as-cotton mouth.
“I need to kiss you, Hester. If I don’t kiss you very soon, I may die of frustration.” He looked back into her mesmerized eyes. “You don’t want me to die of frustration, do you? Think of everything we’d miss…”
Hester’s fevered brain tried to think. They were inside a hack with the canvas shades tied closed against the storm and the rest of the soggy city. It was just them in their own damp little world. Though they rattled through the center of town, they were utterly alone. No one would ever know if they took advantage of the situation.
Oh, but she was too bad. Yet acknowledging that fact did nothing to prevent the inevitable. From sitting beside him, to sitting on his lap, to reclining on the seat with him half covering her, it took but three blocks for him to have her melting beneath him. My, but the man certainly knew how to kiss a girl senseless. He possessed her mouth with his, heating her lips, stroking inside, claiming all in his path, and more.
But other than his intimate kisses and the tantalizing heat of his body’s weight upon hers, he did not press his advantage. Her legs fell open to let his hips nestle there. She arched her aching breasts against his chest, needing that closeness, and she let her hands discover his damp hair, his wide shoulders, and the powerful muscles of his back.
He could have taken her there with the driver mere feet away and only the sounds of the storm as a buffer. She was that mad with wanting him.
But he was the circumspect one. When they passed Leicester Square he pulled them both upright and began to straighten the utter disarray of her clothing, while she sat there, still stunned by the swift violence of her emotions. He smoothed first her petticoats and then her aqua muslin skirt.
“Are you going out tonight?” he asked, as if nothing had just happened.
“I… um… Yes. To… To the Caldecorts’ ball.”
His nimble fingers moved up her bodice, fastening a loose button, then arranging her fichu along the neckline. She caught her breath when he smoothed it down, his fingers nearly grazing the overheated skin of her chest. He raised his vivid gaze from her exposed flesh to her eyes. He didn’t move his hand though. “Do you have to attend that ball?”
Hester could hardly breathe, she was so aroused. But she knew her duty to her clients. “I have to be there—”
She broke off with a gasp when one of his fingertips—just the edge of his nail—slid down the slope of her breast. Lower it dipped, to the shadowed crevice the fichu was meant to cover, then up again, torturing the other breast in the same way. Her nipples hardened to aching points, needing his touch to relieve them. But she knew that touch would only be another, more exquisite form of torture.
“I need to see you again, Hester. Alone.” His voice had gone husky with his own need.
She was mad with wanting him, shaking with it. Still she recognized that he too felt some portion of that same yearning. He felt it for her. “Maybe… tomorrow?”
“Tonight.” He hooked his finger in the lowest part of her vee-shaped neckline, tugging, then bent forward and planted a kiss in that deep, warm crevice.
With a faint cry Hester arched toward his mouth, seeking more and moaning when he drew away.
“Damn, but I want to devour you,” he growled. He pushed away from her but his ferocious gaze devoured her still. “I want you, Hester. Just
as you want me. How long do you plan to make me wait?”
“I don’t want to wait at all!” she burst out, then turned scarlet at so blatant an admission.
A muscle tensed in his jaw, tensed and released. “Then invite me home with you.”
Oh, how Hester wanted to do just that. But there were the Dobbses to consider. Her mother’s housekeeper might have been complicit in the arrangements necessary to Isabelle’s romantic interludes. But Hester didn’t think hers would be nearly so approving. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Then later. Send your servants out on an errand.”
“I can’t.” Hester shook her head. “It’s too difficult. Too risky.”
He was silent a moment. Outside the rain still pelted down, isolating them and their urgent dilemma from the more trivial problems of the rest of the world. Only when the hack pulled up before her cottage on Portland Street did Adrian speak. He sounded almost angry, though she suspected it was more frustration than true anger.
“If you think to tease me, heed my warning: that torment can burn us both. I’ll be at the Caldecort ball tonight. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. But be prepared for a level of attention you have not previously received. You will not sit out any dances tonight, Hester. I’ll not allow it. We’ll dance and dance and dance until it is too torturous for us to dance that near each other again.”
He picked up a fold of her skirt and rubbed it between his ringer and thumb. “People may notice. People may talk. But I don’t care. Do you?”
She jerked her skirt away. “Isn’t it enough that I have—” She broke off, shaking her head. “Would you ruin me before the very people from whom I earn my livelihood? Are you that selfish? That cruel?”
“No!” He snatched up her hand. “I’m not a cruel man. But I am a desperate one.” His voice grew lower. “I want to make love to you, Hester, as soon as I can, as often as I can. Do you understand?”
Though his hand manacled her wrist, Hester could not fight him. The trouble was, she did understand. Slowly she nodded. “I’ll try to think of something.”
Only when the driver knocked at the door did Adrian release her hand. He climbed out and assisted her down, but he let the driver deliver her to her door beneath his sagging umbrella. He didn’t notice the rain as he untethered his horse from behind the hack and rode off through the sodden city. He was able even to disregard the discomfort of riding astride in his state of semi-arousal—which seemed of late to have become semipermanent.
Tonight he would have Hester to himself. Some way, somewhere they would carve out a few hours of privacy, and they would once again climb the heights and plumb the depths of pure physical pleasure.
He smiled and lifted his face to the gray sky and slackening rain. He knew one thing about Hester that she didn’t know about herself. She thrived on the danger of discovery. She looked prudish and demure, yet hid a shocking beauty and a mighty passion beneath that facade. She said no, yet melted beneath his hand. She denied the possibility of a tete-a-tete, yet followed him into shady bowers and rain-shrouded hacks.
She professed a fear of discovery, but Adrian had no doubt that she’d be as eager as ever to be enticed tonight. Who knew, maybe in a hidden niche she would succumb to him, or behind a heavy curtain, or even in the shadows beyond a well-lit terrace with the sounds of the party all around them.
He only hoped it was not the danger that aroused her so much as it was him.
From inside her own carriage in the queuing line outside the Caldecorts’ brightly lit mansion, Hester knotted her fingers in her lap. Had she not had on gloves, by now all her nails would be gnawed to the quick. She was that nervous. The carriage moved forward another length.
Soon enough she’d be disembarking. Then what?
How had it happened that without her knowledge and quite against her wishes her life had spiraled so completely out of control? It was all Adrian Hawke’s fault. Because of him the focus of her life had veered from seeing her three students well matched and married off, to finding time to indulge her heretofore unknown carnal appetites.
Here she was, as lost to wickedness as any woman ever had been.
Perhaps that was why she’d again dressed so severely tonight. She’d even worn her spectacles, for heaven’s sake, and she hated them. But that wouldn’t deter Adrian Hawke. He saw right through her disguise. Indeed, the man saw things in her, possibilities—realities—that no one had ever detected before.
She stepped down and hurried across the still damp gravel and into the brittle gaiety of the noisy ball. Waiting for her was a distraught Dulcie, being comforted by Charlotte. When Hester spied George in a corner haranguing his mother, she understood. It was to be one of those evenings.
Dulcie’s miserable gaze fastened at once on Hester, as did her trembling grip. “Leonard Smythe, Lord Pennington’s heir, has made an offer,” she said without preamble. “And George says he will agree unless I come up with something better by Monday. Leonard Smythe,” she wailed. “I don’t even like him!”
George came up, a scowl forewarning his mood, and that fast Hester reached the limits of her patience. Without weighing her words she rounded on him. “So you plan to waste the investment you’ve made in Dulcie by handing her off to the first fool who waves a few pounds in your face? Have you never considered how pathetic this makes you look, George? How inept and what a poor dealmaker?”
He sputtered a full thirty seconds before getting out a word. “Mind your own business.”
“Dulcie is my business.”
“Then find her a husband so I don’t have to!”
Around them people were beginning to stare, but Hester didn’t care. Everyone knew what George Bennett was like. Viscount or no, he was an ass.
Dulcie, however, was more easily intimidated by her brother.
Fortunately Lady Ainsley could not abide this sort of public spectacle. “George. Be quiet!” she hissed, plucking at his sleeve.
He threw off her arm and lurched toward Hester as if to shove her out of his way so he could get to Dulcie.
Though George was an uncouth lout, normally Hester would not fear physical harm from him. But he reeked of liquor and that always made him meaner and more unpredictable. Still, she was not of a mind or a mood to back down.
“Don’t you dare lay a finger on me,” she warned, steel in her voice and in her narrowed stare.
He loomed over her, the epitome of the worst the ton had to offer: title without class; privilege without moral substance. But he didn’t touch her. He knotted his hands into threatening fists and glared at her. “What you need,” he muttered in an ugly voice, “is something up your arse besides that stick.”
His mother gasped. So did Dulcie and Charlotte, though they probably didn’t understand the slur any better than Hester did. That it was a coarse slur, however, was unmistakable. Without pausing to think, Hester slapped him.
Except that she missed.
Thrown off balance, she stumbled forward. But she caught herself in time to see why her palm had missed its target. Someone had spun the man around and jgrked him up onto his toes.
Adrian Hawke. Where had he come from?
“You bloody ass,” Adrian swore at George. Holding the man by the lapels, he shook him like a dog would shake a rat. “Still the same damned bully you always were.”
Again he shook the man. “It’s time someone broke you of that habit, and I’m just the man to do it.”
In the foyer everyone had gone silent. From outside came the excited voices of people just arriving and pushing to enter. Beyond, in the ballroom proper music played and the buzz of voices gaily carried on.
But even those sounds dimmed as the news traveled like lightning. “Fight in the foyer. Fight in the foyer.”
Hester wanted nothing more than to punch George Bennett in the nose herself. But she knew she must put an end to this fiasco before it became an out-and-out brawl. Already Lady Ainsley had switched her fury from her drunken fool of a
son to Adrian. While Adrian shook the sputtering George, Lady Ainsley beat on Adrian’s back with her fan.
“Let him go, you brute. You bully. You… You…” Lady Ainsley sputtered like her son. “You lowly Scottish bastard!”
Incensed, Hester snatched Lady Ainsley’s fan and shoved her backward, right into Adrian’s uncle, who swiftly hustled her away. Then Hester rounded on Adrian and George. “Let him go,” she demanded.
At least Adrian heard her. He didn’t release the man who’d begun to make a most unhealthy choking noise, but he did turn his head to look at her. “Are you all right?”
She drew herself up, excruciatingly aware of the morbid attention of the encircling crowd. She must pick her way very carefully if she were to preserve her reputation.
“Of course I am all right. But I would be even better if you had allowed me to slap him for his impertinence. His cruel remarks were, after all, aimed at me.”
A muscle ticked in Adrian’s jaw. An angry muscle. “I was not raised to ignore the plight of a lady.”
“I appreciate that, and your mother is to be commended. Nonetheless, I believe you should let him go now. Before you strangle him,” she added. George’s face was very red, almost purple.
She didn’t think Adrian was going to do it. If anything, his hands seemed to tighten and George let out a gagging sort of whimper. Then all at once Adrian loosened his hold and stepped back, flicking his hands as if to shake off the foulness of George Bennett’s touch.
For his part, George collapsed in a boneless heap, sucking huge draughts of air into his deprived lungs. His mother rushed over, wailing her grievances, while around them the hushed silence gave way to excited chatter.
“He nearly killed the fellow.”
“What was that all about?”
“Please, please. Disperse to the ballroom,” Lady Caldecort pleaded, fluttering about, making ineffectual shooing motions with her hands.
“Strike up the music,” Lord Caldecort ordered the butler. Then he turned to Adrian, drew himself up to his full height and glared up at him. “I say, young man, I do not allow fighting inside my house.”
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