She could see the tremor run through George, and unthinkingly took his huge strong hand. It dwarfed her own, but she was not afraid. Rather, she reveled in the contact, the smooth, hard lightly-callused fingers, the barely suppressed power. The tenderness as he returned the pressure. The incredible heat and spark which coiled up her arm like the Queen of the Nile’s asp, causing her to shiver herself.
"I’ll do it. I’ll help you," she said softly. "But I suspect you’re really making this offer to assist me."
He returned to his gruff and blunt character once more, changing his accent the way a chameleon altered its appearance.
"Nonsense. Fine high-stepper like yourself with the most fabulous tits and arse, stands to reason I want ye to display yer wares to all and sundry. They catch sight of you on stage for the entertainment, they’ll be diving out of the pub and into here with their tongues hanging out."
She coloured up once more, but said, "Thank you for the compliment. But I hope I can make you proud by acting well too."
"Bugger the acting. The tits are the thing."
She shook her head gently. "The play’s the thing, as the Bard said. I know you love this, for all your bluster and swagger. What I would really like to know is why you’re working so hard to play a role in front of everyone all the time? The man in the alley that first night we met, the one in your home, is a different one from the George in this theatre, or even in the pub. And a different one again from the one who spends time with his friends. Very upper-class friends, from what I saw, I might add.
"But," she said quickly, when he opened his mouth to refute her words in no uncertain and rather vulgar terms, "we have no time for this discussion now. And in any event it really isn’t any of my business. I cry your pardon for being impertinent. So come, take me through the key points. Walk me through it, as it were."
"I’ll need to find Hugo."
Then he remembered that he was being sought by Bart, and Bart was his understudy. It stood to reason that Hugo would go help with Maggie. So might Bart. He knew with a sinking heart that he had undoubtedly gone off to nurse the injured Maggie after her clumsy fall from the stage.
Damn if the jade hadn’t been drunk, he thought to himself with anger and mild surprise. She had sworn she had left off the Blue Ruin, yet the stench of gin as they had gone past with her unconscious form had been unmistakable.
And why had she been alone in the theatre at that time of day? If they were supposed to be rehearsing, all the others would have been about.
But he had scheduled no extra rehearsals. Nor was there any new play in the offing except The Tempest, which he had been toying with ever since meeting Miranda.
Of course, it had been her name which had suggested it to him. That and the fact that he had always wondered about the logistics of trying to create a storm at sea on a plain old wooden stage. Maybe Maggie had been having some sort of romantic tryst?
George shook his head. All this introspection was not going to get the play sorted. If Hugo wasn’t there, he was just going to have to make Bart do it.
Or be Antony himself, he thought in a fit of daring. Acting opposite the gorgeous Miranda might well prove his undoing, however. He had no idea how he could keep up the mask of indifference to the young beauty if he had to touch her, pretend to be her lover onstage….
At that thought, his heart hammered in his chest. There might never be a better chance to get closer to her. The Devil take the consequences. The show had to go on. And what could be the harm in allowing himself one night of fantasy and bliss?
CHAPTER SIX
The spark of sexual tension which was always between George and Miranda nearly burst into a conflagration as he took her through the role of Cleopatra, leading her from place to place by the hand, showing her the numbered and coloured dots he had pasted to the floor as an aide de memoire for each of the actors.
"So you’re red. But of course moving you from place to place is the problem. I tell everyone to start moving on a certain word as a type of trigger."
She nodded.
She had only half a mind on the words, for she knew them by heart. The trouble was the movement and the feeling, for it was one thing reading them off a page or reciting them. But on stage she had to embue them with meaning. In the world of Ancient Rome and Egypt she was a regal queen, and Antony her lover. She therefore had to act and hold her body in the appropriate way. Behave in a loverlike fashion.
Aye, there was the rub, for she had little experience in that regard. She wondered at the temerity of women who could do that sort of thing. Oh, she had had her fair share of men trying to grab her ever since she had begun to mature into a woman. She had a good country bounce to her, as the men said, for all her family were well to do. If she was not quite as intelligent as her sister Juliet, she was most certainly the more desirable of the two from the male standpoint of wanting a soft gentle woman who was not a bluestocking.
Juliet’s histories of England and knowledge of the classics would have put an Oxford scholar to shame. She had ended up with a good man, though he had not known of her accomplishments for a considerable time after they had wed.
By contrast, Miranda had adored literature and poetry, and her love of language now came to the fore. Her own natural exuberance and the rich rhythm of the language, the wonderful cadence of the great playwright’s blank verse, filled the stage.
"Excellent," George praised sincerely at the end of the first recitation. "So your cue to appear on stage is ‘The triple pillar of the world transform’d/Into a strumpet’s fool; behold and see.’ Make sure you appear on the word strumpet.
"Now stress on the word ‘love,’ for you disbelieve him and are playing the coquette. Don’t forget, at the word ‘thus’ he will press his attentions to win you around, to embrace or even kiss you."
That jolted her out of her composure in an instant. "Kiss?" she squeaked.
"Yes, of course. Kiss. They’re supposed to be lovers, remember? What do you expect them to do, shake hands?" he mocked.
She shrugged her shoulders and hardly dared look at his handsome face.
A hint of devilry allowed him to fall prey to temptation. "Unless you’d rather he did do something with his hands?"
"No, no!" she gasped. Then she realised he was teasing. "It’s not that much of a problem really, except I’ve never willingly kissed a man."
He frowned. That one simple sentence was loaded with all sorts of possibilities he didn’t want to even begin to contemplate. Had she been forced? Was she one of the ladies who preferred her own sex? Surely it wasn’t possible that someone as lovely as her, raised in the streets of London, could be unsullied. She had been working as an orange seller, for heaven’s sake, women notorious for their lightness of skirt and bestiality of tastes.
He stared at her. No, it wasn’t possible she liked it rough. And her blushes told him that the more he stared at her, treated her like a woman instead of a co-worker, the more embarrassed she was becoming.
One thing was for sure. Very few orange wenches ever blushed. Certainly not either of the pair he had seen her consorting with. They were the worst bit of rough trade he had ever come across. He would ban them from the theatre if they ever turned up again. They had nearly emptied the theatre last time, there had been that many queuing up for a swive or pull of their pudding.
"It’ll be all right. Just hold still and it’ll be over in an instant."
"Aye, but I’m supposed to, well, look the part, am I not? And with the um, sultry costume..."
"Yes?"
"He’s going to have to touch me, is he not?"
"Yes, in this scene and others."
"Then you’d better to it."
George gaped, and his throat felt as parched as the Nubian desert. "Do what?" he managed to rasp out.
"You know the words without the book. Put it down and let’s do the scene from the beginning. And you, well, you know. Be Antony, my, um, lover," she said with a blush.
"
Hugo will do it differently because he and Maggie have an um, understanding."
"And do you have an um, understanding with anyone?" she asked quietly.
George considered lying to her, but shook his head. He resorted to his off-puttingly brusque personality. "I have an entire stable full of whore and actresses. Why bother? I take what I need and move on to the next doxy. Don’t buy the cow if the milk is for free."
She gritted her teeth but said nothing. For one thing, she knew George was lying. For all the women he had in his life, not a single one of them had ever said a word against him. In fact, from what she could tell, none of them had ever shared a bed or so much as a tiddle.
Not that some of them didn’t long to. In fact, it was a common cause of complaint against George, even as they praised him for his kindness. All that male talent going to waste. Hung like a hunter and all, had been the most common and least vulgar phrase Miranda had been able to comprehend.
There was also the confusing fact that he never took a share of their wages for all the good living they had in the brothel and bath house.
"Only don’t tell no one, or else every whore in London will want to be working for him," she had been cautioned.
"In that case, I shall not be encouraging infidelity by asking you to recreate the role with me now. And if what you just said is true, then you have no notion of fidelity anyway. So even if you have just lied to me and have a paramour somewhere, I shall not be tempting you into any sin you have not already fallen prey to long ago."
George felt completely winded as he gazed down at Miranda. No, indeed, she was completely wrong on that score. She was indeed tempting him. And sin as he had known it had never been like this. So sweet. So enticing.
He had all to do not to kiss her senseless, take her right then and there on the stage. But perhaps that was the pith of this orange seller--her seeming innocence was her purposeful lure.
But as he put his hands on her body to embrace her, saying gruffly, "I’ll take you around the waist like this, you look a bit begrudging, then I’ll pull you up into my kiss like so," he began to believe that she really was untouched by a man. How was it possible?
Well, London was full of impoverished gentlewomen who had come up from the country trying to earn a living after fate had dealt them a cruel hand, especially during and after the war with Napoleon. She was just one of thousands. And she was here in his embrace...
"Then you linger in my arms, but remember, you are imperious, unpredictable, mercurial even. And I am totally smitten by you."
Miranda blinked in astonishment at the words. But before she could read his expression, he had turned away and found Hugo’s spot on the floor.
Now once more in the role of Antony, head and shoulders thrown back like a stalwart Roman general’s, he waited for her to begin.
She closed her eyes and summoned up a mental picture of Georgina Jerome at her most haughtily flirtatious. She recalled her body, mannerisms, the tilt of the head, timbre of her voice.
She massaged her hands together slowly as her sister had taught her to relax herself and get more into communion with her own body.
All of her body, she thought, flushing red once more. She could feel a throbbing in her lower belly which she had learned from her timid explorations betokened pleasure. The warm rush of sensation was what a woman was supposed to feel upon receiving attentions from her lover, she knew.
But George was not a lover. On the other hand, on this stage, here and now, he was. She would need to respond to him as such in her role. She thought once more of Georgina, and added the delight of her heart pounding, that sense of breathless anticipation she had read about in novels. The kind of sensation she felt whenever she knew she would soon see George again. A heady warmth thrust right up into her at the thought of his hands coming around her again in a few minutes, his lips upon her cheek as he portrayed a man in love.
She came forward, all woman, no longer little Miranda Lyons Dane, raised humbly in Dorset, but Cleopatra, who had once ruled a great kingdom in her own right and won the love of the great Julius Caesar, the incredible general Marc Antony, and now challenged the might of the noble Augustus.
George watched the transformation in awe. In the few moments she had stood totally still in place with her eyes closed, making no motion save the odd rubbing of her hands, he had thought her about to bolt. To tell him that she could never do this in three hours.
And he had his doubts too. For Hugo was now an unknown factor, in sexual thrall to Maggie and not a particularly good actor, though one of the better ones he had seen hereabouts.
Miranda coming forward now was like a powerful force of nature unleashed. George nearly swallowed his tongue as she delivered her first line, every inch the queen. And quean, for her whole posture, set of mannerisms, seemed almost designed to inflame the passions. It was a good thing they had had so many eunuchs in Egyptian service, he thought ruefully as his flesh bolted to attention like a cavalry horse at the charge. Otherwise the kingdom would have come to a standstill.
"If it be love indeed, tell me how much."
He managed to get out his line, "There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned," in a breathless rush, and forced himself to concentrate. A surreptitious adjustment of himself in his suddenly too constricting trousers had him able to draw a deep steadying breath at last.
Then he let himself follow her lead. In the same way that Antony allowed his paramour to lead him around by the nose, or other organ much lower down, he was now cajoling, doing anything he could to get on her good side.
"I’ll set a boundary how far to be beloved," Miranda said with a sultry glare.
"Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth."
They pretended that the messenger arrived with a missive from Rome whom Antony wished to ignore.
"Nay, hear them, Antony:
Your wife Fulvia, perchance, is angry; or, who knows
If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent
His powerful mandate to you, ‘Do this, or this;
Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that;
Perform ’t, or else we damn thee.’"
"How, my love!"
She tossed her head petulantly, giving a little stamp of her foot for good measure. "Perchance! nay, and most like;
You must not stay here longer; your dismission
Is come from Caesar; therefore hear it, Antony.
Where’s Fulvia’s process? Caesar’s I would say? Both?
Call in the messengers. As I am Egypt’s queen,
Thou blushest, Antony, and that blood of thine
Is Caesar’s homager; else so thy cheek pays shame
When shrill-tongu’d Fulvia scolds. The messengers!"
She clapped her hands and waved the imaginary men forward from behind the proscenium arch. Her gestures, her whole body posture, they were all perfect, he thought in awe.
George now approached her more closely, and said in an earnest tone, "Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space."
He gently took her wrists in his huge hands and raised them. Though she still pretended to be furious with him, as he looped her hands around his neck she became more and more yielding, her body fitting into his as though they were designed for one another, for all the difference in their heights.
"Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life
Is to do thus."
George now had his arms fully around Miranda, one hand on the small of her back and the tops of her buttocks, the other riding the gentle valley between her shoulder blades, his long fingers stroking up the nape of her neck, caressing her hair.
Now it was Miranda’s turn to be rendered almost speechless by the sensuality of the contact, and the heated pressure boring into her belly, though there were still a couple of inches between their bodies.
"When such a mutual pair
/> And such a twain can do it, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless."
Now his lips began to descend upon hers, but she shoved his chest hard, taking him completely aback. Her next words were dripping with fury and she turned one shoulder to him in a most insulting manner as she tossed her curls.
"Excellent falsehood!
Why did he marry Fulvia and not love her?
I’ll seem the fool I am not; Antony
Will be himself."
Now George found himself trying to mollify Miranda in earnest, the fear of her displeasure so genuine he felt as though an iron band of despair had been locked around his chest and was slowly being tightened.
The Rakehell Regency Romance Series Boxed Set 6 Page 45
