by Bianca Bloom
The Rake’s Return
To Steal a Groom
The Scoundrel’s Son
Free and Fetching Ladies Box Set
The Bride who Vanished
The Bride who Strayed
Afterword
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Sneak Peek
Please enjoy the following preview from The Scoundrel’s Son, also by Bianca Bloom.
St Petersburg is a city of theatres. It has a beauty that is European, but a savagery that comes directly from the Russian steppes.
Much like the man who was sitting next to me in the booth, a wild-haired Russian prince who still looked bushy and coarse from the cold outside. The man was built with a strength and crudity to his body, and yet his features were so remarkably fine that he could have made a model for any of the city’s aspiring sculptors.
No temptation could have been better designed to threaten my virtue.
The lights were low, and to any observers we must have looked much like any other young couple in a booth. In fact, I was supposed to be chaperoned, but the man had managed to dispatch the lady charged with overseeing me quite efficiently. There was little that I knew about the whereabouts of my abigail, but I felt in my heart that she would not be attending me in the booth until well after the final curtain fell.
And now the man was whispering, his voice subtle and insistent as the tense and dark music, now swelling into a crescendo. I didn’t know the man’s name – only that he was a prince, and that he clearly had no regard for a young woman’s dignity.
The tones of whispering turned his voice into a growl of sorts. “You must contrive to drop to the floor,” he commanded me.
My legs trembled beneath my long, silken gown, far less flimsy than the sort of thing that was fashionable in England. The skirts were full and hung loose on me after dropping from a fitted bodice. Though the lower part of the dress was not at all revealing, my body underneath it was warm, already sticky with longing for the stranger. In spite of my most sincere efforts not to move a single muscle, my legs fluttered. Squeezing them shut, I closed my eyes for the briefest of moments, willing myself to mentally walk back into the world of godliness and solitude.
“I cannot,” I murmured to him. “What, act as if I am falling?”
The solemnity of his tone was unchanged. “Or as if you have dropped a jewel, or lost your fan.”
Knowing that opera viewers all around us were observing, I kept a nervous smile on my lips, my heart fluttering along with the tormented soprano aria that had just begun. Some were looking at the young girl singing the solo, her bosom rising and falling as she strode about the stage, singing something nearly unintelligible. Both the actress and the opera were the sensation of all Petersburg, but there were plenty of opera-goers who were interested only in the crowd. They were present purely to chat with their aristocratic friends. Certainly, if I ducked down, they might see me and whisper about me behind their glittering fans. After all, they did not attend for the music – these individuals were there to see and be seen.
Or, perhaps, some of them may have come to the opera house to embark upon the same dark line of misdeeds that I desired. The thought set my skin into an even deeper blush, and I was glad that the lights were at least low. Could there be another pair of unmarried people sitting in this theatre, planning a liaison, mired in sin and distraction? Surely not. I must be the lowest of the low, the most wanton of all women present. Surely no other girl could be thinking about a deep wish for rough hands on her fair skin. My dress was crimson, but my skin must have been a rosy red that was distinctly unflattering.
The prince didn’t seem to find it so. He growled again. “I care not. No booth is higher than ours, and none shall see you.”
In that matter, it turned out, he was correct. We did have the highest booth in the entire opera-house, but that hardly mattered. Attempting not to move my lips, I tried to defend my honor in fluent but mispronounced Russian. “They may not see, but they shall suspect. The wiser ones shall know what is to be if we two disappear from view.”
His voice was now nearly choked. “Let them know.”
I wanted to agree to his suggestion, but the notion of such great scandal took my breath away. Though I was hardly in a position to remember my exact name, or my place in Russian society, I knew that my virginity was a highly valued commodity. And it was clear that the prince was a rake, and that his intentions toward me did not even contain the ghost of a gentleman’s honor. The idea of my fall becoming some twisted worm of an idea that all the young men of the city would think of as they were trying to find their own pleasure with hands and instruments, as I was informed they all did – no, my inner longing could not become such a public commodity.
And yet, since this rake could never cross my father’s threshold, any interaction of ours would have to be in public. He was publicly whispering to me, after all, and I was publicly shifting in my chair, attempting to talk myself out of making a very reckless decision.
After all, I was young, and this prince was not a true gentleman.
An observation that was confirmed by the way he grabbed my thin wrist through my opera gloves just as the soprano finished her aria. Most of the audience was distracted, and I was yanked forward, down onto the cold floor of the little booth.
For the first moments of applause, my body felt just as bombarded by sensation as the poor little soloist’s ears must have felt. The prince’s lips were already buried in my neck, tasting the flesh that had yearned for him so deeply I longed to douse out all feeling, but my legs and arms were positively massacred by the intensity of my surprise.
My body was on top of the prince’s, but if he had not held it there, I surely would have fallen in a great heap on the floor. It was already all I could do not to cry out, not to take one more moment to pretend that I wanted to make an honorable choice.
Because I knew that the prince, who was already starting to remove his own formal costume, had anything but honor in mind.
When I awoke, it was with the same hot and feverish feelings that had ended my dream. My body was rigid and pained, as it often was when I thought of mysterious Russian strangers, and my bosom was tender in the places where I had apparently been clutching at it.
My body was sweaty, and it had in fact gotten sticky. These dreams always contained my body’s frantic preparations for a physical congress which, in fact, was bound not to occur. Unlike many girls of eighteen years and two months, I knew exactly what a male’s member was meant to do on a wedding night – or after, or before. My mind was perfectly clear on the origin of children, and how unwanted children might be avoided – particularly after a wedding night. Even the details which some women doubtless never learned, involving fluids and the reduction and creation of friction, had been known to me for some years.
And yet no element of my own life had ever brought me close to such an encounter. My legs remained untainted and empty. There seemed to be nothing better for the dull and rote days of my little life than a love affair, and yet there was hardly ever a suitable man within a dozen miles of my home. The dreams simply left me sullen and exhausted, even less prepared to face my unacceptably long days.
Summer seemed to be the worst. Or perhaps it was this particular summer when my longing had reached a peak, and yet prospects of satiating that longing had never felt more bleak.
Worst of all were my feet. They were never beautiful at the best of times, but I had lately so often been incapacitated by such thoughts that they were quite sore. When I was overcome with passion – which could only ever happen when I was alone – I would arch and flex them, freeing my battered toes to stretch and feel.
But when it was time to do more of the tedious work of learning to be a young lady, they pained me greatly. There seemed to be nothing worse than starting the day b
y cramming one’s feet into a hideous and nonsensical pair of “elegant” shoes.
And there was a woman determined to get my feet into those sort of shoes. In fact, as I rubbed at my arches, I heard her coming up to my door with her little mincing steps. “Helena,” cried the woman I thought of as Dusty Dorothea, “Time for your breakfast!”
I wasn’t the sort of girl who could contain her groans.
In the past year, I had finally been sent out of the nursery. But my independence was not to last long. My old nurse, the woman who had seen me through every childhood illness and plight, including the death of my younger brother Alyosha, had taken ill and left service to live with her nephew off in Minsk.
Dusty Dorothea was hired by my mother, and I was quite unable to say her Christian name without adding “Dusty” on the front of it. Half the things she owned were so old they must have belonged to her dead parents, and the books she took down from the library were almost invariably so neglected as to have gathered a hearty coat of grime. Once I had tried to tell her that if nobody had read a given book in ten years, it was likely because the title itself could not hold the interest of the reader.
That particular comment got my knuckles rapped. Perhaps I deserved it, though that did not make my observation any less true.
Perhaps today I could tell Dusty Dorothea that it was, once again, my “time”, and that I was to be allowed to rest. Or perhaps I could use a sick headache as a reason for sleeping.
Lord knows I wasn’t to speak again of having nightmares. Dusty D. was quite immune to that particular excuse. The last time I had attempted to utilize it, her response had been, “Well, you must get to work then, so that thoughts of God and family put those ugly dreams straight out of your head.”
I saw through her response. She simply hadn’t believed me.
And actually, she wasn’t too likely to give credence to my stories of untimely bleeding or sick headaches, either.
The only thing likely to disturb my head was the soft down pillow that I had drawn over it, hoping to keep out the sounds of my persistent governess’s cries. She wasn’t going to actually enter the room, I knew, as her English sensibilities were a bit too fine. She would not stoop to the level of invading a young lady’s bedroom when the lady herself could be expected to rise.
Or when the lady’s mother was more than willing to perform that duty.
My own mother flew in, fabric samples under her arm, and promptly removed the pillow from my head. “Helena,” she said in English, “It is past time. You are to get up and dress yourself immediately.”
Unfortunately, neither my mother nor Dusty Dorothea believed in allowing an unmarried girl to be dressed by a lady’s maid.
I was spared for a few minutes while my mother walked over to my window, smiling at the view in spite of her vexation. We had been owners of our manor estate for seven years, my father having purchased it from a family of somewhat down-on-their-luck aristocrats, and yet my mother still looked on every corner as if it were new.
“The prospect from your room must be one of the best in the house,” remarked my mother, smiling down on the garden that she seemed constantly determined to change and improve.
“Perhaps another fountain . . .” she murmured, looking down again, and I could see her making calculations in her head as to how a new fountain should affect the rest of the garden.
To me, the window just seemed too bright. “I wish you would make me some better curtains, mama,” I muttered. “Sometimes there is a gap in these ones, and the light wakes me.”
“A very good thing, too,” said the mistress of the great house, walking over to my bed. She sat by my head and took one of my hands in both of hers, even as she berated me in accented but perfectly grammatical English. “Even your father is already awake. Who are you to lie abed when the entire household is at work? Rise, then, and be quick about it. Miss Dorothea has no time for you to be a lie-a-bed.”
“Mama,” I moaned, unable to keep myself from telling her the truth. “My feet are in terrible pain. Could you not beg my governess to allow me one day in slippers that do not feel like little instruments of torture?”
This brought a smile from my mother’s wide lips. Her skin, though pampered by the finest powders and lotions, showed her age. She had spent her entire childhood and early adulthood working in the sun, as she was fond of telling me.
“Lenotchka,” she said, starting to speak in her native Russian – a dialect that was both harsh and so utterly hers that it prompted me to lay my weary head on her lap. “When I was your age, I had been walking about for years in all weather. Little did I know of shoes, let alone of pain in my feet! We were taught not to speak of such things, and so I do believe we felt them less.”
I gazed up at her adoringly. “So, to you, it matters not whether my feet pain me.”
“That is true, my dear.”
Sitting up as if there were a spring in my back, I uttered an exclamation of joy. “So I do not need to take Dorothea’s awful lessons on posture! If you don’t care about my feet, I can avoid the lessons, as I shall have no need to accustom myself to the burden of formal shoes,” I said, my bright smile lightening my mental load.
My mother let go of my hand and looked into my eyes. “Lena.” Not quite as affectionate with her nicknames now, and even her Russian syntax seemed to have grown sterner. “We have spoken of this before. You are to do what Miss Dorothea asks of you. Or else she might not stay with us.”
Swinging my tired feet out of the bed, I grumbled in Russian, “That is exactly what I wish.”
One hand on my back, my mother guided me toward the wardrobe. She pulled out a simple morning dress and handed it to me – having grown up with few garments, my mother also grew impatient with my daily deliberations over what to wear. “I know that you wish your governess to leave, Lena. But you know full well you are not to voice that wish while any of your family members are present.”
With orders to me to be quick about my business, she left the room.
Waiting until she was gone, I spoke to the wardrobe. “I cannot abide one more day of being a lady. Dusty Dorothy must leave.”
Either she would leave, or I would have to leave. That was my conclusion. I could run off, perhaps after stealing some of my father’s fortune, and find myself a cheap situation in London. Then I would be free of the dull constraints of my rather non-social society life.
But when I saw the little London boarding-house in my mind, it was not the common food or the hard pillowcases that stopped me from walking through the door – though those things did seem rather disgusting, rather too reminiscent of the cheap garrets of my youth.
It was the absence of activity that kept me from completing, even in my mind, the act of leaving our home. If I ran off to London, what would I do? I had very little desire for social niceties, but being forced to earn my keep as some sort of nurse or governess would be even worse than what I was already enduring.
No, when it came to childhood, it was better to be a spoiled child than to be the person charged with caring for spoiled children. I might not love Dusty, but I was poorly suited to take on the kind of work that she had been doing for years. That much was imminently clear to me.
Since London did not exactly beckon, my declarations to the wardrobe notwithstanding, the morning found me tripping over myself in the room off the nursery that was supposed to look like a drawing room. My mother retained enough of her old imperiousness to force my compliance, and Dusty was more than usually displeased with me.
“Pour the tea like a lady, Miss Helena! Gracious, but you splash it all about the cups.”
My sister Masha reached over to help me. “Tak,” she said, her clear green eyes flashing into mine as she held the teapot with grace in her tiny fingers. She was barely four years old, and yet she still managed to pour more elegantly than I ever had.
Dusty shared my thoughts. “Exactly, Miss Masha. Please show your sister.”
I stood. �
��Perhaps Masha should do this with you, Miss Dorothea. I have not had the pleasure of mastering it, but my sister will make an excellent hostess.”
Dusty’s eyes were dull, but they were not quite as stupid as I liked to make out. “That is all the more reason for you to stay and learn.”
She was right. The sooner I learned, the sooner I could beg my mother’s pardon and escape from this cloistered world of false drawing rooms and crippling footwear.
“Would you like one lump or two,” I asked Masha, my voice syrupy with false solicitude.
Masha was too young to understand my brusque manners, even though she’d long ago discovered that Sister Helena was apt to shout, laugh, and tease much louder than even the brothers (an heir and a spare) that separated us in the Morton sibling line.
With a sigh, I reassessed the tone that I had taken with my sister, sitting there in her little blue dress, innocent and blinking. “Miss Masha, may I give you one lump or two,” I asked, forcing myself to think of her cherubic little smile at the expense of dwelling on the injustice of my predicament.
“Two, please,” chirped Masha, as I deposited two into the beautiful china cup. Knowing that she would like her tea particularly sweet, I made sure that they were large lumps.
About to lift my own tea, I caught the eye of Dusty. Well, perhaps saying that I caught the glare would be more accurate. As a young woman who never wanted any sugar in her own tea, I was constantly coming up against Dusty’s wrath. For some reason, she had decided that tea that most people liked with milk and sugar absolutely must be taken in that manner. Any young lady who refused either of those two additions should be displaying a most shocking rudeness.
I never minded the milk, but I generally did not wish my tea to be sweet. But after feeling Dusty’s formidable glare, I was smart enough to pretend to put sugar in my tea.
And for just a moment, there was peace. That is, until Masha decided to be a lady and start our conversation.
