Sinful in Satin

by Madeline Hunter

  Bella started to follow Marian to the door, but faltered in her steps. She scurried back, took Celia’s hand in her own two, and raised the little pile to her lips.

  Her eyes closed hard while she pressed a kiss on the hand she held. Then she was gone, hurrying to catch up with Marian.

  Noise from the kitchen below eventually gave way to giggles and footsteps on the back stairs. In the library, Celia set down her book and listened to Marian and Bella trod up to the attic passage and the room they would share.

  There were other chambers up there, besides theirs and Mr. Albrighton’s. One was used for storage. Celia had spied into it while she showed Marian the choices. She had needed to use her key to enter, and in the dark noticed only that it held an old trunk.

  Tomorrow or the next day she would go up there, finally, and see what her mother had left in this retreat. Here, perhaps, there might be a clue about her father’s name.

  It had been a full day and a long night, and Celia knew that she should go to bed herself. Mr. Albrighton had not returned, but he would ensure the doors were secure when he did, if he returned at all.

  The day’s events made her too restless for sleep. The house, all but empty these last days, now felt crowded with the new spirits inhabiting it. Lifting her cloak from its peg, she bundled herself well, and left the house to take a quiet turn in the night garden before retiring.

  She strolled down to the shrubbery, and the fallow bed stretching in front of it. Verity had probably taken one look at it and known exactly what to add to it in spring. Verity had found a true calling while living at The Rarest Blooms, first learning all she could from Daphne, then turning to books and journals and experimenting herself. Her earl permitted this avocation’s continuance now, and Lady Hawkeswell’s correspondence with horticulture experts all over England was always answered.

  Verity had been too kind to mention that this entire garden showed neglect. Mama’s brief stays did not facilitate regular upkeep, no doubt. There would be a lot of work to do here this spring.

  She mused about that, and the improvements she would make. Her thoughts turned to Mama herself after a few minutes. She pictured the other house, and the afternoon salons that Mama liked to hold in the French manner, and the dinner parties at which she would have Celia sing.

  The men who attended were all of good blood and high incomes, whether they had titles or not. She should have remembered that. Of course Jonathan must have had one or the other as well, if he had been included.

  She tried to ignore how the thought of that made her oddly sad again. It was silly to react thus. She barely knew him. Yet the intimacy evoked by sharing this house now seemed ruined. The excitement would never be as care-free again. There were rules in the world he visited when he left this house. A man in his situation would probably calculate every act and smile with those rules in mind.

  She forced her thoughts back to her mother’s parties. Men came and went from those assemblies, but some reappeared again and again. She tried now to see their faces in her mind, and wondered if some had been coming for years. Was it possible that her father had not only been in Mama’s past? Had she perhaps even met him at one of those parties?

  She picked through the memories while she strolled back to the house. As she approached the garden door, a shadow shifted to its right, where a garden bench stood. Drawing near, she saw Mr. Albrighton sitting there, his eyes dark pools in the half-moon’s light.

  “It is too cold to sit in a dark garden,” she said after greeting him.

  “It is too cold to walk in one after midnight,” he said.

  “Have you just returned?” She gazed up the house, to the attics. “They are probably asleep now, if you feared the noise they would make in their excitement this first night.”

  “I have been here awhile. You walked right past me when you came out. You were so absorbed in your thoughts, I decided not to disturb you.”

  She sat beside him on the bench and bundled her cloak around her. “Not so absorbed. I often took night strolls where I lived before. The gardens were much bigger there because it was in the country, but not far from London at all. We grew flowers and plants for sale. My dear friend Daphne owns the property, but we all helped her as we could.”

  “Is that where you have been since you left your mother’s home?”

  She nodded. “Then Verity joined us the last two years. And Audrianna—Lord Sebastian Summerhays’s wife now—was with us for a spell too, before she married. That is how I know such fine ladies, in case you were wondering what an earl’s wife was doing visiting me.”

  She found herself telling him about Daphne’s greenhouses and gardens, and the odd family they had all created in that house.

  “And now you have all left,” he said. “Two to marriage, and you to—?”

  She laughed at the inflection and question. “You did not even raise an eyebrow today as I collected Marian and her friend. Yet you must wonder what I am about. I all but invited the worst speculation that first night. Do not worry, Mr. Albrighton. You will not be living above a brothel.”

  “I did not worry about that.”

  Which was not to say he had not thought it might happen. “I am joining Daphne in partnership. That is what those shelves are for—plants.” She described her plan. He listened closely. She could see his eyes as he paid attention.

  He was very easy to talk to. It all just poured out, her plans for the house and the partnership, and her desire to forge a life for herself. “I joined Daphne when I was still quite young. I am no longer, and it was time to go. I think she understands that, even if she wishes I had stayed.”

  “It was good of her to take you in. She probably saw that you were a lovely child, but a child all the same, and needed her help.”

  “Is that what you thought of me back then? That I was a child?”

  “Yes. A very innocent, beautiful child. Too much a child for what your mother planned.”

  “At seventeen I was already older than some young women in that profession. It is considered a good age for marriage too.”

  “Some of the girls who become wives or mistresses at seventeen are too childish as well. Others not. It is not a matter of age.”

  Her face burned. She knew why he was saying this. “You remember me crying that day. My disappointment is why you think I was too childish.”

  She had bumped into him as she ran from Anthony. Mr. Albrighton had come to take his leave of Mama, because he was going away again. Blinded by her tears, she had careened right into him as she fled.

  He caught her before she fell from the collision. He had sat her on the stairs, and asked why she cried. She had told him, this stranger who had an odd way of inspiring confidences. It had just poured out while he absorbed it with his fathomless eyes.

  He did not pretend now that it had never happened, or that he had forgotten. “You can be forgiven that disappointment, no matter what your maturity, Miss Pennifold.”

  “My mother had just spent a year teaching me to have no illusions, and scolded me for forgetting the most important lesson.”

  “To have felt nothing would have meant you were already jaded. There is a lot of distance between a hardened heart and a child’s view of the world.”

  “Do you still see that child sometimes when you look at me?”

  He turned his head and looked at her quite directly. “Not at all. I only see a beautiful and desirable woman, who lights garden paths at night with her mere presence. The moon’s glow finds you, like it finds a white flower. Even when you were back near those shrubs, you remained very distinct in the night.”

  “You were watching me the whole time, as you sat here? Why?”

  “You know why.”

  Yes, she did. His admission changed everything and immediately gave their intimate chat new depths. That delicious tension pulled, full of sensual allure and forbidden excitement.

  “Perhaps you regret I was not planning a different sort of business,” s
he teased, to add lightness to what had suddenly become a mood pulsing with seductive potential. And yet, she still wondered if perhaps he had been waiting, to see how much of the legacy she would accept, the way he threatened that first night.

  “Perhaps I do, somewhat.”

  Well, there it was. She could not say she had not been warned. Although, right now, with her confidences binding them and his warmth against her side, the implications of that did not seem very significant. He was too compelling, as Verity had described him, for her to think about them much.

  He turned his head toward her again and she saw his smile fade into a different expression, one that sent a wonderful shiver down her body. She savored the thrill, and all of the other little responses to the power arching between them. To her relief it had not been ruined after all by the day’s discoveries. There might be a social chasm between them, but that power seemed to bridge it for a while.

  His hand began to move, hesitated, then reached toward her anyway. His palm rested on her cheek. His touch was warm and dry. Her breath caught at how this real connection intensified the enlivening, compelling invisible one.

  Always make them ask. Never let them assume. Especially with the first kiss.

  She ignored Mama’s lesson. She sensed the kiss coming, and she did not make him ask because she did not want words to interfere.

  His mouth took hers. Her heart leapt and all the excitements collected together to shout a chorus through her body. Heed your body’s stimulation. Savor the pleasure. Fight nothing, and it will not be a chore but the sweetest game. She could not have fought or ignored any of it, even if she wanted to. She did not need to concentrate to find the pleasure. It inundated her.

  A kiss. Long enough. Longer than it had to be, even for one stolen in a garden. One touch. That hand on her cheek, guiding and subtly controlling. A presence, dark and deep and unknown, but filling her and surrounding her and coaxing more response than it would ever exploit.

  She knew that. Knew it would go no further, even though her body turned lusciously sensitive and hoped for more. Even while he mesmerized her, she knew this kiss had not been an impulsive accident, but a calculated step. A first step only, and perhaps there would be no more.

  She was not surprised by what did and did not happen, by what he took and did not take. The kiss ended as it had begun, slowly and seductively, and without words. Finally that palm rested on her face and he only gazed in her eyes.

  She was glad he did not speak. He did not say the required apologies that men say to proper women, as if those excuses make a difference. She was relieved he did not pretend she was other than who she was, and also did not act as if this kiss sealed her damnation.

  He took his leave and left her there, sitting in the garden where he had sat. She held on to the happy warmth as long as she could, while she looked toward those black shrubs and wondered if the moonlight really did find her in the night.

  Jonathan woke in an ill humor. That single kiss had tortured him long into the night.

  He had heard Celia finally come in last night, and climb the back stairs. He had not moved while he listened to each footfall, his body urging her to continue on, to this level and his door. He knew she would not, but that had not prevented his jaw from clenching until long after her steps had faded in the direction of her own chamber at the front of the house.

  That had been, he decided as morning broke, the most ill-advised kiss he had ever given a woman in his life. Only she had charmed him totally, sitting there in the night garden, telling him about that place where she had lived and her plans to sell plants from this house.

  He admired how she was trying to create a world for herself here, and establish an income that would permit her independence. It spoke well of her, and she had shown honest joy in her scheme. And in response he had told his better judgment to go to hell and kissed her for the simple reason that he wanted to. Needed to.

  She had undone him with her fresh, vivid pleasure in that simple kiss. He did not think he had ever kissed before and been so aware that the woman knew no guilt, no hesitation, no fear, no expectations, and no regrets. He doubted she had stayed awake half the night debating the wisdom of it. He was very sure that if she had, she had not concluded it was a mistake. She would not think that way. She had not been raised like other women.

  He found tepid water waiting outside his chamber when he opened the door. While not ideal, it was better than drawing cold water from a well himself. He wondered if it heralded that at least Celia did not mind his being here now.

  As he reached for the bucket, he glanced at another door across the passage. A good-size lock stared back. He had been debating whether to pick that lock after all.

  Celia had absented herself from this house enough that he had looked through the chambers down below. He had discovered no caches of papers or accounts, or anything else to indicate Alessandra had left a history of her lovers. This chamber across from his in the attic, however, probably served as storage. His mission would not be complete until he saw what it contained.

  Celia had the key. He did not think she had spent much time examining the contents of the chamber either, but she had probably at least used that key to see what lay within. Perhaps one day soon she would enter the room again, perhaps with her two new servants, to clean it out. He really should get in there before that happened.

  Red-haired Marian stuck her head out her own chamber door at the other end of the passage. A damp rag hung from her hand.

  “That water be a bit cooled by now, Mr. Albrighton. Will you be rising this hour most days, sir? It is hard to have warm water for a tenant if one does not know his habits.”

  The water had not been Celia’s doing. Of course not. It had been only one kiss, after all.

  “I have been awake some hours already. I did not expect water to be brought, and did not check earlier.” He had grown accustomed to waiting until ten o’clock to go to the well himself, to allow Celia her privacy in the mornings.

  “Then eight o’clock will do for you? I will be waking with the dawn myself. I am not used to all the light we have up here.” She walked down the passageway. “Bella and I will be doing the linens later today. We will come and get them and remake the bed if you want, or you can leave them outside the door if you won’t be wanting us in there. All the same to us.”

  “Enter if you like, but do not touch the table, even to dust. I might lose something if it were misplaced.”

  She peered around him and into the chamber, and at the table against the window piled high with booklets and papers. “One of them studious types, are you, then?”

  “More curious than studious.”

  She gave the chamber, and him, a critical inspection. “You’ve no manservant. I would have expected you to.”

  “I travel often. A servant would slow me down.” A servant would have never accepted the conditions of some of that travel the last eight years either. Servants have standards.

  “I expect you hire them as you go, then,” Marian said. “Bella and I can do for you while you are here, if you like. Washing clothes and such. Not so good as a manservant, of course. We won’t be helping you bathe and shave, but for ten pence we’ll scrub and iron those nice shirts of yours.”

  “That is better than bringing them elsewhere.”

  They struck a bargain on the laundry and other chores. As they finished, a commotion below broke the quiet in the house.

  Marian draped her rag on the storage room’s latch, then wiped her hands on her apron. “The plants must have come. I need to see if Miss Pennifold requires help.”

  Plants. Plants everywhere. Celia gazed around her back sitting room, excited to see her plan coming to life most literally.

  Pots holding globes of green on upright stems crowded the landing below the back stairs. A palm as tall as herself flanked the entry to the back sitting room. Verity, decked out in a most becoming scarlet ensemble that complemented her dark hair and snowy skin, was takin
g pots carried to her by Marian and judging their best placement on the shelves by the windows.

  Daphne stood in the center of the chamber with a journal book propped open in her arm. She had accompanied the wagons on this first delivery, to make sure all went well. Tall, willowy, and pale like the light of a winter dawn, her gray eyes watched the plants find their homes while she made notations in her book.

  Boots thudded on the floor. A workman carried in a lemon tree in a deep, wide pot, straining from its weight.

  “We should deliver that at once,” Daphne said. “How will you ever remove it from here, Celia?”

  “You said the Robertsons wanted it next week, not this one. I am going to have help, Daphne. I will not be carrying these plants myself.”

  The man brushed off his hands. “That is the last, Mrs. Joyes. Just the flowers left now.”

  “Put them in the front sitting room,” Celia said. “It is chilled enough in winter to keep them there for a day. In warmer weather we will make use of the cold storage near the kitchen below.”

  The man trudged off to get the flowers.

  Celia went back to moving pots onto the new shelves, all the while keeping one ear open and one eye on Daphne. Fate had conspired against her, and arranged for the wagons from The Rarest Blooms to arrive while Jonathan was in the house.

  Verity caught Celia’s eye. She glanced meaningfully at Daphne, then up at the ceiling, and raised her eyebrows. Celia shook her head. No, she had not yet explained about her tenant to Daphne. It appeared she would be doing so today, though, unless Jonathan decided to remain in his chamber for the next hour or so. He did that sometimes. There were days he never left. Perhaps—

  Boot steps began a descent on the stairs. So much for perhaps.

  Verity increased the noise of her movements and chatter. Marian began a loud conversation asking about the dinner menu. Beneath the growing commotion, like a drum-beat getting louder, those boots thudded in a steady rhythm.