Pleasure for Pleasure

by Eloisa James

  Sylvie would never do anything quite so graceless as to pout…but there were those who might call her expression a pout. “How tedious,” she said, frowning at him. “I would much prefer to continue to look for Countess Mitford. I promised her that I would tell her something of the French way of arranging a drawing room.”

  Mayne felt a sudden, mad desire to get away from her. “Yes, let’s look for Countess Mitford,” he said. “I’m sure she is waiting for you with bated breath.”

  Sylvie’s eyes narrowed slightly but she said nothing. She was, Mayne realized, far too well-mannered to engage in something as undignified as brangling in a public arena. “I apologize,” he said, looking down at her again.

  But she smiled at him. “I was just thinking that you are akin to my father.” She wrinkled her nose. “He is, you understand, quite obsessed with the fate of his dogs. Are they well, are they strong, do they need a constitutional dose of barleywater?”

  “Barleywater?”

  She nodded. “The poor animals dare not show a yellow eye or he puts them on a special diet of steamed broccoli and barleywater.”

  Mayne shuddered. “I fail to see any connection between myself and your father.” Josie had let go of his arm and was standing just beside the fence, watching as another heat of horses made their first sweep around the turn.

  “Josie!” Sylvie cried. “Do back up. You’ll become quite dusty.”

  But Josie didn’t hear her. She was clapping as a slender chestnut broke from the pack and swept forward, her little ears cocked far back. Even from here Mayne recognized the stride of a winner.

  “Who is she?” Josie called back to him.

  He shook his head. “Palmont’s colors—”

  A gentleman moved next to Josie and was eagerly talking to her, and then they watched, shoulder-to-shoulder, as the horses swept about again. A tall, gaunt gelding was gaining on the inside…gaining…gaining.

  “No, no!” Josie screamed wildly.

  Sylvie made a small sound of disapproval. “Who is that man whom Josephine is standing beside?”

  “Lord Tallboys,” Mayne said. Tallboys was watching Josie more closely than the horse. But she was completely swept into the excitement of the race, her cheeks pink, gloved hands gripping the railing tightly. “Rafe introduced him to Josie at the Mucklowe ball.”

  “Is he respectable?”

  Mayne frowned down at her. “Do you think that I would allow Josie to be in his presence were he not? He’s a good man with an excellent estate.”

  “Unmarried?” Sylvie asked in a hushed voice. And then: “Excellent!”

  Just then the brown horse seemed to gather herself and stretch her neck, and before the crowd could even take a breath she swept past the winner’s post. Josie was screaming and waving her discarded bonnet; Tallboys gave a roar of approval. Then Tallboys was dancing Josie around in an exuberant circle.

  Sylvie laughed, watching them. “I think little Josephine just made a conquest.”

  “Indeed,” Mayne said, watching how Josie’s curls were flying as Tallboys swept her around. She was laughing and laughing. Tallboys was a bit young for her. Couldn’t be more than four-and-twenty.

  Which was just the right age.

  Sylvie moved forward and Tallboys instantly came to a halt and gave a boyish bow. “You must forgive me,” he said, “I’m afraid that Miss Essex and I were overcome by the exuberance of the occasion.”

  Sylvie dimpled at him and Mayne watched, expecting him to get an eager glint in his eye on hearing Sylvie’s charming accent. “An enchanting show of enthusiasm,” she was saying. “Perhaps you had made a feather on the race, hmmm?”

  “Took a flutter,” Mayne corrected her. “Tallboys, your servant.”

  Tallboys didn’t seem to have understood Sylvie. He had turned back directly to Josie and had pulled out his race book. “You see,” he said, “her name is Firebrand. It’s a good name, isn’t it, Miss Essex?”

  “I think she was too delicate to be a firebrand,” Josie said. “Did you see how she flicked her ears after she slowed down? As if she knew she had won and was laughing.”

  “She certainly knew she won; a good horse always does.”

  “Some of my father’s horses became quite dejected when they lost.” And then they were off, talking of Josie’s father’s stables.

  Sylvie turned back to Mayne. “I think Lord Tallboys has found a new passion in life,” she whispered. “He will give Skevington some stiff competition.”

  “Do you think so?” Mayne felt as crotchety as a man of sixty. “He’s quite young.”

  “They can play together, like two kittens.”

  To Mayne’s mind, the way Tallboys was looking at Josie had nothing to do with kittens. “We must return to the box now,” he said, pointedly not issuing Tallboys an invitation.

  Tallboys was an inane fool, though he’d never noticed it before. It was a wonder that Josie had laughed at his pitiful comments. She sounded as delighted as if she were talking to Prinny himself.

  It was irritating to find oneself behaving like as much as a fool as Tallboys. He’d never liked it in others, and he was too honest not to notice the same stupidity in himself. The truth of it is, Mayne told himself, that you are engaged and yet you don’t feel quite engaged. He always thought that engagements were a matter of stolen kisses and sudden meetings of eyes.

  Of course, he’d done all the business of stolen kisses in the past, and he didn’t want a wife who was as light-skirted as the women he’d slept with. He had to make up his mind. Either he wanted to exchange kisses with his fiancée or he didn’t.

  Josie was trailing along behind Sylvie and Mayne, who seemed to be in a rather irritable mood, when suddenly a voice in her ear said, “Miss Essex?”

  And when she turned in that direction, there was a portly young man smiling down at her as if he knew her very well.

  She knew his face but she couldn’t place it, so she said, “Good afternoon, sir.”

  “We met at a ball last week. I’m Mr. Eliot Thurman. May I take your arm?” he asked.

  Mayne was continuing without her, so she did take his arm. And then before she knew it, they had wandered off in quite a different direction than Tess’s box, toward the tents where they were serving refreshments.

  She went along rather listlessly. After all, did it matter? Mayne was in love with his passionless fiancée, to whom Josie was beginning to take quite a dislike. Griselda had left with Darlington, and if Josie thought that there should be limits to how close one grows to the enemy, well, Griselda had not asked her.

  If only Annabel had come to Ascot! But Annabel didn’t want to bring Samuel into these crowds; Imogen was on her wedding trip; Tess was in Northumberland with her husband…Josie sighed. Then she roused herself. She might as well try to be polite.

  “Do you have a horse entered in a race, Mr. Thurman?” she asked.

  “No, I have not,” he answered. “My mother says that a gentleman must have an occupation. I’m a little too lazy for something as strenuous as smoking tobacco, so I devote myself to betting.” And he broke into a great peal of laughter: “Haw, haw, haw!”

  Josie felt as if she must have missed something. “Your mother thought you ought to smoke tobacco…as an occupation?”

  “It’s a jest,” he said to her with a shading of disapproval in his voice.

  Last time she heard it, jests were supposed to be funny. Or at least make sense.

  They had walked quite beyond the tents, into the formal gardens that ringed the stables and the racetrack. “I suppose we should return,” she said, stooping to examine the primroses. But someone had made a mistake and planted evening primroses and most of them were shut up against the sun.

  But Mr. Thurman paused and made an odd little noise with his throat. Josie looked at him. He did it again. Suddenly Josie had the alarmed thought that he might be having a fit of some kind. People who had that sort of sodden red color high in their cheeks were prone to seizures
of the heart, or so she’d heard. She frowned at him. Surely she knew that face, and in some unpleasant context too—

  A second later she realized that Thurman was having an attack of a different kind, as he pulled her into his arms and pressed his lips to hers. They were surprisingly cool and rather flabby. For a moment Josie was frozen in surprise, but then he forced a plump tongue between her lips and she began struggling to get loose.

  He was surprisingly strong. Before she realized it, he had backed her under the overhanging roof of the stable. Josie felt as if she were watching from the outside: watching another girl—some other girl, not herself—struggle against the man who had her pinned against the wall. He was rolling his tongue in her mouth so that she was almost choking. Suddenly she felt her dress catch on a spur in the boards behind her and rip. She started struggling, kicking him over and over in the shins, but she was wearing slippers, and he had his feet planted solidly. She tried to kick higher, but her dress was narrow and confined her movement. She managed to wrench sideways, away from him.

  He pulled back for a moment and said, “You’re a feisty one.” His voice was thick, as if he were drunk. Josie filled her lungs to scream but he clamped his mouth over hers again and she almost suffocated. And then she realized to her horror that the rip in her gown was widening. If she didn’t get away it might fall clean off her body.

  If she didn’t—

  So she did.

  She raised her leg in one quick and smooth motion and planted her knee squarely in the groin that had been rubbing itself all over her dress. His hands loosed her arms instantly and she staggered to the side, hearing her dress rip on the rough boards again so that she could feel air on her back.

  He staggered back, bent over, his voice coming in a high wheezy rasp. “You damned—damned—”

  Josie turned to run—of course she should run!—but then her eye caught the back door of the stables. In order to keep the stalls clean and sweet-smelling for the visitors who would be wandering through the stables, the grooms had been diligently throwing refuse out the back door. Presumably someone would haul it away in the morning, but now—

  There was a spade leaning against the wall and a mound of ordure as high as her knees. It was the act of a second to dig the spade into the heaping brown mess and swing around in his direction. She couldn’t lift it over her waist, but she didn’t need to. As the shovel swung about it gained momentum, and just as Mr. Thurman raised his head, doubtless to say something despicable, the steaming, dripping pile of horse dung flew off the shovel and slammed against his face. The last glimpse Josie got before she turned and ran through the door into the stables was his wide-open eyes and his even wider open red mouth, both obscured a moment later by a mass of wet, brown muck.

  She darted into the stables and started running down the long aisle. It was the noon hour, and no races were scheduled until the afternoon. Even the stable boys must be loitering in front of the building. There was no one to help. He would see her; he would catch her. Any moment she would feel his beefy powerful hand on her shoulder.

  Then she caught sight of red blankets with Mayne’s crest, slung over the side of a stall. She glanced behind her, and the wide aisle of the stables lay clear, with nothing more ominous than particles of straw dancing in the sunlight. Without pausing for breath, she unlatched the door of Gigue’s stall, darted around her sleek side and threw herself down in the yellow straw at the back of the stall. And held her breath.

  She couldn’t hear anything. No sound of steps. Nothing but the snorting breath of the filly as she stamped uneasily.

  “Hush,” Josie whispered. “Hush, please.”

  The horse whickered a little in response and switched her tail so it lashed Josie’s face with stings like a flock of tiny wasps. Josie’s eyes filled with tears. She’d lost her reticule somewhere, her bodice was ripped, and when she pushed herself into the corner of the stall, she discovered that her bare back was against the boards. That rip she heard had gone straight through her chemise and gown.

  Once she started crying, she sobbed so hard that her body shook all over. Finally, she collected herself, ripped off a section of her chemise and used it as a handkerchief and began thinking about how to leave the stable. She could hear the voices of stable boys filtering down the aisle. It was only a matter of minutes, a half hour at most, before someone would be along to check on Gigue. Billy would return from his midday meal.

  There was a wooden ladder nailed to the wall, leading up to the hay loft. She could climb the ladder and simply wait until everyone went home for the day.

  Gigue, meanwhile, had managed to turn herself around in the narrow space of her stall and was snuffling at Josie’s face in a comforting sort of way. “I’m so glad you won today,” Josie whispered to her. “Oh, how am I to get out of here?”

  The enormity of her situation was growing on her. Obviously, Mr. Thurman had decided to make the best of a bad situation and taken his malodorous self off to his lodgings to change. Of course he hadn’t followed her. She knew now that she had been safe the moment she darted through that open door: the last thing Thurman would want was to marry her. He was the horrid friend of Darlington who had made fun of her at Imogen’s wedding ball. And yet if anyone—particularly Rafe—ever found out what just happened, she would be forced to marry Thurman.

  She was ruined, and the only solution for ruination that Josie had ever heard of was marriage. Well, she wasn’t precisely ruined. But the memory of Thurman’s clutching hands brought on another shuddering fit and she had to tear off more of her chemise to mop up her tears.

  Why was it that her sisters managed to get themselves ruined with handsome gentlemen who were poised to fall in love with them? Whereas she had to wander off with a disgusting turnip of a man whom she’d kill before she’d agree to marry. It just wasn’t fair.

  Gigue suddenly raised her head, pricking up her ears. Likely, Billy was coming. He would send for Mayne, and Mayne could pull his carriage around the back of the stables, or perhaps he could just throw a blanket over her and pretend she had fainted.

  Except he wouldn’t be able to carry her out of the stables, given her weight. If she were covered up by the blanket, she wouldn’t have to see his face grow red with the exertion, or hear him panting. Tears started to slip down her face again, and Josie wiped them away impatiently.

  She sat up in the corner, brushing off some straw. Gigue had turned about again and was reaching her head out of the stall and whickering. Josie took one look down at her gown. If she were seen in this situation, explanations would have to be made. And if those explanations were made, she would have to marry Thurman.

  A second later Josie was clambering up the ladder into the hayloft. It was a huge, open space that stretched above all the stalls. Golden straw was heaped in large forkfuls on the floor. She would be safe here until she could find her way home later.

  Unless she told Mayne? For that was surely Mayne’s voice. She knelt next to the hole and tried to peer down and sideways, but all she could see was Gigue’s twitching coat. Mayne was crooning to her in his deep voice, and to Josie’s horror, the very sound of his voice made warmth prickle over her body.

  The last thing she wanted was to develop a tendre for Mayne! He was so far above her reach that it was as if he were the god Apollo himself. What’s more, he was in love with another woman.

  Even as she told herself all these things, Josie laid herself flat so she could better peer through the hole. Yes, there was Mayne. It was comforting just to see him: his careless elegance that must have taken hours to achieve. His hair fell over his brow in a sleek and shining curl that fell in a perfect tumble. From the angle of the hayloft, she could just see his shoulders as he caressed Gigue. His coat sat on his broad shoulders as if a wrinkle wouldn’t dare to alight.

  What a contrast to herself! Her clothes were ripped and soiled; she had been half mangled by a loathsome man. It would give her a great deal of pleasure to see Mayne mussed. Crum
pled. Muddy. Perhaps dressed in rags. A little smile curled her lips. Perhaps in a loincloth!

  But then she suddenly realized that she wasn’t thinking about a dandy’s comeuppance, but the dandy’s legs. Below her, his back moved down. He was bowing.

  “She’s not here,” he said. “Damn it, I wish Griselda hadn’t succumbed to the heat.” He must have come to the stables to look for her, Josie. And Josie knew instantly Mayne was accompanied by Sylvie. There was no mistaking the change in Mayne’s voice. It made her feel palpably ill, the way his voice got syrupy and lovesick when he spoke to his fiancée.

  “She has very large teeth,” Sylvie was saying. “And they are so yellow.”

  “Not for a horse,” Mayne replied.

  “You should arrange for one of your persons to wash her teeth. I am certain she would be more comfortable.”

  Mayne didn’t even laugh, which Josie took to be a sign of his smittenness. She could just glimpse the top of Sylvie’s turban. It was as alluring as Sylvie herself.

  “Sylvie,” Mayne was saying, and there was something about the tone in his voice that made Josie swallow. “You’re so beautiful. Do you know that?”

  If Sylvie didn’t have a precise understanding of her own worth, Josie would eat her hat. Not that she had a hat, for she’d lost her bonnet with her reticule.

  “Thank you,” Sylvie said, without a trace of the abject pleasure that Josie would have felt at that compliment.

  “I cannot restrain myself around you,” Mayne said. Though it was really Garret talking, not Mayne. It was the private man, a man in love. A tear fell down Josie’s cheek and she absentmindedly brushed it away. All she could see was the corner of his shoulder now, but he was reaching out, drawing Sylvie to him.

  Josie shivered. If he ever pulled her into his arms, she would—she would fall into them like a tree toppled in a lightning storm.

  Sylvie was of a different caliber. Ashes where Josie would be fire. “Mayne, I scarcely think this is a proper moment for—”