by Eva Leigh
And then he stood less than two feet away. He bowed, pressing a hand to his chest. She nodded her head in acknowledgment.
This close, she could see that his garments were exceptionally well made, clearly the work of an expert tailor, because only the finest needlecraft could create a suit of clothing that fitted his athletic form with such grace. His shining boots also had to be custom from Jermyn Street. Yet in contrast to this elegant appearance, dark stubble covered his cheeks and angled jaw, and he smelled slightly of gunpowder.
That, combined with his roguish grin, made her think of a buccaneer.
“Madam.”
“Sir.” She gave him a polite but shallow nod.
“You keep to yourself.”
He had a faint Irish brogue, making his words gently musical. She had learned many years ago to repress her own Neapolitan accent. There were many in Britain who viewed foreigners with suspicion, and it had been a matter of survival to sound as English as possible.
“I choose to,” she said.
He moved to stand beside her. His nearness was an intoxicant, making her slightly dizzy. Together they watched the swaying mass of bodies on the dance floor.
“I do as well, it seems,” he said, as if faintly puzzled by his own behavior. “This is my first time here and I find myself more content to observe than participate.”
“Some prefer it that way. They derive sensual gratification from watching.” She nodded toward a man who stood by himself, his eyes fastened on the spectacle of two other men kissing passionately, while his hand was down the front of his breeches.
“Usually,” the buccaneer said wryly, “I choose doing rather than watching.”
His grin flashed again, and her stomach gave a quick jump. She could imagine that he wasn’t the sort to sit idly by and let someone else devour an experience.
“What makes tonight different?” she asked. “I hope the establishment meets your expectations.”
“I had no expectations,” he said. “The friend who brought me here kept the nature of this place a secret until I stepped inside.”
She turned to him. “And now that you are within its walls, what are your thoughts on the place?” It was always a good idea to talk to guests, learn what pleased them and what they didn’t care for. Yes, that’s why she kept talking with him rather than moving on to other duties—to ascertain whether or not the club satisfied him. That was the only reason.
He looked thoughtful. Interesting that he would turn pensive, when, not several yards away, people engaged in acts of unrestrained eroticism.
After a moment, he said, “What’s here is joyous exuberance, a celebration of bodily pleasure and letting go. Aside from the code of conduct outlined in the vestibule, rules have no place in this establishment. People can fully express themselves without fear. That’s something to celebrate.”
She looked up at him in surprise. His eyes were the blue of the skies above Napoli, and they gleamed not just with sensuality, but sensitivity and intelligence, as well.
“Uncommon to hear a man articulate himself so well,” she said, “particularly when it relates to the act of fucking.”
His smile was genuine and devilish. “Madam, I can wax rhapsodic about fucking. But,” he added, “this place is about more than sex. It’s about . . .” He searched for the right words. “Living without limitations, liberated from censure and disapproval. That’s something that everyone desires. Even you, I’d wager.”
Instinctively, she stiffened and mentally reached for her unseen shield, protecting herself from any man’s attempt to delve beneath the surface of her carefully crafted persona.
“A moment’s acquaintance, and you feel you know me,” she said drily.
Undisguised fascination gleamed in his eyes when he looked at her. “You’re clever and aware. Always assessing the situation. But that’s merely one part of who you are. There’s passion there as well, though you try to keep it at a distance.”
Her mouth went dry, and she tried to swallow. How could he discern all this about her? From head to toe, she was swathed in her professional identity. She might be a different person with Kitty and Elspeth, but here on the floor of the club, she was Amina the Untouchable.
She pushed out a laugh. “Mercy,” she said, “you ought to set up a booth at Bartholomew Fair and tell fortunes. People would pay good money to have their characters delineated so incisively.”
“Learning about other people doesn’t interest me.” His gaze held hers. “Learning about you does.”
Her breath caught as they stared at each other.
He stepped closer, and warmth radiated from his body into hers. “Will you join me for a dance?”
There was no mistaking the intention in his low, seductive words, especially as almost no one on the dance floor was actually dancing.
Could I? More to the point, should I?
Guests propositioned her nearly every night the house was open, and that clearly hadn’t changed since she’d become proprietress. Her breathing had never quickened with those guests. When she’d fielded their offers, she hadn’t felt the heat of the room pressing against her sensitized flesh.
She had never been tempted, not enough to neglect her duties.
But this buccaneer—with his Irish accent and his wicked lips and his burning blue eyes—he enticed her. To hell with all her rules and caution. She could lose herself in heat and sensation. Without a doubt, he could give her an abundance of pleasure.
But the club, and her dream, came first. Entangling herself with a guest led to complications, and any complication—such as an importunate or jealous lover—would throw yet more obstacles in her path. He would demand her time, her attention, and neither could be spared. She couldn’t afford to be distracted by a man. And this man would assuredly be a distraction.
She struggled to lock away her reaction to him, like a keeper of wild beasts trying to urge a tiger back into its cage.
“There are so many available partners,” she said.
“I want to dance with you.”
Her heart took up a fast rhythm. “I cannot.” Regret tinged her words. She held out her hand. “I’m Amina, the manager.”
His brow above the mask creased with surprise, but like a gentleman, he took her hand and bent over it. Instead of kissing the air above her knuckles, his lips touched her skin.
Fire shot through her body. From the simplest, smallest contact.
He murmured, “I’d introduce myself—”
“But you can’t.” Her voice was breathless. She withdrew her hand, though her skin continued to radiate with his warmth. “For the safety of my guests, I know nothing about them, not even their names.”
“A good precaution.”
“Policy dictates that I don’t get involved with guests.”
His full lips shaped into a frown, and she braced herself for him to ask for an exception, or cajole her, the way other clients had done. Men did not like to hear a woman tell them no.
A moment later, he said, “Understood. I must respect your choice. Everything here is consensual, after all.”
She relaxed slightly. “So it is.” She offered him a smile. “This being your first time, I welcome you. My hope is that everything is to your liking.”
“Everything but the manager’s policy regarding her involvement with guests.” But he smiled as he said this. “This is a wondrous place. We can be our truest selves.”
Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t speculate on his background. Anonymity stood as one of the central tenets of the Orchid Club. Yet he was well dressed, even more finely than a banker or brewer. The artful way he’d bowed revealed a privileged background. She inhaled his scent of gunpowder and spice, taking it deeply into herself, tucking it away for later.
A thousand questions assailed her, wanting to be given a voice. What brought him here tonight? What was he seeking? What responsibilities weighed so heavily upon him that he took delight in the establishment’s offer of fre
edom?
She could never ask, and never know the answer. “You paid the entrance fee,” she said, “so I urge you to take advantage of what there is to offer.”
She waved toward the dance floor, which had evolved into a mass of sweat-slick flesh. Moans and grunts competed with the music.
Damn the distance she put between herself and the guests. If nothing else, he’d give her several hours of pleasure. Touching her deeper, realer self—that was an impossibility. Letting someone get truly close led straight to disaster and misery.
The buccaneer’s gaze never left her. “The most fascinating and intriguing thing here is you.”
She made herself laugh. “Sirrah, you are fulsome in your blandishments.”
He didn’t laugh or smile, his expression utterly serious. “When I set foot outside these doors,” he said, “I don’t need to flatter anyone. What I want, I get. So believe me when I say honestly that I’d much rather talk with you than fuck a stranger.”
Her heart thudded. “Because, unlike everyone else, I tell you no.”
“Because you intrigue me beyond measure.”
She could only stare at him. The part of herself that she’d locked away, the part that longed for comfort and affection and all the things lovers shared, ached with want. Oh, she’d taken men to her bed over the years, but other than physical gratification, she’d made certain those encounters never touched her heart. She had been forged through hardship and loss, treading a solitary path. If sometimes her body throbbed for want of someone to hold her all through the night, if she ached for someone to whisper into her hair that she was to be cherished . . . she tamped it all down.
Think of Mamma. Her pain and loss.
Yet here was this man, this guest, a person unknown to her. Her buccaneer. Offering a taste of what could never be.
“I must go,” she said. “My duties can’t be neglected.”
His mouth turned down, but he nodded. “I will be back soon. To see you, Amina.”
It wasn’t her real name, yet the sound of it on his lips sent a dark thrill through her. Oh, to hear him call her Lucia as he joined his body with hers . . .
He gave another bow before turning and striding away. She watched him, her gaze riveted to the width of his shoulders and how beautifully his breeches fit his long, muscular legs. Compelled to follow, she trailed several paces after him, observing him as he walked. He didn’t join any of the couplings but went straight for the door.
Lucia did not follow him any farther. The threshold was where her dominion ended.
Taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and adjusted her mask.
The club’s policy was to be open every week. Perhaps the buccaneer would return then. Perhaps she might see him once more, and they could talk, as they had tonight.
Her breath came faster.
In all her time here, he was the only guest who ever truly caught her attention, the only guest she’d wanted for her own selfish pleasure.
Doesn’t matter. Flirtation is all we can ever share. The establishment—and the profits it generated—was too important to her to throw anything away on a casual encounter.
Drawing herself up straight, she continued on with the rest of her night. There were responsibilities that needed tending—keeping the refreshments circulating, ensuring the staff’s well-being and the guests’ safety, maintaining the club’s spotlessness—a hundred tiny tasks she had to supervise. Yet, like a child sneaking tastes of her parents’ wine, she permitted herself brief thoughts of the buccaneer.
It would be a struggle not to grow drunk on him.
Chapter 3
One year later
Tom waited at the foot of the back stairs, his body both heavy with grief and impelled into motion.
For six weeks, he’d kept vigil at his father’s bedside, barely sleeping, eating only when forcibly urged to by the physician, and hardly stirring from the ducal bedchamber. But for all that, for all the physician had bled Father and applied every technique that modern medical science had devised . . . the old duke had died anyway.
Tom could still hear the rattle and rasp of his father’s breath stopping. It was that dreadful silence that heralded the end. The man that had both berated and coddled Tom had departed the earth, leaving behind a chasm that might never be filled. That chasm yawned open within Tom. Its emptiness threatened to devour him whole.
Feeling his shoulders bow beneath the weight of grief, he struggled to straighten them. Today was for Maeve, and he had to have strength for both of them.
Only that morning, news of his father’s death had been printed in the pages of the Times and Hawk’s Eye, revealing to the world the loss of one of England’s most staunch defenders of traditional values. They had said nothing about how the late duke preferred roast potatoes every Tuesday, or that, despite the fact that he continually bemoaned his son’s carousing and wildness, he used to give Tom books of adventure stories on his birthdays, even into adulthood. On Tom’s bookshelf in his private study, he had a copy of Guy Mannering, with a typically terse “To My Son on His 32nd Birthday—Yr Father” inscribed on the inside cover.
None of that had been in the papers. There were aspects of the Duke of Northfield that no one but those closest to him would ever know.
But in the Times, there had been a paragraph that, hours later, Tom could recite from memory. It had burned itself into his mind, and into his heart.
We cannot help but speculate whether or not the new duke will take up his late father’s ideology and principles. His Grace, the previous duke, has left a sizable void in the nation’s political landscape. Further, it is a known truth that the younger gentleman in question has led a somewhat undisciplined existence. Many await his next steps with bated breath. Shall he continue in his riotousness, or will he take up the mantle left behind by his father, and preserve England’s established institutions?
We cannot foretell.
God above, but if that wasn’t a burden to carry. The eyes of the country were on him. And all he wanted to do was run.
But now that he was duke, he could use his might in the advancement of progressive causes, as he’d longed to do when he was only the heir. Others might expect him to be a duplicate of his father, but he didn’t have to be. He could be his own man with his own beliefs, his own goals.
A step quietly creaked. He glanced up, and saw Maeve, dressed in mourning black bombazine with a jet broach at her throat, a veil covering her face and a black handkerchief twisted in her fingers.
His heart plunged to see his sister, a girl of just nineteen, so somberly garbed. She ought to be dressed in bright, springtime green or the yellow of daffodils, with a coral necklace about her neck and her pretty face rosy from the heat of a ballroom.
He smoothed a hand over the dark band encircling his arm and ran his finger along the length of his black neckcloth. Unlike Maeve, his mourning was limited to smaller signifiers—in every way.
Ballrooms were forbidden to her, as were color and joy. As if she, or Tom, could ever feel joy again in the wake of their father’s death.
Maeve’s steps were slow as she descended the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she paused, holding the newel post. Her veil stirred as she let out a long exhale.
“Are you certain about this?” Tom asked. “You don’t need to tax yourself.”
“I need to go,” his sister said. Her words were steadier than her gait. “I need to see him.”
“As you like.” But Tom wrapped a sheltering arm around her shoulders as he guided her toward the back door.
Tenderness and protectiveness rose up within him when she leaned against him. He was rocketed back to when he’d been a lad of thirteen, cradling his newborn sister in his arms, frozen with terror that he might drop the delicate thing and have her shatter into tiny fragments at his gangly feet.
His mother hadn’t been able to keep any other baby she’d conceived. All his siblings had either died in utero or within a day of their
births. No one had been certain whether or not Maeve would join her departed siblings in the churchyard. Yet she’d made it through the first week, and when Tom had finally been allowed to see and hold her, he’d vowed then—just as he vowed now—that he would safeguard her for the rest of his days.
They reached the door that opened to a narrow, walled yard, and Tom pushed it open to escort Maeve out. Thick gray clouds smeared across the sky, and a cutting wind blew into the yard.
Maeve tilted her head back and inhaled deeply. “I missed this.”
“The dreadful weather?”
“Being outside. I haven’t set foot outside the house in three weeks and five days.”
He’d had to report back to her about the funeral and burial, as she and their mother had been obliged by the rules of polite society that such a sorrowful ordeal would tax their fragile emotions overmuch.
A corner of Tom’s mouth lifted in a humorless smile. He had been the one who could barely stand beside the open grave as the casket had been lowered. He had swallowed countless tears, trying to manfully force them back rather than permit himself the luxury of open grief. His throat still burned with gulping back sobs. Maeve and their mother, Deirdre, were free to show their sorrow—so long as they did so within the confines of Northfield House. Open displays of anyone’s emotions, be they male or female, were distressing and gauche.
No one seemed permitted to indicate that they had feelings, especially not messy, complicated feelings that threatened to rip one apart from the inside out.
But he had to be strong. For Maeve, for their mother.
“How does it feel to be in the open air again?” he asked.
She was silent for a moment. “Cold.”
“We can go back.”
She shook her head. “I don’t mind. It proves that I’m still alive.”
The unspoken words but he isn’t hung in the air.
“And,” she added, “Hugh’s expecting me.” Though her veil obscured her face, there was a hint of brightness in her voice as she said Lord Stacey’s name.
