Despite her last desperate struggles, she could not get free. Sir Richard would rape her. There would be no escape.
Her stomach heaved and the room began to spin around her. As if from far away, she heard herself scream—an animal scream of pure terror.
6
Tom watched avidly as Sarah scurried out of the room with a couple of the other girls. Damn Mrs. Erskine for choosing this game on the last night he could claim Sarah’s company.
There had not even been time to cheat and ask Sarah where she would hide so he could be sure of finding her first—she had been hustled away from his side too quickly for that.
He searched desperately around the room for a friendly face, finally spying Sarah’s friend in a corner. He strode over to her. “Polly, where will she hide?”
Polly gave a little smile and shrugged helplessly as her companion glowered in an unfriendly way at Tom. “All our rooms are at the top of the stairs. She will be in one of them, I’m sure—probably in her own.”
“How will I know which room is hers?”
“It’s blue. Blue curtains and bedcoverings. You can’t mistake it.”
Tom gave her a nod of thanks and strode over to the door, positioning himself to be one of the first up the stairs.
Mrs. Erskine found him there and drew him aside with a hand on his sleeve just as the call went up to start the hunt.
“What do you want?” he barked at her, itching to be on his way toward his Sarah.
“Come, Mr. Wilde, there is no need to be so hasty,” she admonished him. “The night is still young.”
“I only have Sarah to myself for one more night,” he growled at her. “You’re robbing me even of that.”
“That is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “Come, take a seat.”
“Can it not wait?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” She seated herself on one of the sofas and waited politely until, with another growl, he sat down next to her.
“You see,” she said, with a delicate dab at her nose with a lace-edged handkerchief, “I have another offer for the girl. He wants her from midnight tonight. Which is,” she consulted her watch, “approximately twenty minutes from now. Unless,” and she gave a gentle cough, “you would be interested in extending your payment for another month. I always like to give the incumbent the right to edge out their competition and extend their terms if they please. It’s good for business.”
“Another month?” He shook his head. Paying for another month would make a serious inroad into his ready money. He was not so besotted with the wench as to beggar himself on her account. “Out of the question.”
Mrs. Erskine gave a gentle sigh. “Then I am afraid I will have to accept the other gentleman’s offer.” She rose from the sofa and dismissed him with a wave of one heavily bejeweled hand. “You have fifteen minutes left on the clock. May I suggest you make the most of them?”
Fifteen goddamn minutes. Tom scowled heavily as he raced for the stairs. So much for his plans to spirit Sarah away and keep her to himself for the entire evening. If he didn’t find her soon, he would not even have the time to bid her farewell.
Fifteen minutes to find her before she belonged to another man—to Sir Richard Etheridge, he would wager. He could not look on as she was claimed by the disgusting Sir Richard. Bah—he was more like a squat, fat toad than a man.
He took the stairs two at a time, stopping briefly at the top of the stairs to glance around the sitting room.
The sound of giggling came from behind the piano in the far corner.
He strode over and peered behind it.
A number of seminaked bodies were entwined in the small space between the piano and the wall. One of the girls spotted him looking. “Come, you have found us,” she cried, holding out her arms to him. “You have to join us.”
Sarah was not among them. Ignoring the girl’s outstretched arms, he turned away and strode off toward the hall corridor.
One by one he opened the doors to the bedrooms and looked inside. He found a green room, a yellow room, and any number of pink rooms, but no blue room. Most of the rooms were occupied, but he ignored all invitations to join in the games that were going on. His time was running out.
He had just opened the door on yet another orgiastic scene when a terrified scream rang out from the end of the hall corridor.
Sarah’s voice—he would know it anywhere.
Taking off at a run, he followed the sound of the screaming, until he burst in on a scene that made him sick to his stomach.
Sarah lay spread-eagled on her bed, screaming wildly. Her arms were pinned down by a monster in petticoats, while Sir Richard, damn every bone in his filthy body, cock in hand, prepared to thrust into her sweet body.
Tom grabbed the first thing that came to hand, an iron candlestick holder from the dressing table, and cracked Sir Richard viciously over the pate.
Sir Richard looked up, astonished, for a moment, then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped to the floor. The monster in petticoats took one horrified look at Sir Richard, lying senseless on the floor, and ran for her life.
Sarah was weeping now, curled up on her bed with her face buried in the blankets as if she wanted to hide away from the world.
He took her gently into his arms. “Sarah, my love, don’t cry.” There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say, that would take away the last few minutes. All he could offer her was his sympathy and his understanding, and the certain knowledge that she was safe in his embrace.
Her weeping eventually subsided into hiccuping sobs. “He hit me. He was going to rape me.”
He cradled her in his arms, stroking her hair as if she were a small child. “It’s over, sweetheart. He won’t hurt you again. I won’t let him touch you ever again.”
Sir Richard gave a groan and stirred on the floor. Clearly he had not hit the bastard hard enough. It was a shame he ever had to wake up.
She shuddered at the noise. “Take me away from here. Away from him.”
He picked her up and carried her down the hallway to a deserted sitting room at the very end where she could recover her composure out of reach of Sir Richard.
Sarah clung to Tom as if he were her lifeline. His warmth and tenderness gave her strength and the feel of his arms around her took away her pain. If only she could hold on to him forever. “Make love to me, Tom.”
His mouth fell open and he looked as if she had just hit him over the head with a plank of wood. “What did you say?”
“Make love to me,” she repeated, hiding her face in his shirtfront.
“Why? Why now?”
“Sir Richard frightened me.” An uncontrollable shudder racked her body as she spoke, but she did not weep. The time for tears was past. “I want to remove all remembrance of his touch from my body. I want to take away those memories of lying helpless under him, and replace them with memories that I can treasure. Please, Tom, make love to me.”
“Here?”
“Here, anywhere. What does it matter?” She did not care where—she needed him too badly.
“We cannot stay here. Sir Richard will be furious. He might well be angry enough to have the law on you and have you arrested for assaulting a Member of Parliament.”
“But I did nothing to him,” she protested, knowing all the while that her innocence would make no difference. The law was not made for poor people. She had dared to reject a wealthy man, a Member of Parliament, and he would have his revenge on her one way or another.
“Sir Richard cannot touch me—he knows he cannot touch me—but you? You are defenseless, a prostitute for all anyone knows, an easy target for his vengeance.”
Her heart leaped with fear. The streets would swallow her up after all. “I have nowhere else to go.” There was no armor against the resignation of despair that gripped her soul. She’d always known it would come to this in the end.
“Either he will have you arrested or he will try to rape you again. An
d next time I will not be around to stop him.”
He was right—Mrs. Erskine’s house was no longer a refuge for her. Sir Richard would kill her. Or he would succeed in raping her next time, and she would kill herself and save him the bother. She shrugged hopelessly. Whichever way she looked at it, the result would be the same in the end.
“Where will you go?”
What did it matter? Her life was over before it had begun. “There is nowhere in this world for a woman like me to go.”
Tom looked down at the fragile burden in his arms. His landlady would kick up merry hell if he brought home a strange woman to his lodging house. “You will have to come home with me,” he found himself saying. Ah, damn his landlady—he’d never cared much for her anyway.
Sarah acquiesced with a weary shrug. All the fight had gone out of her. She looked like the empty shell of herself, drained of all emotion. “Just for tonight, then,” she agreed. “I’ll find somewhere else to go in the morning.”
No gentleman worth the name would throw a lady out on the streets. Particularly not the lady he was obsessed with, in love with.
Damn it, he might as well admit it—he was in love with her. Head over heels, topsy-turvy in love with Miss Sarah Chesham. Once he had her in his lodgings, in his bed and in his arms, he would not let her go again.
If it meant that she would stay with him and give him the right to protect her from scum like Sir Richard, he would even marry her.
Marriage. He’d not seriously considered it before, but the more he thought about it, the more it appealed. Sarah would make him a fine wife. Her occupation did not bother him—in fact, he was man enough to admit that it turned him on. He was a grown man and his parents were no longer alive to be shocked by his choice of bride. Nobody else’s good opinion mattered to him.
If she stayed at Mrs. Erskine’s establishment, she would attract plenty of lovers, men with far more money and status than he could ever hope to aspire to. Any of them would set her up in luxury and she would want for nothing. They might not offer to marry her, but then again, such things had happened before.
If wealthier and more aristocratic men than he was did not blink at marrying a fallen woman, then why should he? Besides, Sarah was no whore, but an abused woman. Only an animal would have no pity on her situation. It was his duty to rescue her from Sir Richard and other men who would take advantage of her.
“Can you walk?” Reluctant though he was to put her down, he could not carry her all the way to his apartments.
She struggled to her feet. “I would crawl on my hands and knees to get out of this house tonight.”
They made their way downstairs and out of the front door, unobserved and unmolested.
Arm in arm through the dark streets, they walked to his lodging house. Tom did his best to support Sarah, but she was strong and would not lean on him.
The street was dark, his latchkey was stiff, and his landlady had an ear like a fox. Clad in a voluminous flannel nightgown, a knitted nightcap on her head, and a candle in her hand, she accosted them both on the stairs. “This is a respectable establishment,” she hissed at him, looking askance at Sarah’s ripped silk shift and low décolletage. “I will thank you to take your fancy piece elsewhere. I want no such shenanigans in my house.”
Tom gave her an icy glare. “I will thank you not to refer to my wife as a fancy piece.”
“Your wife?” both women asked at once. Thankfully his landlady’s strident squeal utterly overwhelmed Sarah’s quiet gasp.
“It is hardly the hour for introductions, but since you insist.” He gave Sarah’s arm a squeeze to warn her not to contradict him. “May I present my wife, Mrs. Thomas Wilde, until this happy afternoon Miss Sarah Chesham, and daughter of the late, and highly respectable, curate of Wigglesthorpe.”
The landlady looked doubtful, but in the face of his insistence, she had no choice but to back down. “Well, if she really is your wife—”
“Which she is,” he interjected.
“—then I suppose she is welcome to stay as my guest for tonight.” She gave Tom a meaningful look. “We can talk about your rent in the morning.” With that, she took her candle and waddled off into her apartments, muttering loudly about Sarah’s strange and highly suspicious choice of bridal attire.
As soon as Tom had shut the door into his rooms behind him, Sarah collapsed into a corner of the sofa. The effort of pretending to be strong, of pretending that she was not hurting in every way that she could hurt, was exacting a heavy toll on her. “That was gallant. Unnecessary, but gallant.”
He paced around the room, his head averted from her gaze. “Mrs. Fitchett is not known for her kindness to distressed souls. She would have refused you entry if I had made any other excuse for bringing you home with me.”
His voice was strangely uncertain. Was he already regretting his offer of a sanctuary for the night? She leaned back and closed her eyes, unwilling to face his rejection just yet. “What will you do tomorrow when she finds out you have told her a lie?”
“There is no need for it to be a lie.”
The darkness was a blessing. It matched her mood. “You do not mean that.”
“You are wrong. I meant every word of it.”
All she wanted was for him to make love to her and remove the taint of Sir Richard from her body. She would not feel clean until every trace, every memory of him was washed away. “Then you are either too foolish or too drunk to know what you have just said.” She wanted nothing more from him than his help erasing her memories. She could take nothing more from him.
“I am not drunk, and I make a very good living by my wits, so you should not call me foolish, either.”
“It does not matter. You cannot marry me. I would not ask it of you.” Her arms ached to hold him. “Come to me, Tom. I will be your mistress for tonight at least, though I cannot be your wife.”
“You will marry me.”
Her mouth curved in a faintly malicious smile. “Are you that scared of Mrs. Fitchett that you would marry me to escape her wrath?”
“Damn Mrs. Fitchett. I don’t care a bean for her.”
“Then come kiss me.”
“No.”
Had Sir Richard’s attack on her spoiled even this? She forced her eyes to open, to gaze at his face and read the truth that was in his eyes. “Do you not want me anymore?” His loss of desire was understandable, even excusable. He had seen another man on top of her, preparing to violate her body. The blame for his disgust lay with Sir Richard, not with Tom himself. She would try not to hate Tom for it.
“Of course I want you.” He smashed his fist down on the mantelpiece above the fire in frustration. “I’ve done nothing else but want you from the moment I first met you. I’m just about dead with wanting you.”
“Then why won’t you kiss me? Why won’t you take me to your bed?”
“I am a respectable bewhiskered Victorian gentleman of impeccable morals,” he said, his mood changing from frustration to frivolity on the instant. “I will not succumb to your wicked blandishments until you have agreed to marry me.”
“You are being ridiculous.”
“I don’t care.”
“You warned me weeks ago that you would never marry me.” The memory of their conversation still niggled at her soul. “Why have you suddenly changed your mind?”
“For all the usual reasons.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, waiting for an explanation.
“Companionship, a partner to share my life with, children, great sex.” He gave a comical leer. “Especially the great sex. I’m particularly looking forward to that part.”
Lust was no basis for a marriage. Not the sort of marriage she had dreamed about. “Maybe I won’t want to be intimate with you anymore if we get married.”
His leer turned into a confident smile. “I have had a month’s worth of practice in tempting you to fall into my arms. I am confident I will be able to persuade you into it.”
“Maybe I
will want to fuck other men,” she said, pushing him to see how far he would go with his absurdity. “Consider, I was a coffee house girl after all. I may have picked up a taste that you will not be able to satisfy.”
His face darkened with distaste. “You enjoyed being beaten and nearly raped by Sir Richard?”
An involuntary shudder wracked her body. “That was not kind of you.”
“I apologize.” His voice was clipped, but his irritation was directed not at her for baiting him, but at himself for rising to her bait. “It was cruel of me.”
She should not allow him to flagellate himself simply for reacting to her provocation. “I accept your apology.”
“And my offer of marriage? Do you accept that as well?”
His ability to switch from deadly seriousness to even more deadly foolishness in the space of a heartbeat astonished her. “You will regret it in the morning.”
“Never.”
She pulled her ripped bodice lower, exposing her naked breasts, tempting him as best she knew how. “Come and kiss me.”
Impervious to her nakedness, he stuck his hands in his pockets and did not move away from the fireplace. “No.”
Her skirts were easily adjusted to show off her bare calves and thighs. “You will not make love to me until I agree to marry you?” She lifted her skirts higher, almost to the juncture of her thighs. “Are you sure about your decision?”
He gulped at the sight, but turned away resolutely, refusing to be tempted. “I will not.”
“Then I suppose I have no choice.” She rose from the sofa, clasped the tattered remnants of her clothes around her, and walked with dignity toward the door. “I will not accept charity. If you do not want me as your mistress, I will have to leave.”
His solid form blocked the doorway. “You cannot leave.”
“You have no right to keep me a prisoner here.”
He shot her a reproachful look. “Mrs. Fitchett thinks we are married. What ever would she think of me if my new bride deserted me on our wedding night?”
Parlor Games Page 16
