Enslaved (3 page)

“Good evening, gents. Or as we say in Paris,
bonsoir.
“ She fingered the black garter banding one milk white thigh, and Gavin joined the other male members of the audience in sucking in a collective breath.

Delilah du Lac dropped her slender foot from the bench to the stage floor and turned about to face the audience, and Gavin suddenly understood what all the fuss was about. Unlike the chorus girls he’d seen earlier that night, her face looked porcelain smooth, the features delicate as Dresden china except for her lush lips, her body lithe and long-limbed, her breasts generous without being bovine.

“My, my, what fine looking gents we have with us tonight,” she remarked, addressing the pianist. “Shall we give ‘em a taste of what they came for? Some sugar and spice?” Looking out onto the sea of tables, she raised her voice and asked, “What shall it be first, mates, the sugar—or the spice?”

She punctuated the word
spice
with a shimmy of her hips, and seconds later the audience exploded with calls for, “Spice, spice!”

Smiling, she slid a hand over the pianist’s shoulder and said, “You heard ‘em, Ralphie. Spice it is.”

The pianist answered with an eager nod and laid into the ivories, stroking out the score to popular music hall tune, a saucy number Gavin recognized as “Oh! Mr. Porter.” Delilah swept a scarlet boa from the seat, draped it about her slender white throat, and sauntered forward, the cone of limelight following her to the front of the stage. She stopped at the edge, and Gavin caught a whiff of her scent, some spicy mixture of jasmine and mint and musk that somehow managed to rise above the cigar smoke.

Wetting her lips, she sang:

“Oh! Mr. Porter, what shall I do,

I wanted to go to Birmingham, and they’ve taken me to Crewe,

Take me back to London as quickly as you can

Oh, Mr. Porter what a silly girl am I.”

The lyrics were mildly suggestive but not terribly risqué. Any bourgeois matron or young maid might have sung the same song from the bench of her parlor piano without drawing so much as a raised brow among her guests. It was the bold sensuality of Delilah’s delivery that made the song seem so overtly sexual—the steamy look in her slanted eyes, the perfect pucker of those moist red lips, the perfectly timed pauses and suggestive winks that made the most innocent-sounding of words seem fraught with innuendo.

The music shifted to the mellower tune of a number from
The Beggars Opera
and Delilah opened her scarlet slash of mouth to sing, “Can love be controlled by advice? Will Cupid our mothers obey? Though my heart were as frozen as ice, at his flame ‘twould have melted away.”

Delilah du Lac was obviously well-practiced at playing to her audience. At “heart,” she laid her folded hands over her left breast, lifting it so even more of the creamy cleavage slid out of her gown’s top. At “flame” she lifted her slender arms above her head and quivered her torso and hips, giving the impression of liquid mercury or dancing fire, her swaying more hypnotic than any hypnotist’s pendulum.

Watching her, Gavin was mesmerized. She was obviously a pro at working
it
—the stage, the crowd, him. She was working it—and she was
very
good. So good, in point, he could almost believe she was staring at him particularly, her gaze fixing on his face, her half moon brows lifting, and her stage smile slipping. He stared back, not at her breasts or her legs but directly in her eyes. For a frenzied few seconds, he felt the intensity of her regard like a physical touch, felt the answering hammering of his heart and the unmistakable stirrings of arousal. All at once it was as if he and Delilah du Lac were the only two people in the crowded club, as if the smile returning to her ruby lips was meant for him alone.

Gavin honed his gaze on her mouth, too wide for fashion and yet so sensuously shaped he could well imagine nibbling and licking and tasting the ripe fruit of those full lips for hours on end. Noting how her top lip was a near mirror image of the bottom, he felt something more powerful than lust slam into him.

Recognition.

The last time he’d seen that upside-down mouth it had been smeared with red, too, not with stage paint but with peppermint from the broken off bit of candy stick he’d given her. The sweet had been meant to take away the bitterness of their goodbye.

Daisy? Gavin blinked, half-wondering if the surfeit of drink, cigar smoke, and wishful thinking hadn’t conspired to cloud his vision and muddle his memory. The alcohol must be pouring into his bloodstream at a powerful pace because he would swear the woman who was the object of every slack-jawed stare in the place was the grownup incarnation of his childhood friend.

Perspiring profusely, he sat back in his seat and reached up to tug loose his tie. Delilah du Lac. Daisy Lake.
Lac
was the French word for lake, after all. He’d been searching the four corners of England and all this time Daisy must have been in France. What an idiot he was not to have considered the possibility before. As for his detective, he made a mental note to fire the fool on the morrow.

“All right, lads,” Delilah—Daisy—called out. “I’ve given you a taste of spice. Now it’s time for a nibble of sweet.”

Taking his cue, the pianist slowed the music to a soulful ballad Gavin recognized as “After the Ball.” Delilah stood in the center of the cone of limelight singing of love lost due to misplaced pride, and the wistful expression on her face and the familiar crystalline purity of her voice chased away the last of Gavin’s doubts. Hers was a woman’s voice, not a child’s, and one which obviously bore the benefit of years of practice and professional coaching, but even so the similarity was too striking for him to be mistaken.

Delilah and Daisy were two facets of the same woman. The years had transformed her coltish girl’s body into that of a woman, but beneath the mask of greasepaint, her heart-shaped face was familiar still, the childish promise of great beauty ripened to full bloom.

He dropped his gaze to her long legs sheathed in black fishnet stockings and was reminded of the rumors his friends had repeated earlier.
Legion of lovers. The Prince of Wales invited her to a very private supper when he was in Paris last. Talent onstage said to come as second to her talent between the sheets
. At the time he’d listened with only half an ear, but now each salacious snippet was a drumbeat echoing in his ears, a razor slashing at his heart.

He glanced between Hadrian and Rourke. What the devil was the matter with them? Didn’t they recognize her? Didn’t they know?

The ballad ended and apparently it was time for “spice” again. The music picked up pace, a raunchy burlesque number Gavin couldn’t begin to name. Delilah strutted up and down the stage in time to the tune, interspersing high, thigh-baring kicks with slow, suggestive bump-and-grinds. Watching her, mouth dry, Gavin felt the sharp poke of an elbow in his side.

He turned to a grinning Rourke. “If she moves even half that well in bed, her reputation will have been well-deserved, aye?”

Steeling his voice to steadiness, he answered, “It’s all part of her act, for the benefit of the audience. Offstage I’m certain she’s a different person entirely.”

The effects of drink were fading, replaced by the headier intoxication of raw, animal lust. He felt as if his every sense vibrated with a previously unknown awareness, a steady-striking pulse point of need, stirrings that Daisy in her present incarnation as Delilah was ridiculously adept at arousing.

Rourke cast him a skeptical look but was wise enough not to argue the point. “I’ve set my sights on a certain wee heiress. Pocket-size though she is, I suspect once she warms to me Lady Kat will prove far too lusty in bed to leave me time for show girls, even ones who move like …
that.”

Show girl. Gavin winced at the word and yet that was exactly what Delilah—Daisy—was.

Hadrian yawned behind the back of his hand. “You’ll get no competition from me, either. She’s a tasty morsel, but I’m very much missing my bed and my bride.”

Rourke snorted. “What he means is Callie would turn him into a castrato if she caught him ogling another woman.”

Hadrian didn’t deny it. “I’m married and to hear him talk, Rourke is as good as engaged, but there’s nothing to keep you from following your fancy.”

Rourke nodded his agreement. “Aye, if a fling with a show girl is what it takes to melt your melancholy, go to, man. Go to.”

“I’ve no interest in a fling,” Gavin said. Watching a glowing Daisy stroll back over to the piano, he was already busy calculating how he would go about getting her alone.

He didn’t mean to keep his friends in the dark indefinitely—she’d been their friend, too—but after a year of combing England looking for her, he felt a private reunion was more than deserved. As soon as the performance was over, he would slip backstage and find his way to her dressing room. Or perhaps he should send their waiter with a note inviting her to join him at his table for a glass of champagne. Yes, yes, that’s likely how these things were done. He’d gladly choke down another whole bottle of the dreadful stuff if it meant seeing her alone.

Rourke interrupted his thoughts with a clap on the back. “So, Gav, after all your fashing, aren’t you glad we wouldn’t take no for an answer and dragged you out anyway?”

Gavin didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Patrick. I can honestly say there’s no place I’d rather be.”

“The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking down at me,
There he is, can’t you see,
waving with his handkerchief,
As merry as a robin that sings in a tree.”
—The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery,
Music hall song made famous by Marie Lloyd

T
he song spiraled to a close, and Daisy parked herself by the piano to catch her breath. Draping an arm about the pianist, she called out, “Maestro, for my final number give us a cross between spicy and sweet, if you please.”

Each night, her act concluded with her selecting one man from the audience to bring up onstage for her most seductive number. This night’s selection would be “A Little of What You Fancy,” made popular by music hall legend, Marie Lloyd. Like any song, it was the delivery more than the lyrics that set the tone of the piece. A suggestive smile, a shimmy of shoulders or hips, a subtle inflection of voice could transform the most demure of drawing room melodies into the bawdiest of ballads. It was all in good fun, and the audience ate it up as evidenced by the hefty tips that came her way afterward.

The handsome dark-haired man sitting at one of the front row tables with his friends had caught her eye from the very first.
A real gentleman,
she’d thought, but beyond that he had the look of someone she’d once cherished and lost, Gavin Carmichael, the orphan boy she idolized as a child. For a split second, she actually thought he
was
Gavin before dismissing the notion as fancy fed by wishful thinking and more than a passing resemblance. Taking in his confident carriage, the apparent ease with which he chatted with his tablemates, and the habit he had of looking everyone, including her, squarely in the eye, she told herself he couldn’t possibly be the sweet, stammering, slope-shouldered boy of her memory.

Like Gavin, this solemn-eyed man struck her as the serious sort, not one to appreciate being singled out and subjected to a feather boa looped lasso-like about his immaculate shirt collar—which made the prospect of tweaking that aristocratic nose and coaxing a flush into those high-boned cheeks all the more irresistible.

From the orchestra pit, a drum roll sounded, her cue to sashay down the stage stairs and choose her night’s “victim.” Summoning her most sultry smile, she announced, “I’ll need a volunteer from the audience. Whichever of you fine, strapping gents shall it be, hmm?”

Predictably, hands shot up to the sky along with calls of “Over ‘ere, sweet’eart,” and “Pick me.
Me!
”

Playing to the crowd, she pursed her painted lips into the pout she knew from experience would turn every man within eyeshot into a randy, raving lunatic. “Oh, my, so many gallants to choose from, my poor head is spinning.”

Tapping a finger to the beauty patch beside her mouth, she made a show of scanning the audience, pausing every now and again to hesitate over a pair of pleading eyes or to smile into a flushed face, all the while knowing exactly who she would pick—the dark-haired archangel with the sad, solemn eyes and the beautiful lips. For the span of a single song, she simply had to have him.

“I think it will be …
you!”
She stabbed her finger at him and then crooked it, beckoning him onstage.

Looking like a startled stag confronted with a hunter’s rifle, for a handful of seconds he stared at her unmoving. One of his grinning friends jabbed him in the side. Coming to, he looked back over his shoulder as if the object of her pointing must be sitting at a table behind him. Daisy hid a smile and silently counted off to five. By “four” he’d turned back to her, expression horrified. Staying in his seat, he jerked his head back and forth and mouthed “no.”

He’s shy,
she thought, followed by,
How delicious.
After two solid weeks of being ogled by brutes and occasionally pawed by the bolder ones, the prospect of having to coax a man onstage with her was strangely titillating. Watching the mortified flush spread over his high-boned cheeks, she felt a jet of warmth shoot between her thighs and was startled by it. Though her act was overtly sexual, when performing she was very much detached from her body. More often than not, she felt as though she’d left her physical self entirely, as though she were the puppet master pulling the strings behind the scene of a Punch and Judy show, only instead of Punch, the puppet she manipulated was called Delilah. The byplay and banter she kept up with the males in the audience was entirely for show. The allure of her act rested on her ability to convince every man in the room she must be mad for him, but the truth was she never once felt the slightest sexual stirring while onstage—until now.

Heart drumming and palms perspiring, Gavin watched Daisy sashay down the steps, the spotlight following her as she headed straight for him. As much as he wanted to see her, becoming part of her act hadn’t been any part of his plan.

She drew up at their table.
“Bonsoir,
gents. Do any of you lads know French? It’s the language of love, after all.” Even though she addressed the trio as a group, Gavin didn’t miss how her eyes never left his face.
God, Daisy.

Rourke volunteered Gavin to speak any language she fancied and gamely suggested they commence with Latin. Faces wreathed in grins, he and Hadrian shifted to the side to make room.

Daisy flung her slender arms out to the side and announced to the audience, “I think our handsome friend must be shy. Are you shy, sweetheart?” Gaze locked on Gavin’s, she leaned over the table, sending cleavage spilling out the top of her gown, and ran her tongue along the seam of her lips, a slow, deliberate slide that had the heat pooling in his groin. Straightening, she called out to the other tables, “Come on, fellows, this fine young gentleman wants for encouragement. Let’s give it to him, shall we?”

A wave of boos and hisses rolled over the room. From the back, someone called out “Pisser” and another more benign voice added, “Lucky bloke,” but for the most part Gavin was too caught up in his beautiful tormentor to pay them much heed.

Wrenching his gaze away from her, he pleaded with his friends. “You go, Patrick. You fancy being front and center more than I.”

“Not a chance.” Rourke reached across and slapped him on the back. “It’s your night. It won’t kill you to have a bit of fun for once.”

Mortified, Gavin swung around to Hadrian. “Harry?”

Hadrian shook his head and then gave him a thumbs-up. “Can’t, mate. Callie would have my cock on a platter if she ever found out and even if she didn’t, I’ve had more than my share of show girls in my bachelor days. Pretend you’re in court before the judge and jury, if that helps you. Whatever it takes, go to!”

Gavin started to answer he didn’t care to “go to,” but instead found himself swallowing a mouthful of feathers. Standing behind his chair, Delilah ran practiced palms over his shoulders and down his shirtfront, stopping barely above the waistband of his trousers. Fingers pointed downward, she brought her mouth over his ear. “Either be a sport and come on stage with me or have me finish out my act here. What’s it to be,
chéri?
”

The threat levered Gavin to his feet. Face burning, he submitted to her winding the boa about his neck and then using its tail as a leash to lead him onstage. He mounted the platform amidst raucous applause just as two burly stagehands set down a gilded chair sideways in the spotlight.

“Take a load off, love,” she said, shoving both hands against his chest. Falling back into the seat he caught a whiff of the cool, clean scent of peppermint on her breath, her favorite sweet from all those years ago.

Like Delilah seducing Samson or Salome dancing for Herod, she circled him, her swaying movements matching the tempo of the music, her every teasing gesture designed to arouse. Standing in front of him, she slowly peeled off her elbow-high opera gloves finger by finger, the left hand with her teeth, a slow, seductive striptease. Gavin sucked in his breath, hoping his erection wasn’t visible to the audience as it must be to her.

She bent over him, grabbing the back of his chair with both hands. Her breasts were a hairsbreadth from his mouth, her green foxfire gaze a burn he felt like a brand on his flesh. In the subdued lighting, her skin, very white and slightly damp, glowed like pearls.

Turning her face to the side, she called out, “I think he likes it, gents. What about you?”

The crowd roared its approval and Gavin more than suspected his wasn’t the only hard-on in the room. Coins fell upon the stage floor like hail, one striking Gavin in the outer thigh. Delilah smoothed her hand over the smarting spot and cooed, “Poor baby,” loud enough for the audience to hear. The next thing he knew she was in his lap, or rather straddling it, a leg on either side of his chair. Hands braced atop his shoulders, she wiggled her bottom, her sultry smile telling him she was feeling every brick hard inch of him.

All at once, her eyes flashed open and her jaw dropped, taking her smile with it. “Gavin?”

He nodded. His mouth felt too dry for speaking but he managed to mouth the words, “Yes. Yes, it’s me.”

In that moment, he forgot he was on stage, forgot he was a respected barrister in a compromising, some might say
humiliating
position, a collar of feathers about his neck and a boner tenting his trousers. Feeling as though his blood had turned to molten lava, he threw back his head and fitted his hands to her hips and let her dance in his lap in time to the music.

She pulled back, and he fancied the sudden hitch to her breathing and the trembling of her thighs wasn’t part of the act. Now that she saw him for who he was, she was feeling it, too, something so bold and powerful and altogether erotic that surely simple lust must pale in comparison.

The music built to crescendo. Her eyes found his. Looking apologetic if not precisely shame-faced, she whispered, “It’s the finale. I’m … I’m sorry.”

Before he could ask what she was sorry for, she arched back, and he found himself eye-level with her splayed thighs, a sliver of moist pink flesh peeking out of the slit in her silky black drawers. Suddenly she flipped over, somehow managing to execute the somersault without kicking him in the face. Bounding to her feet, she turned to the audience. In one smooth motion, she reached down and pulled the drawstring of her bloomers. The garment felt away in two halves, revealing the scanty black lace thong beneath.

To a man, the crowd surged to its feet. More money fell upon the stage, crumpled pound notes this time amidst catcalls and wolf whistles and thunderous applause. Playing to the applause, she strutted up and down the stage, stopping periodically to bend over and pick up the money, a device to show off her exquisitely tight, milk white bottom.

Hands full, she pranced back to the piano and dropped the heap of collected coins atop. “Our volunteer has been a proper sport. He deserves something sweet, doesn’t he, Ralphie?”

The pianist obliged with a violent nod. “Aye, Miss Du Lac, seems he ought to get somethin’ for ‘is trouble.”

Daisy winked, a broad gesture meant to be seen all the way to the back of the room and strolled back over to Gavin, still seated in the chair. She settled her hands on his shoulders and looked long and deep into his eyes. “Fancy a sweet, love?”

Gav, have you brought me your sweets again this time?

Gavin opened his mouth to answer that no reward was required but before he could, she grabbed him by the shirt collar and crushed her mouth to his. Drowning in a sea of peppermint and applause, Gavin shot up from the chair, wrapped his arms about her slender waist, and lifted her off the ground.

Off into the distance, a male voice yelled out, “That’s the way, mate. Give her a good rogering.”

The crude remark returned Gavin to reality. He wrenched his mouth away from Daisy’s and looked past her to a sea of salivating faces. All at once he remembered where he was and, more importantly, who he was.

“Enough!” He stripped off his evening jacket and threw it about Daisy’s shoulders. Staring into her startled eyes, he said, “This is for your own good,” and swung her up into his arms.

“Put me down, you bleeding idiot.”

Feet flailing and palms pushing against her captor’s solid chest, Daisy could scarcely wrap her mind about what had just happened. Victim or volunteer, Gavin had turned the tables on her. He’d seized control of the audience,
her
audience, as well as her physical body, and now her shoulders and torso were locked within the vise of his hard-muscled chest and solid chaining arms.

“Not on your life.” Dodging her pummeling, he rushed across the stage with her.

“It may well be my life. If you don’t let me finish, we both may be torn to bits.”

This once she wasn’t exaggerating. Out in the audience, mayhem erupted. Looking back over the shelf of his broad shoulder, she saw tables toppling onto their sides, chairs crashing into walls and mirrors, and patrons fleeing to the exit doors or staying on to engage in bare knuckles brawling. Several angry men tried storming the stage, their bull-necked leader vowing to tear apart the spoilsport limb by limb. Fortunately Gavin’s friends were made of sterner stuff than typical London toffs. Leaping up from their seats by the steps, they used their fists to forestall the onslaught.