In the Flesh (7 page)

I wonder if Sofia can provide me with a few tips?

It would be rather embarrassing quizzing her friend on such intimate topics, and even more so, revealing why she needed the knowledge, but after seeing Sofia’s performance last night in the conservatory, it was clear that the older woman was well versed in the sexual arts.

And then there was always Polly, who seemed to know everything about everything.

Despite these potential wells of wisdom, it was still going to be hard providing Ritchie with value for money. Especially when she was still technically a virgin—despite what had happened with Eustace—and her cavortings with Ritchie last night were the furthest extent of her amatory experience.

No, she’d have to insist on a lesser sum. Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie was a lecherous manipulative rogue, but she still couldn’t bring herself to cheat him. She’d take only enough to pay off the debts that she and Charlie had incurred, and a modest sum to cover their needs while her brother found some kind of sensible paying employment that didn’t offend his gentlemanly sensibilities and where he couldn’t effect any further financial chaos. After that, a little extra to set herself up in a typewriting and secretarial concern for persons of quality.

Good. That’s a decision smartly made. How coolheaded I am in a crisis.

Beatrice narrowed her eyes. There was no doubt who the taller man was, but why on earth would he choose to resort to such subterfuge? Was he trying to discover secrets about her from the servants? Some further skeleton in her closet with which to exert additional leverage over her? That seemed very much his modus operandi.

But even if there was a skeleton, Polly wouldn’t reveal it. And neither would Cook nor Enid, she hoped, at least not deliberately. Unlike some ladies of her acquaintance, Beatrice always endeavored to treat the servants as well as she would like to have been treated herself in their situation. She even helped out with domestic chores as best she could now that the household was much reduced, and she hoped that her efforts to lighten the load offset Charlie’s occasional airs and graces.

So, Mr. Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie, you’ll be disappointed if you’re hoping to find any scandalous morsels about me around the kitchen hearth. I’ve done nothing more wicked than I did with you last night! All my scandalous morsels are already fairly common knowledge.

* * *

“
AND THEN SHOW
the gentleman who seems to be in charge into the morning room, will you, Polly? And tell him I’ll be down presently.”

Fortified by tea, Beatrice prepared for the forthcoming confrontation. Part of her was nervous, part filled with a perverse and delicious longing. She’d soon have a lover, and by all accounts, one as skilled as he was handsome.

“The morning room, not the parlor?”

“The morning room will do. The parlor needs bottoming and it’s only for persons of quality anyway.”

That would show him. If it
was
him.

“And then shall I return to help you dress, miss?”

Beatrice groaned inside. The corset, the layers of petticoats, her hair…it would all take an age.

To the devil with it! And with him! He’ll see me in dishabille soon enough, and after last night, it’s far too late to stand on ceremony.

Those blue eyes, so well remembered, seemed to taunt her, and between her thighs, she imagined she felt his fingers. A sweet ache coiled and tightened in her belly.

“No, that won’t be necessary, Polly. I’ll receive him in my dressing gown. You just keep an eye on the friend. Have Cook and Enid gone out to the market yet?”

Polly nodded, her eyes popped wide, and Beatrice laughed inside. Her maid was usually unflappable, hard to shock.

“But, miss, it’s not seemly to receive a gentleman in your night attire. What would people say?”

“People? Pah! They already think I’m a hussy and a fallen women, so what difference does it make now? And I’ll be dismissing this fellow again within a few minutes. He won’t have time to be scandalized.” She tossed her hair, wondering what Mr. Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie would think of so much curly redness. Polite society considered such hair savage, too wild and abandoned, but she considered it her very best feature. “Now, about your business, Polly!”

The other woman lingered. She gave a pointed cough.

“Now what is it?” Beatrice hid another smile.

“Won’t you need chaperone, miss? I mean, an unmarried lady receiving a gent on her own…without her corset.” Polly’s eyes twinkled with the spark of a conspirator. “There’s some that might say that’s rather fast.”

“Ah, well, as I said, thanks to Mr. Eustace Lloyd, that famously loathsome and despicable cad, I
am
fast, Polly. Positively a Derby winner!” Beatrice shrugged. Her damaged reputation still should be considered a calamity, but all she felt was a delicious liberation. “So I might as well enjoy the freedom my speedy status affords me, eh? Now, off you go.”

“Yes, miss!” Hiding a smirk behind her hand, Polly darted from the room.

Now, as to her dressing gown? The old brown woolen one just wouldn’t do. Time to bring out the fine blue one, one of the last new things she’d purchased before their fortunes had turned to dust.

If a man was prepared to pay twenty thousand guineas for the use of her body for a month, the least a girl could do was wear her nicest dressing gown.

* * *

RITCHIE COULDN’T RELAX
in the damask-upholstered wing chair. It was comfortable enough, and not the usual delicate ladies’ morning-room chair; but waiting, waiting, waiting, he couldn’t find ease in it.

What’s the matter with me? Why am I here like this, sneaking around and behaving like a youth in rut with his brains all addled by his first-ever sniff of a real, live woman?

What was it about Beatrice Weatherly that made him act this way? Despite the licentiousness of the photographs she’d posed for, his gut feeling was still that she was no jaded sophisticate. The women he kept company with were mainly society beauties with inattentive husbands, women eager to share his bed discreetly in return for pleasure and a release from the inherent boredom of the ever repeating Season.

But Beatrice Weatherly wasn’t jaded or bored or married, or even particularly sophisticated, and perhaps because of that, his yearning for her was out of all proportion. She had an elusive quality that spoke to his soul and tantalized his cock. Yet for the life of him he was hard-pressed to define it.

And as for pitching up here in mufti rather than gentlemanly finery? To show her he wasn’t really a toff at heart, he supposed. A self-made man who’d worked hard, like his father before him.

It was also easier to circumvent Beatrice’s ineffectual brother this way too. He’d nothing against the man, but his sister was worth twenty of him.

You’re a sly weasel, Ritchie my lad. Especially when it’s your cock that’s running the show.

Restless, he sprang to his feet, his body humming like an electrical dynamo. The room he’d been shown into by the shrewd-looking maid was pleasing enough, if a little faded and old-fashioned looking, due no doubt the Weatherly’s lack of funds to pay for elaborate furnishings and a sufficiency of servants. Prowling around, he sensed instinctively that this was Beatrice’s domestic domain, the room she spent most of her time in. He studied a number of bookshelves, which were less dusty than some of the furniture, and their eclectic contents surprised and inordinately pleased him. History, the classics, Mr. Darwin’s treatise and other scientific tomes—all these rubbed shoulders with a broad array of novels of high and low style, and notably, issues of the literary publication,
Lippincott’s,
all well thumbed. He had a feeling that Beatrice read across the entire spectrum of the arts and knowledge represented. He sensed a mind in her as curious as it was sharp.

The mantelpiece was crammed with photographs.

Experiencing a twist of guilt, he sought out the life of the quiet, sweet girl Beatrice must once have been before she’d taken to posing for pornographic images. Almost reluctantly, he scanned the frames, his heart athud.

Even in stiff formal poses, Beatrice exuded the same energetic sensuality that informed her nude studies. Perched on a chaise longue beside her brother, and in the company of an older couple, presumably the now deceased elder Weatherlys, she lit the composition with life and vitality. Even with a perfectly straight face, to Ritchie’s eyes, she seemed to smile.

He passed hungrily from image to image, devouring each glimpse of her. Here in a country house garden, in a white dress, hair down, breathtaking in her purity. Here, with enormous daring, in fancy dress and revealing her sleek thighs in what looked like her brother’s breeches.

And here…oh, here…with another man, in what looked like an engagement photograph. This time it was the lucky fellow who seemed barely able to hide his smiles, while Beatrice was a poem of fond affection.

Ritchie set the frame down with thump; his teeth were gritted and his chest tight. Why such irrational anger? Why so jealous of this lost fiancé? There had been men in her life since, surely, and yet he couldn’t seem to summon up much interest in them, or antipathy toward them. Even Eustace Lloyd, who was her most recent admirer, according to his sources, and a man with whom he was vaguely acquainted and for whom he didn’t much care.

Beatrice had been seen in public with Lloyd on one or two occasions before the photographs had surfaced, but not since. All very decorous, an exhibition or two, once at the theater. There was no sign of any lasting affection for him here though, no image amongst this collection, so whatever had passed between them was obviously over.

Frowning, Ritchie tapped his fingers on the shelf, thinking, thinking.

Gut instinct told him there’d been no intimacy with Lloyd. The man was personable enough, but there was something not quite pleasant about him, and he’d been suspected of theft at the Plenderley’s house party Ritchie had attended last year. Even though he barely knew her yet, Ritchie already credited Beatrice Weatherly with a discerning taste in the men to whom she gave herself.

And yet…who’d taken the nude photographs? He hadn’t asked Beatrice, and she’d offered no information of her own volition. Could it have been Lloyd? The man had certainly shown an unusually avid interest in cameras at the Plenderley shindig.

It was something Ritchie would have to look into, as a priority. He had agents and resources aplenty; it wouldn’t take long. There must be a good reason why a refined and spirited woman like Beatrice Weatherly had exposed her beautiful naked body to a nonentity like Eustace Lloyd.

Filing that thought away, he moved to the small piano in order to distract himself from uneasy speculation. It seemed odd that the instrument was in here, rather than one of the more formal rooms, but there was Chopin on the music stand, and various selections from Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan tucked beneath it, along with the sentimental “The Lost Chord.” Did Beatrice play? Most well-bred young women of her class did; it was one of the traditional accomplishments of marriageable young fillies. He pictured her slender, delicate fingers flowing over the ivories and jerked with raw desire, imagining the same dexterity on his cock.

Soon.

He was confident that she’d accept his offer. Not because he believed himself irresistible, but because he’d sensed pragmatism in her, and desire, and the hot spark of something less definable, but still intense. For his part, he’d suffered a
coup de foudre,
one might say, although emanating mainly, he owned, from regions far more southerly than the heart.

His cock ached as he rubbed his thumb and fingertip together compulsively. She’d been so wet and silky last night. Exquisitely responsive. Right there with him. No grim, tight, resisting miss she. No bitter disappointment to him after the promise of her beauty.

A familiar cloud nudged its way into his consciousness, but he shook his head, dislodging it. He would not think of
that
now—or of
her
—just when Beatrice Weatherly was about to appear. The only woman of his recent acquaintance who could truly make him forget.

As if answering his prayers, the doorknob rattled as it turned, and he spun around.

“Good morning, Mr. Ritchie. I didn’t anticipate seeing you again quite so soon.”

She was a vision, everything he remembered from last night, and much, much more.

“Good morning, Miss Weatherly.” Moving swiftly amongst the furniture, he strode toward her and snatched up her hand. The touch of her skin, so smooth and warm, expunged all darkness. “And why wouldn’t you expect me? Didn’t I say I’d have an offer for you this morning?” Like a voracious schoolboy let loose in a sweet shop, he let his eyes rove over her, unable to hide his sudden, surging desire.

Beatrice Weatherly took his breath away just as easily as she stiffened his cock.

His mouth pressed to the fingertips of her raised hand, Ritchie stared at her over her knuckles. Her brilliant hair was unbound save for a few constraining strands caught in a white ribbon at the back of her head, and she looked a fair demoiselle or an enchanted queen in a painting from the hand of Mr. Rossetti. Her magical curls tumbled and drifted like flame, heating his blood.