Mary Balogh (34 page)

Well, he thought, removing himself from her after a minute or two of total exhaustion and settling her in the crook of his arm as he drew the blankets up over them, he would never again be able to look at Lady Mornington and see her body as sexually unappealing. And he would never look at her again and be a little afraid of her as an intelligent woman somewhat beyond his touch. Intelligent she might be. But she was also an all passionate, uninhibited, feminine woman.

Strange, he thought. He had been in search of a new mistress for several weeks. And finally he had found her where he had least expected. Lady Mornington! It was almost laughable.

He followed her into sleep.

She woke him twice during the night, once when the storm moved briefly overhead again, and he turned her over onto her back once more and mounted her without foreplay and loved her swiftly while she held him close. And again when dawn was beginning to light the room. She was standing beside the bed, touching his arm. She was dressed.

“My lord,” she said, “I wish to go home if you please.”

“Edmond,” he said, laughing.

She turned her back on him and walked unhurriedly to the window as he threw aside the blankets and stepped naked out onto the carpet.

She was unwilling for him to accompany her home. “I would be obliged for the use of your carriage,” she told
him, “but there is no need for you to come, too, my lord.”

But he insisted, of course, and they sat silently side by side during the drive to Portman Place, not quite touching, looking out at the early-morning streets, still partly wet from the downpour of the night before.

“At least no one will be complaining of dust for a day or two,” he said.

“No,” she agreed. “It will be the mud.”

That was the extent of their conversation.

He stepped down from the carriage at Portman Place and handed her out as his coachman rang the doorbell.

“Thank you,” she said, looking up at him. If she was embarrassed by the appearance of a curious servant in the doorway to her house, she did not show it. “Good day to you, my lord.”

He held her hand for a moment longer. “I shall do myself the honor of calling on you this afternoon,” he said.

She hesitated for a moment, looking down at their hands. “Yes,” she said at last, looking up into his eyes again. “I shall be at home.”

He raised her hand to his lips before releasing it.

M
ARY WAS USUALLY
an early riser. The morning was too exhilarating a part of the day to be wasted in sleep, she always told anyone who was startled to discover that she frequently walked in the park at a time of the morning when only tradesmen and maids exercising the family dogs were abroad. But it was mid-morning when she awoke on the day following Vauxhall. And even then, when she opened her eyes and saw her cup of chocolate looking cold and unappetizing on the table beside her bed, she would have gone back to sleep if she could.

But she could not. She lay on her stomach, her face
buried in her pillow, and remembered. And felt quite physically sick. She wished it could all be written off as a dream—as a strange, bizarre nightmare. But she knew that it could not. There was that unmistakable, almost pleasant aching in the passage where he had been and worked. There was the tenderness of her breasts, which he had touched and fondled and sucked and bitten. There were the dryness and slight soreness of her lips. And somehow there was the smell of him on her arms and in her hair, and the taste of him in her mouth.

No, it had been no dream. Vauxhall had been real. The storm had been real. And he had been real.

She sat up and reached over to the bell rope to summon her maid. She had to have a bath and wash her hair. If only it were as easy to wash him out of her memory and out of her life, she thought as she swung her legs over the side of the bed.

She cursed the thunderstorm for the first time. Without it she would have arrived safely back at the box, having had a quite horrid time walking with him, and she would have been able to part from him with the fervent hope that she would never have to be in company with him again.

But the storm
had
happened, and it had come at just the worst possible moment. The memory of it had her gripping the edge of the bed in blank terror for a moment. Never since that dreadful night in Spain had she been forced to live through a storm out-of-doors—or as near outdoors as to make no difference.

“A bath, please,” she said when her maid appeared in the room. “And some tea, Rachel. No, no more chocolate, thank you.” Her stomach revolted at the very thought.

Dear Lord, there had been no one to cling to but him. And she had clung, desperately and mindlessly. And she had been so intent on climbing right inside him that
eventually he had climbed right inside her—with her full consent and cooperation. Indeed, she was very much afraid that she had given him little choice.

With Lord Edmond Waite! He had been inside her body. She spread one palm over her mouth and closed her eyes. Dear God, inside her body. Where only Lawrence had been before. And no one for seven years. And now him.

When her bathwater had arrived, she sent Rachel back down to the kitchen to fetch a brush. And she scrubbed at her skin with it until the soapsuds were almost overflowing onto the floor and her skin looked rather like that of a lobster. But he had been inside her. She could not scrub him away.

He had said he would call on her during the afternoon. But she did not want him inside her house. Perhaps he would not come, she thought. But perhaps he would feel obliged to come. Perhaps he would feel obliged to offer for her. Would a libertine and a jilt feel obligated to offer marriage to the woman who had seduced him during a thunderstorm? The thought of marrying Lord Edmond Waite made Mary laugh most hysterically as she stood up and wrapped a towel about her shoulders.

Or perhaps he felt he owed her some apology. Did such a man ever apologize? Perhaps he would not come. She hoped and hoped that he would not come. Ever. She hoped she would never have to face the embarrassment of coming face-to-face with him again.

And it could not be avoided any longer, could it? she thought, wiping the suds angrily from one foot and losing her balance and hopping around on the other. There had not been only that encounter at Vauxhall, for which perhaps she could forgive herself. There had been that horridly sordid house, which was obviously his love nest, and that sickeningly vulgar room with its scarlet
velvet hangings and wide soft bed. And her almost inexplicable lack of resistance to being taken there.

With how many other women had he lain in that bed? she wondered, and felt again as if she must vomit. It had been a certain gratitude, perhaps, a certain embarrassment that had taken her there unresisting. He had done her an enormous favor at Vauxhall. There could be no arguing about that, sordid as their encounter there had been. Dear Lord, on a tabletop … She shook her head clear of the thought. And there had been some leftover terror, the need to cling, the fear of being alone. And a certain lassitude left over from that first encounter. A certain curiosity, perhaps? She shuddered. For whatever reason, she had found it impossible to refuse him.

And you enjoyed what you got there
. The inner voice was almost audible in the room.
You enjoyed every moment of it
. Mary shook her head again, but the voice could not be hushed.

She had always been something of a passive lover, though she had always given herself with willingness and tenderness. Certainly Lawrence had never complained or accused her of coldness. And men, she had always thought, liked to do the loving. Women, she had thought, were the receptacles for their pleasure. Not that she had ever lacked pleasure herself. Lawrence had pleased her.

She had not been passive the night before. Her frenzy was understandable at Vauxhall when the storm was raging. But there had been no storm that first time in the scarlet room. And yet … And yet … Oh, God.

You enjoyed every moment of it. And you gave every bit as good as you got
.

She closed her eyes very tightly. She could not have. She could not. The man repulsed her. He was everything she found most repulsive.

And most attractive
, the voice said, unbidden.

Surely he would not come that afternoon, she thought.
Surely, like her, he would wake up that morning appalled by what had happened between them the night before. But he had said he would come. She would not be there, she decided. She would go out. But she had told him she would be at home. She could not go out.

She dressed herself with shaking hands and brushed through her damp curls. She could still feel where he had been inside her. Well, she had asked for it to be slow, and slow it had been. The resulting soreness was inevitable. It had been seven years.

She rang for the bathwater to be removed.

T
HE BOTTOM FELT
rather as if it had dropped out of Mary’s stomach when the doorbell rang during the afternoon and she waited in the downstairs salon for her visitor to be announced. But when the door opened, she found with enormous relief that it was Penelope who was following the butler into the room, not Lord Edmond Waite.

“Mary,” Penelope said, reaching out her hands to take her friend’s, and kissing her on the cheek. “What a relief to find you at home. I was half afraid that you were still wallowing in some mud at Vauxhall. What on earth happened to you? Adrian had to almost drag me home. There was no point in our waiting around for you, he said, when doubtless you had taken shelter somewhere and were not alone anyway. But, Mary …” Her eyes grew saucer wide. “You were not alone! You were with Lord Edmond Waite, of all people. Do tell all.”

“We waited out the storm, and then he brought me home in his carriage,” Mary said, and hoped she was not blushing.

“I am so very sorry,” Penelope said. “That you were subjected to his company at all, I mean. I feel very responsible,
since I invited you. It never occurred to me that some of the Rutherfords’ guests would not be respectable. She is new to town, you know. He did not ravish you or anything unthinkable like that, did he?” She stifled a giggle.

“Nothing like that, I do assure you,” Mary said firmly. “We found shelter from the rain and passed the time in conversation.”

“Conversation?” Penelope said. “From all I have heard, the man is capable of only one kind of converse with women. But then, I daresay he stands somewhat in awe of you, Mary. Many men do because you dare to be openly intelligent. That is what Adrian tells me, anyway. Did you know that he killed his brother?”

“Adrian?” Mary frowned.

“Lord Edmond, silly,” Penelope said with a laugh. “Ages and ages ago. He was jealous of him, apparently, and killed him. And killed his mother indirectly, too. She died of a broken heart. I am surprised you had not heard.”

“People do not die of broken hearts,” Mary said. “And surely it did not happen quite as cold-bloodedly as you make it sound, Penny. No, I had not heard.”

“Well,” Penelope said, “it is ancient news and I do not know any of the details of it. I am glad you arrived home unravished.” She laughed. “But you have a terror of storms, do you not? Did he offer you comfort, Mary? Oh, I should not laugh, should I? It must have been quite dreadful for you, and I am sorry. I came to drag you out for a walk.”

“I cannot,” Mary said, and this time she knew that she had not avoided blushing. “I am expecting someone.”

“Oh, bother,” Penelope said. “But I will forgive you if he is tall, dark, and handsome. Who is he?”

“I did not say it was a he,” Mary said.

But the door opened again at that moment and the butler announced Lord Edmond Waite.

Mary noticed only her friend’s eyebrows disappearing up into her hair before turning to greet her visitor.

H
E TOOK HER HAND IN A FIRM CLASP
. H
E DID NOT
, Mary was relieved to find, raise it to his lips.

“Lady Mornington?” he said. “Mrs. Hubbard? I came to satisfy myself that neither of you took a chill or any other harm from last night’s storm.”

“None whatsoever, I thank you, sir,” Penelope said, looking curiously from him to Mary as he took the seat indicated. “But then, Adrian had the foresight to get us back to our carriage before the rain started. Was it not a dreadful storm? I cannot remember one that lasted so long.”

He was again Lord Edmond Waite, Mary thought, looking at him appalled. A stranger, elegantly attired, tall, rather too thin—no, “lean” was the better word, memory told her treacherously—with a harsh, thin-lipped face and strangely pale blue eyes. He was a man with a reputation that had always made him best avoided. A man to despise. A man who was not in any way a part of her world.

A man with whom she had spent a night of wild and abandoned passion. She shuddered.

“Nor I,” she said, and his eyes turned on her and burned their blue ice into her. “I am quite well, thank you, my lord.”

“I blame myself,” he said, “for having ignored the
signs until it was too late. I did not know about Spain, of course, but even so, the experience of a severe thunderstorm with only a frail shelter for comfort is not a pleasant one for a lady.”

“But at least Mary had you for company, my lord,” Penelope said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “At least she had that.” He turned back to Mary. “Would you care for a drive in the park later, Lady Mornington?”

How could she refuse? It would be churlish to do so, especially with Penelope sitting there, listening with interest.

“Thank you,” she said. But she really did not want to go. How could she spend an hour or more in company with him, when they had nothing whatsoever in common? How could she let herself be seen driving in the park with Lord Edmond Waite? She would be ashamed to be seen with him.

“I shall ring for refreshments,” she said, getting abruptly to her feet. But he put up a staying hand and got to his feet.

“I shall not interrupt your visit with Mrs. Hubbard, ma’am,” he said. “I have business that needs to be attended to. I shall return for you at half-past four?”