Raine: The Lords of Satyr (9 page)

Then without another word, the only father Raine had ever known deposited him with strangers. He’d left all the rest to be explained by Lord Satyr, who was in fact Raine’s true blood father.

“You are welcome here,” the man had told him, “as my son and heir.” And he had been.

Raine had met his two half brothers, Nick and Lyon, that same day. All three of them had their father’s blood and the blood of a human mother flowing in their veins. Only Raine was a bastard, with a mother other than his siblings.

It had been the last time he’d seen either of the EarthWorld parents who had raised him to age thirteen.

Until today.

“O
ut with it, Mother,” said Raine. “Whose bed is your husband in and what do you propose that I do about it?”

The woman’s eyes spit fire, but her cultured voice remained calm. Through the crack in the doorway, Jordan studied her, fascinated. How she’d love to perfect that technique.

“Very well,” said his mother. “As you’ve guessed, he has been keeping company with yet another strumpet. I want you to find him and bid him return home before the gossips get wind of it.”

“Do you have the name and location of this so-called strumpet,” Raine inquired, “or am I to go door to door asking if any trollops are in residence who might have an extra gentleman in their bed?”

“Signora Celia Cietta. That’s the slut’s name.”

In the other room, Jordan gasped. Raine’s father was keeping company with her own mother?

“Stop eavesdropping, Jordan, and come join us,” Raine demanded, glancing toward the dressing room.

“All right,” said Jordan, refusing to be embarrassed at being caught out. When she turned the doorknob and stepped into the room, Raine’s gaze swept her before turning back to his mother.

“I doubt your husband will listen to me—after all, I am…what did he say the day he threw me out? Ah yes, it comes back to me now—a spawn of the devil,” said Raine.

His mother fidgeted under his stare and a cold silence fell. Swathed in her cloak, Jordan observed the interplay between him and his mother with interest.

“However, I’ll help you under one condition. My friend—Signorina…” Raine looked to Jordan in question.

“Alessandro,” Jordan improvised.

“Signorina Alessandro requires some clothing,” Raine went on. “Several dresses. And…” He floundered.

“Accessories?” Jordan supplied.

Raine nodded. “Yes. Whatever a signorina of nineteen requires in the way of garments and such. Entire outfits, head to toe.”

“What has that to do with me?” asked his mother.

“In return for my help, you will take her measurements before you depart this room. You will then take those dimensions to the finest shops in Venice and see her outfitted by this afternoon.”

Jordan and his mother stared at him with equal expressions of shock.

“And—” Raine’s voice rose, stifling his mother’s protests. “You’ll not ask questions.”

“But acquiring all that is needed to improve this creature by this afternoon is an impossible task,” his mother insisted.

“Not for one of your social standing, surely.”

The woman glowered at Jordan, appearing loath to touch any part of her for fear of contamination. “Very well,” she huffed at length, tugging off her gloves. “I’m no dressmaker. However, I’ll do my best to take her measure.”

“No,” said Jordan, stepping back from the soft lady’s hands that reached for her. “You’ll have to guess at my sizes.”

Raine’s knowing gaze sharpened on her, but he didn’t insist.

“Good grief,” said the woman, pulling her gloves back on with a disgusted jerk. She handed her son a note from her handbag. “Here’s the address of the strumpet’s home. I’ll have the packages of whatever garments I can locate for your
friend
delivered here to your hotel as soon as I’m able. It will be more convenient than having you visit me to collect them.”

“Yes, I’m sure it will be,” said Raine sardonically. “What would the neighbors think to see me return from the dead? You did tell them I was dead after you turned me out of your home, did you not?”

His mother made a show of straightening her hat before speaking. “Let’s not get into that, Raine. It does no good. You may send me a message regarding the outcome of your task once you have completed it.” She moved to the door, where she turned and pierced him with her gaze. “Don’t fail in this, Raine. You owe me. I’ve lost much because of you.”

Raine turned rigid, his expression fairly dripping icicles.

Once his mother had departed, Jordan had a thousand questions. But the look on his face kept her silent on all but one. “Why in the world did you ask her to buy clothing for me?”

Before he answered her, Raine re-opened the door and spoke to a servant in the hall, ordering a bath.

When he stepped back inside, he shut the door and locked it. “I’d like you to accompany me on the errand my mother requested. You’ll need more to wear than a cloak, a mask, and those ribbons if we’re to return to Venice.”

Jordan glanced down to discover herself stroking the ribbons she’d taken from him last night, almost as if they were worry beads. She stared at the colorful strands she’d dreamed of so often. The ones that had led her to him.

Gazing at them, she remembered what had awakened her this morning. Dreams. They were new, confusing, and expected. Once the third and final prophecy of a series of dreams came to fruition, another series always invaded her slumber to take their place. Night after night, this new set would recur until they too were realized.

As usual, last night’s dreams had come to her in three parts. In the first a brilliant white dove had appeared. It had been beautiful, slumbering on its back, with its wings widespread.

Next came the four legs, each encased in blue stockings. And last of all had come the snake. She shuddered, chasing the thought of it away for now.

“And then what? After the clothes and the errand I mean,” she asked.

Raine came closer, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and making her shiver. “I enjoyed last night. If you’re not otherwise engaged, I’d like you to travel with me as my companion to my home in Tuscany. You’ll require clothing there as well.” His eyes slipped over her. Though it was the briefest of studies, she felt it almost as a physical touch. “Most of the time.”

She folded her arms and edged away from him. She’d embarked on a new path last night, one of independence that she hoped would lead her away from male domination. She would not place herself so easily under another man’s thumb.

“You just assume I have nothing better to do? That I’m free to go with you to parts unknown merely to frolic in your bed at your beck and call?”

“Aren’t you?”

Though she was glad he didn’t question where she lived, whom she’d be leaving behind, or why she’d been naked under the cloak last night, it still annoyed her that he so cockily imagined her current existence in Venice to be worthless.

She shook her head. “Last night was a singular event. I can’t go with you. I know nothing of you, nor you of me.”

“I’m Raine Satyr, the middle son of the three Lords of Satyr.”

Her eyes widened.

“I see you know my family by reputation.”

“Not really. But the Satyr name is quite familiar.”

“Ah, then only the vaguest gossip has reached your ears. Let me endeavor to fill in any gaps in your education. We’re winemakers. I’m wealthy enough to keep you in good style. My family home is secluded, in the country where no one will bother us.”

She waved a hand to encompass him from head to toe. “So you’re affluent. Handsome. Intelligent enough to know you could hire twenty escorts more suitable than I. What do you want with me?”

“Companionship.”

“And sex?”

He nodded. “On occasion.”

He was asking her to be his whore for as long as he required her to be. She had to admit the idea was tempting. He still assumed her to be female. If she went with him, she could live as a woman. Wear a woman’s clothing. Be addressed as signorina. She longed to agree to his proposal, if only for a few weeks. Just until Salerno gave up searching for her.

No. Such thinking skirted the edge of self-destruction. If her identity were ever discovered and revealed, her mother’s house of cards would tumble. And what if he discovered the truth of the body he’d been bedding, as he eventually would? He might be angry. Very angry.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said. “Who is your family?”

At last the questions came, but she was ready. “I’m alone,” she lied smoothly.

“How did you come to live on the streets?”

“My father died before my mother gave birth to me,” she began, sticking close to the truth so as to make it less likely she’d be caught out. “When I was born a girl instead of the male heir my mother hoped for, she was rendered destitute. The family wealth was entailed away, and she considered me a great disappointment as you may imagine. Then…she married a…tailor. I grew up in their home, of course, but then…she and her husband left Venice recently and I wasn’t invited along with them. I found my own way of surviving.”

“So you’re new to the streets,” Raine said.

She nodded.

“You won’t last long there, you know. You’ll succumb to disease or mayhem. My offer will extend your life.”

She shrugged. He was likely right, though he didn’t know the whole of it. Both the streets and her home seemed unsafe at the moment.

Even now, Salerno might be sitting in her mother’s salon upon the delicate French chaise Celia recently had re-covered with a satin fabric depicting winged faeries and frolicking nymphs. His complaints about Jordan’s premature departure from the theater last night would fall on sympathetic ears. Her mother would never see her side, never listen to the litany of indecencies and invasions Salerno had exposed her to over the years. Even if she managed to convince her mother not to send her back into his clutches today, he would come for her again, a year from now on her next birthday. And her mother would send her off with him, after yet another lecture on obedience.

Perhaps escape with this man was her best hope of avoiding such an ongoing fate. He would take her far from Venice, where she could make a new beginning. But she couldn’t leave her mother without a word. It would be cruel. For all her faults, her mother loved her in her own way, and she would worry.

A knock sounded on the door and a bath was brought in.

“Delay your decision,” Raine suggested. “We’ll bathe, breakfast, and await the arrival of your clothing.”

While she bathed, he went downstairs to confer with the hotelier on some matter or another. In his absence, Jordan availed herself of the chamber pot, then retrussed her cock and borrowed another shirt and some trousers from his baggage. He smiled when he returned and saw her ridiculous getup, but said nothing.

Fortunately, it turned out that his mother was as good as her word. Within hours, boxes filled with dresses, hats, gloves, and the like arrived.

Jordan oohed and ahhed over everything. Pulling out each of the three dresses that had come, she held them against her, one by one. Two were muslin and the third was made of chintz with two rows of flounces around its hem.

“Oh! They’re lovely. Look at this lace and this stitching.”

Raine eyed her face rather than the pile of feminine gewgaws. “My mother has impeccable taste.”

Jordan threw the gowns onto the bed to rip into yet another package. “And just look at these adorable hats—straw with velvet ribbon and a silk one trimmed with ruches and ostrich feathers. And the slippers. Two pair, one high and one low. Oh! And they fit!”

Raine relaxed into a chair, his booted feet up on an ottoman. Though he held a book in one hand, he didn’t open it. Instead he observed her frenzied enjoyment of the gifts his mother had procured, a slight smile playing on his lips.

She dug through the remainder of the garments like a pirate surveying newly acquired booty. In due course, she pulled a final item from the pile of tissue and held it up.

“A corset,” she whispered in reverent awe. Though it looked like a device of torture, with its threaded back and boned sides, she instantly adored it. For the short time she would assume the guise of a female while under his protection, she wanted to experience everything other women took for granted.

She dashed into the dressing closet, where she divested herself of his clothing, and shimmied into a chemise and a muslin petticoat edged with embroidery. Then she returned to him, holding the corset.

“Help me with this,” she told him, pulling it over her head and giving him her back.

Raine frowned. “You’re slender. A corset hardly seems necessary.”

“I want it,” she insisted. “Please?”

He set his book aside and came to stand behind her. His hands methodically worked at the corset until it was fully strung.

“It’s too loose,” Jordan complained, looking down at herself when he was done. “It should push my breasts up. Like this,” she said demonstrating with cupped hands.

He sighed. “Very well.”

Laboriously he restrung it, cinching it tighter this time. “How is that?”

She took a few tentative, shallow breaths. “It’s like having a great vise around my lungs.”

His lips curved. “Sounds delightful.”

She grinned back at him and then went before the mirror, studying the effect the corset had on her figure with approval. “It brings to mind the time I was swimming in the lagoon and dove so deep my lungs were gasping for air.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever met a woman who has been swimming out of doors,” he commented.

“Or at least not one who would admit to it,” she said, not noticing when his lips widened further.

She slipped one of the muslin dresses over her head and had him fasten it up the back. Then she swished back and forth, watching the skirts sway around her. Cool air brushed her ankles and wafted higher along her legs.

It occurred to her that in trousers, the privates between one’s legs were neatly tucked away and hidden from sight. But under their skirts, most women wore no trousers. No underwear of any sort.

She knew this of course. What was or was not under a woman’s skirts had been a source of ongoing interest to Paulo and Gani, and she’d joined in their speculations on such things as a matter of course. But she’d never considered what it must truly be like to dress as a woman until now.

How easy it would be for a male hand to slip under one’s skirts, to slide up an ankle, a calf, a knee, a thigh. And higher still. All in a flash. Such clothing made a woman vulnerable.

She picked up the pins that had come wrapped in another package and began pinning up her hair as she’d seen her mother do to her longer tresses many times. In the privacy of her room, she’d often played at arranging her own curls, imagining herself to be getting ready for a ball of some sort.