Taming the Rake (13 page)

He leaned his mouth closer. An intoxicating aroma of port filled her nose. “What were you doing on Curzon Street, Lady Georgina,” he whispered, his voice husky, only inches from her mouth.

God forgive her, she trembled. She was aching with desire like she’d never before experienced. Her heart felt drawn to her feet, so intense was the yearning.

He was affected too. She could see the warring emotion flickering in his hazy gaze. The heady aroma of port, the glazed vision.

He was foxed. The flash of insight sufficiently chilled her ardor. “Don’t,” she whispered.
Fool
. After what she’d learned of him today, how could she fall prey to such insanity? “You’re drunk.”

He’d put her on the defensive with his unexpected anger, but she remembered now. She remembered how he seduced women for play. She’d just never imagined how good he was at it. Nor had she imagined that she would be susceptible to his overwhelming masculine magnetism. How she would want to melt into the heat of his embrace.

He muttered a vile profanity and released her.

Raking his fingers through his hair, he seemed to collect himself. “I’m not drunk. On my way, perhaps, but not drunk.”

“Why do you drink so much?” she asked quietly.

“It’s none of your damned business,” he snapped back.

Drinking certainly wasn’t improving his temper any. What could drive a man to constantly dull his senses with liquor? She had a sudden epiphany. “When are you going to recognize the real problem?”

“And what problem is that?”

“That there isn’t enough drink in the world to make you forget whatever it is you want to forget.”

His eyes flashed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but I think I do.” Something or someone had hurt him. Here was a man that projected a cool, devil-may-care attitude, but deep down, he was in pain. He did care. He might not want to, but he did. He felt it enough to try to drown the pain in drink.

One only had to observe him with his sister to see the truth. To see the fondness he fought so hard to hide. Something kept him apart, and Gina was determined to find out what it was.

He met her gaze and Gina felt the connection. Felt the truth humming between them. And he felt it, too, because he looked away.

When he spoke there was a weariness that hadn’t been there before. “What were you doing on Curzon Street, Georgina?”

He’d slipped and used her Christian name. Such an intimacy sounded strange coming from him. Strange, but nice. He’d begun to let her in, even if he didn’t know it yet.

He stared at her hard, waiting for an explanation.

She shrugged.

“I can always make a visit myself and find out,” he threatened.

“No,” she said too quickly. At some basic level, the thought sickened her. Though she felt sorry for Madame Simone, she didn’t want Coventry anywhere in the vicinity of Mayfair.

Goodness gracious. He’d gotten Gina all mixed-up.
He
was the one who should be explaining himself. All of the resentment and anger that she’d harbored earlier surged forth. “Very well, if you must know, I went to offer your light-o’-love a settlement. But when I arrived I discovered it was unnecessary.”

He reached out and grabbed her shoulders. “Of all the asinine, foolish things. Don’t you realize what could have happened if anybody saw you?”

She stuck out her chin. “I was careful. And I’m not the one who should be ashamed. How could you treat the poor woman like that?”

He looked at her like she was a bedlamite. “Poor woman? I settled a fortune on her. She can live like a queen for years.”

“That’s not what I meant. Don’t you know that she is in love with you?”

He scoffed, releasing her. “A woman like Simone does not fall in love.”

Uncaring wretch. Did nothing penetrate his cold heart? “Anyone can fall in love.”

“You’re wrong,” he said flatly. “Don’t mistake passion—which she has an abundance of—for love.”

He sounded so certain, Gina thought to question him further, but he cut her off.

“She’ll find another protector. Women like her always do.”

Something in his tone raised her hackles. “Women like what?”

He took her chin and lifted to meet his gaze. “Women who sell their virtue for money,” he said harshly. “It was a business relationship, nothing more. And now that business has ended. Don’t romanticize her position, my dear. Love was never part of the bargain.”

Gina got the feeling he wasn’t just talking about light-o’-loves like Simone. No, it was too personal. “You can make it sound as ugly as you want,” Gina said stubbornly. “But she is in love with you.”

“Then she is a fool.”

The warning was unmistakable: Any woman would be a fool to fall in love with Lord Coventry.

Without another glance he walked away, leaving Gina alone in the moonlight, a strange sadness engulfing her.

Soon after leaving the garden, Coventry made his excuses to his smirking host (damn Blakemore, anyway) and ordered his carriage back to Brooks’s. He laid his head back on the velvet cushion and closed his eyes, allowing the gentle sway to soothe his flaming body.

Which was no mean feat.

Desire gripped him. He’d never wanted to kiss someone as badly as he’d wanted to kiss that little firebrand. The temptation had been overwhelming. A secluded garden, the soft moonlight bathing her beautiful features in a luminous alabaster light, the succulent red of her sensuous mouth, all drawing him into her feminine web. He’d ached to taste her. And would have, had she not stopped him.

She frustrated him on many levels, but it was the sexual craving that was driving him mad. He better do something soon to slake his lust, or he might well do something he regretted.

His attempt to find another mistress had to this point proved unsuccessful. The slew of available soiled doves he’d considered couldn’t compare to the termagant who haunted his dreams. In truth, his hand held greater appeal than yet another in the long succession of overly painted mouths like those who had preceded Simone. Not when the image of
her
sensual mouth surrounding him kept popping into mind.

Nor did he relish another tiresome scene such as the one he’d endured last week with Simone.

He frowned. Could Lady Georgina have been correct about Simone?

He’d attributed Simone’s hysterics to her passionate Gallic temperament. He’d known she’d grown attached, but did Simone truly believe herself in love? No, it was ridiculous. She was no inexperienced debutante; she knew what she’d been getting into. She’d known it wouldn’t last. With him, no one did.

Still, he could not dismiss the kernel of guilt gnawing at a conscience that he’d heretofore thought nonexistent. He hadn’t set out to treat Simone cruelly. In truth he hadn’t given her feelings a second thought. He thought her a simple, uncomplicated woman, enthusiastically enjoying a mutually satisfying arrangement. Perhaps the arrangement was more complicated than he realized.

He raked his fingers through his hair. He sounded like a damned milksop, worrying about the emotional entanglements of a cyprian. He didn’t understand it himself.

The coach turned the corner onto Piccadilly, clattered past Green Park to St. James’s Street, heading toward Brooks’s. To think, only a few short hours ago he’d been well on his way to a peaceful night of inebriated bliss. He hadn’t intended to attend Blakemore’s dismal little gathering until Ponsonby remarked upon seeing his coach parked in front of Simone’s townhouse.

He shook his head in continued astonishment. Lady Georgina Beauclerk had actually visited his mistress. In some perverse way it made him want to laugh. He admired her gumption, even as he hated to think of what she might do next.

But something bothered him about Lady Georgina. Once he’d gotten past the shock of being so blatantly pursued by a society miss, the questions started to form. As Blakemore had so indelicately put it: Why him? Her sudden attraction didn’t make any sense. They’d crossed paths enough times over the past few years to know that it was not his looks that drew her attention. Nor was it his title or fortune, neither of which she needed. Perhaps she saw herself as some kind of reformer. Maybe that was it; she wanted to reform the rake. Was it the challenge that drew her? Something about the idea rang true—and he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to be some young girl’s project. He chose to live his life the way he wanted to. Who was she to judge him?

He’d been judged enough.

Coventry opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. He was thinking far too much about her. She had him all twisted up in knots. One minute he wanted to throttle her, the next he wanted to kiss her. It was bloody disconcerting.

And it was dangerous. She saw far too much.

He looked out the small window, the familiar buildings of St. James’s Street sliding by. The purely male bastion where no respectable woman would dare tread, even one as bold as Lady Georgina. Another few minutes and he could return to his friends, his bottle, and his cards. The thought should relieve him, but somehow between here and Blakemore’s, getting drunk no longer sounded so appealing.

Still, he wouldn’t allow one pert miss to dissuade him from trying. And for a few more hours he did just that. Until he’d lost the taste—and a good deal of blunt—for gaming and took his bottle to a chair beside the fireplace.

Alcohol no longer warmed the emptiness inside him. Had it ever? Lately it only exacerbated the blackness curdling inside him, leaving him feeling even colder and emptier. And angrier.

Once he’d thought there was something more than the black emptiness that ate at his soul, but now he knew there wasn’t. This was it. Reaching for more only made reality that much worse.

He’d reached for more once.

“Drowning yourself in your cups, Coventry?”

Coventry gazed up through inebriated spectacles to see his smug host. The party must be over. He was trying, but instead he said, “Lady Blakemore lengthen the leash?” he quipped.

Blakemore only smiled. A self-assured smile that made Coventry feel as if he was the one missing something. Though he was hardly welcomed, Blakemore took a chair opposite him.

“If my wife had her way, you would be the one on a leash. Or perhaps in chains thrown in some hideous dungeon.”

Coventry grimaced. “She still has not forgiven me?”

Blakemore lifted a brow. “Do you expect her to?”

Coventry considered it for a moment. “I suppose not. But at the time, I didn’t trust her, she was an accomplished flirt, and I was only trying to stop you from making the same mistake I did.”

His friend’s face darkened, but he didn’t say anything. Blakemore had been furious, but he’d understood why Coventry had done it. He’d witnessed the hell of Coventry’s marriage first-hand.

Misguided though Coventry’s attempt to seduce his friend’s fiancée might have been, he’d only done it out of loyalty, and to prevent Blakemore from suffering his fate.

“You’ll admit that you were wrong? My wife is nothing like Lady Serena.”

Coventry stiffened as he always did at the mention of his dead wife. “It would be hard to deny after watching the two of you parade about in unfashionable marital bliss for the past year.”

Though his mocking tone suggested otherwise, Coventry could not deny the truth. His friend had found happiness in his marriage. Blakemore’s marriage was everything Coventry had once hoped for.

Once he’d believed that his parents were an aberration, that with his own family he would find the love and happiness denied him as a child. Foolishly, he’d invested all of his childish hopes and dreams in his wife. He’d imagined himself in love, doting on his young wife, Lady Serena Lyons, daughter of the Earl of Beauchamp. The match had been promoted between both families for years, due to their neighboring estates, but Coventry never would have agreed to it had he not been so completely deceived.

“Not all marriages need be unhappy,” Blakemore said carefully.

“No,” he conceded.

“Lady Georgina, for example. She’s nothing like Lady Serena.”

Coventry frowned. He’d had much the same thought. But at one time, Serena had seemed perfect. Too good to be true. Much like Lady Georgina. Perhaps that was the problem; no one was perfect. The ugliness inside Lady Serena was well-hidden by the angelic beauty on the outside. She manipulated him with that beauty and with his own pathetic need for love.

He cringed at the memories. He’d been like a starving dog, lapping up whatever morsel of affection she deigned to part with—no matter how meager. He found her coy glances at his friends charming, not calculating. Her attention to his finances, he thought wifely devotion, not avarice. He thought himself fortunate when she felt no pain the first time they made love, never realizing that she was not a virgin.

The signs were all there, but he’d chosen to ignore them. The occasional flash of nastiness directed toward the servants, he attributed simply to her spoiled upbringing—a minor inconvenience that she would surely outgrow.

He’d been a fool, and she’d shown the ton just how much of one.

Even thinking of her, he felt his blood boil, the tightness squeezing in his chest, the explosion of anger inside him so deep and dark, it terrified him.

Lady Georgina’s wholesome beauty might seem to reflect the candidness of her character, but he refused to allow himself to be deceived again.

He focused on his friend. “Is that why you are here?” Coventry asked. “To have me acknowledge the many accomplishments of Lady Georgina Beauclerk?”

Blakemore chuckled. “Am I that obvious?”

Coventry sat back in his chair and observed his friend over his drink. “Your wife sent you.”

Blakemore’s smile deepened. “No, but she was not exactly adverse to my coming.”

“I’ll bet.”

The two sat in silence for a while. “It’s no use,” Coventry finally said.

Blakemore shook his head sadly. “No, I suppose it’s not. But you can’t blame me for trying. It’s a lonely road you’re heading down.”

“How can I be lonely,” Coventry said with a lift of his cup. “When I have all this.”