Disrobed and Dishonored (4 page)

‘Jessica!’ Careless of waiting servants or other houseguests, Sarah threw herself into her friend’s arms. ‘Oh, Jessica, I am so happy to see you!’

Reeling slightly from the impact, Lady Standon hugged her tight, then held her at arm’s length, the better to look at her. Jessica looked radiant, Sarah thought.

‘What’s wrong?’ She tucked Sarah’s hand under her arm and drew her into the house. ‘Come and meet Bel—Lady Dereham—and the others and then I’ll show you your room and you can tell me all about it. Whatever it is.’

Coppergate, the Derehams’ country house, was deep in the Hertfordshire countryside and had the warm feel of a home. Lady Dereham greeted her with a smile, introducing her to the other guests, who were all relaxing, comfortably informal, in the big salon. Sarah did her best to commit the names of the host of assorted Ravenhurst relatives to memory before letting Jessica whisk her away.

‘So, tell me what is wrong. There are dark circles under your eyes and I would swear you have lost weight. Is it Sir Jeremy?’

Jessica curled up in the window seat and listened as Sarah paced the room recounting the tale of Sir Jeremy’s infamy, her impetuous ride and her meeting with Jonathan. When Sarah got to the part where he made his outrageous suggestion to rescue her from her fiancé, Jessica clapped her hands over her mouth and stared in horrified amazement.

‘Sarah! You let him deflower you?’

‘No! I told you—he
almost
did.’ Jessica closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Jessica, I am in love with him.’

‘My dear! It is impossibly romantic. Does he have a nickname for the broadsheets and ride a black stallion?’

‘He has a very ugly horse and no nickname I am aware of.’ Sarah sighed. ‘It is mad of me even to dream. He’s a gentleman gone to the bad, I think.’

‘It won’t do,’ Jessica said with a shake of her head. ‘You know that. This isn’t a Minerva Press novel and he won’t appear in the nick of time transformed into a duke.’

‘I know.’ She was resigned to it, after so many days of sighing for him.

‘Well, the last thing you’ll want is to be flirting with the young men at the party, that’s for sure. You can always take refuge with Elinor Ravenhurst, who is very rational and regards all men as unnecessary frivolity, and Lady Maude Templeton, who declares she knows who she wants to marry but hasn’t organized it yet. The poor man has no idea he is about to be organized, of course, and he is quite hopelessly ineligible.

‘Falling in love is painful, but will get better in time,’ Jessica murmured. ‘I just hope you do not truly
love
him, because if you do, that will take a long time to heal.’

There was a difference, Sarah thought, as she went down to dinner attempting to ignore Mrs. Catchpole’s prattling. Being in love or loving. Which was it? Loving implied knowing a person deeply and truly. What did she know about Jonathan?

He was intelligent and honorable, he had a sense of humor, he was forgiving, he made love like…‘a devil or an angel?’ she murmured, causing her chaperone to glance sharply at her.

‘Sarah, this is no time for wool gathering. This is a significant opportunity for you to meet not just eligible young men, but influential hostesses. Now smile!’

‘Yes, Priscilla,’ Sarah said meekly to Mrs. Catchpole, pulling herself together. She owed it to her hostess to be an amiable guest, and that would not be aided by her thinking about the caress of Jonathan’s mouth at her breast or paying attention to the low, demanding pulse that made her fidget and ache.

Informal Lady Dereham might be, but she arranged her dining table in accordance with precedence, and Sarah was partnered by the vicar and had, on her left side, Lieutenant Harris, a cheerful military man with a bluff sense of humor.

Her mood, when the ladies rose to leave the men to their port and politics, was therefore rather more tranquil. It would be interesting to seek out the two young ladies Jessica had mentioned. Miss Elinor Ravenhurst was easy enough to locate, a tall redhead sitting in a corner with her nose in a book and dressed in a gown of a depressing beige.

‘Miss Ravenhurst? I am Sarah Tatton. I hope I do not interrupt, but Lady Standon mentioned you as someone with a very rational turn of mind and I thought I would like to speak with you.’

‘Rational?’ Miss Ravenhurst smiled and closed her book. ‘She means that she despairs of interesting me in a young man or finding any young man prepared to take an interest in me. Are you a scholar, too, Miss Tatton?’

‘No, I am not in the mood for masculine company,’ Sarah confessed, sitting down.

Intelligent hazel eyes studied her. ‘Either you are in retreat from an unwelcome suitor or you are in love with someone unsuitable.’

‘Both,’ Sarah confessed, startled.

‘Then you must meet Maude.’ Elinor waved her fan, a battered affair that seemed to have been sat upon, and received an answering wave from a handsome young woman chatting with three army officers.

‘She will not wish to be interrupted,’ Sarah began, but Lady Maude abandoned her swains with a flirtatious smile and came across.

‘Maude, this is Sarah Tatton, who is unsuitably in love,’ Miss Ravenhurst announced with the air of a scholar identifying an interesting specimen.

‘Really?’ Lady Maude sat down in a flurry of expensive silk skirts and held out her hand. ‘Is it mutual?’

‘No, Lady Maude. He has no idea of my feelings and I have no idea of his name, his whereabouts or anything, other than that he is entirely ineligible.’

‘Call me Maude, please.’ Her ladyship, dark, vivacious and enviably pretty, perched on the sofa next to Miss Ravenhurst, a contrast in styles. ‘And I see you’ve already met Elinor, who is a lost cause as far as men are concerned, but who will talk common sense and try to persuade us from rash action. Mind you, I cannot help but believe that somewhere is exactly the right man for her, just as there is for you and for me.’

‘Not rash, merely irrational, Maude,’ Elinor corrected. ‘A female should not be dependent upon a mere male for her every happiness.’

‘I quite agree, insofar as most things are concerned. But there are areas of happiness for which one must depend upon mere males, are there not, Sarah?’ Maude’s wicked twinkle left no doubt which areas she was referring to and Sarah felt herself color. ‘Oh, my! You blush. Is he such a great lover, this unsuitable man of yours?’

‘Wonderful,’ Sarah admitted, amazed that she could confide so easily. But she sensed that these two young women, so very different, would be both kind and discreet. ‘I will tell you what occurred, if you promise not to say anything to anyone else.’

‘We are both,’ Elinor announced, leaning forward, ‘agog.’

Sarah awoke the next morning feeling somewhat better. True, Jonathan was still lost to her, but she had made two new friends and had found that her old friendship with Jessica was as strong as ever. Confiding in all three of them had stilled her uncomfortably active conscience. They had reassured her that of course she should not have obliged her father and married Sir Jeremy, having discovered his unpleasant character.

When she went down to breakfast she found it an exclusively female company, for the men, Bel informed her, had all gone out to inspect the stables.

‘We are having a dance this evening,’ Bel announced. ‘A nice, formal,
refined
dance. Everyone will have arrived by then and the men may wash off the smell of the stables and behave like civilized human beings. Discussion of politics, horses and hunting will be forbidden and no one under the age of sixty-five may play cards.’

The last thing that Sarah felt like doing was participating in a ball, but she knew what was expected of a good guest. ‘Lovely! I am so glad I brought a new ball gown,’ she declared brightly.

It had not occurred to Sarah, until she was standing in the doorway and watching the houseguests and the neighboring gentry mingling and laughing in the long room, that being hopelessly in love did not just entail the pain of losing the man of her dreams. It also meant that either she must remain a spinster, and childless, all her days or marry a man she did not love.

‘Sarah?’

‘Elinor, I am sorry, I am blocking the door. What a delightful scene, is it not?’

‘Very animated,’ Elinor agreed, as they entered side by side. She was dressed in gray silk with a cream lace trim, both of which colors effectively killed any glow in her cheeks. ‘And noisy. However, I have a book hidden behind the sofa cushions in the retiring room, so once I have been observed treading on at least one pair of male toes, I can probably escape.’

Maude, who was, of course, surrounded by young men, waved and Sarah heard her companion sigh as they crossed to her. Feeling she had to compensate for Elinor’s lack of enthusiasm, she assumed her best social smile and soon found her dance card much in demand.

When she had first come out such popularity would have thrilled her; now she felt like someone who had an antipathy to cats but who was proving irresistible to the creatures.

‘No,’ she said firmly to one of Lord Dereham’s friends, ‘Thank you, Major Piper, but I do not waltz.’ Never having achieved the exalted status of holding a voucher for Almack’s, Sarah had not been approved by a Patroness and knew that to waltz without such blessing would label her as fast.

So she danced the first set of country dances, then the quadrille, and wondered that she could still keep smiling and pretending to flirt when what she wanted was to be alone with a big man with smiling green eyes and a deep voice and a mouth made for sin.

The third set was a waltz so she could make her excuses and go to where Elinor was sitting out in an alcove sipping lemonade and reading a small book behind her fan.

She had almost reached her when Bel spoke behind her. ‘Miss Tatton! I believe you have no partner for the next set.’

‘No, ma’am,’ Sarah said, turning. ‘I have not been approved to—’

The man beside Lady Dereham was tall, powerfully built, and in formal evening attire. His dark brown hair was cropped fashionably, his expression one of polite expectation. But the look in his green eyes was one of shock that matched her own and the lips of his sensual mouth were slightly parted as though on a sharp intake of breath.

‘Oh, that is of no matter in a family party.’ Bel dismissed the rules with a flick of her exquisite French fan. ‘May I introduce the Earl of Redcliffe? He is hoping you will stand up for him for this set. Lord Redcliffe, Miss Tatton is a dear friend of Lady Standon’s.’

‘Miss Tatton.’ His bow was immaculate, his voice deep and achingly familiar. It could not be. It was impossible that her highwayman—
her love
—was standing there in front of her, a respectable member of the aristocracy.

‘Redcliffe!’ It was Gareth, Lord Standon. He slapped the big man on the shoulder, then took his hand. ‘You are so late I thought you weren’t coming.’

‘I apologize.’ Jonathan shook hands with his friend. ‘I had to go into Town unexpectedly. Things to arrange. But nothing would make me miss your party’ He glanced at Sarah. ‘Almost nothing.’

And then the paralysis that had come over her when she had seen him began to ebb away and she realized the hot sensation that coursed through her was anger.

‘Thank you,
my lord
.’ A fine line appeared between Bel’s brows at the emphasis. ‘I do not waltz.’ Her voice rose, heads turned.

‘Sarah—’

‘I do not want to dance.’ She could hear her tone becoming shrill and modulated it, forcing something close to a smile. ‘Thank you.’

‘Miss Tatton,’ Jonathan said. ‘I would not
constrain
you to anything against your will.’ She felt the color rise in her cheeks. It was as though the scene in the ballroom was shifting in and out of focus and the man in front of her was alternately formally attired and standing against a background of chattering couples, and stark naked in her bedchamber, a wicked smile on his lips and her stocking dangling from his fingers.

‘Let us try, shall we?’ he suggested. ‘You can always tell me to
release
you, should you find the experience disturbing.’

Disturbing?
The heat was gathering low in her belly, she felt light-headed and breathless and
wanting,
and the anger pulsed through the arousal and the ache and she just needed to hit him and kiss him and…

Her hand was in his and she could not, without making a scene, escape. Jonathan drew her onto the floor and took her in a firm hold. ‘You are doubtless as surprised as I am, to meet like this.’

‘I am most certainly surprised, my lord,’ she said.
Oh God, he smells the same. Leather and citrus and man.

‘My lord?’ He quirked an eyebrow at her as the music began. ‘What has happened to
Jonathan
?’

‘I do not know. Tell me, what
has
happened to Jonathan?’

The fact that she was angry and upset and not merely shocked seemed finally to penetrate his consciousness. ‘What is the matter?’

‘Matter?’ Somehow she managed to keep her voice down as he swept her the length of the room and round into a complicated turn at the end. She had never danced the waltz except with a dancing master; now, she realized, she was so preoccupied that she simply followed Jonathan’s lead through the most difficult steps.

‘You lied to me, you deceived me, you took advantage of me and you wonder why I am angry?’

‘Yes,’ he said bluntly, the arched dark brows lowering in answering anger. ‘I never took advantage of you, I never deceived you, I never lied to you—’

‘You lied by omission.’ He forced her into a tight, swooping turn, her skirts swinging out, the room shifting dizzyingly about her. Sarah glimpsed Maude’s face, staring. ‘I thought you were a highwayman, or if not that, at least an ordinary man, a gentleman who had fallen on hard times. How could you not tell me who you were?’

Then the reason he had not, and the real reason she was so upset, hit her like a blow and she stopped dead in the middle of the floor as couples swerved to avoid them.

‘But of course you could not tell me,’ she whispered. ‘Because if you had, you thought I would say that you had compromised me, that as a gentleman you must marry me and you would have been trapped. That is it, is it not?’

‘No!’ Jonathan somehow managed to keep his voice down from a bellow.

‘And I suppose you laughed about it with your friends,’ Sarah added. ‘It was all for a bet, I presume? The highwayman act.’

‘Of course it was a damn bet!’ A couple gliding past stared at him. Sarah was glaring at him as if he was some kind of libertine bent on ravishment. ‘And of course I said nothing about you to them. For God’s sake, let’s get out of this confounded dance.’

‘Certainly, if only to take myself out of range of your blaspheming and bad language.’ She turned on her heel and stalked off the floor, leaving him standing there, the focus of all eyes.

‘I trod on her feet,’ he explained to those couples within hearing and followed her, attempting to look ruefully amused when all he wanted to do was snarl.

By the time he reached the edge Sarah had vanished. Jonathan, despite his height, could see no topknot of glossy brown curls, no slender figure in almond silk. A dark-haired beauty with a heart-shaped face and an expression of exasperation appeared in front of him. He dredged into his memories of last Season. Lady Maude Templeton. ‘She’s gone out onto the terrace. That way.’ She pointed, then walked off. Jonathan thought he heard her add, ‘Men!’ as she went.

Jaw set, Jonathan stalked off in the direction indicated. Idiot woman, of course he hadn’t told her who he was! Couldn’t she see why? And why wasn’t she pleased to see him? He was pleased to see her. More than pleased. It upset his plans, but to hell with that; Sarah was here and he wanted her. After he’d boxed her ears.

The torch-lit terrace held a scattering of couples strolling and flirting. There was no sign of Sarah, but he had not expected her to stop here, in full view. He took the sweeping steps down onto the lawns and glimpsed the flutter of pale skirts in the darkness.

When he reached the same spot, treading quietly, his dancing pumps making no sound on the close-scythed turf, he could not see her. Then he realized that the shrubs that had been planted along this wing of the house had a narrow gap in them. Slipping through, he found a graveled walk between them and the house walls. Sarah had her back to one of the sloping buttresses of the old wall, her gaze fixed on a group of tumbling cherubs set amongst the greenery.

Her head came round as he stepped onto the gravel and he felt his body tighten at the sight of her wide eyes, the rise and fall of her breasts in the low-cut silk.

‘Go away.’ She stood her ground, chin up.

Jonathan kept walking. ‘No. Why are you so angry with me?’

‘I told you!’

‘Did you really expect me, when we first met and we made our extraordinary decision, to whip off my mask and introduce myself as the Earl of Redcliffe? My concern was for your protection.’

‘Poppycock!’ Sarah snapped. ‘Have you any idea how humiliated I feel? Had you no thought that this might happen if we met again? Or was it impossible to believe that humble Miss Tatton might move in the same circles as yourself?’

‘Well, you hadn’t up to then,’ he retorted.

‘No, and I imagine you are none too pleased to find I am now!’ The color was flying in her cheeks, he could see angry tears sparkling, and the effort not to seize hold of her and shake her and kiss her and take her was almost overwhelming.

‘It was certainly not what I planned. I intended—’ He never got the words out. Sarah thumped him on the chest with her clenched fist. ‘Damn it, that hurt!’

‘
Good
.’ She did it again. ‘That’s how I feel, as if someone has punched me in the chest. I
trusted
you and all the time you were just amusing yourself with some silly little gentry virgin who had got herself into a pickle.’

‘Amusing myself? If I had been amusing myself, Miss Tatton, you wouldn’t still be a virgin, believe me.’ Jonathan grabbed her wrists before she could land another blow and yanked her hard against himself. ‘If I had been
amusing myself
things might have gone rather differently.’

She glared up at him, lips parted, face flushed, the scent of hot, angry woman filling his senses and bringing with it the prickle of awareness that she was not afraid of him, not just angry with him, but that she desired him and that he wanted her. Here and now.

Sarah gasped as he pushed her back against the buttress, its slight slope bringing his weight down on her, crushing his loins against her pelvis as he spread his legs to trap her. Her wriggling thrust her against him, and he thrust back, gasping as the heat of her met the aching length of his erection, their naked flesh separated only by thin, silk breeches and the flimsy defenses of her gown.

He trapped her hands above her head, his big hand enveloping both wrists easily, and smiled down into her face, lit by the spill of light from the window above. ‘Now
this
is amusing myself. Be honest, sweeting: do you want me to let you go?’

Sarah went still beneath him, her eyes searching his face, her heart beating against his shirtfront. Then her eyelids closed as though they were too heavy and she whispered, ‘No.’

Shaken by her reaction, he schooled himself to be gentle, lowering his mouth over hers, determined to coax her, but she nipped at his lower lip with sharp teeth, took his mouth with a raw need that was fueled still by anger, and his own frustration rose to meet hers and the kiss became fierce and rough and she matched him, grazing teeth, thrusting, tongues dueling, pressure and demand, with no yielding, no softness.

Beneath his weight her body bucked, not to throw him off but seeking the friction of his hardness against her soft core. His hand left her breast to pull at her skirts until his fingers touched her thigh and he could push between their straining bodies, find the hot, wet folds and part them.

Sarah went still, hanging, waiting for the touch he had taught her to expect, but he slipped one finger past the tight, desperate knot of flesh and slid it into her, gasping against her mouth at the sensation, muffling her own cry of shock and arousal as he added another finger, feeling her tighten around him instinctively.

Her reaction was so arousing he thought he would come just from that alone, and forced himself to stillness, only his mouth ravishing hers, as though to release her would be to cease to breathe. Then she whimpered against his lips and he began to thrust and she arched under him, clenching, matching his strokes until he felt the quivering desperation building, building, and took pity on her, brushing his thumb against her, one touch sending her over into shuddering collapse.

Sarah sagged, her head thrown back against the warm stone, only the weight of Jonathan’s body and his grip on her wrists keeping her upright. The anger had burned away. All she knew was that the man she loved had driven her into a mindless inferno of sensation and need and the impossibly wonderful satisfaction of that need.

‘Sarah,’ he murmured against her neck. ‘Sweetheart. Are you all right?’ He released her wrists and her hands fell to his shoulders and he stood upright, bringing her with him.

‘Mmm,’ she managed to murmur, every inch of her aware of him, his strength and the scent of aroused man and the hardness pressed against her.

‘I didn’t hurt you?’ She shook her head, the world gradually stopping spinning. ‘You were angry. I was, too, because you were. I didn’t know you would be here, any more than you knew I would. Listen, sweet—’ he cradled her against himself, rocking her gently ‘—this can’t go on, we have to talk…to resolve this.’

‘No, I don’t want…,’ she began, trying to explain, terrified what his sense of honor might compel him to say. One moment she thought herself in love with a man who knew he could never offer for her, even should he wish to, the next she found he was a man who would feel obliged to do so. Which, her spinning brain tried to fathom, was better? Or were they both too bad to bear?

‘You don’t want me?’ he asked softly, holding her tenderly now as though that turmoil of exciting, angry passion had never been. ‘I might have something to say to that.’

‘You cannot force me,’ Sarah began and felt him stiffen as though she had hit him again. ‘I—’

‘Was that a bat?’ an alarmed feminine voice demanded just the other side of the bushes. ‘Because if it is, I am going right back inside, Elinor Ravenhurst. I don’t care how interesting the stars are.’

Maude? Elinor?

‘Don’t be foolish.’ That was Elinor. ‘It is an old wives’ tale that they get into your hair.’

‘Lady Maude, Miss Ravenhurst! Have you seen Miss Tatton?’ Mrs. Catchpole sounded breathless. ‘I do not know where she can have got to. I am most alarmed. Lady Dereham must organize a search party.’

Jonathan appeared to be shaking, then she realized he was laughing. Sarah elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

‘Oh, she’s here, Mrs. Catchpole,’ Elinor said blithely. ‘In those bushes. It was the bats, you see. We came out to look at the stars, the three of us, and then the bats swooped down and Sarah screamed and dived into the bush.’

Jonathan reacted faster than she did, brushing down her skirts, pushing a loose curl behind her ear. ‘We will speak tomorrow,’ he whispered, giving her a little push.

Sarah stumbled out onto the lawn looking, she was certain, as though she had been pulled through the hedge backward, rather than having merely taken refuge in it.

‘Sarah! Look at you,’ Mrs. Catchpole fussed.

‘We’ll go to my room and tidy up.’ Maude tucked her hand into Sarah’s arm and whisked her away down the path toward the house, leaving the chaperone trapped by Elinor’s careful explanation of how one could identify the constellation Leo.

‘What is going on?’ Sarah demanded as Maude shut the door and stood there beaming at her.

‘It’s him, isn’t it? Your highwayman, only he’s really Jonathan Kirkland, Lord Redcliffe. I’ve known him for years, so I could see he’d had a shock, and then I saw your face and the two of you were having that really splendid tiff, so we thought, Elinor and I, that we had better leave you to it, but keep an eye on you. And then Mrs. Catchpole started flapping about so we came to rescue you.’ She sat down on the bed. ‘But what was he doing pretending to be a highwayman?’

‘It was a bet,’ Sarah said as Elinor came in.

‘Well, you’ve found each other now,’ she said prosaically. ‘I wonder why lovers so often have such huge rows? It seems most strange.’

‘I know why
I’m
angry,’ Sarah said, sitting down before her knees gave way. ‘But I don’t know what he has to be cross about. He didn’t tell me who he was because he thinks I’d have expected him to offer for me.’

‘Did he say so?’ Maude began to brush the back of Sarah’s dress. ‘Tsk! Lichen everywhere.’

‘No, but what other reason could there be for not saying, once he knew my name?’

‘Have you asked him?’ Elinor inquired, looking up from her notebook.

‘Not exactly.’ Sarah bit her lip. ‘I hit him. On the chest with my fists and I shouted at him. He was quite angry.’

Maude began to giggle. ‘I’m not surprised. Wait until the morning. I am sure you will both be in a better frame of mind by then.’