His Mistress by Morning (11 page)

“You mean the turf and the horses—” He was teasing again, and she realized that she loved the way he liked to tweak her. Rile her a bit. It brought out a daring in her she hadn’t known she possessed.

“No, the grass and the flowers,” she countered, raising her nose in the air. “And the carriage ride, but the company I am starting to rethink.”

“You aren’t mad at me, are you?” he asked, tugging the cork from a bottle and taking a drink from it. Just like
that. No glasses, not even a tumbler. Charlotte found it deliciously wicked.

“Mad? Whatever for?” For giving her this perfect picnic? This delightful afternoon?

Charlotte lay back on the carriage blanket Sebastian had purloined from the Earl of Rockhurst’s curricle and gazed up at the blue sky, wondering what heaven could offer that she hadn’t found in the last hour or so.

They’d feasted on roasted fowl, thick bread with a large pat of butter, two kinds of cheese, and a pair of apples from the basket Sebastian had purchased, along with a bottle of French wine (also purloined from Rockhurst’s carriage).

“For taking you away from your pleasures.”

Her gaze jerked up to meet his. “Pleasures?”

He offered her the bottle, and she politely shook her head. After a shrug, he took another drink and shoved the cork back in. “Your usual pleasures—dice, the races, the cards…the boxing.” He waggled his brows.

Charlotte sat up. “Oh, heavens, no.”

“‘Heavens no’?” he repeated. “You sound like one of my spinster sisters. Where’s my salty gel, my plainspoken Lottie?” He feigned an exaggerated pose, his hand thrown back on his forehead and his voice rising in a falsetto, “Demmit to hell, Trent, if I want to dice my garters away ’tis none of your bloody concern.”

Charlotte laughed despite herself. “I would never say such a thing.”

“Yes, I suppose not,” he conceded. “It was missing at least one more profanity and at least two obscenities.”

This was perfect! She knew as much about cursing as she did…about other matters. Yet there was something else about his performance that stopped her. “You don’t
find this procliv—I mean—my proclivity for such language rather shocking?” She sat up on her heels. “Scandalous, really?”

He laughed. “Lottie, nothing you could ever say would shock me—I love everything about you.”

His confession took her aback. He loved this Lottie despite her penchant for gambling, for her unladylike vocabulary? Loved her despite the fact that nearly every man in London knew what she looked like in her altogether?

Loved her utterly and completely?

“In fact, I wager there is nothing you could say that would shock me.” His brows waggled at her, his challenge thrown down like a gauntlet between them.

Charlotte knew a proper lady would never respond to such a wager. Try to scandalize a gentleman of one’s acquaintance? Why, the notion was ruinous.

Yet his smugness turned out to be too tempting.

What have I to lose? As far as Lord Trent—oh, bother, all of London—is concerned, I am ruined
.

So whyever shouldn’t she try?

Propped up on one elbow, he was in the process of plucking the petals from a hapless daisy, pretending to ignore her. “What? The indomitable Mrs. Townsend speechless? Shall I send a notice to the
Morning Post
?”

“Oh, let me think.”

“You have to think about it?” Sebastian stole the apple from her hand and took a bite from it before he gave it back. He crunched happily on his stolen fruit, making it all that much harder for Charlotte to think of something truly scandalous.

After a lifetime spent avoiding anything even remotely untoward, it wasn’t easy to just dive into such unknown
waters. Why, before this morning, she’d never been kissed. Never seen a man in his…well, without his…

The image of Sebastian’s naked body striding about her room teased her imagination. Ruinous. And suddenly the most scandalous thing she could think of was quite obvious.

“I want to go to the museum,” she declared. “I want to see Lord Townley’s collection of Grecian statues.”

Sebastian’s mouth opened. Gaped, actually. He just stared at her. “You want to see what?”

“Townley’s Grecian marbles.”

And suddenly she realized she’d done it, quite shocked him.

But not for the reasons she supposed.

“You minx,” he said, starting to laugh. Rolling on his back, he let out a roar. “You nearly had me there, Lottie. Townley’s statues, indeed!”

She poked him in the ribs. “I’m serious,” she told him. “I want to see them. I’ve heard tell they are breathtaking.”

“From one breathtaking nude to another?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, not amused in the least. “I think the experience would be edifying. I’ve read the guidebook and all the accounts in the papers…” What she couldn’t say was that his sister and mother had regaled her with descriptions of the statues since they’d gone to see them, and she’d been dying of jealousy to view what most of proper London deemed indecent.

He stopped laughing and turned his head toward her. His eyes narrowed as he studied her. “You’re serious! You want to go see those demmed things.”

She nodded.

“And here I thought you couldn’t shock me. Lottie Townsend, millinery aficionado, whist wastrel, denizen
of the dice, a secret bluestocking?” He let out a low whistle. “Who would believe such a thing? Not even the
Post
would print such a revelation.” He shook his head. “You don’t really have the guidebook, do you?”

She nodded.

His eyes widened, then he threw up his hands in defeat.

“So I won?” she asked. “I shocked you?”

“Yes, you won,” he conceded. “But don’t think of collecting anytime soon. I’ve already put up everything I’ve got to cover that bet with Merrick.”

His glib words nearly tripped right past her, for she was still in alt over her victory. Yet there had been a small trembling note when he’d said “put up everything I’ve got” that rattled her attention.

“You did what?” she whispered.

“Bet everything on that horse you fancied.” He grinned recklessly, with no apology. “If it loses, I’ll be in dun territory for sure. Won’t be anything left for me to do but—”

Charlotte’s heart stilled as his whimsical grin faded.
Marry Miss Burke
.

Those unsaid words hung between them like a hangman’s noose.

Marry Miss Burke?
Why, it would be the end of everything.

Of them.

“How could you do such a thing?”

“You funny girl,” he said, reaching out to ruffle her hair. “What is money when I’ve lost my heart? That’s always been enough for us. And we’ve always known that it was only a matter of time before…well, at least as long as you remain dead set against—”

From the field below, a horn bellowed, stopping his
speech. Whatever he’d been about to reveal might have been important, but as the horn blared again, they sat up in unison and looked down at the track.

“The race!” Sebastian said, jumping to his feet. “Come along, Lottie, my love. Let’s go see what the Fates have in store for us. Let’s see if this Boreas is as fast as the wind, or at the very least, faster than Lord Saunderton’s storied nag.”

O
h, how can this be?
Charlotte worried as they ran hand in hand down the hillside. How could Sebastian have bet all his ready cash on the outcome of a horse race?

Bet their future on her hunch?

They dashed past the now empty booths, forgotten hands of whist, and the quiet roulette wheels. Everyone, it seemed, had left their vice of choice to watch the much anticipated and heavily wagered race.

“Demmit!” Sebastian cursed. “They’ve already started.”

“What does it matter but the finish?” she shot back.

“True enough,” he admitted as he pulled her through the crowd.

Instead of sharing the excitement of everyone around her, Charlotte’s heart clenched with a sense of dread. “I wish you hadn’t bet your money on this. What if I’m wrong?”

He turned and stared at her. “Whatever has come over
you today? Worried about me losing? I’d think you’d be more concerned about going home and telling Finny that you’ve lost the greengrocer’s money for the month—or worse, the blunt to cover her half of Madame Claudius’s latest bill. You know how she is about your gambling.” He chucked her lightly under the chin, then kissed her forehead. “Never mind her—if she starts to ring a peel over your head, tell her you heard about her offering her stockings to Lord Reynolds the other night to pay her
vingt-et-un
losses.” He laughed again. “That Finny!”

“Oh, yes,” Charlotte agreed, “she’s quite something.” She closed her eyes and tried to blot out the image of her proper and spinsterly cousin offering her stockings to anyone. No, she needed to think, and think quickly.

What if Boreas didn’t win? What if Sebastian lost all his money?

Then where would her wish be? She might still be the woman he loved, but he’d be married in short order to Lavinia Burke and her ten thousand a year.

Charlotte looked up at this man she’d thought she’d known, this man she’d wished to know, with his tall beaver hat askew, his cravat ruffled and open, his eyes sparkling with excitement, and his arm tossed over her shoulders without a care in the world. He looked down at her and winked, as if there was nothing more than this very moment.

“Never you fret, Lottie,” he whispered, “nothing will part us but time.”

And then Charlotte understood what it was she’d wished for. For a moment like this, when they were pressed from all sides, surrounded by the cheering crowd, hardly alone, and yet in their own world.

Because he loved her.

And she him.

But there was no denying that his financial state would bring them both to a choice she had no desire to make. Not yet. Not now.

Not when she’d just gotten her wish. And discovered the true joy of love.

A shout rose even as the ground began to tremble with the thunder of hooves.

“They’re coming,” Charlotte said, rising up on her tiptoes and straining to spy the finish line. “Oh, bother, I can’t see!”

“Neither can I.” Sebastian looked around, then caught her by the waist and tossed her up atop a large keg. “How’s that?” he shouted at her above the cheers and cries filling the air.

Teetering on her perch, she clung to his hand to steady herself. Over the sea of beaver hats and the occasional plumes, Charlotte’s gaze swung first in the direction of the horses.

Boreas looked like his namesake, streaking across the meadow in a blinding dash, his jockey clinging to his back while the great horse thundered toward his destiny. But to her horror, he was just behind Lord Saunderton’s roan.

Behind?

Charlotte’s panic hurtled her well outside the constraints of her ingrained Mayfair manners.

Oh, the devil take the beast, this would never do! “Demmit, run!” she screamed. “Run, Boreas, run!”

The horses moved neck and neck, and Charlotte clung to Sebastian’s hand, even as she found herself precariously hopping up and down, shouting every bit of encouragement she could to the horse.

And then the race was over as quickly as it had started,
and Charlotte froze, lost in a daze, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she’d just seen. Around her, a portion of the crowd went wild with glee, while a good part of the company groaned as they realized they had lost whatever gold they had bet.

“Who won?” Sebastian demanded, spinning her to face him. “Demmit, which one was it?”

Her gaze slid down toward his, and for a moment all she could do was stare at him in wonder.

Then she gave over to the wild grin that sprang from her heart.

“Huzzah!” Sebastian shouted.

Toppled by a boisterous pair of men well into their cups, Charlotte fell happily into Sebastian’s embrace, let him catch her in his arms and pull her into a heady kiss.

His lips plundered hers, covering her mouth, his tongue sweeping over hers, tasting and tempting her. One hand tucked beneath her bottom, he tugged her closer yet, until they were nearly as intimate as they had been this morning in her bed.

Her heart, still beating wildly from the excitement of the race, now went into a tempestuous tattoo. His lips went from her mouth to her neck, and the heat of his kiss was enough to make her knees sag beneath her.

“Gads, Lottie, I love you,” he whispered in a ragged sigh. “I love you like no other. Always will, my girl.”

With his hands cupping her face, he kissed her again, this time slowly and with a note of tenderness that left Charlotte thinking just one thing.

If only I had one more wish….

“And don’t get any ideas about me coming in,” Sebastian told her a few hours later. “As much as I’d love to
spend the rest of the evening in your bed, you know very well I can’t.” He paused for a moment, then grinned. “At least not until later.”

After Boreas’s win, they had kissed and danced a wild jig together round and round the barrel. Never mind that the crowd had laughed with them or just outright stared at their outlandish antics, Charlotte hadn’t cared. She’d never felt so unencumbered, so very free in her entire life.

And rich! When Merrick had come ambling up to tell her the sum of her winnings (given the fact Rockhurst’s unpredictable horse had been a long shot), she hadn’t been able to fathom what she would do with such a windfall.

Then, when the sun had dipped low in the horizon, they’d driven the hour back to town, crossing under the gates into London, and venturing through the streets of Bloomsbury.

When Sebastian had turned down a street—Little Titchfield—and pulled to a stop before a house in the middle of the block, she’d been about to protest that this wasn’t where she lived.

Yet it was. She reminded herself that she no longer resided in Cousin Finella’s old, narrow house off Berkeley Square. She glanced up at
her
house and gazed in wonder at the cheery window boxes filled with flowers, the gauzy curtains and the bright blue door.

“Here you are,” he announced.

Charlotte took another glance at the door. Suddenly an uneasy air of shyness settled over her. Lottie’s infamous house. Her new life.

Whatever did she do now? She resorted to the only thing she did know. Mayfair manners.

“Thank you for bringing me home, Lord Trent,” she said, still eyeing the house before her with a measure of trepidation. If she invited him inside, then he’d want to…

Charlotte sucked in a deep breath. Kissing Sebastian was one thing, but finding herself with him like she had this morning, naked and entwined, that was another altogether.

However could she do that?

Meanwhile, he’d laughed at her prim offering and bounded down from the carriage, coming around to her side to help her down. “I’m glad I could be of assistance, Mrs. Townsend.” His mock formality held little pretense, for he winked saucily at her when he said it.

His flirtatious, covetous gaze slanted right through her sensibilities. She tried to breathe, tried to think of what she should do next. Thank him politely at the curb and offer a sincere handshake before sending him off to…to
her
?

No, no, a handshake would never do! She couldn’t send him off to the Burkes with his last thought of her being the embroidery pattern on the back of her glove.

It irked Charlotte, much as it had before, that Lavinia Burke held a part of Sebastian’s life that she couldn’t enter.

Charlotte screwed up her courage as he tugged her down from her seat, his hands catching her by her hips and swinging her down to the cobbles. She let herself fall into his chest, and her hands went straight to his shoulders, finding a steady hold. Without even realizing what she was doing, she stepped closer to him and tipped her head back to look up into his dark eyes.

Perhaps this wasn’t as difficult as she’d thought.

“Now don’t you even dare,” he warned.

“Dare what?”

“Your tricks.”

She had tricks? “Whyever not?” she ventured, feeling positively daring. It was hard not to feel thusly with him holding her so.

“You know exactly why. First it will be, ‘Sebastian, see me to the door—’”

“And what is wrong with that?”

“Because once we’re at the door, you’ll turn to me, just as you are now, and demand a kiss.”

Oh, this Mrs. Townsend was a cheeky chit. “Me?” Charlotte tried not to grin, impressed with Lottie’s prowess in these matters.

“Yes, you.”

“Would it work?” she asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

Lottie Townsend was cheeky; Charlotte Wilmont still had a respectable foot in Mayfair. Yet something pushed her to forget about that previous existence. Whatever had being a proper spinster gained her? And there was something all too tempting about being Sebastian’s mistress, the woman he loved, that lent her a brazen sense of adventure.

“Do tell, my lord,” she said again. “Would it work?”

“Not today it won’t,” he declared, setting her out of his arms and standing his ground.

But Charlotte wasn’t so convinced and moved back into the warmth of his shadow. “And say you did see me to the door—”

He crossed his arms over his chest, his brow arched. “Which I will not—”

“Yes, so you say,” she agreed readily, reaching up and placing her hand on his sleeve. “But say you did. And at
the door, I was bold enough to ask you for a kiss and you, being the gentleman that we know you are, gave in to my forward request? What harm is there in that?”

An odd, wary look crossed his features. “Why do you do this, Lottie?”

“Do what?”

“Spend all day convincing me that you are utterly and completely in love with me—”

“But I—”

He waved off her protest. “And then in two days’ time you’ll be pelting me with your pretty little shoes, calling me all sorts of vulgar names, and tossing me out your door.”

Charlotte shivered. She did that? Suddenly her admiration for Lottie went down several notches. “Perhaps I’ve had a change of heart,” she rushed to say.

And life…and outlook…and well, everything.

He snorted and kept his wary stance.

With both hands on his sleeves, she pulled herself closer. “Believe me, the last thing I would ever do is cast you from my life, from my heart.”

He stared down at her, and she sensed the struggle within him, wary, yet full of longing to believe her. With a strangled sort of cry, his hands snaked out and caught hold of her, tugging her close. Without any prelude, let alone a request, his lips covered hers.

As it did each time, his kiss took her by surprise. For a moment, she felt (despite all her bravado) nothing but panic—for after all she was being kissed quite shamelessly by Lord Trent in the middle of the street—but that fleeting bit of alarm had little time to find roots before it was cleared away by that same delicious warmth of pleasure that he brought to life within her.

Her body melted into his, her breasts pressed against the sharp crisp wool of his jacket, her hips coming home against his.

She didn’t even realize she was sighing as she made out the hardness beneath his breeches.

And since she’d had a rather startling introduction earlier to just exactly what the viscount had concealed in his breeches, Charlotte felt a guilty desire to see it freed from its prison of buff leather.

Then just as suddenly as he’d started this kiss, he ended it, abruptly setting her aside and standing there staring at her with a turbulent fury ablaze in his eyes.

“You are a dangerously tempting woman, Lottie Townsend.” And with that he got into his carriage and began to drive away, but not before he said one last thing that sent a shiver of anticipation down her still trembling limbs.

“We will finish this tonight, madame.”

“Get inside with you,” Finella said, towing Charlotte up the last few steps by her elbow.

She heaved a dewy sigh. Really, her cousin needn’t tug so hard; she felt as if she could float along like a balloon.

Finella shot an aggrieved look at the departing viscount, then turned her critical gaze on her errant charge. Her hands fisted at her hips, her elbows jutted out like a pair of sails. “Look at you! Putting on another show in the street for Mrs. Spratling to see. Why you love to vex that old gossipy cat, I know not.”

Since Charlotte had no idea who this Mrs. Spratling was, she couldn’t really answer Finella’s lament.

She was still lost in Sebastian’s kiss, the dizzy, heady power of his touch.

“Lord Trent thinks I’m tempting,” she said in a dreamy voice.

Finella shook her head. “Heavens above, what has come over you? You’re acting as if you’ve never been kissed before.” She steered her up the stairs toward her room. “Come along with you. You’ve barely enough time to get ready for this evening. Good God, what did you do to your dress? It’s covered in mud and grass.” She heaved an aggrieved sigh and made her way into the closet.

Charlotte barely heard a word she said.

We will finish this tonight, madame.

Finish this? Charlotte bit her lip and looked into the mirror over the dressing table, searching for answers in her reflection. What did that mean?

Her thighs tightened and her nipples grew taut. Well, yes, she had a vague idea what it meant, but however would she manage to…well, finish him?