Mistress by Midnight (12 page)

When it was over, he tucked her against him and fell into peace. His light snores this time were real, and were joined in a duet with the woman who was by his side at last.

L
aurette examined the tea table in the downstairs parlor. Despite the destructive streak of Miss Charlotte Fallon, she seemed to be a conventional woman who would be more comfortable here than the exotic emerald green reception room above. It was hard to picture buttoned-up Charlotte flopping down on the tufted divan or arranging her gray skirts on a shimmering floor pillow.

Everything Laurette saw before her was just as it should be at the finest homes and more—the white linen was bleached to blinding perfection and the silver service twinkled brightly against the deep blue of the walls. Qalhata and Nadia had filled the crystal cake stand with tiny, fragrant sweet morsels filled with dates, raisins and citrus peel. There were simpler bread-and-butter sandwiches and jam tarts. It looked as if there were enough to feed all the mistresses on the street and their protectors besides.

Which proved to be a good thing, for when Aram announced Miss Fallon she was not alone.

“Lady Christie, Miss Fallon,” he said in his most stentorian tone.

Laurette swallowed. She had not expected Lady Anybody, and certainly not the bosomy cool-eyed redhead who entered the room on Charlotte’s arm.

“Do forgive Charlie,” she said immediately, sensing Laurette’s discomfort. “I invited myself. Your arrival on the street in the Mad Marquess’s house has caused quite the commotion, and when Charlie said she was coming to tea, I couldn’t resist. I am Caroline Christie.” She extended a gloved hand and pumped Laurette’s with energy. Her gray eyes were bright with mischief and her round cheeks dimpled.

“How do you do, Lady Christie?” Laurette murmured.

“Please call me Caroline. The less we hear of my husband’s name, the better.” She settled herself on the settee and patted a pillow. Laurette didn’t dare to sit anywhere else, while Charlotte smoothed down another dull gray dress’s folds on a chair opposite.

Her neighbor really had the most dreadful clothes, and once again a spinster’s cap was peeking out beneath an ugly straw bonnet. It was hard to fathom how anyone could mistake Charlotte Fallon for a woman of easy virtue—this Sir Michael must be a blind man.

There could not have been a greater contrast between the two arrivals. Charlotte looked ready to pass out temperance tracts or succor orphans to her tightly-laced bosom. Lady Christie was dressed at the height of fashion in a bronze silk dress, with a naughty feathered confection perched in her russet curls and a thick topaz-and-gold bracelet clasped around each gloved wrist. Bits of topaz winked from pins at her shoulders. Lady Christie was a dazzling, shiny creature.

“Stop gawking, Laurette. See, I told you you’d scare her, Caroline,” Charlotte said, grinning. “Would you like me to pour? I’m quite used to Caroline by now. She’s been a lifesaver.”

Laurette bit a lip. Could it be Lady Christie was one of those reformers who took in fallen women? The woman didn’t look the part, what with half her chest exposed, but appearances could be deceiving. Laurette herself did not credit that
her aging, freckled self still attracted Con in the way his actions last night had certainly proved.

But he would not permit any more tea parties if wind of their situation breezed all around London. Con had not made good his threats to take her out in society. She was almost in purdah here on Jane Street.

As if she were a mind reader, Caroline patted her hand. “Don’t worry, I shan’t reveal a thing to any of our other neighbors. I can be discreet if I care to be.”

Laurette was floored. “You
live
here on Jane Street?”

“Indeed I do. My husband bought my house five years ago when we separated. He thought to make a point, you see, to let me—and the world—know what he thought of me. But I find the street suits me very well.”

“Caroline lives next door to me. One morning she heard me in my garden. I seem to be a noisy neighbor.” Charlotte winked a blue eye at Laurette and passed a cup to Caroline.

“All men are beasts. I am sorry I missed the demolition of those deviant little angels. I should have enjoyed getting my hands around their scrawny golden necks.”

“It
was
fun,” Laurette bit into a pastry and waited to see where else this bizarre conversation would lead. For the next hour she was regaled with the history of each house on the street and the two women before her. Lady Christie was appallingly frank, and Laurette’s head swam. She contributed very little to the conversation, but it was quite lively without her.

It seemed they both had sad tales to tell, but in her opinion, Laurette’s was much more dismal. Neither one of them had been compelled to give up a child. A cold husband and an absent and absent-minded lover did not seem so very bad. It seemed that Charlotte was to be turned out of her house, but Caroline would still be reigning on the street, solving problems and writing about them in her naughty romance
books. If Laurette was bored during her tenure as Con’s mistress, Caroline had offered to loan her a complete set.

When her guests took their leave, the platters held just crumbs and crusts, and the thought of dinner was unwelcome. Con had told her this morning that he had business to attend to tonight and not to expect him until very late. Laurette would have to find something to do with her time, if only to digest her tea. She had learned, though, that Sophie Rydell at Number 4 hosted a card party for the neighbors every Wednesday afternoon, that Victorina Castellano at Number 12 was always good for full-bodied Spanish wine and a weep, and that Mignon Boucher at Number 7 had a green thumb and was most anxious to inspect Laurette’s garden. She should avoid Lucy Dellamar in Number 9 because jewels, and small objets d’art had been known to disappear after her visits. Laurette had said, unthinking, that she had no jewels, and both Caroline and Charlotte had been shocked speechless.

It was, all in all, one of the oddest afternoons she had ever spent, but also one of the funniest. She had missed Marianna’s clever chatter. Now she had two new friends, strange as they might be.

When Con roused her from sleep, she didn’t think to protest but gave herself up to his wicked, wonderful ways.

Con looked at the dispatches on his desk. The plan to take Laurette and the children to his villa in Greece would have to be postponed. His contacts had promised war with the Turks was imminent, if not this year, then next. His best-laid plans once again stymied, he thought wryly. He had longed to take his family to Cliff’s Edge, his whitewashed house perched over the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean. He had imagined the children scrambling up the stone steps that were cut into the rockface, and plucking the purple flowers that stub
bornly sprouted between the cracks. He had wanted to share the air, the light, the food, the
life
with the woman he loved. Every effort he made to entice Laurette here in London was met with feigned indifference. He
knew
she still cared for him. Her body could not lie as well as her lips did.

He had discovered she was more willing when he roused her from slumber, as if she made no waking decision to join with him. She lost her stiffness and distance between her warm rumpled sheets and was a perfect physical match for him in every way. But he missed her conversation. Things were not easy between them when they were not entangled on the bed.

He leaned back in his leather chair, shifting in his seat. Just the thought of her made him hard. Laurette, on the other hand, had softened in the few weeks she had been his mistress. She had obediently eaten all the dishes Qalhata prepared and now was sleek and plumper, her sharp angles, if not her sharp tongue, a thing of the past. Enforced idleness had done her good, although she never ceased to rail at him that she was bored in her confinement. He had sent books, several of which had been thrown at his head. Her aim was nowhere near as accurate as it had been when she was a girl.

He remembered her long-ago offer, but she seemed to have forgotten it.

The July sun was blazing and brutal. Some said it was a sign from God at His displeasure at the sins of man. Even holy Gloucester Cathedral was struck by a fireball. Farmers dropped faint in their fields. Animals, babies and old people died. Thatch caught on fire and the River Piddle dried up to a trickle. What wasn’t burnt brown first was pelted by hail and torrential rain afterward. Con’s struggling crops were ruined, his tenants—and he himself—doomed to go hungry this winter. What was to become known as the Heat Wave of 1808 had far-reaching implications, the principal one for Con being that he had to marry. There was no point to de
laying the inevitable. The notes were due, and only his title would pay them.

He couldn’t avoid it any longer. His measures had proved hopeless. Pathetic. He was no farmer. If anything, finding fossils and broken shards of pottery on his land as he plowed and planted made him want to replicate the steps of his grandfather, off on a quest around the world. To be free of obligation and the baleful glances of his people.

And Laurette. She knew without his saying a word that their chance was turning to smoky mist. It had made her more desperate. Reckless. She had denied him nothing, had cried when he withdrew and spilled into a linen handkerchief. She was not thinking.

Someone had to think. There were times when Con thought his head would explode from thinking. His uncle was like a terrier, Mr. Berryman worse. Not a day went by without a veiled threat from one or the other. Miss Berryman was due any day and Con had yet to tell Laurette. He didn’t know how he was going to.

He was a coward. A coward with a conscience. If he had none, he’d take his own life and skip the family plot at All Saints, crooked gravestones of Conovers and Rylands be damned. They’d done nothing for him but sink him into this pit of penury.

Con clapped a ragged hat on his head, to shade him from the inexorable sun, and set out for a walk to the ring of standing stones. That was certainly a misnomer; most of the stones remaining had toppled or sunk into the earth. He and Laurette had gone there as children, chanted silly spells, and waited for a Druidic presence to scare them away. Nothing had happened, but the spot still felt powerful. He had worn a trail across the fields lately, seeking he knew not what.

She was there before him, as if she knew he was in need. Naked as a pagan sacrifice, her clothes abandoned on the dry grasses, her skin flushed pink in the heat. Wordlessly, she
knelt on a blanket, her eyes as blue as the scorching sky above.

He couldn’t refuse her. Her lips circled his cock, drawing him deep into her own warmth. He leaned against a stone and let her take him, take everything. Watched as her rosy cheeks worked, sucking, her hands stroking his balls. Heard her groan in pleasure as if he were offering her a banquet.

He was a selfish bastard who was all but engaged to another woman. Con half expected another round of lightning to pierce him through the groin. But he was spared long enough to bring her to completion with his own tongue. He tipped her back on the old patchwork blanket, spread her long white legs and feasted. The sun beat down on his back, but he would stop only when he’d given her the only pleasure he could. It was too hot to couple—even limiting the contact between their bodies, they glistened with sweat. He buried his face in her rose-scented curls until she shook him free with the violence of her contractions. He wanted to keep the flavor of her in his mouth forever, hold her, soothe her, but knew what he had to say required distance.

He sat up, nearly dizzy from loving her. “Laurette, we must talk.”

She lay splayed next to him, the rise of her chest hypnotic. She nodded sleepily.

“Get dressed. You’ll be red as a beet. We’ll find some shade.”

She scrambled into her dress and followed him barefoot over the field to a withered stand of trees. He spread the blanket again and pulled her down.

She folded her hands on her lap tightly, as if she wished to squeeze them still. “What’s wrong, Con?”

“You know why I went to London in the spring.”

She nodded, puzzled. “Yes, before my party.” She nervously braided her hair back up, securing it with pins from
her pocket. Con watched her turn from pagan goddess to prim miss in the twist of her wrist.

“Mr. Berryman. You’ve met him.”

“Yes, of course. Your uncle’s friend.”

“He’s no friend to anyone,” Con said in disgust. “He owns my debts. And my uncle’s. I’ve been working like a slave this summer, but it’s come to nothing now. The weather—” He smiled crookedly. “I’ll not bore you with the topic of conversation on every Englishman’s tongue. My people won’t survive until next year. I have to do something. Something I don’t want to do.”

“You’ll marry,” she said softly, surprising his words away. Her hands reached for his, but couldn’t catch them before he stood.

“Oh God, Laurie! You know I love you. I couldn’t love anyone else, ever.”

“I know. Mr. Berryman has a daughter. Is she to be your wife?”

The meadow was as silent as a tomb. Con felt his tongue and throat swell, making it impossible for him to utter any words. Laurette blurred before his eyes.

She sprang up. “Don’t cry. It will be all right.”

“How can it be?” he asked bitterly.

“I’ll be—I’ll be your mistress!” Laurette said, her voice wobbling. “We can go on as we have. I won’t give you up.”

“Oh, Laurie.” He held her damp body close to his, feeling the fervor of her heart. “I can’t do that to you. I can’t do that to Miss Berryman.”

“What is she like?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. I haven’t met her. She’s not you. I wish—I wish—”

“Shh. Love me again. Love me properly this time.”