My Lady's Pleasure (29 page)

“Is it not enough that I ask that you do not?”

“After what has passed between us? No, it is not enough. I believe I am entitled to a reason.”

As little inclined as she was to talk to him just then, she did see the fairness in his request.

“Then I shall give you one, but I shall not give it to you now.” She sounded imperious even to her own ears, and changed her tone. “You have come at a bad moment, but I will find a better moment and give you a better explanation. I promise.” She looked at him with a pleading expression tinged with regret, but it did not touch him. He gave her one more hard look, turned without a word, and walked away.

Lady Georgiana sighed heavily and closed the door.

 

Barnes stalked down the hall, his temples burning with anger. He would not be condescended to! That she could lie naked in his arms one day, and talk to him like that the next!

When he’d entertained the possibility of making an alliance with an earl’s daughter, the idea of an earl’s daughter became much to him. Now the idea of an earl’s daughter turned to ashes in his mouth. She could never forget her rank, or his. She could behave as though they were equals as long as everything was going well but, as soon as there was any fly in the ointment, her sense of what was due her rank reasserted itself.

He played her words back through his mind over and over. Her words had insulted him and her tone had infuriated him, but there was more. He knew, as a man does know, that he had lost his hold on her. Every time he’d met her, he’d been able to close the physical, social, and emotional distance between them simply by standing close, looking her in the eye, and speaking softly. This time, though, he could not.

He had lost her, and he felt regret, but the regret was overridden by anger. In rejecting him, in breaking his hold on her, Lady Georgiana had humiliated him, and Barnes felt the fury of a man unmanned.

Almost automatically, his steps took him down to the kitchen and through to the scullery. Had his better judgment been in command of him, he would have avoided all company and gone to his cottage, alone, to recover his equanimity. But he was being piloted by the need to reassert himself as a man.

There he found Maureen putting things in order for the dinner service. She was surprised to see him; he would know she was busy at this time of day.

“Ah, Maureen, just who I’ve come to see.” He tried to disguise the blackness of his mood, but Maureen knew him too well to be fooled.

“What ever is the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing is the matter.” He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him. “Nothing, at least, that can’t be set right very easily.” He buried his head in her neck, and she felt him pulling her flesh in between his teeth.

She tried to push him away. “It’s busy here. I’ve work to do, and there will be people coming in and out in herds!”

He was not to be pushed. “Then let’s use the jam cupboard.” He pulled her in the direction of a small closet lined with shelves that the household used for the jams and preserves that were put up every fall. They’d used it before, when they were afraid of company in the scullery.

Maureen didn’t like the way this was going. He was often rough, and his roughness was part of what attracted her to him, but this time he was rough with an abandon that was a little frightening. Still, she let herself be led into the jam cupboard. They went in and Barnes closed the door.

There was a high stool in the cupboard, used to reach the uppermost shelves, and Barnes had her skirts lifted and her ass on the stool almost before the door was closed. He maneuvered her drawers down and pulled one of her feet, still booted, through one of the legs. The other he left on, so the garment dangled from her right calf.

Without preamble, he unbuttoned his trousers and pulled out his throbbing cock. He stepped between her legs and took her breasts in his hands. He closed his eyes as he squeezed them, and rubbed his cock between her legs.

This aroused her intensely. When they had gone into the closet, she had thought this was perhaps going to lead to an unpleasant scene, but she had been wrong. He was exercising his power over her, but she did not feel like a victim. Powerlessness, her affair with him had taught her, was heady and intoxicating.

There had been other men in her life before Barnes, and none of them would ever have dared something like this. Rough it might be, but it was proof of his strength, of his confidence—and she thought strength and confidence were the very essence of manhood.

And so, when she felt the calluses of his hands against the soft skin of her breasts as he held them so tight it almost hurt, it felt firm and forceful to her. He was pushing against her so hard she had to hold on to the sides of the seat of the stool to keep from tipping backward, and all her muscles were engaged in keeping her body next to his. She was answering his force with her own.

She had never in her life felt so aroused so quickly. His need, his immediacy, had become her own, and she wanted nothing but to have him enter her and complete her.

This he had been ready to do from the moment they stepped into the closet. When she spread her legs to accommodate him, he was inside with one thrust. The wetness that was welling up inside her hadn’t worked all the way down to her labia, and there was a moment when the friction of his penis entering her caused pain. But the pain seemed to work like the powerlessness, fueling the crescendo that was building inside her.

She gave herself over to him. She watched him and she felt him taking her as though she were a possession. Taking her as though it were his God-given right. Taking her as though the laws of nature dictated that it should be so. But she knew he wasn’t really taking. She was giving. She was giving and it was so erotic, so arousing, that it took her breath away. As his cock thrust in and pulled out, thrust and withdrew, she gloried in it.

Her body knew his urgency and fed on it. She caught his rhythm and matched her pace to his. She came to the verge of climax faster than she ever thought possible, and was there, coming with him, when his explosion came. It was acute and all-consuming, and it reverberated from her toes all the way up to the back of her neck.

Barnes withdrew from her as unceremoniously as he had approached her. He buttoned his trousers and carefully opened the closet door. He looked around and, seeing nobody, slipped out. On his way, he gave her a smile that looked to her to be just a little diabolical.

She put herself back together as quickly as she could, and was back in the scullery before she was missed.

 

Upstairs, Georgiana sat on her bed, looking at the scarlet letter and trying to align her feelings with her thoughts, and her thoughts with one another.

Her talk with Lord Grantsbury had made an impression, she realized. Had she thought him to be completely wrong, she knew her feelings about Barnes wouldn’t have changed. It was because she was afraid he was right that she could no longer feel the attraction to Barnes that she had.

She needed to talk this through, and she needed a friend. She reached for her boots, put them on, and was about to leave the room when she turned, picked up a handkerchief, and wiped the lipstick off the mirror as best she could. Then she strode purposely to Miss Niven’s room.

“Come in,” Alexandra said in answer to her knock.

“Oh, Alexandra, I’m so glad to have found you in your room. So much has happened that I must tell you about.”

Alexandra’s face took on a rather confused look, and she made a downward gesture with her hand that Georgiana read as an invitation to sit, so she took a seat on an upholstered chair near the door. “You won’t credit it, but I’ve found a scarlet letter on my mirror!” she blurted. “A great big capital A written in lipstick! Someone doesn’t know any better than to label me an adulteress.”

Here she sat back in the chair with a bemused look. Miss Niven didn’t respond, but only coughed, and Georgiana looked at her curiously.

At that point, Miss Mumford stepped out from behind the open door of the wardrobe, where she had been setting Miss Niven’s costume to rights.

Georgiana colored. She had not intended to share her news with any but her friend, and she would have preferred that Miss Niven’s rather disagreeable companion not know. But it was done, and she would make the best of it.

“Miss Mumford, I apologize for bursting in on you like this,” she said a little stiffly. “Had I known you had a prior claim on my friend’s attention, I would have come back another time.”

“Not at all, Lady Georgiana,” Miss Mumford said with an oily grace. “I was simply making sure all was in order with Miss Niven’s masquerade costume, and that can certainly wait. I will leave you two alone.” She left the room and closed the door behind her.

“I was trying to let you know she was there,” Miss Niven said almost disconsolately. She knew that Lady Georgiana would not want Miss Mumford to know about the incident. “Had I had my wits about me I would have called to her to come out and meet you. I’m so sorry.”

“Never fret,” Georgiana said, looking kindly at her. “I daresay no harm is done. She knows about everything else, so it means nothing that she knows about this, too.”

Alexandra relaxed a little, and her thoughts turned to Georgiana’s news. “When did you find the letter?”

“Just this afternoon. I returned to my room from an interview with the Earl of Grantsbury, about which I would very much like your opinion.”

Miss Niven was exceedingly flattered by her friend’s soliciting her opinion, and on a matter she discussed with Lord Grantsbury! But her natural modesty made her doubt that her thoughts could be of much use to one such as Georgiana.

“I am, of course, happy to give you my opinion, but I don’t know that it will be helpful to you,” she said.

“I disagree,” her friend said firmly, “and my thoughts are in such a state of confusion that I can’t make heads or tails of them. I need a clear-thinking, sympathetic friend to help me sort it out, and you are just such a one.”

Miss Niven flushed with pleasure. “I shall do all I can, but first you must tell me about the A.”

“I have told it already. I came to my room, and there it was.”

“And you didn’t see anyone in the corridor?”

“Not a soul, and the letter could have been there for an hour or more, as that is how long I was gone. But,” she added thoughtfully, “I do think this tells us something about our culprit.”

“Does it?”

“Yes. Because
The Scarlet Letter
is so well-known, anyone might know that an A brands a woman in that particular way. But only someone essentially ignorant would apply that to me, an unmarried woman. ”

“You may very well be right that it was someone ignorant,” said Miss Niven, “although it might simply be someone educated taking a semantic liberty with the word. But, even if that’s not the case, might not someone ignorant be as dangerous as someone knowledgeable?”

“You are right,” said Georgiana, giving this some consideration. “But it is hard for me to take it seriously when it is so comical.”

The two women agreed, though, that this new piece of information made it look as though servants were more likely suspects than guests. Which servants, though, they could not say.

“One other thought did occur to me,” Georgiana said, a bit tentatively.

“Yes . . . ?” Miss Niven encouraged her to go on.

“Well, at first I thought it could be Mr. Barnes.”

Miss Niven looked at her wonderingly. “Mr. Barnes? But why on earth . . . ?” she said.

“In order to be the hero. It was he who identified the bouquet as poison ivy. He would have been one of the first to know when the peacock died, and he came to remove it himself.”

“That seems like an awful lot of work just to make a good impression,” Miss Niven said, puzzled that her friend would suggest it.

“It’s not just that,” Georgiana said. “I think he’s a shrewd judge of character, and he might have believed that leaving those notes would have the effect of driving me closer to him, not farther away. It’s not difficult to see that I’m rather a defiant sort of girl, and censure I feel to be unjust would simply make me dig in my heels.”

Miss Niven thought about this. She wouldn’t have described Georgiana this way, but now that the description had come from Georgiana herself, she saw its aptness.

“You may be right,” Alexandra said. “And, since he certainly wouldn’t have the same motive where I’m concerned, that would leave open the possibility that it was Miss Mumford in my case.”

“Or anyone else who knew about the notes,” Georgiana added. The girls tried to think of everyone who fell into that category, but the list was much too long.

“Anyone could have told anyone else,” Alexandra said, throwing up her hands.

“You’re right,” said Lady Georgiana. “We can talk about it all day and all night, but it’s getting us no closer to an answer.” She sighed.

Their speculative efforts exhausted, Georgiana then broached the topic of her talk with Lord Grantsbury. She told Alexandra of all he had said, and again asked her opinion.

Alexandra sat silent for a time, thinking carefully about it. She didn’t want to oppose her friend, or appear to criticize, but neither could she say anything other than what she believed to be true. Finally she said, “I cannot but think that he is right.” Georgiana sighed and nodded but didn’t respond, and she went on. “Perhaps it is because I am more accustomed than you to thinking myself at the world’s mercy, and always keep in mind the importance of safeguarding my reputation.”

“But why must women do that, while men need not?”

“I don’t know. I know only that they must, and so I do.”

They talked at some length about men and women, and reputation and restrictions, and Lady Georgiana found Miss Niven’s thoughts on the subject clearer and more compelling than she had expected. At the end of a half hour, she was determined, if not to walk the straight and narrow from that day forward, at least to check some of her more outré impulses.