More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (32 page)

“And me they hoped to humiliate,” he said. “I will deal with them, Ferdinand. Soon.” He refused to discuss the matter further.

But while he had been dallying with his
mistress
for the past week, talking and reading and dabbling with music and art, he had been allowing his reputation to tarnish. It would not do.

It was not until late evening that he finally contrived to get Brougham and Kimble alone. They were strolling together to White's from the soiree.

“You have not, either of you, mentioned the name of my mistress to anyone, have you?” he asked.

“The devil, Tresham.” Brougham sounded irritated. “Do you need to ask when you requested us specifically not to?”

“If you do, Tresh,” Kimble said with ominous calm, “perhaps I should plant you a facer. You have simply not
been yourself lately. But maybe the question was rhetorical?”

“There is a person,” Jocelyn explained, “a Runner with oiled hair and shudderingly awful taste in clothes but with shrewd eyes, who will very possibly be asking questions soon about Miss Jane Ingleby.”

“A
Bow Street
Runner?” Brougham stopped walking.

“Asking about
Miss Ingleby
?” Even in the darkness of the street Kimble's frown was visible.

“Alias Lady Sara Illingsworth,” Jocelyn explained.

His friends stared at him in silence.

“He will be questioning you among others,” Jocelyn assured them.

“Miss Jane Ingleby?” Kimble's expression had become a blank mask. “Never even heard of her. Have you, Cone?”

“Who?” Brougham frowned.

“No, no,” Jocelyn said gently, and began to walk again. His friends fell into step on either side of him. “It is known that she nursed me during my recuperation from my injury. I admitted as much this morning when the person was standing in my library doing his damnedest not to look servile. For three weeks. After which she left my employ. But who am I to have followed the progress beyond my doors of a mere servant?”

“Was there such a servant?” Brougham asked carelessly. “I confess I did not notice, Tresham. But I tend not to notice other people's servants.”

“Was she the one who
sang
at your soiree, Tresh?” Kimble asked. “Pretty voice for those who like that sort of music. A pretty enough girl too for those who like simple country misses in muslin when all the ladies present
are clad enticingly in satins and plumes and jewels. Whatever
did
happen to her?”

“Thank you,” Jocelyn said briskly. “I knew I could trust you.”

“I say, though, Tresham,” Brougham asked, his voice returned to normal, “what
did
happen with Jardine? You are not about to ask us to believe, I hope, that Lady Sara murdered him in cold blood because he apprehended her stealing.”

Kimble snorted derisively.

“I do not
know
what happened,” Jocelyn said through his teeth. “She has not seen fit to confide in me. But let me say this. Jardine had better be dead as the proverbial doornail. If he is not, it will be my distinct pleasure to make him wish he were.”

“If you need any help,” Brougham offered, “look no further than yours truly, Tresham.”

“What are you going to do about Lady Sara, Tresh?” Lord Kimble asked.

“Thrash her within an inch of her life,” Jocelyn said viciously. “Get to the bottom of that ridiculous story. Get leg shackled to her and make her sorry for the rest of her life that she was ever born. In that order.”

“Leg shackled.” Conan Brougham winced. “Because she is your mistr—” He was overtaken suddenly by a fit of coughing, brought on perhaps by a sharp dig in the ribs from Viscount Kimble's elbow.

“Leg shackled,” Jocelyn repeated. “But first I am going to get foxed. Inebriated. Drunk as a lord. Three sheets to the wind.”

The trouble was, of course, that he never seemed able to get drunk when he wanted to, no matter how much he imbibed. He rather believed, by the time he left
White's alone at something past midnight, that he had consumed a vast quantity of liquor. But unless he was drunker than he realized, he was walking a straight line in the direction of his mistress's house, and he still felt only coldly furious instead of passionately angry. How could he thrash her—not that he ever could literally beat her or any other woman. How could he deliver one of his famous tongue-lashings, then, if he could feel no heat with his anger?

By the time he had reached the house and let himself in with his key, he could think only of humiliating her, of reminding her of her very subordinate position in his life. He was going to have to marry the woman, of course, even if she did not realize it yet. She would be his wife in name. But she would soon understand that always, for the rest of her days, she would be less to him than a mistress.

E CAME AFTER MIDNIGHT, LONG AFTER JANE
had given up expecting him, though she was still up, pacing from the den to the dining room to the sitting room, knowing that something was terribly wrong. She was in the den, gazing at his portrait of her, her arms wrapped defensively about her waist, when she heard his key in the outer door. She hurried to meet him, picking up a candlestick as she went. But she mustered the self-respect to step quietly into the hall. She was glad of that restraint a moment later.

He was wearing his black opera cloak. He removed his silk hat and gloves with careful deliberation before turning to look at her. When he did so, Jane found herself gazing at the Duke of Tresham—that stranger from her past. The dark, cold, cynical, and surely inebriated Duke of Tresham. She smiled.

“Upstairs!” he commanded with cold hauteur and a slight jerk of his head in the direction of the stairs.

“Why?” She frowned.

He raised his eyebrows and looked at her as if she were a worm beneath his foot.

“Why?” he asked softly. “
Why
, Jane? Have I mistaken the address, by any chance? But my key fit the lock. Is this not the house at which I keep my mistress? I have come to avail myself of my mistress's services. I need a
bed in order to do that comfortably and her person on that bed. The bed is upstairs, I believe.”

“You are foxed!” she said, matching him in coldness.

“Am I?” He looked surprised. “But not too foxed to find my way to my mistress's house. Not too foxed to climb the stairs to her bed. Not too foxed to get it up, Jane.”

She flushed at his coarseness and stared at him while her heart felt too like a leaden weight to be capable of breaking. But it would break, she knew, once this night was over. Fool! Oh, fool, not only to have fallen in love with him, but to have dreamed that he had fallen for her too.

“Upstairs!” He pointed again. And then he nodded. “Ah, I have realized the reason for your hesitation. I forgot to say please.
Please
go upstairs, Jane. Please remove all your clothes and hairpins when you get there. Please lie on your back on the bed so that I may avail myself of your services. Please keep your end of our contract.”

His voice was colder than ice. His eyes were as black as the night.

She had no good reason to refuse him. It had never been part of their bargain that he must love her before she would grant him her favors. But she felt suddenly disoriented, as if a week—the most precious week of her life—had just been erased without a trace. As if she had dreamed it. As if he had never become her companion, her friend, her lover. Her soul mate.

When all was said and done, she was merely his mistress.

She turned and preceded him up the stairs, the candlestick held high, her heart turned to stone. No, not
that. A stone felt no pain. She blinked back tears. He would not see such a sign of weakness in her.

Never!

“I have come here, Jane,” he said a few moments later, standing inside the door of her bedchamber, his expression quite inscrutable—except that there was something about him that spoke of inebriation and threatened danger, “to be entertained by my mistress. How are you going to entertain me?”

It felt again as if the past week had not been. If it had not, of course, she would have found nothing particularly offensive in his words. There
was
nothing offensive in them. She must not respond as if she thought there were. She must simply forget the past week. But she hesitated too long.

“You do not have a headache, by any chance, Jane?” There was heavy irony in his voice. “Or your courses?”

Her courses were due within the next few days, and she had been feeling a justifiable anxiety about them. But she would not worry before she must. She had known the consequences of such a liaison from the start. There was even a clause in the contract that dealt with children of their affair.

“Or are you simply repulsed by me tonight?” he asked, looking more dangerous than ever with his eyes narrowed on her. “Are you going to exercise your prerogative, Jane, and send me off to hell, my lust unsatisfied?”

“No, of course not.” She looked at him calmly. “I will be pleased to entertain you, your grace. What else do I have to think of and dream of and plan for during all the long hours when you are not here, after all?”

“It is reassuring to discover, at least,” he said as he strode toward her and the bed, “that you have not lost
your saucy tongue, Jane. I would certainly not enjoy you meek and submissive on your back. Now, what sensual delights can you dream up for me?”

She had learned a number of skills during the past week and a half. She had learned not to be shy of her own sexuality or his. It was clear that he really was going to wait for her to entertain him. He took up a stand beside the bed, his feet apart, his hands clasped at his back, and gazed at her with raised eyebrows. It was more than a little disconcerting and very definitely upsetting in light of what she had hoped their next encounter would be like.

She undressed slowly, teasing him with tantalizing glimpses of naked flesh, a little at a time. She folded each garment and turned to set it down on a chair. When she was naked, she lifted her arms and drew the pins from her hair one at a time until it cascaded about her. She smiled. Perhaps after all she could tease him out of his embarrassment over last evening—if that was what this abrupt change in him was all about.

He was still wearing his cloak, but he had thrown it back over his shoulders. He made no effort to hide the telltale bulge of his arousal pushing at the tight fabric of his evening knee breeches. Yet he did not move. His expression remained impassive.

She undid the buttons at his neck and let his cloak fall to the floor behind him. But in doing so she brushed against him and discovered something she had not known before—that there was something erotic about being naked with someone who was fully clothed.

“Sit down,” she invited him, indicating the bed.

He raised his eyebrows, but he sat on the side of it, bracing his feet apart, setting his hands behind him on the bed, supporting himself on his arms.

“You are learning wicked lessons that I have not taught you, Jane,” he said, watching as she unbuttoned his breeches and freed him of their silken confines. “What do you have in store for me? Mouth play?”

She knew instinctively what he meant. And though with her mind she thought it disgusting, she knew with her body that it would not be so. But she did not believe she could do it, even so. Not yet. Not unless the time should ever arrive when they could come together as lovers rather than as man and mistress.

She took him in her hands, caressed him, stroked him while he watched what she did with narrowed eyes. Then she knelt astride him on the bed, placed him at her entrance, and bore down on him. She stayed upright, her spine slightly arched backward, her fingertips on the satin of his evening coat at his shoulders. She looked into his eyes.

“Good, Jane,” he said. “Entertaining.” But he still did not move. He was long and rigid inside her, but he did not move. She could smell liquor on his breath.

He had taught her to ride. But she had done it before while he lay flat and she had leaned over him. And he had ridden with her, stride for stride. They had both labored toward the ultimate pleasure.

Tonight he sat still and watched her with his dark, dangerous eyes.

She was slick and wet and pulsing with desire. She would have liked nothing better than to feel him respond in more than just simple arousal, to have allowed him to lead the way to completion. But he would not do it. There was a darkness in him that she could not seem to lighten. He was still punishing both himself and her,
she thought, for what he must see as the humiliation of his disclosures the evening before.

She kept her weight on her spread knees and calves. And she rode him. Not as she had done before, inner muscles clenching and unclenching to the rhythm of ascent and descent. There was a certain defense in such motions, a certain control over the rising and cresting of passion—at least until the final moments. This time she moved without defenses, her inner muscles relaxed, no barrier against the rigid hardness onto which she impaled herself time and time again as she rode the rhythm of sex. She arched her spine more, tipped back her head, closed her eyes, and braced her hands on his silken knees behind her.