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‘Kit’s housekeeper wouldn’t stay once he’d been gone awhile, nor let Midge stop here without her. She said we lived like swine and she’d no mind to go on mucking out a pigsty every morning, so you two obviously have a lot in common.’
‘How very sensible of her, but wherever did they go?’ she asked and when he didn’t reply, she walked back into the kitchen to find him watching her as if he wished she’d conveniently disappear as well.
Oddly hurt by his clear preference for her room over her company, she frowned and tapped an impatient foot as if waiting for his answer, when she suspected both women would be at Brandon and Maria’s rectory in Kent, awaiting the return of their master before they deigned to come back.
‘She just said Kit would know where to find her when he wanted his house made civilised again,’ he drawled unrepentantly.
‘How insightful of her,’ she said with a scornful glance round the room.
‘I’ll borrow a few deckhands to clean up next time we unload a ship.’
‘In the meantime you intend to go on treating my br … brave Kit’s house worse than a stable? At least a well-run stable is mucked out every day, but this place has obviously been going to rack and ruin ever since he left.’
Was Captain Darke actually blushing? Louisa wondered. Her half-guttered candles were flickering annoyingly and refused to illuminate him properly, but she was surprised he’d even heard it could be done, let alone learnt how to do it himself.
‘He said I was to treat the place as my own,’ he excused himself gruffly.
‘And you truly think so little of yourself, Captain?’
‘Yes, Miss Eloise so-called Rochelle, I do, and this is all I want or need of any place I lay my head nowadays,’ he rasped harshly, as if she’d stepped on to forbidden ground by even asking that question.
‘Why?’ she asked, biting back a ladylike apology for intruding on his private thoughts and opinions.
‘Because … Devil fly away with it all, woman, what right have you to break in here and interrogate me like some long-nosed inquisitor? While we’re on the subject of the devil, where’s Coste hidden the rest of the brandy, so I can get back to my previous occupation when you leave us or at least stop your infernal nagging?’
‘Inside himself from the look of it,’ she answered impatiently and watched him with an implacable look Kit called her I’ll-find-out-if-it-kills-us-both stare.
‘Selfish bastard,’ he grated in a much-tried voice and tried to look as if he didn’t know he was being inspected by his unwanted night visitor and found wanting.
‘You probably have enough left in your system to inebriate a goat.’
‘I never saw a drunken goat, but what an interesting life you must have lived to have done so, Miss Le Havre.’
‘Yes, I have,’ she informed him truthfully, or at least she had until she’d been hauled off to learn respectability at the age of thirteen, much against her will. ‘And it’s not Miss Le Havre, but Miss La Rochelle, if you’re capable of remembering your own name, of course, let alone mine, which I sincerely doubt just at the moment.’
‘I know that too well, but I dare say you could tell a tale or two about that life, could you not?’
‘I could, but I won’t.’
‘Yet you expect me to tell you my entire life story, whilst you reveal nothing of your own? You’re an implacably demanding, as well as an insensitive and intrusive, female footpad, are you not, Miss Rockyshore?’
‘You really have no idea, Captain Darke.’
‘So, is that how you keep your lovers under your slender little thumb?’ he drawled in his velvet-rubbed-the-wrong-way voice. ‘By dragging their darkest secrets out of them when they’re drunk, then holding them over the unfortunate idiots?’
‘Nothing about me is so very little, sir, I’m above average height for a woman,’ she parried coolly, ignoring the urge to counter the rest of his accusations as beneath her notice.
Trust him to take her words as an open invitation to let his silver-blue eyes rove over her boldly. He was good at defending his privacy, she mused, as he let his gaze track over her until those eyes had all but stripped her bare. Then the renegade let that blatant stare of his rest explicitly on the secret centre of her and she had to fight not to press her legs together and visibly, physically clamp down on the fiery demand suddenly all too alive and wildly curious for more under his outrageous scrutiny. Kit and Ben hadn’t fought battle after battle to preserve her honour in their youth so she could be secretly tempted to throw it away on a ne’er-do-well like this.
Yet that fully-formed temptation stopped her thundering scold and sharp exit in its tracks. If she let him take her virginity, then she’d lose all her value on the marriage mart the instant he did so. Not even a Charlton Hawberry would take another man’s leavings, so deeply ingrained as it was in a gentleman’s psyche that he must marry a virgin, or at the very least a virtuous widow—she would certainly be neither after a night in the ungallant captain’s bed. It might be a desperate idea, almost as reckless as climbing out of a second-floor window at midnight, but she wasn’t in a position to discard any possibility just now.
‘So I see,’ he said with a pantomime leer she almost applauded, but there was something deeper and darker than simple lust in his eyes as well. It suddenly occurred to her that the real Captain Darke, whoever he might be under all this dark and dangerous front he faced the world behind, could break her heart if she had one. Luckily she didn’t and stared boldly back at him.
‘That could change,’ she warned, ‘if you don’t stop staring at me.’
‘Me, Miss Rockisle?’ he said, and his silvery-blue eyes were beginning to lose the haze of brandy and world-weariness that had clouded them until now. She dare not look lower to find out if his body was as blatantly aroused as his cocky smile and intent gaze argued it must be.
‘Yes, you—we were discussing your total lack of ambition and self-respect rather than my height and frame, if you remember?’ she said coldly.
‘You can talk as much as you like, my lovely, if you have the breath left for it after I’ve finished with you,’ he mocked as he sauntered confidently towards her.
‘I know when a man is determined to shut me up at any price,’ she blustered.
Suddenly it was very quiet in the house, echoingly empty but for the unconscious Coste, who she would have to swear to keep her identity from Hugh Darke, and two almost-adversaries, each determined to give no quarter. Louisa was too much a child of the streets to yield an inch in the eternal battle to make every choice her own, however wrongheaded and contrary it might be, and stood her ground while she wondered what that next choice would be.
‘And I know just as surely when a woman wants me as much as I do her, my dear,’ he said and stepped closer, silvery-blue eyes full of sensual challenge.
‘I’m not your dear,’ she argued and tried to tell herself it didn’t matter.
‘And if you’re not, what do you care? In a profession where “affection” is traded for expensive jewellery, fine gowns and a rich man’s protection, you can’t afford emotions, can you?’
Chapter Three
Temper had always been her undoing, Louisa decided as she lost it spectacularly and did her best to punch him in the gut. The wretched, ungentlemanly Captain Darke countered her onslaught by engulfing her in such a tight hold there wasn’t even a tissue of air to shield them from each other and it sparked a heat set burning weeks ago, when they had first laid eyes on each other and wondered ‘what if?’. It was like a force of nature, fuelled by some terrible need she hadn’t known could come so urgent it might tear into her very soul in order to make them indivisible.
She moaned at the shock of wanting more so desperately and should have been shaken instead of fascinated by the novel hardness of his rampant male member nudging explicitly, demandingly against her very core. Logic, scruples, reality—they could all wait. She needed to indulge, to learn, to luxuriate. His mouth took hers in an open-mouthed kiss that stole her breath and sent her straight into sensual arousal no real lady would feel for a lover, at least until he’d chipped away at her scruples and guarded heart for weeks, or maybe even months.
Louisa’s heart kicked with a shameless thrill at being so easily seduced, so starkly introduced to rampant sexual hunger, to the merciless drive of one achingly aroused body for another. She was all too ready to lose herself in the heat and novelty, and didn’t that prove her uncle and aunt had been right all along and she’d never make a proper lady?
Unable to resist the urge to explore him with every sense as he amply demonstrated his skills as a lover of passionate women, she lazily let the tips of her fingers take a census of his features. His chin felt as firm as if he chewed nails for a pastime, when not seducing very unlikely maidens, and it was intriguingly shadowed with fine, dark whiskers.
‘I’d have barbered myself if I’d known you were coming,’ he told her wryly in a brief moment of respite, then ran his index finger over her tingling lips as if they fascinated him as much as his did her, before kissing her again as if he couldn’t help himself test their softness and their welcome.
The small part of her brain not occupied with kissing him back went on with her sensual exploration of his intriguing features. He’d broken his nose once upon a time, as she felt a slight twist in his regally aquiline nose, and she decided it made his wickedly handsome face more human. His mouth was all sensuality just now; his firm lips on her softer ones were a balm, the impudent exploration of his tongue an arousing, teasing echo of something deeper and darker at the core of her that throbbed and ground with need in shameless response.
Her breath sobbed when he raised his mouth enough to lick along the cushiony softness he’d made of her lush lips, to tease and tantalise their moist arousal with his tongue as if he couldn’t get enough of her. Then it was his turn to groan as she darted her tongue inside his mouth, to chase and tease and put into practice all he’d just taught her.
Now wouldn’t he be surprised if he knew I was only as adept in the amorous arts as he’s just shown me how to be? she mocked herself silently.
He was a drunkard, a hardened cynic, and now she could add accomplished seducer of women to the slate against him. And he thought her barely one step away from a doxy touting for custom in the Haymarket. Even under the addictive spell of his kiss, Louisa managed to sigh. To him she was a willing mouth and an eager body and suddenly that was insulting everything there should be between lovers. If she were what he thought, she’d still have a heart and soul, however broken and damaged, and she wanted to be more than a reluctant itch to be scratched then added to a list of women he’d taken, then all but forgotten. He was more than that as well, for all he looked as if he didn’t care to be.
There was a depth of sadness under all that to hell-with-you manner, what suddenly seemed almost a wasteland of loss behind his cynical self-mockery. If letting him take her to their mutual satisfaction meant no more than a quick tumble in the hay, then she couldn’t do it even to evade a legion of Charltons. No, a mocking internal voice said, because you want too much from this conundrum of a man for that, don’t you, Louisa?
The question taunted her as his large hands cupped her shamefully aroused breasts and threatened to incinerate other wants with the sheer sensual need for more. Her eager nipples pebbled under the wicked stimulation of his suddenly very sensitive fingers and she felt as if she might burst into spontaneous flames. Temptation tore into her at the very thought of learning more, of letting him take her and render her unmarriageable between one moment and the next, but she fought it. Those who loved her might hope she wavered because of proper, belated, maidenly shrinking at the irrevocable step between virgin and woman, but that was nothing to do with it. It was because he was too embittered to wake up next to her in the morning and make the loss of her maidenhead feel right to either of them that she couldn’t take that step and walk him over a precipice.
It would solve so much, but then he’d know Eloise La Rochelle was as big a lie as the brilliant and icy Miss Alstone was to the ton. Perhaps she was the biggest fool in London to pass on seduction by such a master of the amorous arts, but she met Captain Darke’s clearing gaze and knew her instincts were right. He could be all her tomorrows and her sensual fate, or just a regretted possibility, but she wanted more than a brief but blazing seduction that would probably haunt her for a lifetime. Did she hope for protracted and lingering seductions to come, perhaps? Not marriage—to her that was as impossible as fairy dust—but she couldn’t kill whatever held her back by melting into his kisses and solving one problem with an even greater one.
‘I see how you hook in your prey now, Miss La Rochelle,’ he said with a shake of need in his deep voice that spoilt the steeliness of his would-be taunt.
‘I don’t hook them, as you so elegantly put it—they catch themselves, Captain, then I take my pick,’ she lied.
‘If you think to net me, then you’ve rarely been more wrong,’ he grated out in a fine, frustrated fury.
‘I’m a woman, Mr Darke, and therefore very rarely wrong at all,’ she taunted him with a sidelong look at his still-heaving chest and the flush of hard colour burning on his high cheekbones. She wriggled her hips and boldly abraded his impressive manhood with her lithe body to prove it.
‘In this instance you’re so glaringly mistaken I’m surprised you can’t find the good sense to admit it,’ he informed her stiffly and snapped the spell their bodies were slower to relinquish than their minds by pushing her roughly away. Turning his back on the wanton sight of her, draped against the hard edge of the kitchen table, he groaned in unmistakable self-disgust.
Louisa stayed where she was, mainly because her legs were still shaking so much from want and shock that she doubted they’d hold her up if she tried to move. ‘Yet you’ll remember me, Captain Darke. Even if I was about to let you put me outside like a stray cat, you’d still take the fire we’ve just lit between us back to bed with you and burn mercilessly for me all night long, deny it as you might,’ she taunted dangerously, recklessly prodding at his temper for some reason she couldn’t even put into words for her own satisfaction.
Maybe part of her still wanted to goad him into seducing her until she forgot anything else. She wondered uneasily at her own folly and tried to look as if his revulsion at the very idea of ever touching her again couldn’t possibly hurt her.
‘I might well, but why draw back from a promising new keeper when you seem to be without one while my youthful employer is at sea, Eloise?’
‘To make you more eager, of course,’ she explained, as if it was perfectly obvious to any masculine idiot who hadn’t pickled his intellect in brandy.
‘Just how eager do you expect your lovers to be? Is seeing me so burnt up by the lure of paradise between your finely displayed legs that I’d have promised you everything I have, short of a soul I long ago sold to the devil, not desperate enough for you?’
‘Obviously not,’ she parried, doing her best not to blush at the thought of what they would probably be doing right now if she hadn’t drawn back.
She imagined they’d somehow be striving for a fulfilment her body ached for with a merciless, hard knot of frustration at the centre of her that felt as if it might never relax on being denied what was natural and right between lovers. ‘Lovers’—that was the key. It was what they didn’t have—not one sliver of love flowed between them, so none of it would be right, however hot and needy they were for each other. Although she would never marry, she wouldn’t let herself fully love a man outside it unless she really did love him. That seemed about as unlikely as Captain Darke falling at her feet and swearing undying, unswerving devotion to a woman he despised, for all he claimed to want her so hotly.
‘What else do you expect of a man, then, if that’s not enough?’ he asked.
‘Affection,’ she told him rather forlornly, knowing she’d probably never gain it from this guarded, isolated man. ‘And a little respect.’
‘Very hard qualities for a female in your profession to find, I would have thought,’ he mocked her almost angrily, as if no woman had a right to demand so much of a man she was thinking of taking to her bed, always supposing they managed to get that far.
‘Hard ones to seek anywhere, Captain Darke, let alone on the streets,’ she said, with what she knew would look like too much knowledge in her dark-blue eyes as she met his hard gaze.
‘Aye, I’ll grant you that much bravery, or should that be impudence rather?’ he said reluctantly and she didn’t know whether to feel smug or guilty.
She reminded herself he was so drunk she could probably have pushed him over with one hand when he first staggered across the open door of that bedchamber and made her jump nigh out of her skin. If she’d pushed him away hard enough at any time during this surreal encounter, he would very likely have fallen in a heap and gone back to sleep as sweetly as Kit’s watchman, and nothing they’d done in the last half-hour had caused a stutter in Coste’s impressive snoring. The world ticked on and she and Captain Darke ticked with it and suddenly it felt as if their bittersweet interlude had been little more than a wicked daydream. She put a hand out as if to grasp it, but a picture of him ardent and wholeheartedly wanting her with every sense evaporated under her touch. Such fantasies weren’t for the likes of them; she knew too much and he’d learnt too much for that sweet pipe dream to ever come true.
‘I’d curtsy to acknowledge your extraordinary graciousness,’ she told him in the hard, cynical voice she thought Eloise would use to protect herself from her enemies, ‘but somehow I’ve forgotten to be suitably servile these last few years.’
‘Aye, it’s easy to grow accustomed to luxury and money. Harder than I hope you’ll ever know to manage without them when they’ve become such a part of your life you can’t imagine losing everything,’ he said and she wasn’t fool enough to think he was worrying about her future.
‘I started out with nothing more than the clothes I stood up in, Captain, but you fell a lot further, I think?’
‘You may think what you wish, but don’t expect me to confirm or deny your fantasies,’ he told her abruptly, the story of his sorry downfall obviously forbidden ground.
‘I can pick out the nob in a crowd any day of the week, so don’t try to pretend you’re not one, Captain.’
‘Then be content with being right and leave it at that, my dear.’
‘Again, I’m not dear to you in any way, Captain Darke. Let’s stick to the truth as often as we may.’
‘And if that’s as often as usual, it won’t be heard much.’
She shrugged and reminded herself how little she wanted him to know her true self, even if she would dearly love to know his. ‘So be it,’ she said carelessly.
‘Not much point in me asking what you’re really doing here then, I suppose?’
‘Not much,’ she confirmed with a nonchalance she hoped masked her shudder at the thought of what she’d escaped tonight—and how she’d done it.
‘Well, I suppose we’re done with each other for now then, at least until morning.’
‘Yes, I really suppose that we must be, Captain.’
‘For good, if I had my way, Miss La Rochelle,’ he informed her gruffly enough for her to know he still wanted her and bitterly resented her for it.
‘Now your way would be downright boring and I make it a rule never to be so tedious that gentlemen of my acquaintance truly prefer my room to my company,’ she fantasised cheerfully.
Perhaps from now on she would be herself, as she’d seldom dared to be while she had tried to move amongst his true kind as if she belonged—and blatantly did not. Whatever it cost her to be the girl who’d belonged nowhere in particular once again, that girl was who she was. And to be that person she had to sleep. At least she’d be safe from the predators who stalked the night-time streets, so until it was too early for Charlton and his ilk to be abroad, she could allow herself the luxury of sleep and hope she’d have resolve enough to take up her new life come morning.
She took the candles he carefully didn’t offer her and lit a new one off them, after fetching some from Kit’s dusty and unused drawing room, handing the guttering ones back to him and giving him a significant look she recalled her mother darting at her when she wanted her to go to bed and saw no reason to tell such a grown-up girl to actually go there. By saving herself the fact and almost the feel of his all-too masculine gaze on her nether regions, outrageously outlined as they were by Charlton’s breeches, she had to watch his lithely masculine legs, narrow hips and lean body as he effortlessly scaled the stairs ahead of her instead.
She decided she was turning into some sort of female satyr and felt herself flush at the wicked thoughts the sight of his muscular form roused in her rebellious body. Tonight she’d felt powerfully male limbs so intimately against her own and not even wanted to flinch away; she’d known the astonishing novelty of actually yearning for the thrust and rhythm of that very particular man deep inside her, to show her what no words could ever tell her about the wild, sweet potential of it all. Never mind her unwanted success among the polite world, tonight she’d gone from schoolgirl to woman and never mind the physical fact of her virginity, still exactly as it had always been.
Tonight Captain Darke had taught her to truly want; even now part of her did so as she undressed in Kit’s second-best spare bedchamber, did her best to perform a brief toilette, then blew out her candle and slid between cool linen sheets. She shifted in protest against that unfulfilled need as she stretched luxuriously on the feather mattress and decided her terrifying climb to freedom had been worth every precarious step. Tonight she’d found out exactly why Charlton Hawberry wouldn’t do as her husband, even if she wanted one. Now all she had to do was find out the Captain’s quirks and qualities if she was to take him to her bed and maybe even her heart. That thought sobered her, as she considered the impossibility of Captain Darke ever returning so huge and compelling an emotion as love, even if she had no more desire to be trapped into marriage than he did.
Could any woman reach the last traces of gentleness and vulnerability that must still exist under all that armour of indifference and cynicism, or why would that armour need to be so strong? A colder, less ardent soul than the one he’d sought to bury under layers of pack-ice, or drown in a brandy bottle, would survive without the embittered shell Captain Darke had grown to survive, but could she get inside it if all she found out when she got there was how much he refused to trust his emotions? And how on earth would she ever persuade him she was worthy of his trust if he found out when he took her to his bed that Eloise La Rochelle was as big a lie as hard, embittered and dangerous Captain Darke?
Hugh woke reluctantly and groped for his pocket watch even as he bit back a loud moan at the brightness of a new spring day and the lying promise of a London sky washed clean of all its sins, until it besmirched itself again with the smoke and stink of a great city. He might be less cynical about the day, he supposed, if the sharp sunlight wasn’t falling across his eyes unveiled by shutters or curtains, just as he’d so often fooled himself he liked it. Might be, but he doubted it, as full memory of the night before kicked in again and another shot of agony tore across his aching forehead at the very thought of Miss Eloise La Rochelle, who was very likely waiting to torture him over the breakfast table at this very moment. If she could find it under all the detritus he and Coste had deposited there, of course.