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Ethan rolled over to shed his coat, casting it carelessly across the room. He pulled off his neck cloth and threw aside his shirt, barely repressed impatience in each gesture. Lottie watched. She had seen more than her fair share of naked men and had mostly found the male form a disappointment, oddly shaped, flabby, or even downright ugly. Men generally looked so much better with their clothes on. Her grandmother had told her so before she wed at seventeen and Lottie had never had cause to doubt her.
Not Ethan Ryder, though. His body was firm and lithe, whipcord strong, his shoulders wide and his chest hard and muscled. Lottie thought his thighs would probably be equally heavily muscled from so many hours in the saddle and she felt a little light-headed to think about it. Her mouth was dry and her blood felt drugged, heavy with lust.
“And the rest,” she prompted, as he paused. The glitter in his eyes as he looked down at her was bright and hard, desire distilled. Her heart thumped.
It took him only a moment to discard the rest of his clothes, and then he stood before her entirely naked and magnificent with it, strong, powerful and, as Lottie could not help but note, with an enormous erection as impressive as the rest of him. Her throat felt as dry as sand now. She waited for him to return to her, to straddle her, to take her.
He did not. He stood looking down at her, his gaze as powerful as a physical touch. Lottie shifted restlessly beneath it. Then he was beside her again, touching her with gentle, reverent strokes; the line of her shoulder, the curve of her hip, the hollow of her elbow and the softness of her stomach. He kissed the underside of her breast. Lottie shivered. She reached for him, thinking that she really must show some of the initiative that would be expected of an experienced mistress, but he returned her hands firmly to her sides.
“No,” he whispered. “Lie still. We do this my way.”
He returned to his ministrations, firm and yet tender, his touch leaving a trail of fire in its wake. He nibbled the soft skin of her neck and her shivers intensified as his breath caressed her skin. His mouth moved lower, discovering the soft hollow of her collarbone again, licking and tasting her skin. She found herself arching up to meet him, wanting him to take her breasts in his mouth, aching for his touch. Frustratingly, infuriatingly, he left them alone. Instead she felt his tongue explore the curve of her belly and flick teasingly into her navel. The cool air breathed across her damp skin and she shuddered, need coiling within her like a tight knot.
“Please …”
She had not meant to beg, had not realized that she would want to do so. She felt the sweep of his smile against her stomach.
“Ah.” There was a wealth of satisfaction in his voice.
He raised himself up to take one of her tight nipples into his mouth. She almost screamed; her mind spun away with pleasure. He was pulling it, tugging it with his teeth, the tiny bite mingling with the ecstasy that threatened to melt her very bones. She could not stop the trembling. The muscles jumped and quivered in her belly, and she reached again for him, blindly, but again he pressed her back down into the bed, his lips and hands tracing caresses across her skin from her stomach to her breasts until she moaned. She had never felt so vital, her body alive, all thought banished, a creature of sensation alone.
“You are driving me to madness….” The words were torn from her and she heard him laugh before his lips returned to her breast to torment her anew.
Lottie writhed, desperate to feel him inside her now, but again he evaded her grasp and resumed the slow, tantalizing mastery of her body, pressing his open mouth to her skin, his touch as hot as a brand. This time when his trail of tiny kisses reached her throat again he raised himself above her and his lips returned to her mouth, demanding, insatiable, all control lost. He plundered, but whatever he asked she gave more. There were no memories to haunt her here, no experience to draw on because she had never felt this way before, never felt this pitch of pleasure that was mingled somehow with exquisite tenderness.
“Please,” she cried again, and this time she did not recognize her own voice. “Now …”
This time he slid a hand down to part her legs and she felt the cool air against the damp heat of her cleft. Her body plunged into another spasm of helpless hunger. He was poised above her, the touch of his fingers soft against the softer skin of her inner thighs and sliding toward the burning core of her. When he stroked her there she cried out, thinking she would come at once, all restraint lost. His fingers paused in the slow circles they were tracing.
“Wait,” he whispered. His breath skittered across her skin racking her with shivers. She heard his voice laced with humor and wickedness. “Not yet.”
“I cannot help it!” Another shudder shook her body. Desire, irresistible, unendurable, raked her. She could feel herself poised on the edge, suspended in restless, intolerable need, before one smooth stroke of his hand sent her flying into the abyss, the pleasure exploding through her body, her mind light and free. Gone was the shame and the confusion of the past weeks and months, the misery that had stolen her certainties and wrecked her confidence. She felt vivid and alive and for one terrible moment so grateful to him that she thought she loved him.
The blinding light faded a little from her mind, the brilliance dying. Gasping, she lay back on the bed, her body slick with sweat. She became aware of Ethan still kneeling between her parted thighs, still hard and erect and not one whit sexually satisfied. Truly, she thought faintly, she was a terrible mistress, grasping after her own pleasure so greedily with no thought for his.
“I’m sorry—” she croaked, and saw a frown crease between his brows.
“For what?”
“You told me to wait….” Her body still thrummed with pleasure like the last echo of music.
His expression lightened. “I am flattered you could not.”
He tilted her hips up slightly and slid inside her, forcing a gasp from her because she was so tight around him. A new assault of sensation cascaded through her.
“Oh!”
He held himself quite still as her body instinctively adapted to his, cradling him, enclosing him in its heat. Then he rocked inside her, a tiny movement, a deeper penetration, creating a tumult of feeling. Her body tensed about his, clenching him tightly, and she heard the breath hiss between his teeth. Looking up into his eyes she saw the strength there and the power and knew he would not be provoked into hurrying this. Her body melted further into blissful sensation.
He took her slowly, so slowly, easing out, sliding back so deeply that she felt not only ravished but that she had abandoned everything to him, her heart and her soul, with each stroke. It was so exquisitely tender that it stole her breath. Lottie closed her eyes and gave herself up to the sensation of his loving, drawing him to her, eagerly seeking all that he could give and demanding more.
The rhythm changed, became more urgent. Lottie drew him in deeper still as each thrust drove them both toward an inexorable climax. At last he abandoned all control and plunged into her, crying out, entangling his fingers with hers and gripping tightly as the final thrust toppled him over the edge, sweeping her with him. This time it was darker and more intense than before. She was taken beyond the boundaries of all experience. In some profound way she could not understand, she knew he had claimed her.
Lottie allowed her body to lie quiescent and her mind to float as light as a feather in the darkness. She did not want to test her feelings. It seemed too dangerous, for fear that she, Lottie Palliser, once the most sophisticated of society matrons, might have offered up her heart as easily as her admittedly nonexistent virtue.
Yet eventually thought and feeling did return and she could not keep it out. She felt superbly replete, ravished in the best and most satisfying of ways. The other less physical, more emotional outcomes of their lovemaking she tried unsuccessfully to ignore. She felt vulnerable in a different way now. There was a hollow beneath her heart when she looked at Ethan lying in abandoned pleasure beside her. She wanted to hold him and rediscover the tender closeness they had achieved. She wanted to see love in his eyes.
She tried to make light of the thought, telling herself that she was confusing love with gratitude. Ethan had reminded her of how spectacular physical love could be and for that she was immensely indebted to him. That was all there was too it; she felt no deeper feelings for him, could not allow herself to do so. Nevertheless she felt cold, her stomach dropping in despair, for no matter how she had pretended to view love as a sport and recreation in the past, she had never quite been able to disassociate it from emotion. God knew she had tried. She had taken a score of lovers and claimed it was simply for amusement yet each time she knew she had been searching for something deeper and more elusive, and each time she had emerged with her heart scarred a little more.
Ethan rolled over, opened his eyes and smiled at her and her heart did another little dizzy skip and her despair deepened. No, please no. She could not be such a fool as to fall in love with him when she barely knew him, and what she did know with clear hard certainty was that he cared nothing for her and would only use her and then discard her.
“Thank you,” she said very politely, hiding behind barriers, protecting herself. “That was very nice.”
Ethan laughed. “I am glad to have been of service.” He raised a brow. “No more running away?”
Lottie shook her head. She knew it was far too late for that. “No more running away,” she whispered.
Ethan pressed a kiss on the damp skin of her belly, and Lottie shivered, reaching for the covers to shield her as though they could help protect her heart as well as cover her nakedness.
“I’m hungry,” she said as her stomach rumbled. She was glad to be distracted by another very basic physical demand.
Ethan sat up and reached for his clothes. “They do an excellent dinner here,” he said, “if you like plain roast beef.”
“That sounds delicious,” Lottie said. Her stomach rumbled again loudly. She appeared to be going downhill rapidly in the mistress stakes. A professional courtesan would surely waft fragrantly away at the end of a sexual encounter, her mystique and sophistication still intact even if nothing else was, rather than demand to be fed, having worked up an immense appetite. It was then that she realized she had not eaten for days. She had been too nervous and unhappy in Mrs. Tong’s brothel to be able to face food, the sight or even the smell of it. Now she felt ravenous.
“They mix a fair rum punch here, as well,” Ethan said, shrugging himself into his jacket but abandoning his cravat in a crumpled heap on the chair.
“I should have had one of those before we started,” Lottie said.
“We didn’t need it,” Ethan said. He dropped another kiss lightly on her lips and went out, and Lottie lay in sated abandonment, the sheet draped across her stomach, watching the dance of light and shadow out in the street.
Ethan had been right, she thought. He had been the one she needed and he had been skillful and gentle and considerate, and she was enormously grateful to him for restoring her confidence and reminding her how glorious making love could be. She was so grateful to him, in fact, that she wanted to do it again at once—or as soon as she had eaten and given her food a little time to settle since she did not wish for indigestion.
Yet there was more to this than the simply physical. If—when—she made love with Ethan again, she knew she would tumble all the more deeply into those disturbing and inappropriate feelings she was starting to have for him. It was her nature. In the past she had pretended not to care about her affaires when in reality she had been consistently hopeless at treating them with the superficiality they warranted. It was why she always got hurt and always ended up rushing to the next lover. She was not sure what she was looking for, only that she never found it.
She certainly would not find it here with Ethan.
This was a man who had bought her for his pleasure and she knew she should not forget that. He had been bored, wanting a mistress to pass the time. She was the woman chosen. And though he had shown her patience and gentleness, there was no more to it than that, and she would be mistaken to read something into their relationship that was not, and never would be there.
She rolled over, drawing the sheet about her to ward off the sudden chill of the room. She felt acutely vulnerable, needing to rediscover the old Lottie with her sharp edges and sheen of protective sophistication. She would become the perfect courtesan now, cool and detached. She could do that. It was her future.
When Ethan came back it was with a tray loaded with food to satisfy even the lustiest appetite, and after they had eaten he read the newspaper and Lottie wrapped herself in a sheet and sat in the window seat watching the passersby on George Street on their way to the balls and the theaters. She felt oddly distant and detached from that world of the Ton, the world she had lost. In an effort to ward off her piercing loneliness she turned to Ethan again, this time setting out quite blatantly to seduce him, and they made love with a fierce intensity. But although it was deliciously pleasurable, in the aftermath Lottie felt even more lost than before.
CHAPTER FIVE
ETHAN WOKE FIRST. He lay listening to the sounds of London stirring, the street vendors setting up, the rumble of the milkmaids’ carts, voices, the clop of hooves, the sweep of the brushes of the crossing boys. He had always liked London. He liked its anonymity and its bustle, its entertainments and its pleasures. Paris was a beautiful city, grand and self-important, but London had always held a special place in his heart, which was odd since he did not much care for England and the English.
He shifted slightly, careful not to wake Lottie, who was curled up beside him in a soft, trusting bundle. He watched her for a little while and found it surprisingly pleasant. She slept easily, lightly, with a little smile on her lips as though in sleep she could set aside the unhappy memories that shadowed her waking moments.
Ethan had never spent an entire night with a woman before. He had been very careful not to do so, for such behavior implied some sort of commitment he was not inclined to give. With Lottie he had no choice, although he supposed he could have taken another room. The hotel was not full. But such an idea had not occurred to him and now he wondered why not.
He had slept fitfully. Lottie had fallen asleep after they had made love a second time, snuggling confidingly into his arms, her hair spread across his bare chest like a swathe of silk. Ethan had lain awake and listened to her breathing and felt her warmth, and he had been disoriented and confused, as though he had come home to a place of peace and fulfillment that he had not even realized he had been seeking.
Nothing, he thought, had gone according to plan the previous night. He had wanted the notorious Lottie Palliser, the most scandalous divorcée in London, not a surprisingly vulnerable and appealing woman whom he had had to woo into bed. And yet making love to Lottie had been as profound as it was sweet. It had felt intimate and seductive in a different and far more dangerous sense than the simply sexual. For a few brief hours it had drawn them so close he had almost thought he cared for her.
He had made love to plenty of women in his time and had almost always enjoyed the experience with an uncomplicated and unquestioning pleasure. He had never particularly wanted to prolong the time he spent in their company out of bed. He had never experienced an ounce of genuine feeling for any of them beyond admiration of their amatory skill or appreciation for their sophistication. So it made absolutely no sense that having made love to Lottie Palliser he had felt a peculiar, unfamiliar and completely unwelcome mixture of emotions. The experience had seemed to be weighted with far too much significance. He had felt disturbingly as though he had bedded a bride rather than a new mistress. What had started on his part as no more than a lesson in skilled seduction had ended as something far more profound.
It had been an illusion.
He shifted again and Lottie made a soft sound of protest and reached for him, cuddling closer to his side, instinctively seeking his warmth and the comfort of his body. Ethan felt a powerful urge to pull away from her—he felt almost afraid, for pity’s sake, as though she was asking for something he could not give—but he mastered the feeling, as he had conquered so many emotions in the past, and propped himself on one elbow, stroking her hair gently, enjoying the silken run of it through his fingers. Her skin was very soft, too. He liked the voluptuousness of it when so many women were as brittle as twigs. Lottie was plump and yielding, curved in all the right places. Ethan allowed his hand to drift over her bare shoulder and down to the rounded turn of her elbow. She rolled over, reaching for him, her nipples brushing his bare chest, her breasts pressed against him in their delicious fullness. Ethan felt again the wickedly strong urge to lose himself in her. She was like a drug to him, he thought, as he started to kiss the opulent whiteness of her breast, so sweet, so tempting. At the corner of his mind fluttered a warning; he had never felt so strong an attraction to a woman and he had certainly not expected it with this one. It went against both sense and expectation.
Involvement was dangerous. Emotion was dangerous.
For a moment he hesitated but the fierce clamor of his body could not be resisted. It was only sex, he thought, and it only blazed so strongly because he had denied himself for so long. He had bought her. She was his, and his alone, to take. His blood burned hotter at the thought.
Lottie opened dazed, sleep-filled eyes and smiled at him and his heart gave an odd, errant thump. She shifted accommodatingly, and he rolled lazily on top of her, making love to her in slow, dreamy strokes that heightened his pleasure beyond anything he had ever imagined. He felt as though he was giving up something of himself to her and he tried to resist, tried to hold back, but the gentle demand of her body and the greedy need of his own senses drove him on to abandon all barriers and claim her over and over as his. He was shaking when they fell apart, shocked and drained by the intensity of the experience, their bodies slick and wet with sweat, the room hot and the sun high in the sky.
“How lovely,” Lottie murmured, eyes closed, as she pressed her lips to the point of his shoulder. Her eyelashes were spiky dark against the curve of her cheek and there was a little smile on her lips that was self-satisfied and very knowing.
“I am so pleased you have rediscovered your enthusiasm for it,” Ethan pushed down the rumpled sheet and ran his hand over the bare swell of her hip, wondering how he could still want her when he had satiated his need over and over. He felt as though he was grasping after something he only half understood, finding it but losing it again, a never-ending quest. For so long he had been entirely self-sufficient through choice and necessity. With Lottie he felt as though he was surrendering something of himself and he fought against it even as wanted her; he wanted to know her, explore her, learn her over and over, deeper and deeper.
It had to stop. He was bewitched.
Ethan sat up, running an impatient hand over his hair. Physical love, he thought, should be simple. Strangely, it was proving to be damnably dangerous. He was behaving like a lovesick boy when in fact he was no more than a man enchanted by the novelty of a new mistress. He was about to pull the sheet up and turn his back on Lottie’s nakedness, demonstrating the lack of power she had over him, when he realized that she was trying to cover herself and turn away from him. Contrarily that annoyed him. He yanked down the sheet and pushed her back onto the mattress so that she was lying there completely naked and exposed to his gaze.
“Don’t cover yourself,” he snapped. “I like you to be naked for me.”
She toyed with the edge of the sheet, evading his eyes, trying stealthily to draw it toward her.
“I need to dress….”
“No you don’t. You’re a mistress and a mistress should be naked for her lover if he demands it.”
She looked up and her eyes were defiant. “You are discourteous and I am too fat. So let me get up, damn it!”
Ethan could not deny the first part of the sentence—the damnable need he had for her was making him churlish—but it was the second part that interested him.
“You’re what?” he said.
“Fat.” Beneath her defiance he glimpsed a flash of despair. “I used to be rounded and dimpled. It was fashionable. But then when I … when Gregory started the divorce proceedings I was unhappy so I ate.” A slight smile quivered on her lips. “Then I had even less money because in effect I ate it all away.”
“You ate because you were unhappy?” Ethan frowned. He had not given much thought to what she had done in the months after her husband had thrown her from the Grosvenor Square house and the divorce had ground its way scandalously through the courts. He had assumed that her life would have gone on much as before, which was naive, now he thought about it. With little money, abandoned by friends and family, denounced as a wanton and vilified if she stepped outside the door, what could she have done?
“I ate cake and pastries, biscuits and ice cream,” Lottie said, “until I was sick. I read copies of the Ladies’ Magazine and ate and slept all day.” She reached again for the sheet and this time Ethan did not stop her. “I suppose,” she added, “that should I fall into even greater penury I could live off my fat, like a camel.”
“Camels store water in their humps,” Ethan said, “not fat.”
“It is the same principle,” Lottie said. She sighed. “Please let me dress.”
“A moment.” Ethan put out a hand and touched her wrist lightly. “You did not seem self-conscious before,” he said.
“I forget,” Lottie said simply. “I feel the same inside. Then I see myself in the mirror—” she nodded toward the pier glass on the wall “—and it shocks me.”
Ethan raised a hand and smoothed her hair away from her face. “I like it,” he said. “You are not thin but I like that. You look very pretty to me.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Pretty?”
“Delightfully curved. Voluptuous.” He leaned forward and kissed her. She returned the kiss hesitantly, almost innocently. “We must make love in front of that mirror,” he said, against her lips, “and then you can see how beautiful you look.”
She blushed. “Beautiful now,” she said dryly. “How you flatter me, my lord.”
“Your body is divine,” Ethan said. “Something else of which I must convince you?”
“Later,” a delicious smile lit her eyes. “I really must wash and dress.”
Ethan rang for hot water and fresh towels whilst Lottie wrapped the sheet about her and started to rummage through the bandbox she had brought with her.
“What do you do today?” She was kneeling on the floor, looking up at him as he dressed. She was barefoot and tousled and once again Ethan felt that strange pang of emotion as he looked at her, the tug at his heart. He could imagine her, alone in her exile, sending a maid out for pastry and cake and cream, whilst in the outside world her husband destroyed her reputation and dragged her name through the gutter. A harsh anger gripped him. Whatever Lottie had done, he thought, Gregory Cummings’s behavior had been disproportionate and unforgivable, taking a hammer to crush a butterfly.
“I have business to attend to,” he said, a little abruptly. He wanted to escape the warm intimacy of the room. He needed to break the spell, to refocus his mind upon the urgent plans that had brought him to London.
“Of course,” Lottie said. She got to her feet and shook out the one respectable gown she had brought with her. “This gown needs pressing,” she added, “if I am not to parade about Town tricked out like one of Mrs. Tong’s harlots.”
“Go and buy some new clothes,” Ethan said. “I want you to have something suitable to drive with me later in the park and an evening gown for the theater tonight.”
Her gaze flickered to meet his and he sensed her unease. “We are to go out in public later?”
“Of course,” Ethan said. “If I wished to sit quietly at home reading then I would have stayed in Wantage.” There was a tap at the door and a manservant brought in a steaming jug of water. The man shot Lottie a look, glanced at the tangled bedclothes, and went out smirking.
“Yes, I see.” Lottie sounded subdued, her head bent, but Ethan could see her frown. “I thought—” She started, stopped. “I did not realize that you would wish to—”
“To flaunt you in public?”
She looked up, troubled. “Yes, I suppose so. The fashionable crowd were my acquaintances when I was married. It is awkward—”
Ethan shrugged, once again repressing that wayward sympathy. There was no room for sentiment and he knew it; he had a very particular purpose for her. She had satisfied his physical needs, for the time being at least, and now she would play another role, that of the ostentatious mistress about town. He was intent on creating as much gossip as he possibly could, diverting the attention of the authorities from his true interests and activities. Lottie’s part in his plan was to act as an eye-catching diversion.
“I understand that,” he said. “But you have a different role now. Besides, you will not be obliged to speak to any of your previous acquaintances, merely to be seen by them.”
“Of course,” Lottie said. Her voice was bland but her mouth turned down at the implication of his words, that she must display herself before her previous acquaintances marked out as his mistress. Ethan knew she was struggling to repress her protests. Lottie Palliser did not take easily to the role of accommodating Cyprian, he thought.
“You will be with me,” he said. “That will protect you from any discourtesy.”
“I am sure it will.” She could not quite erase the sharpness from her tone. “No man of sense would wish to find your sword at his throat.”
“Then that is settled,” Ethan said. He put out a hand and drew her toward him. He felt a moment’s hesitation in her but she came to him easily enough. He kissed her, long, hard and deep, a claim, an imprint, a statement of possession.
“You’re with me now,” he repeated softly when he let her go, and he felt a powerful flare of possessiveness. He kissed her again until he felt her relax and respond to him and then his desire caught like a flame again. He was breathing hard when he let her go and he felt shaken.
