Lady of Pleasure (22 page)

Ronan counterfeited a smile that was almost too painful to hold. “I’m notorious for it. I am, after all, my father’s son.” He edged back. “Thanks for the drink. I have to go. I have a long night ahead of me.”

A very long night. Because he was damn well calling on Theodosia.

Shoving his way past the robed butler who had opened the entrance door he’d been pounding on, Ronan thudded his way up the staircase toward Theodosia’s bedchamber.

“My lord,” the butler hollered after him. “Her ladyship has retired for the night. She isn’t receiving!”
“Don’t pretend I never call on this house,” Ronan yelled back in riled annoyance. “Go back to bed already, Seldon. This is going to take a while.”

God keep him from striking a woman. He stalked down the shadowed corridor and upon finally reaching her room, he banged it open.

Theodosia sat in her bed reading a book by candlelight, a long mahogany braid draped over her robed shoulder. The silvering strands that reached into her mahogany hair now whispered of a frost within. One that had always been there. She didn’t even bother to look up from her book. She remained silent.

His nostrils flared and he almost lunged at her mocking indifference. “I’m staying here by the door to ensure I don’t leave any marks on your body.”
She turned a page in her book, still reading. “I know you too well. You would never.”

“I should,” he rasped. “I damn well should.”

“Then why don’t you?” she asked in a strained tone.

“Because I’m better than that.” His pulse roared. “How could you? How could you— I violated her! I violated her thinking it was you.”

She gently shut her book, setting it aside, but didn’t meet his gaze. “One cannot violate a desire that is already there. She wanted you badly enough to disregard every respectable path laid out before her. She went to you willingly and with an open heart. Why do you continue to deny that? More importantly, why do you continue to deny her?”

He could tell she thought she was in the right. He could tell she thought she had every right. His ‘association’ with this, with her, had ultimately allowed Caroline’s future and entire life to be swindled.

Fury choked him.

Swinging viciously toward the wall, Ronan smashed an entire fist into it, wishing he could smash his way out of the reality he’d been sentenced to. The jarring pain now blistering his hand wasn’t enough to blur the angst he knew he’d never be able to dig out of himself again.

“If you intend to destroy my house,” she coolly tossed out, “I suggest you leave.”

He swung back toward her, refraining from hitting the wall again just to show her who was really holding the fist. “Why did you do it? Can you at least answer me that? Why did you have to go and put on a goddamn charade the size of Buckingham Palace? For what? Your own goddamn entertainment?
Is that what you think I am
?! Paid entertainment?”

Her brows flickered. “Though you clearly refuse to admit it to yourself, I know you love her, Ronan.”

His eyed widened. “So you— Are you fucking mad? She was an innocent, Theodosia. An innocent I violated without
any
gentleness whatsoever! To hell with what you
think
! She didn’t deserve—”

“I wanted to ensure she became yours without any resistance from anyone. Her brother can’t object, her mother can’t object, you can’t object, no one can. Because she is now yours. As she should be.”

His throat tightened. “Mine? Is that what you think? Mine? Because I’ll have you know, Theodosia, she won’t have me. I’ll have you know that after what I did to her tonight, she—” Swinging back toward the wall, Ronan smashed a fist into it again, thudding straight through the plaster. “
She won’t have me
!” he roared, feeling as if his veins would pop out of his throat. The very thought of knowing Caroline despised him and thought him a whore made him want to rip himself apart. “After I have spent seven fucking years cradling the only thing that didn’t make me feel like a whore, you come in with your high and mighty hammer and smash it as if it were yours to smash! Nothing remains between her and I after what you did.
Nothing
!”

She leaned forward on the bed, disrobing herself and released an agitated breath. “She was about to get involved with another. And knowing you, and your approach toward women, you would have stepped aside and allowed for it. And forgive me, but after three years of knowing you, I didn’t want that for you. You deserve to have your share of happiness.”
He stared, his chest still pumping from anger. “So instead of telling me about a potential prospect that Caroline was considering, and letting
me
decide on what to do with said prospect, you decided to play God?”

She settled back against her piled pillows and quietly admitted, “I did what I needed to do to ensure your future and your happiness.”

He gave her a black, layered look. “And what do you know of happiness? Do you think
anything
will right what you have done? Do you think
anything
is going to buy back the tears Caroline has cried? The tears I had to watch her shed because of
me
? Is that your definition of happiness? Is it?”

“If she truly loves you, she will forgive you anything.” Theodosia swept up the book again and, paging through its cut pages, grazed her fingers against its binding and paused. “Dowager Gifford, whom I am very well acquainted with and have been for years, informed me that her son, Lord Gifford, is planning to propose to Lady Caroline. When she told me, I knew I had to do something. Because I know you, Ronan. I knew you wouldn’t fight for her. I knew you would let her go because it is in your nature to do so. To let go of even that which matters most to you. But at least now, you have to fight for her. Don’t you?”

Ronan stared, his breath hitching. It was like this woman’s finger was on the pulse of every person in London. He knew Gifford. Not very well, but he knew him. Gifford was everything he wasn’t. Wealthy, respectable, and probably still held the air of a gentleman even whilst pissing into a chamberpot. He was a damn good man, a damn good father and everything Hawksford could have ever wanted for Caroline. Unlike him. “She would have been better off with Gifford. She would have had a better life. She would have had security and a respect no money can buy. The sort of respect her brother is clamoring to give to her. Something I could have
never
offered her. Instead, I destroyed her. I…I destroyed her.”

Theodosia stared him down. “Why do you seem to think Gifford is worthier of her than you?”

He swallowed. “Because he is.”
“No.” Her voice hardened. “Because you want him to be. You have the means to be everything Gifford is but it’s easier to
fuck
women and take their money as opposed to loving them, isn’t it? It’s easier than facing that fourteen-year-old boy who was ruthlessly seduced by a lecherous married woman under the pretense of ‘love.’ It’s easier than facing yourself and asking yourself what love really is.”

Ronan’s breaths came in uneven takes. His eyes burned in unblinking disbelief.

For there it was. The truth. The truth he thought he had buried from everyone, even himself. How at fourteen, four years after his mother had died, he’d idolized a regal, kind, older married woman by the name of Lady Stanbury who had always called on his father and had always delivered him gifts and smiles. She was the epitome of all things beautiful, structured and kind. Unlike the madness of his father’s life that included too many nights spent drinking, too many nights stumbling around at events where he only made a fool of himself, too many nights of reading the works of Marquis de Sade, and too many debts that further marked shame.

The man forgot he had a son.

Lady Stanbury, however, listened to him when he needed her to and was always there to talk to him about everything. In the same way his own aunt had done before she was forced to leave to Paris when a close friend of hers died, and he’d found himself alone within a quiet house, cluttered with empty brandy decanters. Ronan had spent most of his days reading books his aunt sent to him or wandering the streets of London, and was only ever truly able to escape his loneliness and misery whenever his uncle would take him out riding through the park twice a week. Until one evening, Lady Stanbury had called on the house shortly after his father had stumbled out to go to yet another event. She’d asked that he join her for a carriage ride so they could talk. It was a carriage ride that took him toward the outskirts of London and onto a quiet, dark side road.

And that was when her true nature had emerged.

Lady Stanbury had seated herself beside him, smiled and gently rubbed his thigh as she spoke. At first, he thought she was being motherly. So he allowed for it. Until she’d grabbed his face and forcefully kissed him on the mouth with her brandy-flavored wet tongue that slid so deep into his throat, it choked him. As he’d struggled to breathe against the unexpected assault and weight of her moving dewy lips that sought to penetrate the back of his throat, she had slipped her hand into his trousers and rubbed him. He’d panicked, not knowing what to do, and tried to shove away her hands and escape that tongue, so he could breathe, but his cock responded to her advances all the same.

Despite his protests, she’d torn the buttons of his trousers, spraying them to the floor, to give herself free access to his erection which he didn’t want but one he couldn’t get rid of. Though he’d shoved her toward the carriage door, it only riled her more and she not only managed to hitch up her skirts, but straddle him against the carriage seat. Holding him by the throat, she’d commenced riding him hard and tonguing him deeply and possessively. And
that
was when he had ceased struggling. That was when he recognized that deep down inside he had to be a whore.

Because something far more primitive had taken over:
pleasure
. He had found himself instinctively rolling and driving up and into her and soon, he didn’t recognize himself and found himself uncontrollably and ruthlessly pounding and grunting into that wetness, searching for whatever his cock wanted until he bucked and shuddered and yelled out with an explosive pleasure he had never thought possible at fourteen.

This, while her footmen had quietly kept to their well-paid post to ensure no one was coming down the dark gravel road.

When Lady Stanbury slid herself free of him, wiping his seed into a handkerchief she carefully folded and tucked away into her reticule, she then raggedly whispered into his ear that she loved him and that was why she’d done it. That she hoped he loved her, too. He felt guilty knowing he should feel blessed to be loved by someone. By anyone. He felt guilty knowing he had actually
enjoyed
spilling his seed into her. After all, up until that moment of forced bliss, he was too scared to try to even masturbate and knew nothing of what his body was capable of.

Lady Stanbury had slammed open a door he hadn’t been able to close since.

Pleasure became both his greatest exultation and his greatest agony.

As her carriage had made its way back to his father’s home, and he did his best to hold the flap of his trousers closed, given the buttons had long disappeared across the seat and floor, she had slipped a hundred pounds into his coat pocket and told him it would be their secret. That she would pay for anything and everything he wanted in return for more.

His father had needed the money. And Ronan himself had always wanted to afford to go to Eton. Like Hawksford. To get away from his father. A greater part of him wanted to relive that pleasure of spilling seed and forgetting about all loneliness and pain. So he obliged Lady Stanbury twice a week in her carriage on the side of a road at new locations, and then slipped all of the money he ever made into his father’s ledger to fund both his school and whatever bills there were. His father had spent the money on everything but sending him to Eton. His father had also never asked where the money had come from. A good father would have.

Ronan quickly learned to bury his shame by making himself believe that what he and Lady Stanbury shared was love. She’d told him it was. She made him believe it was. Until she got bored nine weeks later, ceased coming to his door and the money stopped.

That was when he knew it wasn’t love.

That was when he knew it had only been sex and that he had been used.

He had kept it to sex and used other women in turn ever since.

Ronan swallowed hard. Holding Theodosia’s gaze in pulsing disbelief that she knew his most guarded shame, he eventually managed, “How did you know about Lady Stanbury? No one knows. Not even my uncle.”

Her features twisted. She searched his face. “I’m about to confide something to you. Something I should have confided the moment we met.” She was quiet for a long moment, her fingers grazing the golden locket that lay beside her on the linen. The locket bearing her brother’s portrait that she wore only when she left the house. “Lady Stanbury seduced my brother, Harris, in the same way you were seduced. Except he was eleven. While you were able to move on, my brother wasn’t so fortunate.”