Pleasure For Pleasure (14 page)

“Lady Godiva,” he breathed into her ear, “ride me.” He picked her up as easily as one might swing a child in the air, carried her across the room, and then he was sinking back into one of the large armchairs, his face alive with laughter and wicked pleasure, a sinful pleasure that had everything to do with her body and his, and nothing to do with beds.

“Shouldn't we return to the bed?” she asked.

“Bed?” He was laughing aloud now. “I'd like to make love to you in the outdoors.”

She felt herself blushing, and he was pulling her forward, lowering her. It was an odd way of proceeding. He stopped, hand between her legs. “I like to watch you,” he said silkily. “Your eyes almost close, but not quite, did you know that? And when you breathe so quickly, your breasts move. Your cheeks are pink, you know.” And all the time his clever, clever fingers were dancing between her legs.

“Charles,” she sobbed, and finally, finally, he let her fall forward, onto him. And then he stopped talking and made a hoarse noise in his throat.

She knew instinctively how to ride. It must be a skill that comes to Lady Godivas in time of need, because she found herself throwing her hair back so that it fell to his knees, arching her back and laughing.

He wasn't laughing anymore. His face was rigid, his teeth clenched. “Ah, God, you're so—” But the words disappeared somewhere and he just concentrated on shaping her breasts with his hands until he really couldn't take it anymore, so he ran a thumb across her rosy nipples. Her eyes drooped and suddenly he was helping in the race, thrusting upwards with all his force.

And then she was crying out, falling forward into his arms, and he was clutching her tight, that lovely damp back, as tight as he could, wrapping his own lady in his arms so she couldn't ride away from him.

L
ady Mucklowe knew exactly what it took to make a ball into a tremendous success: a single stroke of genius. A few years ago she had created the most talked-about event of the season by inviting Lord Byron to read aloud his favorite love poem. That had ensured the presence of every wanton woman in London, as she later boasted to her sister. Wanton women cheer everyone up: gentlemen in the hope that such a woman might do them a favor, and gentlewomen in the realization that they had someone interesting to talk about.

Tonight she was confident that her place as the reigning queen of the interesting party would be confirmed. “I'm not sure I understand, Henrietta,” her husband said fretfully. Henrietta Mucklowe told herself for the fortieth time that if she had been lucky enough to have a more interesting spouse, she wouldn't have such imaginative parties. Because if Freddie weren't Freddie, they might actually have something to talk about at home, and she wouldn't spend most of her time dreaming about fantastic entertainments.

“Masks, dear,” she repeated. “The footmen will be giving one to everyone as they come in. And they must wear them; it's a requirement of entrance.”

Freddie looked nonplussed, so she explained, “Like wearing knee britches into Almack's. You can't get in without them.”

“What about York, eh?” Freddie asked. Occasionally he did have a pertinent point. “You can't just tell a royal duke that he's got to wear a mask or be done with it.”

“Perhaps he won't come.”

“Saw him today.” Freddie grunted as he readjusted the garters on his stockings. “He told me he wouldn't miss it after that other ball you gave.”

“Byron was a very good idea,” Henrietta said, with a nod of self-congratulation.

“Not that, the pheasant last year. Cook's a genius.”

“That too,” Henrietta said. If one had to snare a royal duke by food, she was willing to do it. “You have to wear a mask, Freddie.”

“A what?”

“A mask!”

“Oh. All right.”

Another marital disaster averted, Henrietta made a brief tour of the downstairs. Hundreds of masks, all stitched from black silk (for men) or rosy silk (for women) waited at the entranceway. Candles were lit and footmen stood ready to
replenish them. Three hundred bottles of champagne lay waiting, stuck haphazardly in pails of cold water. All ready. The house hummed gently, an empty tidewater pool about to be filled to the brim.

And then, abruptly, it all began. She heard the high, excited tones of Countess Mitford at the door. Within an hour there was a snarl of carriages that stretched for blocks in every direction. The butler was holding up marvelously, not allowing anyone in without a mask firmly attached to his face. In truth, as soon as people entered the house and saw that everyone was wearing masks, and gained a sense of the possibilities, there was no complaining.

Chaperones grew rigid with alarm, but it was too late. Daughters strained forward like young whippets eager to race. Mothers clutched their arms, whispering instructions, but every girl in the room knew that the rules were off for the night. Anyone might dance a waltz if she were masked. Any girl might dance with the worst rake in the room, if they were both masked. How could she know who she danced with? How could she be responsible for her actions? And yet, each person had the prickling sense that the most important person would surely find him.

Wives held their heads high and glanced roguishly to the left and right, looking for their lovers. Husbands trotted off to the card room, knowing that for once their expression wouldn't betray their hand, or moved in a slow prowl toward one of the two ballrooms, searching for a memory, a girl they once loved, a youthful evening.

There was no one who greeted the masks with more joy than Miss Josephine Essex, formerly known as the Scottish Sausage.

She handed her pelisse to the footman without blinking an eye. In the past month she had almost had to wrench her sheltering, comforting pelisse from her body, so uncomfortable was she with her figure. But that very afternoon
Madame Rocque had delivered the first of her evening gowns, and Josie was wearing it. Rather than being seamed to follow the lines of a corset, this gown was wrapped to fit Josie's own body. It was a kind of indigo violet, far too dark for a debutante, but Josie didn't care.

“My goodness!”
Griselda had said that afternoon. Which was enough. Josie dressed more happily than she had in her life.

True, when she looked at herself in the mirror, wearing only the smallest corset designed to support her breasts, she had an agonizing pulse of anxiety. She could actually feel silk swishing around her unbounded hips. Surely she looked too large, too undisciplined, too bulky?

But then she took a deep breath and walked toward the glass, walking the way that Mayne had taught her. Even thinking of his lithe muscled body wearing the rags of her pink dress made her giggle. And watching the way the dress gave her a woman's shape—a shape she'd had all along—made her eyes narrow.

He was right.

Mayne was the veteran of a hundred
affaires,
if all the stories were true. How had Imogen described him once? As having a Lucifer-like exhaustion. Josie couldn't help grinning at herself. His mouth had lost that dissolute droop when he was bound up in sparkling pink silk and undulating across the floor toward her.

Now she adjusted her rosy mask—luckily, a color that went perfectly with her gown—and glanced around for Griselda.

Griselda was wearing the daring crimson gown that Madame Rocque delivered for her. Actually, in some ways Josie hardly recognized her chaperone. When they first met, several years ago, Griselda was the quintessential pretty, English gentlewoman. She dressed with the exquisite propriety of a widow interested in two kinds of reputation: that of sexual propriety, and that of good taste. She was a merry,
adorable person who showed little interest in the opposite sex, other than a fervent wish to discuss their foibles. In point of fact, while she generally had a beau or two hanging in her train, they were often foolish young men, good for nothing but bleating poetry and providing an arm on the way into supper.

But somehow, in the last few months, Griselda had changed. Josie couldn't quite put her finger on it. Yet as she glanced back, she was fully aware that her chaperone would be the least chaperonelike woman in the room. Madame Rocque's crimson dress was fashioned in such a way that swaths of dark crimson came over the shoulders and crossed—but they didn't actually meet until almost Griselda's waist. Now
that
was a gown that a debutante could not wear.

But, of course, Griselda was a widow. “I will certainly not wear a pink mask,” she was saying. “I'll take one of the black ones, if you please.”

The footman seemed to be bleating something about Lady Mucklowe's instructions, but it was of no use. Josie could have told him that. Within two seconds Griselda was happily tying a black band around her eyes.

“You look wonderful,” Josie whispered to her. “That black makes your hair look positively silver.”

“Silver!”
Griselda squealed.

Josie laughed. “I didn't mean it that way. It looks like moonlight. I do like the fact you didn't put ringlets in your hair tonight. They wouldn't suit the gown.”

“I thought it was time for a change,” Griselda said with some satisfaction. “Now, darling, just because we are wearing masks is no reason for improprieties.”

Josie opened her mouth but Griselda held up her hand. “Josephine, I am not a fool. I am as aware as you are that many a marriage is made under the threat of a lost reputation, and likely a few fathers will burst out of these doors demanding that some reprobate offer marriage by the morrow. But you,
my dear, have no need to resort to subterfuge. Just wait and see.”

“I don't mean to engage in subterfuge—” Josie began.

But Griselda interrupted again. “Only once has one of your sisters knowingly done such a thing, and that was in the case of Imogen's first marriage. I'd ask you to think about that marriage carefully, Josie. Were Imogen and Maitland happy?”

“Obviously not.”

“I rest my case,” Griselda said magnificently. She twitched her shawl so it fell to her elbows and provided a frame for her gown. “Shall we enter?”

They paused for a moment on the threshold of the first of Lady Mucklowe's two ballrooms. A footman sprang forward and offered them glasses of champagne. Before Josie could even stretch out her hand, three gentlemen bowed before them.

“I am,” one of them said magnificently, “the Prince of Purpalooseton.”

In the flurry of laughter that followed the revelation that Lady Mucklowe had decreed that no one was to use his proper name, Josie became aware of one important thing. Those three gentlemen had not sprung to their side only because of Griselda and her crimson bodice. Within a moment they were joined by two more gentlemen, and for the first time in her life—and with a feeling of dizzy pleasure that was all the more intense for being so new—Josephine Essex found herself flirting simultaneously with four men. Griselda waltzed off in the arms of the Prince of Purpalooseton, but she herself was too happy to dance.

Plus, she knew quite well she was a terrible dancer.

Sometime later she found herself in an animated circle, discussing the most sought-after book in London,
Hellgate's Memoirs
. “I may not know who wrote it,” said a gentleman in an orange waistcoat, his mask sitting rather rakishly on
his large nose. “But there's no question whose memoirs we're reading. The moment I read the chapter about the woman he met at Almack's.” He lowered his voice. “'Tis Lady Lorkin and Mayne, obviously.”

“Absolutely not,” said a tall, willowlike man with a fair mustache. “The memoirs are a disgrace, but that chapter could not possibly refer to Lady Lorkin. I thought the pertinent point was the
water spaniel
.”

“How so, sir?” Josie asked.

“Water spaniels,” he said. “Don't know a woman who can abide the breed. Always in the water, aren't they, and then they shake themselves, and then hey! Presto! The lady is wet. Splattered with water. Wet.”

“An obscure point,” the orange waistcoat said. “What's that got to do with Mayne or Lady Lorkin?”

Another gentleman strolled up to the circle and joined them. Josie glanced, and then looked again. There was no mistaking those shadowed cheekbones and straight eyebrows, mask or no mask. Nor, for that matter, his clothing. Mayne was wearing a garnet-colored jacket that fit his muscled body as if it had been sewn on that evening.

She gave him a huge grin. For a moment she had forgotten her transformation, but then his eyes raked her body swiftly. He had an eyebrow arched, and it didn't take women's intuition to know he approved of her current gown as much as he loathed her former corset.

“Must be a woman who loves dogs,” the willowy man was burbling on. “Even wet ones. I say that Hellgate is Charles Burdiddle. Mind you, we shouldn't be discussing such a risqué subject.”

Josie had no idea who Charles Burdiddle was. She glanced at Mayne. “We're discussing an infamous piece of literature, sir,” she said to him. “The Earl of Hellgate's
Memoirs.
Unfortunately I have not had an opportunity to read them, but I have heard enough about them from my
sisters to understand that Hellgate appears to have considered intimacy a challenge rather than something to be defended against.”

“Intimacy outside the bounds of marriage is always a challenge, not a defense,” Mayne said. His voice had all the liquid, Luciferian exhaustion of a man who is tired of saying the proper thing.

“But women so rarely think so,” Josie pointed out. “In fact, it strikes me as a thoroughly male point of view. Did no one consider the idea that perhaps the memoirs are utterly false, and written by a woman?”

“That would be a remarkable deception. I believe there are ladies hoping desperately to be the next
mistake
that Hellgate commits,” the willowy gentleman said with a sarcastic edge to his voice. “Particularly if he would consent to do so in a three folio sequel, handsomely bound in leather.”

The orange waistcoat drew in his breath and said, “There is a young lady present, sir!”

“She doesn't appear to be shocked,” Mayne observed.

“In the case of a less-than-fascinating man,” Josie said, “a woman should always defend against intimacy.”

“A woman should defend her virtue in every instance,” the orange waistcoat said. “Once a woman succumbs to the kind of disreputable behavior depicted in Hellgate's memoirs…well, she is nothing more than a thing unworthy. Stained! The woman described under the
nom de plume
Helena, for example. Shameful!”

“Tsk tsk,” Mayne said. “You speak, sir, as if one's past were irredeemable. As if one could never compensate for mistakes of the heart.”

“One cannot. Scandals of that nature dishonor the soul. There is no recovering from them. Whoever Helena may be, she will never regain the true heart of womanhood: her sanctity and purity. She is
stained
.”

“He doesn't seem to agree that stains come out in the
wash,” Mayne said aside to Josie. “Perhaps Helena was his wife. Will you dance?”

“Of course.” And she turned toward him with the new, lithe freedom that came with wearing no corset, with a confidence bred from the hundred admiring glances thrown her direction in the last half hour.