"Perhaps that is not the life she imagines," Devin pointed out. He stood up abruptly, setting Leona aside. "What if she wants to live in London and foist herself on Society in all her rustic glory?" Devin asked. "Am I to endure my wife making a laughingstock of the Aincourt name?"
"Don't be absurd. What will it matter what she wants? Once you are married to her, her money is yours. You are her husband, her lord and master. She will do as you say."
"Mmm. No doubt just as you do what your lord and master says."
"How absurd—to compare me with a fur trapper's daughter." Leona laughed, her rather short upper lip pulling back charmingly over white, even teeth. "Really, Dev, you make me laugh."
"I am glad you find it so amusing," Devin replied sourly. "I thought you, of all people, would not urge me to marry this chit. Does it bother you not at all to think of my having a wife? Of my bedding her and producing heirs?"
"Really, Dev, don't be so plebian. Your getting a few puling brats on some insipid cow has nothing to do with us. What could it possibly matter?" She went to him, sliding her arms about his waist and leaning her head upon his chest. “I can remember more than once when you have had another woman...even at the same time. As I remember, we both found that rather stimulating."
"It was a different matter altogether," he said gruffly, his mind involuntarily going back to the debauched evening she had mentioned. His loins stirred at the memory. "I did not marry the other woman. I had no obligation to her, no ties beyond money."
"And what binds you to this one besides money?" Leona returned. She slid her hands down the small of his back and onto his buttocks, digging in with her fingertips. "Come, enough talk. I think it is time for my surprise, don't you?"
He bent and kissed her in agreement Leona slipped out of his arms and went to the door. She opened it and stuck her head out, then came back in. A moment later, a figure wrapped in a hooded cloak entered the room. The person was small; he assumed from the stature that it was a woman. The only other noticeable thing about her was that her dainty feet were small, tanned and bare.
As he was taking in this unusual fact, Leona closed and locked the door into the hall and came back to Devin. She took his hand and led him to the bed. Taking off their shoes, they climbed onto the high bed, where Leona directed him to he on his side. She snuggled up behind him, propping herself up on her elbow so that she could see.
The cloaked woman padded over to the side of the bed, taking up a place a few feet away from them. She untied the cloak and pulled it off, revealing herself as a small dark woman dressed in a brief top that covered only her breasts and loose trousers made of gauzy material that gathered at her ankles. Slender gold chains hung at her bare waist and around her neck, and looped across the narrow top. Tiny bells hung in a row around the hem of the top and across the waistband of her trousers. They dangled from a ribbon braided into her thick black hair, and on bracelets and anklets. With every movement they tinkled musically. Over her flimsy garments were wrapped a multitude of colorful scarves, all of the same flimsy material. Just looking at her sent a jolt of desire through Devin's loins.
She looked downward almost shyly as she raised her arms above her head and began to click her fingers together, making a rhythmic metallic sound with tiny cymbals. Then her hips began to move in an undulating motion, setting up the jangle of the bells. She began to dance, her feet and hips moving rhythmically. She moved in a small space, swaying and writhing and twisting.
"Stirring, isn't she?" Leona whispered into his ear, her breath sending shivers through him. She took the edge of his ear between her teeth and worried at it gently. While the girl danced, Leona's hand slipped beneath the open sides of-his shirt and began to roam his chest, and the combination of the erotic sight and Leona's touch made the pulse begin to roar in his head.
The girl danced on, her hips pumping, breasts jiggling, setting all the tinny bells dancing, punctuated by the rhythmic clicking of the cymbals on her fingers. And Leona stroked him, her fingers teasing over his chest and stomach, then down over the cloth of his trousers. She let out a low, throaty laugh at the tumescence pressing against the fabric.
"Would you like more?" Leona breathed against his ear. "Perhaps you want to see her more clearly?" Raising up a little, she clapped once sharply.
The dark-haired dancer reached up, never stopping the movement of her hips, and detached one scarf. She let it fall, drifting slowly down over her legs to puddle at her feet. Slowly, as she twisted and turned, undulating to the rhythm of her cymbals, she undid the scarves one by one.
Devin watched her undress, his breath rasping in his throat, the heat rising in him, as Leona caressed him, her hand slipping beneath his trousers to wrap around him.
"Mmm," she murmured. "Still hard as you were as a lad. I like that." Her tongue flicked out and traced the whorls of his ear, sending a long shudder through him. "What does it matter if you take a wife when we will still have this? Who cares if some peasant from the colonies can claim to be your wife? Go to Darkwater once a year and bed her for an heir, then return to me...and all the pleasures you are used to."
"Leona..." Devin let out a laugh of disbelief and turned to look her in the face. "I cannot believe that even you—you are seducing me into asking another woman to marry me."
"I am asking you to make it possible for us to continue as we always have," Leona snapped back, her eyes flashing. "I told you Vesey is limiting me to a paltry allowance. If my lover, too, is without funds..."
His eyes narrowed. "Are you threatening to take another lover? He won't last long if I call him out."
"Don't be absurd. I would do what I had to. Because you refuse to do what
you
should."
"Dammit, Leona, if you dare..."
"I wouldn't replace you, darling. You would always have a place in my bed. I would simply have to give you less time."
"Christ! You talk like a whore." He pulled away from her, rising to his feet.
The dancing girl stopped and stepped back uncertainly, her eyes going up to Devin's suddenly stony face.
"Oh, Dev, stop acting like a spoiled child." Leona slipped off the bed, too, making a quick motion with her hand to the dancer to continue.
The woman began to dance again. Leona walked over to her and, as the girl slowly undulated, she slid her hand over the other girl's chest, now slick with perspiration, and unfastened another of the scarves. Leona looked up at Devin, her face challenging, her eyes lit sensually. "Come, Dev, my love, you know what I am. I have never pretended to be anything else."
As she talked, she caressed the other woman's body, setting scarf after scarf adrift, until the woman was clothed only in the sheer pants, brief top and delicate gold chains. "I am wicked," Leona went on. "And so are you. You enjoy this, just as I do. Just as you enjoy all the things we do—things no decent person enjoys."
He watched her, no more able to look away from the erotic scene than he was to suppress the hot pulsation in his manhood. His eyes were glued to Leona's nimble fingers as they unfastened the top and pulled it away, leaving only the gold chains draped over the woman's small tanned breasts. She caressed the woman's breasts delicately, circling each nipple with her forefinger.
"Don't you want to take her now, Dev?" Leona purred. "Don't you want to drive yourself into her? I'd like to see it. You'd like me to watch, wouldn't you? Do you think that's normal? It's wicked. Wicked, the way you and I are."
With an abrupt, fierce movement, she jerked at the waistband of the sheer harem trousers, opening them, and let them fall down to the dancer's feet. "What do you think, Dev? Will you take her?" She stepped away from the woman. "Or would you rather take me?"
She unbuttoned the front of her dress and peeled it back, revealing her breasts, firm and full, centered by large dark nipples, pointed with desire. She pushed the dress back off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, revealing her naked body beneath. Running her hands provocatively down her body, she looked at him, arching one brow.
"Well, Dev, do you want me? Or maybe you want both of us. Or are you too pious, like your father?"
"Damn you," he growled, reaching out and pulling her to him. "You know I want you."
Leona smiled and rubbed her body against his. "Then admit it. Admit that you are wicked. You don't give a damn about that silly American chit or whether she enjoys living at Darkwater. You don't give a damn about the Aincourt name. Not as long as you can have plenty of money. And this." She looped one leg around his, rubbing herself suggestively against him. "Well, Dev, do you?"
"You know I don't," he replied thickly, swinging her up into his arms and dropping her none too gently on the bed. "You're right. We're steeped in sin," he said as he unbuttoned his trousers and peeled them off. "And I will marry the damned heiress, if that is what you want."
Chapter 4
Miranda settled her spectacles on her nose and suppressed her sigh. For once, the accounts in front of her bored her past speaking. She had been feeling faintly blue all day. She knew that the feeling had to do with the stranger she had met last night. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the man who had been attacked was the very man whom her father had wanted her to meet. It should have been a fortuitous thing that that man had turned out to be the first man who had sparked her interest since she had been in England. Instead, it was rather depressing, since it was clear that he obviously was so set against her that he had not even been willing to attend his mother's party to meet her. Of course, she had felt pretty much the same, so she could hardly hold it against the man. In fact, it showed that he was not the weak, shallow sort that she had assumed him to be. However, she could not help but feel a trifle miffed, no matter how silly she told herself that was.
She would never admit such a thing to anyone, of course. Indeed, she had not even told her father that she thought she had actually met the elusive Earl of Ravenscar the night before. If he knew that she had found his candidate for a husband in any way intriguing, he would never let up his campaign to get her to marry the man. And, of course, she had no intention of doing anything like that, no matter how attractive she had found the earl. She still felt the same way. She could never marry a man whom she did not love. She wanted the kind of marriage her father and Elizabeth had—they had been devoted to one another from the day they met And while she certainly was not the sort of dependent, clinging female that her stepmother was, she wanted to experience that same sort of firm, long-standing feeling.
She wanted her eyes to shine every time she saw her husband the way that her father's did whenever Elizabeth came into the room. She wanted to miss him when he was away and greet him with unfeigned delight when he returned, the way she had seen Elizabeth do with her father. Otherwise, what use was marriage? She could do very well on her own without a husband. She was used to taking care of things herself, and she had an ample fortune. She did not need to marry the way most women did, and she certainly did not feel, as Lady Westhampton had said about herself, that she must marry out of duty to her family. She might want to please her father, but it would not harm him or the Upshaw name if she did not.
She had told herself that she was being uncharacteristically foolish about the matter of the man she had rescued last night, and so, after picking her way through her breakfast, she had decided to spend the remainder of the day doing something useful—as well as something that usually kept her thoroughly engrossed. So she had pulled her hair back into a plain, no-nonsense bun and slipped into one of the older, much washed sacque dresses that she was accustomed to wearing when she did the accounts or wrote business letters. She was far too likely to get splotches and smudges of ink on her clothes when she worked to wear one of her nicer dresses. Then she had gone downstairs to the study, put on the small round spectacles that she wore when she did close work, and settled down to work with her father's assistant, Hiram Baldwin.
Much to her dismay, she had found that she could not seem to shake her mood. Worse, she could not get interested in the sheets of numbers that Hiram had laid out before her. Usually she and Hiram shared an abiding interest in financial dealings, but today his voice droned on unmercifully, and she found her attention wandering back to the events of the evening before. Time and again she had to pull her mind back and apply it to the business at hand.
It was something of a relief when the door opened early in the afternoon and her father bustled in, grinning from ear to ear. Miranda smiled back at him; it was difficult not to, when her father smiled like that. Besides, she was more than ready to have a legitimate reason to be distracted from her work.
"Hello, Papa," she greeted him. "You certainly look like the cat that ate the canary."
"Indeed?" Her father's grin grew even broader. "Well, I have every reason to be, my girl. I've been talking with a gentleman, and it seems he would like to pay his addresses to you. I told him I was amenable to it, of course."
"What?" Miranda jumped to her feet. "What are you talking about? What gentleman? Papa, what have you done? If you have found some other puffed-up nobleman to try to shackle me to, I swear I'll—"