A Much Compromised Lady

A MUCH COMPROMISED LADY

Published by Shannon Donnelly at
Smashwords.com
Copyright 2011 Shannon Donnelly
ISBN: 978-0-9831423-6-2
Discover other works by Shannon Donnelly at
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His senses spun from half a bottle brandy,
but St. Albans knew he had not drunk so much that spirits had
conjured the half-naked lady in his bed. She sat upright with the
white linens bunched in her fists and pulled to her chest, her hair
tumbling loose, and firelight warm on bare, golden shoulders.

Anticipation quivered under the warmth of the
brandy, and St. Albans realized with a shock that he could not
recall the last time he had felt such an emotion. A disinterested
part of him studied that question with a scholar’s dispassion. But
he was no scholar. And so he concentrated instead on the novelty of
surprise—and the delight that reached past jaded boredom.

“One of us must be in the wrong room,” he
said, allowing a smile to twist up the corner of his mouth. “I do
so hope it is not I.”

She shook her head. A long curl of hair as
black as the shadows that clung to the corners of the sparse room
brushed across one golden shoulder. She had lovely skin. Too dark
for beauty, true enough, but the dusky tones hinted of exotic lands
and things foreign to English soil.

“Close the door—quickly,” she said, her voice
low.

St. Albans smiled. He held a woman’s voice to
be the most critical component of beauty, and she had a voice like
wild honey, rich and deep, with an intriguing touch of refinement.
This storm-soaked night had indeed improved.

From down the hall, the noise of a woman’s
babbling and a man’s shouting carried through the inn. St. Albans
was only too happy to shut the door on that racket. Crossing the
room, he kept his stare locked on the lush body hinted at under the
bedding that she clutched to her.

It would spoil the fun if he did the mundane,
so he did not ask her name. He simply walked toward her, enjoying
the brandy spinning in his head and the vision of her spinning in
his sight.

Her eyes glowed luminous in the dim
firelight. Large and dark and endless. A softly rounded chin
lifted, and a wide mouth made for indulgence edged into a smile.
She did not look as if she belonged in this dilapidated room, and
irritation flashed hot across St. Albans’s skin. She ought to be
lit by a dozen beeswax candles and draped in fine linen. Her
chamber should be hung with velvet tapestries and warmed by thick
rugs. A silk gown ought to caress her skin, and slide from her at
his touch.

Oh, yes, she looked lady enough to be wrapped
in luxury.

Instead, the room in this provincial inn
halfway between Newmarket and nowhere was a shabby thing.

It was the best to be had on a soaking, late
spring night, but it was a cramped space, with the paneling scarred
by age, the board floors bare and dusty, and limp, dingy curtains
better suit a monk’s cell. A single rough wood chair sat before the
fire, while a shaving stand huddled in the corner next to the
four-poster bed, opposite stood a hideous maple wardrobe with
carved cherubs that had long ago had their wings chipped from their
plump shoulders.

It served him well enough, he had thought
earlier upon being shown to the room, and it had also served him
right for traveling without his usual entourage of servants to
arrange his comforts with his own linens and things about him. But
now he was quite pleased not to have those encumbrances. She might
not have found her way to his chamber if there had been a valet,
and far too many other servants to bar her from entry.

When he stood next to the bed, she shifted up
to sit on her knees. One slim, sun-browned hand let half the covers
fall away.

His mouth dried as he glimpsed the curve of
her breast, and his lips quirked as he noticed that, under the
covers, she still wore her shift and corset.

Not so daring as she wants me to think.

He wondered at what game she played. Hope
flared all too briefly that it might be an interesting one. He
shuttered the emotion at once. Hope was a fool’s hobby, and he was
no fool.

Reaching out, her long fingers deftly plucked
the diamond from his cravat with a touch so light he barely noticed
it. She tossed the gem onto the shaving stand with as much concern
as if it were a bit of lint she had removed, and began to unknot
his cravat. Her other hand held the covers to her breasts. He
watched those tempting curves rise and fall with fast, agitated
breaths. From excitement—or something else?

Stripping off his cravat, she sent it the way
of his stickpin. Her slim fingers started undoing the buttons of
his waistcoat.

She frowned as she worked at his clothes, her
fingers deft and all too clever. Ah, what else could those fingers
do? She bit her lower lip as she struggled with the ruby buttons—an
endearing gesture that made him want to do the very same thing. She
had lips that invited tasting, full and wide, plump as dark
cherries.

With his waistcoat undone, she looked up, her
eyes pleading. She had very dark eyes, almost as dark as the cloud
of hair that curled around those warm shoulders. Gold flakes
glinted in her eyes and in the strands of that dusky hair,
sparkling like the dust on a jeweler’s work table. What in blazes
did she want from him? Other than the obvious. And he knew for a
certainty that she wanted something. What woman did not?

Normally, he cared little for the feelings of
others, other than for the amusement it provided him to watch them
act out their follies. But she had piqued his curiosity with her
approach. How delicious it was not to know exactly how this
encounter would progress. Seduction had long ago become such a
predictable game. Enjoyable, but oh so predictable.

“Your coat now,” she said, her tone more
urgent and her glance straying for an instant to the door.

He smiled at her naiveté about gentlemen’s
fashions, and said, his tone affable, “It generally takes two
footmen to ease me out of it.” Her gaze came back to him and her
round chin jutted forward with stubborn purpose, and so he added,
“But that is not going matter to you, is it?”

She rocked back on her heels, and commanded,
“Turn ‘round.”

Her tone pricked him, and for an instant, his
eyes narrowed with a flare of anger.

No one ordered an Earl of St. Albans—not even
the King, for the King was mad and the Prince Regent far too in
debt to St. Albans to do more than be grateful for the discreet
loans that kept the Prince in luxuries.

She shrank back a little before him, and he
forced his cursed temper to cool. He had not drunk so much as to
lose control of himself. He never drank so much. And he was not
about to forfeit this delicious, dusky lady by frightening her with
the dark edge of his own damnable self.

Besides, she was indeed giving him a full
night of novelties. When was the last time anyone had dared order
him to do anything? So, where he defied princes, he would obey her.
For now.

Giving her one of his better smiles—the one
calculated to charm any woman—he turned. “Will this do,” he said,
allowing only the slightest of sarcasm to shade his tone. He waited
to see what she might dare next.

Her breath, hot and sweet, teased the back of
his neck as she reached around him to grasp his coat collar. Her
breasts brushed his back. She pulled away to strip his coat down,
so it pinned his arms. Panting and muttering curses in a tongue he
did not recognize, she pealed the garment off him and tossed it
aside as if it were a rag. His waistcoat went with it, and the ruby
buttons winked up at him like demon eyes.

He spared a brief regret for his coat, which
now lay in a wrinkled, ruined heap. He had rather liked that
particular shade of midnight blue, but he could get another. Naked
ladies—at least ones this comely and intriguing—were rather more
hard to come by.

In his shirtsleeves and pantaloons now, he
decided he had done with what she wanted.

He turned in an instant, catching her in his
arms, feeling her stiffen and hearing her gasp, but he carried her
down with him, falling into the depths of the feather mattress,
trapping her beneath him.

The sheets, worn to threads, tore under them,
and his hands tangled in her hair and her garments and the bed
linens. She smelled of wild roses and some spice that stirred his
pulse. Her shift dragged lower onto her shoulders, revealing sweet
curves and soft skin. Against her low-riding corset, her breasts
rose and fell with rapid breaths that feathered across his face.
Her pulse skittered in her throat, and her hands pressed up against
his chest, fingers splayed wide, as if somehow that would stay him
for even a moment.

He smiled down at her. They were now firmly
in his domain and he would dictate the rest of the night.

“Now, my sweet intrigue. Time to see if you
strip as well as you strip me.”

Eyes enormous and flashing, she pushed
against him, muttering something in that foreign tongue of hers. He
did not understand the words, but a curse was a curse in any
language. He smiled at her protests. They would not last for
long.

He lowered his mouth to hers.

A pounding cut across his intent and he
hesitated, a frown tightening his face. He started to turn towards
the door and the noise, but the lady’s fingers wrapped into his
lawn shirt. She dragged his mouth down to hers.

He forgot the pounding outside for the
pounding inside as blood coursed through him, hot and heavy and
leaving him light-headed. He had no room in his mind for anything
but the beseeching demands being made.

Her teeth bit at his lower lip, and her
tongue soothed what she had bitten. Twenty years of practiced
seductions vanished in a hot flash of raw desire, going up like dry
powder touched by a spark. He fit his mouth over hers, demanding
more, clashing with her, devouring her, tasting every curve of lip
and tongue, exploring every hollow and probing until he pulled a
soft moan from her.

Closing his hand over her breast, he released
her mouth and sought the taste of the skin on her neck, on her
throat, on the valley between her breasts. She sighed, or was it a
ragged pull of breath? And then the door crashed open behind
them.

The lady squeaked and dove under the tousled
covers, wiggling out from his loosened hold.

St. Albans growled, anger cooling his passion
of a moment ago. Slowly, he rose on one elbow, his movements
measured and intentionally languid—his controlled moves kept his
temper at least somewhat in check. With the pulse pounding in his
clenched jaw, he locked a narrowed stare on the intruders.

Three men crowded the threshold. St. Albans
inspected them. An aged, balding, scrawny fellow—the landlord. A
vacant-eyed young edition of him—the son. And a gentleman in a
purple coat, his face pinched and lined, his silver hair worn long
and tied back in the style of last century, with a too-fastidious
air about him.

St. Albans recognized him at once, but he
took the course of deliberately insulting the man by not
acknowledging that fact. After all, facts had never mattered to any
Earl of St. Albans. And he had a personal dislike for Francis
Dawes, Lord Nevin. There was still a score to settle between
them.

For a long moment, St. Albans simply stared
at the trio, his fury for this interruption quivering inside him.
He sent the unspoken words quite clearly to them: if he had to
rise, they would regret it. Deeply.

The landlord, in a nightshift hastily stuffed
into half-buttoned breeches, glanced about wide-eyed, taking in the
scene. He stuttered an apology and began to bow himself out. Lord
Nevin ignored him, pushing forward as if this was his house and he
carried the authority here.

Conceited, overbearing hypocrite
, St.
Albans thought, his patience with this farce thinning.

“There’s a thief loose,” Nevin said, his
narrow face pulled tight as he stared down at St. Albans with
disdain. “We are searching all the rooms.”

St. Albans half expected the man to drag out
a handkerchief and put it to his face, as if he smelled something
offensive. Instead, Nevin gestured for the landlord and his son to
move forward.

With the smallest of movements, St. Albans
turned his stare to the landlord, and asked in a deadly sweet
voice, “Do you mean to accuse me of harboring a fugitive?”

A chorus of denial burst from the landlord
and his son, and both men shifted nervously on their feet, glancing
from St. Albans to Nevin.

“Then why do you enter my room, startling my
lady?” St. Albans asked, his voice softening as his anger began to
fade. Interruptions were always such bores.