More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (24 page)

He was going to end up in Bedlam if he was not careful.

It had been something quite beyond his experience. And certainly beyond his intentions. He had wanted a mistress again. Someone to bed at will. Something really quite basic and simple. He had desired Jane. She had needed a home and employment.

It had all made perfect sense.

Until she had let her hair down. No, that had only fueled his desire.

Until she had called him by name. And said something else. What the devil was it she had said? He rubbed his cheek over the warm silk of her hair and hugged her a little closer.

Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is at heart
.

Yes, that was what had done it. Those few foolish words.

From birth he had been an earl with the rank of a marquess, heir to a dukedom. All his education, formal and informal, had been designed to train him to take over his father’s title and his father’s character when the time came. He had learned his lessons well. He had taken over both at the age of seventeen.

 … the unique person one is at heart
.

He had no heart. Dudleys generally did not.

And he had no unique character. He was what his father
and everyone else had always expected him to be. For years now he had hugged about himself like a cloak his reputation as a dark, ruthless, dangerous man.

Jane’s hair was fragrant with the smell of roses that always clung about her. It made him think of country gardens in the early summer. And filled him with a strange yearning. Strange, because he hated the country. He had been to Acton Park, his own estate, only twice since leaving there after a bitter quarrel with his father when he was sixteen—once for his father’s funeral less than a year later, and once for his mother’s four years after that.

He had intended never to go back until he was carried there one day for his own burial. But he could close his eyes now as he held Jane tightly and remember the rolling, wooded hills to the east of the house, where he and Ferdinand and Angeline had played robbers and highwaymen and Robin Hood and explorers. And where sometimes, when alone, he had played poet and mystic, breathing in the smells of elemental nature, sensing the vastness and the mystery of this nebulous thing called life, trying to formulate his thoughts and feelings and intuitions into words, trying to write them down as poetry. And occasionally liking what he had written.

He had torn up every word in a passion of anger and disgust before he left home.

He had not thought of home in a long age. Not of
home
at least, even though he kept a careful eye on the running of the estate. He had even forgotten that Acton Park ever had been home. But it had. Once upon a time. There had been a nurse who had given them discipline and affection in generous measures. She had been
with them until he was eight or nine. He could even remember why she had been dismissed. He had had a toothache and she had been holding him on her lap in the nursery, cradling his sore face with her large, plump hand and crooning to him. His father had come into the nursery unannounced—a rare event.

She had been dismissed on the spot.

He, Jocelyn, had been sent down to his father’s study to await the thrashing that had preceded the pulling of his tooth.

The Duke of Tresham, his father had reminded him with every painful swish of the cane across his backside, did not raise his sons to be girls. Especially not his heir.

“Jocelyn.” Jane was awake again. She tipped back her head to look at him. Her beautiful face was flushed and heavy-lidded, her lips rosy and swollen from his kisses. She seemed cloaked and hooded in fragrant, shining gold. “Was I dreadfully gauche?”

She was one of the rare women, he thought, for whom passion and sexuality were instinctive. She had given both unstintingly this afternoon as if she did not know what it was to be hurt. Or belittled. Or rejected.

But before he could answer, she set one fingertip lightly to the bridge of his nose to cover the frown line there.

“What is it?” she asked. “What is the matter? I
was
gauche, was I not? How foolish to have imagined that because it was earth-shattering for me, it must have been so for you too.”

Foolish Jane so to expose herself to ridicule and pain. He took hold of her wrist and lowered her hand.

“You are a woman, Jane,” he told her. “An extraordinarily
lovely woman. With everything in the right place. I was well pleasured.”

Something happened to her eyes. Something closed up behind them. He recognized his sudden irritation for what it was. It was shame that his throat and chest were aching with unshed tears. And anger that she had brought him so low.

He should never have told her to call him by name.

“You are angry,” she said.

“Because you talk of earth-shattering experiences and make me feel that I must have misled you,” he said curtly. “You are employed as my mistress. I have just been putting you to work. I always take pains to make work congenial to my mistresses, but work is what it is. You have just been earning your living.”

He wondered if she felt the lash of his words as stingingly as he. He hated himself, which was nothing new except that the passion of his self-hatred had long ago become muted to a disdain for the world in general.

“And giving good value for money,” she said coolly. “I would remind you, your grace, that you employ me for the use of my body. You are not paying for my mind or my emotions. If I choose to find part of my employment earth-shattering, I am free to do so provided at the same time I open my body for your use.”

For one moment he was in a towering rage. If she had dissolved into tears, as any normal woman would have done, he could have lashed himself harder by treating her with scorn. But typically of Jane, she was scolding him with cool dignity despite the fact that she was lying naked in bed with him.

He chuckled. “Our first quarrel, Jane,” he said. “But not our last, I suspect. I must warn you, though, that I
would not have your emotions engaged in this liaison. I would not have you hurt at its inevitable ending. What happens in this room is sex. Nothing else. And you were not gauche. It was as good a session of sexual intercourse as I have ever experienced. Better, in fact. There, are you reassured?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice still cool. “Thank you.”

He was aroused again—by his anger, by her cool refusal to be chastised, by her golden beauty, by the faint smell of roses. He did what he had to do to reassert his control over the afternoon’s business. He turned her onto her back and mated with her again, but this time he concentrated all his powers on keeping the act carnal, even clinical. Man and mistress. Nothing more.

And then he slept, lulled by the sound of rain against the window.

“I
THOUGHT PERHAPS
you would wish to stay for dinner,” she said.

“No.”

They were dressed again and back downstairs in the sitting room. But he had not seated himself as she had. He had gone first to stand in front of the fireplace to stare down into the unlit coals. Then he had paced to the window to stare out at the rain.

He filled the sitting room with his presence and energy. Looking at his immaculate elegance, his proud, erect posture, his powerful shoulders and thighs, Jane found it hard to believe that just half an hour ago he had been lying naked with her in the bed upstairs. It was already hard to believe any of it had happened despite the
physical evidence of soreness and tender breasts and unsteady legs.

“I have a dinner engagement,” he said. “And there is an infernal ball to be attended tonight. No, I did not come to stay, Jane. Merely to consummate our liaison.”

It was not going to be easy, being his mistress. She had never expected it to be. He was an arrogant man of uncertain temper. He was accustomed to having his own way, especially with women. But it was going to be especially hard to cope with his strange, sudden mood swings.

She would have felt hurt by his words, belittled by them, as she had when he had spoken in a similar manner in bed earlier. But she realized that the words were not spoken carelessly but quite deliberately. She was not sure why. To remind her that she was his mistress, not his lover?

Or to convince himself that she meant nothing to him beyond a female body to be used for his pleasure?

Despite all her ignorance and inexperience, she would swear that the first time he had entered her he had not been using her. She had not been a mere woman’s body. It had not been just carnal pleasure.

He had made love to her.
With
her.

He was ashamed now of having shown such weakness.

“That is a relief, then,” she said coolly. “There are several rearrangements to some of the other rooms that I hoped to start today, but I have already lost most of the afternoon.”

He looked over his shoulder at her without turning and regarded her steadily.

“You will not be put in your place, Jane, will you?”

“If you mean,” she replied, “that I will not allow you to make me feel like a whore, your grace, the answer is no, I will not. I will be here whenever you need me. It is our agreement. But my life will not revolve around your visits. I will not spend my days gazing wistfully from the window and my evenings listening expectantly for the door knocker.”

She remembered guiltily how she had paced back and forth to the windows all morning. She would not do it again.

“Perhaps, Jane,” he said softly, his eyes narrowing dangerously, “I should send a message in advance whenever I wish to bed you to ask if you can fit me into your busy schedule.”

“You were not listening,” she told him. “I signed a contract, and I mean to keep it and to see that you do too.”

“What
do
you do with your time?” He turned from the window and looked about the empty room. “Do you go out?”

“Into the garden at the back,” she said. “It is rather pretty, though it needs work. I have ideas and have started to implement them.”

“Do you read?” He frowned. “Are there any books here?”

“No.” He should know very well there were not.

“I will take you to Hookham’s Library tomorrow morning,” he said abruptly, “and buy you a subscription.”

“No!” she said sharply. She relaxed again. “No, thank you, Jocelyn. I have plenty to do. It takes a great deal of time and energy to convert a brothel into a home, you know.”

“That was unprovoked impudence, Jane, and unworthy of you.” He looked very large and menacing, standing before her chair, his booted feet apart, his frown still in place. “I suppose if I told you I would come to take you walking in Hyde Park, you would be too busy for that too?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “You do not need to put yourself out on my account.”

He stared at her for a long time, his expression so unreadable that she could see nothing in him of the man who had loved her with unmistakable passion such a short time ago. He looked hard and humorless and untouchable.

Then he bowed to her abruptly, turned, and strode from the room.

She gazed in surprise at the door he had closed behind him and listened to the sounds of the front door being opened and then shut again. He was gone. Without a word of farewell or any hint of when he might come again.

This time she felt hurt.

Desolate.

HE ROOM NEXT TO THE SITTING ROOM HAD
been furnished with a daybed, a plusher than plush carpet, an inordinately large number of mirrors, which multiplied one’s reflection at least ten times, depending on where one stood, sat, or lay, and the inevitable cushions and knickknacks.

In Jane’s estimation it had been used either as a private retreat by the duke’s ex-mistresses who enjoyed their own company more than anyone else’s, or as an alternative to the bedchamber. She suspected the latter.

It was a room she had ignored while the two main rooms were being refurbished. But now, at her leisure, she was making it into her own domain. The lavender sitting room was now elegant, but it was not her.

The mirrors and the daybed were banished—she did not care what happened to them. She sent Mr. Jacobs out on a special commission to purchase an escritoire and chair and paper, pens, and ink. Mrs. Jacobs in the meantime was sent to buy fine linen and an embroidery frame and an assortment of colored silken threads and accessories.

The den, as Jane thought of the room, would become her private writing and sewing room. She would indulge there her passion for embroidery.

She sat stitching in her den, a fire crackling cozily in the hearth, during the evening following the consummation
of her liaison. She pictured Jocelyn at a grand dinner party and then moving on to a great squeeze of a ball, and tried not to feel envious. She had never had her come-out Season. There had been the year of mourning for her mother. Then her father had been too ill though he had urged her to accept Lady Webb’s offer to sponsor her. But she had insisted on staying to nurse him. And then there had been his death and her year of mourning. And then the circumstances that had brought her under the new earl’s guardianship.