The English Heiress (47 page)

She did, half smiling, half crying, wondering if he would remember in the morning and not really caring. Roger’s body was a little slow to respond, in spite of the inflammation of his mind, because of the desensitization caused by overindulgence in alcohol. Leonie did not mind. She was delighted to be able to display her skills, and they were not displayed in vain. Roger surmounted the effects of drink quite adequately to please Leonie and far too enthusiastically for coherent thought on his part.

Their first union was quick and explosive. It was delightful but by no means enough to content Leonie, who had nearly six months of starvation to make up. They did not talk in the interval. Leonie was too afraid that something she said would divert Roger from the satisfactory track he was in now. Roger had a new puzzle with which to muddle his drink-dazed brain.

He was not unacquainted with the techniques women used to stimulate and heighten their lovers’ pleasure, but the women Roger used all did pretty much the same thing in the same way. This was not surprising because they were all professionals who had received similar training from the procuress who had launched them on their careers. Roger patronized one particular procuress almost exclusively. He had found her to be reasonably honest and to specialize in clean, high-quality wares. Thus, it was understandable that the repertoire of his mistresses was limited. To add to this, he generally needed little encouragement, being a passionate man who had come to a woman for a particular purpose.

A few of the things Leonie had done were familiar, of course, but she was no professional following an established pattern. She was a woman deeply in love, expressing that love. Thus, much of what she said and did was completely new. That meant something, Roger was sure, but thinking of how she touched him and what she said stimulated his body far more than his mind, and he turned to her and reached for her lips. They were yielded readily, as were her breasts, her belly, her thighs. Roger’s caresses were returned in full measure and overflowing. Gentle fingers plucked and stroked, squeezed, scratched, tickled. Roger writhed and groaned, but she held him off, laughing, teasing, until his passion made her own fever too intense to resist.

That was a much longer session. Roger really sweated holding back until his partner’s satisfaction was complete. By the time they were finished, his efforts had burned some of the alcohol out of his system and cleared his head a little. He lay limp, staring at the join of the bed curtains, while a series of ideas drifted around in his head. He snatched at them mentally and pinned them down firmly with numbers, like points in a lawsuit.

1. He had never even thought of some of the things Leonie had done to him. Therefore, those things could not have come out of his imagination.

2. Neither he nor the bedclothes were spattered with semen. One thing he was sure of was the convulsions of pleasure that had twice racked his body. The result of those convulsions had gone somewhere.

3. Except for the delicious fatigue that naturally followed lovemaking, he felt fine. Obviously he was not going blind or dying from bad gin.

4. Ergo, the being whose warmth he could feel, whose soft breathing he could hear, was not a simulacrum bred in his mind but a real being.

“Leonie,” he whispered, turning his head. “Is it really you?”

She smiled at him sleepily. “Have you come to your senses? Yes, of course it is I—really and truly, in the flesh. Do you think you will manage to remember in the morning so—”

“Morning!” he exclaimed. “It must be nearly morning now. Good God, Leonie are you mad? What time is it? How did you get here?”

He had sat up and was preparing to get out of bed. Leonie sat up too, watching him warily. “I got here by cab,” she said. “If you mean how did I get in—I stole your keys from your father’s desk. I don’t know what time it is, but it doesn’t matter. I left the house before dinnertime, and I have been here ever since. Surely I have been gone long enough to create a scandal.”

“Not at all,” Roger assured her. “My stepmother is not such a nitwit as to raise a hue and cry. Unless—you didn’t give her reason to believe you intended to run away with someone unsuitable, did you? Come, Leonie, get up and get dressed. I am sure I can get you back to the house—”

“I haven’t the smallest intention of leaving here. Lady Margaret knows perfectly well that the only man I would run away with or to is you, and she does not consider you unsuitable. Neither do I.”

“Now, Leonie, listen—”

“No, you listen. I don’t know whether you don’t wish to marry at all or whether you don’t want to marry me in particular, but I no longer care. There is—”

“Leonie, don’t be silly. I—”

“There is nothing those whores can give you that I cannot!” Leonie shrieked, overriding his voice. “You don’t love them, but you take them places and talk to them and couple with them. Well, I ask no more of you—and you will save a great deal of money by having me instead—”

“Leonie!” Roger bellowed. “Hold your tongue.”

“I will not!” she screamed. “If you don’t marry me, I will tell the whole world that I was your mistress for more than two years in France. I will not go back to your father’s house. I will stand outside your door and—”

He grabbed her and clapped one hand over her mouth. “Of course I will marry you, you fool. By special license, tomorrow if you wish. I am dying to marry you. I have wanted to marry you from the first day I clapped eyes on you. Now will you let me take you home?”

He removed his hand from her mouth cautiously.

Leonie eyed him with suspicion. “Why do you want to take me home if we are to be married?”

“Because I happen to be in love with you and I want you with me all the time. Naturally my—my—”

“Your whores?”

Roger raised his eyes to heaven. “Whatever. They were not received by my married friends, but I would hate to have to give up all society because my wife was persona non grata.”

It was very suspicious, Leonie thought, that Roger should yield so quickly. All the other times they had disagreed about something, the arguments had continued a long time before he gave in—if he ever did. She got out of bed, but instead of dressing she lit a candle and brought it where it would shine on Roger’s face. He was just tying up his stockings and raised his head to look at her.

“I do not trust you,” she said. “When you think you are saving me from my own folly, you are deceitful as—as a revolutionary. If you insist, I will go home, but I have made up my mind. You must marry me.”

“I will. I assure you. Tomorrow—no, today. As soon as I can get—” Roger suddenly put a hand to his head. “Perhaps not today. The day after. I have a feeling,” he said, “that I will not be a very satisfactory bridegroom today.”

“Backing out already? No! Here I stay—”

“Leonie, please. I do not wish to back out. If you had been a little more patient, I would have asked you in due form as soon as the Season was over. If you are in a hurry, I will marry you as soon—as soon as I am sure my head will not fly off. I merely do not wish to attend my wedding with the great-grandfather of all hangovers.”

“Why not? It is customary in England, I understand, for men to have a party with all their male friends and lots of wine and brandy. And then they marry anyway. No, I do not trust you. I don’t understand why you have changed your mind so suddenly after avoiding me as if I had the plague for six months.”

In spite of two little black devils, each engaged in hammering a long spike into one of his temples, Roger found his mind clear. “It is because I have suddenly discovered that you are mentally incompetent and that my father and stepmother are not capable of controlling you,” Roger replied, taking the candle from her hand and putting it on the floor. Then he kissed her long and thoroughly. “Yes,” he went on, “you are a sad case if you prefer me to all your other suitors. However, I promised your father when he was dying that I would take care of you, and I intend to devote the rest of my life to that sacred promise, since you are incapable of caring for yourself.”

The kiss had stifled Leonie’s initial gasp of outrage, and the rest of what Roger said was perfectly satisfactory. She understood that he was more serious than he himself realized. He did not really think she was insane, not that, but he had been shocked by her behavior. There had been a certain sharpness in his voice when he said his father and stepmother could not control her. He felt they had allowed her twice to come to the brink of ruining herself, and his sense of responsibility had taken firm hold and vanquished his silly qualms about the differences in their ages and fortunes.

How lovely! Leonie smiled mistily. A whole lifetime of shocking and enraging Roger—just a little. He did make love so superlatively when he was angry and forgot to be careful. And a triple benefit each time—the fun of whatever scrape she devised, the joy of “making up“ and the assurance that the mischief would spur her responsibility-minded husband to a deeper interest in her with each escapade.

About the Author

Roberta Gellis was driven to start writing her own books some forty years ago by the infuriating inaccuracies of the historical fiction she read. Since then she has worked in varied genres—romance, mystery, and fantasy—but always, even in the fantasies, keeping the historical events as near to what actually happened as possible. The dedication to historical times settings is not only a matter of intellectual interest, it is also because she is so out-of-date herself that accuracy in a contemporary novel would be impossible.

In the forty-some years she has been writing, Gellis has produced more than twenty-five straight historical romances. These have been the recipients of many awards, including the Silver and Gold Medal Porgy for historical novels from the West Coast Review of Books, the Golden Certificate from Affaire de Coeur, The Romantic Times Award for Best Novel in the Medieval Period (several times) and a Lifetime Achievement Award for Historical Fantasy. Last but not least, Gellis was honored with the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.