Your Wicked Ways

  “How is Rees’s brother holding up, then?” Gina said. “I find it hard to believe that a vicar countenances the presence of a fallen woman, let alone escorts her to Vauxhall.”

  “This is the oddest thing I have ever heard of,” Esme said, sitting back with an utterly fascinated expression. “And it certainly will be the most scandalous evening in which I have participated—and that in a long and misspent life. Who would have thought that our docile Helene would be party to a dissipated revel of this nature?”

  Twenty-eight

  Secret Flirtations Are by Far the Most Potent

  Mayne turned over the little billet doux with a feeling of potent satisfaction. It was a prim and proper white; it was not perfumed; it had no air at all of assignation. Why he should feel an overwhelming relief on receiving it, he didn’t know. Probably had something to do with his sister lowering the boom on his head with her lecture about marriage.

  Griselda was right, of course. He had to marry. But not until he had satisfied himself with the delicate body of Lady Godwin. He couldn’t even imagine flirting with another woman until he sated himself with her.

  The moment when an exquisitely dressed gentleman ambles from a closed, unmarked carriage to a hackney is so common in Hyde Park as to be unnoticeable. Mayne strolled over, knowing perfectly well that she was watching him from one of the little windows, likely savoring his strong legs. He was wearing pantaloons that were not quite in the newest fashion, as he found that ladies responded much better to the tight, knitted styles of last year. Not so out of date as to make him ridiculous…but enticing enough to make him appetizing.

  To his surprise, when he paused in the door of the carriage, Helene was not peeking out the window. Instead, she was frowning down at what appeared to be a musical score. It wasn’t until Mayne sat down opposite her and signaled the footman to close the door that she looked up.

  Her reaction was all the more gratifying when she took in his elegance. Her eyes widened, just perceptibly. For his part, Mayne suddenly remembered that while he liked the look of stockinet pantaloons, they were damned uncomfortable when he encountered a beautiful woman. Helene was wearing a gown similar to what she had worn to Lady Hamilton’s ball, even if it was designed for the daytime. And, significantly, she had taken off her pelisse. It lay beside her.

  “It is indeed a pleasure to see you,” he said. “I am particularly gratified, knowing that you are in seclusion from the rest of society.”

  Helene looked at him a little uncertainly. Seeing Mayne in the light of day, it seemed unlikely that such a man would wish to spend any time at all with her, let alone pay her compliments. “I do greatly desire to keep my presence in London undisclosed,” she said.

  The smile on his lips seemed to promise all sorts of things.

  “I hope never to disappoint you in any way,” he said softly, picking up her hand and putting a kiss on her palm.

  Goodness! Helene had a sudden wish to fan herself with the musical score she held. Rees thought she had merely gone for an aimless carriage ride around London, and had thrown a score at her. Naturally, he could not countenance any time lost that could be spent working.

  “Shall we drive into the country?” Mayne asked, his deep voice rolling over her like the finest chocolate sauce.

  “I don’t think we have time for that,” she said rather nervously. “I must be back for supper, you see. I’m going to Vauxhall tonight.”

  “How interesting,” he murmured. “With whom are you staying?” he said, turning her hand over and examining it closely, as if looking for guidance. She said nothing. “Your hands are exquisite,” he continued. “I know I told you that before, but….”He started kissing the tips of every finger.

  Helene rather liked it. She put the score to the side. Truly, Mayne was very delicate in his approach.

  “I would very much like to pay you a call,” he said silkily, “if circumstances allow.”

  “Unfortunately, they do not,” she said firmly.

  He was kissing her fingertips. “Because you are staying in your husband’s house?”

  Helene gasped. “How do you know that?”

  “Are you reconciled?” Mayne asked. “You see, I ask only the questions that have relevance to…us.” His French accent seemed more pronounced than normal.

  “Oh, no,” Helene said hastily. But she could hardly explain. “It’s only for a month. I’m helping him with his opera.”

  “His opera,” Mayne repeated, clearly stupefied. “I didn’t know you collaborated on his operas.”

  “We don’t,” Helene insisted, feeling more and more embarrassed.

  Mayne sat for a moment, still holding her hand. “All of London is under the impression that Earl Godwin lives with a young woman,” he said, finally. “I gather they are mistaken?”

  “Of course they are mistaken!” Helene said firmly. “My husband has ended the friendship to which you refer.” But she had never been a good liar.

  He didn’t bother to ask again. “Appalling!” he said sharply.

  “No!” she said. And then, “That is, I don’t mean to tell you anything!”

  Unless Helene was very wrong, there was an unusual expression in Mayne’s eyes—at least, she had never heard tell that the Earl of Mayne was a sympathetic man. People said he was hard, driven, debauched as her own husband. She bit her lip. What if he decided to ruin her? But the look in his eyes…

  She was wrong. That wasn’t sympathy. “Whatever it is that your husband has done to you,” Mayne said with precision, “that made you return to him under such humiliating circumstances, I’m going to kill him for it.”

  The stark chill in his voice froze Helene’s marrow. “He hasn’t done anything!” she said, with a little gasp.

  Clearly he didn’t believe her. Who would have thought that the man known for bedding most of London had such a principled streak to him? “Rees hasn’t threatened me in any manner at all,” she assured him. “I am staying in the house of my own free will.”

  Mayne spoke through clenched teeth. “You needn’t explicate,” he said. “I’ll free you from the bastard if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “No, no!” Helene said, anxiety coursing through her blood. “I don’t want to be freed, truly I don’t! I like being Countess Godwin.” She clutched his hand. “Can’t you understand, Mayne? Rees and I are friends.”

  “Friends?” his voice had a frozen edge to it. “A friend doesn’t make his wife live in proximity to a whore!”

  “I should think that you, of all men in London, would understand. You are known, after all, for consoling ladies whose marriages are something less than…ideal.” Which was a nice way of saying he had slept with many married women, so who was he to cavil over married persons’ behavior?

  His eyes flashed. “There is no similarity whatsoever. I would never offer such an insult to any lady, let alone to my own wife.”

  “Rees and I are friends,” she said again. “Don’t you understand? We married years ago, and there’s no feeling between us other than a mild friendship.” She pushed away memories of very different feelings. She had to convince Mayne that she was in the house of her own choice or he would kill Rees. She could see it in his eyes.

  “Mild friendship,” he repeated. “But every feeling of yours must revolt from proximity to a strumpet.”

  Helene let a teasing little smile cross her face. “There’s no strumpet in the house,” she said with deliberate falsehood, knowing he didn’t believe her for a moment. “Yet I do believe that you may have overestimated the sanctimonious side of my character, Lord Mayne.”

  “I feel as if you are changing before my eyes,” he said, staring at her.

  She shrugged, knowing that her breasts moved with a delicious, unsteady wobble when she did so. “I am Countess Godwin, and I prefer to stay that way. I am helping my husband with his opera because he asked me to do so. I do not feel a particle of feeling for him beyond that fact.” She let her hand slide to Mayne??
?s knee. “Naturally, I would be most distressed if you felt moved to imprudent action. I could never be intimate with a man who had injured my husband.”

  Helene felt quite pleased with herself. For someone who had judged herself as having no subtlety whatsoever a mere year ago, she was developing a finely tuned dramatic sense. Perhaps she ought to audition to play the lead in one of Rees’s operas.

  Mayne obviously couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. She let her fingers stay for a moment on his knee and then pulled them away. “I shall be at my husband’s house for a month only,” she said tranquilly. “Naturally, after that point I shall reenter society. You do see how much I honor you with this confidence, my lord?” She leaned back against the seat and sure enough, his eyes flew to her chest.

  “I am nothing if not discreet,” he said promptly. “But, Helene—”

  Helene didn’t want to talk about it anymore. In fact, the only thing she really wanted was to retreat to Rees’s safe, messy music room and forget about this whole conversation, but she could hardly throw Mayne out of the carriage. Not when he might spread the tale to all of London and ruin her irrevocably, or—worse—do some injury to Rees.

  “Garret,” she said softly, interrupting him.

  He was no idiot. He had her hand again and was pressing kisses in her palm, although for some reason Helene now found it irritating rather than enjoyable.

  “Yes, darling?” he asked.

  “I must allow you to return to your carriage in a mere five minutes,” she told him.

  The light burning in his eyes almost made her uneasy. He looked as if he wished to gobble her up, like an ogre in a fairy tale. “I’ve never met a lady who had your refreshing attitude towards marriage,” he said, almost hoarsely. “I feel as if I never lived before this moment. I’ve never met a truly honest woman.”

  Helene suppressed a rather irritated sigh and let him press more passionate kisses on her hand. Thank goodness, Rees had taken up the challenge of fatherhood before she engaged herself further with Mayne. She would have never been comfortable with his passionate conversation. It made her feel embarrassed. Rees’s brusque comments were more her style, in truth.

  “You will be the making of me,” Mayne was saying. “I never thought there was a woman so genuinely honest. So—so candid.”

  Feeling a pulse of guilt, Helene smiled at him. Why on earth was she bothering with this folly? Hopefully by the time she emerged from Rees’s house, Mayne would have forgotten all about her. Everyone said he had the attention of a butterfly.

  He was kissing his way up her wrist now. It is truly quite odd, Helene thought to herself, how little I appreciate these kisses after yesterday’s encounter with Rees. The very memory made her turn rather pink, and then suddenly she realized that Mayne had slipped from his seat and was sitting beside her.

  “You blush like the merest lass,” he was saying in a throaty voice, “and yet you have the sophisticated wit and intelligence of a grown woman. I didn’t think there was a woman like you alive, Helene!”

  That’s because there isn’t such a woman, Helene thought uncharitably. Surely she could dismiss him to his carriage now?

  “You truly have no feelings for your husband at all?” he said, his lips dancing across her cheekbone.

  “No,” Helene said, trying to make her tone even.

  “In God’s truth, a woman after my own heart,” he said, and captured her mouth.

  The Earl of Mayne’s kisses would never be called objectionable. They were so sophisticated and sleek, persuasive and delicate, that Helene didn’t even mind them—much. It was just that she really wanted to get back to Rees. She had a thought about the score he had given her.

  “I must go,” she said, pulling back. And then added, “alas.”

  His eyes had turned very dark. In fact, he looked half out of his mind. “But when can I see you again?”

  “I’ll send you a note once I leave Rees’s house,” she said cheerfully.

  “A month? I can’t wait a month! Not now that I’ve found you!”

  “Well, I’m afraid that you’ll have to. I am utterly incognita, naturally enough. It would be appalling if the news got out.”

  “But what has that to do with us? You cannot think to live like a nun in that house for a whole month, when you could be meeting me discreetly?”

  Helene quelled a vivid image of Rees towering over her in the park yesterday. She could hardly be more indiscreet.

  “You’re blushing again,” he said, seizing her hand. “Come to me, darling. I have a little house in Golden Square, close to Piccadilly—”

  “Absolutely not,” Helene said sharply. “I do not engage in surreptitious behavior.”

  He looked a little confused, as well he might, given that she was currently acting in a remarkably surreptitious fashion.

  “I mean,” she amended, “that our friendship will be conducted utterly in the open. I shall send you a note and request your company once I return to society.” With luck, by then he would have found another married woman and forgotten all about her.

  “Of course,” he breathed. “Honesty such as yours is dazzling.”

  “Precisely,” Helene said, rather uncomfortably. She rapped on the door and her footman promptly opened it. “I wish you good day, sir.”

  Mayne descended, but then he looked back, as if he couldn’t bear to leave. “Helene…”

  But she motioned the footman to close the door.

  Wasn’t she thinking of a glissando at the end of the seventh stave? Perhaps it would have more effect repeated as an echo at the end of the fifteenth.

  Twenty-nine

  Vauxhall

  They arrived by water. Tom sat in the rear of the boat, conscious of Lina quietly sitting beside him. She was always quiet when Helene was nearby, almost as if she were trying not to be noticed. He missed her throaty chuckle. But then—and the realization felt like a stab to the chest—perhaps her silence reflected pain, due to seeing Rees with his wife.

  The waterman in the front pulled the boat through the waves with one mighty heave of his oars after another. The water was a lightless, lurid black, but rays from the lantern hanging at the prow caught drops sliding from the paddles, turning them silver, like black diamonds. There was a very un-vicarlike excitement in Tom’s stomach. He had never been to Vauxhall; men of God didn’t normally entertain themselves with such indecorous amusement.

  As they neared the steps leading from the Thames he could hear a dim cacophany of noise, the sound of an orchestra in the distance, the humming sound of visitors, the calls of hucksters wandering the grounds. The boat docked before the entrance and they all traipsed through the door, emerging onto a broad walk. Dusk was drawing on quickly now, and the gardens that stretched as far as he could see were lit by gaslights strung through the trees. The lamps looked like small candles, burning uncertainly in a breeze, and certainly providing no proper illumination. No wonder Vauxhall had such a bad reputation, he thought. A young woman could easily get lost in the maze of paths, alone or with a companion.

  There was a voluptuous smell in the air too, one that stirred all his senses. Helene’s friend Lady Bonnington was exclaiming over the same scent.

  “Evening primroses,” her husband told her.

  Lady Bonnington was wearing a cloak of deep green and a loo mask that emphasized her mouth. But Lina was an easy rival for her, less fleshy, less indecorous, far more beautiful, to Tom’s mind. What was he doing, comparing two women’s mouths? Had he lost himself, the securely proper self he had always been? Reverend Thomas Holland wasn’t interested in comparing women’s mouths!

  His attention wandered again. Would he be Lina’s companion? Would they lose themselves on a path, walking side by side?

  “I’ve reserved a supper alcove,” Rees said brusquely. “The fireworks are not until eleven o’clock, so I suggest that we visit the arcades.” Then he grabbed his wife’s arm and set off down one of the paths. Tom felt a bounding surge
of happiness. Lina was his for the evening, at least. He put out his arm to her. Lady Bonnington and her husband had strolled directly after Rees, so they were suddenly alone.

  Her large eyes looked almost frightened. “Are you all right?” he said with a sudden pulse of alarm.

  “This isn’t proper,” Lina said in a low voice. “I don’t feel right here, not with Lady Godwin. It was different before I met her. I thought this was all rather humorous, the wife who lived with her mother, and I in her bedroom. I must have been mad!”

  “You’re as much a lady as either of them,” he told her.

  “No, I’m not,” Lina said, shaking her head. Her skin glowed alabaster clear in the light of the gas-lamp hanging from a tree above them.

  “And yet, I think you are a lady by birth, are you not?” Tom said, deliberately ignoring the implication of her statement.

  “That’s hardly the point.”

  “You are a lady,” he insisted.

  She shrugged. “My father was well born enough. But I’m not any longer, and I don’t feel comfortable with them. I don’t.”

  “Your father?” he asked.

  “Just as you said of your position,” she said indifferently. “He is a vicar largely because he is the youngest son of a baron. The youngest of four, mind you. But that is beside the point, as the term lady has little to do with kinship, not really. I’m your brother’s doxy, Tom, and I don’t want to make up a party with his wife. It’s not right. I’m ashamed that I ever agreed to Rees’s scheme.”

  He pushed back the hood of her domino. Her hair caught sparks of light from the lamps and glowed a bronzed gold. Tom was conscious of deep happiness. He caught her hands and held them under his chin, kissing first one and then the other. “You’re going to be my wife, Lina McKenna,” he said.

  She stared up at him. “You’re mad,” she said flatly. “As mad as your brother.” She tried to turn and go, but he wouldn’t let her. Then his arms slid around her and she stopped struggling.