Your Wicked Ways

  He pulled her even higher, even harder, and she started shuddering and crying out. Rees closed his eyes in silent thanks, and relinquished his control utterly. They came together with desperate urgency, with rough tenderness, with one last fierce kiss.

  Rees remembered, dimly, that his wife didn’t like to be flopped on. So he withdrew, and then rolled over onto his back.

  It was only then that he realized they had traveled off the blanket. A cradle of wet flowers felt delicious on his heated back.

  “I did lie on a bed of Star of Bethlehems, didn’t I?” Helene said dazedly.

  Rees felt a drop of rain on his nose and then one on his cheek. Helene’s slender leg lay next to his, milky white against the green leaves. She had the look of a child who had just experienced her first ice, an astonished, almost blinded look of pure joy. He knew instantly that he would spend the rest of his life trying to give her that particular pleasure.

  He rolled toward her, one hand slipping to her leg. “Since childbirth is all taken care of,” he told her, “perhaps we should ensure that the previous steps are successful, hmmm?”

  In the end, quite a few drops of cold rain fell on Rees’s ass, just as he had feared.

  But he didn’t really notice.

  Thirty-four

  Disaster!

  The elegant carriage that drew up before Number Fifteen, Rothsfeld Square had barely come to a halt when two ladies tumbled out, shawls flying behind them, hair all a whirl, a glove left on the floor of the carriage. Leke opened the door just in time to stop it being shoved in his face, only to find himself confronted by an army of two Amazons demanding to see the countess.

  Helene was curled up in the library, trying very hard to concentrate on the score she held in her hand. Rees was thumping away on one of the pianos. More than anything she wanted to go into the room and bump him over with her hip and—and just sit there. Next to him.

  I can’t do that, she told herself. He must work. I must work. What if we added a French Horn to this section? she asked herself. What indeed?

  The door burst open. “Oh, my goodness,” Helene said, jumping to her feet. “Esme! And Gina! What on earth are you doing here?” It wasn’t time for morning calls; they were over hours ago. And it wasn’t yet time to ready oneself for supper, even if they had made plans to dine together, which they hadn’t. To this point, the three friends had delicately avoided the fact that Helene couldn’t receive callers, given Lina’s presence in the house.

  “Disaster!” Esme cried. “Helene, did you tell the Earl of Mayne that you were staying in this house?”

  “No,” she said. “But he knew—” She stopped, horrified. “I asked how he knew and he didn’t tell me, and then I forgot to press the point.”

  “Do let me into the room!” Gina said, pushing Esme forward and shoving the door shut behind her, only narrowly missing Leke’s nose. He had been on the verge of offering refreshments, but instead he retreated to the servants’ quarters for a think. And then he ambled over to the Number Eighteen, Rothsfeld, because the butler in that establishment, by the name of Watts, knew everything worth knowing.

  In the library, Helene sank into the armchair she had just vacated, feeling as if her legs had lost all strength. “He promised he wouldn’t tell anyone,” she said. And then, “Surely he didn’t!”

  “He did,” Esme said grimly, sitting down opposite Helene. “Since you didn’t tell him yourself, he must have bribed the footman who forwarded his note to Gina.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Gina said. She was stark white and looked anguished. “I’m so sorry that I ever, ever passed on Mayne’s note to you. He’s naught more than a cad!”

  “Cad!” Esme cried. “That doesn’t half cover it. The man’s an utter bastard, and if anyone’s to blame, it’s myself. I put him on the list I gave to Helene; I sang his praises between the sheets!”

  Helene’s lips felt numb. “Blame is surely not the point,” she said. “May I ask what the Earl of Mayne has done with his illicitly obtained information?”

  There was a moment of silence. Helene faintly heard a plink-plinking coming from the music room; Rees must have switched to the harpsichord.

  “He told everyone,” Esme said, finally. “Last night, at Vauxhall.”

  “He was at Vauxhall?” Helene gasped. “I never saw him!”

  “Neither did I. But he was there, because Felicia Saville is citing him as her source of information.”

  “Felicia Saville?” Helene asked numbly.

  “I would guess that she’s paid twenty morning calls today,” Gina said quietly. “And all circling around two topics: the Earl of Mayne and his magnificent endowments, and your scandalous activities.”

  “Mayne and Felicia?” Helene was unable to conceive the breadth of the scandal that must be spreading about herself, so she fastened on the lesser matter.

  “Felicia would appear to be his latest inamorata,” Esme said with distaste, “though how he can put up with all that mindless gabbing, I don’t know. Helene, do you think that you might have insulted Mayne in some way? I don’t mean in the least to defend the man, but he’s acting like someone bent on revenge. I’m told he put a bet in White’s that—” She stopped.

  Helene looked at her. “What did he bet in White’s?”

  “Sebastian was likely mis—”

  “What did he bet in White’s?”

  “It had to do with the portion of the night that Rees granted to you as opposed to his mistress,” Esme said.

  “Obviously not a real bet,” Helene said slowly. “He wrote in the betting book only in order to spread the scandal.”

  “I agree,” Gina said. “But I don’t think we have anything to gain by sorting through what insult he may or may not have suffered. We have to figure out what to do.”

  “What are people saying?” Helene asked. “Don’t give me a watered down version, Esme. We’ve been friends too long for that.”

  “You’re ruined,” Esme said, her eyes bleak. “I find it extremely unlikely that any woman of good reputation will receive you in her house ever again. Unless we do something.”

  “Do something? Do something? There’s nothing to do.” Helene leaned back in her chair. She could feel her pulse beating in her throat in a way that threatened to make her stomach flip over. But she wasn’t hysterical. She, Helene, never became hysterical.

  Gina was sitting bolt upright, lips pressed together. “There has to be some way out of this,” she said fiercely. “There simply has to be. What if we make our own calls, and maintain that Mayne is a liar?”

  Esme shook her head. “No one will believe us.”

  “What if Rees challenges Mayne to a duel?” Gina demanded.

  “Duels are against the law,” Esme began.

  But Helene cut in, “and I don’t want Rees fighting a duel. He’d never win against Mayne. I doubt he knows how to pick up a pistol.”

  Esme looked at her in disbelief. “I thought you cared nothing for Rees. If the truth be known, none of us are to blame for this situation except for that bloody husband of yours. Why did he force you to come here, with his mistress in residence? What on earth did he hope to gain from it?”

  “I don’t know,” Helene whispered. “I should never have consented to do it.”

  No one wanted to agree with the obvious, so they just sat for a moment.

  “Will you still receive me?” Helene asked, looking from one to the other. She was starting to feel a little shaky.

  “Don’t be a fool!” Esme snapped. “We’re going to work this out, somehow. Maybe I’ll send Sebastian to duel with Mayne.”

  “Or I’ll send Cam to simply beat him senseless,” Gina suggested. “Cam could tie him up and force him to recant. And break his nose in the process,” she added with a relish that belied her reputation for duchess-like behavior.

  Helene managed a smile. “Rees can pummel Mayne just as well, if that’s needed. But no one would believe Mayne if he recanted now. The damage is
done. I’m ruined.”

  “Where is Rees?” Esme demanded.

  Helene shook her head. “I want to know what I’m going to do, first.”

  “Rees’s reputation was already in shreds,” Gina said with stinging emphasis. “Yet it never stopped him from attending a ton party, should he so wish.”

  “There’s no use crying over the unfairness of life,” Esme said with equal sharpness. “We have to think of a way out of this. Think!”

  Thirty-five

  A Sibling in a Righteous Fury Is a Terrifying Sight

  “Idon’t like it, Garret,” Lady Griselda Willoughby said, her voice as sharp as the edge of a knife. She was standing in his study, looking the very picture of enraged femininity in a gown of pale blue sarsanet, trimmed with white lace.

  Mayne looked up from his writing desk and scowled at his sister. “No one likes it, Griselda,” he observed. “There’s something remarkably distasteful about the whole affair.”

  She walked closer and then began pulling off her pale blue gloves, finger by finger. “That’s beside the point,” she said, slapping her first glove onto the table.

  “I hardly think so,” he said dryly.

  “If there’s anything distasteful here, it’s you,” his sister retorted. Her second glove slapped onto the polished mahogany of his writing desk.

  Mayne’s features set into forbidding lines. He may have been thinking something of that sort himself, but he wouldn’t take the same from a younger sister. “I apologize if I offended you in any way,” he said with an air of chilling froideur.

  “You behaved like a shabby cad,” Griselda cried, unconsciously echoing Gina’s indictment. “I’m ashamed of you. And I’m even ashamed of me, for being your sister!”

  Mayne stood up. “For God’s sake, Grissie, don’t you think—”

  She pointed a finger at him. “Don’t you dare call me Grissie, you—you—degenerate! I have no idea what happened between you and Helene Godwin last night, but I can only assume that she sent you packing. And for you to turn from practically panting at the mere mention of her name—because you were, Garret, you know you were—to spreading vile rumors about her is low! Low and unworthy of you!”

  “She lied to me,” Mayne forced out, walking to the mantelpiece.

  “Wait!” his sister said contemptuously. “Do I hear the sound of violins wailing? So you’ve never lied, is that it? You—who’ve made a name for yourself by sleeping with half the married women in London? You dare reproach a woman for lying?”

  Mayne turned around. The injustice of it had occurred to him in the middle of the night, but he hadn’t known that his little sister would agree. “I didn’t know you thought this of me,” he said, lips stiff.

  “I love you, Garret,” she said, picking up her gloves in an ecstasy of irritation and slapping them down on the table again. “You know that. I love you more than any other person on this miserable planet. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to you. You have to marry because you’re becoming more and more a fribble and less of a man of substance. It seems as if you spend all of your time wooing married women, and then when you’ve got them in the palm of your hand, you dance onto the next woman. Why, Garret? Why?”

  He stared at her. “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly! I think you’re bored. And boredom is making you do shabby things.”

  “I—” But what defense did he have, exactly? He felt shabby. He wouldn’t have put that word on it, but he’d had a smutty taste in his mouth ever since he woke up, and a leaden sense in his belly.

  “All right, I’ll marry,” he said hollowly, walking over to the fire and sitting down, ignoring the fact that Griselda was still walking around the room like a demented vixen.

  “Of course you’ll marry!” she snapped.

  “You can just chose someone and I’ll marry her.”

  “Not until you’ve solved the mess you’ve made,” she said sharply. “You know I love to gossip, Garret. I’m thought of as a gibble-gabbler, and I am one. But I’m not vicious. Helene Godwin would never have gone to that house of her husband’s, not with a strumpet in residence, unless he forced her to do so. You should have seen that as clearly as I! I’ve no objection to jabbering about a woman—or a man, for that matter—who chooses to blacken his or her reputation by imprudent behavior. But I would never palaver about a woman forced by her husband into detestable action, never!”

  Mayne felt really sick now. He’d forgotten his first reaction to hearing that Helene was staying in her husband’s house. “She said—she said he didn’t force her to stay there.”

  “You’re a fool! I’ve known Helene for years, and if you didn’t even see the monstrous Puritanical streak in her, what did you see?”

  “I don’t know,” Mayne said, pulling his hand through his hair.

  “Godwin forced her into that house, and into the presence of his mistress—” Griselda shuddered. “I can’t imagine how humiliating that must have been for her. And you—you break her confidence, and all because she doesn’t choose to join the long line of women who’ve graced your bedsheets!”

  Mayne’s teeth were clenched. “You’ve made your point,” he said, hearing a roaring sound in his ears. “You’re right.”

  Griselda opened her mouth—and shut it again.

  “The point is,” she said after a moment or so, “what are we going to do to change things?”

  “There’s nothing that can be done,” Mayne said through bloodless lips. “I’ve ruined her. I could let Godwin kill me in a duel, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be a greater fool than you already are!” Griselda snapped. “I may be extremely annoyed with you, but you’re still my brother and I won’t have you shot by that degenerate. This is all his fault, at the base of it! We just need to think. Think!”

  Thirty-six

  Great Minds, etc.

  It is a fact long established about the human race that when a great many fine minds assert themselves to the same task, solutions are found with astonishing rapidity. At some point, a clever group of primitives came up with the wheel; a group of housewives bent on retail therapy discovered that metal disks work for bartering just as well as do chickens; a few fishermen managed to extract Napoleon from lazy exile on Elba.

  And so it was.

  When Lady Griselda Willoughby was announced at the Godwin residence, Helene looked confused, but Gina, who knew the precedence of every living member of English peerage, said instantly, “That’s Mayne’s sister. Show her in, Leke.”

  It was during Griselda’s rather flurried and apologetic entrance that Esme suddenly said, “I’ve got it!”

  Griselda instantly dropped her rattled explanation that Mayne was waiting penitently in her carriage, and said “What?”

  “I think it will work,” Esme said slowly. “We just need the cooperation of one person.”

  “Who?” Gina said breathlessly.

  “Mayne will do it,” Griselda said firmly. “My brother will do anything that needs to be done.”

  “Not Mayne.” Esme looked at Helene. “It’s your husband’s …friend. We need her.”

  “For what?” Helene asked.

  “She has to marry,” Esme said decisively. “Become respectable.”

  “I don’t know if Mayne will wish to go that far,” Griselda said, feeling a sudden flash of panic. “He does mean to marry, but—”

  “No, I don’t mean she should actually marry someone,” Esme said. “But she has to pretend to be married. Helene, would you mind very much if we asked the young lady to join us?”

  “Join us?” Griselda squeaked. To tell the truth, she’d never been in the room with a kept woman. It was a good thing that she’d left Mayne in the coach. He had an uncompromising streak when it came to his little sister’s acquaintances.

  “I don’t even know if she’s in the house,” Helene was explaining. “We don’t exactly—I have no idea—” she foundered to a pause.

  “I shall enquire,” Gina sa
id firmly. “What is her name?”

  “McKenna,” Helene said. “Miss Lina McKenna.”

  The three women sat in utter silence, listening to Gina sending Leke off to request that Miss McKenna kindly join them in the library.

  Griselda found herself rather disappointed, to tell the truth. The young woman who was ushered through the door by Leke some ten minutes later was nothing like what she imagined a Bird of Paradise to look like. Miss McKenna had soft brown curls, and large eyes. She was beautiful, in a young sort of way. But she didn’t look debauched, and she certainly didn’t look as if she was—well—spicy. Naughty. Any of those rather exciting words that one associated with strumpets. Mostly, she just looked painfully nervous.

  “Miss McKenna,” Esme said, having made sure that the girl was seated. “I am afraid that the news of Lady Godwin’s residence in the house, in tandem with your presence, has created rather a sensation amongst London society.”

  Miss McKenna gasped and looked to Helene. “They found out?”

  “She’s ruined,” Esme confirmed. “No one in polite society will ever receive her again.” Her voice was quiet but merciless.

  Miss McKenna swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “In God’s truth, I am so sorry.”

  Helene found a smile wobbling on her lips. “It’s hardly your fault. I think we have universally come to the agreement that the fault lies directly at the door of my reprehensible husband.”

  Griselda was rather interested to note that Helene showed no sign of loathing her husband’s mistress. Perhaps Mayne was more acute than she had given him credit for. Helene was, indeed, an unusual woman.

  “I did not wish to remain in this house,” Miss McKenna said looking only at Helene, “and I’m ashamed that I ever agreed. I only did so because Lord Godwin offered me the lead in his next opera.”

  Griselda was feeling more and more confused. The supposed strumpet spoke like a lady, albeit a Scottish one. Griselda could hear a burr in her voice. And she wasn’t even wearing rouge, for all Griselda could see. How could this woman be a self-respecting élégante? Helene didn’t seem to have shed a single tear over the fact she was ruined, but Miss McKenna was obviously biting her lip to keep back a flood.