One Wicked Sin

Yet there was more to this than the simply physical. If—when—she made love with Ethan again, she knew she would tumble all the more deeply into those disturbing and inappropriate feelings she was starting to have for him. It was her nature. In the past she had pretended not to care about her affaires when in reality she had been consistently hopeless at treating them with the superficiality they warranted. It was why she always got hurt and always ended up rushing to the next lover. She was not sure what she was looking for, only that she never found it.

She certainly would not find it here with Ethan.

This was a man who had bought her for his pleasure and she knew she should not forget that. He had been bored, wanting a mistress to pass the time. She was the woman chosen. And though he had shown her patience and gentleness, there was no more to it than that, and she would be mistaken to read something into their relationship that was not, and never would be there.

She rolled over, drawing the sheet about her to ward off the sudden chill of the room. She felt acutely vulnerable, needing to rediscover the old Lottie with her sharp edges and sheen of protective sophistication. She would become the perfect courtesan now, cool and detached. She could do that. It was her future.

When Ethan came back it was with a tray loaded with food to satisfy even the lustiest appetite, and after they had eaten he read the newspaper and Lottie wrapped herself in a sheet and sat in the window seat watching the passersby on George Street on their way to the balls and the theaters. She felt oddly distant and detached from that world of the Ton, the world she had lost. In an effort to ward off her piercing loneliness she turned to Ethan again, this time setting out quite blatantly to seduce him, and they made love with a fierce intensity. But although it was deliciously pleasurable, in the aftermath Lottie felt even more lost than before.

CHAPTER FIVE

ETHAN WOKE FIRST. He lay listening to the sounds of London stirring, the street vendors setting up, the rumble of the milkmaids’ carts, voices, the clop of hooves, the sweep of the brushes of the crossing boys. He had always liked London. He liked its anonymity and its bustle, its entertainments and its pleasures. Paris was a beautiful city, grand and self-important, but London had always held a special place in his heart, which was odd since he did not much care for England and the English.

He shifted slightly, careful not to wake Lottie, who was curled up beside him in a soft, trusting bundle. He watched her for a little while and found it surprisingly pleasant. She slept easily, lightly, with a little smile on her lips as though in sleep she could set aside the unhappy memories that shadowed her waking moments.

Ethan had never spent an entire night with a woman before. He had been very careful not to do so, for such behavior implied some sort of commitment he was not inclined to give. With Lottie he had no choice, although he supposed he could have taken another room. The hotel was not full. But such an idea had not occurred to him and now he wondered why not.

He had slept fitfully. Lottie had fallen asleep after they had made love a second time, snuggling confidingly into his arms, her hair spread across his bare chest like a swathe of silk. Ethan had lain awake and listened to her breathing and felt her warmth, and he had been disoriented and confused, as though he had come home to a place of peace and fulfillment that he had not even realized he had been seeking.

Nothing, he thought, had gone according to plan the previous night. He had wanted the notorious Lottie Palliser, the most scandalous divorcée in London, not a surprisingly vulnerable and appealing woman whom he had had to woo into bed. And yet making love to Lottie had been as profound as it was sweet. It had felt intimate and seductive in a different and far more dangerous sense than the simply sexual. For a few brief hours it had drawn them so close he had almost thought he cared for her.

He had made love to plenty of women in his time and had almost always enjoyed the experience with an uncomplicated and unquestioning pleasure. He had never particularly wanted to prolong the time he spent in their company out of bed. He had never experienced an ounce of genuine feeling for any of them beyond admiration of their amatory skill or appreciation for their sophistication. So it made absolutely no sense that having made love to Lottie Palliser he had felt a peculiar, unfamiliar and completely unwelcome mixture of emotions. The experience had seemed to be weighted with far too much significance. He had felt disturbingly as though he had bedded a bride rather than a new mistress. What had started on his part as no more than a lesson in skilled seduction had ended as something far more profound.

It had been an illusion.

He shifted again and Lottie made a soft sound of protest and reached for him, cuddling closer to his side, instinctively seeking his warmth and the comfort of his body. Ethan felt a powerful urge to pull away from her—he felt almost afraid, for pity’s sake, as though she was asking for something he could not give—but he mastered the feeling, as he had conquered so many emotions in the past, and propped himself on one elbow, stroking her hair gently, enjoying the silken run of it through his fingers. Her skin was very soft, too. He liked the voluptuousness of it when so many women were as brittle as twigs. Lottie was plump and yielding, curved in all the right places. Ethan allowed his hand to drift over her bare shoulder and down to the rounded turn of her elbow. She rolled over, reaching for him, her nipples brushing his bare chest, her breasts pressed against him in their delicious fullness. Ethan felt again the wickedly strong urge to lose himself in her. She was like a drug to him, he thought, as he started to kiss the opulent whiteness of her breast, so sweet, so tempting. At the corner of his mind fluttered a warning; he had never felt so strong an attraction to a woman and he had certainly not expected it with this one. It went against both sense and expectation.

Involvement was dangerous. Emotion was dangerous.

For a moment he hesitated but the fierce clamor of his body could not be resisted. It was only sex, he thought, and it only blazed so strongly because he had denied himself for so long. He had bought her. She was his, and his alone, to take. His blood burned hotter at the thought.

Lottie opened dazed, sleep-filled eyes and smiled at him and his heart gave an odd, errant thump. She shifted accommodatingly, and he rolled lazily on top of her, making love to her in slow, dreamy strokes that heightened his pleasure beyond anything he had ever imagined. He felt as though he was giving up something of himself to her and he tried to resist, tried to hold back, but the gentle demand of her body and the greedy need of his own senses drove him on to abandon all barriers and claim her over and over as his. He was shaking when they fell apart, shocked and drained by the intensity of the experience, their bodies slick and wet with sweat, the room hot and the sun high in the sky.

“How lovely,” Lottie murmured, eyes closed, as she pressed her lips to the point of his shoulder. Her eyelashes were spiky dark against the curve of her cheek and there was a little smile on her lips that was self-satisfied and very knowing.

“I am so pleased you have rediscovered your enthusiasm for it,” Ethan pushed down the rumpled sheet and ran his hand over the bare swell of her hip, wondering how he could still want her when he had satiated his need over and over. He felt as though he was grasping after something he only half understood, finding it but losing it again, a never-ending quest. For so long he had been entirely self-sufficient through choice and necessity. With Lottie he felt as though he was surrendering something of himself and he fought against it even as wanted her; he wanted to know her, explore her, learn her over and over, deeper and deeper.

It had to stop. He was bewitched.

Ethan sat up, running an impatient hand over his hair. Physical love, he thought, should be simple. Strangely, it was proving to be damnably dangerous. He was behaving like a lovesick boy when in fact he was no more than a man enchanted by the novelty of a new mistress. He was about to pull the sheet up and turn his back on Lottie’s nakedness, demonstrating the lack of power she had over him, when he realized that she was trying to cover herself and turn away from him. Contrarily that annoyed him. He yanked down the sheet and pushed her back onto the mattress so that she was lying there completely naked and exposed to his gaze.

“Don’t cover yourself,” he snapped. “I like you to be naked for me.”

She toyed with the edge of the sheet, evading his eyes, trying stealthily to draw it toward her.

“I need to dress….”

“No you don’t. You’re a mistress and a mistress should be naked for her lover if he demands it.”

She looked up and her eyes were defiant. “You are discourteous and I am too fat. So let me get up, damn it!”

Ethan could not deny the first part of the sentence—the damnable need he had for her was making him churlish—but it was the second part that interested him.

“You’re what?” he said.

“Fat.” Beneath her defiance he glimpsed a flash of despair. “I used to be rounded and dimpled. It was fashionable. But then when I … when Gregory started the divorce proceedings I was unhappy so I ate.” A slight smile quivered on her lips. “Then I had even less money because in effect I ate it all away.”

“You ate because you were unhappy?” Ethan frowned. He had not given much thought to what she had done in the months after her husband had thrown her from the Grosvenor Square house and the divorce had ground its way scandalously through the courts. He had assumed that her life would have gone on much as before, which was naive, now he thought about it. With little money, abandoned by friends and family, denounced as a wanton and vilified if she stepped outside the door, what could she have done?

“I ate cake and pastries, biscuits and ice cream,” Lottie said, “until I was sick. I read copies of the Ladies’ Magazine and ate and slept all day.” She reached again for the sheet and this time Ethan did not stop her. “I suppose,” she added, “that should I fall into even greater penury I could live off my fat, like a camel.”

“Camels store water in their humps,” Ethan said, “not fat.”

“It is the same principle,” Lottie said. She sighed. “Please let me dress.”

“A moment.” Ethan put out a hand and touched her wrist lightly. “You did not seem self-conscious before,” he said.

“I forget,” Lottie said simply. “I feel the same inside. Then I see myself in the mirror—” she nodded toward the pier glass on the wall “—and it shocks me.”

Ethan raised a hand and smoothed her hair away from her face. “I like it,” he said. “You are not thin but I like that. You look very pretty to me.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Pretty?”

“Delightfully curved. Voluptuous.” He leaned forward and kissed her. She returned the kiss hesitantly, almost innocently. “We must make love in front of that mirror,” he said, against her lips, “and then you can see how beautiful you look.”

She blushed. “Beautiful now,” she said dryly. “How you flatter me, my lord.”

“Your body is divine,” Ethan said. “Something else of which I must convince you?”

“Later,” a delicious smile lit her eyes. “I really must wash and dress.”

Ethan rang for hot water and fresh towels whilst Lottie wrapped the sheet about her and started to rummage through the bandbox she had brought with her.

“What do you do today?” She was kneeling on the floor, looking up at him as he dressed. She was barefoot and tousled and once again Ethan felt that strange pang of emotion as he looked at her, the tug at his heart. He could imagine her, alone in her exile, sending a maid out for pastry and cake and cream, whilst in the outside world her husband destroyed her reputation and dragged her name through the gutter. A harsh anger gripped him. Whatever Lottie had done, he thought, Gregory Cummings’s behavior had been disproportionate and unforgivable, taking a hammer to crush a butterfly.

“I have business to attend to,” he said, a little abruptly. He wanted to escape the warm intimacy of the room. He needed to break the spell, to refocus his mind upon the urgent plans that had brought him to London.

“Of course,” Lottie said. She got to her feet and shook out the one respectable gown she had brought with her. “This gown needs pressing,” she added, “if I am not to parade about Town tricked out like one of Mrs. Tong’s harlots.”

“Go and buy some new clothes,” Ethan said. “I want you to have something suitable to drive with me later in the park and an evening gown for the theater tonight.”

Her gaze flickered to meet his and he sensed her unease. “We are to go out in public later?”

“Of course,” Ethan said. “If I wished to sit quietly at home reading then I would have stayed in Wantage.” There was a tap at the door and a manservant brought in a steaming jug of water. The man shot Lottie a look, glanced at the tangled bedclothes, and went out smirking.

“Yes, I see.” Lottie sounded subdued, her head bent, but Ethan could see her frown. “I thought—” She started, stopped. “I did not realize that you would wish to—”

“To flaunt you in public?”

She looked up, troubled. “Yes, I suppose so. The fashionable crowd were my acquaintances when I was married. It is awkward—”

Ethan shrugged, once again repressing that wayward sympathy. There was no room for sentiment and he knew it; he had a very particular purpose for her. She had satisfied his physical needs, for the time being at least, and now she would play another role, that of the ostentatious mistress about town. He was intent on creating as much gossip as he possibly could, diverting the attention of the authorities from his true interests and activities. Lottie’s part in his plan was to act as an eye-catching diversion.

“I understand that,” he said. “But you have a different role now. Besides, you will not be obliged to speak to any of your previous acquaintances, merely to be seen by them.”

“Of course,” Lottie said. Her voice was bland but her mouth turned down at the implication of his words, that she must display herself before her previous acquaintances marked out as his mistress. Ethan knew she was struggling to repress her protests. Lottie Palliser did not take easily to the role of accommodating Cyprian, he thought.

“You will be with me,” he said. “That will protect you from any discourtesy.”

“I am sure it will.” She could not quite erase the sharpness from her tone. “No man of sense would wish to find your sword at his throat.”

“Then that is settled,” Ethan said. He put out a hand and drew her toward him. He felt a moment’s hesitation in her but she came to him easily enough. He kissed her, long, hard and deep, a claim, an imprint, a statement of possession.

“You’re with me now,” he repeated softly when he let her go, and he felt a powerful flare of possessiveness. He kissed her again until he felt her relax and respond to him and then his desire caught like a flame again. He was breathing hard when he let her go and he felt shaken.

What the hell was wrong with him?

She sat looking at him, a luminous light in her brown eyes, soft hair falling gently about her bare shoulders, her body pure temptation beneath the twisted sheet.

Ethan stood up, wanting to be gone yet wanting to stay with her, too. The conflict in him puzzled and disturbed him.

“I have left you some money to buy the gowns,” he said brusquely, gesturing to the bag of guineas on the table. “Buy something suitable. I don’t want you looking like a debutante.”

Her gaze was very clear as she held his. “I know what you want from me.”

Swearing under his breath, Ethan went out, down the stairs two at a time, out into the street. He lengthened his stride, putting physical distance between himself and Lottie as though trying to outrun the emotions of the previous night. He felt a sense of relief to have escaped something he could not put a name to but which felt infinitely dangerous.

LOTTIE HAD SEEN Ethan’s relief when he left. It had been in the haste with which he had gone out of the bedchamber; it had been in the tense line of his shoulders and the briskness of his departure and the fact that he had not looked back. She sighed a little as she gathered together the clothes she needed for the day. The intimacy of the night that she and Ethan had spent together had been illusory. She knew that. Physical closeness meant nothing. They were still essentially two strangers who were bound together for as long as Ethan paid for their association to continue. That was their relationship, no more. The previous night she had determined not to become emotionally involved with him and make the same mistakes that she had in the past. He could give her nothing of himself. He did not wish to, nor should she wish it. Her future was as a professional courtesan for as long as she had the looks to sustain the role. She would be particularly bad at her new job if she tumbled into love with every protector who crossed her path.

In truth, there was little to look forward to in Ethan’s plans for the day, Lottie thought. They would bring the horrible social embarrassment of displaying herself in public for the first time since her divorce. She shuddered. Everyone would point and gossip as though she was an exhibit in a freak show. The Ton could be very cruel. She knew she had to be strong but she felt as vulnerable as a kitten. So she needed clothes. She needed clothes to wear as armor, to protect her and give her an outward shield against the harsh talk and accusatory stares. Plus a big hat, perhaps, for her to hide behind.

There was a knock at the door—the maid to take away her gown for pressing. Lottie handed it over, then glanced across to the table, where Ethan had left a small bag of coins for her expenses that day. She smiled wryly. If Ethan Ryder thought that would be sufficient to buy her an evening gown and all the accessories she required, then perhaps he did not know women quite as well as he claimed. Then she remembered that she had tried to steal his guineas and run away the day before. She let the coins slip through her fingers. Under the circumstances, she thought, it was perhaps surprising that he had entrusted her with any of his money at all.

She touched the money and let it run through her fingers. Once again the desire to take it, to use it to escape, stirred in her. She could run away from this life and from the ignominy and shame of having to appear in Ton society as Ethan’s paid mistress.

Except that she had no one to help her and nowhere to run.

She straightened up. She would dress like a courtesan and smile until her face ached and pretend that she simply did not care, whilst she hid the molten shame of it deep inside.

CHAPTER SIX

ONCE, WHEN SHE HAD been a leader of society and a Ton hostess, Lottie had enjoyed driving in the park at the fashionable hour of five in the afternoon. She had done it to see and to be seen, to set new fashions and to hear the latest on dit. Now it seemed that she and Ethan were the on dit, which was, Lottie supposed, exactly what Ethan had wanted. She tried to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead in order to avoid meeting the eyes of her former friends and acquaintances, but it was difficult. Jumbled impressions slid past her as the phaeton rolled along. People were stopping to stare; they were even pointing, which was frightfully ill-bred, and they did not trouble to lower their voices:

“There is that damned traitorous bastard Ethan Ryder with his shameless mistress….”

The sun was bright and it made Lottie’s eyes water even though she had bought a bonnet especially designed to shield her face. She could feel herself growing hotter and hotter under the scrutiny of so many censorious eyes. She drew herself up straight and tense in her seat.

I will not cry. She repeated the mantra fiercely to herself, over and over in her head, as she had when she was a little girl and the other children had teased her because she was a fatherless poor relation. She had scrambled up from that lowly place and had become an influential member of the Ton herself. She shuddered when she remembered the pride she had taken in wielding that social power. She had never imagined that one day she would topple off her lofty pedestal. Well, she had learned that lesson now. Perhaps if she were ever in a position of influence again she might be a bit kinder. She sighed. Not that that was likely to happen. She was beyond disgrace, ruined well and truly.

The carriage slowed because of the press of people and other vehicles and she heard one debutante, all pretty blond curls and demure blue eyes say to her friend:

“She used to be Mrs. Cummings, you know. She was married to a most frightfully rich and proper banker, but she simply could not prevent herself from running around Town with any man who asked. They say she takes after her father in being so loose with her affections….”

The girls’ titters of laughter lingered as the carriage swept past and Lottie felt hot with mortification and anger.

She glanced at Ethan. He had hired a superb high perch phaeton for this outing, all sparkling green-and-blue livery and pulled by two showy gray horses. It was a neat way to show his haughty relatives that he cared nothing for their disapproval, Lottie supposed. She wished she had his self-assurance.

As though sensing her thoughts Ethan took one hand off the reins and dropped it over her tightly clasped ones in a comforting grip. He shot her a blazing smile.

“Are you enjoying this?”

“Of course not!” Lottie said tartly, forgetting that she had promised herself she would uphold the role of obliging mistress even if it killed her. “I hate it! All those people staring and tattling! I do not know how you can do it, my lord. I don’t know why you do it.”

Ethan slowed the horses and turned slightly toward her. His smile faded a little and he looked rueful. “I do it because they are bullies, Lottie,” he said softly, “and they should not be allowed to win. When I was a small boy I had to accept the judgment of others that I was inferior because of my birth.” His jaw tightened. “Now I accept no man’s judgment but my own.” He squeezed her hands. “Remember that you are worth a dozen of that foolish matron over there, or that posing dandy.”

“I was that foolish matron not so long ago,” Lottie said, with feeling. “Now I suspect my function is to be a Terrible Example. Chaperones will scare their charges into conformity with the threat that if they misbehave they will end up like me.”

“They would have to behave pretty badly for that to happen,” Ethan said. “You are more of an example of how one can get away with reckless behavior for years.”

Despite herself, Lottie felt her lips twitch. “I fear you may be right.” she said. She smiled ruefully. “Whichever way you look at it, I am the worst of bad examples to the young.”

There was a devilish light in Ethan’s eyes. “How true,” he murmured. “And you are about to become an even worse example, I fear.”

He allowed the horses to slow to a walk and then drew her toward him. She read his purpose in his eyes and placed a hand against his chest.

“I cannot kiss you here in the Park,” she whispered. “We shall probably be arrested for violating public decency!”

“I had no notion you were such a prude,” Ethan said. “We may kiss one another wherever we please.”

He kissed her, whilst all about them the crowd dipped and whispered. The sun was hot and the noise roared in Lottie’s ears but she was aware of nothing but Ethan’s lips on hers and the strength in his arms as he held her.