Leslie Lafoy (11 page)

Now why they thought she might be willing to be the sacrificial bride in their grand plan for social survival … Somewhere in England there might be a titled woman desperate to wed and bed— Simone shuddered. Bed Lumpy? No, she took it back; there wasn’t any woman
anywhere
desperate enough to marry a short, fat, bald man with a perpetually running nose and an eye that twiched to three-four time. God, if for some reason she was forced to marry him …

“Hey ho!”

Simone blinked away the vision of tossing Lumpy out the window of the bridal bower and focused on the rear yard. Ah, Haywood. Of course he was waiting for her. In almost the exact same spot he’d been standing in when she’d ignored his protests and ridden away.

“Hey ho yourself,” she answered, reining in Jasper and swinging down from the saddle. “You haven’t been standing there the whole time I’ve been gone, have you?”

Ignoring the question—and the groomsman dashing toward them—Haywood caught Jasper’s bridle and asked, “Did you get Lord Lockwood’s coat returned to his sister?”

“Actually,” she replied as the groomsman politely jostled Haywood aside and led Jasper off to the stable, “I returned it to Lord Lockwood himself.”

“You went to his home?” Haywood gasped, taking a half step back.

What? Of all …
“And up to his bedroom,” she supplied, with wholly feigned sweetness. “You may be right about that Lunatic Lockwood thing. A decor wholly dedicated to debauchery.” As Haywood stared at her agog, she added, “Fur whips. Leather swings. I’m sure it was nothing you, being a man about town, would consider shocking. And come to think of—”

“Where is Alvin?” he asked, leaning to the side to look past her and down the drive.

“I sold him to a ship’s captain bound for Shanghai.” Haywood straightened to stare at her, his eyes wide. “Oh, for godsakes,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s somewhere behind me. And when he gets here, he’ll tell you, ever so dutifully and faithfully and honestly, that I went to Lady Lockwood’s home, not Tristan’s.”

“So you didn’t actually see Lord Lockwood.”

Sweet Jesus. Such hopefulness. “I didn’t say that,” Simone countered, desperately holding on to her patience. “He came by to visit with his sister while I was there.”

“You left immediately, of course.”

“Oh yes,” she assured him dryly. “I squeaked like a little mouse, blushed furiously while babbling something inane, and then, wringing my trembling hands, ran out the door as fast as my quaking knees and delicate little feet would carry me.”

He considered her with narrowed eyes. “You did not.”

Well, at
last
he’d found his brain. “Then why’d you bother to ask if I did?”

“I was hoping that, just once, you’d surprise me by acting as a lady is supposed to.”

And then he’d let it slip away again. “And just why would I want to behave ridiculously?”

“For the sake of your repu … ta…” He cleared his throat, looked down at his boots, and mumbled, “Never mind.”

How, after six long years, the man could still harbor illusions … “Hark,” she drawled as the sound of hoofbeats drifted faintly up the drive. “Alvin approaches. Just out of curiosity, do you and Drayton pay him to rat on me?”

Haywood drew himself up and squared his shoulders. “He does not
rat
. He offers reports when necessary, when he thinks there might be consequences for which Drayton or I might need to prepare ourselves.”

“And he offers these reports freely?”

Haywood’s blush was answer enough and every bit as telling as his muttered, “Well…”

“Just as freely as you two offer him tokens of your appreciation and gratitude, right?”

“It is a world based on exchange, Simone.”

“Well, shatter my fantasies,” she quipped, and then walked off, leaving him standing there looking confused. An accomplishment that wasn’t all that difficult to achieve, she had to admit as, grinning, she vaulted up the back stairs and entered the kitchen. And that she could do it to him three, four times a day was just the most amazing thing. He was forever forgetting where she’d come from and the kinds of things that she knew.

Of course exchange made the world go round. She’d had that figured out by the age of five. Bits plucked from rubbish bins and gutters and the mud of the Thames could be traded for any number of things. A slab of bread, a chunk of cheese, a pint of ale. And once the body was fed, you traded your baubles for other baubles, eventually getting yourself a pair of shoes with a few more miles left in the soles, or a shirt, maybe even a pair of pants, that hadn’t been worn too thin. Then, fed and clothed, you traded your labor for the roof over your head.

Making her way up the servants’ stairs, she allowed that the whole matter of exchange was considerably less refined on the street than it was in the peerage. People of privilege didn’t barter for their suppers. They wouldn’t be caught dead laboring in any physical sort of way for anything. But trade they did. Carrie had given up her dressmaking shop to silence the wagging tongues when she’d been sucked into the peerage. Drayton had given up his military career because, as a duke, he was expected to be a prominent politician.

And the things she’d traded for a life of easy meals and a fancy roof … Pants for split skirts. Blunt honesty for deportment lessons and family reputation. For godsakes, she was even polite to obvious and desperate social climbers who wanted to use her.

All right, so her trades weren’t great sacrifices, certainly not in the same league as the ones Caroline and Drayton had made, but still … In the final analysis, everyone was pretty much a whore. Not in that they were renting their bodies to strangers by the hour, but in that everyone traded away parts of themselves to get what they wanted and needed.

Well, all except Tristan. He didn’t seem to be making any trades for his title. He wasn’t giving up his shipping and import company. A peer
in trade
. Gasp! The horror! Simone grinned and slipped into her bedroom. Maybe his refusal to whore himself was part of why she found him so interesting. That and the fact that his interest in her was way beyond the bounds of socially acceptable exchanges.

A proper miss was supposed to trade sex for a spouse with a house. To give it away without getting a ring and long-term financial security in return was considered a sign of not only low morals, but also a lack of common good sense. How trading sex for marriage was all that different from trading sex for a few coins … A whore was a whore, unless she was a member of the peerage, and then she was a prudent lady.

What a farce. And how very typical of the pretentious, two-faced world she lived in.

*   *   *

Simone stopped just inside the dining-room doorway. Fiona looked up from her book and arched a brow in silent question.

“Isn’t Carrie coming down for lunch today?” Simone asked, continuing on to the table.

Fiona marked her page, closed the leather-bound volume, and set it aside while answering, “She says that food isn’t sitting well—too much baby in the way—and she’d rather not make herself miserable. She’s upstairs, knitting another set of booties.”

“Better her than us, I guess,” Simone countered, dropping into her usual seat.

“Neither one of us can knit.”

Simone grinned. “Not well, anyway.” As Fiona picked up the bell and rang for the meal, Simone nodded toward the book. “What are you reading?”

“
Advanced Principles of Mammalian Anatomy
.”

“Sounds titillating.”

“Hardly,” her younger sister countered, tucking an errant lock of blond hair back under her headband. “But it is fascinating. And considering that they won’t let me into the medical theaters to watch a live dissection, it’s the closest I can come to a formal education on the matter.”

Shortsighted men
, Simone thought as the kitchen staff brought out a platter of sliced breads, cold meats, and cheeses and another platter of fresh fruits. Fiona could be just as good a doctor as any of them. And far better than most, actually. She was keenly intelligent and compassionate almost to a fault. Unfortunately, the only requirement for admission to medical school was an attached penis, and that Fiona didn’t have.

“If push came to shove,” Simone asked as the staff left them to their repast, “do you think you could actually do surgery on one of your furry little friends?”

“I don’t know,” her sister admitted, buttering a slice of bread. “I suppose it would depend on the likely outcome of cowardice. If they’d die if I didn’t … Yes, I think I could. I would have to, wouldn’t I?”

Simone nodded and shrugged. “Or live with the guilt forever.”

“Could you do it?”

She grinned. “Live with the guilt? Sure. Guilt and I go way back together.” She lifted her right hand, her first and middle finger held side by side. “Me and guilt, we’re this close.”

Fiona rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I meant would you be able to perform surgery if necessary?”

Now there was something to think about as you slapped a piece of cold, rare beef on your plate. “Well, I could open up something efficiently enough, but after that … Fluffy-kins had better be able to point to the problem and give me detailed instructions on how to fix it. Otherwise, it’s not going to end well for ol’ Fluff.”

Fiona tilted her head to the side and arched a pale brow. “You have a secret.”

“What?”

“You have a secret,” Fiona repeated. “I saw it in your eyes when you were talking about being so comfortable with guilt.”

Truth be told, she had a lot of secrets, but she couldn’t think of any that she felt particularly guilty about. Tristan troubled her a bit, but she hadn’t gone far enough with him to have earned any
real
guilt. “What kind of secret is it?”

“If I knew,” Fiona countered, “it wouldn’t be a secret, now would it?”

“What does it look like to you?”

“Well, judging by the fact that you’re aware of it, I’d guess that you’ve done something so spectacularly outrageous that you hope Caroline and Drayton never find out about it.”

Simone considered the merits of confiding in her younger sister. She did want to talk to someone about what she was feeling, what she was thinking, someone who wouldn’t be duty bound to remind her of the rules of propriety. And while Fiona was very good at guessing secrets, she was every bit as good at keeping them. “Oh,” Simone drawled, “I don’t know that I’d describe it as spectacular.”

“Oh, please, Simone,” her sister said with a soft laugh. “You commit small outrages every day of your life and without the slightest bit of thought. It would have to be a considerable wrong for you to even remember that you’d done it. It would have to be spectacular for you to think it would drop Caroline’s and Drayton’s jaws after six years of dealing with your misadventures.”

“True,” she allowed. “But it really wasn’t
that
bad.”

“What wasn’t?”

“How to put this delicately,” Simone began.

“If you have to frame it that way,” Fiona observed, “you must have achieved new heights. Is it going to be in tomorrow’s paper?”

“No.”

“There’s a blessing.”

Ignoring her sister’s sarcasm, Simone shrugged and simply said, “I let a man kiss me.”

“Why?”

She thought about it for a moment, remembering. The first kiss—the one Tristan had given her as they escaped the fire last night—could be explained as a consequence of the dire situation. Today, though … He hadn’t actually kissed her. Not in the traditional sense. It had been more like a nibble. A long, delicious nibble. She reached up and skimmed her fingers along the length of her throat. “I suppose,” she mused aloud, her pulse skittering, “I let him because I like the way he makes me feel.”

“Well,” Fiona said, “as long as you had sense enough to be somewhere private when it happened and he’s not the sort to go running all over London telling people about it, I don’t see that there’s much chance in a little kiss being a horrid scandal.”

Simone nodded. Fiona settled back in her chair and sighed softly before saying, “And since there’s no scandal in the kiss, what’s worrying you must be what came after it. Did it lead to more than a kiss right there on the spot?”

What a gift Fiona had for guiding a confession. She would make a great priest. If only she had a penis, of course. “In a matter of speaking, I suppose it did,” Simone answered. “He asked me to meet him in the garden at midnight tonight.”

Fiona considered her for a long moment. Finally, she said, “And you’re seriously considering it.”

Simone looked over at her. “You don’t sound at all surprised.”

“Part of me isn’t at all,” her sister admitted. “You’ve always done fairly well as you pleased, how and when you pleased, and without being the least bit concerned about what people outside of the family thought of you. Why should sneaking out to meet a man be any different?”

“But on the other hand?” Simone pressed.

“Well, I suppose that I’ve always thought that you would be harder to tame,” Fiona answered with a shrug of her delicate shoulders. “I’m stunned that it’s barely a week into your Season—the Season you fought tooth and nail to avoid, I might add—and you’re willing to sit on a man’s lap and purr for him.”

Purr?
Like some lap cat delighting over a tidbit of leftover fish? “I am
not
purring,” she protested.

“Well, just as a point of information and generally speaking,” Fiona countered calmly, “people don’t take growling, snarling, and snapping things to bed with them.”

It was a little late to profess complete innocence, but still … “I didn’t say anything at all about being lovers.”

“What?” Fiona asked on a breathy snort. “You’ve challenged him to a game of lawn croquet and that’s the only time he could fit it into his schedule?”

And to think that Fiona had once been silent and shy. What a difference six years made. Simone shook her head and ate a bite of cheese. Abandoning pretenses, she said, “I haven’t made a decision on his invitation.”

“What seems to be the sticking point?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Part of me is utterly fascinated while another part is frantically whispering,
Uh-oh, uh-oh
.”