Pleasure For Pleasure (31 page)

“If even one of those hundred women, Josie—”

It hurt a little bit, so she squirmed. But it hurt and felt good at the same time.

“What about the hundred women?” she said. “Not that you should be bringing up such insensitive subjects—Ouch!”

“Does that hurt?”

“No, I just enjoy pain—Bloody hell!”

He stopped, and a stricken look crossed his face. “It's too soon. I'm an idiot. I'm so sorry, Josie, I—”

She stopped him before he started babbling. “Just stay there,” she ordered him. He froze. She wiggled a little, letting her body get used to the intrusion of him. “All right,” she said.

“All right what?”

“You can—” She waved her hand. “You know.”

He looked as if he were frozen in place.

“Come in a bit more,” she said ungraciously. “Isn't there any language for this sort of thing?”

He choked on a laugh, and then slowly inched forward. Hair fell over his face and he looked so dear that she smiled and didn't even notice that he was stealing forward again.

“Are you extraordinarily large?” she asked a second later.

He seemed to have trouble getting his voice, but then he said, “I don't really know.”

“Well, all those women must have told you, although I do think that we should stop talking about them,” she observed.

“I was trying to tell you, Josie, that if even one of those women—not that there were a hundred, because there weren't—but if even one of them had…” He gave a funny little sound in his throat. “Are you sure you want to do that?”

Josie arched her back again. “It feels good.”

He angled his hips in a different way.

“That,” she gasped, “feels better than good.”

So they enjoyed that for a bit, until they had a rhythm. It was almost like dancing, to Josie's mind, except that she was terrible at dancing, and she seemed to be all right at this. In fact, she didn't think that Mayne had any complaints. She was discovering all sorts of things about him that she liked. The two little hollows on the side of his hips, for example.

“I like your ass,” she told him, clutching him there.

He gave that choked kind of groan again and arched up, bracing himself on his arms so that he could look down at her. Josie knew her hair was all damp with sweat but she didn't care. He'd ripped her gown so he could kiss her breasts, and so she arched up toward him in invitation. He laughed, and panted, and tasted her again, and then said: “Just what sort of a lady uses the word
ass,
Josephine?”

“Did you want to marry a lady?” she said, not caring about that because she could feel all her moorings to the earth starting to float away. Waves of delicious heat were rolling from her toes to her fingertips and she didn't really care what he said as long as he kept thrusting into her in just that way.

Mayne looked down at her and forgot to answer the question. Because when Josie looked like that, all cream and
roses, panting and sweaty and sweet, clutching his ass with both hands and wrapping herself around him, he didn't want to marry a lady.

But he didn't forget the other thing he had to tell her; he just waited until they had collapsed into a sweaty little heap. Then he pulled Josie on top of him so the straw wouldn't give that gorgeous cream skin of hers a rash, and said it into her hair.

“If one of those hundred women had had your body, Josephine My Wife, I wouldn't be married to you, and that's the truth.”

“Huh?” She sounded startled, so he said it again.

“I wouldn't have been able to leave her. I probably would have had a duel with her husband, and killed him, and then had to leave the country.”

“Well, I'm glad that didn't happen,” she said, sounding skeptical. “You must be blind so I'm sure you would lose in a duel.”

He smiled into her hair. “You're the blind one.” She smelled like a saucy woman, everything he'd ever dreamed of. Not that he'd had enough brains to dream about someone as intelligent as Josie.

“Just think. I might have ended up married to someone who really understood horse breeding,” she said.

“Vixen.”

“I'm not a vixen. I'm your honey-sweet wife.”

He snorted. “Must have got yourself mixed up with my other wife.”

Josie lay on top of him, face buried in his shoulder and thought about how sweet she was going to be to him. Just as soon as he stopped saying stupid things. “You don't have any other wife,” she observed. “You've been too busy bounding from skirt to skirt like a jackrabbit looking for a carrot.”

He gave her a little pinch. “I think I was looking for a rabbit hole.”

The enjoyment in his voice cued her in. “That's debauched!” she said. “I'm no rabbit hole for your pleasure.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, sounding a bit sleepy. “And I have a carrot for you…”

It was all so ridiculous that she couldn't even bring herself to point out how debauched his language was, and that clearly he'd learned his odious jokes from all that hell-raking behavior. Instead she just stroked his hair because it sounded as if he might be going to sleep.

And she didn't want to wake him.

One week later
Whitestone Manor, Surrey

J
osie awoke and grinned at the ceiling of the matrimonial suite of Whitestone Manor. Otherwise known as the seat of the Earl of Mayne. And that of his countess.

As of this morning, Josie had officially kept the Earl of Mayne in her bed for seven nights. And seven days, if you counted what happened in the library yesterday. She moved her legs experimentally and winced a bit. Unfortunately, the pain persisted. Of course, it didn't persist all that long.

Every time Mayne…well, every time they began, she said
ouch,
and had to resist an impulse to push him off. But he was always slow and sweet in the beginning, and whispered apologies in her ear, and did other things with his hands. And before she knew it, her body would decide that she didn't mind the invasion after all.

In fact, the very thought of what her body liked and didn't like made her blush.

The door swung open. “His lordship thought you might prefer breakfast in your bed,” her maid said cheerfully. “And a package has arrived for you from London.”

“My book!” Josie said, sitting up and reaching for it. It wasn't just any book either. It was Hellgate's
Memoirs,
that depraved story that everyone in London had read except herself. Now that she was married, she ordered it straight from Hatchard's.

It was a beautiful edition, bound in red leather, stamped in gold. She opened up the first page.
I have lived a life of immoderate passion,
she read. Delicious! A little too florid for Mayne, but…

When she reached for her hot chocolate a few seconds later, it had gone stone cold and apparently an hour had passed.

Mayne had no idea how much gossip about his life she knew. She knew everything.
The Tatler
had reported in detail the
affaire
that he and the beautiful actress, Octavia Regina, engaged in. From what she could see, Octavia was detailed under the name Titania in Hellgate's
Memoirs.
It made it a bit odd that they were both quoting
A Midsummer Night's Dream
the previous night…but that was the nature of coincidence. Odd.

An hour later she was absolutely sure. She was holding in her hands a florid, but detailed, record of her husband's various escapades over the past twenty years.

Josie took Hellgate's
Memoirs
with her into the bath, after her maid inquired the second time about hot water. She
couldn't identify all the women. The story of Hellgate's short marriage was clearly a tarradiddle, placed there to disguise the fact that Mayne's life was laid bare on the page.

The morning dwindled into luncheon, and when her maid brought word that his lordship was going into Chobham and wished to know if she would accompany him, she merely shook her head.

It was five in the evening before Josie stopped reading. She had reached a terrible chapter, one that had her fingers trembling a little. Hellgate had met an angel, chaste as the snow.

Sylvie.

And he was in love with her, of course.

Josie stared blankly into space. Sylvie had an exquisite form, all right.

Not that he would ever speak in such a florid fashion. He expressed himself simply. That night when Mayne taught her how to walk, he told her twice that he was in love with Sylvie.

After being called a Scottish sausage by most of London, she hadn't thought that anything
could
cause her more pain than her figure. But it seemed there were depths of sorrow which she hadn't thought about.

Because the truth was that her husband thought of her as a bouncing, robust woman. And he thought of Sylvie as a delicate, fragile angel.

Frail? Frail? No one could say she was frail. She glanced down at her thighs, a tear chasing the first down her cheek.

If only she could get consumption and almost die, perhaps Mayne would love her. He would pull her into his arms. Josie could almost see the scene before her. She would raise her delicate, fragile hand to his cheek—so slim that the light shone through her fingers—and press a trembling caress to his face.

He would cry then. And he would be sorry that he ever thought he loved a spindly Frenchwoman.

Of course, there was that other woman he loved as well, Lady Godwin. Another spindly, insubstantial type.

Other than wishing savagely that both Sylvie and Lady Godwin would get the opposite of a wasting disease, Josie couldn't think what to do about the women Mayne had loved. Presently her maid brought a tea tray. “His lordship is just changing his clothing,” she said, bustling about. “I'll ask him to join you for tea, shall I? It's not good to spend the day on your own, my lady.”

She took herself out the door without waiting for a yea or nea. Josie sighed. She should probably scrub her face in case Mayne realized she had been crying, but he probably wouldn't. Even with the Argand lamp lit, the room was hardly bright enough for that.

The truth was that she had to stop being so tiresome. So her husband wasn't in love with her, but in love with a brittle Frenchwoman who didn't have any thighs at all. Josie thought about that. Mayne liked her body. He said so.

Even if it would make Mayne fall in love with her, she didn't really want to dwindle down to a fragile little set of bones who could drift along the street like an angel. For one thing, what about her breasts?

Mayne liked them as they were.

The door opened and the man himself entered. He stopped and bowed. “You needn't bow to me,” Josie observed. “We are husband and wife.”

“The day I neglect to treat you with the respect you deserve is the day I shall count myself a base ingrate,” he said, sitting down opposite her and inspecting the teapot.

Josie poured him a cup and found herself leaning forward so he could take a glance at her bosom—should he desire to do so.

Apparently he did, because when she handed him a teacup his eyes had a particular darkness that she was coming to know quite well. And yet, Josie thought to herself, my breasts are not delicate or insubstantial.

“What have you been thinking of all day?” Mayne asked.

“I've been reading Hellgate's
Memoirs.
”

There was a moment of silence.

“And what, precisely, is your relation to Hellgate?” she asked, when he said nothing.

“I'm not sure,” he said slowly. “I only read about half of the book before I threw it away. I couldn't read past the chapter where I was supposedly tied to the wall, a pleasure which I am not eager to experience.”

“I am reluctant to think that my husband may have been such a fool as Hellgate.”

“A fool? All of London admires him.”

“A fool,” Josie said. “Who could possibly write a sentence as foolish as that piffle he wrote about wanting not to soil an angel, but to marry her?”

“You're a harsh critic,” Mayne said, reaching out for another cucumber sandwich.

“Leave me one of those,” Josie said, suddenly realizing there were only two left. “So did you write that sentence?”

“You must be joking.”

Relief flooded Josie's heart.

“But there's no avoiding the fact that the author seems to have played ducks and drakes with my life,” Mayne said. “He must be a devoted reader of the gossip columns.”

Josie felt a sick, churning jealousy in her stomach. “He caught the nuances of your engagement to Sylvie,” she said.

“I didn't read past the middle,” Mayne said. “It's surprising how tedious one's life becomes turned into puerile prose.”

“He says that you fell desperately in love on glimpsing her slender figure on the other side of the street,” Josie said. “And that her delicacy brought out a masculine wish to protect and honor.”

“Well, Sylvie does play a fragile womanhood role very well.”

Josie pushed away the sick, churning jealousy in her stomach. What could she do? Her husband was in love with Sylvie. But he was married to her, and there was nothing worse than a woman who sat about moaning about things that couldn't be helped.

Mayne didn't seem to be on the edge of tears at the thought of his former fiancée. In fact, he had managed to eat the last cucumber square while she wasn't watching. His face was carved, degenerate, just like one would imagine a man named Hellgate to look.

But then he flipped back the lock of hair over his eyes and smiled at her, and Josie forgot everything she was thinking. Hellgate or not, when he smiled, she would do anything for him.

Yet he was a fool. All men were fools.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, watching her so intently that she felt as if he were undressing her.

“That men are fools,” she told him.

He reached out and took her hand.

“True,” he said, and with a twist of his wrist, she ended up on his lap, so he said it into her ear. His palm spread across her breasts, spanning her. “Alas, so true. Tell me, do you think I am particularly foolish, or is it a general characteristic?”

“I don't know very many men well enough to categorize them,” Josie said, thinking about it. “I think you are certainly remarkably foolish to have—well—” She shrugged.

“Wasted my life?”

“Not your life, your substance.”

“As a matter of fact,” Mayne drawled lazily, “my estate is about the only thing I haven't wasted.”

“I didn't mean that. Your—Your spirit. Like that Shakepeare poem, about spending his spirit in a waste of shame.”

He was smiling at her. “I always thought he was talking about semen. Nothing spiritual about it.”

“I know that,” she said tartly. “He's talking about spending spirit in a
waste of shame.
Frankly, I can't help but think that someone as tedious as that Mustardseed is a waste of shame. Or a shameful waste.”

He was nuzzling her neck. “You're right.”

“What?”

“You're right,” he repeated. “It was a waste of spirit and a shameful waste, and anything else you want to call it.”

Josie felt that kind of queer urge, as if one of her teeth was aching and she couldn't stop touching it with her finger. “And when Hellgate fell in love? Was that a waste?”

“Falling in love is never a waste,” Mayne said. His hands were straying now, making her squirm in his lap. But she couldn't not ask.

“Do you still love Mustardseed, then?” she asked.

“Who?” He raised his head. His hair was disheveled,
falling around his face, and his eyes had that intense blackness she was coming to love.

“Is love a feeling that just disappears, like desire?” she persisted.

For a moment he looked confused and then he said, “Love, no. Love stays. Don't you agree?”

She stroked his hair. “Yes. Love stays with you. It's irritating but persistent.”

“Are you in love?”

She couldn't see his eyes and so for a moment she toyed with the idea of telling him she had a hopeless passion for someone. It would even the scale so he didn't feel sorry for her. Being as she was in love with her husband, she meant. The husband who was in love with someone else. “Absolutely not,” she said, steadying her voice. “I'm not the sort to fall in love.”

He grinned at her. “All honey-sweet wives are in love with their husbands.”

“No, they're not.” The more she thought about it, the more annoyed she felt. What had he been doing, scrambling from bed to bed like some sort of tomcat on the prowl? Didn't he have anything better to do with the last twenty years of his life?

“Why not?” he asked. His voice was a little guarded now, though.

She didn't feel like anyone's honey-sweet bride. She felt like a woman stupid enough to fall in love with a man who was in love with a Frenchwoman. Everyone knew that Frenchwomen were perfect—and Sylvie was a prime example—so she had no chance of shaking that image free from his heart. “I just wish that you had made some better choices.”

His jaw tightened. “Hellgate's life is not mine, for all there may be resemblances.”

Josie stood up and looked out the window, her back to him. “Did you or did you not trot from the bed of one married woman to the bed of another, for all the world like a child looking for sweets?”

“That seems unnecessarily critical,” he said.

“I don't think so.” She turned around again. “I married a man whose inability to stay in one bed is notorious enough that a version of it becomes a best seller. I think it's quite a fair, if not gentle, description. A mean description would—” She stopped.

“Would be what?” he snapped.

“Would describe you like some sort of untamed dog, hopping onto one woman for a sniff and then wandering off to another!”