“What happened next?” Hope asked.
“I waited until some people came past, and then I started chucking slates down into the street. They smashed really well, made such a loud noise. And everyone was looking up, so I yelled out as loud as I could that my sister and I had been stolen away and were being sold in a brothel and could someone please help us because we didn’t want to be sold in a brothel.”
Hope gasped at such bold audacity. Sebastian stared, dumbstruck.
“And I yelled and screamed and chucked slates into the street. And then Aunt Sadie stuck her head out of the window and screamed at me to ‘come inside, you naughty girl’ and she tried to tell the people I was her niece and playing a trick on her—”
“But Cassie yelled back that she wasn’t anybody’s niece, and that this horrible woman is a horrible brothel keeper, and we didn’t want to be here! I could hear her, even from the trunk!”
“And I yelled that we’d been stolen from our home, and I just kept flinging slates and yelling and flinging slates until I ran out of slates, and by then people had come from everywhere, and they knocked down Aunt Sadie’s door and came bursting into the attic room, and some men took Aunt Sadie away to the magistrates, and then they told me to come in off the roof, and so I did!” Cassie ended triumphantly.
“And then I got out of the trunk, and everyone was amazed!”
Sebastian regarded his sisters with stupefaction. “You
are
amazing!” he said shakily, and gathered them in a huge, exuberant hug.
They hadn’t been forced into child prostitution!
His little sisters hadn’t been raped and violated, after all. He gulped in huge thankful breaths of air and hugged them tightly to him. The worst hadn’t happened. He’d thought Cassie’s knife and Dorie’s timidity and silence were a result of their hideous brothel experiences. The thought had tortured him for months.
They’d escaped! Rescued themselves from a horrible fate through sheer, bloody brilliance and bravery!
He couldn’t speak. His eyes were wet with tears. He blinked the tears back and hugged his sisters again, sending up a silent prayer of thanks for their ingenuity and their bravery and their blessed, blessed escape.
“And then what happened?” Hope asked, a short time later. Somehow they’d all come to be sitting on the floor in front of the fire. Cassie and Dorie were between Sebastian and Hope.
Cassie answered; she was still in the habit of speaking for both of them. “They took us to the magistrate, and he asked us all about it, and I told him what happened, and he said Aunt Sadie would go to prison. But they didn’t know where Albert was anymore, so they couldn’t punish him.”
“And when he found out we didn’t have any family, he sent us to the Tot.”
“The Tot?” Hope queried.
“The Tothill Fields Institution for Indigent Girls,” explained Cassie. “We were there for—I don’t know—about two months.”
“It’s where I found them,” explained Sebastian. “Or more accurately, where Morton Black found them, acting on my instructions.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Hope. “So that’s why you—”
“Purchased it? Yes,” said Sebastian, giving her a meaningful look. He’d cut her off deliberately. He knew what she’d been going to say, but he didn’t want his sisters to know why he’d kept them from the tea party, not wanting them to meet up with their erstwhile fellow Tot girls. He had no intention of them ever being recognized as former inmates.
He added, “Lady Elinore doesn’t know they were there. They were listed as Carrie and Doreen Morgan, not Cassandra and Eudora Reyne. They never met her. Lady Elinore’s mother was dying, and she didn’t come to the institution at all during that time.”
As the words came out of his mouth, it occurred to Sebastian to wonder about Lady Elinore. Once she found out, would she have treated his sisters as fallen girls, in need of rehabilitation?
He looked across at Hope Merridew, who sat on the floor hugging his sisters and lavishing them with unquestioning love, and he sent up another heartfelt prayer of thankfulness.
After a time, Hope said, “Well, I don’t know about you girls, but I think a celebration is in order.”
“Celebration?” Cassie asked.
Hope said briskly, “Decidedly! We have a number of things to celebrate! First we must celebrate Dorie’s escape and the capture of the evil Albert Watts.” She counted them off on her fingers as she spoke. “And the return of Dorie’s voice, and we must celebrate your brilliant escape from horrid Aunt Sadie, and also, we had another first today.”
They all looked at her.
She winked merrily and said, “Both you and Dorie had your first ride on horseback today, and both of you did marvelously well. So I think we need to all go to Astley’s Amphitheater this afternoon and watch one of the spectacular shows. And you will see the brilliant lady equestriennes there who inspired me when I first came to London.”
She caught Sebastian’s eye and added with a mischievous twinkle, “Not, of course, that you will wish to emulate them. But they are tremendous fun to watch, and if one thing is clear to me, it’s that none of us had enough fun when we were children, so it is our duty to make up for it now.”
She stood up, a lissome, graceful movement that made Sebastian’s mouth dry with longing, and said, “Now, I shall return home to change and fetch my sisters, and you will wish to change also. And then at two o’clock, you shall come and collect us in your carriage, and we shall go to Astley’s. And after that, perhaps your brother will buy us all ices at Gunter’s? What say you?”
“Yes please!” both girls exclaimed in excitement, as if all thoughts of past terrors were forgotten. Sebastian belatedly realized her intention. She’d returned them to childhood and innocence again. He’d wanted to wrap them in cotton wool and comfort them. He’d thought maybe they should take a nap to recover from their ordeal. She offered them a fun outing, a treat, and the opportunity to accept the past and move on.
His lovely miracle woman. It was no accident she was named Hope. She was his Hope, now and for the future.
The girls raced out to change and get ready, and Sebastian and Hope were left alone in the room.
“I thought it was going to be so much worse,” he said raggedly. “I thought—”
She reached up and cupped his cheek. “I know. So did I.”
“They’re extraordinary, aren’t they, my sisters?
“I haven’t yet thanked you for saving Dorie,” he said softly. “Come here.” He pulled her against him and kissed her tenderly and long. “You didn’t just save Dorie. You saved all of us. Me especially. Have I told you I love you, Miss Hope Merridew?”
She smiled mistily. “Mmm, if I saved you, it’s for purely selfish reasons. I love you, too, Sebastian Reyne. So very, very much!” She smiled at him with such a look of blazing love, he kissed her again. And again.
“Do you have to go home and change?” he muttered against her throat. “I think you look beautiful as you are.”
She pulled away and regarded him through half-closed eyes. “Yes,” she said softly. She walked to the door. And closed it. And turned the lock. She faced him with a secret little smile.
“We have half an hour.”
Her habit was blue velvet, but when Sebastian unbuttoned the jacket, he saw she wore only a thin silk shirt. He could see the flesh beneath it, the soft pink nipples that rose as he watched. He laid her gently back on the chaise longue.
She saw the gray of his eyes darken and his jaw lock with tension. And stubbornness. Half an hour was not enough, she decided. He was going to be noble.
He kissed her, deeply, the intensely masculine taste of him filling her mouth, swamping her senses, sending her blood thrumming through her veins with a dizzying, hectic demand. She kissed him back, clutching at the powerful shoulders that had once intimidated her.
His strength was at her service. And she wanted it, wanted it with an intensity that almost frightened her. She pushed his coat open and fumbled at the buttons of his shirt. Heat radiated from him, and she could not get enough of him. His chest was solid and hard and exquisitely different from hers. She scratched his skin lightly with her nails, and he groaned deep in his throat and shuddered under her hand. “My tiger,” she whispered.
He made a harsh sound and reached for her, and she felt a surge of deep, feminine pride in his hunger. For her. For clumsy, bad Hope Merridew. He cupped her silk-covered breasts, moving his thumbs over the hardening nipples, silk and flesh sliding back and forth in delicious friction.
She threw her head back and arched as heat arrowed into her. “Oh that feels so . . .”
His mouth closed hotly around one silk-clad nipple, and she stiffened and made a great juddering movement, almost screaming with the intense pleasure-pain of it. She clutched him.
“Little tigress,” he growled. “Do you like that?”
“Mmm,” she clutched his head mindlessly and pulled it back down, and he took her other nipple in his mouth and sucked, hot and demanding through the thin, silken shirt.
Her limbs thrashed restlessly under him. She could feel his hard, erect member thrusting against her skirt. She wanted no barrier between his flesh and hers. She started to unbutton her shirt, tugging on the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons.
His big hand stopped her. “No.”
“Why not? I want to feel you—”
“Not here, not now. When I take you, my impatient little love, it will not be some hasty coupling on a hard chaise longue. It will be slow, and in a bed. I want to make it perfect for you.” He paused and said, “I want you for my wife, Hope Merridew. Will you wed me?”
She thought her face would split. Half smiling the biggest smile she’d ever smiled in her life, half weeping—and why she should weep when he was everything she’d ever wanted was a mystery to her. She took his jaw in her hands and kissed him all over, ecstatic, clumsy, moist kisses. “Oh yes, Sebastian. I will wed you, with pride and with pleasure.” She paused and then added meaningfully, “Much pleasure. Now, please.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Very well then, my impatient little tigress, here is your pleasure.” And he slipped his hand under her skirt. She gasped as she felt his hand close over her most intimate part the same moment his mouth enclosed her nipple. His hand and mouth started to move, and she was lost in waves of intense, impossible, glorious sensation.
Afterward, she thought she might have screamed. She could not be sure. She lay bonelessly on the chaise longue, staring up into the gray, gray eyes of her man.
After a long time, she was able to speak. “Oh, my,” she whispered. “Whatever was that?”
He grinned. “What you asked for.”
She shivered sensually. “Oh. I didn’t know one could ask for that.”
He kissed her and said, “When we are married, you can ask for it as often as you want.”
“Oh, my.” She thought about it. “I think Aunt Gussie gets it, and she’s not married. Even cats get it on the rooftops.”
He laughed, an abandoned, joyous sound, and began to do up the buttons of her habit. “No, my beautiful baggage. You will have to wait.”
She looked thoughtful. “Did it happen to you, too?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“But it can?”
“Yes, it can. When we’re married. Now, enough talking, my love. My sisters will be down any minute.”
Hope looked at the clock. To her amazement the half hour was up. It wasn’t nearly long enough. And then she thought of his words and smiled.
When we’re married.
She was going to marry Sebastian Reyne.
After the visit to Astley’s, while Hope and her sisters took his sisters to Gunter’s, Sebastian called on the magistrate at Bow Street, to present all the information he had on the villain, Albert Watts. He was determined to spare Dorie the ordeal of having to give evidence in court, if at all possible.
“No need, as it happens,” the magistrate said. “Watts was found dead in prison an hour ago. Throat slit from ear to ear. I gather we put the fellow in with some of his enemies, and from what I gather, he had plenty.” The magistrate shrugged. “Bad for discipline, of course, but it’s saved the hangman a job. We had enough on Albert Watts to hang him several times over.”
Chapter Nineteen
She is a woman, therefore may be wooed;
She is a woman, therefore may be won.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
“AT LEAST I HAVE ENTERED INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE EVENING. Whereas you—” Giles looked Sebastian up and down disparagingly. “You are not even in costume!”
Sebastian shrugged. “It is a masked ball. I am masked.”
“It is a masked
Hungarian gypsy
ball!”
“I am the plain sort of Hungarian gypsy. Not all of us can be dashing,” Sebastian said soothingly. His lips twitched as he added, “Besides, you look dashing enough for both of us. The head scarf and the gold earrings are utterly fetching!” And he ducked back, grinning, out of range of Giles’s fist.
“I suppose I look ridiculous,” Giles said gloomily.
“You do,” agreed Sebastian, “but then so does everyone else. No self-respecting gypsy would be seen dead in these costumes, Hungarian or otherwise!”
“It doesn’t matter—it’s all for fun!” Giles explained in long-suffering accents.
“Oh, fun is it? Well, off you go then, have fun. Find Lady Elinore and go and bring her into fashion. She at least will not be hard to spot in this colorful crowd—just look for a small gray blob.”
Giles sighed. “Yes, where she finds such garments is beyond me. Presumably somewhere in London there is a deranged dressmaker who perpetuates atrocities for a price. Or perhaps they are produced by her orphan waifs—I don’t know.” He frowned. “It’s quite late. What if she doesn’t come?”
“Why wouldn’t she come?”
Giles said darkly, “Who knows how that woman thinks? I offered to escort her here—with the strategy in mind, of course—but she refused! The woman refused!
Me!
One would have thought that a woman who’d never had a male escort would jump at the opportunity, but . . .” He made a frustrated gesture.