She did, actually. Not implicitly and not in every circumstance. After all, they didn’t know one another that well. But in this particular arena, she trusted him. How could she not? Every time he touched her, heat flooded her and she was suffused with a kind of longing she hadn’t even known was possible. Clearly she was out of her depth and these were waters he had navigated before.

  As his mouth traveled from her neck, down to her breasts, Benny could’t remain still. Her hands clutched at his shoulders, sliding over the firm muscles of his back. Then he was trailing his lips along her ribs, her belly. Gentle nips of his teeth were followed with the soft strokes of his tongue to soothe in their wake.When his breath teased the curls at the at the juncture of her thighs, she stiffened. “What are you doing?”

  “You said you trusted me,” he countered. “Now, you have to prove it.”

  Benny was still trying to think of a response to that when he dipped his head just a bit lower. The first stroke of his tongue was beyond shocking. The second was a revelation. He’d demanded her trust. In that moment, she would have given him anything so long as he didn’t stop what he was doing. And when he slid one finger inside her even as his mouth teased that sensitive bud until she was half mad with it, she understood what he’d meant when he had told her to let go. She simply broke apart. The tension that coiled inside her, drawing tighter and tighter, simply shattered. Her body quaked with the force of it, leaving her trembling and breathless.

  Before she could even fully comprehend what had just happened, he had settled between her thighs. Placing one hand behind her knee, he hitched her leg higher on his hip. And suddenly she could feel the hard ridge of his arousal against her. Fear. Anticipation. Excitement. Uncertainty. All of those feelings swirled within her. Then he was nudging inside her, the rigid length of him pressing in slowly.

  It was not what she had expected. Everything else had been so wonderful and this was… not unpleasant, but it certainly wasn’t thrilling.

  “It gets better,” he said.

  “When?”

  “In just a moment,” he assured her. “This bit starts out rocky, but you’ll like the ending.”

  He moved against her and there was a flash of pain. White hot, intense… and fleeting. It had passed almost before she could even register it. And then it was nothing but the pleasure he had promised. It was so different. The sensations he’d created within her with his skilled hands and then his oh-so wicked mouth had been intoxicating. But this… it was beyond anything she could have ever expected.

  When that familiar tension built within her once more, Benny knew where it led. She knew what awaited her on the other side of it, and she was eager for it. Moving with him, straining beneath him, she matched the rhythm of his hips with her own. Instinctive. Primal. Without thought or reason. And when the pleasure crashed through her once more, she felt him stiffen, against her and groan as he found his own release.

  “I told you that you would like it,” he murmured on a ragged breath and then kissed her ear. Immediately after, he withdrew from her and rolled onto his back.

  “I’ll allow you to gloat,” she replied. “You certainly earned it.”

  He was still grinning when he fell asleep beside her.

  It was evening when Payne awakened. Pale light poured in through the windows and painted Benny’s naked flesh in shades of gold. The coverlet had slipped down, baring the curve of her hip and the elegant slope of her shoulder. Her dark hair was swept to the side, pooling on the pillow and exposing the completely irresistible curve of her neck. Leaning forward, he pressed a kiss there and she stirred.

  “I think we’ve missed dinner,” he said.

  “I think I could not face your mother right now, at any rate,” Benny admitted.

  He shuddered. “I’m not particularly eager to face her either. I think I will offer mother a smaller house here in London or the opportunity to retire to the dower house in Somerset. After all, this is your household now and you should be able to run it as you choose.”

  She sat up, grasping at the sheet and pulling it up to cover herself. “Oh, no. No. I am not ready to run a household like this! I wouldn’t know the first thing about planning a menu or overseeing the servants.”

  “The house, for the most part, Benny, runs itself. Barrett and our housekeeper, Mrs. Turley, have been seeing to this house for years. I assure you that my mother is not overly involved in the process. If she were, I would have heard about it… at length. Daily. Perhaps even hourly.”

  “I do not dislike your mother,” she offered, sounding somehow contrite and defensive at the same time.

  “Well, she certainly has given you no reason to like her. In truth, I am not certain if I like her. Do not get me wrong… I love her. I truly do. She is my mother and I hold her in esteem for that fact. But I am not blind to her faults and the difficulty that is inherent in dealing with her.”

  “My own family is… problematic, as well.” She uttered the admission ruefully. “My mother tends toward hysterics that are not only for effect, but quite genuine. Cordelia and I stashed smelling salts in every room in the house. And my father—let’s just say that he can have a terrible temper. He ignores us unless he’s angry about something we’ve done. Once he’s finished yelling, the ignoring begins anew.”

  “I don’t really remember my father. I was nearly ten when he passed, but I was in the country or at school so much while he was here in London. Likely avoiding my mother as most try to do,” he mused. It wasn’t something he’d thought about overly much, but now, faced with the very real likelihood that he would, in the not too distant future, possibly be someone’s father, it certainly bore a bit of reflection. Getting up from the bed, he reached for the trousers he’d discarded earlier. “I have no wish to be an absent father in that way. Nor do I wish to be the kind of father that our children will want to avoid.”

  She blinked in surprise. “I hadn’t thought about it. Having been labeled a spinster for years and deemed quite unmarriageable, the notion of children—much less what sort of mother I might be—had simply not been something I let myself consider.”

  He’d thought about it years earlier. He’d thought about having children with Anne, though at that point in his life, his entire focus had been on the process of conception rather than the consequences of it. Thinking of how painfully young they had both been, he could easily see now that he had not been ready for marriage. Had he stayed and married her rather than taking that infernal tour through Europe, they might well have been miserable together. It was impossible to say. But he knew that Anne would never have stood up to him as Benny would do. He knew that she would never have been as brave and unflappable in the face of danger as Benny. Perhaps that was because of her youth at the time. And perhaps it was just because Anne had been possessed of a very different temperament. Not bad, not wrong, just impossibly different. It was very likely that he would have been a far different sort of husband with her than he hoped to be with the woman before him.

  “You are rather pensive,” she remarked, pulling him from his swirling thoughts.

  “I suppose I am. There is much to contemplate,” he agreed.

  “About our potential progeny and our capabilities as parents?”

  “Ham or roast duck,” he replied. “I’m utterly famished. If you put on your wrapper, we can sneak downstairs to the library with no one the wiser and I can bribe Barrett to bring us a tray.”

  “Couldn’t we stay here and convince him to bring us one?”

  “No,” Payne stated emphatically. “Because I believe you will love this library as much as I do and I want you to see it… the proper way.”

  “What is the proper way?”

  Payne grinned as he shrugged into a banyan. Walking towards Benny, he pulled her to her feet, retrieved her wrapper and helped her into it. If his hands might have lingered a bit too long in certain areas, it was the price to be paid for dawdling. Once she was suitably covered, he crossed to the wall just beside the fireplace and depressed a single wooden panel that blended seamlessly with the others. But it swung inward, revealing a narrow staircase.

  “A secret passage!” Benny gasped. “Oh, it’s marvelous! I’ve always wanted to live in a house with one. Our house in bath is dreadfully dull and I haven’t felt comfortable enough to scour Aunt Marguerite’s for one just yet.”

  “Well now you will not have to,” he whispered conspiratorially. He rather liked the way she looked when she felt like she was being naughty. It added a sparkle to her eyes and an excitement that was infectious. “Slippers, though. The floor is very cold.”

  Benny then dutifully donned her slippers and tied her wrapper tightly about her. No one who saw her would know that she was completely naked underneath it, but he did. He knew every delicate dip and curve of her figure. He knew where to touch her to make her sigh, to make her gasp, to make her cry out. And that sensual exploration was only just beginning. How glorious would it be when she felt confident and secure enough to take the lead in such matters?

  The nature of his thoughts was making it more and more likely that they would never leave the bedchamber and he really did want her to see the library. It was glorious.

  Striking a match, he lit one of the many tapers and then placed the glass globe over it to shield the flame. “Come on. You wanted adventure and I mean to give it to you.”

  12

  White’s was quiet that evening—the crowd thin and not especially entertaining. If Hartley hadn’t gone all missish and was still hosting his lovely soirees, he’d have gone there to scratch his itch. But alas, the most debauched of all rogues appeared to be suffering from such ennui that even the most decadent of orgies could not ease his boredom.

  He rubbed his face, his fingertips moving over the furrowed gouges in his cheek from his encounter with the bloodthirsty bitch at Vauxhall. Women, to his mind, were there for a man’s pleasure. She hadn’t been there for a planned tryst with Davenport. He knew it. In fact, he’d been banking on it. But Davenport had surprised him by claiming a relationship and understanding with the woman, Wainwright was certain, he had just met.

  Miss Benedicta Wylde. She had humiliated him. His friends had been unmerciful in their ribbing of him because of her rejection of his advances and her escape. And the marks she had left on him. But she would pay for them, he decided. Under any other circumstances, he would respect another gentleman’s right of ownership. Davenport had married her, after all, and she was now his property much as a house or a carriage would be once it had been bought and paid for. But embarrassment and ridicule he was being forced to endure demanded recompense from both Davenport and the hellcat he had married.

  Another gentleman entered the club then and Wainwright smiled, waving him over. “Gordon,” he said. “It’s good to see you out and about. No longer rusticating in the country?”

  Lord Eadric Gilray, Viscount Gordon, was a man who courted disgrace with abandon. He could never be trusted to be anything but reckless. And in his present circumstances, Wainwright thought, recklessness was precisely what he needed.

  “I’d had all the boredom I was willing to tolerate,” Gordon replied. “And then I come to town only to discover that Hartley has closed up house and gone… where the devil did he go?”

  “The wilds of Shropshire, I believe,” Wainwright answered. “Brandy?”

  “God’s blood, yes! Is it French?”

  “Of course,” Wainwright answered. “I’m told two of the smugglers who brought it in actually died in the endeavor. Makes it a bit sweeter, doesn’t it?”

  “I shouldn’t think it matters,” Gordon said, but still accepted the glass Wainwright had poured for him. He raised it skyward, “To their sacrifice.”

  The brandy flowed and the plots and schemes coalesced in Wainwright’s mind. They were halfway through the bottle when he broached the topic. “You have a deep and abiding disdain for Davenport, don’t you? Something about childhood enmity that developed at school?”

  Gordon nodded. “Oh, yes. Can’t stand the holier than thou prig.”

  “He married today… amid something of a scandal.”

  That caught Gordon’s attention. “Davenport in a scandal? I’d never have thought it.”

  “Well, I think he stepped forward to spare the lady embarrassment, though she’s hardly a lady. An aging spinster with a nasty temper.”

  Gordon looked at him speculatively. Then he gestured toward Wainwright’s face. “That her handiwork?”

  Nodding, Wainwright agreed. “Oh, it is. And I mean to make her pay for it… and wouldn’t that just destroy Davenport? Unable to protect his new bride just as he’d been unable to protect his former beloved… what was her name? Bird something?”

  “Bardwell,” Gordon supplied, a hard flash in his eyes. “Miss Anne Bardwell.”

  “Right,” he agreed. “Course it was. What say you, Gordon? You up for a bit of mischief to alleviate your boredom?”

  Gordon eyed him speculatively for a moment. Then he smiled. “What did you have in mind?”

  Wainwright grinned. “I’m going to take what ought to have been mine.”

  The library was twice the size of the one in her aunt’s home and larger still than her father’s. It was a much more inviting room. Thickly upholstered leather chairs, a cozy fireplace, large windows to let in adequate light for reading, thick rugs on the floor to ward off the chill. And the books—the books were glorious. From floor to ceiling, they covered almost every inch of the space. A walkway had been constructed around the upper half of the room so that one did not require a rickety ladder in order to access the top shelves.

  “I’ve never been in a more beautiful room,” she whispered. “It’s perfection.”

  “There is every sort of book here imaginable,” he explained. Sweeping his hand towards one shelf, “Novels. Some classics. Some quite lurid. There’s an entire shelf devoted to gothic novels by Mrs. Radcliffe and others.”

  “I love gothic novels,” Benny admitted.

  Payne grinned at her. “I thought it might. There are other books on art, the ancient world, biographies, science and mathematics, agriculture… if a book can be written about a topic, it’s likely in this room. There’s also a section of rather naughty books.”

  Benny’s breath caught. “Naughtier than Mrs. Radcliffe?”

  He laughed then. “Oh, yes. Have you noticed that in Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, she always tells you that something incredible is happening and yet never manages to convey precisely what it is?”

  There were two things in his statement that resonated with Benny. The first was that he was quite right about Mrs. Radcliffe’s work. Even before she’d been introduced to carnal relations, as it were, she’d known the authoress was referring to them… and while she understood that the heroine was overcome, she hadn’t really known what being overcome entailed. The second salient point in his statement was that he’d read those books. “You read Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels?”

  “Of course. I love a good book. Of any variety,” he answered. “Is that so shocking?”

  “Yes,” Benny replied, utterly perplexed by him. She settled on one of the many chairs placed about the room. “My father detested my reading of them. And being wallflowers, as my sister, cousins and I were, we had the benefit of overhearing many conversations. People think nothing of saying truly horrid things in front of us. In truth, I do not think our presence was even registered! But nearly every gentleman made some disparaging remark about either the novels themselves or the women who read them.”

  Benny watched him as he moved toward her. When he stopped, he was standing directly before her chair. He leaned forward, placing his hands on the arm of the chair, caging her between them. His face was only inches from hers when he said, “I am not most men, Benny.”

  “I think I am beginning to understand that,” she replied somewhat breathlessly. She wasn’t afraid of him, but there was no denying that in that moment there was something almost predatory in the way he looked at her. And the very last thing she wanted to do was get away.

  “Do not move from this spot,” he said.

  “And if I do?” she challenged.

  “Then you won’t get to see the surprise I have for you. Close your eyes.”

  It was anticipation that kept her in that spot. Eyes closed, she waited. Expecting a kiss, or a caress, or some other sensual delight, it was a shock when the weight of a book was deposited in her lap.

  Opening her eyes slowly, Benny looked down. If being presented with a book was shocking, then the contents of that book were simply beyond her comprehension.

  There were no words on the pages before her. Only illustrations. Very detailed illustrations. Of things that she had a much better understanding of than she might have had even two days prior.

  With her face flaming, she looked up at him. “What is this?”

  “It is a modern, and by modern I simply mean in the last fifty years or so, tribute to I Modi, the Sixteen Pleasures. If you turn the page there is a corresponding sonnet in Italian. And then an English translation along with a… very detailed description of the illustration.”

  Benny didn’t want to look, but she also didn’t want to look away. The ink drawings were impossibly detailed. Why anyone would need a detailed description of what she could see in the picture was simply unfathomable to her.

  “Why?” She asked.

  “Why did I show you the book?”

  “No. Why are descriptions required? The illustrations are quite clear.”

  He laughed. “Looking at those illustrations can be… titillating. Don’t you agree?”

  Benny glanced at the drawing. “I would certainly call it evocative.”

  “Reading about the act, gives one a more complete understanding. While the illustration depicts only one moment of what has occurred between that couple, the text examines it from beginning to glorious end,” he explained.

  She swallowed convulsively, now trying to resist the urge to turn the page. “Did you do this to shock me?”