Regency Rogues: Candlelight Confessions. Marguerite Kaye

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СКАЧАТЬ lotion on the chafe marks at her knees and thighs, but as she folded away the male clothing she had worn, out of sight of the daily help, her mood slowly lifted. By the time she sat down to take coffee at her desk, she was smiling to herself. Bella Donna, that vengeful, voluptuous creature of the night, would not be confined to history after all. At last, after several barren months, she had her inspiration for the next story.

      What would Elliot think if he knew he was her muse? Deborah paused in the act of sharpening her pen as a lurid image of herself atop the hall table, her legs entwined around him, flooded her body with heat. Closing her eyes, shuddering at the memory of his lips, his hands, the rough grate of his jaw on her skin, she was astounded at the speed and intensity of her arousal. Had the painting not fallen, had she not fetched a light and broken the mood, she would have given herself to him. As she recalled raking her nails on his skin, urgently pressing herself against the hard length of his manhood, she turned cold. What on earth had come over her?

      It would be a salve, to persuade herself that she had become so caught up in Bella Donna’s character as to have forgotten her own, but it would not be the truth. Bella Donna took her pleasures in a calculated way. Bella Donna used and discarded men as she used and discarded her various guises when she had no further use for them. Last night, Deborah had wanted, needed, desired with a purity of feeling which left no room for anything else. It frightened her. The intensity of her feelings, her lack of control, terrified her. She did not want any of it.

      Ever since we met, I’ve wanted you, Elliot had said. But the circumstances in which they met were coloured each time by danger. It was surely that which made him want her, as it made her want him? Only the thrill of defying the rules, the edge which recklessness and daring gave to fear, could explain the strength of their mutual desire in its wake. Nothing else, surely, could explain why she had forgotten all the inhibitions her marriage had taught her and allowed an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed to drive her.

      No, last night, she had not been Bella Donna, but neither had she been Deborah. She could not reconcile that vivid, bold creature with the one sitting at her desk in her grey gown in her equally grey life. But then, wasn’t that what she had wanted from last night’s adventure? To shed her skin, to step out of the tedium of her day-to-day existence, to escape from herself for a few hours? She had certainly achieved it beyond her expectations.

      Now, though, she must get back to reality, which might very well be grey by comparison, but at least it was safe. Never mind that it was unexciting, unadventurous and above all lonely. She was used to being lonely. Most of her married life she had been lonely. And lost. And hurt. She would do well to remember how quickly the bride with stardust in her eyes had become the hated wife.

      Now she was no longer a victim of her own gullibility. She was not the source of every disappointment, the cause of every misfortune. She need not hide from her friends for fear they discover her unhappiness. She need not pretend to herself that she was anything other than miserable. Guilt and insecurity need no more drive her actions than that most cruel emotion of all, love. Her life might be bland, but it was her own. Safe from feeling, maybe, but it was also safe from pain. She intended always to be safe from now on. Whatever had come over her last night, the person she had been was not the real Deborah. The experience had been a release. Cathartic. An antidote, a dose of danger to counteract the malaise of boredom. That was all, and it was over now.

      Resolutely, Deborah picked up her pen. It was past midnight when Bella Donna made her way stealthily out into the night dressed in male attire, on a mission which would scandalise the ton and throw her into the orbit of the most dangerous and devastatingly attractive man in all of England, she wrote.

      ‘You look tired, Elliot.’ Elizabeth Murray drew her brother a quizzical look.

      The resemblance between the siblings was striking enough to make their relationship obvious. The same dark, deep-set eyes, the same black hair, the same clear, penetrating gaze which tended to make its object wonder what secrets they had inadvertently revealed. Though Lizzie’s complexion was olive rather than tanned, and her features softer, she had some of her brother’s intensity and all of his charm, a combination which her friends found fascinating, her husband alluring and her critics intimidating.

      ‘Burning the candle at both ends?’ she asked with a smile, stripping off her lavender-kid gloves and plonking herself without ceremony down on a comfortably shabby chair by the fire.

      Elliot grinned. ‘Lord, yes, you know me. Dancing ‘til four in the morning, paying court to the latest heiress, whose hand I must win if I’m to pay off my gambling debts. Generally acting the gentleman of leisure.’

      Lizzie chuckled. ‘I am surprised I did not see you in the throng around Marianne Kilwinning. They say she is worth twenty thousand at least.’

      Elliot snapped his fingers. ‘A paltry sum. Why, I could drop that much and more in a single sitting at White’s.’

      Lizzie’s smile faded. ‘I heard that your friend Cunningham lost something near that the other night. I know it is considered the height of fashion, but I cannot help thinking these gentlemen could find better things to fritter their money away on.’

      ‘You’re not alone in thinking that.’

      ‘Did you speak to Wellington, then?’

      ‘He granted me an audience all right,’ Elliot said bitterly, ‘but it was the usual story. Other more pressing commitments, a need to invest in the future, resources overstretched, the same platitudes as ever.’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. He told me in confidence that he was considering taking up politics again. Were he to be given a Cabinet post, he said he would do all he could, but—oh, I don’t know, Lizzie. These men, the same men who have given their health and their youth for their country, they can’t wait for all that. They need help now, to feed themselves and their families, not ephemeral promises that help is coming if only they will wait—we had enough of those when we were at war.’

      ‘Henry. I know,’ Lizzie said gently, widening her eyes to stop the tears which gathered there from falling as her brother’s face took on a bleak look. She hated to cry, and more importantly Elliot hated to have this deepest of wounds touched.

      ‘Henry and hundreds—thousands—of others who were brothers, friends, husbands, fathers. It makes me sick.’

      ‘And Wellington will do nothing?’

      ‘I’m sorry to say it, but at heart he’s a traditionalist. He is afraid, like Liverpool and the rest of the Tories, that too many years abroad have radicalised our men. He thinks that starving them will bring about deference. I think it will have quite the opposite effect and, more importantly, it’s bloody unjust. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t swear and I didn’t mean to bore you.’

      ‘Don’t be so damned stupid. You neither bore me nor shock me, and you know it. I have no truck with this modern notion that we women have no minds of our own,’ Lizzie said tersely.

      She was rewarded with a crack of laughter. ‘Not something anyone could ever accuse you of,’ Elliot replied.

      His sister grinned. ‘That’s what Lady Murray says.’

      ‘Alex’s mother is in town? I thought she never left that great big barn of a castle of theirs. Won’t she be afeart that the haggis will go to ground and the bagpipes will stop breeding without her,’ Elliot asked in an appalling attempt to mimic Lady Murray’s soft Scottish burr.

      ‘Very amusing,’ Lizzie said drily.

      ‘So СКАЧАТЬ