“Forget the past.” Grace forced the suggestive, sympathetic tone into her voice as she moved forward, drawing him to his feet so she could inveigle herself back into his embrace. “And enjoy the present. I can take your mind off your sorrows.”

She might not have David beyond this evening but for the next hour he would be the lover she might have had if things had been different. It would be a bright memory to mitigate the miserable future which stretched before her.

Slipping her hands beneath his shirt she ran them up his smooth chest. No longer the chest of the sapling she remembered. Gently she rubbed his nipples, ridiculously gratified by his shivers of reaction. He was putty in her hands and his fascination for her and what she could do for him was growing. What would he think if she tried to entice him further down?

Dare she?

The Grace he’d known would never have been so bold and brazen but she was a woman who played on men’s fantasies for a living. A whore who’d never experienced desire in the course of her work. Now, with the young, healthy body of the only man she’d loved showing increasing willingness, she was desperately conscious of her own lustful urges. They frightened her. How little time she had to revel in the intimacies she’d once hoped to enjoy for a lifetime.

He was highly aroused by the time she slid her hand into the opening of his trousers, his sudden hardening echoing her own need as she felt the rush of warm liquid pooling in her lower belly.

“Oh God, what are you doing?” he gasped, gripping her shoulders as she knelt in front of him and gently circled the end of his manhood with her tongue. Clearly he was caught between pushing her away and keeping her prisoner.

“I shall disgrace myself!” he warned as she trailed her tongue the length of his shaft before taking him deeply into her mouth, but she ignored him, caught up by her own responses to his growing excitement. She could feel her desire roaring in her ears. His breathing was coming fast and even, his body was tense and his hands fisted in her hair as she moved him deeper into the cavern of her mouth, flicking her tongue over the ridges of his swollen shaft, squeezing gently, pushing him back and forth.

“Oh God!” he cried, convulsing as he came. He could barely speak through his shame. “I’m sorry.”

Exultant, Grace slithered upright and held him tightly, as if to comfort him, her heart pounding at the simple fact she’d elicited such powerful reactions. That she was responsible for giving her beloved David such pleasure. “A virgin does not have to apologise for the brevity of his first time,” she murmured, her mind whirling, every sense on high alert as she kissed his earlobe, revelling in the intimacy, though he seemed caught up in confusion, not knowing where to put his hands.

She raised them to her breasts still contained by her low cut bodice. Again, so brazen. The Grace he’d known would never have done such a thing. The David she’d known would have been repulsed by such behaviour.

“You can undo me, if you like.” She wriggled invitingly in his embrace and he seemed to gain confidence, his exploring hands fumbling with the row of tiny buttons down the front of her tight-fitting cuirass. Touching her lips to his right ear, she whispered, “There, I’ll help you.”

When the fabric fell away she quickly divested herself of her upper bodice, pushing him down upon the bed again and settling herself on his lap so he could feel her bare arms and the swell of her breasts above her corset.

At first tentative but with increasing surety he ran his hands over her skin, myriad responses reflected in his rapt expression. Grace closed her eyes and offered herself to him, her heart engaged like it had never been since she and David had been close.

“Is this how it’s done?”

“Seduction?” she murmured as she snuggled against him and toyed with his nipples.

“Whoring.”

Deflated, she froze. Whoring. Yes, that’s all it was to him. She was a stranger. A woman off the streets sent to service him for an afternoon.

“Don’t leave. I’m sorry.” He pulled her back. “I didn’t mean to offend you. You’re very good and I need tutoring.” Unseeing, he groped for her breasts, at first ashamed, then obviously enjoying their size and feel as he trailed his fingertips over their exposed fullness as if committing them to memory.

“Tutoring?” She heard the dullness in her voice. “You make it sound like a lesson when I thought I was here to indulge you. Would you like me to take off my corset so you can weigh them in your hands?” She did not add: That’s what many of the gentlemen like to do? It gives them satisfaction to weigh up the inventory.

Without waiting for his response she stood up, guiding his hands to the strings at the back of the constraining garment. Twisting her head to study his concentration as he worked the laces, she was struck by memory. This was the way he’d once looked at her. Eyes bright with determination as his hands trailed over her—respectfully, lovingly—while vowing that the day he reached his majority and was free of his mother he would marry her.

“Very good. And now for my skirt. Here are the buttons. That’s right. My, but you’re very deft with your fingers.” She took refuge in briskness, her tone falsely admiring. As her skirt slithered to the floor she kicked it aside. A shabby way to treat a garment which cost her what she’d have to earn through servicing more than two dozen clients.

Next, she attended to her princess petticoat, a simple, embroidered linen shift which she removed from over her head leaving her naked save for her stockings. A girl in her line of work had no need for the additional petticoat and combinations modesty required the respectable debutante or matron to wear.

“Sit down,” she instructed. Once again she lowered herself onto his lap and brought his hands up to her breasts as she murmured in his ear, “Take your pleasure. It’s your birthday, David. Enjoy the experience.”

He jerked at the sound of his name but complied, smiling as he held first her right and then her left breast before kissing each nipple with touching reverence. “You liked that?” he asked in obvious surprise at her small gasp.

Grace nodded, her eyes closed as she surrendered to the unusual waves of pleasure elicited by his touch. He’d put his mouth to her breast and was stroking her nipple with his tongue. It sent a rush of feeling to her groin.

“Is there only pleasure on the man’s side? I understand you must hate this work because it…degrades you, but is it true a woman does not enjoy sexual relations?”

Grace realised that he’d not seen her smile of pleasure. He’d taken her silence in answer to his previous question to mean she did what she had to.

Oh David, I’ve only felt like this in your arms, she wanted to say. But if he did not know who she was now, he never would. Grace wasn’t sure which would be worse: to face his revulsion or to accept that she would never know pleasure from the touch of a man, again. “A woman can enjoy sexual pleasure immeasurably if her heart is engaged.” Now she was again the professional he’d hired as she twined her arms about his neck and nuzzled his neck. But when she breathed in his familiar smell, the same sandalwood soap was a bittersweet reminder of happier times. Don’t cry, she exhorted herself. Instead, she steeled herself to say, “You are to be married, David. Do you wish to please your wife?”

“Miss Lenders is a worthy young lady.” His tone was uncertain as he stroked her naked back. “I’m told she’s not unattractive. She’s agreed to the contract, though I daresay I have the better deal.” He gave a short laugh. “The least I can do is learn a thing or two to try to please her so she won’t take a lover in the first year.”

“Perhaps she loves you very much. You don’t have much faith in a woman’s constancy?”

“Experience has taught me to be mistrustful of what a woman says. I prefer to judge her actions.” He tried to speak carelessly. “I like you, though. You feel … nice. Show me how to bring pleasure to a woman. To my future wife. Where should I touch you?”

Unconsciously, his hand was now gently trailing up and down the valley of her breasts creating whorls of sensation Grace had not experienced since David last caressed her.

It was difficult to restrain herself. She shivered with pleasure and longing, and whispered, “A woman’s urges are just as strong as a man’s if she desires him. Here, I’ll guide you to her forbidden places. Those hidden, secret places she tells no one except those she trusts most in all the world.”

Grace had used nearly those same words when she’d made her last promise to David. She’d not been referring to her body, of course, but to a hiding place for something they thought would guarantee their future; their joint happiness.

He stilled, frowning, as if his words had tapped into a memory, and his mouth opened slightly as if he would really ask the question Grace both desired and dreaded: Who are you, really?

But he did not and in the silence Grace guided his hand to her inner thighs. This was business and she’d do well to remember nothing more could come of it than the handsome fee David—or his mother, God forbid!—would hand her after she’d dressed herself and was preparing to leave this house.

As he resumed stroking her, Grace studied him, his remembered promise filtering through her body’s growing sensitivity. “My annuity won’t be much,” he’d told her—it seemed a lifetime ago, now—“but it’ll be enough for the two of us and I’ll supplement it with my painting. I’ll be a real artist, then.” He’d patted the secret drawer of the escritoire where he’d hidden the letter upon which he’d pinned his future. Their shared future. The letter from Señor Borteli, a famous landscape painter in Florence who’d offered to make David his student for a year. The letter that would change both their lives in ways he would never know.

The past was the past, she reminded herself as she shifted in his lap to give him greater access to places he’d never before touched. No point in tormenting herself with it, though the physical was proving a greater torment than she’d thought possible.

She felt exposed as she’d never felt with any client. She was frightened to rest her hands on his head and feel his soft brown hair as he put his lips to the hollow beneath her shoulder blade.

He used to kiss her there when he stopped her after she’d fly in from the passage with a moment to spare between cleaning the drawing room and making the family’s beds. Her contours would be different now, of course. She was no longer the scrawny servant he’d remember, with hands roughened from scouring pots and scrubbing floors.

“Are you cold?” he asked, and when she said she was not, he frowned. “Then why are you trembling?”

“You have a lover’s touch. See?”

His pleasure was real when he felt her nipples spring to attention as he gently circled them before bringing down his face and again taking first one and then the other into his mouth.

Grace threw back her head and moaned softly, guiding his hand back to her inner thighs. “Feel what you’re doing to me,” she whispered and laughed softly at his surprise when he felt the slippery wetness between her legs.

“Is … is it—?”

“It’s called desire,” she whispered in his ear.

“But how—?” He shook his head, unable to finish.

“It’s something a woman cannot feign. The physical manifestation of desire comes from within. For a woman, that is,” she added. “Men are different. If their desires were whipped up only by the women they loved there’d be no need for … whores.”

Though he frowned, he was clearly enthralled by the responses he was eliciting through his increasingly bold exploration of the folds of her sex and the swollen nub at their heart. Excitement was fairly fizzing through Grace’s veins, making her gasp and jerk as her sensitivity grew.

“You must be enjoying it. You’re so wet,” he marvelled. “Look at the effect it’s having on me, too. I … didn’t think I’d ever feel desire again.”

Opening lust-heavy eyes, Grace grasped his growing erection, making him wince, his voice hoarse as he whispered, “You are obviously … practised at making a man feel he is your heart’s desire. I hope you will want to come again.”

Cradling him, Grace laughed softly, avoiding an answer as she murmured suggestively, “I would like to make you come again, but perhaps you’d enjoy it if our pleasure coincided. A woman’s climax is as enjoyable to her as a man’s. You’ve already seen how my pleasure escalates when you touch me here.”

He laughed and increased the pressure on the area between her legs which most excited her while his other arm held her close.

“Oh, that is very enjoyable,” she whispered, nibbling his earlobes.

Suddenly both his arms were around her and his mouth was moving against hers, his voice urgent as he pushed her back upon the bed. “I’ve been closeted from the world for three years. I know only a schoolboy’s love.” He squeezed shut his eyes as if he were in pain and added, haltingly, “I know you’re accustomed to what we’re doing now but…what about what you’re feeling?”

“Never!” she told him with more sincerity than she had felt in three years, resisting the urge to arch up and touch her lips to his. “I have never been with a man as tender and willing to please a woman as you.”

“It’s your job to say that.”

Before she could answer he added, almost roughly, “Why have you chosen this life?”

“In a brothel?” Rolling out from beneath him, she gave a bitter laugh as she stood. She had the strangest feeling she’d put him in danger of being singed by her wickedness. “At least it’s better than the life I had.”

“Which was…?”

“On the streets.”

She did not miss the spasm that crossed his face. Revulsion. Yes, he ought to be repulsed. She was. She was half tempted to leave; to spare him and to spare herself. But bitterness got the better of her.

“The first time I sold my body was to get medicine for my baby.”

“You had a baby?” His hand went out to her and she allowed him to draw her back, first to sit beside him on the bed. But then it seemed he wanted to hold her again and Grace had no reserves left to refuse.

“It’s the reason I was dismissed from my position in a grand house.” The familiar grief clawed its way up her gullet. “But the baby died.”

“I’m sorry.”

She could feel his sympathy as his hands roamed over her body, blazing a trail of sensation across her sensitive skin and scoring her vulnerable heart.

“Sorry that it died or sorry for me that it was born?”

“Both,” he muttered. “The … father didn’t offer to marry you?”

She let out her breath derisively. “The father was a young gentleman visiting the house who believed he was as entitled to pleasuring himself with the servants as he was to the entertainments his hostess laid on for him.”

He was shocked, clearly. Perhaps sympathetic, though her plight was common enough. He would know that.

She took a painful breath. “He forced himself upon me and when the housekeeper realised I was pregnant—before I did, myself, for I had no knowledge of these matters—she spoke to the mistress. My mistress dismissed me. Without a character.” She trembled at the injustice, still just as raw as it ever had been. “And a girl without a character has little alternative but to become a prostitute, in case you weren’t aware. So, take all the liberties you like, sir. There’s nothing I haven’t done and nothing that will shock me. Have you really never been with another woman since you lost the girl you loved?”

He shook his head, his expression bleak, his hands gently cradling Grace’s face. “I’m sorry for your misfortunes. Mine are in a different league. Yes, I’ve lost my sight but often I think I’d still look towards the future with hope if I had her by my side. Despite what she’d done.”

“Falling pregnant and running away with the blacksmith?”

“I would have forgiven her if she’d realised her mistake and wanted to come back,” he muttered.

Grace stiffened. “Perhaps she was waiting for you to come after her and declare your love.”

David gave another of his short, humourless laughs. “She’d have understood why I did not. Do you know, I kissed her for the first time the night before I left for Cambridge. The softness of her mouth and the way she breathed my name are the sweetest memories I will ever have.” His tone changed. “And then she gave herself to another.”

She could not tell him this was untrue so with the greatest self-restraint Grace asked carefully, “You say you’ve never felt desire since her betrayal? What about Miss Lenders?”

“I barely know her, but Mama arranged the match and Miss Lenders will be well compensated for being allied to a useless creature such as myself.”

“Don’t say that!” Grace cried, fiercely, jumping to her feet. “You’re kind and handsome and you only need someone who loves you who’ll be your eyes.” She wished she could stop herself from trembling as she tripped out the platitude. “When Miss Lenders knows you better she’ll be that person because she’ll see you’re a man who deserves a good woman’s love!”