Chapter 6

She was only a few minutes late, no more than three or four. Far too punctual for him to have considered giving up and leaving. And yet he had wondered how long he would wait beyond the appointed time. Ten minutes? Fifteen? Half an hour? He watched her walking toward the plain dark carriage in which he waited, not looking at it, gazing about her as if to admire the scenery, not hurrying. And he wondered if he was disappointed that she was so punctual.

Disappointed? He wanted her, did he not? His loins were already aching in anticipation of what was to come within the hour. He had wanted her for a long time. For six years, though he had not consciously thought about her during much of that time. He had always wanted her. He had twice offered to make her his mistress six years ago, once riding all the way from London to Ebury Court in order to do so. Knowing that she would refuse.

Yes, he had known she would refuse. Not the first time, perhaps. When he had lured her into Freddie’s carriage after a theater performance knowing that he had several minutes alone with her before Freddie would be able to carry his wife outside—Mrs. Sullivan had been unable to walk in those days—he had fully expected that she would accept carte blanche. He had been prepared to offer her a house of her own and servants and a carriage and clothes and jewels, after all, as well as his person. But the second time he had known what his answer was to be even as he rode the distance into Kent.

The question he asked himself now was whether he would have been disappointed if she had said yes. It was a strange question and one he had never thought to ask himself before. Why would he have gone to some pains to offer if he had not wanted her to accept? Because it was her sweetness and her purity that attracted him more than anything else, perhaps? Because he was unconsciously putting her to the test?

And was he disappointed now? He had been about to offer her marriage the day before, but she had forestalled him and offered herself as his mistress instead. Why should he be disappointed? He was to have her today, before another hour had passed, instead of having to wait for banns to be read and other wedding arrangements to be made. And without having to disappoint anyone or give up any of the rules by which he had lived all his life. He did not have to step out into the unknown. Establishing a new mistress, bedding her for the first time, were quite familiar to his experience, after all.

His coachman, dressed plainly and not in the distinctive livery of his household, opened the carriage door, lifted her inside, and closed the door behind her. The duke reached across her without a word and drew the curtain across the window as it was already drawn across the window on his side of the carriage.

“Harriet,” he said, looking at her, “you are punctual.” And rather drably dressed in a gray cloak that the weather did not really call for and a plain bonnet. Yet in the dimness of the carriage interior her hair gleamed golden. Plain clothes had never succeeded in making Harriet look plain.

“Yes.” Her eyes rose to his lips, perhaps to his nose, but not to his own eyes. “I told Amanda that I was going shopping with Julia—with the Countess of Beaconswood. She did not like my leaving the house on foot and without a maid.”

“Harriet.” He took her hand in his. It was icy cold. He raised it to warm it at his lips. “You are going to have to learn to be devious, my dear.”

“Yes.” Her fingers were stiff against his lips.

He held her hand in silence for a few minutes. She directed her gaze at the seat opposite him as he examined her profile. She did not look at all like a woman about to begin a love affair. He wondered if it was just the tension of nervousness she was feeling or if it was active unhappiness.

How would she feel, he wondered, if she knew that he had been going to offer the day before to make her his duchess? Would she have accepted? Or was it just an affair she wanted? From what she had said about her marriage, it seemed that she had been fond of the older man she had wed. Perhaps he had been a great lover. Perhaps it was just that she missed it and wanted to satisfy that craving while she looked about her at more leisure for a husband who suited her fancy. He supposed, after all, that women had sexual needs just as men did. He was to service that need for her just as she was for him. He felt his lips tighten with the same anger—was anger the right word?—he had felt the day before.

Why had he not offered her marriage anyway? Why had he not taken her hands in his and laughed at her and assured her that that was not what he wanted at all? That he wanted more than her body, to be taken in clandestine manner at prearranged times. That he wanted all of her for all time. As his love, his wife, his duchess. Why had he kept his mouth shut and fallen in with her plans as if they had been his own?

Had he really felt disappointment? Anger? Surprise that she had offered herself so cheaply? He was not sure. He had not analyzed his feelings at the time, and he had not done so since. He had merely reacted. And his reaction had been that if he could have her without the trouble of marrying her—and marrying her would have caused trouble— then have her he would. He wanted her badly enough, after all. As she had said, they would doubtless tire of each other by the time the Season drew to its end. He would be able to continue with his cautious courtship of Lady Phyllis Reeder. He would be able to marry her in the summer and please his grandmother and his mother. And himself. Lady Phyllis would fit her role as his duchess as to the manner born. His way of life would be changed and upset hardly at all.

“We could merely take a quiet drive for a short while, you know,” he said. “I could have you set down at Lady Beaconswood’s house if you wish. You have not yet reached a point from which you cannot return, Harriet.”

He held his breath. Almost he thought frowning, as if he hoped she would take the way out he offered her. Almost as if he was willing to give up his afternoon’s sport. 

She looked up into his eyes suddenly, and once more he was jolted by their wide-eyed candor. “Yes, I have,” she said. “I am here. I’ll not turn craven. It is just that I am nervous and uncertain of myself. I have never—done this before. What do you expect of me? That I should be—flirtatious? I am not sure that I can be.”

Heaven forbid. Harriet flirtatious? Harriet batting her eyelashes and pouting her lips and entertaining him with baby talk and trilling little laughs? That was what he was accustomed to, he realized, what he had always found sexually stimulating. But not Harriet. His love nest would not suit Harriet, he thought suddenly. He wished there were somewhere else to take her.

“I expect only that you be yourself,” he said, raising her hand to his lips again. It was still cold.

He wondered if he should take her into his arms and kiss away her chill and her nervousness. Normally he did not wonder what he should do with a woman. He acted from instinct. Fortunately he did not have to torture himself for long. The carriage slowed and then stopped and he felt her stiffen again as they waited in silence for his coachman to open the door and set down the steps.

She hated the house and the servant who opened the door and bowed and scraped as he took her cloak and bonnet and his grace’s hat and cane and looked respectable and discreet—as he undoubtedly was. He made her feel like a scarlet woman. The house was sumptuously decorated and furnished. At least the hall and the stairway were and the sitting room through which they passed before the duke led her through a door leading off it into a bedchamber. The window- and bed-hangings were wine-colored. Not quite scarlet but suggestive of luxury and—sin. It was the only word that would come to mind. The bed was turned neatly back, ready for use. The sheets and pillowcases, she could see, were of satin. It was the sort of place where a man of wealth brought women to be bedded. Or housed them if they did not have independent means. It was perhaps where she would have been housed if she had accepted his offer six years ago.

“If you are as nervous as you look or as you said you were when we were in the carriage,” he said, closing the door and running his hands up her arms before taking her shoulders in a firm clasp, “you would not wish to be detained in the sitting room for tea or some other refreshments, would you, Harriet?”

Suddenly his height and his muscled physique, his handsome features and very blond hair, his silver eyes, all of which had attracted her powerfully for a long time, seemed quite overwhelming. She was alone with him in a bedchamber. They were there for the express purpose of making love. Though she supposed that was not quite an appropriate term for what was about to happen.

“No,” she said, “I would rather—” She swallowed. Do it without delay, she had been about to say. Sordid words. She wished on a sudden wave of panic and nausea that she had accepted his suggestion that they merely drive, that he set her down at Julia’s so that what she had told Amanda would not after all have been a lie. She wished Godfrey were there. She wanted him desperately, his quiet, almost dull friendship and affection. Dull to anyone who was not emotionally involved with him, that was.

“Yes,” he said. “So would I, Harriet.”

His kiss was instantly reassuring, for it fired her as it always did. She had been wondering all morning and all during the carriage ride if she desired him after all. She had wondered if she loved him after all. But his mouth, open on hers, his arms that drew her against the length of his body, his tongue, which explored first her lips, and then the flesh behind, and then the cavity of her mouth and the sensitive surfaces there, put her fears to rest, and for the first time all afternoon she felt heat in her body and desire.

It was not sinful, she told herself. It was not. Neither of them was married to anyone else. Neither of them was deceiving the other. Both of them were freely consenting to what was happening. She would not believe it was sinful. Or sordid. There was nothing sordid about two mature adults taking some pleasure from each other if no one else was getting hurt. She closed her eyes so that she would not see the room. She pushed the sudden mental image of Susan from her mind. She would not feel sinful. This was what she had wanted for six years.

“Harriet.” He was murmuring into her ear and running one spread palm down her back to her waist, past the curve of her spine and lower and then back up again. “Relax.”

She had not realized that she was tense. But of course she was. As taut as a bow. She allowed herself to relax against him. “I am sorry, your grace,” she said.

And then his eyes were looking down into hers from a mere few inches away, silver, mocking, heavy with desire. “We had better dispense with that courtesy,” he said, “under the circumstances. I have tried to think of a more unfortunate name than Archibald that my parents might have given me, and I have failed miserably, alas. There is no more unfortunate name. Most of my intimates call me Archie. If you cannot persuade yourself to do that, it will have to be Tenby. But not ‘your grace,’ Harriet. Not in this house, anyway.”

This house was to be a world apart, of course, and everything that happened in it. Outside this house they would maintain the formality of most of their previous dealings. She had known it would be so. It made sense. She would not give in to that feeling of sin that was trying to intrude.

“Archie,” she said. It seemed more intimate than a kiss to call him by his given name. She had never ever thought of him by it alone. Always he had figured in her mind with his titles.

“Suddenly,” he said, smiling, “I like my name. Do you wish to wear a nightgown? There is a variety hanging in the dressing room through the door behind you. I will wait while you change into one if it will make you feel more comfortable. I would prefer to unclothe you without that lapse of time, of course. Ah, the blush. You make blushes uniquely attractive, Harriet.”

It was real suddenly, what was to happen. Godfrey had never unclothed her or seen her unclothed. He had always made love to her in darkness and beneath the bedclothes, raising her nightgown only as high as was necessary. Even on her wedding night she had felt no great embarrassment.

“It will be as you wish,” she said, wanting the decency of a nightgown but not wanting to step inside that dressing room to view the array of nightgowns his former mistresses had worn.

“That,” he said, “is quite an invitation, Harriet.”

He kissed her again and she knew the moment was coming inexorably closer. She became aware that his hands were opening the buttons that held her dress closed at the back. The buttons extended below her waist. His mouth moved downward, over her chin and along her neck to the pulse at the base of her throat. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes. His hands had drawn her dress off her shoulders and were moving it down her arms. Her chemise, she could feel without either lifting her head or opening her eyes, was coming with it. And then his mouth was at one naked breast and closing, warm and wet and piercingly sweet, over the nipple.

“Ah,” she heard herself say. A stabbing ache had tautened both nipples and set up a throbbing in her womb. This was what physical desire was, she realized suddenly. She had never really felt it to this extent before.

“Come.” His mouth was against hers again, his eyes half closed. “We can pursue this more satisfactorily on the bed.”

It was only when he turned her, one arm firmly about her, to lead her to the bed and lay her down on it, that she understood fully that she was naked. In broad daylight. With his eyes on her. He stood beside the bed, his heavy-lidded eyes roaming over her quite unapologetically as he began to unclothe himself.

“I have always wondered,” he said, “if the blush covered your whole body down to your toenails. It does. How very charming.”

He pulled off his shirt and began on his pantaloons without any apparent selfconsciousness. But then why did he need to feel any? He looked even more magnificent without his shirt than he did fully clothed. He must work very hard, she thought, to keep those muscles so splendidly firm. She looked up into his eyes and saw his amusement at the fact that she was appraising his form as frankly as he was appreciating hers.

And then he was on the bed beside her, one powerful and naked arm pushing beneath her head, the other coming behind her waist to draw her against him. She inhaled slowly and smelled warm masculinity. She thought she might swoon.

“What do you like, Harriet?” he asked against her mouth. “What are your preferences? Let me pleasure you.”

Her eyes snapped open.

He laughed softly. “You are quite inexperienced, are you not?” he said.

“Yes.” She swallowed.

“But not virgin?”

“No.” It seemed that he did not know of Susan’s existence. She did not know why she had never mentioned her to him. She did not want him to know about her daughter. She wanted her two worlds kept strictly apart. She had never mentioned the Duke of Tenby to Susan.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, let me pleasure you even so, Harriet. That is why we are here, is it not?”

Yes, that was why they were there. There would be no romance, he had said the afternoon before in Kew. No love. She had chided herself then for the hurt she had felt. But it was part of what she had decided upon. She had decided to become his mistress. There was no romance, no love in being a man’s mistress. Just this. Physical pleasure.

He pleasured her. She forgot embarrassment and her foolish craving for romance in pure physical sensation as his hands and his mouth and his tongue, marvelously skilled, brought her pleasure. No, not pleasure. Pain. Pain that was pleasure. She put all comparisons from her mind. She had decided beforehand that she would under no circumstances make comparisons. But that part of her mind that was beyond her control made them anyway. Although she had been a wife for four years, although she had been used as such regularly once a week during those years, although she was a mother, she came to understand that her body had been unawakened until now. She came to understand that what had happened in her marriage bed had been more emotional than physical—for her, anyway. She had enjoyed physical union with Godfrey because it had brought her as close to him in every way as she could be and she had loved him. Her body had never rejoiced in what he did to it, only her mind and her emotions.

And then the splendidly young and muscular body with which her own was awakening to the pleasures of the flesh lifted over her and came down on her. Her legs moved wide, the sensitive flesh of her inner thighs riding against powerful masculine ones. She longed, with a sudden renewal of her earlier panic, for love, for the older, thinner, more angular body of the man who had loved her with gentleness and reverence and had never excited her at all.

“Easy, Harriet.” The Duke of Tenby set his mouth lightly to hers and murmured into it. “You are as skittish as a maiden. Easy.”

He kissed her lightly, warmly, while she accustomed herself to the feel of him, hard against the entrance to her. He did not move immediately inside.

“Archie.” Her voice sounded high-pitched. It did not sound quite like her own. She loved him. She had always loved him. She wanted it with love. Not like this. She wanted him to love her. She wondered fleetingly what he would say if she told him she loved him, and pressed her lips back against his lest she should do the unthinkable and say it aloud.

“At last.” He had raised himself on his forearms and was looking down into her eyes, his own liquid silver, heavy with passion. “At last, after six long years, Harriet.”

He pressed into her so slowly that at first she was able to control her panic. His eyes held hers. But when he came deep and deeper, she bit her lower lip and cringed away from his penetration. He stopped.

“All the way, Harriet,” he commanded. “Give it all to me, my dear.”

And so she closed her eyes and relaxed beneath him and allowed him all the way in. It was a moment she recognized for what it was. Surrender. Surrender of her virtue, of what had always been one of her most firmly held values. Surrender of herself. To the man whose mistress she had agreed to become until they tired of each other. Until I join my body to yours, nothing is irreversible, he had said. Now everything was irreversible.

“Beautiful,” he said when she opened her eyes again. “As beautiful inside as out, Harriet. Hot and wet. But you are realizing that you have done something irrevocable, are you not? Your eyes look stricken. I’ll make it good for you—this time and all the other times we will meet here. I promise. Close your eyes and let me lo—. Let me make it good for you.”

He took her hands, crossed them at the wrist above her head, laced his fingers with hers, and lowered most of his weight onto her; setting his cheek against her hair. And then he began to move in her and to keep his promise so that after a couple of minutes she was mindless with need and with pain that hovered on the brink of pleasure and that suddenly spilled over the brink, bringing her a pleasure so intense that it was unbearable, and then was replaced by a sense of peace so unexpected that she felt all energy, all will to live beyond the moment, drain out of her.

He held deep in her while she settled with a sigh into the peace and then drove to his own climax as she held him, loving him more tenderly than she had ever loved before. Except perhaps for the moment when Susan had burst from her womb. She did not fight the fact that the two loves mingled in the same thought, that her two worlds came suddenly and quite unexpectedly together.

“Well, Harriet,” he said several minutes later, having uncoupled them and moved to her side. His arm was about her, holding her against him.

“Well, Archie.” She set her face against his chest, heavy with drowsiness. Don't say anything more, she begged him silently. Don’t ask how it was. Don’t ask if it was pleasurable. She did not want to be reminded yet that it had been pleasure, not love. She did not want to remember that she was mistress, not wife.

But he tucked her more snugly against him, kissed the top of her head, and said no more. She relaxed gratefully against him and marveled at how she could be thinking only of sleep after such a very carnal experience.

And sleep she did, she realized with surprise only when she was waking up again some time later. She was not waking of her own accord. His hand was on her breast, and her nipple was coming to life between the light squeezing of his finger and thumb. His tongue was moving lazily across the seam of her lips. She opened her eyes and looked into his.

“Again?” she said and wished even as the word was passing her lips that she could have swallowed it. His eyes twinkled into hers with lazy amusement and he chuckled.

“We will make regular appointments for twice a week, I believe,” he said. “Once a week would quite frankly not be enough, yet more than twice would court detection and scandal. Twice a week is going to seem woefully inadequate, especially while we are still new to each other. Don’t you agree? But we must be sensible. If we are to have each other only twice a week, then, we must make the most of each encounter. We will have to curtail the sleeping as much as possible so that we may enjoy each other two or three times. Agreed?”

Twice. Or three times? It did not seem possible. She had never thought of it as a possibility. He was going to have her again? And perhaps again after that?

“Yes,” she said.

And she found that it was indeed possible. And equally pleasurable. And a third time too, so closely following the second that they did not even uncouple between times. Life as a mistress, Harriet realized, her face against his damp chest after it was all over, was vastly different from life as a wife. She was too exhausted to explore those differences.

He dressed beside the bed while she dressed at the other side of the room. He had seen her hesitate and then seem to decide that it would be pointless modesty to take her clothes into the dressing room. She stood with her back to him.

He watched her as he dressed. Harriet. Small and neat and beautiful. No longer a mystery to him. Known. His body felt the languor and satisfaction of its knowledge. No longer the pure, unattainable little Harriet of his dreams. She was his mistress. She had become very thoroughly so during the past hour and a half.

He wondered if she would still be his mistress if she had accepted his offer six years ago. He had never kept a mistress for longer than eight months. Six years? He surely would have tired of her long ago. By now she would be forgotten. Not just in his past but forgotten. He could not remember either the names or faces of the women with whom he had taken his pleasure six or even five years ago.

With any luck, if they kept their twice weekly appointments and if he worked her hard enough during those encounters, as he had today, he would have her out of his system by the end of the Season. She was just a woman, when all was said and done, with whose beautiful body his own would become sated through frequent and vigorous use. He was glad he had not proposed marriage to her. She was not close enough to his world for any satisfactory relationship to be a reasonable expectation. She had saved him from making the biggest and most disastrous mistake of his life.

He had had her and he was satisfied. Very satisfied. There were a good number of weeks left during which he could get his fill of her. But he was a little disappointed, nevertheless. He would admit it to himself now. He had just bedded the mistress who had satisfied him more than any other he could remember, perhaps more than anyone even if he could remember all. And he had a great deal more to look forward to. But he felt as if he had lost something too. Someone. Harriet. She was not the person he had thought her. He strode across the room to help her with the top buttons of her dress.

“Thank you,” she said, turning after he had finished and looking up at him. Her face was flushed, not with a blush, but with the aftermath of vigorous sex.

God, when she looked at him like that, all wide beautiful eyes, she was Harriet all over again. And the remaining weeks seemed terrifyingly short.

‘Twice a week will suit you?” he asked, drawing mentally back from her and hearing in some surprise the cold businesslike tone of his voice.

“Yes, Archie,” she said.

“Mondays and Thursdays, then,” he said. “The same time?”

“Yes.”

“We will have to protect your reputation,” he said. “And mine too since 1 am courting another lady and it would be discourteous to her to have this liaison become public knowledge. I will have my carriage pick you up each time, but not always in the same place.. We will arrange each time where it is to meet you the next time. Will that be suitable?”

“Yes, Archie,” she said.

“We must meet formally whenever we are attending the same social function,” he said. “You must never use my given name except here, Harriet.”

She flushed but continued to look at him quietly and steadily. He knew that he was humiliating her, by his businesslike manner as much as by the words he spoke. But curiously he could not seem to stop himself. He felt the quite unreasonable urge to hurt her. Because she had fallen off her pedestal? But he had been very ready to sweep her up when she fell and to lay her down in his bed.

He leaned forward and kissed her firmly on the lips. “Thank you,” he said. “You are very good, my dear. You gave me great pleasure.” The words were intended to placate her, to redeem himself. But they were spoken as briskly as the words that had preceded them. “Come, I shall escort you most of the way home.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He rested a hand against the slender and shapely small of her back as he guided her from the room. He wanted to stop and turn her against him and hold her there until she knew that he had not meant the coldness or the brusqueness. But he did not do so. It was almost two hours since he had picked her up. They could not risk being alone together for much longer.

For a man who had just experienced three powerfully satisfying bouts of sexual activity, he thought as they made their way downstairs and outside to his waiting carriage, he was feeling remarkably depressed. It must be just that he was tired. He was more used to resident mistresses with whom he could sleep all night whenever he so wished. Or it was just that he had to wait until Monday before having her again. At the beginning of an affair he liked to indulge himself with daily beddings. In Harriet’s case, four days were going to drag by, he knew.

They sat silently side by side in the carriage. She looked prim and virginal again in the drab cloak and bonnet that refused to hide her beauty. He wondered if she had regrets, but he would not ask her. He wondered if she was feeling euphoric—but she did not look euphoric—or as depressed as he was. Perhaps she was feeling neither. Perhaps for her it was as she had indicated, a mere physical affair. Perhaps her body was satisfied and her mind was looking ahead to whatever she had planned for the evening.

He kissed her hand when the carriage came to a stop and watched as his coachman lifted her to the roadway. She did not look into his eyes as she took her leave of him or look back before the carriage door closed again.