Once he was settled inside and they were under way, threading through the late morning crowds of conveyances, his thoughts drifted back to his thorough, but sensual, drubbing the night before.
He was fairly confident banishing thoughts of Eleanor from his mind was the easy part. Banishing her from his other bodily senses? Not so much. His cock still occasionally jerked and stiffened at the memory of her body pinning him to the ground, not to mention the scent and taste of her when he'd buried his mouth and nose at the entrance to her quim. The scent was so specific to her, he suspected she had it produced for her alone by the pheromone purveyors at Floris.
He didn't want to think about how much such an extravagant scent would cost. Although he was usually frugal in the extreme, he couldn't find a single reason why a woman like Eleanor wasn't worth every single pence of the cost. His cock agreed.
The most important thing, however, was to make sure the infernal woman never discovered how much she upended his comfortable existence. That would never do. As for what she was up to on all those mysterious estates of hers, he had a few more ideas he was determined to explore.
But how the devil had the frightened young daughter of an innkeeper from Combe Down ever managed to turn into the wealthy, dangerous terror of London society she'd become? That was what he'd like to know. And he intended to damned well find out.
* * *
It wasmidnight at Goodrum's House of Pleasure, and the evening's delights were just unfolding for the wealthy wastrels of Mayfair. El leaned across the pile of account ledgers through which she was poring and took a quick look through a colored-glass window at the crowd forming at the gaming tables below.
She'd had the stained glass especially designed by an artisan from a studio in Florence. Most of the English artists working with glass merely painted opaque scenes onto the surface. The Italians were reviving the glowing see-through qualities of the kind of designs seen in medieval churches. The floral design she'd commissioned was complex enough that she could see what was going on at her gaming tables, but Goodrum's patrons couldn't see her.
She observed the young Earl of Morland nervously fiddling with his pockets. El stood and moved toward a bell pull to alert the dealers at his table. The insipid young buck never stopped trying to trick his way to success at cards. His beleaguered father never failed to cover for his heir's tendency to cheat, but El was in no mood to wait until the boy finally showed his idiocy and had to be escorted from the club. She had a mind to banish him from Goodrum's, and his indulgent father as well.
She checked herself just short of summoning one of her gentle enforcers. She'd been fighting a high sense of pique the entire day. Damn that high-in-the-instep Percy Whitcombe. Although she refused to think of him as the Duke of Chelmsford, she realized his snooping could not be stopped by merely having him knocked about by one of her club guards. He was, after all, a duke, for the love of Hera.
Hell, she'd pummel him herself if she thought it would have any effect on his dunder-headed insistence on "exposing" whatever the dolt thought she was doing at her secretive estates spread across counties adjoining the London environs.
Her mulish thoughts were interrupted by Obadiah. "Dickie dropped off a message. That crazy toff is at it again. This time he's snooping around Totteridge."
El's gut plummeted. The young women being trained for domestic work at Totteridge were in a special set of classes to help them cope with their terror of men after having suffered years of abuse. Having Percy crashing about there was the very last thing she needed.
Enough. Shewouldkill him this time. Or maybe she'd make him wish he were dead.
7
JUNE, 1826
TOTTERIDGE PARK, NEAR LONDON
Percy moved silently through the stables, toward the entry closest to the manor house at Totteridge, certain no one would be about at that hour of the night. The grooms would be abed in the large, elaborate loft area above the stalls.
He moved with deliberation and stealth, so intent on the surroundings at his eye level, that he fell over a sleeping form lying outside one of the stalls and pitched straight forward in the dark. He barely missed landing on an upended pitchfork and stifled a curse before he spied the wide-eyed small girl he'd just tripped over. Her thick braids neatly held back a prodigious amount of thick, springy curls, a few of which had apparently escaped in her sleep.
In the moonlight slanting through the high windows of Eleanor's stables, he studied the child eyeing him so fearfully, and a tear slid down her cheek. She hastily swiped the moisture away and backed slowly toward a stall until she had nowhere else to go.
"You have nothing to fear," Percy began, searching frantically for something to say that would soothe such a tiny girl. He was terrified of children and regretted the terrible job he'd done of comforting his motherless niece Alice over the years.
"I didn't take nuffing," she started, then seemingly emboldened by Percy's lack of scolding, continued. "I'm waiting for Queen Molly to have her baby."
"Queen Molly?" Percy feared he was wholly out of his depth, but then, the light of realization dawned. "Oh...you mean the horse in that stall?"
She nodded slowly, her head down, but still kept her distance, her frail arms folded tightly across her chest. It was obvious to Percy she was fearful and used to being punished. A wave of nausea hit him so hard he nearly doubled over. So this was what Eleanor was up to? She was taking children from the streets of London and using them to exhaustion as laborers on her estates.
The tiny girl looked up to him expectantly. "Did she?"
"Did she what?"
"Did Queen Molly have her baby yet?"
"How should I know?"
"You're fearful tall. You can see up over the stall. Tell me what you see."
Percy walked to the side of the stall and peered in. Despite all the concern over the animal's welfare, the mare seemed to have managed quite well on her own.
