“In exchange for lying with you,” she said quietly. It was not a question. The answer was too obvious.
“I have a certain expertise,” he told her. “It would be my delight to use it for your pleasure, Jane. It would be a very fair exchange, you see. You cannot tell me in all honesty, can you, that you have never thought of sharing a bed with me? That you have never wanted it? That you are in any way repelled by me? Come, be honest. I will know if you lie.”
“I do not have to lie,” she said. “I do not have to answer at all. I will have five hundred pounds plus my three weeks’ salary. I can go wherever I want and do whatever I want. That is a fortune for a frugal person, your grace. I am not compelled to acceptcarte blanchefrom you.”
He laughed softly. “I do not believe, Jane,” he said, “that I would ever be fool enough to try to compel you to do anything. I am not seducing you. I am not tempting you. I am offering you a proposition, a business one, if you wish. You need a home and a source of income beyond what you already have. You need some security and someone to take your mind off your lone state, I daresay. You are a woman with sexual needs, after all, and you are sexually drawn to me. And I need a mistress. I have been womanless for an alarmingly long time. I have even taken to cornering nurses outside their rooms when I escort them there and stealing kisses. I need someone I can visit at my leisure, someone who can satisfy my own sexual needs. You can, Jane. I desire you. And of course I have the means with which to enable you to live in style.”
And in hiding.
Jane looked at her hands, but her mind was considering his offer. She could not quite believe that she was doing so, but she deliberately stopped herself from reacting with simple horror and outrage.
Even assuming she was never caught, she could never go back to being Lady Sara Illingsworth. She could never come into the inheritance due her on her twenty-fifth birthday. She had to think practically of her future. She had to live somewhere. She had to work. Five hundred pounds would not last forever no matter how frugally she lived. She was perfectly capable of taking employment fitted for a gentlewoman—as a teacher or governess or lady’s companion. But to do so she would have to make application, she would have to have references, she would have to risk discovery.
The alternative was to grub out an existence at menial tasks. Or to become the Duke of Tresham’s mistress.
“Well, Jane?” he asked into the lengthy silence that had followed his last words. “What do you say?”
She drew a deep breath and looked up at him.
She would not have to leave him.
She would lie with him. Outside wedlock. She would be a mistress, a paid woman.
“What sort of a house?” she asked. “And how many servants? How much salary? And how are my interests to be protected? How am I to know you will not dismiss me out of hand as soon as you have tired of me?”
He smiled slowly at her. “That’s my girl,” he said softly. “Feisty.”
“There is to be a contract,” she told him. “We will discuss and agree to its terms together. It is to be drawn up and duly checked and signed by both of us before I become your mistress. In the meanwhile I cannot stay here. Is there already a house? Are you one of those gentlemen who keeps a house especially for your mistresses? If so, then I will move to it. If we cannot come to an agreement on a contract, then I will, of course, move out again.”
“Of course I have such a house,” he said. “Empty of all but two servants at present, I hasten to add. I will take you there later, Jane, after Marsh has returned with news from my brother’s stable. I have to do something to fill in the time before word comes from Brighton. We will discuss terms tomorrow.”
“Very well.” She got to her feet and picked up the bowl and the bandages. “I will have my bag packed and will be ready to leave whenever you summon me, your grace.”
“I have the feeling,” he said with deceptive meekness as she reached the door and turned the handle, “that you are going to drive a very hard bargain, Jane. I have never before had a mistress who insisted upon a contract.”
“The more fool they,” she said. “And I am not your mistress yet.”
He was chuckling softly when she closed the door.
She leaned back against it, thankful that there were no servants in sight. All her bravado went from her, and with it all the strength in her legs.
What on earth had she just done?
What had she agreed to—oralmostagreed to?
She tried to feel a suitable degree of horror. But all she could really feel was enormous relief that she would not be leaving him today, never to see him again.
12
T WAS A HOUSE HE HAD OWNED FOR FIVE YEARS. It was on a decent street in a respectable neighborhood. He had had it decorated and furnished at great expense. He had hired decent, reliable servants, two of whom had been there for all five years, staying to maintain the house even when it had no occupant.
It was a house of which Jocelyn was fond, representing as it did a world of private and sensual delights. And yet as soon as he stepped across the threshold with Jane Ingleby, he felt uncomfortable.
It was not just the house. It was the whole idea of her becoming his mistress. He wanted her, yes. In bed. In all the usual ways. Yet somehow the idea of Jane Ingleby as his mistress did not seem quite to fit.
“Jacobs,” he said to the butler, who bowed deferentially, “this is Miss Ingleby. She will be living here for a while. You and Mrs. Jacobs will take your orders from her.”
If Jacobs was surprised to find his master choosing a mistress from among the working classes—she was, of course, wearing the cheap gray cloak and bonnet she had worn in Hyde Park—he was far too well trained to show it.
