It had been something quite beyond his experience. And certainly beyond his intentions. He had wanted a mistress again. Someone to bed at will. Something really quite basic and simple. He had desired Jane. She had needed a home and employment.
It had all made perfect sense.
Until she had let her hair down. No, that had only fueled his desire.
Until she had called him by name. And said something else. What the devil was it she had said? He rubbed his cheek over the warm silk of her hair and hugged her a little closer.
Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is at heart.
Yes, that was what had done it. Those few foolish words.
From birth he had been an earl with the rank of a marquess, heir to a dukedom. All his education, formal and informal, had been designed to train him to take over his father’s title and his father’s character when the time came. He had learned his lessons well. He had taken over both at the age of seventeen.
…the unique person one is at heart.
He had no heart. Dudleys generally did not.
And he had no unique character. He was what his father and everyone else had always expected him to be. For years now he had hugged about himself like a cloak his reputation as a dark, ruthless, dangerous man.
Jane’s hair was fragrant with the smell of roses that always clung about her. It made him think of country gardens in the early summer. And filled him with a strange yearning. Strange, because he hated the country. He had been to Acton Park, his own estate, only twice since leaving there after a bitter quarrel with his father when he was sixteen—once for his father’s funeral less than a year later, and once for his mother’s four years after that.
He had intended never to go back until he was carried there one day for his own burial. But he could close his eyes now as he held Jane tightly and remember the rolling, wooded hills to the east of the house, where he and Ferdinand and Angeline had played robbers and highwaymen and Robin Hood and explorers. And where sometimes, when alone, he had played poet and mystic, breathing in the smells of elemental nature, sensing the vastness and the mystery of this nebulous thing called life, trying to formulate his thoughts and feelings and intuitions into words, trying to write them down as poetry. And occasionally liking what he had written.
He had torn up every word in a passion of anger and disgust before he left home.
He had not thought of home in a long age. Not ofhomeat least, even though he kept a careful eye on the running of the estate. He had even forgotten that Acton Park ever had been home. But it had. Once upon a time. There had been a nurse who had given them discipline and affection in generous measures. She had been with them until he was eight or nine. He could even remember why she had been dismissed. He had had a toothache and she had been holding him on her lap in the nursery, cradling his sore face with her large, plump hand and crooning to him. His father had come into the nursery unannounced—a rare event.
She had been dismissed on the spot.
He, Jocelyn, had been sent down to his father’s study to await the thrashing that had preceded the pulling of his tooth.
The Duke of Tresham, his father had reminded him with every painful swish of the cane across his backside, did not raise his sons to be girls. Especially not his heir.
“Jocelyn.” Jane was awake again. She tipped back her head to look at him. Her beautiful face was flushed and heavy-lidded, her lips rosy and swollen from his kisses. She seemed cloaked and hooded in fragrant, shining gold. “Was I dreadfully gauche?”
She was one of the rare women, he thought, for whom passion and sexuality were instinctive. She had given both unstintingly this afternoon as if she did not know what it was to be hurt. Or belittled. Or rejected.
But before he could answer, she set one fingertip lightly to the bridge of his nose to cover the frown line there.
“What is it?” she asked. “What is the matter? Iwasgauche, was I not? How foolish to have imagined that because it was earth-shattering for me, it must have been so for you too.”
Foolish Jane so to expose herself to ridicule and pain. He took hold of her wrist and lowered her hand.
“You are a woman, Jane,” he told her. “An extraordinarily lovely woman. With everything in the right place. I was well pleasured.”
Something happened to her eyes. Something closed up behind them. He recognized his sudden irritation for what it was. It was shame that his throat and chest were aching with unshed tears. And anger that she had brought him so low.
He should never have told her to call him by name.
“You are angry,” she said.
“Because you talk of earth-shattering experiences and make me feel that I must have misled you,” he said curtly. “You are employed as my mistress. I have just been putting you to work. I always take pains to make work congenial to my mistresses, but work is what it is. You have just been earning your living.”
He wondered if she felt the lash of his words as stingingly as he. He hated himself, which was nothing new except that the passion of his self-hatred had long ago become muted to a disdain for the world in general.
“And giving good value for money,” she said coolly. “I would remind you, your grace, that you employ me for the use of my body. You are not paying for my mind or my emotions. If I choose to find part of my employment earth-shattering, I am free to do so provided at the same time I open my body for your use.”
For one moment he was in a towering rage. If she had dissolved into tears, as any normal woman would have done, he could have lashed himself harder by treating her with scorn. But typically of Jane, she was scolding him with cool dignity despite the fact that she was lying naked in bed with him.
