“Neither do I,” she said. She was aware that her voice sounded oddly tight. “Not entirely. And you must not blame yourself. It is my own fault that I had imagined a somewhat different experience, but in the end it was all very educational.”
“Educational.”
She managed a bright smile. “That is the lure of embarking on a new journey, is it not? To experience new sensations and explore the unknown? Now, if you don’t mind, I would very much like to go to bed. I find myself quite exhausted.”
He did not move, so she was obliged to close the door gently but firmly in his face. For a moment she stood there, listening intently. Eventually she heard Benedict go down the steps. The door of the carriage opened and closed. The vehicle rolled away into the night.
She waited a moment longer. The tears that she had managed to restrain squeezed out of her eyes. She used the back of her glove to wipe the moisture away.
She turned down the hall lamps and went up the stairs. Penny’s door opened. For a moment Amity just looked at her, too choked up to speak.
“My dear sister,” Penny whispered. “What has he done to you?”
“It is not what he did to me,” Amity said. “It is that I think he wishes he had not done it in the first place. And it is, at least in part, my fault because I wanted him to do it.”
Penny put her arms around her. Amity let the tears fall.
Eighteen
He could not have mangled the business more thoroughly if he had set out to do precisely that, Benedict thought.
He had not intended to make love to Amity tonight, but he had been thinking about taking her to bed ever since he had met her. The problem was that he had not made a plan. Instead, he had acted on impulse. When the opportunity arose, he had been unable to resist. Desire was a powerful drug. And now he was paying the price.
No worse than riding a camel.
What did you expect?he wondered. You made love to her in a stable.
The only thing he could say about the matter now was that it had certainly seemed like a profoundly brilliant notion at the time.
The carriage jolted to a halt in front of his town house. The windows were darkened. Mr. and Mrs. Hodges had drawn the drapes for the night and retired to their bed.
Benedict opened the door, got down and sent the coachman on his way. The vehicle rumbled off into the fog.
He took his key out of his pocket, went up the steps and opened the door. The house seemed even quieter than usual. Darker, too, he thought. All of the lights were turned down low, including those in the hall.
He shrugged out of his coat, pausing to take a deep breath when he caught Amity’s scent. He immediately grew hard again. The aching need stirred deep inside him, stronger than ever even though he had slaked his desire once tonight. Perhaps it was because he now knew just how satisfying it was to sink into Amity’s wet, tight body.
The coat would certainly never be the same and neither would he.
What he needed now was a strong, medicinal dose of brandy. He slung the coat over one shoulder and went along the hall toward the door of his study. He reached up automatically to loosen his tie and then stopped, smiling a little, when he discovered that the strips of silk were still hanging around his neck. He had neglected to retie them because he had been fixed on the goal of getting Amity away from the Gilmore house before anyone noticed that she was in a state of enchanting dishabille.
He was so consumed with the sweet, hot memories that he did not notice anything amiss until he heard an odd, strangely muffled sound coming from a dark corner of the room.
He turned swiftly, his hand seeking the gun inside his coat. Mrs. Hodges was sitting rigidly in a ladder-back kitchen chair. Hodges was equally upright in a matching chair. Neither the chairs nor the Hodges belonged in the study at that hour of the night.
“What the devil are you doing there in the corner?”
Hodges made another strange noise. There was just enough light from the low-burning lamp on the desk to reveal the gag in his mouth. His hands and ankles were bound with rope. Mrs. Hodges was secured in the same fashion. Hodges stared, wide-eyed, at Benedict and made more desperate sounds deep in his throat.
The room had been ransacked. Books had been pulled from the shelves and dropped on the floor. The drawers of the desk stood open. The pictures on the walls had been moved aside, no doubt in search of a concealed wall safe.
“Good lord, man.” Benedict removed the gun from the pocket of his coat, tossed the coat aside and turned up the lamp. “What the hell happened?”
The curtains shifted in the corner near the French doors. Benedict turned quickly, gun in hand.
A man moved out from behind the heavy velvet drapery. The light gleamed on the revolver in his hand. The lower half of his face was covered by a black scarf tied at the back of his head.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Stanbridge,” he said.
