She would never have occasion to wear a ballgown in Scotland. But nonsensically, Jack wanted her to have a ballgown. One thing fit for a countess.
“I don’t want you to tell the lady but make a ballgown. And a spring day dress. And a warm woolen one for winter with long sleeves. She will pay for a small part of the spring one. A very small part. I will pay for the rest. She’s not to know this.”
“This is indelicate, but I know you will forgive me. I noticed the lady does not wear stays. She does not need them, of course, given her figure, but if she goes to a ball, it would be noticed by her partner during a waltz.”
Jack thought of the debutantes he had waltzed with recently. His hand on rounded waists. The thickness of the stays under his hand, so unlike the feel of Helen’s waist when he had supported her at the table when she was drunk, or when she had almost fallen into the stream, or when he gone to her last night and seized her as soon as he had seen her, unable to do or think of anything besides possessing her and her body.
He had first gone to another ball last night. He had already accepted the invitation. The Duke of Dunmore was expected. He had thought the ball would serve as other balls had, to distract him and keep him from thinking about Helen. That dancing and flirting would keep him from brooding about how he might find a way to tell her he was John MacNaughton without making her hate him more. Or about how he might fix her situation without seeming to be the one to fix it. Or about how his heart had been in his mouth when he had seen her on his doorstep and how he had only thought of her body under his when he had sat next to her on the sofa.
But the music, the heavily scented air, the laughter and vacuous conversation were intolerable. His cravat strangled him. He could barely recognize the faces around him. His mind and his emotions would not bend to his will, and he could only think of Helen, less than a mile away in her worn muslin nightdress, her hair in a plait.
He would go to her right now and tell her he was the duke. That would stop this. She would hate him thoroughly and she would go home, and he could go back to his new life in London as the Duke of Dunmore.
He left the ball even before the midnight supper, sending his carriage home, walking quickly through the streets in his dress clothes, headed toward her rooms. And then she opened the door and he saw her and he only felt desire. Ravening desire. Nothing else.
There was wild, savage need with her in her bedchamber. He tried to slow himself. To put himself in her place. But he couldn’t. Not for long. And she didn’t shy away from his crude language, his brutal thrusts at the end.
But after he took her, after he released, he felt the heavy burden of his deception and a crushing responsibility he didn’t want.
Walking home, he wondered what his reception would be when he came at ten o’clock in the morning to take her to the modiste.
She was unchanged. Fierce. Bristling. She met his eyes. She answered she was well and she hoped he was well and all of them had eaten breakfast. She took the hack with him to Mrs. Allen’s shop, intent on getting her dress. She made no mention of their tryst when they were in the carriage alone, Mags and Duncan having stayed behind. Instead, she looked out the window and asked him what a London modiste’s shop would be like, what would be expected of her, how much her dress might cost.
Her dress.
“Yes, stays,” he told Mrs. Allen. “Have them made and whatever other underthings she might need.”
“Chemises and petticoats. Some silk, some more practical?”
“Yes.” Gruff.
“And she will need shoes and hose and gloves, of course.”
“Yes, yes. Arrange for it. And she needs a dress today. An additional one. The simplest one you can find. Not that pink thing. But she can’t leave here wearing what she came in with.” Which was the brown dress he had promised her last night they would burn. Together.
“Yes, Captain Pike.”
“I’ll come back.” He left while Helen was still in the back of the shop, likely cursing him under her breath. He walked down to the Thames and looked at the boats out on the water. He pushed a cobblestone into the water with his toe.Plunk. Detritus floated by. The river stank of sewage.
A far cry from a mountain stream in Kinmarloch.
Or from his own beloved, vast, briny ocean. He should never have resigned his commission at the end of the wars. Of course, he was already a lost man by then, Elizabeth having married his cousin Norman. But the loss of his ship, his men, his purpose—now he could see he had unthinkingly compounded the wound.
When he should have been busy, he had been idling. When he should have been concerned with the lives of his men, he had been only concerned with himself.
He was a wastrel. The worst kind. Because what he had wasted was himself, his manhood, even as he thought he was proving his manhood by copulating with woman after woman. Seducing them away from their husbands’ beds only to prove the point that all women were faithless, cuckolding whores.
Like his mother. Who, even while his father had still been alive, had surely lain with his future stepfather. And had gone on having lovers even after she had become Lady Pike, until she had died from influenza.
Like Elizabeth, who had bedded his cousin while betrothed to him.
Like Helen, who had not stopped Jack Pike from taking her last night.
It wasn’t the same, he told himself. Helen had made no promises. She wasn’t betraying anyone. She wasn’t engaged to the Duke of Dunmore.
But she wanted to be.
When he returned to Mrs. Allen’s shop, Helen had been fitted out in a sprigged muslin dress, the material a white field with small blue flowers on it, and a matching blue spencer. It was not the right blue—too dark—but it was a vast improvement over the brown.
