He spoke pleasantly enough, but underneath the amusement was a thread of ice that made Charlotte squirm in his grasp. “Release me this instant. How dare you?”
He jerked her back against a chest as hard and unyielding as a stone wall. “How dare I claim a whore in a whorehouse? I assure you, sweetheart, it takes no daring at all.”
Charlotte could tell by the width of his chest and the hard muscles bulging in his forearm it would do no good to struggle, so she went still and tried to collect her wits. No doubt her friends thought she was right behind them. They’d return for her when they realized she wasn’t, and—
“Not much of a challenge, I admit, to bed a whore,” he went on, “but sometimes a man wants his pleasures to come easy.” He ran a caressing hand over her hip and around the curve of her bottom, then pulled her tighter against him. “And you, sweetheart, are easy.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened.Oh, no. His chest wasn’t the only hard thing pressed against her back. He was becoming…engorged. He’d soon lose all use of his mental faculties and she’d never be able to reason him out of this madness. She took a deep breath and forced herself to speak calmly. “Sir, you can’t possibly think to—”
“Take you right here in the parlor, with every drunken scoundrel in London gaping at us? Tempting thought, but I’m a gentleman, sweetheart. I have a room upstairs.”
Upstairs?Oh, for pity’s sake. Where were her friends? Why hadn’t they come back for her yet? If they returned and couldn’t find her…
Charlotte gave an experimental kick and managed to land a blow to his shin. She heard a pained grunt behind her, but instead of loosening his grip he hitched her higher against his chest, so only the tips of her slippers touched the floor.
“Come now, sweet,” he crooned into her ear. “I promise I’ll take good care of you.”
Charlotte was rather alarmed by this point, but somehow his low rasp penetrated the fog of panic in her brain.His voice. For one wild moment she thought she recognized it, had heard it before, whispering in her ear, promisingsomething. She stilled, trying to place it, but the memory danced just outside her grasp.
“That’s better,” he murmured. “You don’t really want to give all these fine gentlemen a show, do you?”
Fine gentlemen. Of course. She was in a whorehouse, wasn’t she?
She was in a whorehouse, her friends had abandoned her and this large, amorous gentleman—who thought, quite reasonably, she was a whore—was about to drag her upstairs. The other fine gentlemen in question—all of whom also believed her to be a whore—ogled her with ill-concealed excitement. A number of them had staggered to their feet and edged closer to get a better look at the struggle, so she and her tormentor were now surrounded by a circle of drooling scoundrels.
Any of whom could decide at any moment to tear off her masque.
She let her body go limp against her captor’s hard chest. Her best alternative by far was to let him take her upstairs and then try to reason with him in private. If that didn’t work, she could always bash him over the head with the washbasin. Whorehouses did have washbasins, didn’t they? One would think they’d need them—
“Wise choice, love.” The arm wrapped around the middle of her body eased a fraction when she made no move to flee. “You won’t regret it.”
You will.Best not to say so aloud, though. She’d need the element of surprise to escape unscathed this time. She permitted him to maneuver her across the room toward the stairwell and up the stairs in front of him, his hand heavy against her lower back. Once they reached the second floor he hurried her down the hallway to the last door on the left and thrust her through it.
The door thudded closed behind him and she heard the unmistakable scrape of the key as it turned in the lock.
Charlotte scurried away from him before he could grab her, toss her onto the bed and…well, do whatever gentlemen did with whores, which was, she guessed, not the same thing they did with their wives. She wasn’t certain, having never been mistaken for a whore before, but she had a vague notion gentlemen tended to skip the preliminaries where prostitutes were concerned, and she’d rather not reason with him while flat on her back.
“I haven’t got all night, love.” His boots rang on the wooden floor and she felt the heat of his body close behind her, though he didn’t touch her. “Take off your clothing and lay down on the bed.”
Charlotte took a quick survey of the room.Ah. There, on a table by the far side of the bed—a washbasin, old and chipped, to be sure, but if she couldn’t make him see reason it would do the job. She took a stealthy step toward it, drew a steadying breath into her lungs, and turned to face him. “I’m afraid, sir, you’ve made a rather unfortunate mistake—”
She got no further. The words lodged in her throat and her sentence ended on a choked gasp. Every limb in her body went numb with shock, and for one horrible moment she was paralyzed, unable to think or do anything other than stare up at him.
Oh God, she’d dreaded this moment—dreaded it and longed for it since his regiment returned to England. Now the moment was here.Hewas here.
Julian.
“It’s you who’s made the mistake, sweetheart, not me.”
His voice. Shehadheard it before, soft in her ear, his whispered promises—he loved her, his heart was hers, always—and, oh, she’d believed him, she’d treasured his every word, and trusted him with the absolute trust of first love. It made her chest ache even now, more than a year later, to think of such a love.
Maybe he had loved her. Maybe he’d meant to keep his promises, but it hadn’t made any difference then, and it made even less difference now.
“Do you like what you see?”
She jerked her gaze from his face and shoved the memories back into their secret places in the darkest corners of her mind. Such a question needed no answer. It was like asking if she preferred a sky obscured by thick, black clouds where once there’d been nothing but stars.
His face, that handsome face, once so dear to her. He was handsome still—more so, even, now that life had filled in the hollows of youth and etched faint lines of experience into the corners of his eyes. He had the same dark waves falling in a silky drift across his forehead and the same wide mouth with the full, sensuous bottom lip. She’d spent hours tracing his lips with the tips of her fingers.
