Ross is coming for the duchess, and my dear Lady, I am coming for you. I have spent years waiting for you, and I will not give up on us now when we are so close to the unparalleled bliss I promised.
Your servant in every request,
Joshua
—A very inappropriate letter from Joshua Forrester, Esquire to Lady Phoebe Drake. He began to correct his unseemly desires with a more discrete correspondence, but then decided to hell with it, he was done pretending. He sent the correspondence as drafted April 1811
Lady Phoebe Drake sat at the dressing table in the guest room of Caerlaverock Castle staring at the letter in her hand. This room had been her sanctuary in the family wing when she visited Caerlaverock since before the Duchess of Nithesdale was a duchess. Before she and Iseabail were scandalous beyond redemption thanks to Iseabail’s late husband, the Duke of Nithesdale.
“What does it say?” Iseabail asked.
“Pardon?” Phoebe’s voice sounded strangled to her own ears.
“The letter. It must be bad news, your face has lost all its color.”
The attention to the letter in her lap made her coloring return ten-fold, as if she’d stoked the flames in the hearth into a blazing bonfire.
“Ohh.” Iseabail grinned. “It’s that kind of letter.”
“No, really it’s nothing of import.” She lied.
“How can you say that when your blush says the exact opposite?”
Phoebe folded the letter and shoved it up her sleeve. “Given the situation we currently face, I hardly find this missive a topic for us to concern ourselves with.”
“Yet I find it exactly what I need to distract me from mycurrentcircumstances.” She unconsciously rubbed her rounded baby bump as if the child in her womb needed to know it was loved—the child was Iseabail’s world, it was loved beyond measure.
The circling of Iseabail’s hand caused another pang of longing for a child Phoebe would never have. She sighed and rubbed her temple above her right eye as she confessed, “It’s from Forrester.”
“I knew it!” Iseabail exclaimed.
“You knew nothing of the sort. He wrote it months ago.”
Iseabail’s hand paused. “Months? When?”
Phoebe found herself confessing to only one of Joshua’s secret letters that she’d received, and it wasn’t this one. “When I asked him to assist with the acquirement ofThe Memoirs of a Wanton Woman.”
Iseabail’s breath caught. “I still can’t believe you did that, yet I have to admit, I had assumed you obtained them from your husband’s library.”
She shook her head and attempted to smile but failed. “Richard was not that interested in marital relations.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“The last thing I want is your pity. Our marriage was very pleasant.”
Iseabail coughed as ifpleasantwas unimaginable. She supposed it would be to someone who’d only experienced the type of riveting passion Iseabail had experienced with the father of her child, but for most marriages of the ton, pleasant was asgood as it got. Phoebe had never had any complaints about any of the aspects of her marriage, until after Richard’s death. The financial state he had left her in, however, had painted their relationship in an altogether different light.
Yet her viewpoint towards marital relations had never changed—until she read Joshua’s letter that accompanied the bawdy books she’d requested he obtain. His letter had shocked her, and then when she and Iseabail had read the books, she’d started wondering if perhaps there could be more than just tender feelings between a man and a woman. The first of his two highly inappropriate letters had ignited her desire forunparalleled blissand Joshua had nearly delivered it that night in her library, despite them having shared very little physical intimacy. That encounter had made her realize how much she had missed in her marriage bed.
Iseabail slowly lowered herself onto Phoebe’s bed, her black bombazine gown of mourning a stark contrast to the pale-yellow bedding. “I can’t believe you asked your solicitor to find those books. How did Forrester react to your request?”
“The first time he ignored me and continued shuffling papers.”
Iseabail chuckled. “That hardly sounds like Forrester.”
“I know. I voiced the request a second time, and I believe my cheeks may have turned to the shade of the ripest red apple you could imagine.”
Iseabail’s brow furrowed and she placed the damp cloth she always carried across her forehead as she laid back on the bed. It was a sign of the daily sickness Iseabail had felt since realizing she was pregnant. She carried the cloth with her everywhere. “Did he acknowledge your second request?”
