Auctioned Virgin to Seduced Bride (Transformation of the Shelley Sisters 1.50)

Chapter Two

Patrick set her on her feet and stood back, his eyes dark. He raked one hand through his hair and she saw, as though all her senses were magnified, that it shook, just a little. Lust. He had brought the smell of smoke and drink and musky arousal into the room with him and her empty stomach revolted. A man, a beast, just like the rest of them.

Laurel swallowed hard on the nausea and snapped, ‘You bastard. How could you? I trusted you, I liked you.’ I wanted you. It hurt too much: all she had was her anger to sustain her. ‘And all the time you are the kind of man who does this.’

‘Rescues you?’ he demanded, the colour coming back to his face.

‘You expect me to believe that?’ She found a fringed shawl thrown over the end of the bed and dragged it around her shoulders to protect against the shivering, against his eyes on her near-nudity. ‘You had no idea I had come to London, let alone that I had been taken by these…animals. Don’t try and make me believe you are a knight errant. What a little innocent I must be—it never occurred to me that you were the kind of man who would come to these places, let alone want to buy a virgin.’

He made a move as though to reach for her and Laurel jerked back. ‘What are you doing in London?’ Patrick demanded. He dropped his hand, moved back, his mouth grim. He had not defended himself—but how could he?

‘You told me that you had been sent to Martinsdene by Mrs Halgate—Meg Shelley—to find her sisters.’

‘I know that, damn it. We spent three days in that rural backwater talking to all the villagers you thought might know something.’ It had been a waste of time, no one knew anything—unless they were too scared of the Reverend Shelley to speak.

‘And I told you I had lost my position as a companion because Lady Palgrave died and her sons gave me notice,’ she persisted. ‘I didn’t tell you that I had nowhere to go now, no position to take up—and then I thought if I went down to Falmouth Meg could help me find respectable employment—just as she has as Lord Brandon’s housekeeper.’

‘She’s more than that, if I’m any judge,’ Patrick said with a crack of humourless laughter. ‘How could you be so bloody stupid as to end up here? Have you no sense?’ Why was he so angry with her, the hypocritical rake? He stalked over to the bed and dragged back the covers. ‘Get in—you are shaking like a leaf.’

‘Get in?’ She swung round the bedpost away from him, clutching it to stop herself falling as her legs threatened to give way. The shawl slid from her shoulders. ‘You libertine! I’d rather get into bed with a pig. I got here the same way as any innocent country girl does, I’m sure. I had to change stagecoaches to pick up the one to Plymouth and when I did I was gulled and then I was overpowered. I’ve never been in a city before. I had no idea places like this existed—not ones where they would capture and rape women. You make it sound as though it was all my fault. If it wasn’t for men like you—’

Patrick moved toward her, purpose in every stride. ‘Get away from me!’ she panted. ‘Never mind how I got here—what are you doing here? I thought you a gentleman.’ She caught herself on a bitter laugh as she heard her own words. ‘Oh, silly me—they are all gentlemen out there, aren’t they? I thought you were my friend, that we shared something…’

‘You really believe I came here to buy and despoil a virgin? I don’t need to buy women, believe me.’ He was standing toe to toe with her now, the anger coming off him in waves. ‘Yes, I thought there was something between us, too. I don’t know what it was—what it is. I know it was desire—I don’t know if it was more. I would have come back to see you, I think.’ He shook his head as though arguing with himself. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated. ‘All I know is that now you don’t trust me.’

‘Trust you?’ Laurel demanded. He was so close that she could smell him under the stink his clothes had picked up in that hideous room. For three days she had fought what had to be an irrational attraction; now her treacherous body wanted to sway close to him, her hands wanted to reach out and touch him. ‘Of course I don’t trust you! You said I was stupid, that I had no sense. Well, I would be stupid indeed to believe you mean me well.’

‘I came because I think this is how Celina Shelley disappeared, and where she might have ended up,’ Patrick said. ‘An urchin at the inn where she would have arrived from Suffolk thought he remembered a woman who looked like her, and the driver of the carriage she got into, he thought, was one of the bullies from this place. The lad gets tips from travellers who want directing to places like this,’ he added.

‘How can he remember? It is months since Lina vanished.’

‘I know that, damn it. She probably no longer even looked like the girl her sister described. But I cannot ignore any clue.’ He shrugged, his face grim. ‘I succeed in my work because I am thorough and because I have an instinct I cannot explain.’

He reached out and touched her shoulder and she shivered, passive under his hand for a moment while she wrestled with what he was telling her. Trust. He wants me to trust him.

All her life she had trusted people, even when her parents died and no one would help her with the debts. She had trusted Lady Palgrave’s heirs to treat her decently after three years of good service, give her a reference, but they simply turned her out. She had trusted the pleasant, smiling woman who had offered her a ride in her carriage to the inn where the Falmouth coach would leave.

Patrick told her she was bloody stupid to trust people. Well, she would start to learn with him. ‘Let me go!’ She twisted away and her shift tore in his grip. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she shouted at him, her hands frantic on the few scraps of fabric that still shielded her body. ‘You came here with your disgusting needs and—’

‘Damn it, woman—I kept my disgusting needs in check for three days while you trotted round that village like an innocent, helpful kitten with those big violet eyes and that mass of hair I ached to unpin and the scent of you like apricots. Why didn’t you say you wanted to travel to Falmouth? Why were you so pig-headedly stupid not to tell me?’

‘What? Ask you to take me with you? What would you have assumed from that, pray?’ What does he mean, he wanted to unpin my hair? If he wanted me, why didn’t he say something? Show me? Or am I just too inexperienced to read the signals?

‘That you needed help? That you trusted me to escort you? I could have taken a letter to your friend, if you drew the line at my company on a common stage.’

‘I didn’t. It wasn’t that. I didn’t understand how you made me feel. I didn’t… You didn’t…’ Laurel’s voice trailed away as she realised what she had said.

‘How I made you feel?’ Patrick repeated. ‘How the hell do you think I feel? You accuse me of being a perverted libertine and all the time I was with you, I kept a bridle on perfectly natural, perfectly normal desires—’

‘Normal?’ Her voice rose in an undignified squeak. ‘I’m a virgin! You shouldn’t have any desires as far as I’m concerned.’ I’m a virgin and I want you so much I’m ashamed of myself. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ she flung at him, knowing as she spoke how unjust she was being.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Patrick snarled. ‘I’m a perfectly normal man. Of course I’ve got desires. I’m a gentleman—I just don’t show them to unmarried girls.’

‘Really?’ Some shocking instinct drew her gaze to his thin silk evening breeches and the unmistakeable, flagrant bulge that betrayed just what he wanted. ‘I don’t think you are a gentleman at all.’

‘In that case, you ungrateful little cat,’ Patrick said, ‘allow me to demonstrate what I have been bottling up in a gentlemanly manner ever since I met you.’

He flung his coat to one side, reached out and yanked her toward him. The tatters of her shift flew apart as she lost her grip on them and the full length of her naked body thudded into contact with the heat of his. Shirt, waistcoat, breeches might as well not have existed.