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

How quiet the room is, Laurel thought. Heavy hangings, thick carpet. We might be in the depths of the country.

He brought her back a flimsy piece of nonsense in deep amethyst silk, and she realised he had found one that matched her eyes. Was that intentional? He did not look at her as she slipped it on and went to the screen.

She washed, willing her hands to steadiness, and listened to the muffled footsteps as Patrick paced. ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t get out yet,’ he said. ‘This place won’t quieten down until almost dawn, I imagine. I might have purchased your virginity, but they aren’t going to take kindly to me walking out of here with their beautiful new addition to

the staff on my arm. I might enjoy the fight and breaking a few noses, but I can’t risk you.’

Beautiful. She put the word away to think about later. The clock struck one: there were at least three hours to wait before they could venture out, she supposed.

‘I’ll get dressed.’

‘Patrick.’ She came out from behind the screen, belting the robe loosely.

‘Hmm?’ He found his shirt and shook it out. It felt curiously domestic and comfortable, standing here with him dressing, despite the tingle of tension that ran between them.

‘Come back to bed. Hold me.’

Patrick’s head snapped round to stare at the slender, pale figure in the whore’s robe. In her innocence she made the robe seem chaste.

‘I… Laurel, I do not think I can control myself if I am back skin to skin with you.’ He made himself smile. Of course she needed comfort, reassurance after that performance just now. She had been in his head for days, hours when he had fought the aching desire for her and tried to fathom the mysterious happiness when he was with her. But this was not how he’d imagined their first night together.

‘I do not want you to control yourself, Patrick.’ Laurel was looking at him steadily, her violet eyes wide and still sparkling with what he feared were tears. But there was something else. Desire.

‘Here? You want to make love here?’

‘I do not care where it is as long as it is with you, Patrick.’ She smiled, a little daring, a little nervous, all female. ‘That was so strange and new. So wonderful. I want to experience it all.’

‘You’ll be ruined,’ he protested. ‘I told you.’

‘I am ruined. I was ruined the moment they took me. And how much more ruined can a girl be than spending a night in a room in a brothel with a man?’

He could explain how much more, but then he realised that he did not want to. Here, now, this all seemed very simple: they wanted each other and he would deal with the consequences in the morning.

‘Certain?’ He stood up knowing his body was reviving, realising he was not ashamed when her eyes lowered to look at the evidence.

‘Yes,’ Laurel said. ‘Positive.’

Have I’ve fallen in love with him? she wondered as Patrick took her hand and helped her back onto the bed. Is this just lust and desire, gratitude that he has saved me? How do I tell? This is all so new and I was so frightened, and then he came and saved me. I don’t understand it, I just know I want him.

‘You are lovely,’ he said as he touched her cheek, then came to lie beside her. She hugged the realisation of her feelings in her heart. ‘I wanted you so much. Too much. I must have shocked you.’

‘It was exciting,’ she murmured. He did not appear to want to kiss her, or hold her yet. Perhaps they could talk a little. She snuggled against the pillows and he leaned back beside her, still in his shirt, his arm just touching hers. ‘It was like dancing.’ Patrick nodded, his hand curling into hers, sending shivers along her nerves. ‘Choreography that we had to make up by instinct as we went along.’

‘Making love is all about two instincts working together,’ he said. ‘I felt instinctively that we were attuned, that first meeting in Martinsdene. I opened my chamber door in the inn and there you were and I don’t think I’ve been breathing right since.’

‘You didn’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Or do anything.’

‘I was working. And you were a respectable young woman risking your reputation to help your friends. To have done anything would have been wrong.’ There was just the hint in his voice that told her that if she had not been a respectable unmarried girl, things might have been very different. He must lead an interesting life, she thought, sending him a flickering, speculative glance from beneath her lashes.

‘I wish I had been closer to them—Bella and Meg and Lina.’ Laurel curled round so she was close against Patrick’s side and could rest her head on his shoulder. They fitted well, she thought. It felt so comforting to have the warmth and solidity of a man to lean on. How long was it since someone had held her? ‘But their father, the Reverend Shelley, is such a tyrant. He did not encourage friendships of any kind. Meg was the most rebellious though, that is how I know her best. She was the one who would escape for walks and befriend the local girls like me. I was so happy for her when I heard she had run off with Lieutenant Halgate. You are sure he was killed?’

Against her cheek she felt him nod and sighed. ‘At least she is safe now, back in England. But Lina—I cannot bear to think she met this fate with no one to save her.’ Lina had always been the timid sister: how could she have survived this terror, this brutality?

‘And Arabella, the elder,’ he said, and Laurel suspected it was an attempt to distract her from Lina’s fate. ‘At least you found some gossip about her that I had not been able to glean.’

‘Only that she had been seen weeping in the woods, the day before she vanished. Only a week or so before when I met her she had seemed transformed—glowing with happiness, although she tried to hide it. I wondered if there was a man—but there couldn’t have been: no one saw or heard of one.

‘And it was so unlike Bella—she was always the calm one, the dutiful daughter, the one who endured their father’s bullying.’ She sighed, thinking of Meg and her two lost sisters and her own, startling, precarious, happiness. ‘Will you ever find them, do you think?’