“But the women flock to him—especially those whose hearts you have broken.”
“Lovell breaks more than hearts, Penelope.”
“Ah well, like you, he is a beautiful specimen to behold, and I do enjoy beauty.” Penelope held up her quizzing glass and blatantly directed her gaze at Vale’s crotch.
“Egad, Vale,” Lance interjected. “Nearly forgot: felicitations to you on your recent nuptials.”
Vale started. He had nearly forgotten that he was now married.
“Indeed,” Penelope said. “Where are you hiding this wife of yours?”
“We arrived in town but yesterday,” Vale answered. “She is with my cousin Charlotte at the moment.”
He was not particularly interested in pursuing the subject. Though he was sure that Charlotte would pro
ve better company for Harrietta than he, he nonetheless felt a stab of guilt for pawning his wife off on a relative for the evening.
“And will you be introducing us to her?”
“Good God, no,” Vale shot back. “She is a simple girl from the country.”
“Hardly sounds like the sort of woman you would choose to marry after all these years,” Lance commented.
Vale shrugged. “Dunnesford needs an heir. Does it really matter whom I marry?”
“Yes, but of all the beautiful and wealthy women setting their caps at you, why a chit for whom you seem to have ambivalent feelings?”
“Her brother and I were the best of friends before he died at Yorktown in the service of His Majesty. We served in the same regiment for some time together, and I owe my life to him. At the age of ten, I would have drowned in the lake at Dunnesford but for his efforts.” Vale put back his mask. “I should return to the beauty. Her arms must be sore.”
“Even if her constitution is weak,” Penelope attempted, “her arse must be a delight. I almost wish I were a man that I might experience the feeling of being inside her.”
Her arse should have been delightful, Vale thought as he recalled how easily his cock had slid into the woman due to the immense amount of wetness that had dripped from her cunnie into her sphincter earlier. But there had been something missing with this one—as there had been with all the others. The women were more and more beautiful, yet his drive, his passion, continued to diminish. Perhaps it was only natural once one had experienced all there was to experience, tasted all that a feast could offer.
“Ah, we have some newcomers,” Lance noted of a few people who had just walked onto the assembly floor. “Damn me, that brunette looks like Charlotte, but who is the one next to her with the lackluster brown hair and emerald necklace?”
Vale narrowed his eyes at the three emeralds separated by two small diamonds and laced together with silver. At first, he paled. Then his jaw hardened as he answered, “My wife.”
Chapter Two
FOR HARRIETTA DELANEY, now Marchioness of Dunnesford, the eye holes in her mask were not large enough to accommodate her wide-eyed stare as she followed Charlotte onto the floor of Madame Botreaux’s Cavern of Pleasures. There were men and women about her in all states of undress, and yet she, clothed from head to toe in a modest evening dress, felt like the naked one.
Not only were these men and women openly naked in public but they were engaged in all manner of...activity...in public. It hardly seemed real. Only in her fantasies—deep, dark fantasies that she had never shared with anyone—had she envisioned such possibilities. Only in London could such a place exist. Certainly not in the small town where she had lived for all four and twenty years of her life. The prospect of living in the City had been the one bright part of marrying the Marquess of Dunnesford. It was a marriage that made her among the luckiest women in England. And the biggest fool.
“He has wealth and breeding and a title and is pleasing to the eye,” Bethany, Harrietta’s junior by four years, had cooed after the Marquess had finally accepted one of their mother’s numerous invitations.
“Exceedingly handsome,” Marianne, who had yet to have her come-out, had sighed.
Even Jacqueline, the youngest Delaney daughter at twelve, had agreed. “He looks like a prince.”
Harrietta had to admit that King George himself was unlikely to have produced as grand an entry as the Marquess, arriving in his gilded carriage pulled by a team of four with gleaming white coats and footmen who appeared to possess more expensive garments than the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie. The Marquess was also perfection, from the finely powdered hair to the elaborate cravat tied at his throat, the rich velvet coat that flared from the hips, his delicately embroidered waistcoat, and down to the jeweled high-heeled shoes. He was elegant yet commanding. Powerful but refined. Regal and sensuous.
Nine long years had passed since she had last seen Vale, and she no longer recognized him. She had dreamt of him, still flushed when she remembered their last encounter, and had heard much about him—especially about the many mistresses he had kept in those years. At the time of her marriage to him, he had been most recently rumored to be with an Italian countess. A family friend who traveled in the same social circles as the Marquess had described him as an aloof and arrogant rake—not the sort of man Harrietta had ever envisioned herself marrying.
The Marquess was a stranger to her. He was not the Vale who once preferred the company of the Delaney family to his own, who had been Harold’s best friend, and who had been like a second brother to her. She resented this magnificent Marquess for failing to be the man she had fallen in love with as a girl. But Mr. Delaney had three daughters with no dowries. That a man of Lord Dunnesford’s stature would offer for Harrietta—poor and plain—was, according to Bethany, nothing short of the most miraculous gift Fate could bestow.
Dear God, Harrietta thought to herself as she glimpsed a woman whose breasts were being serviced by the mouths of two different men, surely I belong in Bedlam for wanting to see this place?
What she saw next answered her question affirmatively. A naked young woman was hanging from a hook like a slab of meat in a butcher’s shop while a man wearing a silver and black mask was circling around her—and striking her with his riding crop. Harrietta had never seen such tight breeches as those worn by the masked man. She flushed on his behalf. Her gaze traveled from his loins to his finely sculpted chest. The sinews of his strong arms revealed themselves as he pulled the crop back and lashed it against the woman’s backside. Harrietta eyed the planes of his pectoral muscles, the ridges that filled his torso, and the rugged hardness of his belly. She had not thought the naked body of a man could be so...captivating. The man would have made an exceptional model for Michelangelo.