two for the chance of feminine conversation with someone other than Polly or Enid or Cook.
And the talk over the crochet, cross-stitch and teacups had turned out to be unexpectedly racy.
Until Ritchie’s disclosure, Beatrice had believed the Circle to be the primary source of tonight’s invitation. Both Sofia Chamfleur and her friend Lady Arabella Southern had been especially amenable at the weekly meetings.
Now, however, Beatrice had been disabused of that notion.
Either one or the other of those two ladies had acted as a pander, and had expedited her appearance here to serve her up to the infuriating Ritchie. A man who apparently had the power to haunt her when he was nowhere to be seen.
What’s the matter with me? I’m having a perfectly delightful time, a much better one than I ever expected. Why do I keep wishing that every partner was that monster?
It was true. Good company as her dance partners had been, somehow they all seemed like shadows. Even Monsieur Chamfleur, who towered well over a stocky six feet tall. Only the wild, hot feelings she’d experienced in Ritchie’s presence had any verisimilitude. Her arm still prickled where he’d touched her, and when she relived that touch, her thighs trembled and a betraying liquid heat welled between them.
No! He’s a rogue and a womanizer and he’s even less respectable than I am!
Drifting away toward the periphery of the supper room, she looked for Charlie, but he too was nowhere to be seen now. One of his lecture topics on the dance floor had been a stern homily to her on the importance of not being seen in conversation with Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie.
“I didn’t realize it was him until he swanned up to us. The nerve of the man! If the papers are anything to go by, he’s a bad lot. Just stay away from him or he’ll compromise you even further.”
Beatrice had nodded, for once in perfect agreement with her sibling.
Yet she was disappointed. The ball was a dazzling, fairy-tale affair, and all the more so for the remarkable and revolutionary electrical lighting system that the Southerns had recently had laid on in their principal rooms. This new light illuminated the proceedings in a harder and more brittle manner somehow. It was unforgiving, yet it caused the women’s jewels to flash and sparkle and their gowns appear iridescent and vivid. But despite this modern miracle, all seemed lackluster just because she was missing a certain sharply beautiful man with navy-blue eyes, shiny, barely tamed blond hair and a mouth that could have as easily belonged to the devil as to an Adonis.
Lacking appetite, Beatrice sidled out of the supper room and across the broad, gilded reception salon. Glass doors to her right led out of the house proper into a conservatory, a vast and spacious jungle that seemed to have been shipped home from darkest Africa. Within it, the air was moist and hot, as she imagined it might be in the tropics, but it made her shudder, recalling the smaller, far less grand conservatory where Eustace had taken his photographs of her.
“To the devil with you, Eustace!” Muttering, she shook her head as if to dislodge his handsome but now hated countenance. How could she ever have believed she cared for him? Much less pose naked for him?
Loneliness, she supposed, and fear for the future. It’d been so long since she’d been courted—since the loss of Tommy, her first fiancé—and she’d been flattered by Eustace’s attentions. Practical issues had influenced her, too. Engagement to an eligible and apparently affluent bachelor had promised desperately needed security for herself and Charlie, and to her chagrin, she’d bamboozled herself into believing love could grow.
Regrettably, Eustace had been as mistaken in his assumptions as she’d been in hers, although far more deceitful. His affluence was all a facade and the moment he’d discovered the parlous state of the Weatherlys’ own finances, he’d made plans to drop her. But not before wringing a form of income from her in the most despicable way.
“You’ll get your comeuppance, one of these days, you beast. I just hope that I get the chance to witness it!”
Dismissing the weasel who’d shattered her reputation, she forged forward into the greenery. With the sound of a German polka fading in the distance, other sounds came more sharply to her ears. Trickling, tumbling water made the huge conservatory seem more than ever like a wild kingdom, and the cries of birds, and a flash of color right up in the highest edge of her vision suggested there might even be a parrot or two loose in the upper regions. Beatrice pressed on, her footsteps silent on the tiled path in her light dancing slippers.
The source of the water was a playing fountain, fed by an artificial stream. Large, colorful fish swam and wafted their fins in the central pond, and its cool freshness cut through the mulchy, vegetable aromas of the plant life.
What an incredible place. It was like having a patch of the foreign and the exotic in your own home. Unlikely a prospect as it was, Beatrice decided not to let the specter of Eustace deter her. If she ever came into a bit of money again, she’d have a conservatory of her own once more. Something modeled after the garden room at Westerlynne though, and relatively modest.
In the Southerns’ grand enclosure, however, narrow pathways wended away through the aromatic flora, and their promise called to her far more than the superficial world of dancing, chitchat, and social one-upmanship. The mystery of the place reminded her of the dark, troubling attentions of Mr. Ritchie. This wild and steaming jungle would be the perfect setting for his savage male persona.
As she explored further, holding up the hem of her gown to prevent it picking up soil and scraps of leaf matter, another sound, more familiar than tumbling water and parrot calls, caught her ear. Faint voices, both male and female, emanated from a little way ahead of her. She heard laughter and low, intimate tones.
Goodness, an assignation!
Perspiration popped and gathered beneath her corset and between her breasts, feeling sticky. It felt as if someone had suddenly adjusted the furnace that maintained the conservatory’s equatorial heat.
I should turn back … pretend I never heard them … respect their privacy.
But her days of polite, respectable and discreet behavior were over. Inching forward, Beatrice acknowledged a darker, more insatiably curious nature. Creeping like a native amongst the ferns, she followed the sounds.
And came upon a little grotto, right in the heart of Lady Arabella Southern’s metropolitan jungle, where two hungry creatures were cavorting, in flagrante.
Sofia and Ambrose Chamfleur were sitting on a bench, both pink in the face and gasping. She, with the bodice of her dress and her corset loosened so that her milky-white breasts overspilled the top of them. He with … dear heaven … his trousers unfastened and his masculine parts … his cock … fully out on view.
Beatrice’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart throbbed like a drum. And low in the pit of her belly, a serpent stirred.
So this was what a gentleman looked like when he was aroused? It wasn’t quite as she’d imagined, but then, what had she imagined? Women weren’t supposed to dwell on this particular part of a man at all until they were married, and respectable wives not even then. But having seen certain medical illustrations, Beatrice had often speculated about it. Long ago, she’d felt Tommy’s loins harden against her thigh when they’d managed to snatch a secret embrace in the rose arbor at Westerlynne, and Eustace too had become agitated and short of breath after a stolen
