he desired was respectability. He’d worked diligently to earn it, and now his father was about to snatch it away again. Through her. If the Earl was so bent on ruining Sloane he would have the house watched, how long before her secrets were known to the man? Even marriage could not erase the scandal of a wife who trained women to be courtesans.
She took a deep breath, like a dying person gasping for one last breath. ‘But I do not wish to marry you, Sloane.’
He flinched. It was almost imperceptible, but she caught it. ‘You… do not wish to marry me?’
Morgana made herself smile, trying to remember how Harriette Wilson looked when she turned on her charm. ‘Oh, no. I thought I told you I did not.’
His brows dropped and his voice became very low. ‘After last night, do you expect me to believe you would not desire the marriage bed?’
It was Morgana’s turn to flinch. She only hoped she hid it as effectively as he. To belong to Sloane, to make love to him, until death parted them was everything she desired. It was why she’d begged him for this past night. He must not pay by giving up everything he desired, merely because he had obliged her.
Morgana’s mind whirled with ways to convince him that she did not want him, though her soul ached for him even now. ‘Oh, I desire the lovemaking.’ She aped the light flirtatious voice of Miss Wilson. ‘Thank you so much for showing me that I would enjoy it. It quite informs me that I should like that part of a courtesan’s life.’
‘Morgana,’ he cried in a fierce groan.
She fluttered her eyelashes and went about collecting her dress. ‘Now do not lecture me, please do not.’ She put the dress on over her head and placed her back to him so he could fasten the buttons. ‘My mind is quite made up.’
‘You will not marry me?’ Another man might make this sound like a plea, but in Sloane’s voice it sounded like a pirate about to attack. He fastened her buttons with lightning speed.
She made her voice light. ‘Do not be absurd. You’ve no wish to marry me! Goodness! To think you would propose out of some obligation. You need not play the gentleman with me, Sloane.’
Her words wounded him. She saw it in his eyes. For a moment she wished he would strike her. The pain might distract from the wrenching ache inside her. But she knew he was too much a true gentleman to do so.
She picked up her stockings and balled them in her hands, putting her bare feet into her dancing slippers. He shrugged into his coat and ran a brush through his hair. Morgana put hers in a quick plait.
‘I will see you to the back entrance of your house. If we are careful, no one outside will notice you.’
It was a gentlemanly thing to do. He could have just opened the door and pushed her out.
‘Thank you,’ she said, failing to maintain her bright-sounding speech.
He did not appear to notice. He opened the bedchamber door and walked her down the stairs. She managed to put one foot in front of the other, although all she truly wanted to do was sink into a puddle of despair. On a table in the hall was her gold domino, folded neatly. He put it around her shoulders and pulled the hood up over her head. His touch was like a smithy’s tongs hot from the forge.
When they walked out of the door and through the gap in the garden wall, they did not speak. The silence spread through her like some wasting disease.
She had given him the means of retaining his hard-won respectability. She had given him a clear path to offer for a respectable wife—her cousin. But she’d hurt him. Not with her refusal of marriage. A man soon got over such a blow to pride. No, she’d treated him as if he were not a gentleman. That made her no better than his father. And it made her feel sick inside.
The door to her house was unlocked. He opened it for her and she stepped inside. She turned quickly to bid him goodbye, but he had already withdrawn. He did not look back.
The man wore a vendor’s apparel and carried a sack of brushes on his shoulder. He’d wandered around Culross Street since dawn, finally discovering a way to slip through the mews to a shrouded place where he could spy on Cyprian Sloane’s townhouse. Instinct told him to watch the back of the house. Instinct, and lack of success witnessing anything of consequence from the front.
It was too bad he could not watch the house next to Sloane’s where he’d briefly spied the pretty girls through the window. Sloane’s place was as quiet as a church cemetery.
Just as he was about to leave, Sloane’s door opened. There was the man himself, a woman with him. He walked her over to the other house and she entered it.
What an arrangement, thought the man with envy. Some men have all the luck.
Morgana paused when reaching the door to the library. It was open a crack, and she could hear the girls’ voices and the reedy laughter of her grandmother, who undoubtedly found everything to be very lovely. Oh, to have her grandmother’s forgetfulness, to live in a present that was perpetually lovely. How much easier life would be. How much less painful.
The voices were not sounding happy, however. Katy’s shrill tones rose above the others. ‘We need Miss Hart! She will know what to do.’
Morgana glanced down at her hand, still holding her stockings. She stuffed them into a pocket inside her domino and stuffed her numbing despair along with them.
She opened the door. ‘I am here.’
Katy leapt up from her chair. ‘Gracious, Miss Hart!’ She looked her up and down. ‘Did you have a nice night?’
Lucy and Rose stared at her, and Miss Moore, seated near her grandmother, gave her a kind, knowing smile.
It felt as if someone had ripped off all her clothes in a public square, but she realised it was not making love to Sloane that made her feel exposed. It was the ache in her heart.
She tried for a vague smile. ‘A lady does not speak of such matters, Katy.’
Katy laughed. ‘Harriette Wilson had no trouble speaking about it.’
Morgana gave her a candid look. ‘But Miss Wilson is not a lady.’
Was it too late to convince them that they could be ladies? Oh, not ladies of the ton, perhaps, but respectable women who deserved men who loved them and who would never walk away?
Lucy stood up. Her face looked drawn. ‘Miss Hart, we must tell you about Mary.’
If something had happened to Mary while she was making love to Sloane. ‘What of Mary?’
‘It is nothing bad,’ assured Rose.
Lucy gave an imploring glance to Miss Moore.
Miss Moore beamed at Morgana. ‘It seems our Mary has run off to Gretna Green with Mr Duprey.’
‘That cowhanded sapskull…’ Katy shook her head ‘… how could she?’
Tears sprang to Morgana’s eyes. She walked over to Miss Moore. ‘Is it really so?’
Miss Moore handed her a letter. Mary wrote that
