His Mistress by Morning (19 page)

He stiffened in his seat, probably never having been spoken to thusly in his entire life (at least not by a woman).

Undeterred, Charlotte continued. “I love you. I love you with all my heart. I know that Rockhurst is considered by all to be my next choice of protector—” She raised a gloved hand to stave off his sputtered exclamation. “I am no more immune to gossip than you are, but if I were to leap into the boughs every time you went off to
woo Miss Burke—that’s where you were this morning, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Her father…my father, as well, are pressing me to have the banns read.”

She sighed. “You have them and I have Finella badgering me at every turn, and so we are caught in the crosshairs. So what ever are we to do? Spend our time with this ridiculous bickering? I don’t know why we aren’t using our precious time for what matters most.”

They rode in silence for a moment before he asked, “And that would be?”

Charlotte threw up her hands. “Our love! What the devil is wrong with you? Do you think me such a dolly-mop that I would be tempted away from you by the mere sight of diamonds?”

He gave her another one of those looks that spoke volumes.

“It doesn’t bother you to drink my wines—which are supplied by Lord Kimpton, or stay in my house, which was a gift from—” Oh, bother, that bit of history hardly mattered at the moment. She’d gained the house because Lottie had warmed another’s bed, and there was nothing she could change about that. “Well, from someone else.” She let out a frustrated sigh. “Do you love me or not?”

“Yes,” he ground out.

“Then why can’t you believe the same of me?”

“I do,” he said, so passionately that Charlotte’s heart stilled. “It’s just that—”

She stopped him with a single finger pressed to his lips. “Say no more. I know.”

Yet something changed. Beneath her the world shifted ever so slightly. Not as it had the day she’d made her
wish, but she knew she was precariously close to losing everything.

Oh, heavens, what had Quince said? She could go back? It certainly would make things easier for Sebastian. He’d marry Miss Burke and the Marlowes would be secure.

And she’d be…back at Queen Street, living with her mother and a staid and prudent Finella.

Charlotte let out the breath she’d been holding and watched the passing streets with eyes glassy from unshed tears. When they arrived at her house, Sebastian drew the horses to an abrupt halt.

“Lottie, I—”

She didn’t let him finish. Instead she moved into his arms and pressed her lips to his, sealing her fate to his. She couldn’t let him go, let go of this life.

No matter the consequences.

He returned her kiss, greedily, hungrily. Though they’d only been apart for a few hours after having spent the night making love until the wee hours, it was as if they’d been parted for a month.

She stretched closer to him, relishing the feel of his hands on her, his lips teasing her earlobes, the tingle of desire running down her limbs.

Give up this? Never.

“Is Finella at home?” he whispered into her ear.

She knew what he was asking and was only too eager to reply. “She was gone when I left. I think she planned on being out all afternoon with Kimpton.”

He growled happily, lustfully into her ear, “Shall we go inside? I would like to apologize for my boorish behavior with something a little more to your liking.”

“Oh, yes, please,” Charlotte said, her body aching to feel him naked, atop her, inside her.

They tumbled out of the carriage, dashing shamelessly hand in hand up the steps and through the door.

And into a scene of mayhem that spelled disaster.

“O
h, ma’am, I’m so glad yer home,” Prudence gasped. “She’s like to harm herself, she is.”

Charlotte gaped at the scene before her.

Finella lay sprawled on the stairs, a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other. A glass she was in the process of filling.

The hallway reeked of spilled brandy.

Her usually well-dressed cousin looked like a Seven Dials slattern, her face contorted, her gown disheveled.

“To Lord Kimpton,” she called out, raising her glass. Brandy sloshed down her sleeve. “May he rot in hell. I curse the day I let him put that miserable, little, shriveled—”

“Finella!” Charlotte snapped, stopping the woman’s drunken declaration before it slid completely into vulgarity.

She looked up, wild-eyed and sloppy. “Lottie! Come have a drink with me, my dearest child. Come drink to my unhappiness.” She teetered forward and looked about
to topple right down the stairs, given her state of intoxication.

Charlotte rushed forward and caught her before she landed in an ignoble heap. It took all her power to push the lady, who suddenly seemed to have gained another two stone, upright. “Finella, whatever is wrong?”

“Lord Kimpton, that miserable, rotten—”

“Yes, yes, I gathered all that,” Charlotte said. “What has he done?” She lowered her voice. “I thought you and Kimpton had an understanding.”

“An understanding!” Finella scoffed, filling her glass again. “What is an understanding when you have to make it with a man?” She started to tip the glass to her lips but stopped when she spotted Sebastian standing in the doorway. “All of them. They are all the same. Mark my words, Lottie, love matters not. They’ll toss you aside when you become inconvenient.” She threw back the brandy in a hasty toss. “Marry another.”

Her cold prediction sent a chill down Charlotte’s spine, and without even thinking, she caught hold of Finella’s glass and took it from her, setting it on the table well out of the lady’s reach.

“Give that back,” Finella protested. “And then leave me be.” Her head lolled back and forth, and for a moment she seemed to have passed out.

Charlotte turned to Prudence. “Whatever is wrong?”

“Lord Kimpton got married.”

“Married?” Charlotte glanced from Prudence over to her stricken cousin, everything suddenly making sense.

Prudence continued the sad tale. “Seems Mrs. Finella went over to see him. For their usual afternoon and all, and his butler sent her packing. Said her services were no longer required. The old blighter hadn’t even the decency
to come down and tell ’er ’imself. He was too busy upstairs with ’is new bride. Seventeen, she is and some cit’s by-blow.”

“Graddige’s daughter,” Sebastian supplied. “He’s made a fortune in shipping. Half the
ton
owes him favors. Kimpton more than most.”

“Oh, dear God,” Charlotte whispered. “Poor Finella.”

“Yes, yes, poor Finella,” her cousin said, rousing enough to cast a wild eye about the audience before her. “Poor me. He’s been promising me he would marry me for years. Oh, yes, Finella, I’ll marry you. Oh, my dearest Finny, I love you with all my heart,” she wailed. “Just waiting for his dear sainted mother to go aloft so he can make it all legal and then he goes and marries some child. He takes her over me because he owes that bitch’s father five thousand pounds.” Moving with a speed that belied her rare state, she caught hold of the brandy bottle and bypassed the glass, tipping it up to her lips and drowning her sorrows.

The rich amber liquid spilled sloppily down her cheeks, running in a thick stream down the front of her once pretty gown.

Charlotte sucked in a deep breath and knew not what to do.

“We need to put her to bed,” Sebastian said, stepping forward. He caught hold of the bottle clenched in Finella’s grasp and wrenched it free. Ignoring the woman’s spiteful complaints, he handed it to Prudence. “Hide this and then lock up the cellar.”

Prudence nodded and fled into the back of the house.

Sebastian leaned forward and in one swift motion, plucked Finella up into his arms.

“Leave me be, you bastard. You aren’t any better than
the rest of them. Full of promises and half-truths. But I know better, I know what you are. A liar. Like the rest,” she wailed, her hands beating impotently at Sebastian’s strong chest.

“Where to?” he asked, ignoring Finella’s caterwauling.

Charlotte couldn’t even look Sebastian in the eye as she said, “Her room would probably be best.”

He nodded and with very little effort carried the lady upstairs.

Finella didn’t go quietly. “I suppose you’ll toss me out as well, won’t you, Lottie? You don’t need me either. I know it. I’m nothing but an old woman. A sad old woman with nothing left.”

Her sobs cut Charlotte to the core.

“No, Finella. This is your home as well as mine. You will always be welcome here.”

“So you say, but I know better. I know you want to throw me out as well. I can see it in your eyes. You don’t love me any more than he did.” Finella gave into her sorrows, keening loudly. All too quickly her tears left a dark stain on Sebastian’s coat.

Charlotte hurried ahead, only to discover the lady’s room was in no better shape. It appeared she had taken her first course of wrath out there before she’d drowned the rest of her anger in the brandy bottle.

The stench of perfume filled the air, the result of a bottle having been thrown against the mirror over her dressing table. Broken glass lay on the floor, and clothes, bottles, trinkets, and other pieces of finery lay in heaps and broken piles.

“Oh, heavens,” Charlotte said, standing amidst the chaos.

Sebastian said nothing about the scene but carried the poor woman to her bed and gently set her down on the tangled sheets.

If there was anything to be thankful for, it was the fact that Finella had passed out and now lay snoring away.

“At least she has some peace,” Charlotte said.

“For the time being,” Sebastian agreed. “Best keep the key to the wine cellar well hidden. And have Prudence do a good search of the house to make sure Finella hasn’t more of that brandy stashed about. You know how she was last winter when she and Kimpton quarreled.”

Charlotte nodded but didn’t dare look at him. She kept her gaze fixed on Finella, wondering if she too would share the lady’s fate one day.

Broken and alone, no income and no protector.

She heard him shift from one uncomfortable foot to another.

“It’s probably best that I go—”

She glanced over her shoulder and nodded.

“I’ll call again soon.”

The words held a pall to them that chilled Charlotte’s heart. But before she could turn to him, find something to say to bridge this sudden awkwardness, he was gone.

Charlotte sighed, as much from the dark promise of Sebastian’s words as from the sight before her eyes.

Oh, poor Finella.
She retrieved the coverlet from the floor and lay it gently atop the older woman. “Whatever will become of you?”

Become of me…

Absently, she went to work setting the room to rights, not wanting the lady to awaken surrounded by the evidence of her rage and disappointment.

“Never you mind that wretched baron,” she told her. Stooping to pick up a hat that lay precariously in front of the hearth, Charlotte spied a letter beneath it.

Old and yellow, it caught her eye, and moreover, it sent a chill down her spine like a warning.

Leave it be
.

But she couldn’t. She picked it up and turned it over, reading the directions:

The house Finella had inherited from her parents, which had later become Charlotte’s home when Finella had taken her and her mother in after Sir Nestor’s death.

From its well-thumbed edges, Charlotte realized that this missive had come to her cousin before she’d become…well, before she’d turned into this ruined version of Finella.

Before Quince’s changes. Her fingers trembled.

How many times in this past fortnight had she wondered how it was that Finella had entered the trade, never mind had brought up her young cousin in the business as well. And why had Charlotte’s mother abandoned her to Finella’s questionable care?

Charlotte glanced around the room and realized this wasn’t the only letter. There was one sticking out from beneath the bed, two perched atop the mantel, several more littering the floor and a few more encircling the chair near the dressing table. Some were folded up like the one she held, but several of them had blossomed like spent flowers, their contents open for any prying eyes to see.

Charlotte tiptoed around the room and plucked them
up like wayward petals, clutching them in her still trembling hands.

For some reason she couldn’t help shake the notion that she’d seen these letters before. That Lottie knew their contents intimately, but those memories, like so many others, were still locked away in the ethers.

Yet here it was. She could wait for those recollections to reappear or…Taking a deep breath, she opened the first one.

She glanced over at Finella and laughed a little. It was hard to imagine either the staid and proper Finella or the blowsy and immoral Finny as any man’s “dearest little poppet.”

“Love letters, Finella? How I would love to tease you about such a sentimental secret, but I daresay it wouldn’t be very fair of me.” Charlotte smiled at the secret tidings. She certainly couldn’t imagine the blustery Kimpton using such a phrase.

So who was Finella’s secret admirer?

“No, I shouldn’t be doing this,” she whispered, determined to set the letters aside, when the rest of the opening lines caught her eye.

Charlotte set it down, suddenly feeling that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to be doing this. After all, she
wouldn’t have even been in Finella’s room if it hadn’t been for the lady’s grievous misfortune today.

Not to mention her own dilemma, she mused, as she glanced at the doorway through which Sebastian had fled.

“Perhaps,” Charlotte reasoned as she ever-so-slowly reopened the letter, “there is a lesson to be learned from Finella’s mistakes.”

She certainly didn’t want to live her life in such a hopeless state, so she continued to read…just a little past the more passionate passages.

Breeding? Charlotte’s hand went to her own flat stomach. How often had she and Sebastian been together?

She blushed to think of how many times they had made love. And up until now, Charlotte, naive and sheltered as she had been, hadn’t given a single thought to what might come of their unrestrained passions.

Charlotte shook her head.
No. Such a thing only happens to—

Those sorts of girls. To ladies of low character. To girls destined to become…

Courtesans.

This time she read with a bit more haste, feeling the web of Finella’s fate entwine with her own.

Charlotte’s heart skipped an odd beat as her gaze went unwittingly up to the date at the top of the letter.

The same year her father had died and her mother had found herself a young widow with a child on the way.

Had Finella been in much the same circumstances, though without the blessing of having had a husband first?

Charlotte searched for more answers and found one at the bottom of the letter, in the form of a single scrawled name.

Charlotte’s brow furrowed, and she continued to read William’s assurances, which had arrived for the next few
weeks, until she came to one dated the first part of April. Apparently William had still not returned and had written to explain.

A veil of tears rose up in Charlotte’s eyes. An undeniable sense of foreboding permeated every line.

You don’t love me any more than he did
. Finella hadn’t been talking about Kimpton…she’d been talking about this William. And she had to imagine it was this man who’d left Finny with her hard, and broken, heart.

Charlotte sorted through the letters quickly and realized she had read all of them.

But there had to be one more. At least one more. Surely William had come in time before Finella’s shame had been undeniable?

Charlotte paced around the room and even went so far as to get down on her hands and knees searching for the tiding that would reveal what she had to imagine Finella would never tell.

And then to her joy—and dread—she spied another
letter, hidden beneath a discarded and trod-upon hat. The plumes were bent, much as the letter was tattered and stained. Charlotte had no shame; she snatched it up and pulled it open.