The Harlot (12 page)

“Has Morag been letting you out?”

“No.” She was adamant in that. “Ask her if you do not believe me.”

“You really think I am going to quiz the servants about your activities?” He shook his head and stomped off, retrieving the port bottle from the mantel shelf. He sloshed the dark wine into glasses and pushed one across the table toward her.

She followed in his footsteps. “I am no more than a servant to you, and you are quizzing me.”

Once again she revealed her annoyance about being be
holden to him. “Indeed.” He pulled out a chair and sat. “But you are more trouble than you are worth. Perhaps I should have left you to rot in that tollbooth.”

The affronted look she afforded him made him laugh aloud.

Her eyes flashed angrily. “Where did you go today?”

Gregor lifted his brows. “You know where I went. To buy you clothes.”

“Did a woman help you?”

Lord, she was insatiable in her quest. “A seamstress, yes.”

A thwarted expression settled on her face.

Gregor threw back a swallow of his port.

Meanwhile, she paced about, and her luscious figure was outlined in the candlelight, forcing him to observe it. This squabble would only be settled by an apology on her side or a rough bout of carnal congress. Preferably both.

“Notice if you will that I answered you civilly when you quizzed me about my doings. You would do well to learn such manners.”

She cursed aloud, her annoyance obvious.

Gregor laughed at the irony. “You are the most contrary woman I have ever known.”

She alighted on that, but not in the way he might have expected.

“What about the women you have known?”

She truly was in need of something to think upon.

“Tell me about them,” she added as she drew to a halt in front of him. “I want to learn.”

There was such a demanding air about her that Gregor suddenly relished the prospect of telling her every sordid detail. “You want to know about the whores I have encountered?”

Her lips tightened and her eyes flashed angrily. “Yes.”

Inflamed by her challenge, Gregor put down his glass. “In that case, I'll tell you.”

He stood and snatched her into his arms, then thrust her toward the bed with one arm around her waist. Once there, he threw her down on the mattress, relishing the way her breasts spilled from her bodice when he did so. He put one knee on the bed beside her, pinning her there with his weight on her skirts. Steadying himself with one hand as he arched over her, he rubbed the other briskly over the mounds of her breasts as they spilled free.

Her eyes flashed with anger, but she put her hands flat on the bed. Her expression revealed her emotions. She had instigated this situation; now she would have to suffer it. Gregor smiled. He had never known such stubbornness in a woman. Even so, her nipples had crested and were delightfully peaked, and he could tell that the flush in her cheeks was brought on by desire as well as anger.

He threw off his coat and hauled his shirt over his head, tossing it aside.

Resentfully, she cast an eye over his bared chest.

“You see this?” He drew her attention to the small scar that ran down his left side.

As she peered at it, she nodded.

“I gained the wound in a knife fight in Morocco. The prize was a night with a dark-skinned beauty who had a talent for bringing a man off by stroking every part of his body with exotic oils, before mounting his oiled cock.”

Jessie writhed against the bed, her hands fisting.

“I won that prize, and enjoyed her immensely. In India I bought a whore who had pictures painted on her skin and precious stones studded through her ears, gems that dazzled me in the candlelight while I fucked her.”

Jessie cursed beneath her breath.

“In Italy I drank sweet wine from between a whore's cupped breasts, and ate succulent fruit from her cunt.”

Jessie twisted under him, looking at him as if she hated him.

“I have seen a dancer so agile that she could pick up with the plump lips of her puss the coins men offered her.”

“Such talent,” Jessie snapped, her voice ragged with emotion. “It is little wonder you have been abroad so long.”

Gregor laughed, his bad humor mellowing as the prospect of bedding her took hold. “There are temptations aplenty, I'll grant you that. Why, I have seen a woman charm a snake so thoroughly that it entered her cunt, offering its head and length to her, for her pleasure.”

“It is a wonder you came back here at all, with such lurid delights available!”

Despite her angry retorts, he could see that his diversions aroused her, too. She writhed against the mattress, her hands clutching at the surface, but when she looked at him he saw resentment in her eyes. Would he ever fathom this woman? The only thing he knew with any sense of conviction was that they both had to find release, and soon. His cock ached to mount her.

“Ah, but women are all different, Jessie, and some have so much more passion than others.”
And your passion becomes you so well.

He tweaked her nipple then, for he was more than ready to enter her. The need between them had swelled, and the way her body moved distractedly against the bed made him want to feel that movement more specifically, from inside.

She seemed to take that last comment particularly badly, however, for she turned her face away and he saw dampness on her eyelashes. Had he taunted her too much? That thought
made him pause, his mood leveling. But Jessie was rolling in a different direction.

She let out a frustrated cry and then grabbed at his hand, forcing it to rake over her breast. “Mark me,” she whispered. “Make me yours.”

Startled by the shift in her mood, he attempted to pull free. But she held on, pressing his hand against her.

Gregor fell silent, astonished by her strange behavior. Moving his fist to the front of her skirts, she pushed down on it, rocking her hips in a lewd motion. “Touch me, use me.”

The plea was anguished. “Put it in me,” she begged. “Fill me, please, make me feel that I am worth as much as them.”

Angry with himself for bringing her to this, he shook his head.

She clutched at his forearms. Her eyes shone with some crazed need. “Please, Gregor.”

The sight of her this way made his chest tighten, and it was a peculiar twisted sense of yearning that he experienced when he looked at her. “You are worth as much as them, Jessie. More.”

She looked at him from under her eyelashes as if she did not believe him. But it was the truth. There was a passionate fire in her that he had never found before. “I have never broken into a jail dressed as a minister for a woman, before I met you, Jessie Taskill.”

His words seemed to calm her and she swallowed her tears.

“Come now, what foolishness is this?”

“You have driven me to madness with your wild stories,” she accused, her expression most ashamed. “I need a man inside me because of it.”

“And you will have this man. That was always my purpose, my dear.”

She looked deep into his eyes, and he smiled and touched his finger to the end of her nose. “You asked, did you not?”

She nodded.

Gregor stood up, unlacing his breeches. “Lift your skirts. Open your legs for me and I will show you exactly where I want to be.”

She took a deep breath and then exhaled it shakily while she did as he instructed. Pulling up her skirts, she opened her legs to him, feet flat to the bed.

He was captured at first by the sight of her bared puss. Between the shadowy enclaves of her soft thighs her slit glistened enticingly. Her bud protruded, swollen and ruddy, and the plump lips invited him to pivot against her, right there in that most tender spot. She held her skirts in one hand, resting the other on the soft curve of her belly, fingertips against the place where soft dark hair feathered over her mound. He nodded toward it. “Show me more. Open yourself to me.”

Jessie moaned, and he could see by the rise and fall of her breasts that she was struggling with her needs. That knowledge made his ballocks ride high, ready for action. At that moment Gregor could think of no other woman he would more willingly claim. He took his cock in his hand, fist closed hard around the base, while he looked down at her.

The anticipation in her eyes when she looked at his erect length made his cock jerk within his grasp. The way her lips parted expectantly and the damp tears on her lashes glittered only made him want her more. Then she moved her hand and plied her folds open with her fingers, revealing her most intimate place to his eager gaze. How that dark, juicy opening captured him. The prospect of easing his rod inside its hot, tight grasp and stretching her open was all-encompassing. He climbed over her, staring down into her eyes as he directed his distended cock to her.

Her sweet furrow was sleek and ready and he worked his crown into her, watching her expression alter as he filled her. The stories he had told her had enflamed her all the more, for she cried out and her hot puss snatched eagerly at his length.

“Hellfire,” he whispered, and gave himself over to the over whelming need to drive and thrust into her. She clung to him, whimpering as he rode her, her hands stroking his shoulders and back, her body arching up from the bed. Her responses made him want to hold her in his arms all night long, and he would.

The sounds of her pleasured moans ran fever over his skin. She had locked her legs loosely around his hips, and their thrusts became faster. Each time he rubbed her deepest places her body bucked beneath his, rising to meet him. Gregor relished the grip of her muscles and the heated look in her eyes, and he marveled at how different she was from all those other whores. All those women had impressed him with their tricks and their diversions, and yet never had he found such passion, such sensuality as he did in this woman.

As he pressed home, driving them both over the edge and into the ecstasy of mutual release, that knowledge settled deep inside Gregor Ramsay. Whatever happened, he knew that he would never forget this woman.

 

Gregor awoke that night when she cried out in her sleep. Stirring, he glanced about to get his bearings. A stub of candle still flickered in its holder beside the bed, and he blinked and looked at the warm woman who nestled against his chest in slumber. He rubbed his face with his free hand. All was dark at the window. It was past midnight, but nowhere near dawn. He was about to settle down to sleep once more when her body stiffened against his and she cried out again. The sound
disconcerted him, for it was a mewling noise, like that of a distressed animal.

In the gloom he could see that she held her hands in loose fists, and her fingers furled and unfurled. Her eyelids flickered and her mouth opened. Bad thoughts had come upon her in her dreams. Should he wake her? He rocked her gently in his arms, and her body relaxed. She moved closer against him and seemed to settle in his embrace.

After a few minutes had passed her breathing grew more regular and peaceful. He decided against waking her. However, he could not return to sleep so easily, because he could not help wondering what it was that had disturbed her dreams.

When had she gained her title as the Harlot of Dundee? he wondered, and how long had she pleasured men in order to keep herself from starving? These were not things he had thought about before, but Jessie had kept hidden the unhappiness he had witnessed tonight. Even when she was in a fury with him she was neither afraid nor dispirited.

What had happened to her, and when had Jessie Taskill lost her innocence? Had it been stolen, or had she given it freely? She did not talk about her beginnings. As time went by, Gregor began to wonder about them.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING THEY WENT ABOUT
their ablutions and dressing in a cautious silence. Gregor saw that she was humbled and perhaps left somewhat tender by what had happened the night before, and he let her be. After they had breakfasted, she tidied the things and then stood up.

“How may I assist you today, Mister Ramsay? Have you a lesson in mind for me?”

Her demeanor was so different that he found himself amused by her efforts. But she had reverted to addressing him formally. He reached out his hand and drew her nearer to where he was sitting. She looked at him cautiously from under her eyelashes, as if she half expected to be admonished again. That was the last thing on his mind.

“I know I have been hard on you, Jessie, and that you are not used to being kept this way. But you have shown yourself willing, and you were a fast learner. I have great faith in you, and am sure that you will help me in my quest for retribution and justice.”

Her chin lifted.

“You had begun to call me by my given name. That was a liberty you took, but I have grown used to hearing it on your lips, and you may continue to do so.”

A smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Yes, Gregor.”

“That's better. Now, I have business to attend to today. But you are right. We should make use of the situation. There is little time to waste. Bring my boots and assist.”

With neither argument nor question, she darted off.

Gregor shook his head. She was a puzzle indeed.

When she returned, he instructed, “Your master has asked you to put on his boots and polish them. I want you to show me that you would do so willingly, eager to please, and that you will be devoted to your task. But you must find a way to lure his eye all the same.”

Jessie went about the job eagerly. She knelt at his feet and straightened his stockings. When she reached for the boots, her hips dipped and swayed and their curve was displayed to good effect.

“Please be lifting your foot now, sire,” she whispered, and looked at him from beneath her lashes as she did so.

Gregor restrained his amusement. With some vigorous tugging and no small amount of panting and wriggling, she got both boots on. Gregor stood up.

She remained kneeling at his feet, with her hands on her thighs, and stared directly up at him. Her face was close to the front of his breeches and he was reminded of their first encounter.

“I shall put a shine to them, sire, before you step out, if that pleases you.”

Gregor noticed how her eyes gleamed in the morning light. Her lips were dark this morning, the lower one damp and
inviting. His cock hardened, and he quickly gestured for her to continue, lest he request she do something else instead.

She is ready.
The thought occurred to him as he looked down at her. Yes, if he had been her master it would have been far too tempting to redirect the course of events.
Or have I lost all sense of judgment on the matter?

Gregor frowned at the waywardness of his thoughts.

Meanwhile, she hurried away and returned with a cloth, then set about producing a high gloss on his riding boots. Her breasts jiggled and she arched her neck, sweeping her hair back when it trailed down across the pale skin of her throat and collarbone. Gregor could think of nothing he wanted to do more than carry her back to the bed and lose himself between her thighs.

When she stood up, he mustered an appropriate response. “Very good, you have developed an appropriate and pleasing manner.”

“Thank you, Gregor,” she replied, with a demure smile. “I am so pleased that you believe I can seduce a man in the appropriate manner now.”

Gregor's attention hitched. Was there a teasing note in her voice? If so, he decided to ignore it. “I will be collecting your new garments today. Tomorrow, I want you to be ready to come out with me.”

“Come out?” she repeated, her expression delighted.

“Yes, tomorrow we will travel to my enemy's abode. We will not approach, but I want you to see it in order to be prepared for what lies ahead.”

She nodded, and he could see how much she longed to be out of these quarters.
Yes, that is what she wants,
he reflected. To be done with this and on her way, as did he.

When he looked at her upturned face, however, he found it difficult to move.

“If you are ready to leave,” she said, “I will go to my room.”

“Yes, do that.”

He watched as she left willingly. He should have been pleased by her agreeable behavior, and he assured himself he was, but he could not shake the notion that she did not stay in there anyway, and he might as well let her have the run of the place. She had taken liberties enough, though, and now that they were on an even keel he could not afford to let her become unruly again.

He followed her to the door.

She was seated on the cot, and when he nodded her way, she smiled.

For the first time, when he turned the key in the lock, Gregor felt incredibly guilty.

 

It was with a sense of achievement that Jessie realized she had made her way into his bed, and it had happened almost by accident. The night before had been a strange one indeed. He'd had a foul mood on him after the incident with Mister Grant, but what had passed between them later melted that away.

Their tumble had been most unusual, and as she thought back on it Jessie became wistful and lingered on the memory. She did not, however, want to linger on thoughts of how his talk of whores and exotic places had made her feel, and so she pushed that aside. It also bothered her that he did not seem convinced by her promises that she would not run away. Would she? No, she did not want to. She would earn her purse honestly, and then her journey north would be a comfortable one. Besides, she enjoyed being with him. What woman wouldn't?

Instead of thinking on the bothersome things, she stood by the window and thought about his promise to take her out
with him the following day. There would be new garments, too. Jessie was feeling so uplifted about it that she even decided she would be good and stay inside her room that afternoon.

As the hours ticked past, however, her old enemy, boredom, reared its head. She paced up and down, trying to resist the lure beyond the locked door.

When she turned at the window, she caught sight of Mister Grant's secret lover coming across the hilltops on the horizon. A striking figure he made, tall and burly, covering the ground easily with his long stride. Would he come up to Mister Grant's quarters, she wondered, or did Mister Grant meet him belowstairs? Curiosity got the better of her. She would not venture out, but she wanted to observe the fieldworker's arrival.

Moments later she had worked her magic on both the first lock and the second, and had the door to the landing slightly ajar so that she could see who came upstairs.

Impatiently she watched, bobbing her head. She thought she heard a sound nearby, and then another, and after a moment she opened the door a little wider to take a peek along the landing—just in time to see Mister Grant's door swing shut.

Surely he could not have got up here that quickly, and without her seeing? No. She shook the notion off. It was just the door closing. The two men had to be downstairs, perhaps chatting over a tankard of ale. Having determined that, she crept toward the top of the staircase, listening for voices below as she did so.

An uneasy sense of awareness crept over her. She paused.

Then she was grabbed from behind.

“I told you there was someone skulking about. I felt it yesterday and I heard something again on my way in.”

Struggling to break free, Jessie twisted around and saw that it was the fieldworker who had grabbed her. How had he got past her? It was not possible for him to cover the ground and
climb upstairs before she got to the door, no matter how fast his strides. Perhaps there was another entrance or stairway? But where?

Beyond him Mister Grant stood, an unhappy frown on his face. “Be careful with the girl,” he said.

The fieldworker continued to hold her, peering at her with a disgruntled expression. “What were you doing, lurking here?”

“I was doing nowt.” She managed to pull herself free, but it left her perilously close to the top of the stairs. The room began to spin. With a squeal she fell back into his arms.

“Sorry, sire.” She stepped away and straightened her skirts. Both men looked at her as if she were mad. “I was merely looking out for my…”
What was he supposed to be?
“Cousin.”

“It is true,” Mister Grant said. “She was with a man who has lodgings here. I saw them together yesterday.”

Wriggling her shoulders defiantly, she darted for her own doorway. “Yes, and he is due to return at any moment,” she declared.

Stepping inside, she quickly leveled her head enough to redo the spell, relocking the door, then returned to her room.

Impetuosity had got the better of her, as it so often did. As a result she had been seen out there, and if either of them was loose-tongued, Gregor might hear of it. That was bad, for they were on good terms now. Nevertheless, the likelihood of a secret entrance soon filled her mind, and she hurried to the window, pressing her cheek to the tiny panes of glass, peering out at the building.

After a moment she became aware of a presence. Gregor was standing beneath her window, arms folded, looking up at her with an accusing but wry smile.

She jerked away, biting her lip, and then chuckled. He had packages at his feet. It was with a rush of excitement that Jessie realized it must be the clothing he had promised her.