Vanity (47 page)

A smudge of dirt adorned her nose and her cheek. And her nails were encrusted with grime.

She put down a basket and a cloth-wrapped bundle and grinned at him. Putting her hands on her hips she twirled in a swirl of orange skirts and dirty petticoat. “Don’t I make an excellent tavern wench?”

“Hell and the devil, Octavia!” he exclaimed. “What is this?”

“I thought you should have two different female visitors,” she explained. “One will be the mysterious veiled
lady, and the other will be the tavern wench. That should confuse them nicely, don’t you think?”

He shook his head in disbelief, but before he could say anything, Amy reappeared with the razor, soap, and a jug of hot water. She too stared at Lord Nick’s visitor. But with an air of unfriendly suspicion.

“Who’re you?”

“A friend of Lord Nick’s,” Octavia said haughtily. “If it’s any business of yours, girl.”

“’E’s my gennelman,” Amy said, her mouth pursing. “An’ ’e don’t need the likes of ye lookin’ after ’im. This is my area, an’ I’ll thank’ee to keep out of it.”

“I’ve every right to visit the prisoner,” Octavia declared, twitching her nose as if at a bad smell. “You’re ’is servant, an’ I’m his friend. So I’ll thank
you to
remember that. Put them things down by the bath an’ be on yer way. We’ll call if we needs anythin’ else.”

Amy puffed out her chest and tossed her head, obviously preparing to launch into a stream of invective. However, Rupert, struggling with laughter, interposed himself between the two of them.

“Thank you, Amy,” he said warmly. “I’m most grateful for your help. I know I’ll be relying on you a great deal from now on.”

Amy bridled and cast the highwayman’s visitor a glowering look of triumph. “I’ll be ’ere whenever ye needs me, sir,” she said. “Not like visitors what ’ave to go away.”

“Just so,” he said, ushering her to the door.

With a final toss of her head in Octavia’s direction, Amy left. Rupert closed the door behind her and stood leaning against it, regarding Octavia with eyes brimming with laughter.

“I suppose it’s ridiculous to be surprised at what an actress you are.”

“Of course,” she said matter-of-factly. “You know what an actress I am. Haven’t we been on stage ever since we met?”

“I suppose we have. But the play’s over, Octavia.”

She shook her head. “Nonsense. Now, come and have
this bath. I’ve brought you clean clothes, laudanum, arnica, all your toilet articles. So you may be quite comfortable until we can find a way to get you out of here.”

Her mouth had a stubborn line, and there was something in her voice that told Rupert it would be pointless to argue with her. If it helped her to believe that something could be done, then who was he to disabuse her? She would face the reality soon enough.

“You seem to have thought of everything,” he said neutrally.

“Yes, I believe I have.” She smiled and came over to him. “Now, you don’t have to do anything. Let me look after you.”

She gently eased his torn coat off his shoulders. Deftly, she removed his waistcoat and unbuttoned his shirt. As she opened his shirt, a little cry of dismay broke from her at the purpling bruise across his ribs.

“What did they do to you?”

“Oh, they amused themselves a trifle,” he said. “But I’m not made of glass, sweeting.”

“No,” she agreed, pushing the shirt off his shoulders. “But if I could get my hands on them, I’d cut out their cowardly hearts!” She glared fiercely up at him, her hands spanning his narrow waist. “Chicken-hearted bullies!”

“Very true,” he agreed, smiling at her fierceness, feeling his depression lifting under her vital presence.

Her hands were busy at his waist, unbuckling his belt, unfastening his britches. She pushed them down his hips together with his woolen drawers, then gave him a little push backward onto the bed. “Sit down.”

“This is not the most seductive disrobing I’ve been subjected to,” he grumbled, sitting on the edge of the bed as she bent to pull off his boots. “You’re behaving more like a nurse than a lover.”

Octavia looked up from her task and smiled, her tawny eyes clearly showing her relief that he was entering the spirit of her visit. “Wait,” she promised. “That’ll come all in good time.”

“Oh, good,” he said with a mock sigh of satisfaction,
stretching out his legs so that she could pull his britches and drawers clear of his feet.

“Now, get in the tub,” Octavia said. “Ah, here are those men with the other jugs.”

She went to the door and greeted the arrival of her two laborers with a cheerful vulgarity that sent Rupert’s eyebrows into his scalp. Octavia had clearly not wasted her time in Shoreditch.

He lowered himself into the steaming water and groaned with a mixture of pleasure and pain as the heat stung his scratched and abraded skin. Resting his head against the rim, he let his feet dangle over the far edge of the tub.

Octavia closed the door firmly on the departure of the water carriers and came over to him, struggling with two heavy cans.

“I can wash your hair now,” she said briskly, kneeling beside the tub, hefting one of the cans. “Sit forward and put your head back.”

Rupert complied, closing his eyes as the warm water washed over him. He felt as if he were back in the nursery, being attended to by his nursemaid, and the idea both amused him and relaxed him.

Octavia’s hands were gentle on his scalp, but they were clever as they massaged and stroked. He found himself remembering how he’d once attended to her in the same way, soothing her tension. His fingers twitched, remembering in their nerve endings the suppleness of her skin, the lithe, slender body rippling beneath his hands.

“You seem to be enjoying this,” Octavia commented casually, her hands sliding down his body to the jutting evidence of his enjoyment.

He groaned with soft pleasure, his flesh pulsing between her caressing hands. “I’d enjoy it more if you’d take your clothes off,” he murmured plaintively.

Octavia smiled and leaned over the bath to kiss him, her lips brushing over his mouth, her tongue darting across his cheeks, over his eyelids, her eyelashes fluttering against his forehead.

Sitting back on her heels, she unlaced her bodice and pushed it off her shoulders. The straps of the grimy petticoat followed; then, bared to the waist, she knelt and reached for the soap. She lathered it between her hands as she leaned over him. Her rounded breasts hung like peaches above his mouth, and he captured a nipple between his lips, stroking with his tongue, grazing delicately with his teeth while she soaped his neck with long, seductive strokes.

His hands slipped down her rib cage to the bunched material at her waist. “Take the rest off,” he directed, drawing his tongue up through the deep cleft of her breasts in a hot, languid sweep.

Octavia smiled, fumbled with a hook and wriggled out of the gown and petticoat. “Better?” She knelt upright so he could see her body, naked down to midthigh and the top of her gartered cheap cotton stockings.

“Much!” Taking a firmer grip of her waist, he yanked her over the edge of the tub, sending water slurping over the oak boards as she landed on her knees astride him in the narrow bath.

“Oh, now you’ve soaked my stockings!” she exclaimed in feigned annoyance.

“You should have taken them off,” he responded coolly, encircling her neck with his hands, his thumbs stroking the fast-beating pulse at her throat. His eyes narrowed abruptly, the amusement dying out of them.

“I’ve missed you, Octavia. More than I can describe.”

“And I you,” she said, caressing his face with her fingertips. “I so much wanted you to sweep my miseries aside. To compel me to forgive you. And yet I knew I wasn’t giving you the slightest opening. But I couldn’t help myself.”

“It was a loathsome thing to do,” he said. “My only excuse lies in the past.”

“And you still won’t tell me?”

He shook his head, but his eyes darkened with that pain and anger she now recognized.

“It’s a tale I must carry to my grave, Octavia. There’s
no way to redress the wrong now. And nothing to be gained by passing it on.”

Her own eyes flashed. “You are wrong,” she stated flatly. “You have never been more wrong, Rupert Warwick.”

Before he could say anything, her mouth fastened on his in a kiss of such desperate hunger that he was engulfed in the power and passion of her conviction. His own certainty of the hopelessness of the present and the future dissolved under the sweeping wave of her need and the force of her will.

Her hands were hard on his shoulders as her tongue drove into his mouth, drinking his sweetness, devouring, possessing with all the fervor of a vampire in agonized need of his life’s blood. Her lower body moved sinuously over his loins, her thighs parting as she captured his erect flesh in the throbbing cleft of her body. She lowered herself onto him without releasing his mouth, and he pressed deep within her as she rose and fell against him, her nails scribbling against his skin, her teeth nipping his hp.

He had no active part to play in this. Octavia was loving him with all the possessive, driving need of a long-deprived lover, and he lay still beneath her orchestration, his body thrumming with pleasure as her own was on fire, her wet skin searing his, her hungry words of earthy sensuality rustling against his ear.

She raised her head and he looked up into her face, transfigured by desire and its growing fulfillment. Her skin glowed translucent, her eyes were huge with wonder, her lips hungrily parted. She ran her tongue over her lips, then bent and licked the salt sweat that beaded his forehead.

“I want you,” she whispered. “God, how I want you.”

She surged above him, her hips moving rapidly with each thrust that drove him deeper and deeper inside her. And when he touched her womb and her eyes widened as the explosion of glory grew ever closer, she said fiercely, “I will not let you die, Rupert.”

And then her body convulsed around him and he was devoured in her fires, swept into dissolution on the tidal
wave of her passion, and her words flew away like torn scraps of paper in a tornado.

Until the tide receded and the fires went out. And then he heard them again, whispered against his ear. He had no answer for her, and Octavia didn’t ask for one.

She lay beached upon him in the rapidly cooling water, her heart slowing, matching the rhythm of his, beating against her breast. Then she pushed herself up onto her knees and laughed down at him, her expression so light and easy, her eyes so full of amusement and the glow of fulfillment that he wondered if he’d imagined the intensity of those whispered words.

“There, now. Isn’t that a wonderful cure for bruises?”

“None better,” he agreed, grasping her hips firmly. “And perfectly appropriate behavior for a tavern wench.” His hands slipped behind to pat her bottom. “But not, I fear, for the veiled lady.”

“Oh, I daresay she’ll be making very few visits,” Octavia said airily, moving her backside seductively against his palms. “Only enough to create a degree of mystery.”

“Hop out,” Rupert said, releasing her with a final pat. “Before young Amy comes in and starts fussing.”

“Jealous child, isn’t she?” Octavia observed, clambering dripping from the tub. “Now, where did I put the towels? … Oh, here they are, still in the basket.”

She drew out a thick white towel and wrapped it efficiently around herself before holding up a second. “Come, my lord. Allow me to dry you and anoint your bruises.”

Smiling, he stepped out in a shower of drops and stood obediently as Octavia rubbed him dry, walking all around him with a little frown of concentration as she blotted the water from his skin and then smoothed arnica on the livid bruising.

“How about here?” she murmured mischievously, her hands sliding down over his belly. “I’m sure a little here would be beneficial.”

Rupert grasped her wrists and held them away from him. “Mercy, Octavia! I need some recovery time.”

“Pshaw!” she said scornfully. “Since when?”

“Since I was worked over by a trio of hefty barbarian bullies,” he declared.

Octavia was instantly contrite. “Oh, poor sweet, how thoughtless of me.”

She hurried over to the bundle she’d brought with her. “See, I have here clean linen and your riding clothes. I thought you’d be more comfortable in buckskins, rather than anything more formal.”

“I’m not expecting an invitation to St. James’s Palace, certainly,” he agreed wryly, taking the bundle from her.

Octavia looked as if she was about to say something; then she closed her lips firmly and bent to pick up her own discarded garments. There was silence for a minute as she peeled off her soaked stockings.

Rupert buttoned his shirt and tucked it into the waistband of his britches with a sigh of relief. Clean clothes had a most amazingly revivifying effect, he reflected. Although, of course, he probably should put his present sense of well-being down to rather more than a new wardrobe.

He glanced at Octavia, who was slipping her bare feet into the wooden clogs. She looked up quickly, feeling his eyes on her, and smiled.

“You look much more yourself.”

“I feel much more myself,” he agreed, passing a hand over his chin. “And once I’ve shaved, I shall be completely restored.”

“Ben said he’d come to see you. He said Bessie would be bound to load him with victuals and other goodies for you.”

She perched on the broad windowsill, idly swinging her legs, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her back, as he lathered his face and applied the razor.

“He’s taking it very hard,” she added.

Rupert made no reply. He knew how Ben would be feeling. The tavern keeper had lost two of his closest friends to the hangman in February. Gerald Abercorn had been almost a brother to him. To face the loss of another dear friend would be dreadful to endure.

Octavia looked over her shoulder, down into the pressyard.
The scene had an anarchic air to it, and it was almost impossible to tell those prisoners without irons from their friends, families, or the various shopkeepers who moved among them with their wares. Surely, it ought to be possible to smuggle one man out in the melee?