Ripe for Pleasure

CHAPTER 2   



Viola yawned and poured herself another cup of tea. She fingered the hot, aching mark that ringed her wrist. In a few days, she’d be sporting a blue-black bracelet where her rescuer had manacled her wrist.

It had been a long night, hours spent waiting for the night watchman to summon the constable and for poor Ned to be taken away. Viola shuddered and swallowed a mouthful of lukewarm tea. Her stomach protested, and she set the cup aside.

She’d paced and drunk tea and watched with slightly horrified fascination as her rescuer stepped into the breach. He handled absolutely everything with the swift efficiency of a man who was used to giving orders, all the while giving every indication that he’d much rather be doing anything but helping her.

There were now a handful of hulking footmen guarding the house, and the hall had been cleaned by a swarm of women who’d arrived from his own home along with the footmen. He’d sent her own maids back to bed, an act of kindness that she couldn’t easily dismiss.

It was fascinating. He was fascinating.

Lord Leonidas Vaughn. The Corinthian with the mismatched eyes. One blue, the other green, and both of them cold as the North Sea in February. Viola knew exactly who he was. One of the Mad Vaughns. The second son of the Duke of Lochmaben.

His grandfather was renowned for having intentionally burned down an entire wing of the family seat in a fit of rage, his father for kidnapping his bride from the steps of the church as she was arriving to wed someone else. And only last year, one of his cousins had been tried for the murder of his valet. He’d been acquitted, but all the same… There were rumors and stories of the Vaughn family’s quirks and indiscretions going back to their knightly ancestor who had supported Queen Eleanor against her husband, Henry I.

Viola had been close enough on several occasions to judge those mismatched eyes for herself, but she’d failed to find them as arresting as the rest of London. Not until tonight, when she’d run headlong into him, while wearing just this side of nothing. Suddenly she’d been transfixed, for his famously frigid gaze had been anything but cold.

Viola stretched until her joints strained and her elbows popped. There was no point in dwelling on those eyes of his. He was notorious for never having kept a mistress, a fact much bemoaned among the ranks of the fallen, and she had neither time nor use for cicisbei. Only the money from her memoirs stood between her and debtor’s prison, and the payment she’d received for the first volume was very nearly gone. But the offer she’d secured for the second volume would keep her in coal and lobster patties for years to come…


She wasn’t an actress, couldn’t sing or dance—at least not well enough for a career on the stage—and at seven-and-twenty, her days as one of the reigning belles of the fashionable impures were behind her. It was time to make do or suffer the lot of so many other fallen women: the slow slide down into common whoredom. A decline from which recovery was impossible.

Viola knew what she was, and she didn’t regret the choices that she’d made, but she’d be damned if she’d let the sacrifices be for naught. She’d prepared so carefully, planned so thoroughly—and had been ruthless enough as she did so to earn the enmity of more than one man—only to see everything swept away by a few investments that had turned out badly and the actions of one petty baronet.

When Sir Hugo had discovered her working on the chapter about their time together, he’d stormed from her house and never returned. He’d even stopped the annuity that had been a part of their contract. Did he think she wouldn’t find a way to avenge herself? That dropping her in such a way would somehow improve what she wrote about him? He was a very foolish man if he did.

She picked up the head of her smashed figurine and turned it over in her hands, watching the light play off the opalescent glaze. The last remnant of her girlhood. A gift from her father only days before she’d eloped… She set it in the saucer of her cup and rose to pace toward the window. It really wasn’t worth mourning.

If she was going to indulge in that particular emotion, she had far more valuable losses she could contemplate: love, innocence, and reputation, all gone in one fell swoop. Viola swallowed a mouthful of air, pushing the faces that swam up from the recesses of her memory back where they belonged. Back where she kept them carefully partitioned and locked away.

Viola twitched back the curtain. A cloudless blue sky and a stream of sunshine greeted her. A small herd of sheep rambled down the street, their young shepherd marching beside them. A glossy coach pulled by four bays rattled past in the other direction, the livery of the footmen bright against the dark finish of the coach.

Just another May morning. Everything seemingly the same as the day before. Perfect. Beautiful. Unbearable.

A loud rap on her door made her jump. She turned to find Lord Leonidas framed in the doorway, his head nearly scraping the lintel. It was as though her house was simply unable to contain him. How had she never noticed that he was so tall?

His disordered hair was a deep auburn in the sunlight; strands escaped his queue and hung down at the temples. In candlelight, it was merely brown. It made her almost sick how badly she wanted to tuck those stray bits back into place, just to have an excuse to touch him.

His expression held both lust and revulsion, and not a little bit of self-loathing. An intriguing mix, as though he were aware of the contradiction. Men were usually so much clearer about their wants and needs, and they so rarely bothered to be squeamish or apologetic about them. To want, to lust, to need, that was enough for them. And Viola liked it that way. It made them so much easier to manage.

Leo paused before entering Mrs. Whedon’s boudoir, a sudden stab of lust burning away exhaustion. She’d pulled a flowery dressing gown over her wisp of a nightgown, but the sun blazing through the open window outlined her long limbs and trim waist perfectly through the thin cloth. Light filtered around the curve of her breasts and sparked her hair into a blaze around her head and shoulders. A Botticelli goddess without the half shell.

She dropped the curtain, and the room plunged into semi-lit darkness. She became merely an extremely beautiful woman, rather than something approaching the celestial.

Thank God for that.

“So what am I to do now?” Viola stepped toward him, and the whole room seemed to shrink.

“Go to bed, ma’am.”

Her mouth quirked up, mocking him, as though she knew it was all that he could do not to beg to join her. As well she should, practiced coquette that she was. She could probably smell lust halfway across town. It was her stock in trade after all, no different from a tailor knowing the hand of his cloth.

“Practical advice, my lord. Will you be taking it yourself?”

Leo’s mouth went dry. Was that an invitation or a taunt? His cock twitched, clear about what answer it wanted.

“Yes, ma’am,” he ground out. “I was only stopping to take my leave. I’ll return this afternoon to await the arrival of Mr. Addison’s men.”

One elegantly straight brow arched as she stared him down, blue eyes unblinking. There was a stillness about her that was fascinating, reminiscent of a doe as the baying of hounds washes over her and she takes stock of her options before erupting into flight. It made it hard to look away from her. Impossible really.

Leo caught himself and yanked his wandering mind away from her. He was tired. That was all. He was tired, and sleeplessness always bred fantasies and gave luster to otherwise mundane objects. She couldn’t possibly be as beautiful as she looked at that moment. No woman could.

Annoyed with himself, Leo nodded, turned on his heel, and left. If he stayed a moment longer, he’d tumble into bed with her, and falling under Mrs. Whedon’s spell was the last thing he could afford to do.