Page 44

So much the better.

“I’m going inside.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you now? Even though it’s locked?”

She slipped the ribbon from under her dress. “I think I might have the key.”

Understanding flared in his eyes. “Interesting.”

The key from the cottage did not fit the lock. But the key that Miss Taunton had left for her “cousin” most certainly did.

The heavy wooden door creaked open. Flickering firelight welcomed them.

She ought to rein in her curiosity, her interest in the symbolic orchid. It was not seemly of Lady Clara. But here in the quiet midnight shadows glittering with rain, with Bram at her side, she suddenly could not bear to pretend.

The rain began to pelt, and they ducked inside.

The interior of the grotto was a stone hallway with arched openings leading into several chambers. Nude statues of Venus and frolicking nymphs and disconcertingly endowed satyrs escorted them by the light of torches. She imagined they were kept well lit during house parties such as this one. There were flowers in stone niches, fresh from the hothouse. It smelled of roses and incense and damp.

Clara wandered through the chambers, noting the raised daises, the beds and padded benches and baskets of ropes. The manacles secured to one wall, the iron lined with velvet. Her cheeks heated and she refused to glance in Bram’s direction. Butterflies invaded her belly even as her usual practical self began to take notes for future books.

She was going to be run out of London with the stories currently taking form in her head.

“There’s a smile I’ve never seen,” Bram murmured. He sounded very, very composed. Stoic, even.

“Bram?”

“Yes, Clara?”

“Why would Sybil leave me a key to sex caves?”

“I couldn’t say,” he replied, amusement lacing his voice.

“The marquis’s great-grandfather was a member of the Beggar’s Benison,” Clara said instead, as instructing and bracing as a governess. Miss Vinegar was a hard one to avoid. “I expect that’s why no one has made much of a fuss over this grotto. A quirky family thing, as it were.”

The Beggar’s Benison were a great deal more than quirky; rumors of their antics were infamous. Their full name was the Most Ancient and Most Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther—Merryland being the euphemism for a woman’s private flesh. They were said to share lewd songs amid posture girls posing for their pleasure, and to engage in group masturbation.

“Well, he is a marquis,” Bram pointed out drily.

“True.”

There was no denying that the marquis’s title offered him both privilege and protection. He could have the kind of secrets untitled or less-titled men could not. But she did not think they were here, in the grotto. He did not hide its existence beyond parlor tricks, and nor had his father or father’s father. It was either a brilliant cover-up or just another peccadillo. A sex club was hardly unusual.

Sex was nothing to be ashamed of, if you asked Clara. Absconding with women, on the other hand, ought to have him hung by his smalls in the town square. Or at Westminster, preferably.

Even a marquis could be brought low. His valet would know more than anyone else, but he was unlikely to talk to her. She would try anyway, but would focus on the maids at the Hall and the women in the village. Spinsters, dowagers, the innkeeper. Someone had to know something about the man.

She could have asked the butler.

Considering he was right here. In the sex caves.

With the valet.

“Damn and blast,” she muttered.

Bram was already moving, closing his hand over her mouth to silence her even as urged her into a small, curtained niche. It was just large enough to fit them both, her back pressed against his chest, his mouth near her ear.

Before she could react, before she could decide if she wanted to bite his fingers or suck them into her mouth, all options narrowed to one: stay pressed against each other in the darkness.