Page 9

Number 15, Rothsfeld Square

Alina McKenna was bored. Lord, who would have thought that the life of a courtesan was so tedious? There were more and more days when she would give anything for the frantic hither-and-yon of the opera house, to be back there, knowing that a line of gentlemen were at the stage door, just hoping for a glimpse of her. Of course, she hadn’t been a prima donna, and she’d had less attention than the leads, but even so…Her eyes softened, remembering a certain Hervey Bittle who gave her a pair of blush-colored gloves and took her for a ride around Hyde Park. It was rather sad to think that these days she would never wear such poorly made garments.

Which reminded her precisely of her own situation. Naturally Hervey Bittle couldn’t compete with a genuine earl, once Godwin had made it clear he was interested. All the other girls were mortified with jealousy, properly mortified. Especially when Rees whisked her off to his grand house on Rothsfeld Square and said she could have whatever she wanted in the way of new gowns, just as long as she’d sing for him when he wished. And bed him, naturally.

She brooded over that for a moment. He wasn’t the first gentleman in her life, although it was hard to know if Hugh Sutherland, back in Scotland, really counted as a gentleman. Probably not. He was the son of a butcher, and people had called him Cow when he was a boy. But Hugh grew up well enough to catch the eye of a bored vicar’s daughter longing to take her fine voice and flee to the city.

Ah well, Hugh was far in the past now. There was no need to wonder what her father would think of her now. He was surely praying every night for the safety of her soul, even without knowing she’d become a fancy woman. Lina pressed her lips together hard. She didn’t like to think of her mama crying, but life was what it was. She wasn’t made to live in that dreary old vicarage.

She glanced around her bedchamber. The only relief she had from the tedium of it all was when she summoned decorators. Perhaps she should change the appointments again. At the moment her bedchamber was hung entirely in blush silks, the color of the faintest damask rose. No, she’d leave it for at least a month or so.

She sat down at the dressing table, virtually the only piece of furniture left in the room from when Rees’s wife lived in the house, and dragged a brush through her already shining hair. She felt dreary, properly dreary. Rees did most of his writing at night, and so he refused to go anywhere, not to a concert, not to a ball, not even to Vauxhall. It must have been months since he had taken her out of an evening. She couldn’t go back and talk to the girls at the opera because she ended up feeling embarrassed by her circumstances, for all they envied her. And she missed it, oh, she did. All those cosy conversations about who had a pair of stockings without a run, and who had lost a garter on a dark night, and who might be chosen to sing….

Lina’s eyes darkened. He had taken her away from there. He could bloody well accompany her out the door.

Rees was in the sitting room, naturally. Lina walked in, distastefully aware of the papers brushing her ankles. It reminded her of walking down a street filled with rubbish. But Rees would no more allow one of those sheets of papers to be discarded than he would dress in a gown. The thought of burly Rees in a petticoat made her giggle and he looked up.

“Lina!” he said in that abrupt fashion he had. “Sing this phrase for me, will you?”

“Are these the words?” she asked ungraciously. “I trip through the green woods, all covered with dew. What is Fen thinking? That trip through is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to sing.”

“I don’t give a damn about the words, or what you think of them,” he said impatiently. “Just sing until you get to the end of the second page.”

“I don’t like the melody either,” she said with some satisfaction, a few moments later. “The way that line drops to a lower register is a disgrace. It makes me sound like a hymn-singer.”

Rees’s lips set. “I particularly like that section of the line.”

She was about to poke fun at the melody when she remembered that she wanted to go shopping. So she leaned against his shoulder instead. “Perhaps I sang it too quickly. Here, let me have another go.”

This time she gave it her best effort. And since Lina had a voice that rivaled that of Francesca Cuzzoni, the best operatic voice of the last century, her best was very good indeed. In fact, Lina pretty much thought that she could make any plunking old tune sound better than it really was.

He looked happier now, which was all to the good. “It’s lovely. I was wrong,” she cooed into his ear. “Rees, I should like you to accompany me to Madame Rocque’s French Trimming shop on Bond Street.”

He twitched away from her kiss and was scribbling on paper again.

“I’ll do whatever you wish…tonight,” she whispered throatily, leaning against him again.

This time he gave her a little shove. “I’m busy, for God’s sake, Lina. Go practice your tricks on someone else, will you?”

She narrowed her eyes. Madame Rocque made the most ravishing creations in all London but to Lina’s fury, she had discovered that if Earl Godwin did not accompany her to the modiste, she was treated like ditch water.

“I’ll sing the entire aria for you after we return,” she said, not bothering to add a throaty intonation. He hardly ever visited her bed anyway. In fact, it had been months since he darkened her bedroom door, now she thought of it. Rees’s skills in that area weren’t of a sort to keep a girl awake at night wondering where he was.

He didn’t say anything, just kept scribbling on his sheet.

“Three times,” she said. “I’ll sing that”—she swallowed the word stupid—“I’ll sing your lovely new aria three times, Rees.”

He shoved back from the piano and stood up with a sardonic look on his face. “Since I’m obviously not going to be allowed to work until you’ve gotten your way, we might as well go. Did you call the carriage?”

“How could I? Leke is nowhere to be seen,” she pointed out. Rees had a great deal of difficulty keeping servants. The butler, Leke, was the only servant who never left, but he kept his own hours and couldn’t always be found.

“Damn it,” Rees said elegantly, heading for the door.

Lina paused for a moment and very delicately, with just the tip of her rosy finger, pushed his score off the piano so that it drifted into the scads of trash wafting around her feet.

“Coming, dearest !” she thrilled, adding a little tremolo to give him a frisson. Because it hadn’t taken her long to realize that her personal accoutrements did nothing for Rees Godwin. The luscious body and suggestive glances that had reduced Hervey Bittle to a stammering fool hardly interested the earl at all. Witness the fact that she was living in his wife’s bedchamber as if she were a nun.

It was her voice that he had wooed from the opera house, and her voice was the only thing that he really wanted in his house. More fool she, to have been so blinded by infatuation that she didn’t notice.