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Rosalind rose from his lap and he slapped her bottom playfully; she laughed and danced across the room into the arms of a fellow actor. Blake leaned back in his chair until his head rested against the wall. He lifted his glass to his lips and drank deeply of the English whiskey, wishing it was scotch. He’d had quite a bit to drink. Enough. He was tired, tired of the party, of Rosalind and her vulgar friends. He wanted to go to bed, but that would mean returning to the Mayfair town house, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that.
Beyond the wall he leaned against, he could hear that there was another dinner party going on. He could hear the rattle of dice, the clink of glasses and boisterous male laughter. He could also hear the voices of women.
He kept thinking he heard Sapphire Fabergine’s voice. He thought he heard her husky laughter, and when he closed his eyes, he could feel her mouth on his. God, he really had had too much to drink.
He opened his eyes, sat up and set his glass on the table as he stood. That little fortune-seeking strumpet was invading his thoughts too often and he found it worrisome. All these years he’d managed to keep any woman from getting under his skin—why this one?
“Where are you going, Blake?” Rosalind called out to him when she saw him walking toward the door. She tried to escape the arms of her dance partner, but he held her tightly, pressing his lips to her breasts bared by the low-cut bodice of her gown.
“Home.”
“Don’t you want to come home with me?” she asked, pursing her rouge-stained lips. “Worn you out, have I?” she teased loud enough for several of her companions to hear her.
They chuckled.
Blake offered a perfunctory smile. “Precisely. Thank you. Good night.” Grabbing his coat and hat from a hook near the door he slipped out onto the stair landing. He glanced down the hall in the direction of the lute music and the voice he kept thinking was Sapphire’s. He couldn’t hear her now; maybe it had been his imagination.
At the very end of the dimly lit hall was a small table with a middle-aged man and woman seated at it, their backs to him. He frowned and turned away as he punched his arms into his coat sleeves. They ought to know better at their age. There was no such thing as love—anyone with sense knew that. There was only lust.
Blake lowered his top hat to his head and started down the narrow back staircase. Hearing someone approaching from below, he attempted to move to the side, but the stairwell was narrow. He could tell it was a woman from the sound of her light footsteps. A woman in heeled slippers. Another actress or orange girl, probably. They’d been coming and going with men all evening.
At the landing halfway between the upper rooms and the main room over the tavern, the staircase turned sharply and Blake nearly collided with the woman skipping up the steps.
“I…”
One green eye. One blue. She stared up at him, as shocked to see him as he was to see her. Her cheeks were flushed and her lips rosy, her hair slightly tousled as if she’d been dancing…or kissing. It had been her voice he’d heard.
Sapphire found herself staring up at Blake Thixton, breathless, her heart pounding. She tried to step back to put space between them, but on the small landing there was no place for her to go. He was holding both of her forearms tightly—she could not escape him.
“Why wouldn’t you accept the letter I sent to you?” she demanded, feeling her cheeks burn. “You have to give me a chance to explain my situation to you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do! I am Sapphire Thixton, daughter of—”
With a quick movement, he covered her mouth with his hand, turning her so that her back was pressed against the wall of the stairwell.
She wanted to scream when she felt his weight against her, his whole hard, lean body molding to hers. He held her immobile against the wall, taking his hand from her mouth only long enough to kiss her savagely.
Sapphire tried to push against him with her free hand but there wasn’t enough space between them; with his body pressed so intimately against hers, she couldn’t get any leverage. She tried to call out, but he only kissed her harder, forcing her mouth open with his tongue.
She thought she was going to faint, but at last he slid his mouth from hers, only to draw it along her cheek to her ear.
“What’s the matter?” he murmured. “Those tiresome fops good enough for you, but I’m not? I’m wealthy enough to buy and sell them all, damn it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she panted, turning her face away from him.
“I think you do. I saw you tonight at the theater, flirting with those men, strutting your wares before them. I heard you upstairs laughing. Really, Sapphire, all those men, what do you do, move from lap to lap?”
Sapphire stiffened and turned to stare at him. “What is it to you?” she demanded, feeling her eyes blaze with hatred for him. “Now let me go,” she ordered. “Let me go, or—”
“Or what?” His voice took on a teasing tone. His breath smelled of scotch. She could still taste it in her mouth. “What will you do to me, Miss Fabergine? Make me kiss you again?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “Let me go. Someone will come looking for me and then—”
“And then they will see this for what it is. You’ve been upstairs all evening with a bevy of male suitors. You and I are doing nothing you weren’t already doing upstairs with them.”
She tried to breathe deeply, tried to slow her pounding pulse. “I can assure you those men are all too kind, too gentlemanly to take advantage of a women in that way.”
