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‘Go home to that garret?’ he asked, swinging round. ‘To scrape a living working long hours while your fingers are still nimble and your eyes sharp? And then what? Where will you be in ten years, Nell? Twenty?’
‘I will manage. I must. Thousands of women have to.’ Nell tried to keep the desperation out of her voice, not to listen to the little voice, the one that kept her awake at night, the one that murmured about insecurity and poverty and a slow slide into destitution. You are all alone, it would insist. All alone.
‘There are alternatives,’ Marcus said.
‘Domestic service?’
‘You are an attractive woman. If you were not so thin, not so anxious, you would be a beautiful one.’ There was a note in his voice that reached inside her, a hint of husky desire that twisted a hot ache low in her belly.
‘You suggest I should sell my body?’ she demanded harshly.
‘Find yourself a protector.’
Nell made herself meet his eyes, her chin up. ‘Are you offering me a carte blanche, my lord?’
‘Perhaps.’ He moved closer, almost touching her knees. Nell gripped the edge of the chest and fought with herself.
Marcus Carlow was strong and powerful. He would protect her—for as long as she was his mistress. He would be generous, and if she was prudent, she could save. He was attractive. Oh God, so attractive. And that is why you are giving even a second’s thought to this insanity, she argued with herself. You are discussing selling your body, putting yourself in a man’s power. Ruining yourself.
But she was so tired of being alone, of fighting every day for food and respectability and some semblance of a decent life. ‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why me? I thought you had a new mistress.’
‘Not yet.’ Marcus moved a little closer, his thighs pressing against her knees as she perched on the high chest. ‘Why? I wish I knew. I tell myself I do not trust you and yet I read more fear than cunning in your eyes. You are too thin, you throw out no sophisticated lures to attract me—and yet, when I have kissed you, there has been a spark of such fire in you that I am in danger of burning up.’
As she stared back into the intent, dark gaze, her throat tight, her heart banging against her ribs, he nudged his leg between her knees, parting them. And then he was standing between her thighs, the heat of him soaking into her trembling limbs, the scent of his body filling her senses, the breadth of his torso filling her sight.
‘There is a kind of purity about you, Nell,’ he murmured as he lifted his hand to run the back of it down her cheek. She shivered, turning her face against his knuckles, trying to control her breathing as a primitive pulse began to beat where the heat of his body met the aching warmth of hers.
Purity. He thinks me a virgin. I can’t… I want him. Is this so wrong if I want him? But I must tell him.
‘Marcus.’ His hand slid round to cup her chin, turn her face up to him. ‘There is something… I am not a virgin.’
For a long moment he stood quite still, then he flung himself away from her, leaving her shivering with the sudden withdrawal of his heat. ‘Then I was right. You are his mistress.’ There was a curious kind of bitterness in his voice and, keyed up to tell him what had happened, she was thrown off balance.
‘Whose mistress?’ Then she saw what he was thinking. ‘You believe I am his whore? Salterton’s whore.’
‘Don’t use that word.’ Marcus swung round, his face dark with anger. ‘Don’t ever use that word of yourself.’
‘Why not?’ Nell slid off the chest, jarring her heels as she landed on the bare boards. ‘It is what you think, what you would make me, is it not? Or are you too much of a hypocrite to face it? You leap to conclusions, accuse me on no evidence, cannot wait one moment to let me explain—but of course, you are disappointed so you make wild accusations. You want a virgin, don’t you? That’s what men always want, after all.
‘Well, I am not a virgin, so you can go back to your expensive, skilled mistress and make her an offer and enjoy her expertise and her practised tricks. Not as titillating as fear and screams and pain, but I am sure it has its satisfactions.’
‘Nell, for God’s sake!’ Marcus reached for her as she stood there, panting with anger and the terrible relief of pouring it all out at long last. ‘Nell, come here.’
‘No.’ She lashed out at him, hitting his face more by luck than intention. They stared at each other as the sound of the slap echoed against the carved panelling of the little room, his eyes so wide she could see her own tiny reflection in them. ‘No.’
Fear and screams and pain… The words buzzed in his head, more painful than the sting of Nell’s fingers on his cheek or the ache of unsatisfied arousal in his groin. She had been forced? Had the ferocity with which she had fought him in the carriage, the rejection in the Long Gallery, had those been terror and not the sudden recollection that she was betraying another lover?
‘Hell!’ he said out loud into the empty room as the echoes of the slammed door died away. What had he done? But he knew. He had raked up a past that was agony to her. He had offered a sexual relationship when that was the last thing she needed. In his male arrogance he had crowded her with his body, his strength, blocking her escape, reminding her, inevitably, that he had the power to do with her what he wanted.
Marcus strode to the door and then stopped. Nell did not need him pursuing her all over the house. She needed, he was certain, another woman to talk to and there was no one here but strangers she could not trust. As he had shown her she could not trust him.
Nell ran up the stairs, scrubbing at her face as if she could stop the tears by brute force. Damn him! Now he knew what had happened to her and he would despise her for it. It was always the woman’s fault, of course, the woman who was ruined as a result.
By dint of sheer willpower, she stopped crying, got the hiccupping sobs under control and looked around. She was somewhere on the first floor, but in her distress she had missed the turn to the wing where her bedchamber was and now she was lost. The old house rambled like a living organism. Passages led off from corridors, doors might open onto chambers or stairs or more corridors. Small flights of steps appeared for no apparent reason.
At random she opened a door and found herself in a small library. There was a desk in the window, a fire in the grate and a pleasant smell of apple-wood smoke and leather. A book—that would help her compose herself. Nell walked across and began to examine the shelves, taking slow breaths as control returned.
It was a very masculine selection, she decided, opening a copy of the Racing Calendar for 1810 at random, then replacing it. Heavy bound editions of the Classics did not tempt her either. There was a glass-fronted bookcase on one wall. She tried the handle as she peered in. Locked. The books inside did not seem particularly valuable: a row of matching volumes, each with the date in gilt on the spine. Diaries, she supposed.
