AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER7
“Jeremy, you do not seem yourself.”
“What? What makes you say that?”
“For starters, you are barely taking part in this card game.” As Stephen tossed more betting chips into the center of the table, Jeremy lowered his cards to the wood, uninterested in the game. With raised eyes, he looked around the gambling hall, thinking of why he had come.
It had been two days since Sophia had come to see him in the middle of the night and they had lost themselves in passion. That meant it had also been two days since he hadn’t stopped thinking of that moment.
What is wrong with me? Usually, one moment of passion is enough for me to be free of temptation!
When Stephen had invited him to the gambling hall, he had seen it as the perfect opportunity to escape from his thoughts. This darkened room offered many pleasures. Between the candlelight that hovered over the other tables, men gambled, others drank to great lengths until they were in the cups, and courtesans walked back and forth. It was hardly the most formal of gentleman’s clubs, but it helped tonight.
“Jeremy? You out again?” Stephen asked, urging Jeremy’s attention back to the table.
“You play on, Stephen. I have had enough for tonight.” As Jeremy stood to his feet and moved away from the table, he saw Stephen was not disappointed for long. In the shadowy room, he was quickly drawn back into the game with the others at the table, so much so that Stephen was in danger of seeing all the money he had so far amassed disappearing to nothing.
Jeremy walked away from the table, finding the gambling was not enough to distract him from his own thoughts.
I need something else for that task.
He moved to the edge of the room where a footman offered to bring him a whisky. Soon, Jeremy as sat in an armchair by an open fire, with the whisky balanced in his hand. It wasn’t helping. He kept thinking of the way Sophia had knocked back those glasses of whisky, with her pink lips curving round the edge of the glass.
“You look lost, stranger.” A melodic voice appeared beside him.
Jeremy looked up into a pair of dark eyes. He blinked, certain for a minute that he had conjured the very woman he was thinking of from his imagination.
Sophia?
Then the woman stepped further into the light and sat on the arm of his chair, leaning toward him. She was a courtesan. Though she had dark eyes, similar to Sophia’s, there the likeness ended. She did not have Sophia’s beauty, nor was her voice bold enough. Thanks to the liquor he had drunk, Jeremy found himself growing angry that the courtesan was not Sophia at all.
“You look as if you need to forget the troubles of the world,” the courtesan whispered.
“I do.” He had done this before, hadn’t he? It was hardly unusual for a gentleman to visit a courtesan when it was needed. When she offered her hand to him, he took it and let her drag him to his feet, urging him to follow her through the room.
As he trailed behind her, like a dog at her heels, her scent wafted toward him. There was something wrong about her scent. She smelled like spices, exotic, particularly cinnamon. It was all nice, but it was not the scent he wanted. Jeremy longed for the scent of honeysuckle, the one that Sophia had brought to his house and the one that had barely left his sitting room since.
He found he was avoiding that room as much as possible now, for it made him think of that night all the more.
The courtesan led him all the way through a black curtain at the back of the room. When they found a spiral staircase at the rear of the building, she drew him up the stairs. As Jeremy’s boot reached the top step, he froze. It urged the courtesan to turn round and face him.
Here, there was only one candle in the distance to light her face. She looked even less like Sophia now, with her dark eyes hidden in the shadows.
“Something wrong, stranger?” she asked.
“I am sorry. I do not think…” He trailed off, wondering what was wrong with his body. When the courtesan inched toward him and placed a kiss on his lips, her jerked back, not allowing her to finish the kiss.
That was wrong.
It was not the kiss he wanted, nothing like it. The kiss he wanted was one that lingered, with hands curling up around his shoulder blades.
“I am sorry. I cannot do this.” This time, Jeremy managed to disentangle his hand from the courtesan. He hastened back down the spiral staircase, so quickly that his hessian boots thumped on the steps beneath him, almost blocking out the calls of the courtesan who was begging him to return.
Reaching the gambling hall, he thrust the dark curtain to the side, startling so many gentlemen on the other side that some nearly dropped their glasses, and one man even dropped his pipe in his friend’s brandy glass, much to their complaint. As Jeremy passed Stephen, they shared a look, one Stephen must have read easily enough as he leapt to his feet to follow Jeremy, despite the protests of the other men at the table.
Jeremy collected his top hat and coat from the footman at the door and hurried out of the building. Jumping down the front steps, he landed on the path and paced up and down, until Stephen appeared, carrying his own hat under his arm.
“Jeremy? What on earth is wrong?”
