"I shall take you to someone," he said, "someone in London who will take care of you on my recommendation."

"A brothel?" she asked in a shocked whisper.

Rutherford felt an unexpected wave of amusement at the idea of his grandmother's very respectable establishment being mistaken for a brothel and his grandmother for a procuress.

"No," he said. "An elderly lady of great influence who will find you genteel employment, Jess, despite the lack of a recommendation from your former employers. Her word will be far more respected than theirs, you may be assured.

"Oh, will you?" she cried with such passionate gratitude that he felt sudden guilt for what he had tried to perpetrate against her, and his desire began finally to come under his control. "How very generous you are, my lord. I must leave here and go to my room." She scrambled off the other side of the bed.

Rutherford stood up, raising his eyebrows as he looked around at her and noted her flood of embarrassment. "Get back into bed, Jess," he said. "This is where you are going to sleep tonight. I will not molest you further. You have my word on it, though I do believe there is a lock on the door if you are unconvinced. I shall sleep in the parlor. Perhaps you would do me the honor of breakfasting with me?"

"I cannot stay here," she said, turning to him again now that he had pulled on his breeches.

"Yes," he said. "This you can and will do. You will not spend the night in an attic with the servants. You will sleep in this bed tonight even if I have to break my word and sleep in it with you to hold you here."

The fight had gone out of her, he saw. He picked up his shirt from the floor, made her a mock bow, and withdrew to the parlor, where he spent an uncomfortable and near sleepless night on one of the worn armchairs, feeling less than charitable with the whole of the female sex, devising in his mind wonderful tortures for Miss Jessica Moore, and cursing his own tenderness of conscience that would not allow him any intimacy with a female for which he did not have her full consent.

Moments! Moments only and he would have mounted her and it would have been too late for her sudden attack of moral scruples. He could have taught her to enjoy instead. And she would have enjoyed. He had never failed to delight a woman with that part of his lovemaking. She had already been responding with flattering heat until somehow her mind had gained the ascendancy over her body.

And he would have enjoyed! There was no doubt whatsoever about that. Jessica had excited him more than any other woman he could recall at the moment.

Damnation!

He was certainly never going to have anything to do with virgins again.

Except his wife, he thought with a grimace. Whoever she turned out to be.


Jessica did not sleep much better, though she lay awake in greater comfort than the man in the adjoining room. She was consumed by embarrassment and guilt. Embarrassment at what she had done with Lord Rutherford, what she had allowed him to do. Guilt at what she had done to him. She had agreed to become his mistress, had allowed him to take her to bed, allowed him unimagined intimacies, and then denied him the ultimate one. She had some inkling of the great willpower it had taken him to stop at that particular moment. She also realized full well that perhaps only one man in a thousand would have stopped. And how could she have accused him if he had not?

But he had stopped and then, instead of throwing her out into the inn corridor in her nightgown and hurling her valise after her, he had insisted that she sleep in his bed for the night while he sat up in one of those shabby chairs in the parlor. And he had promised to give her an introduction to a lady in London who would find her employment. Jessica had her doubts about his ability to do so, but she appreciated his generosity in being willing to try.

In fact, strange as it seemed, she felt a certain respect for the Earl of Rutherford. True, he had tried to seduce her the night before, and tonight he had made her a very improper offer of employment and had tried to seal their contract without delay. But the man was no ravisher. He took her for a servant, which she was. She knew that for many gentlemen, women of the servant class were considered theirs for the having. And yet Lord Rutherford had been willing to release her without argument the night before, and he had let her go tonight even after she had consented both verbally and physically to allow him his will.

Why had she stopped him? It had not been fear. Not physical fear anyway. She had wanted him even before he had come into the bedchamber. The wanting had become almost a pain as soon as he came to her and touched her. In fact, she had not waited for him to bring her against him. She had put herself there, in an instinctive need to dull the ache of her longing against his body. And on the bed she had felt no shrinking, no embarrassment-that came only now, afterward. She had felt no shock when his hands had found their way so easily inside and beneath her nightgown. She had only wanted more, had been aware with an almost unbearable surge of heat that even that was not enough. It was not enough that he was against her skin, caressing, teasing, exploring. She had wanted him beneath her skin, deep inside her very being.

Why, then, had she stopped him? It seemed now little short of miraculous that she had been able to do so when she had wanted him so desperately. But there lay her answer, she realized. Had she been less excited, less full of aching pleasure, she probably would have allowed him to carry the act to its conclusion. It was her very pleasure that had forced her to stop what was happening.

The truth was that becoming a man's mistress, allowing him the full access to her body that her upbringing had taught her she must surrender only to a husband, was totally against all the moral training of her youth. Until this day she had never even dreamed that such an offer as Lord Rutherford's could be a temptation to her. She would rather die than lose her virtue, she would have thought even just yesterday. Yet she had agreed to his offer. Her own future had looked so desperate that she had agreed. Better to become Lord Rutherford's mistress, she had reasoned, than totally to lose her pride by taking the only other alternative open to her.

But, her decison made, Jessica felt the need of punishment, or at least the need to feel that the employment she had agreed to would involve some hard work or some sacrifice. If she had found Lord Rutherford's touch unpleasant, if she had had to contend with fear or embarrassment or a sense of humiliation in bed with him, she probably would have considered that she was earning her keep, doing a difficult job only because she had no alternative, or at least no alternative that she chose to take.

Her conscience would not allow her to do something that she knew was almost the ultimate in sin and enjoy it at the same time. There would be no sacrifice in being the mistress of the Earl of Rutherford, no punishment for the sin involved. It would be wonderful. She would probably enjoy every moment of her life with him.

Jessica was sitting up in the bed, her arms clasped around her knees. She rested her forehead on them. She had saved herself by moments. Although he had still been beside her on the bed, she had sensed that she was about to bear his weight, that he was about to take a husband's privilege. A moment more and she would have known how all the yearning ache of those preceding minutes was to end. There was pain, she had heard. There was tedium and indignity, she had once overheard from two matrons who had not known she was within earshot. But she did not believe any of those things for one moment. Lord Rutherford would be as expert with his body as he was with his hands and his mouth. Probably more so. She had no doubt at all that she had deliberately denied herself what would have been the greatest pleasure of her life.

And for what? For continued life as a governess? As a companion? How very dreary was the prospect for what remained of her life. She slid under the bedcovers, determined yet again to try to sleep. At least she still had her most valuable possession, she thought wryly: her virtue. If she could be said to still have that. And at least she had more hope than she had had all day. Perhaps that elderly lady in London would be able to find her something.

She would not think of it, she decided, until the morning.

Or of Lord Rutherford.

Or of his lovemaking and the consummation she had missed.

Jessica tossed and turned on the bed for what remained of the night.

4

The Dowager Duchess of Middleburgh was seated at the escritoire in the morning room of her house in Berkeley Square when her grandson was announced. She was in the process of writing to one of her many old acquaintances scattered throughout the country and farther afield. She peered at him over the spectacles she had affected several years before, though the same grandson was in the habit of telling her that from the windows of her house she would be able to see an ant crawling over the Chinese roof of the pumphouse in the middle of the square if she felt it in her own interest to do so.

"Never tell me you are up and abroad already, Charles, m'boy," she said. "Can't be more than ten o'clock. Must be in love. With the Barrie chit?"

"Quarter past, to be exact," Lord Rutherford said, crossing the room and bending to kiss the wrinkled cheek offered for the purpose. "And no and no."

"You did look her over, though?" she asked sharply. "Not a beauty, I take it. But wealthy, Charles, and of good family. You could do worse."

"I suppose I could," he agreed. "I suppose I could get leg-shackled to a poor girl of bad temper and total absence of character. The thing is, Grandmama, that I don't need the blunt. I don't gamble, you know, and have only one expensive habit. And I have quite a sizable income. Papa is as rich as Croesus and you are said to have moneybags stuffed behind every wall in the house. And who else does either of you have to leave it all to but your favorite son and grandson?"

"You are our only son and grandson. And don't be impertinent with me," his grandmother said, laying down her pen and blotting her half-finished letter carefully. "Why are you here?"

"I am your grandson," Rutherford said. "And I have just returned from a journey you sent me on. I thought you would be interested to know that the girl will not suit. She turns me decidedly green."

"Nonsense," the duchess said. "You can't expect a gel of good family to jump between the sheets at a snap of the fingers, Charles. Gave you the cold shoulder, did she? Your trouble is, m'boy, that you know only one type of wench and think they must all be the same."

"Grandmama," he protested, "I do not live all my life in the gutter or in the boudoirs of actresses, I would have you know. I have met one or two ladies in my time. You and Mama, Faith and Hope, for example."

"What are we going to do with you, then?" she asked, frowning. "I refuse to die until you have got an heir, Charles. I'm not having anyone emptying out my walls on my death for the sake of what's-his-name. Henry? Theodore? Never can remember which one is next in line. The chinless one, anyway."

"Theodore," he said. "Grandmama, I promise to try my best not to pop off until I have done my duty in the nursery line. In the meantime I have a favor to ask."

"I knew it," she said suspiciously. "You did not rush over here the morning after a long journey because of filial loyalty, Charles."

He grinned. "I want you to help one of my failed oats, Grandmama," he said.

"A wench?" she asked sharply. "And failed, Charles? She's not in the family way? I don't intend to start providing for your bastards, my lad. I always told Middleburgh the same."

"I don't ask you to," he said. "My own purse will stretch to providing for all two hundred and thirty of them. No, this is a girl after your own heart, Grand-mama. She wouldn't have me. Twice. I unleashed all my not inconsiderable charm and skill on her, but she would have none of me. I, of course, consider her remarkably foolish."

"And you want me to help her, Charles? Ring the bell, boy. You will join me for some coffee. Nothing stronger. Too early in the day for you to start drinking. You probably do it for all the rest of the day anyway."

"Coffee will be welcome," he said, settling himself into a chair beside the fire and stretching his boots toward the blaze. "It is deuced cold outside today."