Though not with him once she had chosen him. With him she had expected an innocence that would be all at her mercy.

As though she were an experienced courtesan.

How foolish had been her expectations.

His fingers feathered her breast and closed lightly over her swollen nipple. She almost cried out with the pain of it – the pain that was not pain.

His body came over hers then, and his weight came down on her as he released her wrists and slid his hands beneath her buttocks. He lifted his head and she knew he was looking into her face, though she could scarcely see him in the darkness.

"There is a kind of love," he said, his voice very low, "that a man feels for his lover, Cass. It is more than lust."

And he came into her even as his words undid her and made it impossible for her to brace herself against the invasion.

He was big and long and hard, as she remembered from last night. She clenched her muscles about him, as she had done then, and slid her feet up the bed and hugged his strongly muscled legs with her own.

He smelled clean, she thought. His subtle, expensive cologne did not mask less pleasant odors. It merely enhanced cleanliness. His hair was soft and faintly fragrant. She slid the fingers of one hand into it as he rested his head on the pillow beside hers, his face turned away from her. She wrapped the other arm about his waist.

And he began the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of intimacy, always the part that had required the greatest effort of endurance from her during most of her marriage.

He had more control over himself tonight. She soon knew that. It was not going to be over in a very few minutes. His movements were steady and measured. Deep and shallow, deep and shallow.

She could feel the wet slide of him inside her, hardness against softness, heat against heat. She could hear the suck and pull of their coupling.

It was a curiously enticing sound.

And a sort of yearning began there, where he worked toward his own pleasure, and spread to her bowels, her breasts, her throat. A yearning that was an ache, a pain that was not pain. She wanted to weep. She wanted to twine her legs tightly about his, raise them to his waist, wrap her arms tightly about him, press her face to his shoulder, cry out with the strange longing for she knew not what.

She wanted to abandon herself to that longing. To lose herself. For one blessed moment in her life to /give in/.

It was what she /ought/ to do, she realized with an effort of conscious thought. She was his mistress. He was paying her handsomely to pleasure him, to flatter him by taking pleasure.

But if she feigned pleasure, she might be snared by her own game.

She felt helpless and frightened.

And aching with longing.

His hands slid beneath her again. His face was above hers once more.

"Cass," he whispered. "Cass."

And as the rhythm ended and he pressed deep and held there while she felt the hot rush of his release, she knew that it was the very worst thing he could have said.

She wanted to be woman and mistress to him. She wanted to keep herself for herself. She wanted her two lives – her private life and her working life – to be kept strictly separate. But he had looked into her face in the darkness and called her by that name no one else had ever used, and told her with that one use of it that he knew who she was and that she was somehow precious to him.

Except that he did not, and she was not.

It was just /sex/.

She was suddenly alarmed by the realization that two hot tears were trickling diagonally across her cheeks and dripping through her hair to the pillow beneath. She hoped fervently that his eyes had not become accustomed enough to the darkness that he would notice.

All the aches and the yearnings subsided to be replaced by regret, though regret for /what/ she did not know.

He drew out of her and moved to lie beside her. He turned her half away from him and snuggled in behind her before drawing her back to lean against his body, her head on his shoulder, his arm beneath her head and stretched along hers to the wrist, about which his fingers closed as her hand rested against her ribs.

She could hear his heart thudding steadily.

He smoothed back her hair with his free hand and set his lips against her forehead, just above the temple. The place one would kiss out of affection.

She could suddenly hear his words again. /There is a kind of love that a man feels for his lover/.

She did not want his love, not any kind of love. She wanted his money in exchange for what she gave him here.

She repeated the thought over and over in her mind lest she forget what this was all about.

"Tell me about the child," he murmured against her ear.

"The child?" she said, startled.

"At the door this afternoon," he said. "She was peeping about the skirts of your maid. Is she yours?"

"Oh," she said. "No. You mean Belinda. She is Mary's."

"Mary is the maid?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "I brought them with me to London. I could not leave them behind. They had nowhere else to go. Mary was dismissed when Bruce – the new Lord Paget – finally came to live at Carmel. Besides, she is my friend. And I love Belinda. We all need some touch of innocence in our lives, Lord – Stephen."

"Mary has no husband?" he asked.

"No," she said. "But that does not make her a pariah."

"Did you have no children?" he asked.

"No." She closed her eyes. "/Yes/. I had a daughter who died at birth.

She was perfect, but she was born two months too soon, and she would not breathe."

"Oh, Cass," he said.

"/Don't/ say you are sorry," she said. "You had nothing to do with it, did you? And I miscarried twice before that."

And probably once after, though the third time there was only very heavy bleeding almost a month after she had missed her courses and she could never be sure there had been a child. Oh, but she knew there had been.

Her woman's body had known it. So had her mother's heart.

"Don't deny me words," he said. "I /am/ sorry. It must be the very worst thing any woman can be made to endure – the loss of a child. Even the loss of an unborn child. I am sorry, Cass."

"I have always been glad of it," she said harshly.

She had always told herself she was glad. But saying it now aloud to someone else, she knew that she had never been glad at all to have lost those four precious souls who might have become an inextricable part of her own soul.

Oh, how foolish to have said those words aloud.

"You have a voice," he said, "to match the mask you wear. I am more than relieved that you spoke in it just now or I might have believed you. I could not bear to believe you."

She frowned and bit her lip.

"Lord Merton," she said, "when we are together in this room and this bed, we are employer and mistress, or if you prefer to coat reality in sugar, we are /lovers/. In the strictly physical sense that we share bodies for /mutual/ pleasure. /Physical/ pleasure. Man and woman. We are not /persons/ to each other. We are bodies. You may use my body as you will – you are paying enough for it, God knows. But all the money in the world will not buy you /me/. I am off limits to you. I belong to myself.

I am your paid servant. I am /not/ and never will be your slave. You will ask me /no more/ personal questions. You will intrude no further into my life. If you cannot accept this – that we are man and mistress – then I will give back the ridiculously large sum of money you sent me this morning and show you the door."

She listened to herself, appalled. What was she /saying/? She did not have all his money left to give back. And she knew as surely as she was lying here in his arms that she would never find the courage to do this all over again with another man. If he took her at her word, she was destitute – and so were Mary and Belinda and Alice. And Roger.

He withdrew his arm from beneath her head and his body from against hers so that suddenly she found herself lying flat on her back. He swung his legs over the far side of the bed, got to his feet, and walked around to her side. He stooped and picked up his clothes, tossed them over the foot of the bed, and proceeded to get dressed.

Even in the darkness she knew he was angry.

She ought to say something before it was too late. But it was already too late. He was going to go away and never come back. She had lost him merely because he was glad she did not really think herself better off without her dead children.

She would not say anything. She /could/ not. She was all done with seducing him, with playing the siren. It had been a desperate idea from the start. A foolish idea.

Except that there had seemed – there /still/ seemed – to be no alternative.

She waited in silence for him to leave. After she had heard the front door shut behind him, she would put her nightgown and robe back on and go down to lock and bolt the door. And that would be the end of that.

She would make herself a cup of tea in the kitchen and dream up another plan. There had to be /something/. Perhaps Lady Carling would be willing to give her a letter of recommendation. Perhaps she could find an employer who had never heard of her.

He had finished dressing, except to pick up his cloak and hat from the chair just inside the door as he left. But instead of moving toward them, he was bending over the dressing table, and suddenly the room was lit up with a flare of light from the tinder box and he set the flame to the candle.