He reached out and started to toy with her breast. She was extremely well endowed, her flesh curving into his hand as he played with her. He liked that as well. He wanted her again already, even though they had only just finished making love. He corrected himself. They had not made love. There had been nothing of love or tenderness in their coupling, nothing but a raw greed and sensuality. Which suited Tom fine. At last he had found someone to play with who matched him perfectly in terms of her lack of moral scruple.

“I hear,” he said, touching a finger to the sapphires that were still about her neck, “that you are very rich.”

She laughed. “And I hear that you are a fortune hunter.” She trailed her hand down his chest. “Tom Fortune,” she said. “How inappropriate when you are penniless.”

He kissed her, hard and deep, one hand covering her breast the other tangled in her long blond hair. “Perhaps we could share your money?” he suggested when they broke apart.

“Are you proposing to me?” Her sapphire eyes mocked him. “Here, now? How romantic.” Her languid gesture swept over the tumbled sheets and the frowsty little tavern room. “No, dear Tom-” she took his erection in her hand, stroked, rubbed, fondled him with such ruthless efficiency that he struggled not to come there and then “-you are good for one thing-” She squeezed his cock to make her point. “and at that you are very good indeed, my dear-but not to marry. I have other plans. Don’t come,” she added sweetly as he struggled with both his anger and his arousal, and the fusion of both of them into a mad desire, “I need you.”

With a swift, voracious movement she straddled him and took him inside her. He gasped aloud.

“Your plans-” he said, grabbing her hips to control the tantalizing pace she set. “Do they involve Nat Waterhouse? Do you want to be a countess?”

She checked for a second and her eyes narrowed. He felt a flash of triumph and a return of a modicum of control. With this woman, he suspected, it would always be a battle.

“They might,” she said, punishing him with the most shallow of movements atop him. “I might. Why do you ask?”

“Because-” Tom was struggling to keep his mind clear against the onslaught of sensation. “Because if so you should know that your gallant earl is not as honorable as you might think.”

She was so surprised that she stopped moving altogether. Her palms rested on his chest. Her thighs pressed closely against his. He was captured, encased, held still.

“Whatever can you mean?” she said.

“I can’t tell you that,” Tom said, savagely pleased to be able to thwart her. “Trust me, though-he is not as worthy as you think.”

She squeezed him tight and he writhed beneath her, groaning. “Do you have some sort of hold over him?” she asked. “Are you extorting money from him?”

“I wouldn’t tell you if I was,” Tom panted.

“I suppose not.” She started to move again and Tom felt relief and a renewed hunger. “Perhaps it just makes him more exciting,” she whispered. “Perhaps he would not be as boring in bed as I suspected-”

Tom rolled over suddenly, impaling her beneath him. “Are you thinking about him now?” he demanded, his mouth hot against her breast, biting hard, wanting to mark her white skin.

She gasped, but not with displeasure, and arched upward to his mouth.

“I might be,” she whispered.

Tom pulled on her nipples until she screamed.

“You think about your plans,” he taunted, “and I will think about mine.”

“Not my frumpish little cousin Mary,” she gasped as he started to drive into her with ferocious strokes. “She’s so dull.”

“But her money is lovely,” Tom said. He forced her legs further apart. “I worship it. Lovely,” he repeated as the violence of his thrusts almost lifted her from the bed. “Lovely.”

LATER, MUCH LATER, Sir Montague Fortune awoke in his bedroom at Fortune Hall. Lizzie had instructed the servants to put him to bed but Spencer, his valet, had done the bare minimum of work and merely removed his jacket and cravat, not even bothering to take off his boots. Nor had the man closed the curtains and it was the moonlight, falling across his face, which woke Sir Monty up. For a moment he lay quite still, for his head hurt vilely and there was an unaccustomed sickly sweet taste in his mouth. Then he realized that he needed both the jakes and a drink of water, and he groaned. His whole body felt soft and leaden at the same time, too heavy to move. He knew he should not have had that last glass of claret, but he had been celebrating the advent of yet more money into his coffers. He had never planned to wed, but now he could see what a splendid and enriching idea it was…

The moonlight flickered as a shadow crossed the room and Sir Monty turned his head. His heart jumped. Just for a moment he thought that he had seen the figure of a woman there; a woman in a cloak with her hood up carrying, most bizarrely, what looked like an umbrella in her hand. But there was no one there. The moonlight rippled across the room and Sir Monty groaned again and closed his eyes.

He did not see the blade and only opened his eyes a second before the knife slid silently between his ribs and by then it was too late to do anything at all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIZZIE WOKE with a headache from the brandy and a bad taste in her mouth. The house was silent. Monty, she knew from past experience, had taken so much drink that he would not wake until past noon. Tom was probably not even home yet though the bright yellow of the sun cutting through the gap between the curtains told her that it must be late morning.

What had happened the night before? Her evening gown and shawl were lying in a puddle on the floor. Her evening slippers, resting in a patch of sunlight, looked discolored and spoiled. She stared at them and the memory flooded in, pushing back the tide of brandy-induced forgetfulness. Of course-she had walked into the wood, amongst the dew-stained grass. That was why the hem of her gown and slippers were ruined.

Other memories were impossible to ignore. Nat had followed her and had proposed marriage to her and she had turned him down. He had kissed her and it had been as deliciously seductive as before. The temptation to melt into his embrace and promise to wed him had been so strong. But instead she had found the strength to reject him. She loved him too much to condemn them both to half a marriage. She knew that he did not love her, and marriage, to her mind, should be about the building of a future relationship, not about regrets over a past one. Love should be overwhelming and all consuming, the type of love she felt for Nat and that he so manifestly did not feel for her. Otherwise there was too much inequality in it.

Nat had kissed her with lust and this time she had not confused it with love. Desire was delicious, hot, strong, seductive, but she had been burned so badly that night in the folly, confusing lust with love in her naïveté, that she was never going to make the same mistake again.

She thought of her mother then, as she so often did when she was unhappy. The Countess of Scarlet had been reviled for her unfaithfulness, but the truth, as Lizzie well knew, was that her mother had been a victim of love not a heartless wanton. She had run away from a husband who gave her everything in a material sense and nothing in an emotional one. Lizzie had only been young when her mother had fled but she had sensed Lady Scarlet’s unhappiness with the acute sensitivity that children can possess. She had known that her mother wanted nothing other than her husband’s love and had been driven to despair by the lack of it. People thought that her mother’s bad example should be a warning to Lizzie and it was, but not in the way they imagined. All it had taught Lizzie was not to give her heart when there was no prospect of seeing her love returned. She had forgotten that, briefly, that night in the folly. She had loved Nat and thought she was loved in return. She had been wrong and now she was never going to forget that painful reminder.

So it was over. She felt miserable. Nat had proposed and she had refused and that was an end to it. Now she really was free to forge that pretence, to remake her memories, wiping out that night in the folly whilst the days, weeks, months passed and after a while the new memory became the truth.

Nothing happened…

She sat up and hunted about for her underclothes. There was no point in calling for a maid. Tom had tried to seduce her most recent lady’s maid and the girl had left in high dudgeon a week ago. There was only Bridie, the housemaid, left to do everything. Besides, she could manage perfectly well on her own. She always had done.

What if there was a child…

Nat’s words echoed unbidden through her head and she froze for a second, her blood feeling stone-cold despite the warmth of the summer morning. That was one aspect of her situation she had blindly refused even to consider until Nat had put it into words the previous night.

She allowed her hand to slide down over her night rail, following the flat planes of her stomach. She looked the same. She felt the same. In fact she felt sick, but that was the brandy rather than anything else. She could not be pregnant. That truly would be a disaster. The thought of it terrified her. It was all very well for Laura Anstruther, for example, to have a child. Laura was old-at least thirty-and already had a daughter and anyway, she was a grown-up. And Lydia Cole-well, Lydia’s pregnancy had caused a most terrible scandal but Lydia herself would be a wonderful mother because she was so sane and so calm and so loving that she could surely look on her baby and feel all the right emotions rather than the sheer terror that Lizzie would feel if only she permitted herself to think about it for a second…Her thoughts ran wild like rats in a trap until she took a deep breath and calmed herself.