“Then I hope he knows you are forsaking fame and fortune in Paris for him,” said Michael as she hugged him good-bye.
She chortled. “I’ll make sure that he never forgets my sacrifice.” She kissed Michael, then waved at him from her compartment.
She wished that Stuart, in his haste, hadn’t sent the telegram from the post office nearest Lyndhurst Hall. Not that they could keep their arrangement a secret for long—discretion was the best they could achieve—but she did not want it known to the Dowager Duchess of Arlington so soon.
The dowager duchess had ways to track Verity’s movement—how else could she know to deliver a letter to 26 Cambury Lane within days after Verity had moved there? If the dowager duchess learned that Verity had returned to London again, and that Stuart, too, had cut short his stay at Lyndhurst Hall in favor of London, would she not infer that something was going on between the two of them? More importantly, would she interpret it as another attempt by Verity to reclaim her old identity?
Verity arrived in London in a strangely uneasy mood. But Stuart had left her a key to his town house before he departed Fairleigh Park, and the feeling of unlocking his front door and gliding inside quite buoyed her. At last, no more service entrances for her where he was concerned.
But her pleasure fizzled a little when the house turned out to be empty. Where could he be? She’d thought he’d be waiting for her. She lifted her valise—the rest of her things would be sent along later—and trudged up the stairs.
She used the water closet and washed her face in the washbasin in the bath. It was when she contemplated repeating history yet again—waiting for him in the tub—that she heard the front door open and close below.
She rushed down and quite knocked him into the wall on the first-floor landing. Without a word, she threw her arms around him and kissed him until she was completely out of breath.
Only then did she bother to ask, “Where were you?”
Before he answered, he took her face between his hands and kissed her back with a hunger that made her whimper. “Out on a heroic quest.”
“For dragons?”
“No, for something that apparently doesn’t exist in England.”
“What is it?”
He pulled up her skirts, his hand blazing a trail of fire up her thighs. Then she gasped, for he went directly for the ribbons of her drawers. The drawers fluttered to a heap around her ankles.
His hand found her and toyed with her, his touches barely there, yet etching paths of fire. “Would you like me to show you?”
“Yes,” she panted.
At her fervent affirmative, however, his hand left her. She gripped him by the arms, her body pulsing in stark need. He returned shortly, and touched something round, soft, and smooth to her inner thigh.
“I went out and bought it today. You can’t begin to guess the trouble I had.” He braced her legs farther apart and stroked her with the silky cover of the sponge. “Every place I went to assured me that they carried nothing of the sort—why, they were a proper, decent, God-fearing establishment. Every shopkeeper assumed that I was there to land him in hot water with somebody, because a dried-up prig such as myself couldn’t possibly have a personal use for something so nefarious.”
He twirled that nefarious something slowly, against a most sensitive point. She gripped his arms even harder, this time to help her remain standing.
“It was a woman, in the end, who took one look at me and promptly emptied my pocketbook. I think she sold me all the sponges in the sea.”
The travels of the silk-wrapped sponge continued. She bit down on his lapel, tasting warm wool, hungrily inhaling the scent of the clean, starched linen of his shirt.
Now he pushed the sponge against her. It resisted, then slipped in suddenly, his finger sinking inside her all the way. They both gasped.
“God, I hope I bought enough,” he said.
For a moment, reality intruded and her heart wrenched. She’d brought along a supply of sea sponges herself. But the length to which he’d gone forcefully reminded her that as much as he loved her, he could never go for a stroll in the park with her, never mention her in polite company, and certainly never give her any children—because any children they produced would be illegitimate, and he was the last man to willingly contribute to the creation of illegitimate children.
But then he freed himself from his trousers and entered her. And she forgot everything else. She shuddered and convulsed almost right away, her pleasure-starved body releasing—and releasing and releasing—years of pent-up desire in one sustained, glorious peak after another.
“I adore this room,” she said. “But I didn’t expect you’d sleep in a place like this.”