Page 19 of The Consort's Curse
“As you’ve seen for yourself, I enjoy the company of whores,” he said coolly, but with a faint rasp to his voice that gave him away. Or perhaps I’d merely begun to observe him with obsessive closeness, a necessity if I meant to survive this marriage. “I feel no shame in admitting it. And you, despite your relative innocence, are here as a whore of sorts. Trading your body for an escape from your seclusion, or whatever else he offered you. That may make you think I’d feel no shame in lying with you. To some extent, you’re right.”
He glanced down at his glass, raised his eyebrows in seeming surprise at finding any liquor in it, and tossed it back. The carefully gentle way he put it on the sideboard had me quivering with tension in a way that throwing it across the room wouldn’t have done.
When he looked back at me, his eyes burned. “You may amuse yourself as you wish by convincing my mother I’m a deviant who likes to corrupt more or less willing novitiates,” he said, very low. “And I’m not prone to shame. As I’ve said. But I beg you’ll do me the honor of refraining from imagining I’m the sort of man who’d violently rape a terrified young virgin, or simply a young prude, whatever you are—whether or not he happened to be my consort, or in my father’s employ, or both. Or, in fact, anyone of any description, including the more traditional variety of whore. Feel free to sleep in that chair ifyou wish, or in your bed, or on the floor, for all I care. You’ll be equally safe from me anywhere in this house tonight, and you may be sure of it, because I shan’t be in it.”
And with that, he strode out of the room, flinging the door open against the wall with a crash and not troubling to close it behind him.
His footsteps echoed as he went down the stairs. A short, sharp command to a footman, followed by a murmured assent and the sound of the front door opening and closing, told me he’d meant what he said.
Would he return to the same brothel? Or find another? Or perhaps he had a more genteel lover somewhere in the neighborhood, conveniently close by? Someone he eagerly wanted to put in his lap and caress and kiss, rather than simply doing so to prove a point…
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. I’d be safe in my room tonight, and Aldrich would bring me a cup of tea and one of those lemon scones that had been fresh this morning and would still be delicious tonight. My bloody husband could go and do whatever he bloody well pleased.
I rose slowly, rubbing at my aching temples, and left the study to drag myself up the stairs. The house lay in brooding silence around me. Surely I’d won this round of whatever game I’d been dragged into when Ser Prendian came to fetch me away, hadn’t I? The Lord Chancellor had been pacified for now. Lady Estella, albeit for all the wrong reasons, meant to provide me with a gentleman’s wardrobe, and more than that, she and her husband had maneuvered Lord Stefan into allowing me out of the house to wear it. Lord Stefan had been mortified and discomfited in a way that surely I ought to find very funny, as he’d suggested.
But it didn’t feel like I’d won. It didn’t feel like it at all.
Chapter Eight
“The pine green, most certainly,” said Madam Carmela, from her throne—an armchair surrounded by fabric swatches, really, but it had become a throne by virtue of her having deposited her voluptuous, silk-swathed form thereon. Her assistant and the tailor she’d brought with her, both sharp-eyed young women who had reduced me to mute obedience and Aldrich to fawning infatuation within minutes, nodded and made notes. “And the gold. And that ocean blue, but not the royal blue. White shirts. Brilliant white! No natural linen. And the jackets will follow the line of his waist precisely, in a contrasting velvet. Now, Lord Remigius, strip to your drawers, if you please, and we will begin to fit you.”
Except for her greeting when she arrived, those were the first words she’d troubled to speak to me directly. Her minions had installed me in front of a large mirror Aldrich had produced from somewhere and placed in my sitting room, and since then I’d been standing there like a life-sized doll having bits of fabric draped around my face and body while Madam Carmela evaluated their effects on my complexion and hair.
I looked around the room and found four pairs of eyes fixed on me, all of them waiting for me to remove my clothing.
Balking at the instruction would do me no good. I stripped.
But once the assistant had put me into a gossamer-thin white shirt, all lacy at the top, that barely buttoned high enoughto cover my nipples, she produced a skimpy satin garment she meant to put over it. I gaped, gasped, and damn well balked.
“That’s not a waistcoat! And this is only half of a shirt!”
The assistant paused, still holding out the corset, and glanced over at Madam Carmela.
“You will wear it, Lord Remigius,” she said briskly, “because it is the fashion, and no, it is indeed not a waistcoat.” She sniffed and took up her cup of tea. “I would never put a gentleman of your delicacy into a waistcoat. Good heavens. That isnot the fashion!”
“You’re going to look very well in it, my lord,” Aldrich dared to put in, and was rewarded for the risk by another sniff.
“Madam does not needyouto confirm that her judgment is correct,” the assistant said quellingly.
Gods, I would look totally ridiculous. Absurd. I raised my arms and stood as still as the mannequin they seemed to believe me to be, allowing Aldrich and Madam Carmela’s assistant to tie me into a boned black corset that pushed all that lace up into a froth and nipped in at the waist, making me look…delicate, and damn Madam Carmela for being right.
I barely recognized the man in the mirror. My tousled red curls seemed rakish rather than merely untidy. My figure appeared to be lithe rather than merely too thin. And my bare collarbones were somehow more obscene than a fully naked torso would’ve been.
It gave me an odd, squirming sensation low in my belly to see all that exposed skin. Shameless…men would desire someone who looked like this.
The tailor got to work, marking up the black satin with a bit of chalk, and they fussed around me, fitting breeches and a coat and measuring and prodding and pinning until I could hardly bear to stand still for another moment.
But at last they were done, packing up all of their odds and ends. Madam Carmela rose and shook out her no doubt extremely fashionable brocade skirts. “They’ll work all night to ensure that one suit of evening dress and one for the afternoon will be delivered tomorrow morning,” she said. “I trust that this fellow will know how to care for your lordship’s new garments?”
Aldrich fell all over himself reassuring her of his competence, leaving me nothing to do but nod and drop into a chair, rubbing at my aching calves.
Would this have been my life if I’d been able to remain at home? If my father hadn’t been executed and my family disgraced? Maybe I’d already have owned a whole dressing room full of corsets, each more outrageous than the last, and have been accustomed to going out where everyone could gawk at me.
The thought of entering a room full of whispering strangers wearing anything like what I’d been trying on made me wish for a cold cloth for the back of my neck. And I would be, tomorrow night.
Aldrich returned from escorting my three tormentors out, shutting the door behind him. “Well!” he said, and grinned at me. “I can’t wait to dress you tomorrow, my lord! You’ll be a sensation.”
My stomach twisted painfully, a combination of nerves and gnawing hunger. Lunchtime had come and gone in a flurry of brightly colored satin, and I’d hardly eaten a bite of my breakfast. It had arrived with a note from Lord Stefan tucked under the teapot informing me that our first public appearance as a married couple would be at Lady Vienni’s ball, tomorrow night, and I’d lost my appetite.
