Page 14 of The Earl’s Forbidden Temptation

Madam Rebecca’s glance slid to him and softened. “Yours has been improved by matrimony. Give my respects to your lady. She sent word that if I so much as attempted to offer you any of my ladies, I would wake to find my pleasure palace reduced to ashes by morning. I have already sent a dozen roses in apology.”

“I will give her your regards,” Thomas said, warmth in his tone.

“My artist is visiting me tonight, and will soon arrive,” Rebecca said, shifting her regard to Sebastian. “I thought you might conduct the assessment I mentioned. I know no one better suited. Say you will assist me.”

Her careful emphasis pricked Sebastian’s curiosity. He rose. “Then I shall oblige.”

“Finally,” she murmured, “there is the wicked glint my ladies adore.”

He chuckled. This was why he had come: to drown duty and responsibility in an hour of illicit pleasure and forget the troublesome household that had entered his life unbidden. Tonight, he would indulge every appetite Aphrodite could satisfy, and he would not think of warm golden-brown eyes.

CHAPTER 6

The hatbox was heavier than it appeared. It had arrived a few hours earlier, but Darcy waited until after dinner with her sisters before hastening to her chamber. She set it upon the writing desk and eased the lid open. She stared down at a mask of lacquered silk, red and black and bold as a harlequin’s masque, beside a dark-red wig arranged in an elegant coiffure, its pins and combs already threaded into place. Beneath them lay a folded letter, sealed with plain wax. Her heart gave an uneven beat. She broke the seal and smoothed the single sheet.

Dear Mrs. D. Whitley,

Your painting reached me with the greatest pleasure. The elegance of your hand and the longing you have stirred from so simple a country scene persuade me that you are precisely the artist I require. Your geese appear ready to lift from the canvas. I must warn you that the commission is scandalous. For that reason, your identity must be protected. The enclosed mask and wig are intended for your use, and I beg you to employ the utmost discretion in coming to my establishment. Though the subjects will be bold, your virtue shall never be in jeopardy; you will be safe and well protected whenever you work for me. I hope the project will be finished within 3 months. Your reward will be handsome: one hundred pounds for each painting. I require eight in all.

Darcy choked on the breath she had been holding and pressed her knuckles lightly to her lips. One hundred pounds each. Eight paintings. Eight hundred pounds. The figure stood in her mind with the authority of a magistrate. When she had asked the agent in the country about a small cottage with four bed chambers, a parlor, a library, a dining room, and a well-situated kitchen, he had quoted fifty pounds for the year. Eight hundred pounds would keep a roof over them, food on their table, and clothes on their backs for several years. This was a fortune. It was not merely a reprieve; it would be a future earned by her own skill. She looked again at the neat lines of the letter and read on.

If you accept this invitation, come tonight to the address enclosed by ten. Wear the provided wig and mask, and tell the majordomo that you are Red and here to meet the Madam. Should you agree to enter my employ, I shall arrange for a carriage to collect you and see you safely home whenever you come to paint.

There was an address on a small card tucked into the fold. “This must be a mistake,” Darcy whispered. “One hundred pounds per painting. Who would pay such a sum, and why?”

She read the letter again. “What could be so scandalous that anyone would pay such a sum?”

Darcy lowered the letter and brushed the wig with the back of her fingers. The hair lay soft beneath its pins, a deep wine that would draw out the gold in her eyes. The mask gleamed. She lifted it, turned it toward the window, and watched the candlelight run over its surface like water. Red and black, bold as a dare. It would hide her brow, her nose, the slope of her cheekbones, and leave her mouth free to speak and breathe. No one who knew Miss Darcy Whitley should recognize her beneath such a disguise.

She worried her lower lip and considered. The letter had warned that the commission was scandalous. Darcy was not a fool. She knew what such work might entail. She might be asked to paint what polite ladies pretend not to see. Yet the letter’s assurance of safety sounded like a promise meant to be kept. Her mind began to order the problem as she would lay out a canvas. If she accepted, she would have to go tonight. The staff here believed her to be a widow with some connection to Lord Raine; an evening engagement would not invite much curiosity. Even so, she could not permit his coachman to carry word of Aphrodite back to the earl. She would have the carriage set her down in Piccadilly and hire a hackney for the final distance. Darcy glanced at the mantel clock. Nearly nine. She could go to Aphrodite and return before the house banked its fires.

Taking this commission would let her rent a cottage with a garden, buy coal without counting the lumps, hire a daily governess for Sarah, and keep a proper table. She could look Lord Raine in the eye and know that whatever protection he chose to extend or withdraw, her sisters’ future would not rest upon his mercy.

Reckless, she thought. Reckless, and skirting the edge of ruin if a single step went awry. Yet ruin had a hundred shapes. Hunger was one. Begging was another. Dependence, forever, was a third. Darcy drew a steady breath.

“I will do this.” It did not seem prudent to arrive in one of her old gowns, with seams ready to give way. The modiste who had attended them had altered several beautiful gowns for Darcy, and she had thought she might never have cause to wear such things. Young women in her circumstances, without fortune or useful connections, seldom owned anything so lovely, nor were they invited anywhere that required it. Yet some instinct told her that one of those lovely gowns would be suitable to wear when calling upon this Madam. She lifted her chin, smoothed her skirts, and set about preparing herself for the night ahead.

Almost two hours later, Darcy stood before the polished black door of Aphrodite and felt her pulse in her fingertips. Lord Raine’s carriage had set her down in Piccadilly, and the hackney she hired for the final distance now rattled away behind her. She had not replied to the letter; she had simply prepared herself and come.

Darcy had chosen a deep-blue silk gown that flattered her figure, following the gentle curves of her body before falling in graceful folds to her ankles. The décolletage was lower than anything she had ever dared wear before, revealing a tantalizing expanse of her breasts above the delicate edging of lace. Once the gown settled about her figure, she had felt scandalously exposed, yet there was something undeniably elegant about the effect, something that made her feel not merely pretty, but sensual.

Upon her feet were evening slippers of matching blue silk, embroidered across the toes with silver thread. Beneath the mask concealing the upper half of her face, Darcy had tucked every strand of her dark hair beneath a red wig, its curls arranged with artful care and allowed to tumble over her shoulders. The transformation felt extraordinary. Dressed as a woman she scarcely knew how to be, Darcy felt a strange mingling of nervousness and exhilaration. She lifted a gloved hand, touched the mask once for courage, and raised the knocker.

The majordomo opened at once, grave as a judge.

Darcy inclined her head. “I am Red,” she said, her voice low through the mask. “I am here to see Madam Rebecca.”

He bowed. “Follow me.”

Decadence met her at the threshold. The air was warm with sandalwood, beeswax, and something sweetly illicit. Silk in shades of garnets and lustrous jet-black pooled in generous folds along the walls; light from a hundred candles softened the gilt and turned shadows into invitations. A broad staircase swept upward, its banister threaded with ribboned lanterns that cast slow-moving halos upon the steps. Women in jewel-bright satins drifted past with silver trays, offering champagne and sugared fruits that gleamed like temptations in a still life.

Music pulsed from the grand salon, coaxing the room into a languid sway. In a curtained niche, a masked lady, half-reclined, toyed with a glass while a gentleman’s hands lingered at the ties of her bodice. On a velvet chaise, a pair kissed with shameless pleasure, the woman’s skirts rucked high, the man’s coat fallen open as if his restraint had slipped to the floor with it. Incense and amber curled through laughter and soft gasps, a scent that stroked the skin.

He led her along a corridor laid with thick Turkish carpet; the walls wore silk damask, the color of ripe pomegranates. Lamps in gilt brackets spread honeyed light. She passed niches where statues glowed like cream, curtains that fell in obedient folds, paintings that winked with varnish and sin.

Overhead, swaths of silk hung from the ceiling like captured night. Nearby, a couple turned in a private waltz, their steps slow, the lady’s gown pooled at her hips as if the dance had undressed her by degrees. Everywhere, pleasure was curated and offered, a gallery of sin arranged with a connoisseur’s care. Laughter lifted, hushed, and rose again; a gentleman’s murmur, a woman’s answering purr, and the soft chime of crystal threaded a hundred private pleasures into one indulgent hum.

Darcy’s pulse hammered while her stomach drew tight. She had never set foot in a place like this, had scarcely believed such rooms existed; shock warred with a sharp, unwelcome curiosity that drew her a step farther in.