Page 4 of To Tame a Wicked Widow

He’d thought to go over some old notes and sketches from Egypt until he was tired enough to sleep in this rather cell-like bedchamber, but all he’d found were detailed paragraphs about pleasure toys. The legend of Cleopatra and her live bee-filled gourd. The preference of leather dildos to stone or wood. And now he was as hard as oak himself as his mind wandered to his beautiful hostess.

How wicked was Lady Upcott, really?

Given Faith and Winifred’s belief that showing even a square inch of bare skin made a woman a harlot, he refused to take their opinion with anything other than a grain of salt. But the notion that the sensual and voluptuous lady of the house might be adventurous and uninhibited when it came to fucking, perhaps enthusiastically embrace toys, oral acts, even ass play…

Ethan groaned again as his cock strained against his trousers. He definitely needed different reading matter, something bland and dull that would send him straight to sleep. Maybe there might be something in the small library down the hallway. Lady Upcott had pointed it out earlier, and generously offered him full use of it.

Hauling himself out of an uncomfortable high-backed wooden chair, he padded out of his borrowed chamber and down the narrow candlelit hallway to the library. Knowing Sir Josiah, there would be slumber-inducing tomes aplenty.

“Oh! Good evening, my lord.”

He froze, almost speechless at the sight of Lady Upcott curled in an overstuffed armchair in front of a well-stoked fire, with an open book. Mainly because she wore a jade-green satin dressing gown tightly belted at the waist, which only emphasized her lush breasts and hips. “Good evening,” he replied, a trifle hoarsely. “Didn’t mean to disturb. I just wanted something unreadable to send me to sleep.”

“Help yourself,” she said with an impish smile. “Sir Josiah ensured we have plenty of examples. Do take care not to choke on the dust, though.”

Ethan’s lips twitched. “My, my, Lady Upcott. Never say you read for inspiration and education rather than lethargy?”

“Prepare yourself, my lord…” she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “…I do.”

He mock staggered. “I’m shocked. Shocked, I say.”

Lady Upcott beamed. “No, you aren’t. How delightful. I’ve been told on many occasions that a well-read lady is a blight on society and will bring about the fall of the empire. It is yet another of my crimes alongside harlot and garish red-headed whore of Babylon, one imagines.”

Oh, but he liked this woman. Stunningly beautiful with mouthwatering curves was one thing, but well-read and a sharp wit? What an intoxicating combination. “Indeed.”

“Lord Dare, you are staring.”

“I…was just trying to see the title, and the true extent of your depravity, madam.”

“You witness a lady beyond redemption, I’m afraid,” she said huskily, shifting in the chair, and causing her breasts to strain against the robe. “Last week it was the journals of Captain Cook’s first voyage, followed by the memoirs of a Paris courtesan. This is Aristophanes Lysistrata. It is so very amusing.”

By the gods. She read Ancient Greek plays? “Did you know he apparently devised one hundred and six ways of describing the male part?”

Lady Upcott blinked, and Ethan wanted to sink beneath the floorboards. Why the hell had he blurted that?

“Hmmm,” she said, twirling the end of her robe’s sash around one finger. “And a woman’s?”

“Excuse me?” he replied, his mind turning to mud at the thought of that sash loosening.

“How many descriptions of womanly parts?”

“Oh. Ah…ninety one, I believe.”

“You know the most fascinating tidbits, my lord,” she purred in a tone that wrapped around his cock and squeezed it.

“More so after a few bottles of brandy. Although I fear the topics move from risqué to downright disturbing. My field of study in Egypt was…rather unconventional. Sexual practices and rituals in the ancient world.”

Rather than dismay or distaste, Lady Upcott’s face brightened with what looked remarkably like genuine interest. “Now I’m thoroughly intrigued, Lord Dare. Although I’d wager you have intrigued women since…Cambridge?”

Ethan snorted. “You’d lose that bet. I was a lanky pile of bones with two left feet and little polite conversation. Then I sailed for Cairo, and there aren’t too many ladies trudging around the pyramids and whatnot. It’s no wonder I’m still a v…”

Oh fuck.

Horror at the unthinking lapse scorched a path of fire across his cheekbones, but any hopes that he’d trailed off before she understood were immediately dashed as her jaw dropped.

“You’ve never been with a woman?”

No.