Like the inside of a dark carriage.
This smoking room was another genius design from the proprietresses. It was decorated in shades of brown and oxblood and cream. The chairs were deep and worn and comfortable, and the little table arranged before the settee was battered, perfect for supporting one’s booted feet. The carpet and curtains were as thick and dark as the walls of a cave. It was the perfect room for men to regress to their primitive impulses, cursing, smoking, belching, and using bad grammar and the like. It suggested that women understood that men were little more than animals parading around in Weston-cut suits and Hoby boots, and if this could not ever be fully remedied then setting aside a room for them to misbehave was a compromise, the way one would set aside a box of wood shavings for a pet cat to defecate in.
He realized he had no one in which to confide his torment.
The truth was, he felt as though some scaffolding surrounding him had collapsed. He could not locate the ends of his composure to regather it. He had entirely been faking it for two days. He’d been undone by a kiss and he was appalled at himself.
He’d constructed the last nearly twenty years of his life in order to avoid ever again feeling this appalled at himself.
But every glancing thought of Keating made his muscles tense, as if preparing to pin her to a mattress. He’d meant to look out for her welfare. Instead he’d taken advantage of an innocent girl.
Yet... had he? It had not been calculated or strategic. It seemed to him that it could not have been helped.
This was what disturbed him the most.
He would be leaving London for two days to tour a textile factory for sale in Sussex. It was for the best. He knew she would be kept busy, now that her season was actually a season.
Unlike many men, he appreciated that women were often possessed of lusty natures and singular sexual preferences and he believed they were well entitled to them. He would never condemn Keating—or any woman—for seizing an opportunity for exploration.
Perhaps having had her new experience with a controversial baron, she could turn her attentions to the young heir to an earl. Which would be the best possible outcome.
Why did the notion of this clench every muscle in his body as if it was something beyond endurance?
“I shouldn’t let the losing trouble you overmuch,” he said to Delacorte, conciliatory. “You’re just a nicer person than I am. I am simply too bloodthirsty to lose.”
“Your day will come,” Mr. Delacorte said sagely. “One wrong move will be your undoing, Kirke.”
It felt a little too much like a prophecy.
The day after Lord Dominic Kirke had felt her breast in a carriage, Catherine and Lucy at last stood in front of an exhibit at the Montmorency Museum, escorted by Lady Wisterberg. They stared at the suit of another alleged rake. Lines had formed to see it.It had been nearly an hour before they had been allowed inside.
It looked like an ordinary man’s suit, albeit a nicely made one, and she thought perhaps that was the most poignant lesson: you can never tell from the outside what might be roiling inside any man. What secrets he might be hiding. No matter how handsome he was. So many titillating words had been written about Mr. Colin Eversea, the so-called Satan of Sussex, an alleged rake who had escaped from the gallows after being accused of murder and ultimately proven innocent. She and her father and her housekeeper had marveled over his exploits reported in the newspaper.
He was now, apparently, happily married and raising cows, the newspapers reported. He had donated his suit to the museum, elevating the museum’s stature, rather the way waltzing with an allegedly scandalous man seemed to have, paradoxically, elevated her own.
Lord Kirke was to be away from The Grand Palace on the Thames for a few days—he had gone to visit a textile factory in Sussex, or so Mrs. Hardy reported—and at first, she was glad about it. She was inwardly stormy with thoughts, desires, confusions, and fears, and outwardly expected to take tea with fine ladies who could look her over and decide if she might be the sort their well-bred young sons and nephews should marry. She’d done this twice, once at Lady Wisterberg’s, once at another matron’s home. She thought she’d comported herself well enough. The next assembly, during which she could be expected to look beautiful and dance with young men, the sort she’d always imagined marrying, was a few days away. Plans for the party continued apace.
Her nights were wildly restless.
She wanted more than her next breath to feel the entirety of Lord Kirke’s skin over hers.
It was the most wrong thing she’d ever wanted.
She longed to talk about how she felt with someone, but of course there was absolutely no one in which she could confide. She entertained herself by imagining the horrified gasps she would draw if she even so much as suggested she’d been alone at length with Lord Kirke, let alone kissed him.
How could she possibly explain? These things she knew to be true: life was short; it seemed a terrible sin not to seize extraordinary pleasures when offered them.
So why was it considered a sin to instead seize them? Why was society constructed in such a way to condemn this?
She might never have guessed that such glorious sensations could be coaxed forth from her body when touched by the right man, like a genie from a lamp. So she touched herself at night, exploring, and imagined her hands were Lord Kirke’s, and discovered a few interesting things she might otherwise not have discovered.
At will, she could conjure the taste of him—liqueur and smoke and a rich, singular Essence of Kirke—and when she did, her knees nearly buckled and her groin pulsed with longing.
And then she tried to imagine the hands of other young men on her. For some reason her thoughts reeled away from this. The hands on her clearly needed to be the hands of a man she at least knew.
And trusted.
And wanted. Really, really wanted.