Dedication
To the women labelled as whores, sluts, or witches
for refusing to abide by double standards.
From the Back Cover
Can there ever be real love between a powerful lord and the actress he took as a mistress?
A year ago, Hester Green's fascination with Lord Worcester led her to accept his proposition to be his mistress, her first foray into the delights of the bedroom. And what delights! Every time they spent the night together, he made her even more addicted to his prowess. But now the gossipmongers are abuzz with his impending betrothal to a duke's daughter. That is too much to swallow, and she severs their liaison even though it wrenches her insides to do so.
Drake, the Marquess of Worcester, has no intention of bending to his mother's manipulation. Even less marry the girl the dowager spread rumours as being his intended. And he has zero intention to allow it to damage a perfectly convenient arrangement with the woman he can't get enough of. But Hester moves out of the house he bought her—and out of his life. He'll find ways to keep her close, though the woman is revealing to be more of a rebel and less of the meek mistress she once was.
CHAPTER ONE
London, 1818
Hester Green sat across from Drake as the housekeeper served their meal. She looked at the man who took her as mistress a year ago, his brown hair gleaming in the candlelight, not as short as fashion demanded. But then, the Marquess of Worcester cared little for any demands that came his way. In truth, he usually had his way. His bone structure conferred an almost rude tinge to him made even more so with the evening stubble shadowing his rugged jaw.
A flutter arrowed through her at the memory of smoothing her hands over his masculine face. A hand, that had once showed calluses and scratchiness from work, but not for a year. In this period, she’d lived the life of a lady without being one.
He consumed another bite of food, and she followed the muscles on the jaw and thick throat flexing with his gusto at the fare. Gusto was another word that defined the marquess—in every respect.
His brandy-coloured eyes lifted to her, intent and liquid. His eyes had called to her even before she learned his name. The light shifted their hue, the sun made it more intense, fierier, just like the man himself. With the candles on the table, they acquired a dark shade yet still liquid. In the throes of passion, they stormed even darker.
“Your cook did an excellent job today,” he commented in that deeply silky voice of his. It also changed when he lost himself in the primal desires to which he introduced her. That was when he ended her innocence and reared her sheer lust for him. A lust that had lurked in her core from the first minute she’d set her eyes on him.
“My cook was well chosen,” she answered, as he saw to hiring the staff.
Though nothing, absolutely nothing, here was hers. Not the discreet but elegant house; not the furniture or the decoration; not her clothing, and certainly not his heart … never his heart.
This perception lanced acute pain through her. Noblemen took actresses like her as mistresses. They forged the very view that in her circle women were little better than light-skirts. Those women had fled poverty, by trading what they hadn’t offered in the first place. And Hester had joined the crowd. Not because penury loomed—her family owned a tidy theatre company—but because she hadn’t been capable of resisting the impossibly severe attraction she felt for him.
One corner of that carnal mouth lifted humorously. “I liked that you invited me here tonight. You never did it before.” And he drank his wine with the same relish he ate his food, or drove her to maddened sensuality.
No, taking the initiative wasn’t something mistresses did, she learned fast. They sat in their leased houses, with clothes that weren’t theirs, pampering themselves with expensive gifts, and waited. They waited for the men who paid for their lives, paid for their finery, paid for the exclusive privilege of calling on them. Sent messages for their mistresses to ready themselves, avail their bodies for them. Men those women provided for. Provided entertainment, provided a break from boring families, boring social-lives, boring marriage beds.
And that’s what Hester had done for the past year. Wait, provide, and yield.
They finished the meal she'd asked the cook to prepare with special attention. They stood from the table, and Hester couldn't help but stare at him. Six feet four of height and almost as broad. Every time her eyes measured him, a molten wave of heat rippled in her middle. He was so big. Everywhere! His solid legs, his bunched arms, his wall of a chest. All of him. He must have come from a breed of Viking warriors that plundered these lands so long ago. She was of petite build, and he dwarfed her standing… or lying. The simple impression got her ready for him instantly.
Both headed for the drawing-room, where she busied herself with serving his brandy and her tea to dispel the sensations his height invariably produced in her.
She turned with his glass in hand nearly to collide with him standing so close that she registered every nuance of his magnificent eyes, the little points of light as his head lowered to hers. Then the irises darkened.
“If you called me here, it’s because you need me.” He retrieved the glass and placed it back on the sideboard behind her.
And sure as day followed night, he brought up the role he'd appointed for her in this pantomime. The mistress that waited, provided, and yielded for the lord, for the man who paid her way. Until men like him tired of women like her or found someone more amusing, more beautiful, or younger. Overnight their old-news mistresses had to leave. The leased houses, the lovely dresses, they had to leave with nothing but the thing they'd given those men—their bodies. Or they had to leave with what those men engendered in them, their bastards.
“And I need you.” Drake rasped as she felt his large hands cup her buttocks to pull her to him. The scent of him, earth and man had the power to deflect her attention from what this evening was about. And when she clashed with his rock-hard erection, the deflection almost turned into surrender.
“No, I—” She blurted as her palms rested on his massive chest.
Her clear, decided intentions nearly faltered. She might put this off until later, Much later.
Sure as day followed night, Drake would also abandon her; soon. For the other reason lords forgot about their meaningless mistresses: Marriage. She didn’t frequent his exclusive circles, but she got to hear the gossip. His mother had been pressuring him for a match for years. He’d taken his sweet time since at one and thirty he’d slipped the chore. The wagging tongues, though, assured everyone that he’d settle for Lady Millicent, and his mother was on cloud nine with it.
“Oh, you’re in those days?” He growled and ground closer. “We can be… inventive.”
Inventiveness was his middle name. And she knew exactly what he meant as every nerve-ending overheated with the idea, almost as much as they heated with his impending nuptials. The thought launched excruciating anguish over the same nerves. It caused her to want to scream, pull at her hair. Then thrash every delicate object in view. Then she only could shed a river of tears like Ophelia, or Juliet, in their tragic grief for love and loss. But unlike Juliet, Hester was not loved. While like Ophelia, she was drowning in a dark brook of sorrow and hurt.