In the Flesh. Portia Da Costa
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morning room, will you, Polly? And tell him I’ll be down presently.”
Fortified by tea, Beatrice prepared for the forthcoming confrontation. Part of her was nervous, part filled with a perverse and delicious longing. She’d soon have a lover, and by all accounts, one as skilled as he was handsome.
“The morning room, not the parlor?”
“The morning room will do. The parlor needs bottoming and it’s only for persons of quality anyway.”
That would show him. If it was him.
“And then shall I return to help you dress, miss?”
Beatrice groaned inside. The corset, the layers of petticoats, her hair … it would all take an age.
To the devil with it! And with him! He’ll see me in dishabille soon enough, and after last night, it’s far too late to stand on ceremony.
Those blue eyes, so well remembered, seemed to taunt her, and between her thighs, she imagined she felt his fingers. A sweet ache coiled and tightened in her belly.
“No, that won’t be necessary, Polly. I’ll receive him in my dressing gown. You just keep an eye on the friend. Have Cook and Enid gone out to the market yet?”
Polly nodded, her eyes popped wide, and Beatrice laughed inside. Her maid was usually unflappable, hard to shock.
“But, miss, it’s not seemly to receive a gentleman in your night attire. What would people say?”
“People? Pah! They already think I’m a hussy and a fallen women, so what difference does it make now? And I’ll be dismissing this fellow again within a few minutes. He won’t have time to be scandalized.” She tossed her hair, wondering what Mr. Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie would think of so much curly redness. Polite society considered such hair savage, too wild and abandoned, but she considered it her very best feature. “Now, about your business, Polly!”
The other woman lingered. She gave a pointed cough.
“Now what is it?” Beatrice hid another smile.
“Won’t you need chaperone, miss? I mean, an unmarried lady receiving a gent on her own … without her corset.” Polly’s eyes twinkled with the spark of a conspirator. “There’s some that might say that’s rather fast.”
“Ah, well, as I said, thanks to Mr. Eustace Lloyd, that famously loathsome and despicable cad, I am fast, Polly. Positively a Derby winner!” Beatrice shrugged. Her damaged reputation still should be considered a calamity, but all she felt was a delicious liberation. “So I might as well enjoy the freedom my speedy status affords me, eh? Now, off you go.”
“Yes, miss!” Hiding a smirk behind her hand, Polly darted from the room.
Now, as to her dressing gown? The old brown woolen one just wouldn’t do. Time to bring out the fine blue one, one of the last new things she’d purchased before their fortunes had turned to dust.
If a man was prepared to pay twenty thousand guineas for the use of her body for a month, the least a girl could do was wear her nicest dressing gown.
RITCHIE COULDN’T RELAX in the damask-upholstered wing chair. It was comfortable enough, and not the usual delicate ladies’ morning-room chair; but waiting, waiting, waiting, he couldn’t find ease in it.
What’s the matter with me? Why am I here like this, sneaking around and behaving like a youth in rut with his brains all addled by his first-ever sniff of a real, live woman?
What was it about Beatrice Weatherly that made him act this way? Despite the licentiousness of the photographs she’d posed for, his gut feeling was still that she was no jaded sophisticate. The women he kept company with were mainly society beauties with inattentive husbands, women eager to share his bed discreetly in return for pleasure and a release from the inherent boredom of the ever repeating Season.
But Beatrice Weatherly wasn’t jaded or bored or married, or even particularly sophisticated, and perhaps because of that, his yearning for her was out of all proportion. She had an elusive quality that spoke to his soul and tantalized his cock. Yet for the life of him he was hard-pressed to define it.
And as for pitching up here in mufti rather than gentlemanly finery? To show her he wasn’t really a toff at heart, he supposed. A self-made man who’d worked hard, like his father before him.
It was also easier to circumvent Beatrice’s ineffectual brother this way too. He’d nothing against the man, but his sister was worth twenty of him.
You’re a sly weasel, Ritchie my lad. Especially when it’s your cock that’s running the show.
Restless, he sprang to his feet, his body humming like an electrical dynamo. The room he’d been shown into by the shrewd-looking maid was pleasing enough, if a little faded and old-fashioned looking, due no doubt the Weatherly’s lack of funds to pay for elaborate furnishings and a sufficiency of servants. Prowling around, he sensed instinctively that this was Beatrice’s domestic domain, the room she spent most of her time in. He studied a number of bookshelves, which were less dusty than some of the furniture, and their eclectic contents surprised and inordinately pleased him. History, the classics, Mr. Darwin’s treatise and other scientific tomes—all these rubbed shoulders with a broad array of novels of high and low style, and notably, issues of the literary publication, Lippincott’s, all well thumbed. He had a feeling that Beatrice read across the entire spectrum of the arts and knowledge represented. He sensed a mind in her as curious as it was sharp.
The mantelpiece was crammed with photographs.
Experiencing a twist of guilt, he sought out the life of the quiet, sweet girl Beatrice must once have been before she’d taken to posing for pornographic images. Almost reluctantly, he scanned the frames, his heart athud.
Even in stiff formal poses, Beatrice exuded the same energetic sensuality that informed her nude studies. Perched on a chaise longue beside her brother, and in the company of an older couple, presumably the now deceased elder Weatherlys, she lit the composition with life and vitality. Even with a perfectly straight face, to Ritchie’s eyes, she seemed to smile.
He passed hungrily from image to image, devouring each glimpse of her. Here in a country house garden, in a white dress, hair down, breathtaking in her purity. Here, with enormous daring, in fancy dress and revealing her sleek thighs in what looked like her brother’s breeches.
And here … oh, here … with another man, in what looked like an engagement photograph. This time it was the lucky fellow who seemed barely able to hide his smiles, while Beatrice was a poem of fond affection.
Ritchie set the frame down with thump; his teeth were gritted and his chest tight. Why such irrational anger? Why so jealous of this lost fiancé? There had been men in her life since, surely, and yet he couldn’t seem to summon up much interest in them, or antipathy toward them. Even Eustace Lloyd, who was her most recent admirer, according to his sources, and a man with whom he was vaguely acquainted and for whom he didn’t much care.
Beatrice had been seen in public with Lloyd on one or two occasions before the photographs had surfaced, but not since. All very decorous, an exhibition or two, once at the theater. There was no sign of any lasting affection for him here though, no image amongst this collection, so whatever had passed between them was obviously over.
Frowning, Ritchie tapped his fingers on the shelf, thinking, thinking.
Gut instinct told him there’d been no intimacy with Lloyd. The man was personable enough, but there was something not quite pleasant about him, and he’d been suspected of theft at the Plenderley’s house party Ritchie had attended last year. Even though he barely knew her yet, Ritchie already credited Beatrice Weatherly with a discerning taste in the men to whom she gave herself.
And yet … who’d taken the nude photographs? He hadn’t asked Beatrice, and she’d offered no information of her own volition. Could it have been Lloyd? The man had certainly shown an unusually avid