Beauty Tempts the Beast (Sins for All Seasons #6) - Lorraine Heath Page 0,45
his heel, he headed down the stairs at a near gallop, needing to put distance between them, needing this warm, electrifying sensation to dissipate. He finally reached Jewel’s office near the kitchen. The door was open. Unlike him, she never shut it, didn’t mind being disturbed when she was at her labors.
“Why aren’t you upstairs taking the lessons?”
Sitting behind her desk where she’d been writing in a ledger, Jewel glanced up. “What need have I for them?”
She poured scotch into two glasses and scooted one toward the edge of the desk. “I did stay long enough to ensure the girls would behave. Althea rather quickly charmed them.”
He wasn’t surprised. Even when she’d been irritated with him for asking questions that first night at the Mermaid, he’d been charmed. Dropping into the chair before Jewel’s desk, he took the glass, lifted it in a salute, and sipped the amber liquid. It went down smoothly, heating his chest. “I need you to teach her the precautions she should take so she doesn’t get with child.”
Jewel paused with her glass nearly to her lips. He seldom knew precisely what she was thinking. The best doxies—and Jewel had been one of the best—were skilled actresses. But her guard was down, and he could see that he’d stunned her.
“I’ve never known you to dip your wick within these walls, but I could sense from the beginning that something about her was different.”
He tapped his glass. “I have no plans to do any dipping, but she’s asked me to teach her how to seduce men.”
Eventually, someone else would do the dipping. His jaw clenched as he fought not to envision it; his stomach tightened as fury threatened. He didn’t want anyone else bloody touching her. But what he wanted was not the issue, was not how the terms had been laid out.
With a Cheshire cat-like grin, Jewel leaned back in her chair. “That should prove interesting. Are you going to do it?”
“I haven’t a choice. It was a condition of hers in order to tutor the ladies.”
“You don’t sound pleased. Do you fear falling for her? Being unable to resist the temptation of her?”
Yes. Yes. “No. It’s simply that I hesitate to set her on a path fraught with dangers.”
“The path she decides to travel should be her choice to make—just as Sally’s was. You’re not responsible for her dying. If anyone is, it’s the blackguard who attacked her that night. That they wouldn’t even consider arresting him because she was a doxy still eats at me.”
“If I hadn’t agreed to protect her—”
“Sally still would have engaged in her trade, Beast, and she’d have had a harder time of it, filled with more slaps, punches, and men who treated her unkindly. I speak from experience. Before you took me in, I cursed men on a nightly basis but saw no way out. Now look at me. You taught me how to manage things and keep ledgers. How to be a hostess. I daresay when the last of the girls is gone, we could turn this place into a proper boardinghouse and make a tidy profit.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“I think I’m well suited to it.”
He nodded. She would do well with that plan, had lots of time to implement it and enjoy the fruits of it. She was only four years younger than his thirty-three years.
“Why does Althea have a need for this skill you’re to teach her?” she asked quietly.
“She plans to be some man’s—some lord’s—mistress.”
“Ah. I know a couple of girls who went that route. It hasn’t been a bad life for them. Fancy house, fancy clothes, fancy food. Makes it a bit rough, though, when they fall in love with their keeper.”
He couldn’t imagine Althea being content to be kept as though she were a pet. He often wondered if his own mother had been kept. His brother Aiden knew his mother had been his father’s mistress. During the past year Aiden had come to know his mother, and Beast fought not to envy his sibling for the closeness he was developing with the woman who’d given birth to him. At the time Aiden was born, she’d had no choice but to give him up.
Based upon what Beast knew of his own mother’s words when she’d handed him over to Ettie Trewlove, she’d had no choice, either. She’d promised to come back for him, but perhaps that had been said only to ease her conscience. He didn’t like to consider that