A Well Pleasured Lady by Christina Dodd Page A

stopped in London for a whirlwind buying tour. Lord Whitfield had insisted, and Lady Valéry agreed, that Mary be outfitted with garments from the inside out. The new styles, the modiste had explained, eschewed whalebone corsets and petticoats. Instead, Mary wore a high-waisted satin and velvet gown over nothing more than a chemise and underpetticoat. Worse, as they’d traveled south into Sussex, the weather had grown warmer and she’d had to discard her pelisse.
    Now Lord Whitfield’s fingers pressed into her ribs, his palm rested on her thigh, and the contact she’d been scrupulous about avoiding, that of flesh against flesh, was sensuous reality. When the material slipped, he touched her in a new place. When he adjusted her in his arms, he violated another portion of her skin. With each breath, his chest moved against her and she clasped one hand over her stomach to ease the anguish. This wasn’t traveling sickness, but the sickness of a woman so accustomed to loneliness, she’d forgotten the comforts of human touch.
    Lord Whitfield reminded her of that too forcibly as he carelessly stripped the cushion of time and distance away, and she feared that when he finished with her, she would once more be needy, dependent Guinevere Fairchild.
    Worse, he would know, and revel in it. She had no illusions about Lord Whitfield. He would use her, and if he hurt her in the process, he would consider that a bonus.
    She’d met a man like him before. She’d killed a man like him before.
    â€œI don’t mind if you look sick,” Lord Whitfield said in an undertone. “But do you have to look frightened, too?”
    â€œI am frightened.” Not of the Fairchilds, as he imagined, but of him.
    â€œDo you want them to know?”
    â€œOf course I don’t want them to know.” He made her so angry. “I don’t want them to know anythingabout me. But you’ve taken care of that, haven’t you?”
    A small grin tugged at his mouth. “Now you look incensed. That’s better, I suspect.” He rejoiced, she knew, in his role of conqueror, returned from battle with his spoils. With her. If he’d planned it, he couldn’t have created a better scene than this.
    â€œHave you got her?” Lady Valéry leaned on the cane she seldom used, giving the impression—false, as Mary well knew—of fragility. “Poor dear,” she said to Mary. “I’ll wager this is not how you pictured your return.”
    â€œI never pictured my return at all,” Mary answered, and it was true. Imagining Fairchild Manor and all its inhabitants crushed by her magnificence had been one of the many satisfying fantasies she’d not allowed herself.
    â€œWe’re here now,” Lady Valéry said. “The worst is over. You won’t have to travel again.”
    â€œUntil we leave.” As miserable as Mary had been during travel, she still hoped they would leave soon. Now would be even better.
    â€œLet us complete our mission.” Lord Whitfield swept an austere glance about them. “Then we’ll discuss escape.”
    What was it he saw that put that expression of disgust on his face?
    Cautiously she lifted her gaze to the facade of her ancestral home.
    She had hoped that her youthful fancy had createda structure bigger and brighter than it really was, but no. The gleaming white marble edifice hadn’t shrunk in the intervening years. The mansion still swallowed the sky with its height and spread like a bloated belly across the Sussex plain. Each finial, each cupola, each balcony, had been chosen with care to create an overall impression of wealth. Fabulous, overwhelming, consumptive wealth.
    Emotions buffeted her. She wanted to shrivel with shame. She wanted to scream with rage. She wanted to own part of, be part of, the Fairchild legacy.
    Yet she hated the house, the legacy, and the Fairchilds, and nothing could change that. Nothing,