Sin by Sharon Page Page B

fingers, tossed it back to his desk.
    “But I must go. I can’t wait for her to return! What if she talks before then?”
    “Hell and damnation,” he muttered. “You want to go to an orgy because you are afraid that anxiety will kill your father? I would say that he deserves some anxiety.”
    But that would only cause her more, so she could not agree. “I believe if I go, I can understand what kind of woman Mrs. Harcourt is. And plead with her not to ruin my family.”
    He sauntered over to a bookshelf, with his long predatory stride, and pulled out a slim volume. “ A Gentleman’s Choice ,” he read off the spine. “ Or a Guide to the Fashionable Impures of 1818 . Anything you wish to learn about this Season’s courtesans can be found in here. Lydia Harcourt is featured.”
    “Someone publishes an annual guide to courtesans?”
    “Illustrated as well.”
    Given her own pictures, why was she blushing? “Do you select your mistresses from descriptions in a book?”
    “You disapprove?”
    Well, she did, but she had no right to.
    “But you know how enticing a book can be. Here, take a look.”
    She found Lydia Harcourt’s picture near the back of the volume, a voluptuous woman shown wearing only a corset. Large breasts pointed boldly at the viewer, her legs were crossed to hide her quim but to reveal her full thighs and generous bottom. The sketch was ink, in black and white, depicting Mrs. Harcourt with a pretty face and masses of black curls.
    “Lydia Harcourt was once the Queen of London’s courtesans,” he said. “But now she is nearing forty, her charms are fading, and the men she once entranced are seeking out new, younger lovers. Rumor has it that she raved at the publisher of that book for placing her at the back and blackened his eye before he had her thrown out. Under her veneer, she’s a coarse scrapper who will do anything to survive.”
    “Not very sympathetic, then.” She read the text that accompanied the picture. Magnificent forty-inch breasts…most skilled mouth and clever hands…conquests include the Duke of Montberry, the Earl of Brude…Rodesson’s mocking pictures…
    “My father painted her picture.” She hadn’t even thought to look.
    Trent nodded. “Several unkind ones that revealed Lydia’s origins as a coarse butcher’s daughter and mocked her aspirations to bed dukes.”
    Venetia frowned. Yet Lydia had still let Rodesson come to her bed. Why? Had revenge been Lydia’s goal all along and her father had stupidly played into her hands? Venetia closed the book. “Then I shall have my father write out an apology and take that to her. Surely that will help.” Now she understood—Lydia wanted her father to suffer, she wanted to torment him by threatening to ruin his daughters.
    “You can’t go to an orgy, my dear.”
    “I want to see what an orgy is really like,” she protested. “It would be…an adventure. I don’t wish to be good and proper and pure anymore! I want adventure. Even if only for once, I want to be part of the world I draw.”
    “Have a love affair then, sweetheart. Do you ride horses?”
    That surprised her. “Not well,” she admitted.
    “Would you want to climb on the back of Zeus, my horse, and race him down the Row?”
    “Heavens, no.”
    “Then your first sexual adventure should not be an event that exhausts even London’s most experienced and randy men. At Chartrand’s orgy, you would be seriously out of your depth.”
    “I know what happens at orgies. I’ve drawn them!” Venetia cried.
    Marcus picked up Venetia’s book, Tales of a London Gentleman , and flipped the pages until he found an orgy scene. Rodesson had drawn dozens of such scenes and his father had insisted he look at every one. For his sixteenth birthday, his father enacted his favorite at a brothel. A bloody wretched night it had been, he reflected. Six young ladybirds had sprained their ankles, three of his father’s friends were laid up for a month, and he’d spent