One Good Earl Deserves a Lover

She paused, adding as an aside, “Well, I do have the experience from the bull in Coldharbour, but . . . it’s not entirely relevant understanding, as Penelope and you have both pointed out. Can’t you see? I only have eleven days. And I need every one of them.”

He backed into the hazard table, and she kept coming. “I need them. I need the knowledge they can give me. The understanding they can afford. I need every bit of information I can glean—if not from you, then from Miss Tasser. Or others. I have promised to be a wife and mother. And I have a great deal of research to do on the subject.”

She was breathing heavily when she stopped, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, and the skin of her pale br**sts straining against the edge of her rose-colored gown. He was transfixed by her, by her passionate concern and her commitment to her ridiculous solution—as though understanding the mechanics of sex would change everything. Would make the next eleven days easy, and the next eleven years even easier. Of course, it wouldn’t.

Knowledge wasn’t enough.

He knew that better than anyone.

“You can’t know everything, Pippa.”

“I can know more than I do,” she retorted.

He smiled at that, and she took a step back, staring up at him, then down at her widespread hands. There was something so vulnerable about her. Something he did not like.

When she returned her unblinking gaze to his and said, “I am going to be a wife,” he had the wicked urge to ferret her into one of the club’s secret rooms and keep her there.

Possibly forever.

A wife. He hated the idea of her as a wife. As Castleton’s wife. As anyone’s.

“And a mother.”

A vision flashed, Pippa surrounded by children. Beaming, bespectacled children, each fascinated with some aspect of the world, listening carefully as she explained the science of the Earth and the heavens to them.

She would be a remarkable mother.

No. He wouldn’t think on that. He didn’t like to consider it.

“Most wives don’t frequent prostitutes to develop their skills. And you have time for maternal research.”

“She seemed as good a research partner as any, considering you’ve already cut my pool of possibilities in half. After all, you have not been helping. Is she your paramour?”

He ignored the question. “Prostitutes seemed a reasonable next step in your plan?”

“Interestingly enough, they didn’t until last night. But when Penelope suggested that there might be prostitutes here—”

“Lady Bourne knows about your ridiculous plans and hasn’t tied you to a chair?” Bourne’s wife or no, the lady deserved a sound thrashing for allowing her unmarried, unprotected sister to gallivant through London’s darker corners without purchase.

“No. She simply answered a few questions about the Angel.”

About him? He wouldn’t ask. He did not wish to know.

“What kind of questions?”

She sighed. “The kind that ended with me knowing that there might be a prostitute or two here. Is she very skilled?”

The question was so forthright, his head spun. She did not need to know that Sally Tasser was perhaps the most skilled workingwoman this side of Montmartre.

“What do you want to know?”

She blinked up at him with those big blue eyes and said, as though it were a perfectly reasonable thing to say, “Everything.”

For one long, lush moment, he was lost to the vision of just what everything might entail. To the way her body might fit to his, the way she might taste, soft and sweet on his tongue, to the wicked, wonderful things she might allow him to do to her. To the lessons for which she did not even know she was asking.

He wanted to show her everything.

And he wanted to begin now.

“Do you think that Miss Tasser would be willing to provide a lesson of sorts?”

It was becoming difficult to breathe. “No.”

Pippa tilted her head. “Are you certain? As I said, I would be willing to pay her.”

The idea of Pippa Marbury paying to learn Sally Tasser’s trade made Cross want to destroy someone. First Bourne, for allowing his sister-in-law to run untethered throughout London, and then the Marquess of Needham and Dolby, for raising a young woman who was completely lacking in sense, and then Castleton, for not keeping his fiancée properly occupied in the weeks leading up to their wedding.

Unaware of the direction of his rioting thoughts, she said, “Lord Castleton has never attempted to compromise me.”

The man was either idiot or saint.

If Cross were Castleton, he’d have had her a dozen different ways the moment she’d agreed to be his wife. In darkened hallways and dim alcoves, in long, stop-and-start carriage rides through the crush of midday traffic, and outside, quickly, against a strong, sturdy tree, with none but nature to hear her cries of pleasure.

To hear their mutual cries of pleasure.

But he was not Castleton.

He was Cross.

And this was thoroughly, completely wrong.

He took a step back, his thoughts making him guilty—making him look around the dim casino floor in sudden fear that someone might see them. Might hear them.

Why was it that she was always where ladies should never be?

“Last night, I attempted to indicate to him that I was happy for him to touch me. Kiss me, even.”

He hated the earl with a wicked, visceral intensity.

She was still talking. “But he didn’t even seem to notice me. Granted, it was just a touch on the hand, but . . .”

Cross would pay good money for her to touch him so simply.