Bertrice Small - Fascinated

Your friend, Ancilla.

She was appalled.

"I'm speechless," she said finally.

"It's over," Reginald crowed jubilantly. "Ancilla has made London safe for all womanhood. We owe her a debt of gratitude. You're not angry?"

"I?" Shocked was more like it. And feeling not a little like the carpet had been pulled out from under her after she had gone through such soul-searching to gird herself to accept him.

But now she had accepted Jeremy-or had she? What had just happened in there?

"No. I'm happy for her. She will run him like a top, despite what she says in her letter, and it will be a better bargain for her than for him. And maybe she will bring him to heel in the process. So, Father…" She handed him the letter and made to close the door.

"Oh. Oh, of course." He turned to go, and then turned back. "By the way, is that Jeremy in there with you?"

"WHAT?"

"My dear girl, I'm no greengull. Jeremy-you must marry her now."

"And so I will," Jeremy called back, with no compunction, no sense of her feelings.

"Excellent. It's what I had planned from the start. Everything has worked out right and tight."

Regina sagged against the door. "What you- planned ?"

"My dear girl-a knight to rescue you, orchestrated from the moment I overheard your abominable desire to engage Mr. Raulton. Of course, I had thought Jeremy was a man to practice courtly love… but-ah, one can't expect everything, can one? Post the banns as soon as ever you can. I can't countenance what has been going on in my very own house for much longer. Congratulations, my dear. Jeremy is everything I could want for you in a husband."

Husband? Husband ? Oh, God. Husband!

She slammed the door and whirled around to find Jeremy sitting upright, all of him upright. "I am top over tails here. What is going on?"

"Ancilla has run off with Mr. Raulton. I have asked you to marry me, and your father planned the whole from the start. It's perfectly clear. You were always destined to be mine. You are mine. Be mine…"

"You don't…"

"I do."

"You don't have to. Not here, not now. You don't have to marry me." She had to say it, and she held her breath. He couldn't want marriage now, not after everything she had given him. He didn't need to marry her. But she needed desperately to marry him.

"I do. You do. You know you do."

She was on the thin line, the sharpest edge. Everything would end here, and begin, did she say yes.

He didn't move; he didn't importune. This was the most delicate balance, between her need and her desire. His desire and his need. And there was nothing to stand between them now.

She wanted, oh, how she wanted. This was Jeremy. Well-known, utterly adored Jeremy. She should have no hesitation. And yet she did, because how did she cross the line from mistress to wife?

But he had asked her to marry him; he had no qualms whatsoever.

And he was waiting. Jeremy was waiting.

"Say you do."

"Do I?"

He smiled. "You can do nothing less. Say you do."

It was all right then. She smiled back, and she dropped her wrapper and climbed into the bed next to him. "Only if you do"-she grasped his penis and tugged it and pulled him between her legs-"this…"

He did this , driving into her meaningfully, passionately, and she took him, she rode him, and she sighed. "I do…"

She wanted a man-if just for one night.

The man who stood before her was willing to pay a woman-just for one night.

He blocked the door, six feet tall to her own five-feet-four-inch frame. His face was harshly handsome; it looked as if his features had been hewn out of sand and sun. Lines bracketed his mouth and radiated out from the corners of his eyes-eyes so dark they appeared to be black.

Muhamed, the innkeeper had called him. Mr. Muhamed.

He was an Arab; she was an Englishwoman.

He was garbed in a white robe and turban; she was shrouded in a black dress and veil.

They had nothing whatsoever in common save for their physical yearnings, yet here they both were in Land's End, Cornwall.

Megan knew what she had to do; it was the hardest thing she had ever done. Slowly, deliberately, she lifted her veil and hooked it over the crown of her Windsor hat.

Bracing her spine, she mentally prepared for she knew not what: rejection, acceptance.

The Arab had ordered the innkeeper to procure him a whore; instead, a forty-eight-year-old widow had knocked on his door.

And he had let her in . As if she were, indeed, the prostitute she pretended to be.

And perhaps she was.

No respectable woman would engage in the charade she now played.

Her chest rose and fell, lungs filling, emptying-she could not draw enough air into her oxygen-deprived body. The harsh wool of her gown chafed her nipples. She did not have to glance down to know that they stabbed her bodice.

His black gaze raked over her face, her breasts-they swelled underneath his perusal, fuller than those of a young girl, heavier-dropped down to study her stomach and hips that with the rest of her body had rounded over the years. Slowly his gaze raised back up to her face and the lines there that owed nothing to sand or sun, but everything to a woman's age.

She clutched the side of her skirt and the pocket within that held the key to her own room just down the corridor.

Now he would accept her, or now he would reject her…

"You are too old to be a whore," he said flatly.

But she was not too old to want a man.

Inwardly, she flinched.

Outwardly, she held his gaze; her green eyes, at least, were unchanged by time. "Some would say, sir, that you are too old to need the services of one."

Faint color darkened his cheeks-or perhaps it was her own shamelessness that colored her vision. "You are naked underneath your gown."

The warm color tinting his angular cheekbones leaped blazing hot into her more rounded ones.

She defiantly tilted her chin. "Yes."

Megan wore no bustle, corset, chemise, drawers nor stockings. None of the apparel that respectable women wore.

Nothing that would impede the purpose of her visit.

She wanted this night.

She wanted to lie naked with this man.

She wanted to experience again the closeness found in an intimate embrace.

Megan was fully prepared for-everything. The vinegar-soaked sponge crowding her cervix burned and throbbed, a reminder of- everything .

Possible pregnancy. Potential disgrace. Purgatory… .

A coal exploded in the fireplace.

Tension prickled her skin. The rectangular bit of the key jabbed through the wool of her skirt and the silk of her glove.

A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth. "You are not from around here."

Native west Cornish folk spoke with an unmistakable singsong cadence. During the past thirty years, Megan had learned to speak like a gentlewoman, just as the Arab before her had at some point in his life learned to speak like an English gentleman.

"No, I am not from around here," she acknowledged evenly.

"Have you come from another man?"

Megan fought down a spark of-anger? Trepidation? How would the painted prostitute whom she was a substitute for respond to such a question? "No."

She suspected no man would pay for what she now offered.

His gaze remained colder than a starless night. Searching. Probing. Looking for a remnant of the youth she no longer possessed.

A cold sheen of anxiety broke over her.

How could she have been so naive as to believe that for lack of choice, this man would take her?

Megan jerkily offered, "I fully understand if you prefer someone who is young-"