I beg your pardon?”
Anthony comforted himself that she did not appear to be offended by the suggestion. Only stunned, her dark eyes wide and wondering, as if he had made the proposition in a language she did not speak.
“I would pay you for your services, of course,” he added.
“Of course you would. I’d hardly render such services out of charitable inclination. Might I have that drink after all? I feel a sudden urge for one.” And then, as he reached for the decanter and poured into an empty glass, she asked, “Have you had sex before?”
His hand trembled over the glass, and a few stray drops of liquor splashed onto the surface of the desk. Hell. He’d requested frankness for himself; it was hardly fair to expect her to couch her own speech in oblique references.
“Yes,” he said.
“But it was just once, well before my injury—before I went off to war.” A pretty young barmaid he’d met one evening before he’d shipped out. He’d been young, shy, and completely inexperienced. Hadn’t really known what he was meant to do. It had been only a quick tumble, which had been satisfying enough for him, but almost certainly less so for her, though he’d been too embarrassed to ask.
“Why?” she asked.
“Surely there were women in the camp that would have made themselves available had you an interest.”
“Officers’ wives and daughters,” he said.
“I’d not have touched them out of respect for my fellow officers. There were, occasionally, women who came to camp to sell their services, but I’d seen how quickly certain ailments spread through the infantry. Thought it best not to risk it myself.” There was nothing quite like waking to the agonized cries of a fellow soldier who had gone to relieve himself in the morning only to discover that his prick burned when he pissed.
“Probably wise,” she mused.
“I treated many of those men, saw firsthand what ravages those diseases could inflict. I always chose my benefactors with care for that reason. I can think few things worse than falling victim to a disease for which there is no cure, given to me by someone less scrupulous than myself.”
“So you have some methods, then, of preventing them?” he inquired.
“And pregnancy,” she said, “which would be ruinous in my line of work. Condoms, always, and an herbal tea once daily. Of course it has been some time since I’ve had a need for it, which suits me well enough, because it is dreadful bitter.”
“You’ve had no lovers since your retirement?”
“No, though not for any particular lack of offers. You sacrifice a great deal,” she said, “when you are a mistress. There is no great expectation of privacy even within your own home, for your benefactor might choose to drop round at any moment. And it is never your home, but his—the one he leases for you, for the duration of your arrangement.” She took a thoughtful sip from the glass in her hand.
“I suppose,” she added, pensively, “that I have grown too much accustomed to the precious privacy I’ve attained. I find I am not particularly eager to cede it to someone else. Even a lover.”
“I think I understand, at least a little,” he said.
“I’ve been something of a hermit these last years.” Tucked away in a small cottage, and it had been…pleasant, even if it had also been lonely. There had been no one to gawk at him, no one to whisper behind his back.
“My return to England has been a difficult one. I am the object of much speculation.” He hesitated. Reached for the decanter and refilled her glass, which had grown dangerously close to empty.
“I don’t want a mistress,” he said.
“I could have paid a woman for at least the pretense of looking past my face, if that was of any interest to me.”
Charity canted her head, and an artful curl slipped down the side of her neck, smooth and shiny in the lamplight.
“So not since before the war for you?”
“No.” Probably it should have shamed him to admit to it, but thus far she had reserved judgment upon him, for whichever reasons she might have.
“I am not…particularly practiced,” he said.
“And men are easily pleased, I’ll admit. I don’t want a mistress to please me. It would be more apt to say—to say that what I require is a tutor. A woman to teach me how to please her, so that I will have some certainty that the woman who becomes my wife will not suffer me in the bed chamber.”
“You realize,” she said dryly, “that a courtesan is a purveyor of pleasure, not a receiver of it.”
“You have got the experience which I lack,” he said.
“And I would be grateful for the benefit of it.” He poured himself a glass of liquor, and confessed, “It is not easy to be the object of fear or disgust for the unfortunate arrangement of one’s features. It is less easy still to admit to one’s deficiencies, when one knows one might be mocked for them. I think you might well be the first,” he said, “not to do so, when given the opportunity. I think I could learn more from you than only how to give pleasure.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, and the tip of her finger slipped around the edge of her glass in a slow circle.
“I think you could teach me how to rise above such concerns, as you have.” Because she carried herself with an unshakable poise, an air of such self-possession that he could hardly conceive of ever attaining for himself. Like the duchess she was, even if her position was temporary at best. So far above such things that not even the worst of slurs could touch her unassailable pride.
“I think you could teach me how to be…contented.”
“Confident,” she said simply.
“Comfortable in my own skin,” he countered.
“Or—the skin that is left to me.”
“First, you must stop doing that,” she said.
“You must stop speaking of yourself in such terms. You must stop even thinking in them.”
“How am I to do that?” He flattened his palm upon the surface of the desk, tented his fingers.
“How did you do it?”
A small shrug, which set that loose curl rolling down over her shoulder.
“Perhaps I have always been a little more subversive than is considered acceptable,” she said.
“I decided I would not accept criticism from anyone who has not themselves been in my position. People may render their judgment, Captain—”
“But you don’t have to accept it.” She had said as much before.
“That’s it. That’s it exactly.” She favored him with a smile.
“So when they do, I simply disregard it.”
“I wish I could do the same.” He wished he had half so much strength as she did, half so much self-assuredness.
“You can. I cannot pretend that it will always be easy. But you’ve come out the other side of war. You can weather the Ton, Captain.”
“You say that,” he said, “but sometimes I think I’d rather brave a battlefield than a ballroom. At least I’d be armed.”
Her melodious laugh rippled through the air, and the sound of it trickled to his ears, warm and sweet as honey. For a moment, Anthony found himself stunned by it. He could not recall the last time he had made someone—anyone—laugh like that. With pure, genuine amusement rather than mockery.
“You cannot take a musket into a ballroom,” she said, the last hum of her laughter lingering still upon her lips.
“But every duke comes equipped with a cutting glare, or so I am given to understand. That must be your weapon of choice. Only make judicious use of it.” At last she sobered, straightened in her seat, and drained the last of her liquor.
“Your eyepatch,” she said.
“Will you remove it?”
The dread that skittered down the back of his neck felt as cold as if someone had dumped a bowl of ice down his collar. “Why?”
“Because I would like to see how it has healed.”
“Why?” he asked again, rattled, and it was an effort not to use that cutting glare upon her.
“Because if you want a woman to love you, you must be prepared to be vulnerable with her. Call it your first lesson,” she said.
“I know what lies beneath it already. But I haven’t seen how it healed.”
“Then you will…assist me?”
“I have not yet decided,” she said.
“Naturally, we could not—take any action that would result in an annulment becoming an impossibility. Even if I am not particularly devout, still I would prefer not to be put into the position of lying to a man of God, should I be called to give testimony to the Ecclesiastical Court, you understand.”
“I would not ask it of you.”
“But I would still like to see,” she insisted, her full lips pursing into a little moue, as if his hesitation had annoyed her.
“If I am to consider this proposal of yours, I will require this concession of you. You may call it a condition of my consideration, if it so pleases you.”
She wanted his vulnerability in this. Because, in her judgment, he would need to be vulnerable to win a wife who would love him genuinely, and this—this was more than just a lesson. It was a test. Of his will; of hers. Of his sincerity. Of whether or not he was worth the effort she would expend in the fulfilment of the utterly improper request he had made of her.
“Have you ever been so vulnerable?” he asked, unable to keep a vague resentment from his tone as he reached behind his head to untie the strings binding the patch to his face.
“Never,” she said without a qualm, without a shade of shame.
“The war took things from me, too, Captain. I’d have cut my tender heart out a dozen times over if I had not hardened it of my own accord—and now it is too tough, too gamey and mealy by half for any shred of vulnerability to be found within it. But that has served me well enough in its turn, since no man has been able to make a meal of it, so I count it no great loss.” She stretched her hand out across the desk, which he understood to mean she expected him to surrender the eyepatch into it.
And he did at last, closing his one good eye as he laid the patch into the cup of her palm, unable to bring himself to meet her gaze, to behold her perfect, beautiful, flawless face—while she beheld his scarred one.
But that only left his ears open, all the more sensitive to any hint of recrimination, even the slightest tone of distaste that might linger in her voice.
“It’s not so bad,” she said, and she sounded almost pleasantly surprised.
“My hands were shaking so badly when I did the stitches that I feared I’d done much worse by you. But the wounds have healed well. Better than I could have expected.”
Somehow the words…touched something in him. Like the tiniest part of that ugliness, which had seeped through his scarred skin and straight into his soul, had been rubbed away. Tarnished silver in the earliest stages of a good polish.
“It’s not pretty,” he said. He knew well enough what she was seeing; the closed lid bearing evidence of the empty socket beneath it, the ridges and webs of white and pink scars cutting across his face. Ragged lines carved into his flesh, ones which had nearly taken his life.
“Well, no,” she allowed.
“War wounds rarely are, but pretty is as pretty does. Truly, it is not so bad as all that.”
With that faintly dismissive tone, she suggested he had wallowed too long in an unearned misery. It might have irked him, if—
If she had not pushed back her chair, the legs of it rubbing over the rug before the desk. If she had not leaned across the desk, settled her soft hands upon either side of his face. If she had not laid her lips gently, sweetly, right upon the closed lid of his missing eye.
“I am sorry you lost it,” she said.
“I would have saved it, if it had been possible.”
It hadn’t been. The shrapnel had seen to that.
Carefully she repositioned the eyepatch upon his face, and reached around his head to tie the strings. A subtle floral sweetness filled his nose as she leaned in. Her perfume, he thought. Close enough to smell, almost to taste.
“There,” she said.
“Is that as you prefer it? Too tight? Too loose?”
“It’s fine,” he said, and surprised himself with the raw, guttural sound of his own voice.
“Have I made myself vulnerable enough for you?”
“For the moment.” Her voice had a light, teasing cadence.
“But now you know, don’t you?”
He thought he just might. That if this—his greatest point of sensitivity—was safe within her hands, so too was everything else. Any point of weakness he might reveal to her, that he might discover within himself, would not be at risk of suffering mockery or shame.
But he thought he had learned more than she had intended to teach him. He had learned also that even after sixteen years of self-proclaimed hardheartedness, she could still handle someone else’s heart with the same care and tenderness she had shown to the soldiers whose wounds she had once tended.
Whatever else she had been in the years since they had last met, Charity had been a healer first.
***
A drop of ink dripped from the nib of Charity’s pen, ruining the sheet of paper laid out upon the small desk before her. It didn’t matter; she had only managed as much as Dear Captain Sharp before words had deserted her.
She had yet to give him an answer, had not been certain she would accept his proposition. But she did owe him a proper response to it. There was no particular need for her to accept; though he had offered her payment, she had money enough to afford herself an exceedingly comfortable life. So if she did accept—
If she did accept, it would be because she wanted to, and for no other reason than that. And that was what she had wrestled with these last few days. The part of herself that wanted, against all sound logic, to accept.
She set the pen down across the ruined sheet of paper and leaned back in her chair, considering for once just how very quiet her little flat was, how empty. Oh, she had filled it with things—those trappings of wealth which had pleased her, for all that her last patron, Chris, had often remarked that they made her home look like a brothel. A beautiful upholstered couch with ornately carved and gilded legs. Velvet-covered pillows dripping in gold fringe. Intricately-painted tea cups, not matched into a set but selected piecemeal whenever she had found a pattern she liked. Rich rugs and curtains in sumptuous and expensive fabrics; perfumes contained in tiny crystal vials. Gowns that had cost a bloody fortune, and jewels which—well, the jewels hadn’t cost her anything, since they had been purchased largely by former patrons.
She had turned a small, spare flat into a lavish home. It had become everything she had ever wanted, resplendent with every comfort she had collected for herself.
But sometimes, just recently, it felt so very empty.
It hadn’t seemed so, in the beginning. When Chris had decided to make an honest go of his marriage to his wife, she had been glad of it—both for him, and for herself. She’d got the flat out of him for the unexpected termination of their arrangement, and when he had had his key delivered back to her, there had been an undeniable thrill that had arrived with it. Not because she had disliked their arrangement, but because it had represented a sort of peace she had never had before.
The end of obligation. She was free to ignore a knock at the door, and there would be no one to simply let himself in regardless. And she had reveled in it, that precious freedom she had seized.
She had never gotten around to finding a lover; someone with whom to share her now-unending free time when she wished it and not otherwise. And now, Captain Sharp had offered her an unexpected challenge: not simply to find a lover, but to create one.
A uniquely tantalizing prospect. Men, even the very best of them, could at times be selfish and cold lovers. Some, regrettably, perceived the use of a woman’s body as something he was owed, something to which he was entitled—most especially if she were his mistress or his wife.
Charity had been largely lucky in the patrons she had chosen for herself. But many women were not. Too many gave themselves in marriage with no concept of what their married life would be, what she might face in the marital bed, whether she would be treated with the respect due to her in or out of it.
If she was of a mind, she could teach Captain Sharp to be the sort of husband, the sort of lover that every woman deserved. It would be a service, as it were, to whichever woman came after her.
It would be a service, however briefly, to herself. To mold a lover—in a sense—to her tastes. To have a willing student; a man devoted not to his pleasure but to her own.
A queer shiver ran down her spine, and a sudden heat bloomed in her belly. A sort of arousal she’d not felt in months. A reminder, she thought, of her own inherent sensuality, largely latent for some time now. A woman had needs, and hers had long gone unfulfilled. Long enough that she had almost forgotten the feeling of a man’s hands between her thighs, a man’s mouth at her breasts.
A healthy sexual appetite too long ignored could do strange things to a woman.
They could, for instance, cause her to agree to an incredibly indecorous proposition. With trembling fingers she disposed of the ruined sheet of paper, found a fresh one, and took up her pen once more.
Dear Captain Sharp, she wrote, in perfect fluid script, all hesitation vanquished. I accept.