Page 22 of Duke of Wickedness (Regency Gods #4)

“Minx,” David accused, pecking a light kiss onto her neck.

“I just… I know we think of ourselves as being in an enlightened age, and I think that’s true, in some ways.

But it fascinates me to see how we have become decidedly less enlightened when it comes to matters of carnal pleasures, especially where ladies are concerned. ”

“Yes, I can see how these ladies were a bit more…adventurous than we are meant to be these days,” Ariadne murmured, turning to another page in which a woman was… Well, Ariadne didn’t precisely know how to describe what was happening there, but the lines of the simple drawing were highly suggestive.

“Oh, and these relatively modern drawings are positively tame compared to what our ancient ancestors got up to,” David said, sounding almost innocent in his excitement, more like a scholar than a flirt—remarkable, given the subject of this particular bit of scholarship.

He hurried over to another shelf, ran his finger down a few spines, then pulled one off the shelf.

“This one,” he said, rifling through pages, “tells about the rites of ancient fertility cults.”

Ariadne had been more focused on the book than on David, but at this, her head jerked up.

“Ancient what ?”

His eyes gleamed with the excitement of finding an eager recipient for this information. He opened the book to a page that showed a group of women, all nude, lounging around in a temple while one man knelt in apparent adoration.

The image had only been reproduced in black and white, but even so, Ariadne could see that the women were painted almost lovingly, their expressions beatific in a manner that was only rivaled by that on the kneeling acolyte’s face.

“This was the temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love,” he explained.

Her mouth twitched to the side.

“Might I remind you that my name is Ariadne ?” she said. “I know my classical myths, thank you very much.”

“Well,” he parried, “did you know that devotees of Aphrodite could dedicate themselves to sacred prostitution? That’s what is depicted here.”

This, she had not known.

“So, these women used to…” She blinked. “For their religion?”

“Just so,” he agreed. “It was considered a high honor to dedicate one’s body to the goddess thusly. And this—” He flipped the page. “—was a celebration to honor Dionysus.”

“The god of wine ?” she asked incredulously, fascinated by the image of a circle of joyous, scarcely dressed dancers.

“Wine, pleasure, theater—all the good things in life, really,” he said. “Devotees would celebrate him by indulging in all things hedonistic for days on end.”

“Days,” she echoed. “My goodness. And I assume that you named your house after this fellow as…pure coincidence?”

He bit his lip slightly. “More like impure coincidence, I would say.”

David edged in next to her. When they stood side by side, she couldn’t quite see his expression, but she could somehow practically feel his smile.

“In any case, this is the one I find the most fascinating,” he said, flipping another page to an image that made Ariadne’s heart stop in her throat.

There had been more than two people in many of the other images, so it wasn’t just the numbers that were alluring.

No, it was that the people in the image were nearly all men. And they were all focused on the one woman, who lounged in the middle of the page, luxuriating in the many hands that caressed her arms, her legs, her breasts…

And her stomach was rounded with pregnancy.

“I find that many of my contemporaries put women into distinct categories,” he says. “They act as though women are either wives and mothers or they are the women with whom we seek pleasure—actresses, courtesans, the women of the demimonde.”

He chuckled mirthlessly. “They hold that these two categories are entirely separate—must be entirely separate—even when it completely disregards any logic about how wives become mothers in the first place.”

She thought, for just a flash, about Lord Hershire, about his desire for a pure wife, how he thought that so-called purity would make him better than he was.

It was easy to see how men might be tempted into making this stark division if they told themselves that they were the ones who would benefit, when they were the ones who didn’t pay the cost.

“Or how demimondaines end up being born,” Ariadne added, eyes gazing over the worshipful look on the face of a man who was kissing the inside of the central woman’s wrist.

“Precisely,” David agreed. “They may say that such thoughts are to protect ladies, as if being desired makes you cheap. As if courtesans and actresses don’t need protection. As if keeping these things separate isn’t just condescension and cruelty in another name.”

Ariadne looked up at him, slightly surprised by the vehemence in his tone. The hint of bitterness there.

But, for the first time all evening, David wasn’t meeting her eye, and so she didn’t press. She just let him talk.

“Our antecedents didn’t hold with such ideas. They knew that a woman lost to her pleasure was a beautiful thing, and that she could be not only a sensual creature, but also a mother, a wife—she could be everything. They adored her for it. They treated her as a marvel.”

He delivered this last bit in a silky tone as he came back to his original position behind her, his hands on her hips, his chin hovering just above her shoulder.

“What do you think, little bird?” he crooned into her ear. “Would you like to be treated like the marvel you are? Would you like to be worshipped as you took your pleasure?”

“Not by multiple men,” she said at once, so alarmed by the mere prospect that it took her a moment to realize the other implication to what she had said.

The implication that she would like being worshipped by one man very much, indeed.

Neither of them had to ask about which man that might be.

“Good to know, little bird,” he said, kissing the back of her neck. “Very, very good to know.”