Thorndyke lay with her until daybreak. He had taken her virtue, her dignity, everything she had to give, and in return he had turned her from anxious spinster to a woman, ripe and ready to be plucked again and again and again.
Now they lay there side by side, his magnificent body like marble hewn from the hands of Michelangelo himself, as they heard the household begin to stir.
‘I must take my leave of you, Miss Morland,’ Thorndyke said, his voice husky with spent passion. ‘I trust my attentions . . . pleased you?’
Posy smiled, though truly there was little to smile about when she, an unmarried woman with responsibilities heaped heavy on her fragile shoulders had welcomed the most scandalous rake into her bed. For ultimately she had welcomed him, not just with lips and treacherous limbs, but with rapturous sighs and throaty moans of encouragement too. Her reputation had been the only currency she possessed for she had little in the way of coin, and now she no longer had that.
Yet still she smiled. ‘My lord, since when have you ever had any regard for what pleases me?’
‘Touché, Miss Morland,’ Thorndyke told her, his dark eyes heavy and slumberous. (NB Can eyes be heavy? And slumberous? Wouldn’t he just look like he was knackered?) ‘But I’m not the kind of rogue who thinks only of his own pleasure. I trust I rose to the occasion? That you weren’t disappointed?’
In truth, as Thorndyke had schooled her in the art of lovemaking, he’d been the most tender, the most obliging of men, but as the sun slanted through the curtains that Posy had hastily drawn last night as Thorndyke began to disrobe, so the magic they’d experienced by flickering candlelight was already a fleeting memory.
‘For once you didn’t disappoint, as well you know. But the Ton, indeed all of London, know that you take your pleasure where you can find it, then move on to fresh sport,’ Posy said sadly, though she knew it would be madness to expect anything more from Thorndyke. Certainly not his heart.
‘But are your charms worth fifty guineas?’ Thorndyke asked, and suddenly his eyes were as cold and as hard as the diamonds that Posy was sure that he possessed in abundance. ‘I think not.’
‘Sir! What do you mean?’ Posy scrambled to cover the flesh that Thorndyke had worshipped for hours, but his hands closed around her wrists. ‘Was I merely a game to you?’
‘Aye! And one I tire of playing,’ Thorndyke said with a cruel laugh. ‘I had a ten-guinea wager with Sir Piers Brocklehurst that I could take you. Oh, come now. Wipe the frown from your face. I’m not a complete monster, I’ll take the ten guineas off your debt.’ He flung Posy away from him and rose from the bed as she cowered amid the crumpled linen that had borne witness to her ruination. ‘Perhaps Piers might be willing to pay the rest in return for your favours, but I fear not. He likes fresher flowers.’
‘How could you do this to me? After what we shared? The intimacies? The promises you made?’
‘I made no promises to you, Miss Morland,’ Thorndyke sneered as he dressed with a slow ease as if he were entirely comfortable. ‘The only promise I made was to myself years ago, that I would not let a woman treat me the way you always have, with contempt, with damnable haughtiness as if it were I that was some lowly guttersnipe and not the other way round. If you were a man, I’d have challenged you to a duel for your insolence and disregard, but you are not a man so I sought my revenge as best as I could.’
‘You blackguard! You scoundrel! Would that I were a man, I would dash your brains out with my bare hands!’ Posy rose up on her knees, dragged her gaze away from the cruel curl of Thorndyke’s lips to light on the tumbler sitting on the nightstand. She snatched it up and threw it at his damnable face.
Thorndyke caught the glass in one hand. ‘Is that the best you can do? What a ridiculous excuse for a woman you are!’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Now, I must away. Retire to purer climes.’
‘Go!’ Posy screamed. ‘And may Satan himself be at your heels!’
Thorndyke paused in tying his cravat – and how Posy wished that it were a garrotte. ‘I fancy you’ll be better acquainted with hell than I am, for it will be the debtors’ prison for you if you don’t pay off your debts.’ He bowed mockingly. ‘And now I must bid you farewell, madam,’ he said, then leapt out of the window just as Little Sophie knocked on the door.