Free Wanton Widows: Three Short Regency Romps by Isabella Hargreaves

What a Widow Wants
    By Isabella Hargreaves
    The young Dowager Lady Caroline Newberry, like
all the debutants at Lord and Lady Massey’s ball, was dressed in her best
finery and on the hunt for a man. Not just any man. A specific type of man. He
didn’t need wealth or power or to be in need of a wife.
    He did need to be available, well-made
and good in bed. He didn’t even need to be forward. She was more than willing
to make all the advances to signal her desire for nothing more or less than
intercourse – not after marriage or after engagement, or next year, or next
month, or next week, or tomorrow - but tonight, as close to now as possible.
    She scanned the crowded ballroom, hung with
chandeliers and baskets of cascading flowers, for her quarry. Her eyes flicked
over the elderly, the married, the weak-chinned, the effeminate.
    It was one whole, long year since her husband
had passed away and she wanted a man, needed a man, yearned for a man.
    Her husband may have been dead a year, but it
had been nine whole, long years before then that she had found out, at age
eighteen on her wedding night, and every night thereafter, that her husband was
impotent. Completely. Nothing had stirred his lifeless limb. Ever.
    The realisation had been a surprise … a relief
because he wasn’t a young, attractive man and … as the years mounted up, a
frustration that never died.
    So, for ten weary years she’d been trying to
deny her needs, her desires, her yearnings. In that time she had created a long
list of fantasies of how and where she would like to lose her virginity.
    In the last year she had planned for, and
dreamed of, this very night - her first ball of her first season since she made
her come-out at age eighteen.
    Ten years ago, she had been prime meat and her
family had quickly and easily married her off to Lord Newberry, a fifty-year
old father of eight who had already put two wives into the family grave in
distant Yorkshire.
    She had expected to be the mother of another
eight of his children by now, but time had diminished his ability and it was
not to be.
    She took another slow turn around the ballroom
with Harriet, her staid step-daughter-in-law, nodding to acquaintances as she
walked and assessing the male merchandise. By the end of the second set of
dances she had narrowed the choice to Lord Quigley or Sir Robert Townley.
Caroline managed to engineer a set with each of the men and flirted
outrageously. Her mother, God rest her soul, would have been well and truly
shocked by her behaviour. Lord Quigley’s only deficit was his incredible bad
breath, while Sir Robert was young and bumptious. But beggars, it appeared,
could not be choosers. There was no-one else!
    Then she saw him.
    He was the cliché of tall, dark and handsome –
except his handsome was of the cynical, dangerous type.
    A whisper from her companion, dear prim Harriet,
told her who he was.
    Sir Nicholas De Courcey was not someone the
mothers of the debutants wanted dancing with their daughters. He was not
eligible. He was utterly ineligible. He was married … and separated …
and rumoured to have divorce on his mind … maybe. Until such time as he was
divorced, he was in limbo and a danger to the debutants, who seemed stricken
with him wherever he went.
    He avoided them of course, as she saw for
herself. Who could blame him? He had married one of their kind once, and look
what had happened. That was what she was told.
    But, he didn’t need to avoid her , did
he?
    She asked her starchy step-son to introduce
her to him and he grimaced at her request, then obliged, to stop her vexing him
further.
    “Sir Nicholas, I’m delighted to make your
acquaintance,” she said.
    He looked at her with polite interest and
perhaps something more suggestive. “And I yours, Lady Caroline. My condolences
on the passing of your husband.” His voice was deep and smooth.
    She inclined her head in acknowledgement of
his words and waited, unmoving and pointedly, for him to