Free In the Flesh by Portia Da Costa Page A

gentleman who seems to be in charge into the morning room, will you, Polly? And tell him I’ll be down presently.”
    Fortified by tea, Beatrice prepared for the forthcoming confrontation. Part of her was nervous, part filled with a perverse and delicious longing. She’d soon have a lover, and by all accounts, one as skilled as he was handsome.
    “The morning room, not the parlor?”
    “The morning room will do. The parlor needs bottoming and it’s only for persons of quality anyway.”
    That would show him. If it was him.
    “And then shall I return to help you dress, miss?”
    Beatrice groaned inside. The corset, the layers of petticoats, her hair…it would all take an age.
    To the devil with it! And with him! He’ll see me in dishabille soon enough, and after last night, it’s far too late to stand on ceremony.
    Those blue eyes, so well remembered, seemed to taunt her, and between her thighs, she imagined she felt his fingers. A sweet ache coiled and tightened in her belly.
    “No, that won’t be necessary, Polly. I’ll receive him in my dressing gown. You just keep an eye on the friend. Have Cook and Enid gone out to the market yet?”
    Polly nodded, her eyes popped wide, and Beatrice laughed inside. Her maid was usually unflappable, hard to shock.
    “But, miss, it’s not seemly to receive a gentleman in your night attire. What would people say?”
    “People? Pah! They already think I’m a hussy and a fallen women, so what difference does it make now? And I’ll be dismissing this fellow again within a few minutes. He won’t have time to be scandalized.” She tossed her hair, wondering what Mr. Edmund Ellsworth Ritchie would think of so much curly redness. Polite society considered such hair savage, too wild and abandoned, but she considered it her very best feature. “Now, about your business, Polly!”
    The other woman lingered. She gave a pointed cough.
    “Now what is it?” Beatrice hid another smile.
    “Won’t you need chaperone, miss? I mean, an unmarried lady receiving a gent on her own…without her corset.” Polly’s eyes twinkled with the spark of a conspirator. “There’s some that might say that’s rather fast.”
    “Ah, well, as I said, thanks to Mr. Eustace Lloyd, that famously loathsome and despicable cad, I am fast, Polly. Positively a Derby winner!” Beatrice shrugged. Her damaged reputation still should be considered a calamity, but all she felt was a delicious liberation. “So I might as well enjoy the freedom my speedy status affords me, eh? Now, off you go.”
    “Yes, miss!” Hiding a smirk behind her hand, Polly darted from the room.
    Now, as to her dressing gown? The old brown woolen one just wouldn’t do. Time to bring out the fine blue one, one of the last new things she’d purchased before their fortunes had turned to dust.
    If a man was prepared to pay twenty thousand guineas for the use of her body for a month, the least a girl could do was wear her nicest dressing gown.
    * * *
    RITCHIE COULDN’T RELAX in the damask-upholstered wing chair. It was comfortable enough, and not the usual delicate ladies’ morning-room chair; but waiting, waiting, waiting, he couldn’t find ease in it.
    What’s the matter with me? Why am I here like this, sneaking around and behaving like a youth in rut with his brains all addled by his first-ever sniff of a real, live woman?
    What was it about Beatrice Weatherly that made him act this way? Despite the licentiousness of the photographs she’d posed for, his gut feeling was still that she was no jaded sophisticate. The women he kept company with were mainly society beauties with inattentive husbands, women eager to share his bed discreetly in return for pleasure and a release from the inherent boredom of the ever repeating Season.
    But Beatrice Weatherly wasn’t jaded or bored or married, or even particularly sophisticated, and perhaps because of that, his yearning for her was out of all proportion. She had an elusive quality that