The Clever Strumpet Read online

She knew full well what he meant. Though he hadn’t said anything outright, she understood that his family’s financial situation was dire. The Herrington lands in Shropshire had experienced failure after failure in the past few years, reducing revenue to a degree that was no longer sustainable. It was the reason Rufus had been one of Nigel Kent’s initial suspects in the theft of the Chandramukhi Diamond. Few families needed money more than the Herringtons. And while a part of Caro believed the Herringtons’ difficulties could be solved with a change in land management techniques and a more modern approach to stewardship, she wasn’t fool enough to believe that would change the expectations that had been placed on Rufus’s shoulders.

  He sent her a mournful, guilty look that hinted at what he was about to say, so she said it for him.

  “Your father is demanding you marry well and quickly, isn’t he?”

  Rufus stared at her for a moment with a stricken look, then blew out a breath and ran a hand through his fiery hair. “He’s all but arranged a marriage to Lady Malvis Cunningham.”

  “Lady Malvis?”

  Caro nearly laughed in spite of Rufus’s depressed spirits. Lady Malvis Cunningham had been engaged to Jo’s new husband, Lord Felix Lichfield, months ago, but had called off the engagement when she discovered Felix’s reputation for bedsport that the Marquis deSade would be proud of. Little did Lady Malvis know that Felix’s reputation had been unwanted and that he had thoroughly changed his ways upon his marriage to Jo. It was a delicious sort of irony that she should have set her marital sights on Felix’s closest friend now.

  Evidently, Caro wasn’t able to hide her mirth well enough. Rufus sent her a sullen look. “Please don’t laugh at my misfortune.”

  “I’m not laughing, darling,” she said, scooting closer to him and cradling his face, though she couldn’t wipe the smile from her own. “I know how you feel about this.”

  “Do you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you know that I only come here to assist you in your search for the diamond thief because it allows me to misbehave scandalously with you?”

  “That’s not true,” Caro told him gently. “You’re as concerned about the thief as I am.”

  “Am I?” He whisked her into his arms, twisting to lie her on her back under him. He managed to slip her gown off her shoulders and tug it just enough so that both breasts popped free of the silken fabric. He cupped one hand around a breast, kneading it gently. “Do you know how desperately I long to make you mine, how badly I want to sink my cock deep into your quivering pussy until we both come so hard we black out?”

  Caro caught her breath, brushing her hands up his sides and resting them on his shoulders. “Yes, I do,” she said earnestly. “You want it as madly as I do. I don’t understand why you haven’t claimed what you want already.”

  His eyebrows lifted as he stared at her. “Because you’re not one of Khan’s cheap whores,” he said. “You’re Lady Caroline Pepys. You hail from a distinguished family. Your father is a viscount.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t get wet when you fiddle with me the way you are,” Caro said, torn between wanting to laugh at the paradoxical sweetness of the way he seemed to see her and wanting to tear open his breeches and force the matter there and then by riding him until his eyes rolled back in his head with pleasure.

  His body tensed, and for a brief moment she was certain he would burrow under her skirts to see if what she said was true. All too soon, he shook his head and sat straight.

  “I’m going to have to marry Lady Malvis.” He said her name as though tasting a particularly salty fish. “But I don’t want to give you up,” he added. Caro sat up, doing nothing to adjust her bodice or hide the full expanse of her breasts from him as he rushed on with, “I can’t marry you, but say you’ll be my mistress. I’ll keep you in grand style. You’ll want for nothing. As soon as I do my duty by Lady Malvis, I’ll put her off and devote myself exclusively to you, to the family we could have together.”

  Caro’s heart flopped in her chest, and she sent him a sad smile. “You know you don’t have the money for any of that,” she said softly.

  “Lady Malvis brings quite a price with her,” he argued.

  “A price which would go to your father and your family’s estate,” she pointed out.

  “Yes, but….” He clenched his jaw, and when no words came out, he blew out a defeated sigh and scrubbed his hands over his face. “It’s over, then,” he said, shoulders dropping. “I am utterly at the mercy of a title I never asked for and a family I am a part of completely by accident. Would that I were a pauper who could claim his own life and the woman he loves.” He glanced meaningfully at Caro.

  Flutters of bitter sweetness swirled through Caro’s insides and her soul. Rufus loved her. She’d suspected as much for weeks. It had come upon them both suddenly and furiously as they’d set every rule of propriety aside to engage in their wicked flirtations while trying to catch the diamond thief. And if Rufus’s situation were the only one in play, theirs would have been a tragic love indeed. But there were a great many things about her that Rufus didn’t yet know. Things that might turn the tide when they became known.

  “We need to focus on what truly matters at the moment,” she said, inching closer to him. She reached for his hand and lifted it to cradle one of her exposed breasts. “We need to return to the ballroom where we can flirt and tease and pretend to be as careless as any other of Khan’s guests, all the while keeping our eyes peeled for the diamond thief and his accomplices.”

  “But what if we catch the thief?” Rufus asked. “What if Newman or Miss Dobson returns and we nab them and the game is up? What of us then?”

  A slow, clever grin spread across Caro’s face. There was so much that Rufus had yet to learn, so much that would change everything. “Why don’t you leave the future to me?” she asked. “I have plans for it, after all.”

  “And do those plans involve me?” Rufus asked, kneading her breast and rubbing his palm across her nipple to make it hard once more.

  “Of course they do,” Caro answered, mischief in her eyes.

  Chapter 2

  Plots and schemes to alleviate the unfortunate situation Rufus found himself in reverberated through Caro’s brain all through the night and into the next morning. Of course, she knew the course of action she planned to take. Indeed, she’d been hard at work doing everything she could to provide just the sort of windfall Rufus and the entire Herrington family would need to change not only their fortunes, but their way of thinking. The way her pen scratched across the paper in front of her was proof of that. Her hand was beginning to cramp, seeing as she had been writing since dawn in the office once occupied by Miss Dobson. But as she’d hoped, her publisher had sent her a note just that morning begging for more material. He could hardly produce Mrs. Vickers books fast enough to meet the voracious demands of the readers.

  “She brushed her lips softly against his,” she wrote, “her heart aching for the losses he had experienced, but if she had her way, other parts of her would be aching in no time as she allowed him to have his wicked way with her.

  “‘Is this what you want, my lord?’ she asked, stepping back and letting the robe slip from her shoulders to reveal her fresh, virginal skin and the gossamer curls between her legs.

  “‘Yes,’ Lord Darkington told her. ‘I want it all. I want you on your knees.’

  “Felicia lowered her eyes and did as she was commanded.

  “‘Now, unleash my dragon and give him a home in the sweet cave of your mouth.’”

  A knock sounded at the office door, jolting Caro out of her overheated imagination so sharply that ink splattered across the page.

  “Lady Caroline, Lady Caroline,” Flora, the school’s loyal, if flighty, maid burst into the room. Her brown eyes were wide and her uniform cap was askew. “You’re needed immediately.”

  Caro reached for a scrap of blotting paper and touched it discretely to the wet ink before standing. “What seems to be the tro
uble?” she asked, loath to step away from her desk.

  “It’s Lady Alphonse and Lady Towers,” Flora said. “They’ve come to demand a reckoning.”

  Caro’s brow shot up. She should have grown used to the parents of the few remaining students pestering her with their concerns and inquiries, but each new visit to the school and the demands they brought with them irritated her. She had things perfectly well in hand, after all.

  “Tell them I’ll be there—no, I’ll tell them myself.”

  She stepped away from the desk, sending a last, lingering glance of worry at her manuscript. Felicity and Eliza would be in the room within seconds to pore over what she’d already written. Caro didn’t know whether to love them for their wickedness or to be exasperated for their nosiness.

  As soon as she reached the hall, the new sounds of the school swelled in chorus around her. In the room across the hall from her office, three of the girls were in the midst of a music lesson, one of them playing while the other two sang a duet. Farther down the hall, the voice of Dr. Brunning as he lectured half a dozen young ladies about Socratic method sounded through the door to one of the classrooms. Closer to the front of the hall, a trio of pupils were arguing fiercely about something in German. And standing near the front door were Lady Alphonse and Lady Towers.

  “Good morning, my ladies.” As she reached the two, startled women, Caro dropped into a perfect curtsy. “May I be of some assistance this morning?”

  Lady Alphonse blinked rapidly and shook her head as though she were attempting to wake herself from a dream. “Now see here, young lady,” she began, though perhaps without the force those words should have carried. “I am entirely displeased with the fact that you have continued operation of this institution without its founder.”

  With as pleasant an expression as Caro could manage at any mention of the horrible Miss Dobson, she said, “Miss Dobson abandoned the school and has not been heard from since. However, we, the pupils of this school, decided that our intellectual and moral education was of paramount importance and that the school should remain open for our benefit.”

  She wanted to grin like a cat over the baffled expressions her explanation prompted in the two grand ladies in front of her. The explanation had been crafted and refined after similar visits from anxious parents intent on taking their daughters home. Caro refused to simply bow to pressure, however, and since she was rather too old to continue on as a pupil herself at the ripe age of three-and-twenty, she had declared herself the new mistress of the establishment.

  “But,” Lady Towers stammered, exactly as Caro expected. “But you cannot simply turn a school over to its students. Where is the order of it all? Where is the hierarchy?”

  In answer to her question, Caro followed the script she had perfected and gestured for the ladies to follow her down the hall as though giving a tour.

  “As you can see, we have engaged educators of the finest renown to take Miss Dobson’s place.” She crossed to one of the classrooms and opened the door to reveal four young ladies sitting at a table, slates ready, while a stolid man of the cloth lectured them about the Gospels. “Rev. Ellis has taken over the spiritual guidance of our students,” Caro explained in a quiet voice.

  “Oh, hello.” Rev. Ellis interrupted his lesson to nod gravely to the two, fine ladies. “Would you care to attend to the lessons of the life of our Lord Jesus?”

  “Oh, no, no, carry on,” Lady Alphonse said, backing away from the room as though she had interrupted a vicar in the middle of his sermon. Once Caro had shut the door, she said, “I don’t recall Miss Dobson having a man of the cloth on staff to instruct the young ladies,” in a respectful voice.

  “She didn’t,” Caro said, leading them on toward the dining room. “But it was an oversight we sought to correct immediately upon her disappearance.”

  She didn’t need to elaborate in order to inform the two ladies that the purpose of the new spiritual lessons were to equip the young ladies with the ability to question what they learned in church from a rational viewpoint as well as to learn the true words of the Bible rather than simply what they were told.

  They turned the corner into the dining room, where two of the remaining pupils were listening to Mrs. Murphy, the school’s new cook, explain proper table settings and meal management.

  “I cannot stress enough the importance of frugality without sacrificing quality,” Mrs. Murphy told the young ladies with a shake of her finger. “When you are running your own households, you’ll thank me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the two young ladies said earnestly.

  “I don’t recall Miss Dobson teaching the skills our girls will need in their married lives,” Lady Towers said, her expression brightening. “In fact, I’d given up all hope of my Eliza ever making a suitable wife, but now….”

  “That is the reason your daughters were sent to this school, is it not? To erase their past transgressions and prepare them for a new, respectable life?” Caro questioned both women, trying not to give in to her temper. In fact, she knew full well most of her friends and fellow pupils had been sent to the school to be forgotten as hopeless.

  “Oh, yes,” Lady Towers said with sudden seriousness, her cheeks glowing pink.

  “Absolutely,” Lady Alphonse agreed. “Didn’t I say our girls would be washed as clean as the morning dew and ready to rejoin polite society after their time here?”

  “You always did.” Lady Towers nodded.

  Caro clenched her jaw, but tried to smile all the same. If she had her druthers, her friends would learn what they needed to hold their own against their callous, unfeeling families. They might not be able to break free of the rigid social lines that would hold them in place for the rest of their lives, but they would have imagination, knowledge, and a liberal education in all the ways that a woman could secretly enjoy herself and her life by the time they returned to the world.

  “As you can see,” she lectured the two fine ladies as she led their tour toward the music room, “we have adjusted to Miss Dobson’s absence and are thriving.”

  “Yes, I can see you are,” Lady Towers said, smiling as the strains of a Handel aria wafted down the hall. “I told you there was nothing to fear,” she said to Lady Alphonse.

  “I believe it was I who told you things were well in hand,” Lady Alphonse argued.

  Caro managed to keep her brittle smile in place by marveling at how easily the two had been swayed. It had taken other mothers—and an occasional father—far longer to come around to Caro’s way of thinking. But she’d won her way in the end every time.

  She was about to open her mouth to invite the two women for tea in one of the unused classrooms that she’d had redecorated specifically for the purpose of wooing hesitant parents, when Lady Towers said, “Miss Dobson will be in quite a pickle when she returns from her father’s country house.”

  Caro’s mouth dropped open and her pulse sped up.

  “I dare say she will,” Lady Alphonse said. “But I do have one further concern.” She turned to Caro, her expression growing serious once more. “How do you respond to the unfortunate reputation of the house next door?”

  Caro could have screamed. Not so much as a trace of Miss Dobson for weeks, and the moment the answer to the mystery of the woman’s whereabouts had been dropped in her lap, the subject had been changed to the stickiest topic of all.

  “We have very little interaction with our neighbors,” she told the women, frustrated as she felt her face grow hot. Blushing was a terrible accompaniment to lies.

  “But the influence,” Lady Towers said. “I cannot help but worry that my poor, innocent, impressionable Eliza might glance out the window at an inopportune time and see examples of lust and depravity.” She lowered her voice to a whisper at her last words.

  Caro resisted the urge to arch an incredulous brow. The only reason Eliza and Felicity hadn’t become embroiled in the entertainments on offer at the East India Company’s house was because they did not yet kno
w about the secret passageways. But if the two ever found out, Caro was certain they would be dancing naked in the ballroom on a nightly basis.

  “I can assure you—” she began, but was sharply cut short.

  “Caroline!”

  Cold fingers of dread slipped down Caro’s spine, snapping her posture rod straight. She turned to glance toward the front of the hallway only to find her own mother standing inside the front door like a framed portrait of a Valkyrie about to pass judgment.

  “If you will excuse me for a moment,” Caro whispered to Lady Alphonse and Lady Towers. “Please feel free to observe the music class, if you’d like.”

  She steered the two women—who seemed as alarmed by her mother’s appearance as Caro was—toward the music room. Once they were on their way, she squared her shoulders, tilted her head up, and marched down the hall toward her mother.

  “What a pleasant surprise, Mother,” she said with the best smile she could manage, which was as sour as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. “What brings you to our humble school this morning?”

  “Miss Dobson’s school, you mean,” her mother snapped, looking this way and that. “Where is the old prune?”

  Caro lost her smile and tried not to lose her confidence with it. “Surely, you’ve heard, Mama. Miss Dobson has abandoned the school.”

  Her mother blinked, staring hard at Caro. “How? When?”

  Caro cleared her throat, her stomach sinking. “More than a month ago. Do you not remember?”

  “No,” her mother said with a frown.

  Caro hesitated for only a moment before saying, “I sent you a letter.” Indeed, she had. One that informed her mother not only of Miss Dobson’s disappearance, but of her intention to take the school in hand.

  Her mother waved her hand as though swatting a fly. “You know I never read your horrid drivel.”

  Caro swallowed hard. There it was—the reason her mother had shunted her off to a fourth-rate reformatory and left her there to rot. Her writing. She cleared her throat and did her very best to scrape up her pride enough to say, “Miss Dobson is gone, and we, her students, have decided to carry on under new management.”