A House East of Regent Street Read online

  “Um, one more thing, Miss Myles. Your name – um, I should like to know your first name.”

  Oddly, given the forthrightness with which she’d conducted herself up until now, she hesitated for a moment. “Will a nom de guerre be all right? For some years now, I’ve been called Cléo.” Clay-OH.

  He blinked. The queen. In the play. What was the line? Age… age cannot wither her, nor…nor something…

  Cléo.

  “It will do very well, Miss Myles – ah, Cléo. Well, tomorrow then.

  “The front parlor. At three.”

  Tuesday: The Front Parlor

  He hadn’t slept well.

  She’d haunted his dreams, but not in the pleasant, teasing, voluptuous way he’d anticipated. The images flickering against his eyelids had been fragmentary, uneasy.

  He was late getting to the house; somehow he’d lost his way. Confused by all the new constructions going up, he’d wandered for what had felt like hours through labyrinthine streets; his knee had slowed him down, perhaps he needed an invalid chair.

  Ah, but there she was, just around the corner – well, there was the hem of her velvet cloak anyway. He tried to hurry his steps, keep pace with her. Not too far to go now – Soho Square was just a few yards away. The house’s fine front of gray stone and red brick materialized like a ship in the mist.

  His cane disappeared, and so did the ache in his knee. He bounded up to the front door, stopping to stroke the thick black curls of the little housemaid scrubbing the shallow marble steps.

  Somehow, he knew to be careful; someone had spilled some sort of slippery ointment.

  A blue-eyed cat sat perched on an iron railing. It watched as he tossed the housemaid a coin and then it leaped out of sight.

  The girl turned a hideous gargoyle face to him, stuck out her tongue, and hissed.

  He woke with a pounding heart, a headache (he’d drained the brandy bottle after she’d gone) and a guilty, sweaty awareness of how shabbily he’d behaved the night before. Yes, she was beautiful, fascinating, the most desirable woman he was ever likely to have (in this world anyway, and he wasn’t counting on the possibility of another). And yes, she could be bought, but not because she’d intended to peddle herself. She’d consented to the deal he’d proposed because she’d had no other choice. He’d exploited her and he’d cheated the Frenchman, who actually seemed quite a decent chap. He’d taken cruel, petty advantage of their evident financial embarrassment. Which is, of course, always the surest method of increasing one’s own capital.

  But he hadn’t done it to make himself richer. He’d done it because he was in such blatant, humiliating need of her.

  Which made it all the more unconscionable, an insult both to her and to himself.

  Still, he told himself, it wasn’t too late to make it right.

  He could still invalidate the bargain, free all parties from obligation. Offer the present owners a fee to ensure that they’d rent to the Frenchman – make it worth their while, even at a financial loss to himself.

  But… you’re not the sort of man who does business at a loss, she’d told him. You’re utterly lacking in grace or style – she hadn’t said that, but surely she’d meant it. You’re nothing, compared to the refined gentleman I’m used to.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw Soulard grip her hand, watched her slender fingers straighten the paisley shawl about the invalid’s lap. They’d been together for twelve years; casually, unconcernedly, they’d flaunted their intimacy, their mutual sympathy, like a king adjusting his fur-lined greatcoat in sight of a shivering beggar. It was a mortification, he thought, to have barged in upon them with his lonely, jealous lusts. The only thing to do was apologize and make it right; back off and leave them to their poorly conceived business venture.

  But he’d never backed off from an opportunity. If he were that sort, he wouldn’t have begged a job on a merchant ship when he was twelve. He’d have stayed in Lancashire; he’d probably have died in the colliery.

  If he couldn’t have the sort of touch he coveted, he’d have whatever sort of touch he could buy. And as for his lack of grace and style – she could bloody well think anything she liked of him. A woman who could speak so casually of beds and lubricating ointments oughtn’t to be judging him. And in any case, he intended to get his money’s worth.

  For he’d also awoken this morning with a monstrous hardness between his legs. And – as he swung his body around to get out of bed, dragging the bad leg behind him – he knew that there was no possibility he’d apologize. And not a chance in hell that he’d break the compact he’d bound her to last night.

  Three o’clock, was it? He’d probably specified three in order to see her again in the sweet light of afternoon. Or because three was supposed to be a magic number, or simply a nice leisurely time of day to have at her. In any case, it had sounded right when he’d proposed it, but now it sounded a damnably long time away.

  Well, how did one usually pass the time?

  Breakfast – no, he was still too queasy for breakfast. Wash, dress, have his man shave him.

  Walk about town. Aimlessly, and then sometimes with dogged, mechanical rapidity, even when his knee pained him. He barely took note of where he was: Holborn, Bloomsbury… the next time he looked about him he’d wandered deep into the East End, where the buildings crowded so closely upon each other that they blackened the morning sky. The streets were filthy, the buildings hideous rookeries; he kept a firm grip on his purse and held his cane like a weapon. Cold eyes appraised him from doorways. As a boy, he’d learned how to put up a wary, aggressive front. The men watching him could tell that he knew how to fight – one on one, anyway. He hurried away before a gang could gather. Or before his knee could buckle and give him away.

  Returned to the City’s safer precincts, he lingered at his accustomed coffee house, reading the newspaper and trading bits of gossip about the price of securities and movement of commodities on the ’Change. None of his regular acquaintances were about, but then, it wasn’t his regular time: midday usually found him at the Oakshutts’. He buried himself in the newspapers for an hour and a half more, making his way to Cavendish Square around two.

  Where he learned (though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise) that the young ladies and their mother were on a shopping expedition. The butler didn’t try to mask his disapprobation: the oldest miss had thought you might be here an hour ago, Mr. Merion, but…

  They’d be home about three. Jack murmured something about an engagement of his own at three and resumed his wanderings.

  Astonishing, though, just how slowly the time passed when you deliberately set out to waste it. Unless, like Crowden and his intimates, you belonged to one of those West End gentlemen’s clubs. Gambling and betting were prodigious time-eaters; according to the viscount, clubmen’s conversation was more effective still. Analysis of the cut of a coat or the cuttingness of a remark could occupy the better part of a day. Before you knew it, it was time to hurry out to supper or the opera.

  Of course, Jack could never aspire to membership in such a fraternity; the best he could hope for was that someday a son of his… Dutifully, he made his way back to the Oakshutts’. He left his card, along with a promise to call again in the evening, when he hoped the young lady would be free to receive him.

  After which errand he discovered that he was late (just as he’d been in his dream) and obliged to hurry eastward, across the half-laid pavement of Regent Street, through the raw constructions of what would someday be a graceful boulevard. He ran the last few blocks, limped up the white marble front steps (no gargoyle scrubbing them, anyway), put his key to the lock, and made his wild-eyed, dusty, disheveled, apologetic entrance into the green front parlor.

  Where no apology was required. A customer, after all, could arrive any time he wished. He’d hired her to please him, and it was clear that she intended to do exactly that. Yesterday’s negotiations were all in the past. Today, she would give him everything she’d promised.<
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  Beginning, just as she’d said, with an appropriate setting. Remarkable what she’d done, just by moving things here and there, adjusting the light, and placing herself at the center of the scene. As though she were an actress in a play, delivering her lines in front of a couple of potted plants the audience would come to take for an entire forest. The house was a brothel again, Jack an eager customer, and she… But was it the kohl outlining her eyes, the inviting curve of her painted lips, or the languor of her slouch? Whatever it was, she looked entirely natural: mildly bored, reasonably good-humored, a bit relieved that he wasn’t an entirely unsavory piece of work. Because what he wanted – what they’d do in the next hours – well, it was all in a day’s work, for her.

  She’d removed the covers from the room’s few pieces of furniture – a settee with slender, delicate legs; a small inlaid table; a lamp. The room was much darker than it had been yesterday; she’d drawn the brocade curtains. Well, she’d have to, wouldn’t she, Jack told himself reasonably, it would be indecent to leave the windows uncovered; anyone could look in on them from the street. Still, she hadn’t drawn them entirely shut; a few harsh golden diagonals of sunlight cut through the space. The upper panes of the windows were cut like prisms; a rainbow splashed and wavered against the floorboards like the sun on ocean waves. The lamp flickered, the rest of the room seemed huge, indeterminate, a pirate’s cave of shifting, unpredictable darks and lights. He corrected himself. Not entirely unpredictable: as always, the light knew how to find her. Her black hair shone almost blue; the short yellow peignoir blazed against the settee’s bronze brocade, as the words took form Jack’s memory.

  The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne…

  Except that Cleopatra hadn’t arrayed herself on that barge with one black-stockinged leg carelessly curled beneath her. Or had a narrow velvet ribbon tied about her neck. Nor had there been a cigarette dangling from her fingers when her boatmen had rowed her down the Nile to greet Mark Antony. If the old Egyptian doxy had staged her big entrance this seductively, Jack thought, she wouldn’t have needed smiling attendants, purple sails, or “strange invisible perfume” drifting in the wind.

  The acrid fragrance of one black Turkish cigarette would have been quite sufficient.

  She took a long draw, exhaled, and smiled lazily at him through the smoke, like a girl who’d had an easy day of it so far and might welcome a little exercise at the hands of a likely customer.

  “Hullo luv, care to take a turn?”

  Impressive. He nodded, flashing his handsome hero smile in return.

  To be rewarded with a quick, appraising glance – from head to toe, and especially in between.

  “All right, then,” she said, “a bit of rantum-scantum, then. They told me about you, you see. Said he likes it more than one way, if you get my meaning, sir. Well, why not, I said, so long’s his money’s good.”

  Infinitely more beautiful than any girl he’d ever had, she’d nonetheless managed to present herself as a compendium of all of them. He sat next to her on the settee, pinched her breast where it swelled out from the neckline of her peignoir, and pulled open the knot in her sash.

  “Your money is good, ain’t it, darling?” she whispered. “Because the rest of you don’t look too bad.”

  “My money’s good,” he murmured. “But let’s see the rest of you, Cléo.”

  She giggled and moved to her feet, managing as she did so to wriggle out of the peignoir and kick it out of the way. Serene, unabashed, as though they had all the time in the world, she stood with her black-stockinged legs well apart, the inky thatch between them just visible though the fine linen of her shift. Arms akimbo, hands on hips at the edge of her tightly laced corset, she raised her chin, letting the cigarette dangle from her lips. A slender trail of smoke rose from the tip; she gazed back at Jack from under heavy, painted eyelids.

  The shift’s neckline had a drawstring, tied only in a simple bow. Not that it would have mattered; he could have loosened any sort of knot she might have used to close it – he might actually have preferred a bit of a challenge, to uncover, to reveal, to free the breasts he’d been aching to hold in his hands. Firm, heavy, ripe: he buried his face in them, slid his hands down to her waist and back around to her arse. He kissed and nibbled, sucked and licked and nuzzled; pulled her closer to him now, clasping her between his thighs, his fingers exploring the parts of her he hadn’t yet seen, tracing the curve and the cleft of her behind. And yes, he thought triumphantly, she was breathing more quickly now. She gasped, and took the blasted cigarette out of her mouth.

  “Turn around,” he told her. “I want…”

  But she already knew what he wanted to see – the tapering curve, the cleft like one you sometimes find in a perfect white peach, downy, dark, mysterious. In truth, he could have gotten a far better view of her arse if he were willing to let her move a few inches further away from him. But he’d once more taken hold of her breasts, his thumbs and fingers tight around her hardening nipples.

  Ah well, it was only the first day. There would be time.

  Everything in due time, but first things first. Regretfully, he let go of her. “And now turn around again, to face me.”

  He moved his hands to her shoulders, in case she didn’t know what he wanted next. But of course she knew. She kissed him lightly, put her cigarette between his lips, and sank to her knees between his legs.

  He leaned back, dragging on the cigarette as she undid the buttons of his trousers. Quickly. Very quickly, the buttons undoing themselves, it seemed, the fabric folding itself out of the way as though bewitched by her fingers. Ah, she had him in her hands now. Lovely, her touch. And charming, the way she was smiling down at the flesh she held cradled in her palm.

  He didn’t usually watch while a woman prepared to take him into her mouth. Sometimes he even closed his eyes; he liked the passive feeling of being serviced. The cigarette she’d given him contributed to the effect – often, at times like this, he liked to fancy himself a pasha in a harem, drawing upon the mouthpiece of a hookah.

  But today he found himself gazing down between his legs and into her eyes.

  She stroked her face against the length of him; murmured endearments – “Oh, but ain’t he the pretty fellow?” (Did she really find his cock pretty? Did it matter?) He wasn’t fully erect yet (had he disappointed her?) – but he could feel the blood gathering, as his flesh rose and stiffened under her touch. She slapped him gently, stroked him underneath, pinched his scrotum – carefully at first, and then a bit more roughly. He moaned and she smiled, eyes alight with the pleasure of discovering him, of learning his tastes and knowing his secrets. She blew him a flirtatious kiss and ducked her head lower between his legs. Oh very nice indeed – her tongue making long smooth strokes up and down the underside of his cock. He watched the glint of her eyes behind the spectacle of his own rising erection.

  What a mischievous tongue she had: on each downstroke it snaked itself a little further over his balls. Greedy little beast, going at him quite as though she liked – as though she loved – the smell of him. She’d taken his scrotum into her mouth now: he felt his blood coursing to his center, hardening his muscles, engorging his cock; he shuddered, his belly and thighs began to tremble.

  She caressed his belly with one hand, stroked his cock between the slender fingers of the other, while her tongue – he cried out to feel it – made its slow, shameless way to the root of his balls, and farther, a bit farther, into the darkness, dangerously close to the cleft of his arse.

  A quick retreat from darkness now. A return into the light: he could see her again, licking him slowly and easily on each side of his cock’s shaft. More slaps, a little harder this time, now kissing the head that had made its way past the foreskin, and now – oh God yes now – taking the length of him into her mouth. Calmly, easily, moving her lips and the soft jelly wetness of the insides of her cheeks against him. Caressing him worshipfully, respectfully – too respectfully, he thought.
“Tongue,” he growled, “more tongue.” Yes that was better; like a tiny flickering torch in the darkness, catching him here and there – egad, especially at one particular place – her lips active and mercurial as well, while he moved more deeply into her, probing toward her throat.

  The cigarette, long forgotten, had burned down to his fingertips. He snuffed it out and tossed it away. He caught her hair in his hand; she leaned her head back into his grasp; he wanted to lead now, to control the pace and the rhythm of it, to move that gorgeous, astonishing mouth where he wanted it to go… at least before the pulls and the surges and the deep, deep tremors – the inevitability of his orgasm – took hold of him. Too soon. He could feel it coming. Too soon. But then, forever would have been too soon.

  Hovering on the brink of climax, he stared down into her eyes, all his senses dissolved into a blue blaze of triumph as he shot his seed into her throat.

  The rays of sunlight coming through the windows were fainter when he found his bearings – well enough, at any rate, so he could situate himself in space and time again. No need to reach for his pocket watch; the sun’s angle would suffice.

  Her head lay against his thigh, her mouth and cheek close by his spent cock. She might have been sleeping; he didn’t want to disturb her. In any case, he liked having her mouth where it was. Perhaps he might recover enough strength to have another go at her. Or perhaps she might simply kiss him there when she woke.

  His cock jumped a bit at the thought of the kiss. She laughed, stretched her arms, and raised her head; it seemed she hadn’t been asleep after all.

  “He’s still a lively fellow,” she murmured.

  “He wants another kiss from you.”

  A light, girlish kiss, at the tip. And another, more lascivious one, on the shaft, near that spot her tongue was so good at seeking out. It wouldn’t be long now; he’d soon be ready for her mouth again.