She prayed fate was kind.
Her possession of Cranston Abbey and her father’s comfortable old age relied on one incalculable factor. Whether she could get Tarquin Vale to plant a child in her empty womb.
Chapter Three
Ashcroft sipped his champagne, the cold bubbles bursting against his palate. It was the only coolness in the theater turned ballroom for the night. The oppressive heat that had hung heavy over London all day hadn’t eased with evening. Around him, the crowd heaved in sweaty, forced gaiety. Discordant laughter and chatter overwhelmed the orchestra scratching out the latest waltz.
What was he doing here? He hadn’t meant to come, although his presence at the courtesans’ ball was as much an institution as the ball itself.
He glanced around, deliberately avoiding avid feminine eyes. He never left the ball without a companion, sometimes more than one. What had seemed exciting decadence to a man in his twenties now palled.
Damn it, he was thirty-two. Was he really the same fribble he’d been a dozen years ago? Were his amusements as banal? Would he stand here, leaning against the orchestra rail, searching for a warm body to relieve his solitude when he was forty? Fifty?
Bleak, disturbing thoughts.
He took another sip, grimaced at the wine’s cheap bite, and wondered if he should go home.
His self-reflective mood wasn’t completely the fault of his evening entertainment. Since ordering his visitor from his library yesterday, he’d been restive, discontented.
No woman had made a lasting impression in years. But something about the mysterious intruder lodged in his memory and wouldn’t shift.
Breaking his habit, he’d stayed in last night. So he’d woken unusually early, before noon, and with a clear head. And immediately remembered Diana—if that was her real name, which he took leave to doubt. That automatic recollection made him sorry he hadn’t sought oblivion in the fleshpots.
He’d forget the jade quickly enough. He wasn’t even sure he remembered what she looked like. Half an hour in a wench’s company, however intriguing she and her proposition might be, wasn’t likely to linger in his mind when so many pleasures offered distraction.
Except pleasures lost their charm through sheer repetition. Here he was surrounded by the most spectacular light-skirts in London. And he couldn’t generate energy to crook a finger in any particular woman’s direction.
You’re a hopeless case, Vale.
He ignored yet another lure from a masked woman. Perhaps a courtesan. Perhaps not. The ball was open to the public, which made it such an illicit thrill for members of the ton who attended. One never knew if one danced with a duchess or a Covent Garden drab. All one needed was the price of a ticket. A lot of women didn’t even have that, but hung around outside in hope some sap scratched up the blunt to get them in.
“Have you chosen a companion yet, my lord?”
The sultry voice penetrated his brown study, and he found himself looking down into a pair of big blue eyes under a silver mask so flimsy as hardly to justify the name. Familiar big blue eyes.
“Hello, Katie,” he said without enthusiasm. Although the courtesan was as much friend as occasional lover, their association harking back to when he first came down from Oxford.
“My escort for the evening proved disappointing.” She sipped her wine and sent him a meaningful glance under her artfully darkened lashes. “Young men can be so…young.”
Ashcroft laughed softly. “But sadly old ones can be so old.”
“There’s a stage in between that’s just right.” Her lips, reddened to ruby with a glistening salve, curved upward in unmistakable invitation, and she placed one hand on his arm. “Would you like to remind me?”
Normally, Ashcroft would accept her overtures. She was a luscious armful with the deftest hands in the business. And he was grimly aware he had nothing better to do tonight.
He didn’t know why, but tonight Katie, for all her obvious allure, didn’t answer his strange mood. Perhaps “obvious” was the problem. Although God forbid he tired of beautiful women who knew just what they wanted from him.
Regretfully, he shook his head. “Not tonight, sweeting.”
As he’d expected, she took her rejection with good grace, pressing his arm and smiling. “I can see you’re blue deviled. Perhaps a friend of mine will lighten your humor. She’s new to Town. A true redhead. A Long Meg, tall as a Grenadier Guard, legs like a Thoroughbred.”
Great Jehovah, what was wrong with him? Even the idea of bedding an Amazon fresh to the capital didn’t appeal. “Maybe later.”
Katie cast him a searching look, but she knew not to pry. A few remarks on the latest scandals, and she sauntered off with a sway of her voluptuous hips.
After half an hour more of pretending to enjoy himself and unaccountably failing, Ashcroft handed his glass to a passing footman—probably an out-of-work actor. The urge to escape, to seek fresh air, was overwhelming.
He nearly always stayed in Town through summer. He caught up on his parliamentary work when the city was quiet, and the social whirl temporarily slowed. This year, he wondered if he should retreat to the gloomy magnificence of Vesey Hall, his country seat. He hated the house, but London didn’t seem to answer his current, inexplicable frame of mind.