The Blushing Harlot (When the Wallflowers were Wicked Book 4) Read online

  “I assure you, he won’t get far, Mr. Khan.” Rebecca gasped as Nigel Kent marched out of the house and came to stand by the Indian man. Her heart did a loopy somersault in her chest and her skin broke out in prickles. “We’ll catch the thief.”

  “But how?” the Indian man, Mr. Khan, lamented. “They’re all getting away.”

  “We know the name of every man who was here today,” Nigel told him. “The thief may have left before you made your announcement. We’ll catch him yet.”

  “But the diamond,” Mr. Khan pressed on. “It’s worth a fortune, more than you can possibly comprehend.”

  “I will find it, sir. I give you my word,” Nigel promised.

  A flutter spread through Rebecca’s heart…and lower. Nigel was every bit as heroic as she remembered him to be and larger than her memory had painted him. It had been months since the night of Lady Charlotte’s engagement, months since they had sat side-by-side in a darkened carriage. She hadn’t had time to dress properly, and only his clothes, a robe, and a thin layer of sugar had come between them. The heat between them in the carriage that night had been sweltering as she’d imagined the two of them in every sinful position she’d ever witnessed Mary and Lord Grey in. She’d even had half a mind to loosen the fall of his breeches so that she could fondle his male part the way she’d observed Mary doing. She would even have considered putting it in her mouth as Mary had done, which had seemed entirely distasteful to her up until that point.

  Just as she was pondering the potential size of Nigel’s member and what it would taste like, he glanced in her direction. Their eyes met, and a look of shock spread across his face. Rebecca caught her breath as Nigel excused himself from Mr. Khan and descended the East India House stairs to cross the street.

  “Ladies, get away from there,” Miss Dobson’s shrill voice rang out from behind Rebecca. “Get away from there at once. This is unseemly in the extreme.”

  Rebecca gulped and turned to see how close she was to the certain doom of Miss Dobson catching her. To her surprise, at least a dozen other pupils were persistently clinging to the fence, smiling and waving and flirting with the men who had fled the East India House but who hadn’t gotten far.

  “This is an outrage,” Miss Dobson continued to holler. “You will all be punished tonight. I will have you all kneeling on the stone floor of the classroom in nothing but your shifts, reciting verses while I smack each of your impudent bottoms with a switch.”

  “God help us all,” one of the men fleeing the house groaned, grabbing his crotch in a decidedly ungentlemanly manner.

  Rebecca hardly noticed the amorous reaction of a few men to Miss Dobson’s threat, though. Her eyes were fixed on Nigel as he strode across the street, making his way directly to her.

  “We’ll distract Miss Dobson,” Jo whispered by Rebecca’s side, “but you must be quick.”

  Rebecca nodded absently as Jo and Caro pulled away from the fence, likely to cause as much trouble as they could on Rebecca’s behalf.

  “Miss Burgess,” Nigel greeted Rebecca as he reached the fence, touching the edge of his cap. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same,” Rebecca said.

  “A diamond has been stolen from a prominent minister of the Mughal emperor,” Nigel explained in a rush, glancing to the side as though he shouldn’t have been sharing the story. “It was meant to be a gift to the king to secure an alliance. Tonight’s gathering was a prelude to the presentation ceremony, but when the diamond’s case was opened, it was empty.”

  “But why are you here?” Rebecca instantly pinched her eyes shut, ashamed that she was handling their meeting so clumsily, then opened them, clinging to the fence with both hands.

  “I and several of my colleagues were asked to provide security for the evening,” Nigel explained. He blew out a breath. “Now it seems I’ll be investigating a theft. But at least I know the culprit was one of the men present tonight.”

  He glanced down the street at the dispersing men who had rushed out of the East India House. Rebecca’s heart ached for him. It must have felt as though he was watching any hope of quickly catching the thief slip away. Just like she had felt her chance to know him better slip away when he’d dropped her at her family’s house the night of Lady Charlotte’s engagement party and driven away.

  “It’s so good to see you again,” she said, her heart brimming with pathos over what could have been.

  “Likewise,” Nigel said, his dangerous expression melting to a smile that was almost shy and definitely alluring. “I tried to come see you after…that night, but within days, your family’s house was deserted.”

  Rebecca huffed out a breath. “I know, and I’m sorry. Everything happened so quickly after Lord Grey was arrested. Mary was shipped off to the Caribbean with Lady Charlotte and I was unceremoniously deposited here.”

  “Where is here?” Nigel asked.

  Rebecca opened her mouth to explain everything but was cut off by Miss Dobson’s shout of, “Rebecca Burgess, if you do not come away from that fence this very minute I will switch you so hard you won’t be able to sit for a week.”

  Nigel’s expression went dark—both with anger and something far more tantalizing. “You’d better go,” he said in a low growl.

  “But we have so much to talk about,” Rebecca protested.

  Nigel closed one of his giant hands over hers as it clutched a slender, iron fencepost. “Meet me tomorrow at Hyde Park Corner,” he said. “I won’t be able to get away until four in the afternoon, but nothing will keep me from you.”

  “But, I—”

  “Miss Burgess!”

  Rebecca whipped around only to find Miss Dobson only a few yards away, closing in on her.

  “Go,” Nigel whispered, letting go of her hand and stepping away.

  “But, Nigel, I—” Rebecca tried again, but it was too late.

  “I told you to get away from there,” Miss Dobson said, clapping a hand over Rebecca’s shoulder and forcing her away from the fence. “That will be bed without supper for you, for all of you. After all the sacrifices I’ve made to teach you young ladies to be better than your wicked natures, this is the thanks I get. I am outraged.”

  Rebecca had no choice but to let Miss Dobson drag her away from the fence and from Nigel. Nigel had already returned to the East India House and was whispering something to Mr. Khan anyhow.

  “I am livid,” Miss Dobson went on. “I am insulted. I am locking every one of you in your rooms tonight.”

  Rebecca’s shoulders dropped, and she let out a sigh. How could she possibly dash off to meet Nigel at Hyde Park Corner the next day—as every bit of her longed to do—when she was locked away in her prison masquerading as a school?

  Chapter 2

  “This is an outrage,” Caro said, arms crossed, as she paced the short length of the bedroom Rebecca, Jo, and Caro shared that evening. “My father does not pay Miss Dobson an obscene amount of money for me to be locked in my room like a disobedient child.”

  “Are you certain that’s not precisely what he does pay for?” Jo asked in a small voice from where she sat on her bed. “I’m sure that’s why my parents sent me here.”

  Rebecca sent Jo a sympathetic smile from where she sat on the sill of the room’s one window, which looked out into the mews in back of the school. She still wasn’t entirely certain what indiscretion Jo had been sent to the school to atone for, but, like Rebecca, Jo had heard nothing at all from her family—no letters and no occasional parcels of home comforts, like other girls sometimes received—since arriving.

  “There are times I feel as though I was planted here the way medieval prisoners were sealed in an oubliette,” Rebecca sighed. “I would do anything to be free.”

  She turned and glanced over her shoulder out the window at the darkened mews, imagining Nigel was there, watching the East India House in an attempt to catch the diamond thief, but also keeping watch over her. If she could have, she would have jumped fr
om the window into his waiting arms.

  “That was a peculiar sigh for someone contemplating a life of imprisonment,” Caro said, pausing in her pacing to grin wryly at Rebecca. “Does it perhaps have anything to do with the alarming gentleman with whom you spoke this afternoon?”

  Rebecca turned back to her friends, blushing. “Perhaps.”

  Jo jumped off the bed and rushed to Caro’s side as the two of them faced her. “Do tell,” she said. “He was quite startling in appearance.”

  Rebecca’s face felt hotter as she stood. “His name is Mr. Nigel Kent,” she explained. “He is a Bow Street Runner who helped with the investigation of Lord Grey’s treachery last spring.”

  She hoped to leave the explanation there, but Jo and Caro positively brimmed with excitement, their wide eyes fixed on her.

  Rebecca let out a breath of resignation and went on to say, “He was of great assistance to me after Lady Charlotte’s engagement party.”

  “The party where you and Miss Sophie Barnes posed nude?” Jo whispered, clapping her hands to her mouth.

  “Yes,” Rebecca squeaked. Embarrassment and the memory of that night had her as hot as a furnace. “We enjoyed an…interesting carriage ride back to my parent’s house.”

  “Did he compromise your virtue?” Caro asked, unable to contain her grin. “Tell me what he did to you. Did he touch you inappropriately? Did you kiss? Did he stroke you into a tremor of ecstasy?”

  Rebecca’s mouth dropped open. Not for the first time, she wondered how Caro knew about such things. She wondered what kind of experiences her friend had had. Caro had been interred in their current mausoleum for writing inappropriate books, but Rebecca had never read one. She now wondered how her friend had researched the topics about which she wrote.

  “It was nothing like that,” she answered, pressing the backs of her fingers to her cheeks to cool her face. “But it could have been.” She slipped into a mischievous smile. “I so wanted it to be.”

  Caro and Jo clutched each other and giggled.

  “I knew it,” Jo said. “I just knew Mr. Kent had the look of a man in love about him.”

  “Love?” Caro snorted. “He had the look of a man who wanted to dip his wick in Rebecca’s well is more like it.”

  Rebecca joined their giggling. “I would do it,” she whispered, scandalized at her own loose morals. “I don’t care how wicked it is. I’ve…I’ve witnessed such acts before.” She lowered her whisper even more. “I’ve seen how pleasurable they can be for a woman, and I would gladly engage in such activities with Nigel. With my whole heart.”

  “Then we must make certain it happens,” Caro said, the light of mischief in her eyes. A moment later, Caro’s face fell, and Rebecca’s spirits with it. “If only we weren’t trapped in this dungeon,” Caro sighed.

  “I believe a dungeon is a room below ground, like Miss Dobson’s wine cellar,” Jo said, a look of dread splashing across her face. They had all heard stories about the wine cellar. “We are more akin to princesses stuck in a tower.”

  A flash of inspiration hit Rebecca. “Princesses in towers in fairy tales always manage to find their way out,” she said. “Surely there must be a way to escape this room.”

  “If there is, we will find it,” Caro agreed with a nod.

  The three of them launched into motion. Jo rushed to the door, testing the knob and the hinges. Rebecca and Caro turned to the window, prying the heavy pane open.

  “It’s a long drop to the ground,” Rebecca sighed as they both leaned out.

  “Perhaps we could tie bedsheets together to make our descent,” Caro suggested.

  Rebecca pulled her head back into the room. “But if that fails, then we’ll be stuck sleeping on beds with tattered sheets. I doubt Miss Dobson would allow us fresh sheets if she saw we ruined what we have now.”

  Caro stared flatly at her, as though she were a ninny for thinking more of her own comfort than their collective escape. “Then we’ll make a ladder or rope out of some other material.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Rebecca turned her attention to the room around them. There was very little in the way of furnishings or luxuries. The room was plain, with no ornaments on the walls, no carpet, and only their three beds, a washstand, and a wardrobe. The beds were narrow and unadorned. Rebecca’s bed was pushed up against the wall with the window, and the other two were squeezed against the opposite wall. The wardrobe took up most of the space against the wall opposite the locked door. Searching for materials that would help them escape out the window took all of a minute before they decided there was nothing.

  “It’s hopeless,” Caro said with a frustrated sigh, sitting heavily on her bed. “Miss Dobson is a dragon who guards her hapless princesses well.”

  “There has to be something,” Rebecca insisted. She moved to the side of the wardrobe, hoping to find some sort of rope or cord keeping it fixed to the wall. “I refuse to believe our cause is—”

  She stopped suddenly as she leaned against the wall in an attempt to see what was behind the wardrobe. Something was there—something with an eerily familiar feeling to it. The room’s only ornament was drab wallpaper with a faded, floral pattern that didn’t match up where different panels had been slapped against the wall. But behind the wardrobe, the panels of paper seemed to match up even less. In fact, Rebecca spotted a wide gap between two sheets of paper. A wide gap and a small, almost unnoticeable notch in the wall.

  “It’s just like our secret passages,” she gasped. She grabbed hold of the side of the wardrobe and attempted to pull it away from the wall.

  “Your what?” Jo asked, rushing to help her.

  “Secret passages,” Rebecca said. “We had several within the walls of our house.”

  “You had secret passages in the walls of your house?” Caro stood, blinking at Rebecca with the light of literary inspiration in her eyes.

  Rebecca’s face heated all over again as she said, “How do you think I was able to witness so many carnal acts? It was as though the passages were specifically intended for voyeuristic intent.”

  “I’ve heard of such things,” Caro said as she too grabbed hold of the heavy wardrobe in an attempt to move it. “They’re not all that uncommon. And yes, they are designed so that illicit behavior may be observed and enjoyed.”

  Rebecca was spared having to detail exactly how much she had enjoyed watching her sister—in spite of her paramour being the traitorous Lord Grey—when they managed to scrape the wardrobe a scant foot away from the wall.

  “If this is anything like what we have at home, the door will open inward,” she said, smoothing her hand along the wallpaper to the notch. “That way, the hinges do not protrude into the room being observed and its occupants never know they are being watched.”

  She finished her explanation by slipping her fingers into the notch, finding what felt like a small trigger, and pushing it. Instantly, there was a click, and the wall came loose. Another push, and it groaned open.

  “Good heavens,” Jo gasped, then burst into excited giggles.

  “Ladies, we have our means of escape,” Caro said in a triumphant whisper.

  “But where does it lead?” Jo asked.

  “It must lead into the East India House,” Rebecca said, squeezing between the wardrobe and the wall. “Someone bring a candle.”

  They leapt into action. Jo retrieved two candles in their holders from the washstand in the corner of the room. She handed one to Rebecca—who took the lead as they advanced into the secret passageway—and brought up the rear with the other.

  The passageway was dusty and narrow, but Rebecca’s experience told her that it wasn’t unused. There were no cobwebs lining the walls, and although she was loath to look closer, she didn’t feel detritus that could be animal droppings or remains under her feet. She inched slowly along the passage, checking the space in front of her carefully before taking steps. The school did indeed butt up against the East India House. The two buildings were esse
ntially one. Every once in a while, Miss Dobson and her students would hear the hum of conversations or exotic music on the other side of the walls.

  It was late as Rebecca and her friends made their way down the passage, but they could still hear the drone of conversation and other activity. They turned a corner, which led them deeper into the house.

  “Where are we going?” Jo whispered as they went.

  “There have to be other doors,” Rebecca whispered back. “Our house has several that let out into—”

  She froze, holding up a hand. Caro nearly tumbled into her. Jo managed to stop without throwing them all into a pile.

  “Is it a door?” Caro asked.

  Rebecca waved her hand frantically for her friends to be silent. In the light of her candle, she could see small slits and handles in the wall that told her the purpose of that particular network of passages had the same purpose as the ones in her parents’ house. There was no telling what they might observe if they slid one of the spying holes open. It was the sounds she heard that had grabbed her attention, though. She would know that kind of low, impassioned moaning anywhere.

  She touched a finger to her mouth, then moved as silently through the passage as she could. The pleasured moans grew louder as they reached the end of the passage, near an intersection. There were two sets of moans, a man’s and a woman’s.

  “Oh, my stallion,” the woman sighed, then gasped as though she’d been touched in a particular way. “Yes. Yes, like that. Oh.”

  Behind Rebecca, Jo squeaked and slapped a hand to her mouth. Rebecca and Caro both turned to glare at her, and Jo shook her head in contrition.

  “My little dove,” a man’s voice said, thick with passion. “Your cunny is as sweet as honey.”

  It was Caro’s turn to snort, and to have Rebecca and Jo glare at her. Caro defended herself with a barely audible, “I cannot abide that sort of clumsy rhyme.”

  Rebecca gestured for complete silence as she leaned to one side then the other, attempting to ascertain which room the carnal activity was taking place in.