Potent Pleasures Read Online Free PDF Page A

muttered curse he mentally divided the room into quarters and then patiently wove through each quarter, surveying all the young women who reached his shoulder. But he couldn’t find her. Yet even when he knew rationally that she must have left the ball, he kept searching, doggedly, until the dance closed down.
    She was gone. And whoever she was, she’d gone with her loss of virginity, and he’d paid nothing. But that wasn’t it, and he knew it. He wanted to see her again. The thief was only hiding behind a wish to compensate for his crimes: In fact, he wanted her, with an urgency that made him feel slightly insane. He wanted to reclaim that lovely, untouched body, to kiss away her little pants, to repeat the crime again and again and again.
    The odd thing was that she sounded like a lady. And she looked like a lady. But of course no ladies came to the Cyprians’ Ball on a Saturday night, and so she was just a very clever whore—but what was a whore thinking, to give away her most prized possession for free, in the gardens? Alex left the ball in a ferocious temper.
    That night he woke from dreams of wild seduction completely confused, gazing around his room as if he’d never seen it before. His garden girl … her body had been just there, and he had been tracing the shape of her breast with his tongue, and she was moaning in his arms. For some reason she had stolen into his mind and wouldn’t go away.
    For a few weeks Alex treasured the hope that he’d receive some sort of a ransom note from her protectors or perhaps even from her parents, if she were a serving girl rather than a whore. He rather hoped she was; he would protect her, and find her a house in London, a quiet little house. But there never was a note.
    And even though he went back to the Cyprians’ Ball the next Saturday night, to the distress of his brother, Patrick, who had had no fun at all the week before, she wasn’t there. He also went to a few society balls in the next two weeks, thinking if she was a lady he might see her, but he couldn’t find any tall, slender girls with green eyes. The young girls in London were bouncy and curled and small, whereas he was looking for willowy and composed.
    If only he knew the color of her hair it would be easier, but she had been wearing a ridiculous amount of powder. Alex’s domino smelled faintly of lavender for weeks. He thought about it carefully and decided that she had red hair. With skin that white, her hair had to be red. So he looked for a red-haired girl who smelled of lavender, and Charlotte, whose hair was jet-black and who smelled of orange blossoms, never crossed his path.
    When Alex wasn’t dreaming about making love to her (and he didn’t even think how odd it was to use that term about a probable whore), he dreamt she was weeping, and he was comforting her, and saying tender things. Probably, Alex told himself rationally, he kept thinking of her because he hadn’t gone through with it and finished: But even thinking about how wet she had been, and how small, made him pale. She couldn’t be a lady; there was proof positive. No lady enjoyed sex, let alone a virginal lady.

    On her side, the truth came slowly to Charlotte. She ran into the ballroom and thankfully saw Julia and Mr. Colby standing by the statue of Narcissus, although she didn’t notice the mutinous set of Julia’s mouth. She didn’t have to say anything; Julia simply shoved her across the ballroom and out into Mr. Colby’s carriage. In fact, she didn’t even think until later how odd it was that no one said a word on the way home. Her mind was so tumbled that she barely felt as if she were in the carriage at all.
    And when they got home and Julia babbled about Mr. Colby, that he had tried to kiss her—to kiss her , Julia!—and she had had to grind her foot into his in order to make him let go, Charlotte just sat numbly on a chair and nodded occasionally. Finally Julia stopped.
    “Are you all right, Charlotte?” she