Venus Read Online Free PDF Page B

from her shoulders, she stood up and began to open her smock. Her fingers shook slightly, but he had seen her naked already, so any embarrassment was surely ridiculous. “Do you wish to lie with me now?” This was the exchange she had expected—her virtue for his patronage. And she would count her fiercely protected innocence well lost, the currency that would buy her access to ambition.
    Nicholas knew that he did want her—very much. And that if she removed her smock again, revealing that peerless body, he would be lost. Circumstances had intervened the last time, but there would be no disturbances in his ownhouse, his own bed, and the task he had assigned himself was sufficiently complicated without added entanglements. “No, I do not for the moment,” he denied, his voice a trifle thick. “I think you should get into your own bed quickly.” He wrenched his eyes away from the temptation of her breasts and walked over to a low table where reposed a decanter of brandy.
    “Do you not find me desirable?” She sounded surprised, and a little disconsolate. “It is not the case, in general.”
    He whirled on her. It was a mistake since she now stood quite naked, glowing and perfect in the lamplight. “You said you were a maid?” he rasped.
    Slowly she nodded, the honeyed river of her hair pouring over her shoulders. “I am, but many men have wished … have tried—” Her shoulders lifted in an expressive movement. “Prue stood my friend in that, else I’d have succumbed to rape long since. When I have taken the gulls abovestairs, they have always fallen asleep almost straightway.”
    Gulls! Nicholas winced at the appropriate term. He had been gull enough to fall for that beauty and the accomplished performance. He tried to look at her dispassionately as she stood before him and found that he could not. He tried to find anger, but there was none. This exquisite creature, who talked so matter-of-factly about her narrow escape from rapine brutality, had been sufficiently bruised and battered by life’s ferocity.
    It was an effort, but he managed to turn back to the brandy decanter. He filled two glasses. “Put on your smock and get into bed.” He waited with averted back until a rustle and a creak indicated that he had been obeyed, then he turned and brought one of the glasses over to the truckle bed. “This will warm you.”
    Polly took the glass of Venetian crystal; never before had she handled anything so delicate or so precious.
    “Where did you learn to speak as you do?” Nicholas asked casually. It was a question that had puzzled him, but healso hoped that a change of topic would deflect the awkward intensity that had sprung up between them.
    Polly sipped her brandy, a thoughtful frown creasing her brow. “Speak like ’ow? Oi speaks awrigh’, dun Oi?”
    Nicholas laughed, and she smiled mischievously over the lip of her glass. “You are an impertinent jade, Polly. Answer my question.”
    “Prue used to be in service with a parson in the country. Long time ago, before she married Josh. They let her keep me with her, although I was too young to work. No one really noticed me much. I used to hide in the corners and listen to the gentry talking. Then I’d practice to make the same sounds.” She chuckled. “I’d make the folk in the kitchen laugh when I mimicked the master and mistress, and then I’d get an apple tart or something, so I learned to do it all the time. The family, and any visitors … I’d just listen for a bit, then I’d have it perfect.” Her shoulders lifted in a tiny shrug. “Then, of course, Prue had to go and wed Josh. We came back to London, and no one thought it at all funny that I could speak like that—quite the opposite. It used to make Josh madder than a cornered fox. So I stopped.”
    A perfectly simple explanation, Nick thought, seeing in his mind’s eye a lonely little girl of whom no one took any notice, slipping in and out of shadows, listening and observing,