Page 26 of The Virtues of Christmas
Chapter Five
All good things must end, or at least be paid for, and Henrietta the Housemaid eventually realized that her station in life had changed. I had the sense she might slip back to the shires, given a chance. I was forever finding her in tears over some draft of a letter to her martinet of a papa. No matter how often she wrote to him, he apparently never answered.
Having no recourse, when I offered to put my arrangement with her on professional footing, she accepted, and thus the career of London’s greatest courtesan had its origins in my family parlor. Delicious irony, that, but for one small detail, which I must prevail upon you to tidy up…
Michael Brenner had needed a woman.
Or maybe—Henrietta wasn’t quite awake, so her thoughts wandered instead of galloped—he’d neededher? Somebody with whom to be passionate, tender, funny, and honest. Maybe he’d needed a lover, an intimate friend with whom to be himself, wholly and joyfully.
Henrietta had needed him too. Needed a man who wasn’t interested in tricks and feats of sexual athleticism, who wasn’t fascinated with the forbidden, or bored with it, but still fascinated with his own gratification. Making love with Michael had been soeasy, and yet so precious.
She’d been needing him for the past ten years.
To join with Michael had felt intimate, invigorating, and sweet. Surely the Bard had put it better, but Henrietta couldn’t summon any literature to mind. The hour was late, and she was abed with a lover.
Her first lover.
She reached beneath the covers and found warmth but no Michael. Her ears told her he wasn’t stirring about behind the privacy screen, which meant…
Nothing for it, she must open her eyes.
A page turned, the sound distinctive even when Henrietta’s mind was fogged with sleep. Michael had pulled a chair near the hearth and lit a branch of candles. He sat reading a small book, his hair tousled, his dressing gown half open. His expression was beautifully somber, suggesting the prose on the page was serious.
Foreboding uncoiled where contentment had been.
“You’d rather read than cuddle?” Henrietta asked, sitting up. She kept the covers about her, and not because the room was chilly. Michael’s expression was anything but loverlike.
“I’d rather cuddle, but I couldn’t bear…”
“What?” Couldn’t bear to remain in bed with her?
He closed the book and stared at the fire. “I couldn’t bear to further deceive you. I have misrepresented myself to you, Miss Whitlow, in part. I’ve also been honest in part.”
Miss Whitlow?Miss Whitlow?
“You’ve beeninsideme, Michael. Several times. Don’t call me Miss Whitlow.”And don’t remain halfway across the room, looking like a fallen angel on the eve of banishment to the Pit.
“This book is the reason we met,” he said, holding up the little volume. “Lord Beltram wants it back, though legally it is entirely your possession. He’s begun searching for a bride and realized what a weapon he’d given you.”
No flannel sheets, no cozy quilts, no secure embrace could have comforted Henrietta against the chill Michael’s words drove into her heart.
“Youseducedme to get Beltram’s bloody book, and now you’re confessing your perfidy?”
“I hope we seduced each other, but yes, my original intention was to steal this book from you.” He thumbed through the most maudlin collection of bad verse and inferior artistry Henrietta had ever seen.
She rose from the warmth of the covers, shrugged into her night-robe—and yes, that made her breasts jiggle, and what of it?—and Michael looked away.
“Are you disgusted with the woman you seduced?” she asked, whipping her braid free of the night-robe. “Was bedding me a great imposition, my lord? What hold does Beltram have over you that you’d make a sacrifice of such magnitude with his cast-off mistress?”
“Miss—Henrietta, it’s not like that.”
Henrietta had a temper, a raging, blazing, vitriolic temper that had sent her from her father’s house ten years ago and sustained her when it became apparent that Beltram was exactly the handsome scoundrel every girl was warned against.
She’d learned to marshal that temper in the interests of professional survival, but she wasno longer a professional.
And she might not survive this insult. “It’s never like that,” she snapped. “Good God, I thought I knew better. Never again, I promised myself. Never again would a man get the better of me, no matter how handsome, how charming, how sincere…”
Michael rose, tossing the book onto the empty bed. “Henrietta Whitlow, I am not ashamed of you. I could never be ashamed of you. I am ashamed of myself.”
