Page 11 of The Damsel
Now, she was far wiser in the ways of the world.
Robert cleared his throat. “I see.”
“I’m not certain you do, so allow me to make this clear to you. The room is secured, and all I require now is someone to accompany me upstairs.”
This time, she felt certain he might suffer an apoplexy when he flushed from his neck to the roots of his hair. He opened his mouth, then closed it, looking very much like a fish out of water. A pretty fish with perfect eyebrows and pouting lips, but a fish nonetheless.
Cassandra helped herself to more of his whisky—this time straight from the bottle—while she waited for him to find his voice. After a moment of gaping and sputtering, he finally managed to respond.
“My lady, I don't think … surely you cannot mean …”
Corking the whisky bottle, she looked him in the eye and delivered the words that would either kill him off altogether or make him hers.
“I do mean it, Mr. Stanley. I want to take you upstairs and fuck you.”
Chapter 2
She could have knocked Robert over with a feather, he was so shocked by her declaration. Had she left it at ‘the room is rented, and all I require now is someone to accompany me upstairs’, he might have convinced himself she couldn’t mean what he assumed.
However, she’d driven it home with frank—albeit crass—speech.
I want to take you upstairs and fuck you.
His blood heated at the way the words fell from her mouth, particularly the way her voice had cradled the word ‘fuck’. In her cultured tones it should have sounded odd. Instead, it struck a chord, some primitive part of him reacting to the sound of that monosyllabic word.
On top of that had been her odd phrasing. He’d had whores whisper all manner of filth into his ear, and not one of them had ever declared that she would be the one doing the fucking. It was always ‘fuck me’, ‘take me’. Despite knowing that if he accepted her offer, he would be the one inside her, her wording left him wondering what her offer might entail otherwise.
He would have assumed a lady would refer to it as intercourse, or congress, or even attached some flowery connotation by saying ‘make love’. But, he realized a well-born lady would never refer to it at all, let alone accost a man this way. Even so, he’d always known there was something about Cassandra that set her apart, something that had caught his attention during the trial of Lord Bertram Fairchild.
And, damn it all if he wasn’t more curious about her now than ever, wanting to delve deeper and find out just what that ‘something’ was.
“Well?” she prodded when he did not respond.
He blinked, glancing up at her from his whisky. This close, the impact of her eyes was even more potent. He’d never looked into them from such a close vantage point and could now see why they appeared gray from a distance. Striations of the color spread out from her pupil, before fading into blue on the outer edges, as if storm clouds had gathered over a dreary sky. But, there was nothing drab about them. Quite remarkable, those eyes.
Clearing his throat for what felt like the hundredth time, he forced himself to hold her gaze. “Well, I … I’m really quite flattered …”
“Don’t be,” she said, that sharp voice of hers piercing him like the edge of a knife. “I want someone in my bed for the night. Any other man in this room will do, but as we are already acquainted I found approaching you more pleasing than any other option.”
His face burned from the insult, but once the initial shock of it faded, a new thought sprang forth in his mind. That any man would do rang false. He’d watched her scan the room, her gaze falling on several other men before landing on him. That they were familiar actually increased the chances of her reputation taking a blow from this encounter, which ought to be reason enough for her to stay away.
There was a reason she had chosen him, and he became overwhelmed by the desire to discover what it was.
“I do not believe that any other man would do. You specifically chose me. Why?”
A brief flicker of surprise showed upon her face, before she replaced it with the previous mask of apathy she’d been wearing through their conversation. So, she was not quite as confident as she appeared.
“Does it matter why? I am offering you a single night with me, no questions asked, no demands to be made of you afterward. Most men would not think twice about accepting.”
Most men of their acquaintance would be as shocked as him by such boldness from any woman, let alone a prim, reserved spinster such as Lady Cassandra Lane. He chose not to point that out, and instead blurted the next burning question weighing upon his mind.
“Why are you doing this, my lady?” he asked, keeping his voice low so they were not overheard. “You are a lovely young woman, and had you approached someone else—someone with no scruples or morals —he might have taken advantage of you … it could end badly.”
She scoffed, rolling her eyes in annoyance. “Spare me your gentlemanly concern, as well as your flatteries. I am five-and-twenty years of age, and besides that we both know I now lack the pristine reputation of some virginal debutante. We also know I am not ‘lovely’. So, you may keep your false words behind your teeth where they belong and stop speaking to me as if I’m some dimwitted girl incapable of thinking for herself. I wish to fuck you, and I wish to do it now. You need not worry that you must behave with honor or spare my girlish sensibilities, as I have none. Think of this as a purely transactional encounter, one that ends the moment you’ve spent. It is no different from an agreement you’d make with any Haymarket strumpet, only I do not want or need your coin.”
Robert finished off the whisky in his glass and refilled it, certain he’d need all the fortification he could get when dealing with Cassandra. A dozen arguments against her proposition rattled about in his mind … That she might have a sullied reputation, but it was no fault of her own … That he still saw her as a lady above reproach and wished to respect her as such … That while she might be called plain by others, he found her to be far more intriguing than some other whey-faced debutante … That even as they discussed a transactional agreement, he could not bring himself to compare her to a whore.
She seemed to think him still resistant, because she spoke again while he went about draining yet another tumbler of whisky.
