Lost in Pleasure Read online

  ‘Eighteen sixteen.’

  One thing to think it. Another, quite another, to have it confirmed. ‘Bloody hell.’

  She swore like a man, though she didn’t sound a bit like one. In fact everything about her was absurdly feminine, despite her clothes and her hair and her language. ‘You seem perturbed by that fact.’

  ‘Perturbed!’ Errin giggled nervously. ‘That’s one way of putting it. So would you be if you were in my position.’

  ‘And what position, pray, would that be?’ Richard asked, trying not to be distracted by the many positions in which he could too easily imagine this exotic creature.

  ‘When I went to sleep it was the year two thousand and thirteen.’

  Richard’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re saying that you have travelled here, via my chair, from the future?’

  The astonished look on his face made her want to giggle again. Errin tried valiantly to suppress it, but it escaped all the same. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not really funny—not for you, anyway, but it is for me. Kind of. In a mad way. I mean if it’s true—and I really think it must be because there’s no other logical explanation—I’m just totally blown away by the whole thing. Aren’t you?’

  ‘If you mean, do I find the concept of time travel intriguing, then yes I am, as you so quaintly put it, blown away.’

  ‘So you believe me?’

  He tried to think dispassionately. He tried to assemble the facts and look at the logic of the situation. He tried, very hard, to assess what she had said in a cold, scientific way, but for once Richard’s heart refused to allow his mind sway. ‘I believe you.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘I shouldn’t but I find I actually do believe you.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Richard agreed, looking down into her captivating face and her gold-flecked eyes. If he were the victim of some adventuress, then he was a willing dupe. Errin McGill met his gaze with an uncertain smile and a connection sparked between them, so visceral as to be almost physical, as if they were both anchored by the same rope. ‘Absolutely extraordinary,’ Richard said, pressing a kiss to her hand. Laughter bubbled up from deep inside him. ‘Welcome, Miss McGill,’ he said with a flourishing bow, ‘to the nineteenth century.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Wow.’

  Richard raised an eyebrow. ‘Wow?’

  ‘I mean, how terribly exciting,’ Errin said, trying and failing dismally to drop an answering curtsy. It was trickier than it looked. ‘I’m in actual Regency London. It’s awesome. I have to see it. Can we go out? Can we go for a walk or—have you got a carriage?’

  She really was extremely attractive, and quite beguiling in her enthusiasm. Richard removed her fingers, which were clutching at his sleeve and in danger of spoiling the nap of his superfine coat. He twined them safely in his own, noticing as he did so that she had coloured her nails, a glossy, enamel-like scarlet. He’d never seen that before. He didn’t know why, but he liked the effect. He could imagine those painted nails...

  ‘I have several carriages and a stableful of horses at your command,’ he said, distractedly, for he had now noticed that the colour on her nails matched her lips. Was that, too, artificial? It did not look it.

  ‘Several carriages and a stableful of horses,’ Errin repeated in a terrible attempt to mimic him. ‘Your accent is so fabulous. Say something else.’

  Her odd request successfully distracted him from speculating what those red lips might taste like. She didn’t look at all apologetic for having mocked him, and he was surprised to find he didn’t at all mind. ‘I have never before had my accent described as fabulous. May I return the compliment and ask where you acquired yours?’

  ‘Well, I was born in Maine, but I’ve lived in New York for the last seven years.’

  ‘Ah. You’re an American. That explains a lot. Tell me, Miss McGill, are the travails of the frontier, then, so very bad that you are forced to dress in men’s clothing? I’m afraid it shows off rather more of your really rather delightful figure than is considered decent here. I’ll send out for a selection.’

  ‘A selection of what?’

  ‘A selection of more appropriate clothes.’

  ‘Send out! You must be joking. One,’ Errin said, holding up a finger, ‘I’m twenty-eight years old and I’ve been picking my own clothes for quite a few years now. Two, I don’t even know what size I am here. And much more importantly, three. Where’s the fun in having stuff delivered to your house? I hate shopping online.’

  ‘Online?’

  ‘It’s too complicated to explain, trust me.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Richard said, his voice tight. ‘As a man of science, I am naturally curious. We will encompass a trip to a modiste while we are out and you can tell me more about the world you inhabit. I find it fascinating.’ What was he thinking? He abhorred shopping.

  ‘That would be great, but—I insist on paying for my clothes myself?’

  ‘Do you indeed. Do you have any money, or has coin of the realm been abolished in the twenty-first century?’

  ‘Oh.’ Errin’s face fell. ‘I’ve only got plastic. Cards,’ she elaborated in response to his blank look. ‘It’s—oh, it doesn’t matter. I guess the shopping trip is off.’

  ‘I am famously wealthy, you know. A few dresses will hardly break the bank.’

  ‘No. Thank you, but I couldn’t possibly.’

  Any other woman would have leapt at the offer. That she had not, made him contrarily determined to persuade her. ‘I’d like to,’ Richard said, shamelessly utilising his most endearing smile. ‘It would give me pleasure.’ He was surprised to find that he meant it. Seeing his world through her eyes would be not just interesting but—amusing! If this is what came of wishing for a little unpredictability in life, he should do it more often. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had amused him.

  Errin faltered. She so wanted to, though it went against the grain. Or at least it would in two hundred years’ time. But right now maybe she should go with the flow a bit? It’s not as if there would be any consequences. How could there be? ‘I have very expensive tastes,’ she said archly. ‘You might live to regret it.’

  ‘The only thing I will regret is not seeing you rigged out à la mode.’

  ‘Well, I guess I’d regret that too. So thank you—I accept your generous offer,’ Errin said, consigning her scruples to the future and kissing him on the cheek.

  Her body pressed against his, the buttons of her coat digging into his waistcoat. Her kiss was one of simple gratitude, given casually, as if such intimacies were everyday. She was smiling at him, seemingly oblivious of the effect her lithe curves were having on his libido. She didn’t seem to appreciate how very unusual it was for a female to be so forward or to express such unequivocal enthusiasm. Restraint to the point of indifference was de rigueur in Richard’s society. This, more than anything, persuaded him that she was not of his world, perhaps truly not of his time.

  He smiled down at her, meaning to share his thoughts, but as his eyes met hers, the mood shifted. He saw precisely the moment when desire struck her, for her smile faded, her lips softened in readiness for his kiss. She wanted him to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her. He needed to kiss her.

  His arms went around her waist, pulling her closer. She tilted her head. He inhaled the sweet heat of her, his body registering the way hers melted into his, making the blood rush to his groin, knocking the breath from him. But as his lips touched hers and she sighed and closed her eyes, he stopped and gently disengaged himself. ‘You’d better wait here while I order the carriage and find you a cloak to cover your clothes,’ he said, making for the door.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Richard stopped in his tracks. ‘For what?’

  ‘I thought you wanted to—I obviously got the signals wrong.’

  He examined her expression for evidence of coquettishness but saw only an openness that was as touching as it was unusual. ‘You didn’t misinterpret my
thoughts. I find you irresistible.’

  ‘And yet you did resist. Why?’

  She was making him uncomfortable. ‘Because I am a gentleman, of course,’ Richard said in his haughtiest manner.

  ‘Don’t gentlemen kiss, then?’ Errin persisted, her impish sense of humour urging her to discomfit him further.

  ‘Yes they do,’ he replied, ‘but ladies do not.’

  ‘I do,’ Errin asserted before she could stop herself. ‘And if I say so myself, I’m really rather good at it.’ She normally disapproved of blatant flirting—it was a complete no-no. But here, with this totally un-PC man, it seemed like the right thing to do, and she refused to feel guilty. Feminism hadn’t even been invented, right? Errin licked her lips provocatively, a silly trick she’d used to practise in front of the mirror as a teenager and had never utilised. She was astonished to see it worked. Richard’s eyes widened. His pupils darkened. He threw her a hungry look. A look that in twenty-first-century Manhattan would have earned him a sarcastic put-down. Here in Regency England, all Errin could think of was how to encourage him to look at her in just such a way again.

  He covered the short distance between them practically before she could blink, wrapping his arms around her and moulding her body against his. The soft knitted material of his pantaloons could not disguise his arousal. She pressed against it, relishing the length and satisfying hardness of it, making him gasp in surprise.

  His hands tightened on her shoulders. Her heart began to race. Her blood began to heat. She felt dizzy, aching with anticipation, that stomach-wrenching roller-coaster thing again. A surge of desire spread to every part of her body. She hadn’t expected that. Any of it. She’d never been easily turned on, never so aroused as this—and he hadn’t even kissed her yet. Oh please, please let him kiss her.

  Then his lips met hers and Errin, cool, calm and collected Errin, realised that she was way out of her depth. He kissed her not in the hard, thrusting way she’d been expecting, but softly, taking slow, tortuous possession of her.

  His kisses were like velvet, beguiling, wickedly knowing, tantalisingly assured. His mouth was pillow soft and darkly sweet, like bitter chocolate laced with something soporific and addictive, decadent and dangerous. His tongue licked its languorous way along the fullness of her lower lip, sparking pulses that tingled through her bloodstream. He tasted, just as his portrait promised, of pure unadulterated pleasure.

  Instinctively she curled into him, opening her mouth to deepen the kiss. The slow, assured possession continued for unbearable moments and Errin realised just how thin a veneer her sophistication was. Faced with the innate, rather than tutored, sexual power of a truly masculine male for the first time in her life, she crumbled and did exactly as he bid her. She submitted.

  Or she would have, but to her intense frustration he stopped. He wore a teasing look that momentarily annoyed her and yet at the same time made her want to smile too. She held her hands up in mock surrender. ‘Okay, you win. I guess I’m not such a great kisser after all.’

  Richard’s smile widened to one of genuine amusement. He kissed the tip of her nose and the intriguing little frown line between her auburn brows. ‘Oh, you can kiss, Miss McGill. Take it from me, you can definitely kiss.’

  ‘So, that makes me not a lady. But you are still a gentleman, right?’

  Richard bowed with a flourish. ‘You can have no idea how much I wish I was not.’

  She wished he wouldn’t look at her like that. ‘Well, I’m glad that you are.’ It was a lie, but this whole situation was bizarre enough without complicating things even further. So she should be glad. She would be, later. ‘Shopping,’ Errin said, clutching at the distraction with relief. ‘You mentioned shopping.’

  ‘A woman’s panacea for all life’s little disappointments,’ Richard replied. ‘It’s nice to know that some things don’t change,’ he added, and then left to organise the carriage.

  * * *

  While he was gone, Errin wandered around the room in a daze, running her hands over the smooth surfaces of the furnishings, marvelling at their newness and the fact that they had been commissioned straight from the catalogues of the legendary designers themselves. But the treasures that would ordinarily have captured her full attention now formed only a backdrop, for it was their owner who occupied her thoughts, whose step she listened for eagerly, whose touch tingled still on her skin, on her lips, and whose personality intrigued her.

  Richard returned bearing a dark blue silk cloak lined with pale blue satin—a domino, he informed her, made for a masked ball. It fell in soft folds around her, making a lovely rich swishing sound as he led her out of the library into a large reception hall, with floor tiles of pink-and-brown Italian marble, dominated by a magnificent suspended staircase. A footman, complete with green livery and a powdered wig, looking exactly like he’d stepped out of the pages of Cinderella, opened the front door onto a scene that left Errin in no doubt that she really had slipped back in time.

  The cobbled streets were populated by horse-drawn carriages of all shapes and sizes. There were sedan chairs. Men in breeches and pantaloons, women in long dresses and elaborate hats. Footmen in livery. No cars. No planes in the sky above. No power cables overhead. Exactly like a period film set, but totally, subtly different. The air smelled odd—of horses and people, not carbon emissions and fast-food outlets. The noises too were different—the rattling of horseshoes and metalled wheels on cobblestones, the shrill cries of flower sellers, the loud hollers of coach drivers, all distinct because there was no background buzz of traffic. Another world, quite literally.

  Richard propelled Errin down the shallow flight of steps to where a carriage drawn by a pair of grey horses was waiting. ‘Tell me,’ he said, climbing onto the narrow seat, ‘what do you find most different?’

  He leaned down, extending his hand, but Errin hesitated, caught in the folds of the heavy cloak until he pulled her up with a casual ease onto the seat beside him. It was like being in the gondola of a Ferris wheel, only without the safety bar. She shifted closer to Richard, felt the warmth of his thigh against her own and then shifted away again very quickly, for the contact was like a spark of electricity. ‘Me,’ she said quietly. ‘I feel different.’

  He drove the high-stepping thoroughbred horses with their polished leather harnesses around Hyde Park, where she marvelled at the haut ton and the demi-monde parading their toilettes. Errin herself was the subject of a few interested stares, but Richard seemed oblivious, too intent on pointing out Lady This and Lord That, providing her with a potted history of each that was usually scandalous and always amusing. He seemed equally well informed on points of dress, describing the difference between a dandy, a macaroni and a Corinthian, picking out, at her behest, a promenade then a carriage dress, shako hats and poke bonnets.

  Passing through the park gates where John Nash’s Marble Arch was yet to be built, Richard drove on to Bond Street and Errin learned the art of Regency shopping, which was not at all like any shopping she’d ever experienced, not even that one time when she’d been given a personal shopper in Barneys. Though the dinner hour was approaching, New Bond Street was still crowded. Liveried servants scurried by with parcels and notes, tradesmen with drays made deliveries. There were several Bond Street beaux on the strut, raising their quizzing glasses in a most imperious manner. Hawkers called their wares, selling everything from pint pots of ink to tallow candles. Two news criers stationed on opposite street corners with their bells vied for customers.

  Richard pulled the horses to a halt and leapt lithely down from the phaeton, holding out a hand to help Errin disembark, handing the reins to a waiting urchin and tossing him a penny before ushering her into a modiste’s. Here Madame Celeste herself greeting him effusively and batted not one eyelid when Errin’s pantsuit was revealed, though she looked extremely startled at the sight of her new client in a skimpy bra and knickers with neither slip nor corset to cover her modesty.

  Errin gave herself ove
r to the sensuous pleasure of trying on first one dress then another, morning gowns and evening, half robes and full. There were silks and satins, sprigged muslin and figured, jaconet and finest cambric, blond lace and scalloped sarsenet. Errin twirled and preened in front of the long mirror in the elegant fitting room, enjoying Richard’s obvious appreciation, posing and pouting in a provocative manner that would have horrified her usual buttoned-down self and yet was wholly gratifying to her new Regency persona. She relished his admiring glances, frankly, and hungered for more. It was—stimulating. Titillating. The old-fashioned word sprang to mind, making her smile inwardly at its aptness. She bent over, deliberately provocative, in a pretence of adjusting a flounce on the hem of her robe. Richard’s pupils darkened in response. A slight flush highlighted the planes of his cheekbones. Errin’s stomach muscles tightened.

  He got abruptly to his feet. ‘I think we’ve seen enough.’

  She couldn’t have agreed more. Settling hastily on two day gowns and three for evening, Richard gave instructions for something mysterious called necessaries to be included along with the requisite gloves, hats and stockings, and ushered her out to the carriage. The journey back to Cavendish Square was accomplished in a state of heightened awareness, every brush of thigh on thigh, arm on arm, shoulder on shoulder, making them flinch apart, allowing the slow, irresistible graduation of their bodies towards one another to begin over again. A form of pleasurable torture, Errin thought, wishing it to be over, willing it to last forever.

  She was hardly conscious of the carriage pulling up outside Kilcreggan House, of Richard helping her down, leading her back through to the library. But when he had divested her of her domino she found it difficult to meet his eyes. ‘What are necessaries?’ she asked apropos of nothing more than a need to fill the awkward silence.

  ‘Undergarments.’

  His voice was husky. She could hear him breathing, shallow and fast, like herself. Aroused. Like herself. ‘Like a bra and knickers?’ she asked, risking a glance, rewarded by another of those hungry looks she so relished.