Chapter 3
Anthony Paschal-Lamb, Viscount Corbet, had long fantasized about bringing Letitia Delemere to his family home when he was a young buck. Actually doing so now was something of a nightmare.
He sneaked her into the house and up the stairs under the cover of darkness, her swaying all the while under the influence of whatever was clouding her mind. But finding a suitable place to put her posed something of a problem.
The viscountess’s suite would cause remarks from his staff. Some distant room might do the same. He settled on a guest room down the hall from his own, where he might oversee her care from a small distance.
On the carriage ride home from the Forest, he’d kept his Buck mask on as Letitia had slumped against him, her mysterious protector. She was so good at engendering the protective instincts of men. Why, she even did it while half out of her mind!
Anthony considered removing his mask for the sake of his own comfort but reasoned with himself that it was better to remain anonymous.
Letitia was a seductress, a snake of the first order, and with his identity and title known, she’d no doubt set about sinking her claws into him again — now that she’d sunk so low as to require protection from Pinchpenny.
The creeping, cruel possessiveness of Pinchpenny also made him reluctant to reveal himself, potentially sending Letitia fleeing, in the event she had some lingering aversion to wealthy viscounts with oversized cocks and generous tongues.
Stranger things had happened. Why, it had happened to him in the last decade with that very woman!
And so Corbet placed her in that guest room down the hall, handed her care off to his exceptionally discreet and well-compensated housekeeper, and tugged off his stag mask before availing himself of a hot bath and collapsing into bed.
He eyed the stand of decanters at the other end of his suite, but decided he was too exhausted to get a drink.
And he’d want to have his wits about him, should Letitia cause a disturbance in the night.
Not that he’d go to her! He should simply be prepared to direct his servants to her room in the event of a scream or yell.
But she didn’t yell that night. And he heard nothing from her room the next morning. When capable Mrs. Oldacre passed him in the hall, she’d merely curtseyed. Blast, he’d selected someone too discreet for Letitia’s care.
It wasn’t until late afternoon that his former lover upended his life.
Anthony had been reviewing his correspondence with his secretary when a housemaid burst into his study.
She opened her mouth to speak.
“Lead the way,” he said, dropping his boots from atop that massive desk and following the terrified girl up the stairs to that familiar hallway.
Outside of Letitia’s room, Mrs. Oldacre paced, her composure broken after years of only the most competent demeanor.
Anthony paused before her.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re here,” she said. “It’s awful. She has scissors.”
His lungs and belly seemed to drop through the floor. He moved to the doorknob.
“Oh, not like that!” said Mrs. Oldacre, reaching for his hand before drawing back.
“Then what is the matter?”
“It’s her hair,” the older woman said, her eyes filling with tears.
“Her hair.”
“I thought she might feel better with clean hair, but the mass became tangled, and now she’s confused and wants to cut it. All that beautiful hair. Lost.”
“Hair.”
“It’s a woman’s pride, you know,” said Mrs. Oldacre.
Anthony thought back to those waving locks he’d admired from a distance, then worshiped with his fingers.
Letitia’s mane spread over his legs in bed.
Draped on a blanket when they’d enjoyed a private picnic.
She’d been so beautiful, like a painting, and she’d been so debased and deluded that she wished to surrender her most feminine charm. It was unthinkable.
It took Anthony a few minutes to locate a black silk mask from a fancy dress party he’d attended several years ago so he could talk to Letitia without revealing his identity.
He’d have to find a long-term solution for her living quarters, though.
He trusted Mrs. Oldacre — and she certainly wouldn’t divulge his name to Letty — but the longer Letitia stayed, so grew the risk that she would discover the identity of her benefactor.
Upon opening the door to Letitia’s bedroom, he paused. She had draped herself on the bed, her long locks trailing behind her, and she wore naught but a chemise. Her eyes were open but unseeing. At first, he thought she was dead.
“Letitia?” he whispered.
She blinked and finally focused, seeing him in the doorway. But she didn’t react.
“I hear you wish to divest yourself of your hair,” he said, pausing so as not to alarm her.
Letitia held up the golden scissors she’d somehow negotiated away from Mrs. Oldacre. Why the woman thought to bring her scissors was beyond him.
“You needn’t cut your hair off,” he said. “Someone can brush it for you.”
She pulled her long mane from where it rested on the bed. Before her, the locks that had once been her pride were damp and knotted. The ends were thin and frayed. How wretched she’d become in the days since he’d known her!
“I want it gone,” she said softly.
Anthony moved towards the bed, then sat beside her. Above the neckline of her fine chemise, Letitia’s chest was bony where it had once been smooth with youth and proof of good appetite. The roses that once bloomed on her cheeks had wilted. She was but a shade of her former self.
Even so, his heart beat faster being in the same room as Letitia Delemere.
He was transported back to his early days as a young blade in London, pride and lust overflowing as he captured the most luminous courtesan of the age.
He should have known then that it wouldn’t last. At least he had learned that lesson and a few others besides — thanks to this woman.
“I’ve a mind to let you cut it off,” he said. “But I think I would do you a disservice if I didn’t at least try to help you first.”
“I am willing to be disserviced.”
“Lie down on these pillows. You needn’t even sit up. Merely allow me to brush out the knots,” he said.
Letitia reclined against the mound of plush bedclothes, her hair trailing behind her.
“Let it be known that I don’t permit just any man to touch my hair,” she said.
Anthony snorted. How like Letitia to claim superior morals while acting the harlot. Was she not willing to let a group of men fuck her just last night? And now she wished to pretend that she’d never allowed a man to brush her hair before?
Why, Anthony himself had done so frequently! He’d take up those silver brushes she favored and run them through her hair while she told him the latest gossip of the day or recounted some witty joke.
One day, after dreaming that she had been lost in a plague, Anthony had snipped a lock of her hair and placed it within the pages of an early printed edition of Dante’s La Vita Nuova that he had acquired on his Grand Tour.
At the time, he’d thought they’d begun a new life together.
What a predictable, pathetic young man he’d been, squandering jewels on a faithless woman who existed to part men from their money.
And he should have known that; nothing about their arrangement should have been a surprise to him.
Anthony touched the brush to the bottom of her hair and tugged at a knot. Harder than he would have in the past. But then, he wasn’t a fool in love anymore, hoping to spare his darling the slightest pain.
He heard her draw in breath, but she didn’t complain or speak.
“How did it get so tangled?” he asked, surveying the mess. At this rate, they would be trapped in this room for ages. He might as well let her cut it all off.
“Don’t know,” she said, her voice devoid of color. “See what a mess I’ve made? You should permit me to cut it.”
How like her to cut and run the moment things became difficult, or another opportunity emerged.
He’d been cut like those frayed ends the moment a richer, more powerful protector had emerged.
A duke. What was the heir to a viscount, living on a carefully allocated allowance, to a duke?
According to Letitia herself, as she departed his bachelor lodgings for the last time: precisely nothing.
He grunted rather than vent his spleen and give himself away.
“Why are you wearing a mask, Protector?”
Anthony’s hand stilled.
“You needn’t with me. I won’t tell anyone who you are,” she said.
Older and broken, but still blessed with a seductive tongue. His Letitia was everything he’d imagined her to be in those lonely years since she’d fled in the duke’s carriage and left him with a broken heart and hard cock in those cozy rooms where he’d thought them to be so happy and content.
“But I don’t know you,” he said. “So it would be impossible to trust you.”
He thought he heard her breath hitch, but maybe it was simply because of easing loose the first of a million knots in her long locks.
How many times had he done her this service before the fire?
Before braiding her hair for the night, lying her on the rug, and feasting on her cunt until she sobbed with pleasure.
The mask burned against his skin. Must be the dyes used to get the silk such a perfect black. Anthony wished he could order Letitia to cover her eyes, rip the thing from his face, and quickly finish this thankless task.
Would it be so bad to give Letitia her way and cut the tangled mass off? It would certainly be easier than dealing with this slow torture.
He flipped the unknotted skein of hair over Letitia’s shoulder to keep it separate from the mess on which he worked.
And then she did something that surprised him: without even looking at the strands, she whipped her hair into a braid. But not just any braid; it was the pattern he’d favored after receiving careful instructions from his sister.
Letitia might have run from him, but he was still woven into her very being. He didn’t know that it made him feel any better.