Chapter Twelve
Wolf could count on one hand the number of times he had been embarrassed in his lifetime.
He, who had engaged in the most vigorous bedsport with the various widows of the ton, had little capacity for humiliation at his own nakedness.
And yet, as he lay on a table, sans clothing, while the woman he loved beyond reason, who would never love him back, applied whiskey to his arse, his skin flushed wildly in arousal, humiliation, and awareness.
While he had set out to learn more about her perspective, he had not imagined he would end up in such a state.
Wolf had long entertained fantasies of the lady stripping his clothing from his body, but he had been conscious in these imaginings and they often came after she had forgiven him.
In his dreams, she was not seated behind him threading a needle that she was planning to insert—
“Can I have some of that whiskey?” he bit out.
There was a pause, then the sound of several glass objects clanked behind him.
“I need you to sit up on your elbows.” Petra returned with the whiskey and two tin cups.
“Are you joining me, my lady?” Wolf asked as he raised himself to his elbows.
“Would you, er, like me to cover you while we…?” Petra flushed, not for the first time that evening.
Though he nurtured a desperate hope that the bloom upon her cheeks served as an indicator of any lingering regard, Wolf chided himself that the flush was merely a consequence of the startling impropriety of their situation and his general nakedness.
“It’s fine,” he sighed. She was going to see it all anyway.
Again, he had wished for far different circumstances.
And yet his bad luck had brought him to her, so perhaps it was good fortune disguised as bad.
He was going to choose to see it that way, he thought, as he watched Petra pour two whiskeys, one significantly larger than the other.
“More for you, I need to keep my wits about me to sew you up,” she murmured as she handed him the tin cup.
“To your handiwork,” he raised the cup and drank it in one gulp. Petra, for her part, only betrayed her intolerance for whiskey with a small cough.
Before she began, he had to ask. “Lady Petra,” he began.
“Yes?” she answered too quickly. Whether it was because she was embarrassed or because she wished to evade the subject he was about to address, he did not know.
“I know this afternoon has been chock full of the strangest series of events imaginable, but where in the blazes are we?”
“Ah…that is the question, isn’t it?” Petra collected the tin cups and disappeared from his line of sight.
“I know I am evading.” Her sigh was audible behind him.
“But it is a long story. I would not have told you before, but you were honest with me about why you were here…Wolf.” Despite the chill all over his body, something warmed inside him at her words.
It wasn’t Jules or Julian, but he recognized the olive branch before him.
“Do you mind if I start on your wound? I would be more inclined to tell you if I have something to do with my hands.”
Swallowing his pride again, Wolf lowered himself down so that he could rest his head on the padded table, resigned to this humiliating yet oddly intimate exercise in restraint. It only made him appreciate the lady more, as she was being kind to him despite what he had done to her.
“This is going to sting for a moment.” Behind him, Wolf heard the tipping of a bottle, then felt a sharp burn against his wound. Although he wished to remain strong in front of the lady, he must have made an audible hiss.
“Sorry.” Petra’s voice was soothing as she dabbed at the wound. “I had to clean your wound and staunch some of the blood. This next part might not hurt as much, but it will be…uncomfortable.”
“I think ‘uncomfortable’ has already been reached today. I cannot be more uncomfortable than I have already been, so go on.”
The next thing he knew, there was an odd tugging at the site of his wound. Pushing away the thought of what Petra must see right now, and of how her featherlight touch stirred a pulsing within him that traveled up his inner thigh, straight to his groin…he returned to their previous topic.
“My lady,” he grunted, attempting to ignore the odd sensation of her stitching his backside.
“My lord.” Her voice came from behind him.
“You were going to explain where we are.”
“Yes.” Petra paused in her ministrations and Wolf already missed the contact, uncomfortable though it be. “To understand this place, it goes back several years. Well before my come out.”
Wolf gestured, unsure of whether she could see him or not. “I have all the time in the world for a yarn, as you can see.”
“Quite,” Petra hummed to herself, and he felt that odd tug at his wound again.
“As I told you before, my mother died when I was a girl and my father soon remarried. My father’s second wife was not much more than a girl herself, and though he tried, my father never got his heir and his spare from her.
Sadly, she died in the process. He seemed to give up after that.
Within a year or so, I started to notice a great turnover in the maids at Kemberley House, though never if we went to the family seat, only in town.
I knew all the maids because, I suppose I was rather lonely and they were kind to me. ”
Wolf wished he could turn around and take her in his arms at such a statement, then remembering his bleeding backside and his nakedness, thought better of this idea.
“It wasn’t until my governess, Miss Winston, left under cover of night that I realized that something untoward was going on, but I was not sure what it was.
” In the quiet of the room, he could hear her breath quicken.
“But it wasn’t until it happened to me that I knew what it was.
” She paused in her speech and the sewing stopped momentarily.
“Have you ever read the novelist Elizabeth Sheppard?”
“I can’t say that I have, no.”
Petra hummed again. “She writes of something called a honey trap, in which a woman uses her wiles to trap a man, often blackmailing him. You could almost say my father set up honey traps. Yet, I am not sure if it would be called a honey trap if one does not consent to be the bait.”
When Wolf spoke next, he spoke very slowly, unsure if he could believe what he was saying. “Your father…used his servants against their will to trap men?”
“Not just any men.” All warmth had gone from Petra’s voice and it reminded him of her tone after they were caught at the Stillwell Ball. “Any peer or member of Parliament who he needed something from. His greatest target was married men rumored to be lechers.”
Wolf tilted his head, managing to glance back at Petra from the corner of his eye.
“According to my father, while married men of such station are expected to keep mistresses, they are not expected to, as my father so genteelly puts it, ‘tup the domestics’.”
“Your father spoke to you about this?” Wolf almost made to get up but again remembered his precarious position.
“I figured it out, you see.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a slow, sad smile cross Petra’s face. “Love a mystery, me. I was even able to get him to stop in a way.”
“In a way?” Wolf repeated.
“Unfortunately, in our society, a lady’s word against a gentleman holds a great deal more water than a domestic servant.”
Wolf truly did sit up at that. No longer able to lie prostrate before her, he gathered the linen around himself and turned toward her.
“No.” He could not believe, could not comprehend that a father would offer his daughter in such a way.
Petra was staring down at her scissors and string as if unable to look up at him. “The first few times, I did not understand what was happening.”
“Did they…” Wolf found himself unable to finish his question, bile coating the back of his throat at the implication.
“No, they did not complete the act, Lord Wolfridge. My father still wanted me to be untouched as a future bride.” Petra steadfastly declined to raise her gaze, her fingers nonetheless remaining preoccupied with the labor of winding the thread into a compact ball before her.
“I was so innocent, I did not understand, I only knew I did not like it. It was only after the third time that I confronted my father about what was happening and the disappearing maids. And we came to an agreement.”
Though a pervasive dread began to settle within his bones at the prospect of her revelation, he recognized with a grim finality that he possessed no alternative but to attend her every utterance as she raised her gaze to meet his eyes.
“If he left the servants alone, then he could continue to use me in his traps,” she said quietly.
“Petra,” Wolf moaned. His wounds seemed small and insignificant as he began to comprehend the depths to which the earl would stoop. The devastation he had inflicted upon his daughter. “No.”
“Perhaps I am impure in your eyes, Lord Wolfridge.” That was the second time she had called him that, as if to distance herself, protect herself from any censure.
But he could never condemn this thoroughly decent, needlessly noble angel.
His heart broke again as he realized the depths of his betrayal in appearing to work with her father.
No words came, yet he needed her to know how much he understood. How greatly he admired her.
“No, never,” he bit out.
“At the same time,” Petra pressed on, as if she had not just shared how her father engaged in the most despicable, villainous acts he could imagine. “I was in touch with my grandfather’s estate.”
“The Greek one?” Wolf asked, although he sensed he already knew the answer.
Petra gave a small nod, as though acknowledging the unspoken truth amongst the ton that her grandfather was foreign. Not that it made any difference to Wolf, but Lord Kemberley liked to keep quiet that the source of his first wife’s great dowry was a man from the Mediterranean.