Chapter 1
One
Lady Phoebe,
I would be most pleased apologize if my behavior aroused you beyond measure offended you in any way.
I believed my actions to not only be what you needed, but what you desired.
I certainly did. I was driven by my cock commitment to please you in all that I do, not what I failed to do.
Because I apparently failed to do it rather miserably.
If I had not served as your sounding board, confidant, partner in crime solicitor for so many years, I might be prone to believe your escape departure from the house party in London was out of fear of me and what I planned for that evening due to a desire to retire to the country for a few months in hiding respite.
I was pleased to hear your cousin had come to terms with the duke.
It is the appropriate, and best outcome for all involved.
Our results, however…damnation woman, you left me with an unending cockstand I cannot satisfy and I strongly suspect your sweet cunny is dripping as you read this.
I have been everything that is proper, but we are not proper.
We are debauched, depraved, and downright dirty.
Our minds have been in the gutters for months.
I know I am not alone in this wickedness.
You were grinding your delightful quim against my cock and you nearly unmanned me in your library.
Ross is coming for the duchess, and my dear Lady, I am coming for you. I have spent years waiting for you, and I will not give up on us now when we are so close to the unparalleled bliss I promised.
Your servant in every request,
Joshua
—A very inappropriate letter from Joshua Forrester, Esquire to Lady Phoebe Drake. He began to correct his unseemly desires with a more discrete correspondence, but then decided to hell with it, he was done pretending. He sent the correspondence as drafted April 1811
Lady Phoebe Drake sat at the dressing table in the guest room of Caerlaverock Castle staring at the letter in her hand.
This room had been her sanctuary in the family wing when she visited Caerlaverock since before the Duchess of Nithesdale was a duchess.
Before she and Iseabail were scandalous beyond redemption thanks to Iseabail’s late husband, the Duke of Nithesdale.
“What does it say?” Iseabail asked.
“Pardon?” Phoebe’s voice sounded strangled to her own ears.
“The letter. It must be bad news, your face has lost all its color.”
The attention to the letter in her lap made her coloring return ten-fold, as if she’d stoked the flames in the hearth into a blazing bonfire.
“Ohh.” Iseabail grinned. “It’s that kind of letter.”
“No, really it’s nothing of import.” She lied.
“How can you say that when your blush says the exact opposite?”
Phoebe folded the letter and shoved it up her sleeve. “Given the situation we currently face, I hardly find this missive a topic for us to concern ourselves with.”
“Yet I find it exactly what I need to distract me from my current circumstances.” She unconsciously rubbed her rounded baby bump as if the child in her womb needed to know it was loved—the child was Iseabail’s world, it was loved beyond measure.
The circling of Iseabail’s hand caused another pang of longing for a child Phoebe would never have. She sighed and rubbed her temple above her right eye as she confessed, “It’s from Forrester.”
“I knew it!” Iseabail exclaimed.
“You knew nothing of the sort. He wrote it months ago.”
Iseabail’s hand paused. “Months? When?”
Phoebe found herself confessing to only one of Joshua’s secret letters that she’d received, and it wasn’t this one. “When I asked him to assist with the acquirement of The Memoirs of a Wanton Woman.”
Iseabail’s breath caught. “I still can’t believe you did that, yet I have to admit, I had assumed you obtained them from your husband’s library.”
She shook her head and attempted to smile but failed. “Richard was not that interested in marital relations.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“The last thing I want is your pity. Our marriage was very pleasant.”
Iseabail coughed as if pleasant was unimaginable.
She supposed it would be to someone who’d only experienced the type of riveting passion Iseabail had experienced with the father of her child, but for most marriages of the ton, pleasant was as good as it got.
Phoebe had never had any complaints about any of the aspects of her marriage, until after Richard’s death.
The financial state he had left her in, however, had painted their relationship in an altogether different light.
Yet her viewpoint towards marital relations had never changed—until she read Joshua’s letter that accompanied the bawdy books she’d requested he obtain.
His letter had shocked her, and then when she and Iseabail had read the books, she’d started wondering if perhaps there could be more than just tender feelings between a man and a woman.
The first of his two highly inappropriate letters had ignited her desire for unparalleled bliss and Joshua had nearly delivered it that night in her library, despite them having shared very little physical intimacy.
That encounter had made her realize how much she had missed in her marriage bed.
Iseabail slowly lowered herself onto Phoebe’s bed, her black bombazine gown of mourning a stark contrast to the pale-yellow bedding. “I can’t believe you asked your solicitor to find those books. How did Forrester react to your request?”
“The first time he ignored me and continued shuffling papers.”
Iseabail chuckled. “That hardly sounds like Forrester.”
“I know. I voiced the request a second time, and I believe my cheeks may have turned to the shade of the ripest red apple you could imagine.”
Iseabail’s brow furrowed and she placed the damp cloth she always carried across her forehead as she laid back on the bed. It was a sign of the daily sickness Iseabail had felt since realizing she was pregnant. She carried the cloth with her everywhere. “Did he acknowledge your second request?”
It was a scene Phoebe had played over and over in her mind.
“He jumped to his feet, gathered the contracts I had just signed for the new distribution of our spring hats and said, ‘I will get on it right away, Lady Drake.’ Then he rushed out the door without another word. I think I embarrassed him more than myself.”
“Is it possible he felt something—else?”
“The man is a paragon of propriety.” At least she’d believed him to be until his first letter.
Then, their encounter in her library had shown just how wicked he could be.
His latest letter…well, it was far from the correspondence of a paragon.
It was gloriously unprincipled and she found she liked that side of him so much more.
“Except when it comes to you.” Iseabail took a deep breath and exhaled.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“When he first approaches you, he smiles as he bows. With everyone else, he gives a polite nod.”
She shook her head in dismissal of the idea as she began running through past encounters with Forrester one at a time.
“I hardly think a smile makes a man fall off his pedestal of propriety.” Yet he did smile in her company, and then his second letter…
and at the house party they truly had been debauched, depraved and downright dirty.
She would take it one step further and describe them as filthy, debased, immoral—and she had never enjoyed herself more thoroughly.
She closed her eyes and confessed. “Last February at my house party he told Ross and Astley that he had been courting me for months.”
Iseabail’s mouth dropped open. “Why didn’t you tell me he was courting you?”
“That’s just it. If the man had been courting me, I was more ignorant to the event than you. To make matters worse, he said Nithesdale approved the match.”
“So Nithesdale knew of his courtship, but you did not?”
“According to what Forrester said, yes.”
“Has he kissed you?”
“Of course not.” Lie number two.
“Has he taken you for a ride in the park?”
“He is my man of affairs. He manages my money, he handles the banks, and he handles any disputes I have at my business. I have considered him a friend and a confidant for years, but a suitor? Most certainly not.”
Iseabail frowned. “Does his lower station bother you?”
“I haven’t given it any thought.” She found it preferable.
“You should. If you were to marry—”
“You’re jumping too far, too fast. I haven’t even considered him courting me,” Phoebe insisted; but then looked down at the letter in her sleeve.
“Suppose he did want to court you, would his lower station be a concern?”
“No.”
“You didn’t give it much thought.”
“That’s because I have no wish to marry at all, let alone marry an aristocrat. My parents decided my first marriage for me. If I marry again, it will be my decision.”
“I thought you loved your husband?”
Phoebe smiled. “I was very fond of Richard. The Countess of Astley introduced us because she knew I wanted someone who was kind. Richard treated me well, but it was never a love match despite our tender feelings. Yet I feel betrayed by the manner in which he did not disclose the state of our financial affairs. I know it was his male ego that kept him from telling his much younger wife that he’d made a hash of everything, but I still have a hard time forgiving him.
My father was made a baron because of his business acumen, not because he was born into the peerage.
He had viewed my marriage as a shrewd business move for growth in our family business.
I trusted him to choose someone who understood business. ”
“What would women do if we weren’t chattel to the men in our lives?”