More Than a Mistress by Mary Balogh

Author:Mary Balogh [Balogh, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical Romance, Adult
ISBN: 9780345529046
Google: Q1oWMkSkgdsC
Amazon: 0440226015
Barnesnoble: 0440226015
Goodreads: 29126
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Jocelyn did not sleep. He was thoroughly sated but also uneasy. What the devil had he been babbling? He hoped she had not been listening.

Of course she had been listening.

What they had just done had been done together. They had not been separate entities giving and taking a purely physical pleasure. They had been—damnation, he could not stop thinking the way he had been speaking. He had become her, and she had become him. Not that that was it either. They had both, together, become a new entity that was both of them and neither of them.

He was going to end up in Bedlam if he was not careful.

It had been something quite beyond his experience. And certainly beyond his intentions. He had wanted a mistress again. Someone to bed at will. Something really quite basic and simple. He had desired Jane. She had needed a home and employment.

It had all made perfect sense.

Until she had let her hair down. No, that had only fueled his desire.

Until she had called him by name. And said something else. What the devil was it she had said? He rubbed his cheek over the warm silk of her hair and hugged her a little closer.

Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is at heart.

Yes, that was what had done it. Those few foolish words.

From birth he had been an earl with the rank of a marquess, heir to a dukedom. All his education, formal and informal, had been designed to train him to take over his fathers title and his father’s character when the time came. He had learned his lessons well. He had taken over both at the age of seventeen.

. . . the unique person one is at heart.

He had no heart. Dudleys generally did not.

And he had no unique character. He was what his father and everyone else had always expected him to be. For years now he had hugged about himself like a cloak his reputation as a dark, ruthless, dangerous man.

Jane’s hair was fragrant with the smell of roses that always clung about her. It made him think of country gardens in the early summer. And filled him with a strange yearning. Strange, because he hated the country. He had been to Acton Park, his own estate, only twice since leaving there after a bitter quarrel with his father when he was sixteen—once for his father’s funeral less than a year later, and once for his mother’s four years after that.

He had intended never to go back until he was carried there one day for his own burial. But he could close his eyes now as he held Jane tightly and remember the rolling, wooded hills to the east of the house, where he and Ferdinand and Angeline had played robbers and highwaymen and Robin Hood and explorers. And where sometimes, when alone, he had played poet and mystic, breathing in the smells of elemental

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