Wanton Slave by Rogers Evelyn

Author:Rogers, Evelyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Evelyn Rogers
Published: 2011-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

When Sarah awoke early the next morning to merciless sunbeams streaming through the lone high window, she decided she was as tired as she had been the night before. How arduous were the activities of dancing and making love with Jake. She had spent much of the night tossing and turning alone in his bed, trying to forget some of the particulars of the two events.

After pulling on the layers of clothes she had selected at the Grand Bazaar—trousers, smock, waistcoat and caftan—she answered a knock at the door and found herself confronting a somber, pasty-faced gentleman wearing the uniform of a carriage driver in Hyde Park. On the street behind him loomed a carriage and a spirited gray gelding. A young boy in livery stood at the gray's head, reins gripped in his gloved hands.

"Hello," Sarah said in surprise.

As the driver opened his mouth to answer, a pair of excited Turks passed between him and the carriage, their voices raised in argument. At the same moment a wagon loaded with cloth-wrapped cheese lumbered along, casting sour smells and dust into the morning air.

The driver paid them no mind, instead devodng all his attention to the rough caftan and to the trousers visible just below the hem. His gaze moved on to the room behind her. His lips pursed.

"Miss Whitlock?" he asked in the disapproving way she so well remembered from her reckless London days. "Mr. Price thought you might be ready for your ride to the embassy."

"How thoughtful of Mr. Price," Sarah said in her own London don't-fool-with-me voice. She looked past him at the closed carriage. It sat high above the street, its sadn-lined cab providing elegant room for two passengers behind the driver's perch.

"A brougham," she said. "However did he manage to find one here?"

"Through the embassy. Mr. Price insisted on the best."

Sarah felt a cold, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Jake could not wait to send her on her way, and in style, as though if she went grandly enough she would be less likely to return.

Once he had said she would need an armed guard to travel safely through the streets of the city to the embassy. Unless the waiting driver and footman were far more fierce than they appeared, it would seem he had changed his mind. After dragging her from the coffee house to his apartment, he had tested her vulnerability and decided she could fend for herself.

She tried to tell herself she was being unreasonable. She was the one who insisted she leave. But he had not put up much of an argument last night, and in the light of morning she was certain he must have been relieved.

You're more trouble than you're worth.

His words came back to haunt her.

Shoving them aside, she rubbed her toes against the rug. Her lone pair of slippers were somewhere in the back room of a Turkish coffee house. If she were really to go in style, Jake should have sent a cobbler along with the brougham.

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