The Lesson Plan (Lords of Lancashire) by Jackie Barbosa

Author:Jackie Barbosa [Barbosa, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Circe Press
Published: 2011-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

“Viscount Langston is here to see you, sir.”

Startled, Conrad looked up from his morning coffee. At not even ten of the clock, it was far too early for standard social calls. Peele, the butler, made this calm announcement from the arched doorway that separated the dining room from the main hall. Pressed, polished, and proper as always, the aging servant appeared utterly unperturbed by this anomaly. But then, it was Peele’s job to be unperturbed by even the most outlandish events.

Conrad took another slow sip of his coffee in an attempt to soothe his rattled nerves. It had been nine days since the night at the woodcutter’s cottage. Freddie had promised that she would contact him if she suspected a pregnancy, but what if she hadn’t? What if she had conceived but hadn’t kept her word to let him know? If Nash had found out…

Conrad’s chest felt weighted by concrete blocks. He’d trusted her promise and spent the better part of the previous week on tenterhooks, alternately hoping that she had conceived a child and that she hadn’t.

He was a seething mass of contradiction on the matter. He wanted her. Ached for her. To the point that he lay awake at night, stroking himself until he was spent as he replayed every wicked moment of their encounter. He doubted he would ever again find a woman whose craving for submission and surrender seemed so perfectly to mirror his own need for domination and control.

And yet…and yet, she was still Freddie. Wild, irrepressible, intractable Winifred Langston, who always did exactly as she pleased and never obeyed anyone. Except him when he had ordered her to take off her clothes, spread her legs, suck his cock, fuck him.

Hell and damnation, he had to stop going there.

But that was the real problem, wasn’t it? He would go there with her. For the rest of his life, if he married her. He would never be able to treat her like a wife; he would always treat her like a mistress. Like a whore. And that unsettled him for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain, even to himself.

Added to that was Freddie herself. She might bend to his will in the bedroom, but would she be equally compliant when it came to the demands of being an aristocratic wife? If they married, she would one day be his countess, and his countess must be a model of domestic feminine virtue. Even if Freddie consented never to wear breeches and henceforth to ride sidesaddle, he doubted she would ever fit anyone’s picture of a proper English lady.

Least of all his own, because he would be fucking her every night like anything but a lady. How on earth could he ever reconcile that?

“Sir?” Peele repeated.

Conrad cleared his throat and set down his coffee cup. “Yes, of course. He’s waiting in the front parlor?”

The butler nodded, bowed, and turned to depart.

“Er, Peele?”

The servant promptly faced him. “Yes, sir?”

“Did the viscount seem…well, out of sorts? Angry?”

Peele’s expression almost never hinted at emotion, but his sparse, graying eyebrows rose ever so slightly.

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