A Precious Jewel by Mary Balogh Page B

job as some old girl’s companion just like that if she chose.” He snapped his fingers. “But that would be too dull for her. She would prefer to earn her bread by——” He completed the sentence with an obscenity.
    Sir Gerald noticed that his hands were opening and closing at his sides again.
    “If you want to go to Lettie, Ramsay,” he said, “don’t let me keep you. I shall stroll around here awhile longer and see what sells.”
    “I hate to leave you alone,” Mr. Ramsay said, “but I had better get this thing over with Lettie while I have it in my mind. How many handkerchiefs do I have?” He laughed as he patted his pockets. “I am bound to have the waterworks turned on all over me.”
    Sir Gerald turned away.
    Bertie Ramsay was only a chance acquaintance, a friend of Peter West, another acquaintance of Sir Gerald’s with whom he had agreed to go to Vauxhall a few evenings before. He had not been looking for any such entertainment, but it was the same evening as he had been asked to go with the Majorses. He had pleaded a prior engagement and had thought that perhaps the opportunity to be seen by them squiring around another young lady was too good a one to be missed. It appeared to have worked like a charm.
    When Ramsay had had nothing to do at White’s an hour or so earlier and he had had nothing particular to do, either, he had agreed to accompany the man to Tattersall’s.
    He hoped Ramsay would forget about his plan to call at Brookhurst during the summer.
    Sir Gerald left Tattersall’s and began to walk aimlessly. He had never thought of his relationship withPriss as anything sordid. Even when he had taken her as his regular whore at Kit’s it had not seemed sordid. He was a normal young man with normal appetites, satisfying them in a thoroughly normal way at a whorehouse that had a reputation for cleanliness and skilled girls.
    Priss was his mistress, the woman he housed and paid to give him regular and exclusive access to her body and the satisfaction of his needs. There was nothing unusual about such an arrangement. He benefited, Priss benefited, everyone’s interests were served, and no one got hurt.
    There was nothing sordid about it.
    Sir Gerald looked up sharply to find himself the object of a furiously shaking fist and a stream of hair-raisingly colorful language. It seemed that he had crossed a street with his head down and caused a near collision between a gentleman’s phaeton and a vegetable cart. It was the carter who was excited. The gentleman was grinning.
    “Who is she, Stapleton?” he yelled. “You had better keep yourself alive for her, old chap.”
    Sir Gerald grinned back at him and raised his hat to the carter.
    He could not associate vulgarities like “plowing” and that other one Ramsay had used with Priss and what happened between them in their bed.
    Priss was too good to be described in coarse terms. Not good in the way one would expect a whore to begood, perhaps, but good in the way one would expect a wi—. Well, she was good. She satisfied him utterly and always had. Even that very first time she had given him precisely what he had asked for. He could not remember a time when she had failed to please him in bed.
    And yet he had told Ramsay in that careless tone men tended to use when talking of women, especially women they used only for sex, that he would have thought of dropping Priss too if he had not leased the house for a year.
    Would he? Was he keeping her only because he had paid for the house anyway and might as well get value for his money? Would he drop her if he had to pay out more rather than keep her over the summer so that she would be there for him when he returned to town in the autumn or winter?
    Devil take it. He stood still on the pavement and did some mental calculations, frowning down at the ground. It was early July. He would spend the second half of the month at Brookhurst and all of August and September. Often he stayed for October, too, and