Lust by Charlotte Featherstone Page A

allowed it. Truth be told, she had reveled in his words, in the way his breath was hot against her throat and his hard body pressed into her soft one.
    After coming in from the maze, she had been disoriented, her head heavy and foggy with the lingering effects of his seduction and the heady scent that had preceded his arrival. Thank heavens Mercy had found her and pulled her into an empty salon where she had immediately set Chastity’s hair and gown to rights. Mercy, in her kindness, had not questioned Chastity’s crumpled state, but her worried expression had told Chastity how dreadful she really looked.
    She complained of a headache and a desire to leave the ball, so her father had promptly loaded her and her sisters into the carriage and taken them home. Mary had been livid, of course, but Prue and Mercy had seemed to understand. Once home, Chastity had fallen onto her bed and slept as though she had been drugged. Her sleep had not been peaceful, but clouded with visions and dreams of a masked stranger with blue eyes and black hair. Astranger whose voice seemed to constantly whisper to her…. Let me in….
    Even now she heard it, murmuring to her from across the stone fence at the back of the garden. She didn’t know how to resist it, only knew that she must. It was a trial, she realized. A test of her strength, her virtue. And sometimes, especially in the dark while she was alone in her bed at night, she feared that she would fail it. Her virtue, she knew, was slowly being stripped from her, and she was helpless to impede it.
    Stopping to inspect a row of peonies and their swelling buds, Chastity noticed a footprint in the dirt. It was large, pointed at the toes. The imprint, she was certain, was that of a boot, a pair of Hessians.
    It was a strange place for a footprint to be. Perhaps if her father had been a big man, or if they had a gardener, she would have thought nothing of it, but her father wasn’t tall enough to have a foot of this size, and with their arrival in London only a few days ago, a gardener had not yet been installed. It could not belong to her brother, Robert, either. For Robert had not come to call on them.
    Intrigued, Chastity followed the footprints, noticing how they seemed to lead away from the garden and the house. Which was even more bizarre because there was nothing back there but the stone fence that enclosed the garden. Beyond their yard was a small thick brush that was slated to be razed to make way for another square of fashionable town houses.
    Where did the footsteps lead? she wondered, clutchingthe posy tightly in her hand. The trail abruptly stopped at a wall covered in ivy at the back of the garden. By now, the sun was slipping quickly beneath the horizon, making way for the moon to creep up into the evening sky. It was rather dark back in the corner, what with the ivy and the shadow of the house and the tops of the trees that loomed over the garden wall. She really should return to the house, but she ignored the self-protective instinct.
    Dropping to her knees, Chastity saw that the ground was disturbed, as if something had been slid against it. But what? There wasn’t a gate in the garden, not that she could recall anyway. But there was a footprint there…
    Perhaps the man had scaled the garden wall and dropped to the other side? But what would someone be doing in their yard? A footpad? A housebreaker? Fear skittered through her, making her thoughts race. But then the breeze blew, taking the long, loose tendrils of ivy, scraping them against the stone, revealing a fleeting glance of a rusted piece of metal. A latch? A gate?
    She thrust aside the ivy, revealing a long-neglected garden gate in the faint glow of dusk. She had never known of a gate, but as she reached for the rusted latch a deep-rooted memory sprung forth.
    â€œOh, don’t be going through that gate, miss,” Cook’s assistant had said in her thick Yorkshire accent. “The