Parlor Games by Leda Swann Page B

let him touch you ever again.”
    Sir Richard gave a groan and stirred on the floor. Clearly he had not hit the bastard hard enough. It was a shame he ever had to wake up.
    She shuddered at the noise. “Take me away from here. Away from him.”
    He picked her up and carried her down the hallway to a deserted sitting room at the very end where she could recover her composure out of reach of Sir Richard.
     
     
     
    Sarah clung to Tom as if he were her lifeline. His warmth and tenderness gave her strength and the feel of his arms around her took away her pain. If only she could hold on to him forever. “Make love to me, Tom.”
    His mouth fell open and he looked as if she had just hit him over the head with a plank of wood. “What did you say?”
    “Make love to me,” she repeated, hiding her face in his shirtfront.
    “Why? Why now?”
    “Sir Richard frightened me.” An uncontrollable shudder racked her body as she spoke, but she did not weep. The time for tears was past. “I want to remove all remembrance of his touch from my body. I want to take away those memories of lying helpless under him, and replace them with memories that I can treasure. Please, Tom, make love to me.”
    “Here?”
    “Here, anywhere. What does it matter?” She did not care where—she needed him too badly.
    “We cannot stay here. Sir Richard will be furious. He might well be angry enough to have the law on you and have you arrested for assaulting a Member of Parliament.”
    “But I did nothing to him,” she protested, knowing all the while that her innocence would make no difference. The law was not made for poor people. She had dared to reject a wealthy man, a Member of Parliament, and he would have his revenge on her one way or another.
    “Sir Richard cannot touch me—he knows he cannot touch me—but you? You are defenseless, a prostitute for all anyone knows, an easy target for his vengeance.”
    Her heart leaped with fear. The streets would swallow her up after all. “I have nowhere else to go.” There was no armor against the resignation of despair that gripped her soul. She’d always known it would come to this in the end.
    “Either he will have you arrested or he will try to rape you again. And next time I will not be around to stop him.”
    He was right—Mrs. Erskine’s house was no longer a refuge for her. Sir Richard would kill her. Or he would succeed in raping her next time, and she would kill herself and save him the bother. She shrugged hopelessly. Whichever way she looked at it, the result would be the same in the end.
    “Where will you go?”
    What did it matter? Her life was over before it had begun. “There is nowhere in this world for a woman like me to go.”
     
     
     
    Tom looked down at the fragile burden in his arms. His landlady would kick up merry hell if he brought home a strange woman to his lodging house. “You will have to come home with me,” he found himself saying. Ah, damn his landlady—he’d never cared much for her anyway.
    Sarah acquiesced with a weary shrug. All the fight had gone out of her. She looked like the empty shell of herself, drained of all emotion. “Just for tonight, then,” she agreed. “I’ll find somewhere else to go in the morning.”
    No gentleman worth the name would throw a lady out on the streets. Particularly not the lady he was obsessed with, in love with.
    Damn it, he might as well admit it—he was in love with her. Head over heels, topsy-turvy in love with Miss Sarah Chesham. Once he had her in his lodgings, in his bed and in his arms, he would not let her go again.
    If it meant that she would stay with him and give him the right to protect her from scum like Sir Richard, he would even marry her.
    Marriage. He’d not seriously considered it before, but the more he thought about it, the more it appealed. Sarah would make him a fine wife. Her occupation did not bother him—in fact, he was man enough to admit that it turned him on. He was a grown man and