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When Alice had
found him and later put him into the business, he had bedded some of the
noblest of nobles and they never remembered his face afterward. The Duchess of
Wallingford would have been mortified if she had known whom she’d bedded at
Madame Dupuis’ whorehouse—a former prostitute and a paid servant? She would be
most displeased.
    “Not if you don’t let her.”
    “Alice, you make me think there is hope when we both know
otherwise. As my friend, you must not encourage this suggestion any more than I
can act upon it.”
    “Man cannot divine what woman wants unless he asks her.”
     
    John returned to the mansion where he worked. He glanced up
at the edifice from the back side, where the servants entered, and thanked the
powers that he had secured such a respectable and well-paying position. And
Alice. She had a way about her. And her black book gave her access to untold
favors.
    Entering the house now would be its own special hell.
    He would get to see and hear everything.
    Torture came in many forms. He suspected he had just
increased his self-abasement a hundredfold. He doubted that he was the only
servant who had ever fallen in love with a woman quite above his station. He’d
always been in a position to declare that love but what good would it have
done? She might have laughed. He might have lost his position. Yes,
self-preservation was as keen as his need to tell her the truth.
    Not in a hundred years would he have imagined that he’d have
the opportunity to bed Lucy. And the circumstances leading to that minor
miracle, while astounding to him, might seem tawdry to an aristocrat who had
never known the meaning of hunger or desperation.
    Alice Dupuis had found him when he was twelve.
    She had scoured him with a scrub brush and, in time, turned
him into a reasonable facsimile of a gentleman along with the
appropriate reference letter from one of her devoted clients. He was
faultlessly mannered when he had to be, which was most of the time. Exposure
came in times of stress—anger, sexual tension, frustration.
    Alice had been a hard taskmaster when it came to his reading
and his sums.
    And, of course, he had whored for her. Partly he knew he
must repay his debt to Alice. Secretly he enjoyed the strange reversal of
fortunes in that he got to fuck women who were shallow enough to bed a river
rat and think it a great delight. He enjoyed their screams though he was rarely
so moved as to release with them.
    She had plenty of obscene specimens to delight her clients,
but John was what the ladies wanted. Large, but not so mythically proportioned
that he couldn’t service a woman properly.
    At one time, John was Alice’s most highly paid prostitute.
    He would always be grateful to her because she had known his
wish was to be someone respectable, to have a life and someday a family. He had
the funds to do so—Alice had been very generous in her payment to him and the
nobles who visited the brothel were enthusiastic in discussing their
investments.
    After he obtained his position with the Duke of Wallingford,
after he had fallen in love with Lucy, John had spilled his secret to Alice, as
one does to a long-trusted friend.
    It was true money couldn’t buy everything. What he had
invested was respectable but it would never buy the love of a duchess.
    Nor could it erase his past.
    * * * * *
    Lucy pressed her hands to her face in an attempt to cool, or
maybe hide, the impassioned blush. A week ago she had indulged in such shocking
and rich pleasures that even now to think on them brought a wicked rush of
desire that coursed in hot bolts through her whole body until she thought she
would burst into flame.
    She had naïvely imagined something tender and gentle. What
she received was tempestuous and life changing.
    What surprised her was the pain of longing that had lodged
in her chest for a man she would never see again. Attempts to banish him from
her thoughts had failed and yet she couldn’t bring him into focus