Masquerade Read online

  Masquerade

  A Steamy Pride & Prejudice Variation

  Emma East

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Also by Emma East

  Chapter One

  “Your actions will label you both the most outrageous flirts in the country and ruin all of your sisters’ chances at marriage!” Elizabeth cried. “Why would you ever think to do such a thing?”

  Lydia, cheeks red from anger, clenched both fists at her side and squared off in front of Elizabeth. Lydia was no stranger to physical confrontation in her efforts to get her own way, but she had never managed thus far make contact with Elizabeth, who was wily and quick. She appeared now as if she would be game to try again. “You are no fun, Lizzy! Maybe you cannot understand how it is to be desired and flirted with by a handsome gentleman, but I am wanted at that party. Mr. Ferris asked after me specifically only yesterday at the assembly rooms. He said he had a lovely bit of poetry he wished to read me.”

  “You simply cannot understand, like Lydia said,” Kitty echoed her sister dutifully, adding, “Please, Lizzy? There is nothing better than being the apple of a fine gentleman’s eye… to feel his touch of his hand on your waist… to his making love to you with his eyes.” Her sigh was a sweet agony, her gaze far and distant on these relished daydreams.

  For daydreams they were. The girls were fifteen and sixteen, respectively, and had not a drop of maturity between them. If any man eyed them as prospects for marriage, then Elizabeth would grow wings and quack.

  “Yeah,” Lydia said with a smug air, “not to mention the tightness of his breeches!”

  The two girls roared with laughter.

  Enough. Elizabeth would have to put her foot down since obviously they either did not understand or care about the repercussions of their illicit plans.

  “Lydia! Kitty! I am shocked at you both. You would indulge in this shameful display of impropriety while we are guests of our aunt and uncle. It would mortify our poor mother to know that you had planned to lie to attend a party without a chaperone and our Aunt Gardiner would bear the brunt of your tactless display! She has been kind and generous to allow us to experience the season in town—”

  “The end of the season, you mean!” Lydia corrected snottily. “It is nearly September!”

  “Oh, do not be such a snob. You should be grateful she invited you to come when it is the busiest season for our Uncle. You could very well be miserable at home instead of going to constant balls and assemblies.”

  “You are never any fun, Lizzy! It isn’t fair. Oh, my heart would just burst if I never saw Mr. Ferris again before we leave next month. I am sure he will propose.” Her eyes lit up at this prospect and she grinned triumphantly at Elizabeth. “Our mother would have a fit if she hears you would stop me from meeting an eligible man.”

  “Mr. Ferris is ten years your senior, Lydia! He wishes nothing except a diversion before his lady love returns next season. You must have heard Mrs. Adkinson when she told me, you were standing nearby. He does not love you and will not ask you to marry him, I am sorry to say.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “The more is the pity, Lydia. I would be glad to marry you off if only to escape your whining and troublemaking!”

  From her expression, she had indeed known that Mr. Ferris admired another, but she had not wanted to admit it to herself. To have Elizabeth force the truth upon her, Lydia’s rage faltered and then crumbled. “You don’t know what it’s like to want someone so badly. To have your heart beat so hard it might come out of your chest! When he looks at me, Lizzy—” She stopped and sighed. “You wouldn’t understand how it feels.”

  “Like your heart will break if you cannot gaze into his eyes,” Kitty supplied, sitting up eagerly, always the helpful sister wanting to impress. “And - and how your heart will literally burst if you don’t get the chance to dance with him.”

  Elizabeth pursed her lips. “Neither of you are original in your silly attitudes and you do not get to claim martyrdom for it. Most of us learn how to control ourselves and respect the rules of society—as you shall too, if I have to drag you by the ears to do so!”

  Lydia groaned and flopped onto the bed beside her sister. Outside, the birds were singing and the bees buzzing in the back garden, but Lydia acted as if the sun would never shine again. She wailed, “But I promised Mrs. Allen that we would attend! Surely you would count her as a chaperone.”

  “Not if this is the dress required for it. I still cannot believe how you altered it.” Elizabeth picked up the dress that had caught her attention, sparked her questions, and ultimately revealed her sisters’ plan to attend a masquerade that night. Elizabeth and their Aunt Gardiner, however, had thought Mrs. Allen had invited them to attend a late supper. Mrs. Gardiner had bought them each a new dress for the season and the silly creatures had cut them up to create horrendously improper costumes for the masquerade. Just seeing them again refueled her anger at their thoughtless actions. “You are fifteen and sixteen and have no place in decent society without a chaperone. You have even less of a place in a masquerade displaying yourselves to society at large. Think of your reputations! If you will not, think of our family’s!”

  “Phooey to our reputations,” groaned Lydia, addressing the ceiling.

  Kitty jumped in as her sister flagged and sat up at the end of the bed, her hands pressed together in front of her chest. “Oh, but please, Lizzy! We even brought you a mask, if you wanted to come. Please come and you will see that we will be on our best behavior! See? Here is the mask we bought you.”

  It was a kitten mask. Elizabeth would have laughed if she hadn’t been so furious.

  “No.”

  Kitty drooped. Lydia sprang up from her reclining position and glared at Elizabeth. “I hate you! I hate you! You’re no sister of mine, Elizabeth Bennet!”

  Kitty nodded like a marionette with an overenthusiastic handler. “Yes, you’re - you’re dead to us!”

  She dropped the revealing dresses back to the floor where she had initially thrown them and grabbed the bonnet and ribbon carelessly strewn on the writing desk. “Fine. As long as I am dead to you, I will take back this and this!”

  Both girls cried out. “But my ribbon—!”

  “It is my ribbon, Lydia Bennet, which you well know.”

  “Fine.” She glared. “We don’t care about silly things like ribbons, anyway.”

  “You will stay in your room tonight and eat your dinner here once I send it up,” she told them. “I cannot possibly face our Aunt Gardiner with you there constantly reminding me how shamefully you would act without supervision.”

  She stormed out and only just caught herself before she slammed the door.

  Stupid, stupid girls!

  It was best she had come to London to supervise her two youngest sisters. Mrs. Bennet had been prepared to send them alone. However, Aunt Gardiner’s correspondence with Elizabeth and Jane beforehand had revealed her anxiety over having the two visit. Aunt Gardiner had three children of her own to look after and she admitted their natures might overwhelm her. Elizabeth had volunteered to come to London with her sisters to chaperone them. And well she had!

  Kitty by herself is meek, but she is keen to tag along with whatever schemes Lydia devises. And Lydia would do anything to see herself walk down the aisle before her sisters, respectable or no! That dreadful girl!

  She crossed to her room and put away the ri
bbon and bonnet she had taken back from her sisters. What irritating pinheads to believe that she did not have the same desires! Did they believe Elizabeth a frozen harpy who turnend her nose up at a gentleman with admiration in his eyes? It was only that she knew better: to invite admiration, to invite dances and flirtations with abandon could lead to disaster. It meant revealing her own secrets.

  She pressed her hand to her heart. Oh, how she had wished to be admired, to feel a gentleman’s warm breath on her knuckles as he bent to kiss her hand, to see the light of lively enjoyment in his eyes as he admired her. But that was not all she wanted. She bit her lip at this traitorous thought.

  Do not give me poetry or dancing or conversation—give me the heat of his hands on my waist and silk sheets tangled around our forms and dark laughter in my ear.

  She dropped her hand. She shook herself back to the present and out of ridiculous, unreal daydreams. Back to the real world where she was a gentleman’s daughter. She did not want hidden trysts or slow seductions. She wanted a husband she could love. To want the touch of a man simply to indulge in her own horrible desires was sinful and shameful. She was a respectable woman.

  For her sisters, it was imperative they understood the dangers of inviting attention with no marked intentions on the gentleman’s side. They would put the family in terrible danger with their daydreams of dancing and flirting and reading poetry by moonlight.

  But, she thought as she descended the stairs for dinner, at least their daydreams are sweeter than my own.

  She ignored this and went downstairs. Her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner and the children met her.

  “Where’s Lydia and Kitty?” Mrs. Gardiner asked.

  Elizabeth fabricated a tale about them being tired from their day’s exertions to and from their acquaintances houses. The food smelled lovely, and she complimented it repeatedly as she ate. This compliment served the purpose of being both the truth and a distraction for when her relatives asked about Kitty and Lydia. She was afraid the whole terrible truth would spill out if she dwelled upon them too long.

  She also dwelled on Lydia’s accusation. Of course, Elizabeth also desired compliments and admiring looks. But Elizabeth’s true desires were darker, desires a gentleman’s daughter should not entertain. A man reading poetry to her repelled her. What compelled her was the idea of tangling her hands with his on the bedsheets, of dark rooms and whispered secrets. She wanted the heat of a union of two warm bodies, the tingle that his touch would elicit, the sensuality of a mouth covering her own. She was innocent of a man’s touch and despaired that she would ever experience it.

  A gentleman is not likely to be well versed in the ways of lovemaking and a gentleman is likely who I will marry, if I even marry. Perhaps I have been left alone so far because gentlemen can sense that I am… not like other women.

  Elizabeth had resigned herself to a solitary life long before, near Lydia’s age. If her thoughts made her unnatural, she would not subject any gentleman to them. She would be a comfortable old maid, tending to her sisters’ children and reading and sewing in her spare time. She had no need of a husband that would either mock her or moralize at her for wanting to perform her wifely duties with more vigour than a wife only seeking to reproduce.

  No, I would be alone rather than judged. For judged I will be if I reveal my deviant desires.

  After dinner, Elizabeth excused herself from sitting with her aunt and uncle and went upstairs. She would check that her sisters were well fed and uncomplaining—though they rarely lacked complaint—and then retire herself. She had spent most of the day playing with her little cousins and her legs ached from the exertions.

  “Lydia? Kitty?”

  The bedroom was dark, quiet. The setting sun cast shadows across the guest room. Elizabeth took in the two lumps under the comforter and, realizing she might let in too much light, began to close the door.

  But something stopped her before she could pull the door shut. She took a step forward and another, holding her candle high. It was a warm night to be bundled up, head to foot, under the comforter. Yet, there they were, cuddled together like it was the Arctic.

  She reached the bed and hesitated, her hand hovering over the edge of the comforter. Then with a quickness that belied her calm movements, flipped back the blanket.

  “Oh no…”

  She tore away the rest of the comforter, letting it pool at her feet as she stared at the mattress in horror. Pillows and rolled up dresses.

  They were gone.

  Chapter Two

  “Darcy, would you be a bit of fun? It is only a little sport.”

  Listening to the insipid women whinny and whine? Subjecting himself to the braying of polite society? All while wearing a mask and attempting to guess which cretin was attempting to converse with him?

  “No, thank you,” Darcy said, bracing himself as their carriage careened around a corner. “I would rather run myself through. But I will gladly laugh at you.”

  Martin Willoughby barked a laugh that sounded like a blast of a shotgun. “You haven’t changed from university. Still as missish as ever. Remember when we jumped our horses over the master’s table? No, you wouldn’t, because you were in your room, squinting at your books and having no fun at all.”

  Darcy scowled. “I also didn’t need to donate an entire wing in order to graduate.”

  “There is that.” He grinned. “But tonight is different, Darcy. No one will know who you are. You can gallivant and be as free as a bird tonight, with no one the wiser who it is they wake up beside in the morning.”

  And how many bastard children do you have, Willoughby?

  Darcy knew he should have never accepted his old schoolmate’s invitation for a night out without asking for the particulars. He should have expected the youngest Willoughby son to be as wild as he was in their days in university. He was a blond-haired, blue-eyed man about town and one of Satan’s own. Darcy told him as much.

  “Come now, Darcy,” Willoughby said with a laugh, “you cannot pretend me a fool. Faint all you wish, but I have witnessed the Devil in you once or twice.”

  That had been immediately after his parents’ deaths, when the universe spun around him and he could not regain his footing. He had been barely a man, barely reconciled to the idea of his parents ever dying, when both his mother and father passed away in a carriage accident upon the road. Darcy had spun out of control—briefly, but for long enough to horrify Darcy when he came out of his grief-addled stupor.

  Willoughby had been beside him then: urging him on to new depravities, protecting him when he would have fallen into a trap of marriage to an unsuitable partner, and eventually dragging him back to reality.

  “Perhaps,” Darcy said. “But I am not the man I was then. I have matured while you, put simply, have not.”

  Willoughby laughed. “Pray, you sound like my eldest brother. But what is stopping you, Darcy? Is there a lady who has already caught your eye?”

  “You gossip as well as any old mother.”

  “I guess that is a no, then.”

  “Can you tell your driver to stop trying to race through the streets, man? I’m sure we’ve hit a pedestrian or two so far since Grosvenor Street.”

  “Very well. We should be fashionably late, anyway.”

  Darcy could relax when the breakneck speed of their passage through London’s streets slowed. He adjusted his shoulders, indignant that his friend had no consideration for his distaste of irresponsible drivers.

  Willoughby, though removed by a few odd years, recognized Darcy’s expression. He grimaced. “Sorry, old boy. It slipped my mind entirely.”

  Stiffly, he nodded. “It is fine.”

  Willoughby reached across the space between them and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good sport, Darcy. But truly. You should find entertainment tonight. This party is not like any other boring old masquerade. It is a true delight in sin and vice. Gambling, drinking, food… women.”

  “It sounds like every asse
mbly in town.”

  Willoughby rolled his eyes. “No, truly, Darcy. The women who enter tonight… they are goddesses of delight and play. They will be carefully screened by the host and only given leave to enter if they are prepared to risk a little of their reputations.”

  Darcy was astounded. “By God, these are society ladies?”

  “That is the genius, Darcy. They will not wish to reveal their names or faces, but they want to explore the arts of seduction before their marriage beds… or after, in some cases. It has been happening for years—the list is as exclusive as any man or woman of gentle breeding would desire.”

  “How did you learn of such a… gathering?”

  Willoughby winked. “I move in the right circles.”

  “Perhaps these goddesses of delight can afford to lose their reputations, but I cannot.”

  “So there is a lady!”

  “Eventually, I suspect. There is not one that has so far tempted my serious interest—”

  “Then there is no harm!” Willoughby cried. “It is simply a meeting of two individuals who share the same goal, a union of like minds.”

  “And what bastards have come from these parties, Willoughby?”

  “You are too serious! What has gotten into my dearest friend to make you so dour and gloomy?”

  Only my sister attempting to run away with the man who acted like a brother to me in my youth.

  Darcy twitched his shoulders. He did not wish to think about Ramsgate or his sister. His tone sharpened. “And why have you avoided all responsibility since we last met?”

  He snorted. “I have responsibilities enough. I divide my time between my writing desk and society functions. But there is such a thing as too much responsibility, Darcy, and you could be the spokesman for the disease. You may scowl, but only because you see the truth in it.”