Except she wasn’t. She stood, thrust her plate—along with her half-eaten sandwich—into his hands and directed her full attention to Sally. “I’m waiting for you.”
Sally cut him a quick look, clearly unsure of how to proceed.
Pippa did not seem to notice that she’d thrown them all off, instead stepping forward and extending her hand in greeting. “I am Lady Philippa Marbury.”
Goddammit.
He would have given half his fortune to take back the instant when Pippa told Sally her name. One never knew when the madam might rethink her allegiance, and knowledge made for heady power.
For now, however, Sally pushed her surprise away and took Pippa’s hand, dipping into a quick curtsy. “Sally Tasser.”
“It’s lovely to meet you, Miss Tasser,” Pippa said, as though she were meeting a new debutante at tea rather than one of London’s most accomplished whores in a gaming hell. “I wonder if you have a few moments to answer some questions?”
Sally looked supremely entertained. “I believe I do have some time, my lady.”
Pippa shook her head. “Oh, no. There’s no need to stand on ceremony. You must call me Pippa.”
Over his decaying corpse.
“There is absolutely every reason to stand on ceremony,” he stepped in, turning to Sally. “You will under no circumstances call the lady anything but just that. Lady.”
Pippa’s brows snapped together. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Cross, but in this conversation, you are superfluous.”
He gave her his most frightening stare. “I assure you, I am anything but that.”
“Am I right in understanding that you have neither the time nor the inclination to speak to me at this particular moment?”
She had backed him into a corner. “Yes.”
She smiled. “There it is, then. As I find myself with both, I believe I shall begin my research now. Without you.” She turned her back on him. “Now, Miss Tasser. Am I right in my estimation that you are, indeed, a prostitute?”
The word slipped from her lips as though she said it a dozen times a day. “Dear God.” He shot Sally a look. “Do not answer.”
“Whyever not?” Pippa smiled at Sally. “There’s no shame in it.”
Even Sally’s brows rose at that.
Surely this was not happening.
Pippa pressed on. “There isn’t. In fact, I’ve done the research, and the word is in the Bible. Leviticus. And, honestly, if something is in a holy text, I think it’s more than reasonable for one to repeat it in polite company.”
“I’m not exactly polite company,” Sally pointed out, brilliantly, Cross thought.
Pippa smiled. “Never mind that . . . you’re the perfect company for my purposes. Now, I can only assume that your career is just what I imagine, as you are very beautiful and seem to know precisely how to look at a man and make it seem as though you are very much in love with him. You fairly smolder.”
Cross had to stop this. Now. “And how do you know that she is not simply in love with me?”
That was not the way he’d intended to stop it. At all. Dammit.
She looked over her shoulder at him, then back at Sally. “Are you in love with him?”
Sally turned her very best smolder on Pippa, who chuckled, and said, “I didn’t think so. That’s the one. It’s very good.”
Sally met his gaze over Pippa’s shoulder, laughter in her eyes. “Thank you, my lady.”
Well. At least she’d used the honorific.
“May I speak plainly?” Pippa asked, as though she had not been speaking plainly for the last four days. For her entire life.
“Please,” Sally said.
The moment was getting away from him. Something had to be done.
“No,” he interrupted, inserting himself between the two women. “No one is speaking plainly. Certainly not to Sally.”
“I’m happy to speak to the lady, Cross,” Sally said, and he did not miss the dry humor in her tone.
“I’ve no doubt of that,” he said. “And yet, you won’t. As you have somewhere to be. Right now.”
“Nonsense,” Pippa protested, edging him out of the way with a firm elbow at his side. Actually, physically moving him. “Miss Tasser has already said she has time for me.” She blinked up at him from behind thick lenses. “You are dismissed, Mr. Cross.”
Sally barked her laughter.
Pippa returned her attention to the prostitute, taking the woman’s arm and walking her away from Cross, toward the main entrance of the club. She was going to exit the casino, onto St. James’s in the middle of the day, on the arm of a prostitute. “I wonder if you might be willing to teach me how you do it.”
“It?” He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.
Pippa ignored him, but answered the question. “To smolder. You see, I am to be married in eleven days. Slightly less than that now, and I need to—”
“Catch your husband?” Sally asked.
Pippa nodded. “In a sense. I also require your obvious knowledge in other matters of . . . marriage.”
“What kind of matters?”
“Those relating to procreation. I find that what I thought I knew about the mechanics of the act are—well, unlikely.”
“Unlikely, how?”
“To be honest, I thought it was similar to animal husbandry.”
Sally’s tone turned dry. “Sometimes, my lady, I’m afraid it isn’t that different.”
Pippa paused, considering the words. “Is that so?”
“Men are uncomplicated, generally,” Sally said, all too sage. “They’re beasts when they want to be.”
“Brute ones!”
“Ah, so you understand.”
Pippa tilted her head to one side. “I’ve read about them.”
Sally nodded. “Erotic texts?”
“The Book of Common Prayer. But perhaps you have an erotic text you could recommend?”
And there it was—the end of his tether.
“Did you not lose a wager with me that prohibited precisely this kind of interaction?” The words were harsh and unkind. Not that he cared. He turned to Sally. “Leave now, Sally.”
Pippa raised her chin in what he was coming to think of as her most frustrating stance. “I promised no questioning other men. There was nothing in the wager relating to women.”
He opened his mouth to reply. Closed it.
She nodded once, filled with self-satisfaction, and returned her attention to Sally. “Miss Tasser, I assume from what I witnessed that you are clearly skilled . . . at least, Mr. Cross seems to believe so.”
Was she out of her mind?
“Cross and I have, unfortunately, never . . . done business,” Sally said.
Pippa’s mouth fell into a perfect O. “I see,” she said, when she clearly didn’t. “You must be discreet of course. I appreciated that. And I would be happy to pay you for the instruction,” she added. “Would you be willing to visit me at my home?”
He had been wrong; there was the end of his tether.
She would learn nothing from Sally. Nor from Temple. Nor from Castleton, dammit—it didn’t matter that he was her fiancé.
Cross didn’t want anyone touching her.
Not if he couldn’t.
He reached for Pippa, taking her by the arm, pulling her away from Sally, away from whatever scandalous path she had been considering taking. He ignored her gasp of outrage and the way his fingers fairly rejoiced at their contact. “Sally, it is time for you to go.” He turned back to Pippa. “And you. Into my office, before someone discovers you here.”
“The club is closed. Who would discover me?”
“Your brother-in-law, perhaps?”
Pippa remained unmoved. “Bourne and Penelope are fishing today. They left for Falconwell this morning. Back tomorrow.”
“To fish.” If he had an eternity to try, he could not imagine Bourne lakeside, fishing.
“Yes. They’ve fished together for much of their life. I don’t see why it’s such a surprise.”
Sally shook her head. “Tragic when a rogue of Bourne’s caliber goes soft.”
Pippa met her gaze. “I suppose it is for most . . . but my sister seems happy with the results.”
“No doubt she is. Bourne has always been able to keep a lady happy.”
Pippa considered the words for a long moment. “Do you mean to say you have . . . with Bourne?”
“She means no such thing.” He gave Sally a pointed look. “Out.”
The prostitute tilted her head, a wicked gleam in her eye. “I’m afraid I can’t leave, Cross. Not without giving the lady the information she requests.”
Pippa seemed to forget her question about Bourne. Thank heaven. “It’s very kind of you to come to my defense.”
Sally Tasser had spent too long on the streets for kindness. The prostitute did nothing that would not advance her cause. The only reason she was willing to cross Knight was because the Angel offered to pay her triple the amount she received from her current benefactor.
Cross made sure she understood his thoughts with nothing more than a look.
“Sally is leaving, Lady Philippa.” The words came out more harshly than he’d intended. But a man could only be pushed so far.
For a moment, he thought both women would fight him. And then, Sally smiled, tilting her head and turning her coyest smile on him. “Well, someone should answer the lady’s questions.”
Pippa nodded. “It’s true. I will not leave without it.”
The words were out before he could stop them. “I shall answer them.”
Sally looked immensely pleased.
Shit.
There was nothing he wanted to do less than to answer the questions Philippa Marbury had collected in preparation for her lessons from a prostitute.
Pippa’s gaze narrowed. “I don’t know.”
“Cross is highly skilled,” Sally said, extracting herself from Pippa’s grasp, fairly purring the rest. “He knows all your answers, I’m sure.”
Pippa cut him a doubtful look that made him want to prove the prostitute right this very moment.
Sally noticed the exchange and turned a bright, knowing smile on him. “Isn’t that right, Cross? I’m certain you don’t need my help. Aren’t you?”
“I’m certain.” He felt as uncertain as Pippa looked.
“Excellent. I shall see you tomorrow, as planned, then.”
He nodded once.
She turned to Pippa. “It was wonderful meeting you, Lady Philippa. I hope we have the chance to meet again.”
Not if he had anything to say about it.
Once Sally had disappeared through a dark passageway to a rear entrance to the club, he rounded on Philippa. “What would possess you to lie in wait for a prostitute inside a casino?”
There was a long silence, and Cross wondered if she might not reply, which wouldn’t be terrible, as he had had more than enough of her insanity.
But she did reply, eyes wide, voice strong, advancing on him, stalking him across the floor of the casino. “You don’t seem to understand my predicament, Mr. Cross. I have eleven days before I have to take vows before God and man relating to half a dozen things of which I have no knowledge. You and the rest of Christendom—including my sisters, apparently—would have no trouble at all with such an act, but I do have difficulty with it. How am I to take vows that I don’t understand? How am I to marry without knowing all of it? How am I to vow to be a sound wife to Castleton and a mother to his children when I lack the rudimentary understanding of the acts in question?”
She paused, adding as an aside, “Well, I do have the experience from the bull in Coldharbour, but . . . it’s not entirely relevant understanding, as Penelope and you have both pointed out. Can’t you see? I only have eleven days. And I need every one of them.”
He backed into the hazard table, and she kept coming. “I need them. I need the knowledge they can give me. The understanding they can afford. I need every bit of information I can glean—if not from you, then from Miss Tasser. Or others. I have promised to be a wife and mother. And I have a great deal of research to do on the subject.”
She was breathing heavily when she stopped, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, and the skin of her pale br**sts straining against the edge of her rose-colored gown. He was transfixed by her, by her passionate concern and her commitment to her ridiculous solution—as though understanding the mechanics of sex would change everything. Would make the next eleven days easy, and the next eleven years even easier. Of course, it wouldn’t.
Knowledge wasn’t enough.
He knew that better than anyone.
“You can’t know everything, Pippa.”
“I can know more than I do,” she retorted.
He smiled at that, and she took a step back, staring up at him, then down at her widespread hands. There was something so vulnerable about her. Something he did not like.
When she returned her unblinking gaze to his and said, “I am going to be a wife,” he had the wicked urge to ferret her into one of the club’s secret rooms and keep her there.
Possibly forever.
A wife. He hated the idea of her as a wife. As Castleton’s wife. As anyone’s.
“And a mother.”
A vision flashed, Pippa surrounded by children. Beaming, bespectacled children, each fascinated with some aspect of the world, listening carefully as she explained the science of the Earth and the heavens to them.
She would be a remarkable mother.