“You are the thief, Mrs. Chase,” Ainsley said coolly. “I’ll deal with whoever is necessary. I’ve brought you the money, now I take the letters, as agreed.”
“You should not have tried to go behind my back, Mrs. Douglas. Because you did, the rest of the letters will cost you much more than the original price. One thousand guineas.”
Ainsley stared. “One thousand? We agreed on five hundred. It was difficult enough to persuade her to give me that much.”
“She shouldn’t have written such letters then. One thousand by the end of the week, or I sell them to a newspaper.”
Ainsley thumped her fists to her skirts. “I can’t possibly come up with a thousand guineas. Not in four days.”
“You’d better start sending telegrams then. She can afford it, for all her fussing, and it’s her own fault she was so indiscreet. One week.”
Ainsley wanted to scream. “Why on earth are you doing this? You were a lady of the bedchamber, someone she trusted. Why did you turn on her?”
“I turn on her?” Phyllida’s eyes blazed, and for the first time, Ainsley saw an emotion in Phyllida Chase other than cold calculation. “Go and ask her why she turned on me. All I wanted was a little happiness. I deserved a little happiness. She snatched it all away from me, and for that I will never forgive her. Never.”
The fury in Phyllida’s voice was genuine, anger and despair that ate deeply. Phyllida had already been gone from the queen’s service before Ainsley came into it three years ago, but she’d never learned why Phyllida had been dismissed. She’d heard whispers about Mrs. Chase—such as her notorious pursuit of younger men—but the queen had always been tight-lipped about Phyllida and forbidden gossip.
“I don’t have a thousand guineas,” Ainsley said. “I have five hundred. You would at least have that.”
“The original price is a thing of the past. Consider the second five hundred the cost of me keeping quiet about how you seduced the paper from Lord Cameron.”
Ainsley’s face heated. “I didn’t seduce it from him.”
Phyllida gave her a hard smile. “My dear Mrs. Douglas, Lord Cameron is not only a man and a spoiled aristocrat, he’s a Mackenzie. He’d not simply hand you back the letter without exacting a price for it. It scarcely matters if you haven’t yet given that price to him. You will.”
Ainsley blessed the darkness, because she knew she must be blushing all the way down to her toes. She remembered the heat of Cameron’s mouth pressing the key into hers, the equal heat of his mouth on her br**sts in the woods.
Before you leave at the end of the week, we will finish it, he’d told her. Depend on that.
“I haven’t gone to his bed,” Ainsley said. “Nor will I.”
“Naïve darling, Lord Cameron doesn’t take his women in a bed. Anywhere else in the room, yes—or in the carriage, the summerhouse, or on the front lawn. Never in a bed. Quite known for it, is our Lord Cameron.”
Ainsley thoughts flashed to Cameron’s hard body pressing her into his mattress, his large hand on her wrist. He’d been ready, she’d felt through his kilt, not seeming to mind at all that they were on a bed.
But he’d released her. He could have taken what he wanted right then, could have coerced Ainsley into giving in to him. But he hadn’t.
“I won’t,” Ainsley said.
Phyllida gave her a pitying look. “The unworldly Mrs. Douglas. You are no match for Lord Cameron Mackenzie. He’ll have what he wants from you very quickly, and you’ll go to him. Cameron sees, he wants, he takes, and he is done.”
We will finish it.
Ainsley’s heart beat faster. “You seem very sanguine for the woman who is his lover.”
“I went into my affair with Lord Cameron with my eyes wide open. He has the reputation for being a most pleasurable lover, and that is what I sought, to relieve my ennui at this dreadfully dull gathering. Hart Mackenzie used to hold exotic orgies that were all the rage, but now he invites stodgy people to do stodgy things for a stodgy week in the freezing Scottish countryside. Cameron is as bored as I am, but now that he’s seen your pretty eyes, I’m certain he’s finished with me. No matter, because I am finished with him.”
Ainsley listened with growing warmth, realizing that she’d stumbled into a world she’d only glimpsed—husbands and wives seeking other partners for the novelty of it, lovers casually discarded for other lovers. In Ainsley’s world, a young miss could be ruined in the blink of an eye; in Phyllida’s, vows meant nothing, and pleasure was all.
Ainsley thought about Lord Cameron, with his fierce eyes and the passion that simmered below his surface. He tempered that passion into gentleness when he handled his horses or the frail Mrs. Yardley, protecting them at the same time he took care of them. That gentleness gave Ainsley the conviction that, even in his world of mistresses and secret lovers, Cameron Mackenzie deserved better than Phyllida Chase.
“I can give you the five hundred guineas,” Ainsley said firmly.
Phyllida flicked her fingers. “I want a thousand. She can afford it.”
Yes, but the small queen had very strong ideas on where money should be spent and how much at a time. She’d found it insulting that she’d have to pay at all.
But even the queen realized that the letters could seriously damage her reputation if it got out that she’d written such sentimentalities to Mr. Brown, never mind she’d never actually sent them to him. People were not happy with Victoria’s reclusive life as it was, and there might be cries for her abdication if they thought she stayed home only to play with her Scottish equerry.