Mr. Ridley: A Whipping Society Novel Read online

  “You needn’t worry. Unlike the rest of these Christian ankle-biters, you’ll find me to be incredibly respectful of you and your culture.”

  “Yet you speak of restricting a woman’s breath.”

  Lowering his chin, he pointed. “Don’t make me admire your wit. It won’t end well.”

  She met his finger and then his gaze. “It certainly has not started well, either.”

  “Fortunately for you, Watkins, I prefer my mangoes ripened.”

  Her lips parted at what she surmised was an insult. “Being that you are from London, I doubt you ever even consumed a mango.”

  “Oh, I’ve eaten all sorts of fruit. Though it has been some time since I’ve picked up a basket.”

  She almost leaned back but the weight of the chains prevented it.

  “I wouldn’t advise papayas,” he rumbled out. “They’re a bit rancid.”

  Her mouth opened.

  “I am, of course, referring to my former wife.” He remained serious but his expression was one of exasperated misfortune. “Nothing but yellow, orange and pink juice everywhere. That demon of a red-head once backhanded me with a vase and that was on a good day.” He grimaced. “Parliament cored that one and pushed through the only good they ever did for me as a tax-paying British citizen: a divorce. I’ve been celebrating ever since with expensive cigars and champagne.”

  Jemdanee’s mouth further opened. He was comparing his wife, his marriage, and his divorce to smashed fruit, cigars and champagne. All whilst remaining completely serious.

  Stepping back, Ridley cracked his knuckles. “Forgive the rant. Poison-infused oranges sitting in a theatre made my mind gallop.” Propping up the collar of his coat, he paced, the ankle length great coat billowing from each move. “I need the name of the constable who arrested you. For some reason it wasn’t in your file. Do you remember the name?”

  She lingered, her hands fisting. “All too well.”

  Ridley paused, glancing at her. “Did something happen?” He edged back in, intently searching her face. “If so, I need to know.”

  She swallowed knowing it could have been worse. She could have been raped. Instead, she was emotionally raped. “He had me stand naked for over an hour in a backroom where he left me. I was not given a right to clothes until a warder kindly covered me with his coat and hollered for prison attire to be brought in.”

  His features darkened. “I want a name.”

  Some men deserved to be backhanded. “Mr. Pickering.”

  He set his shoulders, remolding his rugged features to a gentlemanly calm. “Pickering is an opium addict and former soldier out of India. To explain his behavior would be to explain nothing, but he lost his wife and newborn child during an arson that occurred in Ambala at the hands of the natives. You needn’t worry, Watkins. I’ll rip his ear off. There are a few questions I have pertaining to your log.”

  A part of her felt honored that he would even bother.

  “Look at me.”

  She did.

  “Did he attempt to touch you?”

  She shook her head and kept shaking it, grateful.

  “Good. It means he gets to keep his other ear.” His masculine face marked with resolve as he thudded a fist to his chest in mock greeting. “Meet your personal retinue compiled into one: me. As of two days ago, your name and likeness appeared on every broadsheet sold on the street. You can read about it in The Morning Herald, The Times, and The Observer at a mere seven copper pennies. Congratulations. You have achieved the highest level of infamy in London since the Radlette Murder that inspired the rhyme for crime: They cut his throat from ear to ear, his head they battered in, his name was Mr. William Weare, he lived in Lyons Inn.” He leaned in and offered, “I can only imagine the whimsical little rhymes they will be chanting in your name.”

  She gaped. “How is that legal? How can they do that prior to a trial? How can they—”

  “It’s known as ‘journalism’. They own everyone’s name, regardless of the source or the lies they tell to sell papers, and I’ve been living with it since I was twelve.”

  She sensed he was not exaggerating.

  He eyed her. “Given the public has a tendency to believe everything they read as if they were the tablets of God delivered by Moses, you’ll end up dead if anyone sees you on the street. Which is why wherever I go, you go. When I ask a question, you answer. When I tell you to do something, you do it. Follow orders and you’ll have the one thing few get: my respect. Agreed?”

  She gripped her skirts hard to keep herself and her chains from rattling. What choice had she? Being lynched was not an option. “Agreed.”

  Turning, he stalked toward the chair set before the desk. Lifting it, he effortlessly swung it toward her, bringing it close, and set it with an informal clatter beside her.

  Unbuttoning his great coat while holding her gaze, his hands curved over the back of the wood and on its top again. He tapped it. “We are on an uncompromising schedule and I know the weight of those chains are exhausting you. Come. Sit.”

  This man was not oblivious to his own intensity.

  She awkwardly trailed toward him, trying not to wince against the iron dragging and digging into her skin. Not meeting his gaze, she turned and seated herself, a breath escaping her as the weight of the chains now rested against the chair as opposed to her body.

  The raw chafing of her wrists pulsed. It didn’t matter. She was getting out.

  A knock came to the door making them pause.

  He tapped a forefinger against his lips, signaling her to be silent.

  She half-nodded, stilling the chains so they wouldn’t make any noise.

  Removing his pistol from the holster, he cocked it and crossed to the door, scuffing his boots to a halt. With the tightening flex of muscles that strained his coat, Ridley pointed the primed pistol directly at the closed timber panel. “Enter.”

  Jemdanee felt her body coil in dread knowing she couldn’t even help him.

  She was chained.

  The door edged open with a rusty creak that pierced the silence like a rooster getting its throat slit.

  Chapter 2

  A warder peered past the oak paneling and snapped up a key. “Yardley had it.”

  Jemdanee almost sagged off the chair knowing it was the key to her shackles.

  “Someone smack that idiot to La Manche.” Ridley uncocked the pistol with the flick of his thumb and shoved it back into his holster. “The logs have already been addressed. The moment we leave, reorganize it back to what it was lest they be on to it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Taking the key from the warder, Ridley pointed. “Inform Turner we only have seventeen minutes lest we all get dirked and join the inmates. Where the hell is he?”

  “Vacating the last of the posts. Flank turned into a bit of a nuisance. He kept asking about returning her to the cell, so I told him I was taking over and ensured he didn’t come this way.”

  “Good. Keep him on the east-end. Now go.”

  “Yes, sir.” The warder stepped out, closing the door.

  Adjusting his open coat, Ridley strode toward her in silence. He rounded her, the faded leather belt on his hip shifting the weapons attached to it.

  The discolored leather and the notches near its buckle were stretched.

  It whispered of a man who stood at his own bedside each night, fisting the end of the leather and yanking it loose from his trousers to set it onto a table. A table whose wood was probably as equally scuffed from the amount of times he had laid his weapons on it.

  This one was a man dedicated to ritual habit.

  His belt alone, heavily faded in its appearance, breathed that truth.

  Ridley squatted before her, his muscled thighs expanding against his wool trousers as he chinked the manacles. Leaning in, his large scarred hands slipped up her restrained wrists.

  His features tightened. “These were fastened wrong.”

  Was there a right way to fasten them? “I th
ought being in discomfort was the premise.”

  He stared her down. “Your skin shouldn’t be rubbing off. Why didn’t you say something?”

  She swallowed in an attempt to ignore the heat of his taunt, muscled thighs possessively holding hers with his knees through her wool prison skirts. “If I were to announce my discomfort to the world every time it happened, my tongue would fall out.”

  A breath escaped him. He angled the bands of the shackles toward himself. “Even the bolt was turned inward. These bastards might as well have put you in a shrew’s fiddle and a knee splitter.”

  A shrew’s fiddle? A knee splitter? Yet her people were accused of being heathens?

  “Hold still.” Gritting his teeth, he turned the key in the padlock bolting her confined wrists together.

  With a clank, it unhinged.

  Setting the lock aside onto the desk with a clack, he quickly rose and, standing before her, slid her hands out of the iron, unraveling the long chain. “Lean forward.”

  She did so and paused. Her face now hovered near the flap of his trousers that had been uncovered by his open great coat. The textile fabric was form-fitted against a dormant but still very sizable indication of that male fertilizing organ consisting of a different sort of pollen.

  Her knees instinctively locked together, unable to look at much else. That flap was the size of a map holding the world together with only a few buttons and…it was asking for directions.

  She leaned far back.

  Ridley jerked her back toward himself. “Ey. Hold still.”

  “Your stamen.”

  “My what?”

  She scrunched her nose, realizing she had used a botanical term for his lower half. “Your reproductive organ. You keep wagging it in my face.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Pardon the wagging, but every man has one. Or did your plants never tell you that?”

  She veered her gaze to his arm. He probably thought she was nose-to-the-book virgin. Little did he know her nose had been in far, far more than books despite her being a virgin.

  Well before she’d even turned eight, she’d seen more cocks on the streets of Calcutta than she had real roosters.

  Not all nefariously, of course.

  Too many men in the district of hovels where she had lived went to the same mud wall to piss regardless of who had walked by. Some even tried to artistically draw things with their urine and then grandly gesture toward it as if they had discovered uranium.

  She had stories. “My plants tell me more than you think. If they were here, they might point out that you unbuttoned your coat to flaunt your virility.”

  “I thought we were getting along.” Angling his lower half away from her, his hand gripped the back of the chair behind her hard. He leaned down so they were almost nose to nose and directly eye to eye. “I’m thirty-two, Watkins. Count the years between us and be certain to include your toes. When I was eighteen, you were four. That turns off the imagination and everything below the nose. I unbuttoned my coat for one reason: mobility. These English coats are no different from a corset and are too expensive to rip. My advice? Embrace the maturity you lack knowing I have enough for the entire nation.”

  She wasn’t doing very well transitioning into the Western world.

  “Eyes to the elbow.” He flicked her cheek hard with a forefinger and leaned over, removing the iron and remaining chain from around her corseted waist.

  Her cheek now stung and she knew she had no one to blame but herself.

  With a loud clatter he deposited the long chain and iron bar onto the nearby desk.

  She rolled her wrists against the raw swelling and eyed him knowing she ought to say something. “I thank you.”

  “You’re quite fortunate the bolts didn’t gouge you anymore than they did. It could have damn well gone to the bone. Who put these on you?”

  Oyo. “Mr. Pickering.”

  He said nothing.

  With a loud clatter, he whipped the rest of the chain and iron bar onto the desk with the grit of teeth that had nothing to do with its weight, sending flecks of veneered wood from its surface into the air.

  She jumped.

  Turning back, he leaned in again and carefully rolled up her sleeves to ensure they weren’t touching her skinned wrists. “He will know your pain.”

  She watched him, those cool, casual words unsettling her. She dared not fathom what happened when a man like him lost control. “Leave it be. I have endured worse.”

  “Many of us have. That doesn’t make it acceptable.” He stepped back, checking his watch.

  He paused and tucked it away. Adjusting his great coat around his muscled frame, he fastened all three buttons, tugging it over his trousers and glanced back at her, his profile illuminated by the lantern. “Up, little one. Your prison attire has to be removed.”

  She stood, her pulse roaring. “You wish for me to remove it now?”

  “Yes. Now.” Ridley rounded the desk and opened the satchel, removing a well-folded gown. Stalking back toward her, he held it out. “Put this on.”

  She snatched the clothing from his hand, the billowing material unraveling like a sail.

  He swung toward the door, his great coat swiveling against his large frame, offering her his broad back. Pulling out a hemp rope, he knotted it twice. “You have three minutes.”

  Recognizing she had better rustle as much clothing as possible, she frantically stripped her assigned wool dress that had been stitched with a prison number by untying all strings binding it together and let it drop to the floor, leaving on the tightly laced corset.

  Her wrists burned. They were a touch more raw and reddened than she realized.

  Pulling the calico gown she’d been given over herself while her long black braid kept falling in between the fabric, she grudgingly pushed that braid back out. She shimmied into the rest of the plain taupe gown, adjusting it into place.

  Eyeing him, she quickly sniffed under each arm and cringed. Any hint of jasmine oil had long faded and given way to an earthy scent she hoped he couldn’t smell.

  Realizing the hooks were in the back of the gown, she paused. Western clothing had never made any sense. In her opinion, they had been designed by a loon in need of a monkey.

  The hooks fastened in the back.

  As if any human arm could bend that far.

  Her hands dropped against the awkward position. Noting the upper rounds of her bronzed breasts were still on full display, she tried to yank up her décolletage to cover both, but it kept falling given its weight.

  How was she to even reach the back against the corset she’d been laced into?

  “One minute,” he rumbled out.

  Eck! Clinging to the heavy, lopsided and ballooning calico gown in an attempt to keep it above her half-exposed rear (she had no chemise…), she puffed out an exasperated breath, recognizing she had no idea how to affix the gown or keep it up. She’d only worn a Western gown and a corset twice in her lifetime.

  There was a reason.

  She adjusted the massive weight of the gown, but could only keep it in place by setting her hands against her breasts. Which still did not address…the rear.

  Western gowns ought to be burned.

  At this point she didn’t care if he saw her shoulders and rear. Others had seen worse given she always swam nude in the river and she wasn’t staying in prison. “I require assistance,” she admitted, molding the gown against herself.

  He set his shoulders but did not turn. “Are you granting me permission to turn?”

  She blinked. Was it too early to admit that this one fascinated her? How was it that he, a six foot three male in a position of power with three weapons strapped to his thighs, would even think to ask a female Hindu for permission in a world that never did?

  Overly serious and grudging though he was, she liked him.

  She didn’t even mind that he was fourteen years older.

  She’d been through enough in life to be at least thirty-two herself.
Maybe even thirty-three.

  Pinching her lips, she pertly tugged the front of the gown down just enough to reveal a sliver of her upper breasts to showcase she wasn’t his version of four.

  She set her chin regally. “Permission is granted and yours, Mr. Ridley.” I am not by any means four.

  Tucking the knotted rope back into his pocket, he swung toward her. Skimming her bare shoulders and the exposed upper rounds of her breasts sitting above the corset, he paused.

  Their eyes locked and her heart seemed to rush to her head and every toe.

  His steady gaze bore into her with the heat of sandstone.

  It was the only acknowledgement she needed as a woman.

  She almost, almost smiled but thought that would be over-flirting. “It must have fallen.”

  His eyes grew flat and unreadable. “Along with whatever respect you have for yourself. Wit over tit, Watkins. Pull it up.”

  It wasn’t in the least bit fair that the first white man she genuinely didn’t mind flirting with, refused to even flirt back. The gods knew how to laugh. “I cannot attempt to cover myself when I am asking for assistance in garbing myself.” She was now trying to argue her way out of being silly. “Look, look. There is more of this gown than there is of me.” She rustled it twice for emphasis.

  Ice crusted into those feral eyes.

  She drew in her lips, awkwardly tightening her hold on the dress. How was it without even a word he could make her scramble to do what he wanted? Peter would insist she marry this one for that alone.

  Jemdanee dragged the gown upward, securing it into place. “Armageddon.”

  “Exactly.” Rounding her, he leaned in from behind, towering well above her and gripped her gown, further holding it into place. “You may want to reconsider your earlier commentary about meat. It reduces cravings.”

  An unwelcome heat crept into her cheeks.

  He swept her unraveling braid out of the way and over her shoulder, his calloused fingers skimming her exposed brown skin.

  She almost fainted as uncontrolled sensations radiated down to her breasts and to her belly and well below it. A shaky breath escaped her.

  It sounded loud even to her own ears.