ROOK AND RAVEN: The Celtic Kingdom Trilogy Book One by Julie Harvey Delcourt

without the constraints that existed in London. She had often thought that if mama had lived, and she had been brought for a Season, she wouldn’t have enjoyed it.  The white gowned, simpering, coquettes of the Marriage Mart, and the ungodly strictures that ruled their behavior, was nothing but a way to leave one gilded cage for another.  
    These excursions were a pale and potentially dangerous substitute for her more youthful freedoms.  But she knew if she didn’t have some outlet she would burst with the demands that her life placed on her.  Demands she would not wish away, but confused and exhausted her all the same.  Tonight she wanted to just be distracted and stop thinking about the decisions weighing her down.  She wanted to not think about Sebastian St. Just.
    Bridge House was certainly not the worst of the haunts frequented by either of her worlds, but nor was it strictly an acceptable establishment for her to visit when she had marks already against her.  It was a place where both her worlds melded together. Owned and run by a woman who had once been the very notorious mistress of a duke, it was a gathering place for the rakes, the high flyers, the bored aristocracy, the merry widows and racy wives of wealth. 
    Everyone went masked, which only added to the allure, and provided a license for looser behavior.  It also allowed everyone to conveniently not recognize one another.
    Jessy adjusted her black silk mask and the domino which covered her golden dress.  Of course she was still recognizable, but by the code of the house, everyone would pretend otherwise.  She felt the little frisson of excitement that her monthly visits elicited and a sense of recklessness.  She was feeling decidedly rebellious.  Between the scene with Sebastian and her (not unrelated) decision that she would not accept Tamworth, she felt dangerously close to the edge.
    Feelings, sensations she had almost forgotten she possessed had coursed to life again.  She had forgotten the intoxication of feeling hot blood beating under sensitive skin, of all her most delicate and secret places blooming to life at a touch, a look.  No number of masked flirtations or turns at faro could produce that level of excitement.  Is that what drove all this? She wondered.  Was her restlessness a product of having known such extreme physical and emotional sensations and then been deprived of them?
    For a long while she had feared that what she had known, had felt with Sebastian would haunt her entire life.  It was too easy to be addicted, to crave that experience.  She knew people, men, who had come back from Waterloo injured and found themselves addicted to opium.  She knew the stories of
    Caroline Lamb and the obsessive love that drove her mad over Byron. That poor woman had lost all sense of self, and dignity, in the compulsion that drove her. Love, lust, opium or alcohol could all be unbreakable addictions. 
    There had been a time when she couldn’t get through an entire day without his touch and the sound of his voice.  Joy at time spent with him would swing her so high she was transported, only to be followed by despairing lows when he was gone for so much as a day.  It had taken years to reach a place in her life where he wasn’t her center, where she could think about him and not want to violently break something. The pain had been unspeakable to have to do without him, and worse to know he hadn’t felt the same when he abandoned her.  Living without him she had felt cleaved through the heart and soul. The rare times when the numb fog of misery had taken over were welcomed. Now he was back and so was the urge to smash her hand through the carriage window.
      His touch tonight had confirmed for her fears.  How could she live on a diet of the bland and ordinary when she had tasted the rich and heady?  She had experimented and let other men, a few, kiss her and hold her over the past years and found the moments lacking.  She had