To Marry The Duke (34 page)

“You wanted to rescue me from my reserved English way?” he said with an amused tone, lifting his eyebrows.

“I suppose I did. But I wanted you to rescue me, too, from the endless boredom of my perfect life in New York. I never had to work for anything, my father always gave it to me, and I was weak. I’m stronger now.”

“You were always strong, Sophia.”

She smiled. “You also rescued me from the marriages my mother kept trying to arrange for me. I wanted passion, and I saw it in your eyes. I knew you possessed an abundant wealth of it—that it was bottled up inside you, just waiting to be released. I wanted to reach in and find it.”

James cupped her cheek in his large hand. “You did, Sophia. You found it. You reached inside, and here I am now, vulnerable in front of you.”

He gazed at her for a shuddering instant before devouring her mouth with his own. The kiss was deep and wet and probing, and Sophia knew that the barrier was breaking down.

She gave in to the erotic allure of the open kiss, while her hand at the same time found its way down to his erection. Indulging in the glorious feel of him in her palm, she carefully stroked him under the water until she felt out of control with the searing need to feel him inside her.

Sophia turned in the tub, then sat up on her knees to move a leg across and straddle him. He watched her face the entire time as she took him in her hand again and placed him at her eager opening.

A pounding frenzy of desires cascaded over her as she arched her back to wiggle down around him. Slowly, teasingly, she took him inch by inch into her throbbing insides and let out a delirious little cry at the feel of the hot, wet friction against her sensitive, feminine tissues.

The water sloshed up against the sides of the tub as Sophia rose up, then drove slowly down again, pressing herself hard against his pelvis to enhance her own pleasures. He held her hips, guiding her up and down, thrusting his own hips forward to meet each marvelous, grinding plunge.

The room and the daylight disappeared around Sophia. She closed her eyes. All that existed was the dizzying sensation of floating in hazy darkness with James, while sheer, extravagant lust besieged her senses.

“Sophia.”

She could feel him with her, beside her, hear his soft voice in the passion-filled haze; she could not stop herself from moving in a slow, pulsing rhythm over him, so lost in the pleasure was she.

“Sophia,” he said again.

She opened her eyes, looked into his face. He was watching her.

“Yes,” she whispered.

He said nothing for a moment while he gazed at her tenderly. Lovingly.

Sadly.

Sophia stopped moving. She squeezed herself around him.

A tear trickled from the outside of his eye, down over his cheekbone.

She stared at that tear with heart-seizing, soul-reaching comprehension.

“I love you,” he whispered softly.

Sophia couldn’t move. She could only stare at him, blank, astonished, and profoundly shaken. Her mind and body seemed to stop functioning.

“My heart is yours,” he said. “I am in your hands.”

Through the roaring din of joy washing through her like a waterfall, Sophia somehow found her voice. “I love you, too, James. I will
always
love you, till the day I die, and beyond that.”

All at once, her heart swelled irrepressibly with that love. She threw her arms around James’s neck and wept as she hugged him.

He held on to her as if he never wanted to let her go—his strong arms wrapping around her back, his face buried in her neck.

“No one has ever touched me like you have,” he said. “I never believed it was possible. I am yours, Sophia. For eternity.”

Her own tears began to fall, and she sat back to look at his dark, beautiful face. She sobbed and laughed at the same time, and wiped the wetness from her cheeks. “I am so happy.”

“I intend to make you happy every day for the rest of my life. You are my one and only love, Sophia. You have saved me.”

Sophia couldn’t stop crying. “I was so afraid to let myself hope that you would ever love me.”

“Before I met you, I never thought I could love anyone. I was wrong, Sophia. I love you, more than life itself.”

“James, I never dreamed…”

He held her and kissed her and stroked her hair, and for the first time, she felt as if she were truly home. This was where she belonged. In England. With James. Here in his arms. As his wife, his duchess.

He shifted his body minutely beneath her—the smallest trace of a movement—but it was enough to transform their shared tenderness into a burning arousal, in one sweeping, wondrous instant.

James closed his eyes; Sophia grabbed on to the sides of the tub and began to stir herself over him. Fiery eroticism returned with a vengeance. She let her head fall back, then felt James’s hot lips suckle her breast and work her expertly with his tongue. Her breaths came in short, quick succession until at last she felt the coming onslaught of orgasm.

But it was different this time. It was more intense, more resonant, for there was love between them now. James had told her he loved her. He loved her! The pleasure was unfathomable.

It descended upon her with all the force of a tidal surge, storming through all her muscles everywhere, tightening, tingling to a potent climax, then finally releasing her. James cried out, thrusting deep inside her and shooting his seed into the very center of her womanhood.

Sophia closed her eyes and rested her forehead on James’s shoulder. He had made love to her. Her husband. He loved her. She could barely contain the tremendous euphoria that was flowing through her body and soul.

Feeling elated, basking joyously in the sound of his breathing and the feel of his heart beating against hers, Sophia sighed.

A short time later, they got out of the tub and dried off, then moved to the bed and made love again, tenderly and with great consciousness of each other’s needs and desires. James said the magical words again—
I love you, Sophia
—as he gazed into her eyes and held her face in his hands.

Then they helped each other dress, and went down to the drawing room to gather with the family before dinner. Sophia requested that the leaves be taken out of the dining table, so the family could sit nearer to one another, tonight and every night, far into the future. In all her life, Sophia had never felt so happy.

Martin and Lily walked in, and James hugged each of them in turn, then his mother entered the room and he hugged her, too, while she released years’ and years’ worth of anxieties and wept openly in his arms until her tears became tears of joy.

She moved to Sophia and hugged her, too. “Thank you,” she said to her daughter-in-law. “Thank you.”

Sometime near dawn the next morning, James pulled Sophia close. “It’s a new day,” he said, “and the world is already a brighter place. All because of you. How was I ever so lucky, to have found you when you lived your whole life on another continent?”

Sophia smiled up at him. “We were meant to be, James, and nothing was right until I came here.”

“Are you glad?” he asked, touching her chin with his finger and lifting her face to look into her eyes. “Even though it was difficult in the beginning?”

“Of course. This is my home now, and I am gloriously happy to be here with you. You’re the only man I ever could have loved.”

“And I am gloriously happy to have you, my darling. May I show you how much?”

Sophia rolled onto her back and ran her finger up his bare chest. “If it would please you, Your Grace.”

“The point, my dear, is to please
you
.”

She smiled seductively. “Far be it from me to argue with a duke.”

Your determined daughter,

Sophia

For years I’ve wanted to write about American heiresses searching for husbands in aristocratic London, ever since I read about Edward VIII abdicating the English throne for the woman he loved—Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. I was fascinated by the couple’s passionate romance, their difficult struggle for acceptance, and, in the end, a king’s decision to give everything up for love.

Later, I read
The Buccaneers
, by Edith Wharton, a brilliant novel about four American girls invading English society in the late-Victorian period. Again, I was enchanted. The romantic notion of English lords falling head over heels for American girls because they were beautiful, exciting, and different (and filthy rich) intrigued me, as well as the darker side of history that was more often the case, where young American women gave up their home and country for a life of loneliness abroad, with strangers who never truly accepted them and husbands who had married them only for their money.

In actuality, between the years 1870 and 1914, approximately one hundred American women married British nobles, and of those one hundred, six set their sights high and captured dukes—the exalted cream of the nobility crop. These women were the glamor icons of the late-Victorian period, and not unlike Princess Diana, had to dodge photographers and raving admirers who wanted to glimpse the fairy-tale “dollar princesses.” You can read about five of those American heiresses—whose stories are engaging, inspiring, and sometimes tragic—in the book
In a Gilded Cage
, by Marian Fowler.

All the characters in my book are fictional, with the exception of Edward, the Prince of Wales (“Bertie” to his friends and family), who was in fact a key player in the overall acceptance and success of the American heiresses in England. His mother, Queen Victoria, gave him very little to do regarding the affairs of the country, so he had to amuse himself somehow, and being half-German himself, did not possess the usual prejudice toward foreigners. He enjoyed beautiful women and found the American heiresses more than capable of keeping him entertained. They could afford to host frequent, lavish parties when many of the English aristocrats were suffering financially from an agricultural depression and the negative effects of the industrial revolution. (Fast-moving steamships were bringing competition from American beef and grain; consequently, farm prices in England fell. On top of that, the tenant farmers were trading in their pitchforks to work in factories.)

Mrs. Astor was also a real person—the matriarch of high society in old New York. She eventually had to accept the
nouveaux riches
, because among other things, many of their daughters were wearing English coronets.

I hope you enjoyed reading about Sophia and James, and will look for the sequel about Sophia’s sister, Clara. This will be the second book in my series about American heiresses in England.