What I Did For a Duke (20 page)

This brought him up short. He was genuinely surprised. “Genevieve, listen to me. We will both be agreed on the beginning and end of it. I will never, ever willingly hurt you. Do you believe me?”

She stared at him, biting her lip.

“I swear it on all that I hold dear,” he added.

She looked at him skeptically.

“I hold some things dear, believe it or not.”

“Don’t swear it at all. You don’t need to. I believe you.”

He nodded once. “Very good.”

“But don’t you see? I
can’t
. It’s simply very wrong.”

He took three more long strides away from her. And then stopped. He actually sighed a long-suffering sigh. She was surprised he didn’t extract his watch from his pocket, because he had the air of a man who was done negotiating and had tired of the topic.

He looked around at the landscape, but apparently his eyes found nothing they wanted to light on.

His mouth quirked in resignation. And he turned to her.

God. He’d eyes like mirrors. A changeable dark green splashed through with gold shavings. Hazel, she supposed she’d call it. His lashes were so black and thick. She stared at him now. There was a powder mark beneath his skin. A tiny scar beneath his chin. He was almost ugly, when viewed as a set of amplified details and features.

Taken together, those details were devastating. She could not have designed a more thoroughly
desirable
man if God had assigned the task strictly to her.

Though it seemed more the sort of task the devil would delegate.

It could also have a little something to do with the fact that she knew what it was like to kiss him.

And when he spoke he spoke quietly, quite seriously. He didn’t look at her.

She followed his gaze.

Millicent was growing more and more distant. One of her slippers had flown off and arced through the air. It landed, bounced, and began to tumble down the green.

Harry and the footman were far behind her, both doubled over, hands on their knees, wheezing.

The swan stopped at last, apparently bored. He waddled back to the pond and waded in. He glided majestically, serenely back over the water.

“Genevieve, I saw something in you Lord Harry didn’t see,
can’t
see, because it isn’t in him to see it. Ask yourself why this is so. Ask yourself whether this might be rather an essential oversight on his part. Ask yourself if you’ve just discovered something about yourself that you may otherwise never have known. Ask yourself why you came looking for me last night, and whether you want to know more.”

He turned to look at her now. “Because . . . I’m the one who can show you. And you may never have another chance to learn it in
just this way
. With someone you can trust. And who wants it as badly as you do.”

She stared at him. She scarcely heard him, because she was panicked and furious with this new realization:

She thought his eyes were beautiful.

“Two members of the same species always recognize each other, no matter how unlikely that might seem, Genevieve. That Redmond fellow, Miles, he would be able to tell you a thing or two about that.”

“I’m not a member of your
species
. And please don’t speak of the Redmonds to me.”

He grinned because he’d made her say something ridiculous. The grin was wicked, white and tilted.

She panicked, because she thought of sun-shot ponds and sunlight coming down through trees when she looked in his eyes now, and judging from the temperature of her cheeks he was a devil sent up from Hades, not a bloody poem.

She might be turning any number of colors, from scarlet to parchment to all those shades of rose in-between, but he regarded her evenly.

He was older, bolder. He knew of whores and wars, violence and vendettas. He knew precisely what he wanted, always.

He wanted her.

For a disconcerting few moments he didn’t speak. And she had the strangest notion he was studying her the same way she’d been studying him just moments before. Reassessing. Entertaining impressions about her and rejecting them (her eyes are beautiful!), only to have them float insistently back before his mind’s eye.

He didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t speaking.

“You’ll kiss me again.” His low-voiced, arrogant confidence made her wish she had something clutched in her hand to throw at him. “The advantage of being a member of
our
species, Miss Eversea . . .” very deliberate, that, and he waited for her face to go thunderous “. . . is one that does whatever one wants because they want to and because they
like
it. And you both
want
to and you
liked
it. Not every woman does. Ponder that.”

She glared at him.

“But liking it has more than a little to do with
who
you’re kissing. And when you kiss me again it will have naught to do with
wisdom
. It will be because you will be unable to think of anything
else
until you do. Find me after midnight.”

He strolled onward, whistling what sounded like
The Ballad of Colin Eversea
.

Chapter 18

I
t was of course all she thought about the following day.

The duke had sent Genevieve, Harry, and Millicent back to Pennyroyal Green in his barouche, and stayed behind at Rosemont to take care of some estate business. During the journey, Millicent shared with Genevieve a new collection of sketches she’d made.

“I call it
Angry Swans
,” she announced.

One sketch showed a swan rising up out of the water, enormous span of wings upraised menacingly, neck outthrust.

“This is what I saw just before it came after me,” she explained.

Millicent was still a trifle put out that such beautiful animals should have been so unwelcoming, so as proof she’d captured their behavior in charcoal.

“They’re wonderful,” Genevieve said very sincerely. “Very convincing. It’s a new direction for you, though, isn’t it? Menacing waterfowl?”

“I think I prefer the kittens,” Harry said. He’d been silent until then.

“You dislike moody animals, even if they’re beautiful, Harry?” Genevieve teased.

“I dislike believing things are one way when they’re really another way entirely.”

And if that wasn’t an innuendo, Genevieve didn’t know what one was.

She just didn’t know if he was referring to his own heart, or to
her
, in general.

But that could very well be her conscience interpreting it.

She sighed. She felt a certain kinship with that swan. Everyone thought Genevieve Eversea was serenity and purity itself. When she really was capable of . . . alarmingly original behavior.

And something else, something slightly traitorous, crept into her thoughts. What kept Harry from just saying what he thought? When the duke never seemed afraid to do it?

It was an unfair comparison. The duke was an older, wiser, more confident man.

And the duke couldn’t possibly break her heart if he said precisely what he thought.

He could, however, keep her body restless.

T
he duke hadn’t returned to Pennyroyal Green by dinner.

There was a moment of indefinable terror when Genevieve knew,
knew
he was gone for good. That he’d been toying with her. That he’d remained behind at Rosemont and from there had decided to return to London in pursuit of
horses
. This was followed by a great swoop of relief she wouldn’t have to make a decision about kissing him again, then furious
indignation
that she wouldn’t have to make a decision, all of which was very ironic considering the women had devoted the evening to the quietest of pastimes, reading and embroidery and mercifully benign gossip about the neighbors. Not the barbed sort that permeated London ballrooms. The soothing sort about who had a new horse or baby niece.

Harry and Ian had taken themselves off to the Pig & Thistle for darts, which meant for the duration no proposals were being issued to anyone.

“Is aught amiss, Genevieve?” Her mother had asked her once, peering at her as she stabbed with an excess of vigor into her embroidery.

The flowers on her sampler were growing ever-lusher, crowding the vase as though clamoring for escape. Tonight, with uncharacteristic whimsicality, she impulsively decided to stitch a flower outside the vase, as though heretically, it had escaped the bouquet altogether. There was a pleasing asymmetry and messiness to it.

“Aught, Mama,” Genevieve lied a little too easily.

She looked up with innocently widened eyes when her mother said nothing for a long time. Merely fixed her with an unreadable look.

But she went motionless with an unseemly relief and an uncertainty that made her nearly nauseous when carriages began rolling up to the drive. Neighbor gentlemen spilled out. Much laughter echoed in the foyer, the footmen took coat after coat, and then the men disappeared into the room behind the ballroom.

The game of five-card loo would get under way.

Which obviously meant the duke had returned.

L
ong, long after the ladies had abandoned their embroidery and repaired to their bedchambers, Genevieve remained awake. She didn’t undress for her bed. She kicked off her slippers and curled up in a chair and attempted to give her attention to the orphan in the Horrid Novel, but when the orphan met a mysterious handsome stranger she stared at the book incredulously, then frowned at it punitively and laid it down with a sigh. She listened instead to carriages departing now, carrying away men whose pockets were doubtless lighter now than when they’d arrived this evening.

The roses in the corner looked as fresh as the day they’d arrived. They seemed everywhere in her peripheral vision, and they drove her to the curtain.

She parted the curtains of her bedroom window and looked out onto the back garden. The sky was blue-black and glass-smooth; stars had been flung in reckless handfuls over it. Between two trees was the dull gray outline of a stone bench.

And moonlight glanced from the polished toes of a pair of Hessians.

The duke was lounging upon the bench, looking as much a part of it as any gargoyle carved into a medieval edifice. He casually stretched. He looked up to the window.

And raised one hand. She thought she saw a flash of teeth. A grin.

Bloody man.

She dropped the curtain, but stood staring at it as if she could stare right through it. Her heart had started up a thudding that sent blood ringing through her ears, but she moved as quickly as if she were fleeing war drums.

She slid her arms through the deep brown, fur-lined pelisse and turned to stare. This time her eyes were on the clock.

And it was after midnight.

She flew down the back stairs, slippers in her hands until she reached the back door.

H
er breath announced her approach with little white puffs, but the cold was certainly bearable. She stopped right before him, suddenly at a loss as to what to do next.

“Good evening, Miss Eversea. Why don’t you sit beside me? The stars are particularly spectacular tonight, don’t you think? Dazzling. As if they’ve all had a good rinsing from the storm.”

His voice was appropriately low for someone lurking in a garden at midnight. But there wasn’t a shred of triumph in it.

She hesitated.

He gave the bench an encouraging pat.

She settled down next to him. The cement chilled right through to her bum, even through her pelisse. She pulled her fists into the belled sleeves of her pelisse to warm her hands. She ducked her chin, and looked down at their feet in disobedience of when the invitation had been to look at the stars.

She looked up suddenly, as though she’d heard a sharp sound.

As it turned out, it was the force of his gaze that had brought her head up. He was staring at her fixedly. He didn’t flinch or pretend he was doing anything other than baldly admiring her. One might even say
devouring
her. Imagining what he would like to do to her.

Finally one corner his mouth tilted with a sort of lazy satisfaction.

Devil.
She thought she could see the constellations reflected in his eyes. A girl could forget her precise location in the universe when a man looked at her with eyes like those. She could forget where he began and she ended.

“Aren’t you going to gloat?” she whispered peevishly.

He blinked. “Gloat? About what? I thought you came out to admire the stars,” he reproved gravely. “I welcomed the company. For we’re here in your garden, in your father’s house, beneath a window where anyone craning their head properly could see.”

Was he really toying with her?

She was speechless with disappointment and embarrassment.

He laughed softly, ruefully shaking his head. “You should see how
disappointed
you look.
Honestly
, Miss Eversea.”

Bastard! Very well, then, she’d look at the bloody
stars
.

“Ha-ha!” she laughed unconvincingly, tilting her head up. “Don’t be silly. You’re quite right, of course. I thought it a beautiful night. Who could be disappointed in these stars—”

At some point as she spoke, in a motion as natural as an exhale or a stretch, he’d begun sliding his hands up her thighs.

She stopped talking.

And thinking.

And breathing.

She resumed breathing on a shuddery exhale.

And as her thighs were bare apart from the garters holding up her stockings; his hands heated all the way through the fine silk of her dress to her skin. Every tiny hair on her body stood erect, as if craving his attention. She felt spangled with heat, cinders everywhere on her body. “Molten” rather described how she felt between her legs.

He strummed his thumbs softly, softly, back and forth, back and forth, against her thighs.

Oh God. She opened her mouth to reiterate:
Only kissing.

“Guh,”
surprisingly, was what emerged instead. A sort of hybrid gasp-sigh.

“ ‘Guh,’ indeed,” he agreed, softly.

She would have laughed. But the sensation was too new and too total, and desire gathered with a distracting, heavy intensity beneath the weight of his hands, coaxed by those feathery stroking thumbs, and her entire body, brain included, was invested in enjoying
that
, not in making coherent sounds. She fought to keep her thighs from falling open like a trap door, inviting him deeper in. Was it cold? Were they outdoors? She knew only his touch.

“I would never
dream
of disappointing you, Genevieve,” he reassured her on a rough-silk whisper that dragged against her imagination the way his fingers dragged along her thighs, stirring possibilities into life.

But he proceeded to do exactly that when his hands arrived at the top of her thighs and stopped. The sweet spot at the juncture of her legs gave a great breath-stealing throb of protest.

He was closer now, so close she could feel the heat of his body, wear it like a second pelisse. And now that her very bones were molten—she had the presence of mind to consider that this had certainly been almost too easily accomplished—she had no choice but to flow right toward him.

She tipped up her head as his mouth was coming down.

You would have thought they’d done this dozens of times, rather than just once before, that it was more natural to her than breathing, judging from her sigh of relief. But he of course dictated how she would be kissed. And the kiss, too, was devastating, his mouth landing soft as moth wings, then sliding gently enough to show her how a universe of sensation and want could be coaxed from her lips. How the slide of his lips over hers could create craving everywhere in her body.

“Fur,” he approved on a murmur against her mouth, because the backs of his hands encountered the lining of the pelisse as his hands journeyed up her thighs, along her hips, her waist, taking such savoring pleasure in her womanly curves it was like he was pointing them out to her deliberately, persuasively:
You’re a woman. Don’t you see? You’re made for this.

It was a decidedly dangerous way to think.

She knew what to do. Or rather her body did. She wrapped her hands around his head, threaded her fingers into his hair, which was soft and cold, and slid down around his ears, which were chilled, and which she strangely wanted to warm for him.

He sighed as her fingers dragged along his throat. She loved the sound savagely.

His body was so hard. And so large. He was clearly so much stronger than she was, and she liked the fear of him and the sense of being enclosed and protected.

It should have been awkward, the two of them twisting toward each other on the bench, but it felt effortless; she’d gone pliant with desire and heat. She loved the feel of his large, warm hands spread over the blades of her shoulders, and then the shivery light strokes of his fingers against the rectangle of bare skin above where her dress laced, dancing there, tantalizing her with the possibility that he might open the laces. The contrasts drugged her: his hard male body and his delicate touch; the scrape of whiskers against her own smooth cheek; his chilled skin and his hot, hot, velvety, savagely demanding mouth.

He growled low in his throat.

“Bit like a badger,” she murmured aloud, without intending to.

“Pet names, my squirrel?” he murmured.

She laughed.

“
Shhh
,” he admonished. “No man enjoys being laughed at while he’s kissing.”

His mouth abandoned hers but was traveling from her lips to her ear, down, down to the silky hidden place beneath her jaw. Every place his lips touched fired quicksilver communications to the far reaches of her body, until she was alight, shivering like a flame.

And suddenly nothing was funny, and everything was urgent.

She heard herself utter a word:
please.

And here, she knew, is when he began to lose his grip on control. Tension vibrating in his big body, desire tightly reined, his hands tightening on her, becoming less careful and purposeful and strategic, more demanding, which told her more about what he truly wanted. She sensed they were on the precipice of something dangerous.

Good.

His head dipped; his tongue drew a leisurely path to the base of her throat and his lips opened hotly there.

It was her turn to make an animal sound: a low moan she hadn’t known she was capable of, the very sound of want. And his mouth opened on a slow, hot caress over the thump of her heart, beneath the soft swell of her breast.

“Sweet,”
he whispered.

With a certain amount of effort he swept her onto his lap. She looped her arms around his neck. And he eased her around until, shockingly, she straddled him. His hands slid up her thighs again, beyond the tops of her silk stockings this time, to cup her buttocks, and to slide her closer.

The bulge of his cock was seated hard beneath at the join of her legs.

“God, Genevieve,”
he swore.

The contact sent a bolt of pleasure through her that made her gasp. She was suddenly afraid, and suddenly greatly in need. She might have said something, but his mouth was on hers again, drinking, capturing her tongue with his. His hands tense and trembling with want, fumbled at the laces at the back of her dress.