What I Did For a Duke (26 page)

And then suddenly they weren’t.

He’d reached out and pulled her to him or she’d all but flown to him, it was all the same; regardless, the meeting was violent and sudden.

He lifted her up; she nearly climbed him. Her arms locked ’round his head, pulling his mouth to hers; their lips met, tongues tangled and teeth clashed before the kiss became settled, became a battle, a celebration, a point proven: no kiss had ever been deeper, sweeter, more melting, more seductive, more of a relief.

He scooped his hands beneath her arse, lifting her higher, so he could bury his head against her throat, and he groaned, uttered a filthy and thoroughly erotic epithet. His mouth was so hot and insistent on the soft flesh of her throat there she feared, half hoped, it would leave marks, a brand. And his hands seemed everywhere on her; she was clothed in his heat, protected and ravished. Utterly exposed.

He slid her down the length of him to the floor, down over the swollen cock straining behind his trousers, and she moaned. She was shockingly close to her release. Trembling on the brink.

He got her by her shoulders and turned her abruptly to face the dressing table.

“Look at yourself,” he demanded, the words hoarse. “Look at us.”

He lifted her hair away from her face. It slid down one of her shoulders, a caress against her bare skin, colluding with him to give her pleasure. She saw in the mirror a girl with a heart-shaped face that was hers, and yet not: it was wickedly flushed and languid-lidded from lust and glinty-eyed with desperation for it to be sated. Her skin was all over rose from heat, her mouth was kiss-swollen; her own sensual beauty, viewed this way, shocked her. She sensed she saw what he saw in her, the white curving girl with full breasts and long neck and a body that craved his, and this was why he wanted her to look. Who
wouldn’t
want this girl?

The realization was disorienting. Embarrassing. A gift.

“Watch,” he ordered into her ear, and his rough, ragged breath was a caress, too, raising gooseflesh along her arms, her throat.

And so she did. She watched as his hands covered her breasts, roughly thumbing her nipples to peaks; she watched herself ask for more of that by arching back against him. She saw her mouth part, her rib cage jump on a helpless gasp of intense pleasure, as she writhed beneath his touch. Their eyes met in the mirror; his were dark and luminous and fiercely intent, his mouth unsmiling, jaw tense, as his big hands slid down over her ribs, the curve of her waist, the seam between her ribs, sliding, sliding down to cover the triangle of hair between her legs.

Lamplight glanced from the gold signet ring and one of his fingers slipped between her dark curls and expertly stroked. Hard. Just once.

But her white body arched as the bolt of pleasure cleaved her.

He did it again.

“Please.”

“You feel incredible to me. So wet.” His voice was hoarse, drugged-sounding, wondering. She was beyond shame. She wanted him; her body made that clear. His hands disappeared from the mirror, from her body, and she was about to protest when she realized he was unbuttoning his trousers. He got them down as far as his hips, springing his cock. He dragged his hands down her narrow back and pushed her inexorably forward. Not knowing what else to do, she tipped and gripped the edge of her dressing table. His hand slipped swiftly between her legs, stroking, lulling, and then his knee urged her legs farther apart, then she felt his cock nudging against her, and she moaned softly as she gave a throb of anticipation.

He impaled her with one swift, deep thrust.

She saw the wanton in the mirror thrown forward by the force of his invasion, then toss her head back and bite down on her lower lip from the exquisite primal shock of the joining. He pulled slowly, slowly back, and brought a hand around to stroke her.

He pulled back and thrust forward again, hissing out his pleasure, his fingers moving against her with the rhythm of his body.

But he wanted to take, and he did. He cared more about his pleasure in the moment than hers. Selfish, demanding, primal, male, he took, she was helpless against it and she loved it. He gripped her hips and pulled them back against his as he drummed into her, each thrust taking him as deeply into her as he could go, and she felt him everywhere in her body, in the soles of her feet, at the outer reaches of her being. Her hair dropped down over her eyes, blinding her with silky tangled darkness as they rocked hard together, their bodies slamming rhythmically, and then she could feel it soaring toward her. So soon. So soon.

“Alex . . . I. . . .”

But his breath was a rapid savage rasp behind her. He plunged and plunged again.

Her release was surprising and total, a nova of pleasure exploding with her inside it. It bowed her body with its force. His name was her silent scream; her knees buckled, but he held her fast ’round her waist and in the mirror he was nearly a blur as he drove himself to his own release. A ragged groan tore from him, as though he’d been ripped from his own body.

He never came inside her.

He kept her from falling. His arms were steel bands ’round her waist. She could have crumpled to the floor just like her night rail.

He scooped his arms beneath her and lifted her as though she were made of down, and gently, gently, settled her on the bed.

She’d never felt more precious. And she covered her eyes with her arm at the rush of feelings, too many to sort, all of them bigger than she was, most of them new.

She
was
abashed.

He stretched out next to her and gently but firmly lifted her arm away from her face. He wanted to see her, apparently. She still didn’t want to open her eyes. It felt safer, somehow, to keep them closed. Through the cloud she floated upon she felt his lips, soft, soft, achingly tender, brushing over her eyelids, her cheek, her forehead, her throat, her lips. So soothing. A tender inventory. He murmured things that may have been endearments.

“Your feet are ice,” he murmured. And his hands matter-of-factly rubbed heat into them, then slid up her calves. He gently, gently combed them through her hair, smoothing it gently, efficiently away from her face. He strummed them over her forehead softly, softly, softly.

She sighed and opened her eyes. And met his.

And in her weakened state she simply allowed herself to surrender to their beauty and to the expression in them, which was one of such undisguised tenderness it ought to have unnerved her.

She smoothed his hair from his face, pushed it back. It stayed. It was soaked with sweat. He was still entirely clothed.

He lay down alongside her.

Both were in excellent humor now. Spent, limp, pensive, too magnanimous in their satiety to feel anything but pleased with the world. Other inconvenient emotions could wait. Nothing was confusing or frustrating. It was all about recovery.

They didn’t speak at all.

Until she did. “It isn’t a
terrible
idea.”

She was certain he knew what she meant.

She’d expected him to snort. Instead he stiffened next to her.

“Are you perchance describing my suggestion of marriage?”

Suggestion.
She was never going to get a proposal. She lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant answer.

“Tell me again it isn’t a terrible idea when you’re
not
addled from sex.”

Hmm. She supposed she
was
rather addled from it. How odd that this existence could feel more vibrant than the one she lived during the day, but it wasn’t at all real and it was entirely temporary. No proper life could be made from the pursuit of blinding pleasure followed by limp exhaustion. All of this had been the most reckless, satisfying, terrifying thing she’d done in all her born days. She supposed she was due for something of the sort, given her bloodline.

She had the uneasy sense that she’d only just begun discovering the magnitude of what her body demanded.

“Very well, Genevieve. If Harry proposes to Millicent before the week is out, then I will marry you. I will consent to be your consolation prize.”

Something about his tone was a bit wrong, but she was still . . . addled. And she couldn’t put her finger precisely on it.

If Harry proposes to Millicent.

With those words, reality intruded unpleasantly, and once it made inroads, she noticed that the fire was lower now, the wick on the oil lamp was burning down, sweat was drying on her body and she was now cold, the soreness between her legs made itself known.

And the notion of Harry marrying anyone but her was painful enough to penetrate the haze of it all. She sighed gustily. Remembering how all of this that had come to pass had begun with Harry.

The duke had become her means of forgetting. Her brandy, her opium.

“Shouldn’t at least one of us marry for love?”

“I thought you loved only Harry and would
only
love Harry until the mountains crumble into the sea, and so forth. And are you telling me now you wouldn’t mind being a duchess should your love for Harry not come to fruition? You can live with that?”

There was a taut note in his voice. It wasn’t his usual dryness. She couldn’t read his mood, and when she couldn’t it made her uneasy.

“If you can,” she added.

Silence.

“Anyone would be honored to be your duchess,” she tried softly.

The softness just made him smile some sort of secret, rueful, dark, and private smile and shake his head.
Kind,
she suspected he was thinking, and not kindly, either. Disparagingly.

“It isn’t a weakness to accept kindness,” she told him tartly, which was ironic, as this was hardly a kind thing to say. “It isn’t a weakness to allow yourself to be cared for.”

“It is if the kindness is given out of pity. If it is, then it’s not called being kind. It’s called being
patronizing
.”

“I simply cannot bear seeing you unhappy.”

The admission was an intimate one, and so fierce and almost anguished it startled both of them into stillness and silence.

“You cannot bear to see
me
unhappy, or
anyone
, Genevieve?” he said ironically.

She wouldn’t answer. She knew the answer.

You, you, you.

But what did this mean? How had this come to pass?

Tension was drum-taut between them.

“This will be the last time we make love,” he said, almost conversationally.

She scrambled upright.
Last.
Not a word she enjoyed.

The fire had burned very low, and she was thoroughly chilled now. Her night rail was . . . She scanned the room.

“. . . Over near the wardrobe, where I dropped it.”

She wasn’t about to press up against him for warmth. He didn’t offer, either. She didn’t quite leap off the bed to retrieve it yet, either.

He was in fact holding himself still in what appeared to be a finite amount of space on the bed, and she sensed that if she held her hands up she’d encounter walls up around him, invisible ones but present nonetheless.

“Are you punishing me?”

She’d blurted it. Two measures of how she’d changed in a few short days. She blurted things—if only to him—and considered being denied the pleasures of his body a punishment. She sounded like a child.

She hoped it sounded a bit like a jest. It wasn’t. She, once again, was panicked.

He still wouldn’t look at her. He was watching the ceiling as though it were a crystal ball. He’d rested his forearm across his forehead, as if checking for fever.

“Mmm . . . consider it a latent attack of honor. Harry is sleeping under this roof, after all. I’m not getting any younger, you know. I’m in danger of being used up by you entirely and if I marry I imagine my wife would object to a spent and useless man. And I’ve
so
much more I haven’t yet shown you . . .”

And with that taunt, he rolled from the bed. He’d only to rearrange his clothing and button his trousers, which he did while staring down at her. It was the first time she’d felt a bit of a trollop.

She watched, going hot in the face. He hadn’t even truly removed any clothes, they couldn’t even wait for that, and they’d gone at it as fiercely as ferrets.

She’d
seen
ferrets go at it, so she knew.

Genevieve wanted to keep him with her and wanted him to go so she could be alone with whatever emotions were buffeting her.

He stood back and gazed at her. She felt his eyes on her, soft and thorough as his fingers. He inhaled. She watched his fine furred chest rise and fall, and she thought she saw a little mark on it where she’d nipped or clawed him.

“If this is the last time, oughtn’t there be a farewell?” She sounded so desperate. She wanted a kiss. Because she knew if she kissed him she could make him stay.

“This
was
farewell, Genevieve. Couldn’t you tell?”

And with that he was gone, as quickly as he did most things.

Chapter 24

B
AM. BAM. BAM.

Alex had just managed to drift into a shallow fitful sleep when he became aware that the thumping wasn’t his heart, getting ready to explode, nor was it his head, as he hadn’t had all that much to drink tonight for a change. He’d left Genevieve only an hour before.

BAM. BAM. BAM.

He opened one eye and with an extraordinary effort tipped his head to one side on the pillow to squint at the clock. He could just make out that the hands of it were positioned at two and twelve. He dragged his palms up punishingly hard over his face, as if trying to wake himself up one body part at a time, beginning with his features. He pushed his hair back, and rolled over, reluctant to do more than that, and waited for his brain to make sense of the pounding.

In seconds he realized it was the door. Someone was rhythmically pounding at his chamber door.

BAM BAM BAM!

A fire in the house? Was somebody ill? An angry husband? Wait—no, that was a guess rooted in his past; it had been years since he’d seduced a married woman. Jacob Eversea with a pistol prepared to shoot him for making love to his daughter under his roof? Or hammering the door shut to keep him prisoner until he did? Ian Eversea desperately demanding he meet him at dawn over pistols?

He was awake now. As none of the possibilities were pleasant he slid from bed, reflexively seized his pistol from the table next to his bed—always clean, always loaded, powder always dry, such was his trusting nature and so beloved was he by the
ton
—and unlocked and cocked it. He seized his trousers and shoved his legs in, and with another stride was at the door.

BAM! BAM!—

He slid the bolt abruptly and opened the door about two inches.

Someone nearly fell in. He shoved the door hard back to keep them from landing on top of him.

The hall was dark; all the candles in the sconces long since doused. And yet the damned golden hair still gleamed.

“I need to talk to you, Moncrieffe.”

Good grief. The man had slurred an entire sentence into a single multisyllabic word.

He pushed open the door a few more inches, and Osborne all but poured through the opening.

“Osborne, what the
devil
—”

He was in shirtsleeves, floppy hair a scrambled mop, his eyes ringed in red. From fatigue? Weeping?

“Do you love her?” he slurred.

Moncrieffe was instantly alert for danger. He flicked his eyes over the man, searching for weapons. He shifted his pistol in his hand.

What did Osborne know?

“Osborne, I want you to leave
now
,” he managed coldly.

“DO YOU
LOVE
HER?”

Harry lunged forward and tried to seize Moncrieffe by the lapels and stopped short, confused, when he realized Moncrieffe wasn’t wearing a shirt.

The stopping short nearly toppled him.

He righted himself with some effort. Moncrieffe stood back, pistol lowered surreptitiously at his hip.

Good God, the boy was
foxed
.

Harry immediately looked sincere and apologetic and frantic.

“Here ish the thing, Moncrieffe. It hash all gone badly, badly wrong.
Badly
wrong. Badly . . .” Harry stopped, and frowned, displeased that his chain of thought had slipped his grip.

“Wrong?” Moncrieffe suggested darkly.

“Yesh!” Harry agreed in almost angry surprise. “That’s preshisely it. You see it, too!”

Oh, for God’s sake. “I’m not certain I do. What have you been at, Osborne? Whiskey, brandy?”

Harry waved impatiently, vaguely, and the gesture nearly swung him off his feet. “Whatever was in all the bottles in the library. For the pain.”

“Well, naturally. It’s why liquor was invented. ‘For the pain.’ There were quite a few bottles in the library.”

“None now,” Harry announced with glum satisfaction.

Wonderful.

“Have you come to . . . hurt me, Osborne?” He managed to make this sentence sound amused.

Harry eyed the pistol balefully.

“Oh, I’m afraid of you, I’ll admit, Falconbridge. But you can put your pistol away. I’m not the sort. I cannot see you’ve done anything
wrong
.”

The relief was profound. The intensity of it was a potent reminder that what he’d been doing was not only foolish . . . he’d allowed it to get out of control.

It was far more in command of him than he was of it.

“But here ish the thing, Moncrieffe. I had a plan. I did. You weren’t meant to be here at this house party. You weren’t meant to court her, she wasn’t meant to care for you, you weren’t meant to . . .”

He shoved his hands through his hair as his despair escalated until his words rushed from him in angry, tormented, bursts.

He paused.

“I. Love.
Her
.
I
do.”

The words were anguished gasps.

Moncrieffe stood back. As much from the fumes as from the pure force of the terror of first heartbreak.

Something was amiss here.

Osborne took a noncommittal step, then paused and frowned at the ground, puzzled. Wondering perhaps whether one of his boot heels had suddenly grown higher than the other, or whether the carpet was laid over water.

Moncrieffe hooked his boot around the rungs of the chair at the writing desks and shoved it over to Harry with his foot.

Osborne sat down in stages: bum hard on chair, elbows hard on thighs, head dropped hard into his hands, breath rushing out of him in a great exhale.

And for a while he just breathed.

Everything has a rhythm, Moncrieffe couldn’t help but think, watching. The sea, our breathing, our anguish, our love. We couldn’t endure the force of any of it all at once. It
has
to ebb and flow.

Moncrieffe sat down opposite Harry, almost gingerly. The emotion in the room was too volatile and uncertain; he didn’t know what might disturb it. The hour was late, he was weary, and in his vulnerability an image crossed the membrane of his memory then: it was midnight, the clock his wife had loved chimed out the hour with obscenely merry chimes. He was hunched over in a chair, and another man, a doctor, stood near him, having delivered his news. She was dead in the next room.

Agony. Emptiness.

He watched Harry. He tried to ignore the creeping contempt he felt for himself. Oh, he’d been so clever. With his games and strategy. He’d nearly had for himself what he wanted. He would have punished Ian Eversea beautifully.

Instead he’d managed to build for himself a brilliant trap with nasty teeth, and no matter how he turned, they tore at him.

Then again, with the arrival of Harry, he may have just been presented with a brilliant opportunity.

What a man he’d become to have such a thought in such a moment. He was not wealthy by accident.

Harry sighed. His voice was steadier, but still muffled with emotion.

“My whole life I’ve loved her. Genevieve.”

“Your whole life.” Moncrieffe repeated the words, stalling to give his mind space in which to unravel what was happening here. He didn’t think he was witnessing his plan, Genevieve’s plan, coming to fruition. The plan where they showed Harry his heart because he didn’t know it.

I had a plan,
Osborne had said.

They’d
all
had a “plan,” apparently. Not one of those plans seemed to be unfolding as . . . planned.

It was almost funny.

He sighed and reached behind him for the shirt he’d abandoned next to his bed when he’d fallen into it. He slid his arms into it, but didn’t bother to button it. He seized the poker to poke at the fire, but the fire wasn’t interested in giving off more heat.

“She’s . . . oh, but she’s beautiful. Don’t you think? For heaven’s sake, don’t answer that,” Harry added hurriedly. “I don’t want to know. I know I will do anything to make her smile. She has a dimple
here
.” He pointed. “Have you
seen
her shmile, Moncrieffe? What am I saying? Of course you have. She smiles for
you
. . . all the time.”

He drifted momentarily on a satisfying tide of self-pity.

Alex said nothing.

“And by God . . . she’s . . . she’s so funny and clever and very,
very
funny and . . .” He sighed, and stared into the fire.

“She’s clever, too,” Moncrieffe suggested diabolically.

“She
ish
,” Harry agreed vehemently, shocked at their accord. “So you noticed all of it, too.”

A pause, as in his weary state all of the things that Harry had said, all the things Genevieve was, settled over him, beat inside him.

“Yes.” With an effort he said it in a voice of infinite, implacable patience and reason. A steady voice, that gave away nothing. “I’ve seen it, too.”

“From the first?” Harry demanded.

As if he would answer such a question. From the first he’d wanted to ruin her, abandon her to punish someone who had yet again taken something from him too soon.

He didn’t care at all about Ian Eversea anymore.

He was standing once again on the precipice of losing her. When there was a hairsbreadth of a chance, after tonight, he could have her forever, simply because her body wanted him.

All he said was, “You ought to choose fewer words that contain
S
for the time being. You are spitting all over me.”

Harry inhaled deeply, as if hoping to suck a little of Moncrieffe’s own patience from the air. “Likely you are right,” Harry agreed gloomily. “I shall try.”

“Why are you here? Why have you so rudely interrupted my sleep?”

“I need to tell you this, Moncrieffe. It’s my only hope. For as long as I’ve known her I’ve loved her. From the start I knew. I don’t know if
you’ve
ever felt such a thing, Moncrieffe, but I shaw her . . . saw her . . . and it was like I could . . . I could see . . .” He glanced up, sheepishly, then turned his face back toward the fire, mouth tilted wryly, abashed at his own hyperbole. “I could see what forever would be like. I liked it.” His voice grew pensive again.

The muscles of Alex’s stomach tensed.
Forever
. He could see what forever would be like. And forever was what he was about to lose.

Again.

He couldn’t allow it again.

Harry looked up. “And then
you
came along.” He was back to the self-pity now. “They say you plan to marry her.”

Moncrieffe neither confirmed nor denied this. Because he was, at heart, a strategist. He wasn’t in the habit of enjoying bosom chats with anyone, let alone drunken lordlings, and he sensed he might learn something that could get him precisely what he wanted.

“Many a life has been made or broken on a misfortune of timing. I cannot be responsible for yours.”

“The timing was perfect until you arrived. I had a plan. I needed a plan, because I’m not a bloody duke,” Harry pointed out bitterly. “I cannot simply buy her with money and a title.”

“Have a care, Osborne. You’re enjoying my hospitality on sufferance at the moment. I do hope you’ll arrive at a point soon.”

Harry jerked his head up in surprise at the tone, sobered. And then he looked about him as though he found the “hospitality” bafflingly wanting.

“I thank you for hearing me out, then, Moncrieffe,” he managed with sodden dignity, even if it was an afterthought. “As I said, I had a plan. For you see, I never could quite read her heart. I thought . . . I
thought
she loved me, too. But I never dared propose because I hadn’t enough money to suit her father. I’ll inherit a title but I’ve no home to give to a wife. Not yet. I’ve tried to earn money on my own, but I thought, well, if she loves me I might very well chance it; if I knew for certain that she loved me her parents might be persuaded to allow us to marry. And how I want her in my . . .”

He was stopped from finishing that sentence by something dark and dangerous glinting in the duke’s eyes. Because that last word was going to be
bed
.

“But I didn’t know whether she did. You see, she never showed it in a way that convinced me. I had to be certain. And sho . . . so . . .” He sighed. “I told her I intended to propose to Millicent. To see what she would say or do. To watch her face. To force her hand.”

Moncrieffe was difficult to shock. But the potent cruelty Osborne had perpetuated in the name of
love
speared him motionless.

He leaned slowly back in his chair, and then froze, staring at the young man. He looked at handsome Harry and saw Genevieve’s white, hunted face, sick with misery; saw her entire being aglow at the very
idea
of Harry, and because
he
knew—
he
alone knew, of all the people in the world, not her family, not this idiot before him—the depths of her passion, her feeling, and ability to love. . . . He knew this boy had nearly killed her.

Out of
cowardice
.

He’d never known such purifying rage. It was a sour, metallic taste in his throat. He could scarcely speak.

He stared at Osborne so long and so silently that Harry finally turned his head. He flinched at the black, scathing glare he intercepted.

“Just to be very clear . . .” Alex managed slowly, his voice thrumming with suppressed violence. “ . . . in order to force a confession of love from her, you thought you might
frighten
her into showing her feelings? You thought you might
break
her heart in order to
win
her heart?”

Osborne met his gaze. Chin up, his own eyes suddenly ablaze.

“What the hell kind of man are you?”

“You can’t understand, Moncrieffe. How would I know? How would I
know
if she did? She’s so . . . serene. So self-contained and so kind. To
everyone
. I knew we were special friends. And yet I couldn’t be certain she felt more than that for me.”

Serene. He thought of the nude girl flying at him, of savage kisses that rocked him to his viscera, of her body submitting to his, of her quickness in putting him in his place.