When the Duke Found Love (25 page)

“Here we are,” he said, and as soon as she’d entered, he closed and latched the door after them.

She turned around at once, her blue eyes wide and troubled. “Why did you do that?”

“What, close the door?” he asked. “Because if I didn’t, some servant or another would come bumbling in to disturb us. You live with servants. You should understand.”

She swallowed, glancing back at the closed door. “But to be alone with you like this is—is not right.”

“Is it right that I don’t wish Fantôme to follow us in here?” he asked. “He will mistake the cover sheets for bushes, and misbehave. Besides, you would be alone with me anywhere in the house. No one will know unless you tell them. And didn’t I give you my word earlier that I would respect both you and your Lord Crump?”

She frowned, thinking. “Yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Yes. All that is true. I suppose a single door doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t,” he said, looking around the room as his eyes adjusted to the murkiness. As in every great house, the furnishing in unused rooms were draped with linen cloths against dust and the heavy curtains closed tight against sunlight and fading, curtains that he now pulled open himself. Even on this gray afternoon, the view was magnificent, over the house’s gardens, orchards, and outbuildings, and further across the fields north of the city. The worst of the rain had passed, leaving rolling low clouds of mists and the palest of sunshine over the spring-green plantings and trees.

“How vastly beautiful, Sheffield,” Diana said, forgetting her wariness to join him at the window.

“This was my mother’s favorite room,” he said, “and because it was hers, it was my father’s, too. We often took breakfast together here, the three of us. It does have the best vantage in the house.”

She leaned her fingertips lightly on the window’s frame as she gazed out, her face delicately lit by the pale daylight. “I don’t wonder that your mother loved it.”

“I wonder if she’d like the view as much now,” he said. He hadn’t been in this room for years, and he realized now how much he’d missed it. “Look there in the distance, beyond the last of our walls. You can just make out the New Road, the turnpike built not long ago for the farmers coming to the London markets. A convenience, they say, but it means the town itself soon will follow, and with it will come an end to our green country view.”

“A convenience, and progress,” Diana said softly, her voice echoing his own melancholy. “It cannot be helped, to be sure, but still I often wish things would stay as they were and never change.”

She stood hugging her arms closely around her body, and he fought the almost irresistible urge to slip his own arms around her and pull her close. He’d never wanted to hold a woman more, nor desired one more, either, and restraining himself like this around her was a torment that, as a duke who’d always gotten what he desired, he’d never before experienced.

And as if she sensed it—or even felt the same—she abruptly turned away from the window and him to walk across the room to the pictures on the farthest wall.

“So these must be the portraits of your parents,” she said, her voice as full of deference as if she were meeting them. “By these I’d venture you’re the sum of them both.”

“That’s inevitable, isn’t it?” he said, chuckling. “Parents beget children in their likeness.”

He pulled the dust cover from the wide settee across from the portraits and sat, leaning back to look up at the portraits. Like his parents, the pictures had always been side by side and never separated. These weren’t the grand ermine-draped duke and duchess portraits that hung in the ballroom downstairs, but smaller and informal, the way he remembered his parents. His mother was dressed as if for a masquerade, in the red and gold spangled sultana’s costume that had given the room its name, and with magnificent green emerald was on her finger. She was turned to look over her shoulder, laughing as if she’d just heard a merry tale or jest, or was simply reveling in the wonderful, wanton silliness of her costume. His father wore his country clothes, the same kind of wool jacket and buckskin breeches that Sheffield himself favored, with his two most devoted hunting dogs beside him.

But the likenesses went beyond mere clothing. It was eerie, and unless Diana had mentioned it, he doubted he would have seen it for himself. His mother’s smile and eyes, his father’s dark hair and jaw, all jumbled together to make his own face.

“They loved each other very much, didn’t they?” Diana continued. “You can tell by their faces. They’re happy, and they’re in love, and it shows.”

He’d never thought of the pictures quite in that way, but she was right. He remembered his parents’ endless affection for each other, almost as if they’d been lovers instead of husband and wife.

“It was a love match,” he said thoughtfully, looking at the painted faces and remembering the real ones. The longer he looked, the more he remembered, and the clearer his own thoughts were becoming in other ways, too. “They eloped, which must have been quite the scandal. But yes, they were happy. Always.”

She came to sit on the settee with him, albeit with a sizable distance between them. She leaned back, as he had done, and bumped her hat against the carved back. She unpinned the hat and pulled it off, and then, unencumbered, she leaned back once again with a sigh.

“My parents were the same,” she said. “Not that I can recall, for my father died before I was born. But Charlotte remembers, and says it was so. Mama has never remarried, because she says there will never be another man she’ll love as much as she loved Father.”

He nodded. Her reminiscences were a perfect match for his, as was so much else about her.

“The same,” he said. “The same.”

“And that’s why you wish to marry for love yourself,” she said softly. “I did, too.”

He turned, his arm outstretched along the settee’s carved back toward her.

“You did?” he asked. “You no longer do?”

Blindly she looked down to avoid his gaze, while her hands curled together into tight little fists in her lap.

“I believe that love will come with marriage,” she said carefully, without emotion, as if reciting by rote. “I believe that I will in time come to love Lord Crump, and that he will love me in return.”

“Look at me, Diana,” he said, his voice low and rough with urgency. His earlier resolutions were forgotten now, as was his promise to respect her as Crump’s future wife. All that mattered was what she said now. “Look at me, and tell me you believe that.”

Still she did not look up, her head bowed and her shoulders bent as she warred with herself.

“Lord Crump is a good man, an honorable gentleman, who respects and admires me,” she said, her voice trembling. “He will in time love me. They all say so. He
will
love me.”

“But do you love him, Diana?” he demanded. He’d no right but every reason to ask, and he was not going to give up until she answered him. “Do you love him as a wife, as a lover? Damnation, do you love him as a woman should love a man?”

At last she looked up to him, her eyes bright with tears, and shook her head.

“No,” she whispered fiercely. “I do not love him, and heaven help me, I never will.”

It was exactly what he’d been waiting to hear, and now, at last, he’d wait no longer.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Diana had meant to carry the truth about not loving Lord Crump as a secret forever, buried deep beneath her conscience and somewhere below where her heart had once been. She’d vowed to herself and to her family that she’d try as hard as she could to be the wife and marchioness that Lord Crump deserved, the path that all assured her would be the way to her happiness. She had tried to be as dignified, reserved, and refined as a noble lady must, the wife, daughter, sister, and someday mother of peers and peeresses.

She had tried, and tried harder, and this was what had come of it. For while there was no doubt that Lord Crump was a good man, she was not very good in return. The abundant proof of her not-very-goodness was on display here, now, on a blue silk damask settee in the late Duchess of Sheffield’s Sultana Room, where she was inelegantly and shamelessly entangled with the present Duke of Sheffield, who was kissing her as if his very life depended on it.

Perhaps it did. She knew her own life was hanging in a precarious balance, desperate for the love of a man whom she loved in return. No, not simply
a
man, but Sheffield, the man whom no one else wished her to have, and the only one she’d ever truly wanted.

All of which was why she was kissing him every bit as fervently in return. He held her with his arm around her, cradling her in the crook of his arm at the exact angle that made her reach out for him, her hands splayed against his chest, the soft wool of his waistcoat covering the hard muscles of his chest. She was always both startled and pleased by how strong his body felt, how different it was from her own—and how much she liked that very difference.

She made a happy, wordless purr of contentment, which he resourcefully employed to part her lips and slip his tongue inside her mouth. Ah, another of the things that fascinated her about him: how he tasted, warm and male and charged with desire. She slid her palms along his chest to rest on his shoulders, letting him draw her closer as he deepened the kiss. She opened her mouth eagerly, taking him deeper. It was almost as if he wished to devour her, and really, if she were honest, that was how she felt about him, too. Kissing him made her heart race and her breath quicken and her body twist against his in a way that only made her long for more of it, and him.

“Do you know how you’ve captured me, Diana?” he whispered hoarsely, breaking away from her mouth to kiss the side of her throat, a place she’d no idea could be so divinely sensitive. “From the first time I saw you, sweet, the first time. I could never put you from my mind.”

“So it was with me as well,” she whispered in return, nearly breathless from joy. “Oh, Sheffield, I cannot begin to tell what I feel for you!”

She cupped her hands around his face and brought his mouth back to kiss him again. She had slipped back farther on the settee, against a cushion as well as his arm, and Sheffield wasn’t so much as sitting beside her any longer, but across her. She was twisted about, her hip and her hoops awkwardly pressing into him, and she shifted to try to become more comfortable. At once he moved forward to settle directly on top of her, drawing his arm from beneath her shoulders. Now he could brace his weight without crushing her, but it also meant that she was lying on her back as if lying in her bed—a bed that now included Sheffield lying with her.

A tiny fragment of her conscience howled at this, warning her of exactly how vulnerable her position could be, yet the rest of her ignored it. How could she not, when at this precise moment she was also made aware of how the row of tiny thread buttons on her bodice were not the impenetrable armor that she’d thought? He’d not only deftly unfastened them all, but had slipped his hand inside and was now doing the most bold yet wondrous things to her breast, teasing and tugging and caressing her nipple and the flesh around it until she arched up against his hand as if to beg for more.

“Do you know I love you, Diana?” he said fiercely. “Do you know that of me?”

Her eyes widened, filling with tears as she gazed up at his handsome face, so close over hers. She remembered all the times he’d spoken of how he’d only marry for love, as his parents had done, and of how much he valued a love like that. Is that what he meant now when he said he loved her? Is that what he was offering to her now, the kind of love that would last a lifetime, and not simply for a single achingly perfect afternoon?

“I love you, Diana,” he said, more firmly, as if he’d heard her unspoken doubts. “I love you.”

She gulped, overwhelmed by emotion.
He loved her:
three words that were more than enough to bring back the impulsive part of herself, the part that she’d tried so resolutely to subdue, but have never quite gone away. She would never again be tempted to abandon everything for the sake of love, of passion, not wed to Lord Crump. She’d only have this one chance with Sheffield – if she dared. She knew what she’d be granting in the name of love, too – she might be an innocent, but thanks to her sisters’s conversations regarding their husbands, she wasn’t ignorant – and she knew the risks of consequences and scandal.

But Sheffield loved her. He loved her, and for that moment, with him, nothing else in all the world mattered more.

“Oh, Sheffield,” she confessed, the words spilling out straight from her heart. “I love you, too. I’ve always loved you.”

“Then let me love you as you deserve,” he said, his voice so low and full of promise that she shivered with anticipation. “Be mine, Diana, here, now. Be only mine.”

“Yes, oh, yes,” she murmured, the only words she could speak before he was slanting his mouth hard over hers once again. He’d shoved aside her bodice entirely and pulled down her shift and stays, leaving her breasts entirely exposed. Easing lower down her body, he kissed each in turn, then licked and nibbled at her nipples until she gasped with the pleasure of it. She tangled her fingers into the dark silk of his hair, freeing it from his once-tidy queue as he suckled at her before claiming her mouth again.

Somehow—she wasn’t sure when—he’d shed his coat, and now when she grasped his shoulders, there was only the fine Holland linen of his shirt beneath her fingers. She moved her hands along his back, relishing the feel of his muscles as he moved over her, all coiled masculine strength and power. She wished he’d shed his waistcoat, too, and as they kissed she reached between them, fumbling a bit as she blindly undid the buttons and shoved the waistcoat across his shoulders.

He grunted with approval, and shrugged the waistcoat free and to the floor. Now when he pressed down on her, her bared breasts grazed against the linen, the last thin barrier between them. Daringly she pulled his shirt free from his breeches and slipped her greedy hands inside the billowing linen. His skin was hot beneath her touch as she explored him, the long hollow of his spine, the bunching of his muscles. Even his scent intoxicated her, all heated male overlaid with the faint fragrance of bay leaves and lime from his shaving soap.