How to Tame Your Duke, page 21
“I don’t . . . I don’t need . . .”
“Emilie, I am not Anthony Brown. I am Anthony Russell, the Duke of Ashland, and I have spent the past week in London arranging my affairs. I have instructed my solicitor to begin a suit of divorce against my wife, and we will be married as soon as the final decree is issued.”
Emilie sprang from her chair, clutching the papers. “What? No!”
“In the meantime, I cannot exist without you. You hold in your hands the freehold title of a house near Ashland Spa, a large and I believe quite comfortable house, which I have transferred to your possession in the name of Emilie Brown. I have already ordered my staff to clean and prepare the house for you. You may furnish it to your own taste at my expense. I have also arranged an initial draft of ten thousand pounds to be deposited in an account in your name, with a yearly allowance of two thousand pounds for your living expenses, to be made in perpetuity from my estate during your life. Should”—his businesslike voice wavered for an instant—“should we be so fortunate as to conceive a child, I have made provision of ten thousand pounds for each of our issue, to be paid at the earlier of marriage or majority, and a corresponding increase of one thousand pounds per annum in your own allowance. I hardly need add that I shall recognize such issue as mine, to be formally legitimized upon our marriage.”
Emilie stood speechless as the sterile words whirled past her ears: issue and annum and perpetuity. At his pause, she gasped out, “Your mistress? I am to be your kept mistress?”
“You are to be my wife.”
“Your wife? Are you mad?”
He ignored her. “But in the meantime, if we are to share a bed, with all the consequences that may arise from such association, you have the right to my protection. To my guarantee of care and comfort during your life.”
“How dare you! How dare you enter this room and issue orders . . .”
“I am not issuing orders.”
She held up the papers. “And what do you call these, exactly? Only the means to control me with your money and houses and children.”
“Rubbish. I only want to provide for you, to make you comfortable . . .”
“This is ridiculous. I am perfectly comfortable.”
The mantel rattled under his fist. “The bride of the Duke of Ashland does not live in some hovel with relatives who do not treat her according to her due.”
“I am not your bride.”
“You will be.”
“Even if I were, should I instead live under your keeping before marriage? Your avowed mistress before the world? Every door would be shut against me!”
“I would exercise the utmost discretion. I don’t go out in society, and the house itself is remote.”
“The idea is lunatic.” Emilie tossed the papers into the armchair behind her, and in the next instant she was seized in Ashland’s embrace, his hand cradling her face.
“What is lunatic,” he said, in a fierce whisper, “is the idea of seeing you only once during each week, less perhaps, burning for you every other endless damned night, until the wheels of the English legal system can be made to free me from that betraying, unnatural bitch I once called a wife. I want a home with you, Emilie. I want to give you all the ease and luxury you deserve. I want to sleep next to you at night. I want to reach for you when I wake up in the morning. I want to feel our child growing in your belly, and I don’t want to wait—God only knows, a year, two years, more even—to claim you as mine.”
She was breathless, churning. He surrounded her with his heat and his demands, his tantalizing vision of a passionate future. He crowded out her outrage. He crowded out her reason.
“You don’t even know me.” His lips were so close, she brushed them as she spoke. “I might be anyone.”
“You are Emilie. That’s all I need to know.” Ashland kissed her softly. “I spoke in haste, just now. I’m too used to giving orders. I was afraid, you see, that if I asked, you’d say No.”
“I still said No.”
“If I ask you instead, will you answer differently?” He was nibbling her now, tiny, exquisite movements of his mouth around hers, eating her alive, bite by bite. Another moment, and she would die from it.
“Ah, you don’t understand.” She laid her arms lightly about his waist, and her chest glowed when he didn’t flinch at her touch. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand everything. I understand that I can’t live without you. That I can’t live without this.” His fingers went to the fastening of her corset and released her body from its cage. He pulled down her chemise and enclosed her breast with his hand, rubbed the tip with his thumb. Every nerve of her body burst into tingling life. “Can you, Emilie? Tell me you can live without this, and I’ll stop. I’ll walk away.”
“No.” She tugged at his coat. “No, I can’t.”
“Emilie, listen to me carefully. I’m going to take you right here on this chair, hard and fast, because I shall go mad if I don’t have you now.” His mouth replaced his hand, and he suckled her breast with sudden strength, making her cry out needfully. “And then I’m going to take you to bed and make love to you slowly. I’m going to kiss every precious inch of you, from every angle. I’m going to see how often I can make you spend, and how hard. I’m going to take hours. And then I’ll let you sleep, and in the morning you’ll wake up to me sliding back inside you.”
His words made her blood heat to boiling strength. She was turning molten, a liquid pool of desire, her brain churning from the images he stirred there. Already her limbs were heavy and loose, preparing to receive him. “Wait.” She put her hands on his chest. “Wait.”
“I can’t wait. I’ve been imagining this all week, imagining you sitting in this chair with your legs spread apart, open for me.” His arm went beneath her bottom, and he was lifting her and settling her gently in the chair, drawing her chemise up to her waist, spreading her legs. “My God. Like this.” He parted her with one thick finger and eased slowly inside her, all the way to the knuckle.
“Ashland!” She dissolved into the chair.
“God, look at you. Soft and wet . . .”
Emilie’s hands fluttered at his shoulders, urging him on despite the throb of warning in her head. “Ashland . . . wait . . . I can’t . . . I meant to speak to you first . . . I . . .”
“So beautiful.” His tongue flicked her nub, just above his knuckle.
She gasped out, “Children, Ashland . . .”
He lifted his head. “What’s that?”
“Children. I can’t. We can’t . . . I . . . It’s impossible.”
Ashland drew his finger gently from her body. “What do you mean, Emilie?” His voice was almost too low to be heard. “What do you mean? Do you not want children?”
“I . . . It isn’t that, it isn’t you . . . but I can’t. Not now.”
A heavy pause rocked between them. “Emilie, I’ve told you already. I’ve laid it out in writing, legally binding. I will recognize our children as mine. I will give them my name. I will provide generously for any child with whom God chooses to bless us. You needn’t worry.” He said the words in a curiously emotionless tone. The tone, she knew, of his deepest feeling.
“Children need more than a banker’s draft,” she heard herself whisper.
He exploded at that. “Good God, Emilie. Do you think I wouldn’t be a father to them? My God, I’d dote on them. I’d spend every possible minute with them and with you.”
“But you have a son already.”
“Whom I love with all my heart. But he’s nearly grown. And I rather think he’d welcome the company.”
What had Freddie said? I’d always rather fancied a brother. Or even a sister.
Ashland’s child in her womb, in her arms. The four of them, a doting family. Laughter over dinner, chess and conversation in the library. Emilie’s chest squeezed so tightly, she couldn’t breathe.
“In any case,” Ashland went on, more softly, “you may already be with child by me.”
“But I may not. And I can’t take that risk again. Not yet,” she added, purely to appease him, for there could never be another time.
Not after he knew the truth.
He remained still, breathing quietly into her skin. “Very well. That is your right, of course. I can take steps to avoid conception.”
“What steps?”
“I can decouple before spending. Or there are more secure means, if you prefer.”
She could hardly think, with Ashland’s body hovering over hers, hot with masculine power. The word decouple sent another surge of desire through her belly. “What means are those?”
He sighed and straightened her chemise, and then his body heaved away from hers. “Wait here a few minutes.”
As if she would leave. As if she could leave.
The door clicked shut. Emilie sat in the chair without stirring. In her black cocoon, every sense was unnaturally sharp. She could trace each tingling nerve, each concentration of heat, each symptom of sexual arousal that Ashland had awakened in her body. There was not a single parcel of her flesh that didn’t scream with the need to feel him inside her. She wanted him so badly, she hurt with it.
You are Emilie. That’s all I need to know.
Emilie forced her body from the chair and felt her way to the mantel. The fire was hot and steady, glowing against her bare legs. One by one, she plucked the hairpins from her chignon and laid them on the cool marble. The false knot, her former glory, fell away into her hands. She idled it about for a moment, measuring the silky mass, before placing it next to the hairpins. With shaking fingers, she untied the blindfold, folded it into a neat square, and set it atop the golden luster of the chignon.
The hotel was oddly still this evening. Even the wind had died away, heavy with falling snow, making the air seem hollow in its absence. The room, the elegant private suite of the Duke of Ashland, lay around her, every stick of furniture dear to her, though she had scarcely ever seen it. It was the smell she knew best: lemon oil and tea leaves, the trace of smoke, the snow-clean and tea-spiced scent of the duke himself.
Emilie stared into the round bull’s-eye mirror above the mantel. Her face gazed back at her, distorted by the convexity of the mirror, enlarging her blue eyes and diminishing her shorn hair and her jaw and chin. Herself, only different, deformed. She shook out her hair, combed it through with her fingers. Emilie, the disguised and ruined Emilie, the Duke of Ashland’s lover. In that strange and unnatural face, not a trace remained of the studious and bespectacled princess of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, with her outward virtue and her inward restlessness.
Who was she?
The door opened behind her. “Emilie?”
“Here,” she said softly, without turning.
The door clicked shut. She listened for the sound of his footsteps on the carpet, but nothing came. He stood utterly still, his gaze burning the back of her bare neck.
“I see,” he said at last.
Emilie placed her fingers on the edge of the mantel. “I was thinking, while you were gone, that . . . that we have both engaged ourselves to a great degree, in a rather short period of time . . .”
“I see.”
“You are prepared to enter into . . . into a permanent arrangement with me. And it would not be fair . . . We cannot continue, without seeing each other as we truly are. As our real selves, face-to-face.”
Ashland’s feet shifted. “I offered to remove the blindfold last week. You refused. I assumed you were not ready to see what I am.”
“And you would ask me to marry you without my having seen this face of yours? Without your seeing mine?”
His footsteps moved the floorboards at last, approaching. He came to a stop directly behind her and laid his hand softly on her shoulder. “What happened to your hair, Emilie? A fever?”
“No. Not a fever. I cut it off.”
His breath tickled her neck. “Emilie, if I have understood anything during the past decade, I have understood how we poor mortals are deceived by beauty. My wife was beautiful, extraordinarily so, and when I married her, I naively presumed this physical perfection went through to her soul.”
“You mistake me, sir. I am not afraid of your face. I know your character, your heart, and there is no part of you I couldn’t imagine the most beautiful in the world.”
“Ah, Emilie. You’re afraid of my seeing you, then? That I’m not capable of the same generosity?”
Emilie gazed at the floor in wonder. This was the stiff and arctic Duke of Ashland saying these tender words to her. The reserved and formal Ashland: Where was he now?
His lips touched the nape of her neck. “In the beginning, you wore that blindfold because I chose to remain anonymous. Later, as I came to know you, I didn’t have the courage to ask you to take it off. I couldn’t bear the thought of you recoiling from me, your look of horror.”
Emilie lifted her hand and laid it atop Ashland’s.
“A moment ago, Emilie, I told you what I wanted. But what do you want?”
She shook her head. Her throat was tight, her eyes stinging.
“Tell me. Will it matter, Emilie? My face?”
She shook her head. “Will mine?”
In answer, Ashland’s hand slipped around the ball of her left shoulder. His other arm came up to hold her right.
He turned her around.
She wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t hurt him, she couldn’t deceive him like that. Ashland’s masked face shifted into view before her, jagged and familiar, his blue gaze so soft and tender with love she nearly cried out.
She stood waiting under his regard. He was blurred at the edges, a little indistinct without her spectacles. Was that recognition in his expression? How could he not recognize Tobias Grimsby in her face, in her eyes? Any second, and that all-seeing eye would widen, that skin would draw tight over his cheekbones. He would step back in horror, in disgust.
The clock ticked behind her ear. Ashland’s warmth radiated through her chemise. His left hand released her shoulder to brush her cheek with his knuckles.
“Beautiful,” he said, and he lowered his face to kiss her.
She kissed him back. Her shaking arms enclosed him. Dazed with relief, shamed with her own cowardice, she said nothing at all and simply gave herself up to him.
“Emilie.” He hauled her off her feet and carried her to the round table at the other side of the room. He tossed the book on the floor, parted her legs, and sealed his mouth over hers in a deep and ravaging kiss, stroking her with his hot tongue, running his hand up her thighs to her belly and breasts. “Reach in my pocket, Emilie. The left pocket.”
Her brain was spinning with lust. She put her hand in his pocket and pulled out a small packet.
“Open it.” He took her earlobe gently between his teeth.
She opened it.
“Not the sort of thing a man uses in bed with his wife, you understand. But as my lady commands.”
She stared at the gossamer-thin object in her hands. “Where did you find it?”
“The hotel keeps them—discreetly, of course—in case a guest requests one.”
Emilie hid her burning face into Ashland’s shoulder.
He said, “I’ve never used one. I can’t . . . You’ll have to help me put it on. You’ll have to tie the strings for me.”
“But I don’t . . .”
He took the sheath from her hand and went to the pitcher of water on the drinks tray. “It needs to be dampened. I know that much.”
“How do you know it?”
He sent her an amused look. “I was in the army, you remember.”
He returned to her with deliberate steps. His gaze devoured her, as if she were something he might eat. Her blood thudded in her ears. She reached out as he drew near, but he didn’t touch her. Instead he took off his coat and waistcoat and slid his braces from his shoulders. Her gaze dropped to his trousers.
“Take me in your hands, Emilie,” he commanded her.
Something in his voice burned away the last vestige of shyness. She unbuttoned his trousers, and he sprang free, stiff and dark and . . . well, rather enormous. Far larger than she’d imagined, larger than the drawings in her books had ever led her to expect. Had he really pushed this inside her last Tuesday? All of it?
She should be frightened at the sight. She should swoon with maidenly shock.
Instead, she wet her lips. She wrapped her hands around his heavy length, ran her fingers along the velvety circle of skin at the tip. A drop of moisture welled free, and without thinking, she bent to lick it off.
Ashland shuddered.
He tasted sharp and tangy. Wild. She licked again. Her tongue found the fissure and dipped inside.
“You’ll kill me,” he growled. He took her hand. “Help me with this.”
She struggled with the sheath, her eager fingers too clumsy for such delicate work. He strained under her touch, bumping into her belly as she bent over him and tied the strings at the base. The action was so forbidden and shameless, so charged with erotic purpose, she felt another surge of warmth between her legs.
“I can’t wait, Emilie.” He lifted her chemise and found her with his fingers. “God, you’re drenched. Come here. Closer. That’s it.” He urged her to the very edge of the table, bracing her with his right arm, caressing her with his left. His fingers grasped her thigh. His tip parted her, settling just inside her lips. He said huskily, “Now, watch us. Watch me join us together, Emilie.”
“Here?” she gasped, astonished.
“Here.”
She gripped the edge of the table, breathing in shallow gasps. His damp forehead touched hers, his breath warmed her face. She looked down, and there he was, hard as steel, rope-veined, disappearing millimeter by millimeter into the V between her legs. The sight of it, of Ashland feeding his thickened member into her body with utmost control, sent wild shocks pulsing in her blood. Her delicate flesh stretched and stretched, stretched almost to the edge of pain, and she cried out at the fullness of him, of the solid weight rubbing against her sensitive tissues, too much sensation to bear.
