How to Tame Your Duke, page 22
Ashland was breathing hard. His face was hot and damp with perspiration; heat radiated from the arms that gripped her. At the base of his throat, right before her eyes, his pulse thrust aggressively against his skin. He tilted her backward slightly and worked himself even deeper, another precious inch, until his snug ballocks pressed her below and the strings of the scandalous French letter tickled her outer lips.
Emilie gripped the edge of the table with all her strength, fighting to keep herself from disintegrating under the impossible pressure. Ashland’s breath pumped into her ear. He slid his hand to her bottom and braced himself. “Put your legs around me, Emilie,” he whispered, and she put her legs obediently around him, digging her heels into his upper thighs. Another shock of pleasure rippled through her body. “That’s it. Good girl,” he told her, and with a kiss to her shoulder he began to move. He glided out slowly, in a rush of slickness, and eased himself back in. “All right?”
“Yes . . . yes . . .” She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. The table was hard and unyielding beneath her bottom; Ashland’s rod was hard and unyielding between her legs. She was squeezed between the two. A rock and a hard place, she thought wildly. No escape now.
“Love, I can’t hold back any longer.”
“Then don’t,” she gasped out.
His next thrust rocked her to the core, making the table rattle. His hand tightened on her arse and he thrust again, again, faster, stopping her breath with his strength. He made little growls as he went, punctuating each ramming shove into her body, and her own cries of pleasure shot out from her throat at the force of him.
They settled into a pounding cadence, meeting each other at each thrust, never missing a single beat. Ashland struck so deep it hurt; but the hurt was a good hurt, compressing her pleasure to an unbearable extremity, so exquisitely timed that Emilie’s climax began to gather in her loins after no more than a dozen strokes. It wound her tighter and tighter, this insatiable vise, each thrust more intense than the last, while Ashland’s grip trapped her at the edge of the table.
Shove, shove, shove, relentless and perfect, his fierce face, his damp skin, his want, her want. His rocky voice: “I’m going to come hard, Emilie.”
Her heels dug hard, beating in rhythm. Too much, too much. Her every nerve strained to the point of rupture, reaching, reaching.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed.
He kept on pounding. “You can. You can. Let it go, love. Let yourself go. Spend for me. Spend. Now.”
Shove, shove, shove, and climax burst like lightning. She flew outside herself, propelled by the white streaks of sensation that shot from Ashland’s stiff flesh within her.
“Emilie!” He shouted her name, gave a final mighty thrust, and wrapped himself around her, taut and shuddering. A slow groan rumbled his throat, ending in a noiseless sigh.
For a long moment they remained still, breathing hard, locked together at all their various points: his arms, her legs, their faces pressed together, his staff still rigid within her. Emilie was dizzy, boneless. Without Ashland holding her in place, she might have floated to the ornate plaster ceiling.
“My God,” Ashland muttered. His chest was still heaving. “My God, Emilie.”
He lifted his head and kissed her forehead, kissed her nose and her cheeks. He braced himself on the table and withdrew as deliberately as he had first slid inside her, wincing as his tip pulled free.
Without speaking, he gathered Emilie up from the table, carried her into the other room, and laid her on the bed. “Don’t move,” he said, and he disappeared through the door.
NINETEEN
The Duke of Ashland stared at his face in the mirror above the sink. His skin was still flushed, still damp with perspiration; his single eye glowed back at him, pupil madly dilated. He could still feel the pulsing aftershocks of climax in his veins, the most thunderous climax of his life.
Though, to be sure, last week had come exceptionally close, even without that epic and perfectly matched rhythm he and Emily had achieved just now.
He smiled.
A well-pleasured man, that’s what he was.
He looked down at his tool, which emerged from his trousers still stiffened, still covered by the damned French letter. He fumbled with the string, untying it at last, and washed it out in the basin. He dropped it carefully in a jar and removed his clothes, piece by piece, folding each one with a soldier’s discipline: necktie, shirt, trousers, stockings. He placed the stack on a chair and went to the bedroom. The air rasped against his skin, recalling his nakedness at every step.
Undressed.
Defenseless.
Emily was lying on the bed as he had left her, propped by the pillows, her knees tucked up. One hand lay across her belly, and the other was up on the pillow, next to her shorn head. He hadn’t lit the lamp, and the light from the room behind him left only the slightest dusky glow on her skin. He looked at her face, at her round, wise eyes, and for an instant a chord of bone-deep familiarity struck in his chest.
He knew her.
She was his. They belonged.
In the next instant, Emily bolted upward.
He approached with the silent steps he’d learned in Olympia’s training, the steps with which he approached his prey. The Wraith, they had called him in the Afghan mountains. He tried to hold her gaze with his, but her eyes slipped inevitably downward to encompass his naked and vulnerable limbs, his maimed body, his aroused prick. The beast that he was.
“Ashland, you’re beautiful,” she whispered, and held out her arms.
He bent his knee into the mattress. “Wear and tear included at no additional expense.”
Her face held an odd expression: wonder, and something like wistfulness. She touched his cheek. “Ashland, I . . .”
“Shh.” He kissed her, eased her into the pillows. With his good hand he drew down the bedclothes and settled her inside. “We have all night. I’ve left instructions this time. I’m not expected back until morning.”
“Ashland, I can’t. I . . .”
He kissed her lips and stopped her words. “Nothing lies between us except your own pride. Just accept me. Accept us.” Another kiss. “After last week, after what happened just now, how can you deny what exists between us? Besides”—another kiss, this time in the hollow of her throat—“having ravaged the virtue of my proper and virginal young companion, I have no honorable recourse except marriage.”
She laughed at that, a melancholy laugh. “You’re a duke, Ashland. You can do whatever you please.”
“Not so.” He settled her into the shelter of his body and propped himself up on his elbow. His fingers drew lazy figures along her skin. “I can’t quite seem to convince you to become my duchess. I don’t know why. A life of squalid luxury, a faithful husband in your bed. Granted, I shall never make a particularly decorative figure on your ballroom floor, but at least you’ll have a ballroom floor.”
Emily stared silently at his face, while the word husband swelled and echoed in the air between them.
She reached up and untied the black leather mask from the side of his face. He didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as flicker as she drew it away.
She leaned forward and kissed his empty socket, on the lid sewn shut by a long-ago surgeon. “I adore every inch of you. Whatever happens, whatever becomes of us, Ashland, remember that.” She kissed his shattered jaw, his scarred cheek, his ravaged self. “Every inch of you.”
He went still under her featherlight caresses. “That sounds rather like a farewell. Best of luck, old chap, and thanks for the memories.”
“I want you to promise me something, Ashland,” she said, with her lips against his throat.
“Anything.”
“When you know. When I’ve told you everything. Promise me you won’t hate me.”
“Emily.” He put his finger under her chin and looked into her eyes. What beautiful eyes she had, round and blue, improbably young. Guileless. And filled with emotion, brimming with feeling, matching the love that overflowed his own heart. “I could never hate you.”
She drew in her breath. “Ashland, there’s so much I haven’t told you. About me, about my past. Who I am.”
“There’s so much I haven’t told you. The things I’ve done.” The men I’ve killed, and how I killed them. He steeled his brain and forced the thoughts away.
Emily found his stump and covered it with her hand. Under the warmth of her touch, the ache dulled almost to nothing. “But that was long ago. This is now. Who I am now.”
“As I told you already: You’re Emily. That’s all I need to know. The rest is just so much rubbish. I knew my wife’s ancestry clear back to Dutch William, I knew every detail of her life, and what use was it? I never knew her at all.”
“Perhaps you don’t know me at all.”
Ashland swiveled his gaze upward to scrutinize the ceiling. He lifted his finger to tap his chin. “Let’s see, then. Are you a murderess?”
She snorted. “No.”
“Forger?”
“Oh, do be serious, Ashland. I’m trying to . . .”
He snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. The proprietess of a house of ill repute?”
She picked up a pillow and lobbed it at his face. “And what do you know about those?”
“Well, you recall, I was in the . . .”
“Army. Yes, I recall.” She relaxed back into the pillows. Her skin was still pink, still warm and glowing from frantic carnal intercourse. With him.
Ashland assembled his face into sternness. Clearly he was going to have to take the upper hand, to clear away all her feminine doubts and scruples. A rather overwhelming proposition, after all, marrying a duke. He could understand her shock. Her trepidation, even. And perhaps he hadn’t handled the bit about the house and the money with the appropriate degree of tact. Ladies tended not to see such things in a practical and rational light. “It seems I haven’t made myself properly clear. I don’t give a damn if you were born to the meanest family in England. I don’t care if you’ve fled some crime of the most dastardly nature. It doesn’t bloody well matter to me if your past reeks of scandal, if you’re living under an assumed name, if you’re a modern-day Jacobite under sentence of treason. I intend to marry you, and I’ll fight every court in the land, I’ll damned well bury any scoundrel who dares to say a word against you.” He captured her wrists and lowered his head to kiss her, deeply and thoroughly, until they were both gasping for air. “Is that clear enough for you, duchess?”
“Yes,” she whispered, looking entirely subdued.
“Good, then. And now I’m going to make love to you for the rest of the night, exactly as I said I would, because I don’t break my word, Emily. You’re going to lose count of the number of times you spend. You’re going to forget your own name, whatever the hell it is. You’ll be begging me to stop. And when you wake up in the morning, I want no more talk about holding back, about waiting, about leaving things be. I don’t want to waste another minute of my life without you by my side, in my bed, across my table. I shall order my carriage and take you to your new home, and I shall spend the rest of my life endeavoring to make you happy.” He lowered his head to lick her breast. “Understood?”
She didn’t say yes, but she growled, a low feminine purr of a growl, and Ashland decided it amounted to the same thing. He bent over her with fingers and lips, with tongue and teeth. He lingered over every curve and fold and angle of her body, studied and pursued her every gasp of pleasure, until she hummed like a well-tuned instrument under his caresses. Until she was shuddering and crying his name. Until her lithe body arched and her wet flesh vibrated with release. And before she had drifted back down to earth, he began all over again, doing things to her he had only dreamed of doing to a woman before, lost in the miracle of Emily.
When at last she could take no more, when she was begging him to stop, he rose and fetched the sheath from its jar and took his own pleasure at last, shoving his prick deep into Emily’s luxurious wet grip. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and urged him on, and he couldn’t last, she wouldn’t let him last. He spent in violent spasms and sank atop her, inhaling the scent of sweat and sex and Emily. He imagined, in that instant, that he’d been released from purgatory at last and allowed through the gates of heaven.
* * *
Emilie opened her eyes to a perfect pitch blackness. For a long and panicked instant, she could not place herself in the universe. Where she was, who she was.
She breathed slowly, allowing her mind to rise up naturally from its velvet depth of sleep. A warm scent invaded her nose, rich and intimate and muscular. Such a gorgeous, familiar scent: She craved more of it. She closed her eyes again and filled her lungs, and as she did, she became aware of the heavy weight lying across her ribs, the steady breath stirring her hair, the solid mass radiating heat next to her skin.
Ashland.
Her breath tripped, and started again.
By the good Lord, he felt heavenly. That was his scent, his warmth surrounding her. That humming feeling of well-being in her limbs had come from his hands, his lips, his attentive and tireless lovemaking.
How often had they come together last night? She could not quite remember. On the table, that first time, hard and fast and exhilarating; and then again on the bed, after he had wreaked rapture on her body until she could scarcely move. They had fallen asleep for an hour or so, and then Ashland had risen and ordered a late cold supper and fed it to her himself, with sips of champagne here and bites of paper-thin ham there, with kisses and caresses and laughter, until at some point they were joined once more, rocking together in a lazy rhythm, whispering unspeakably dirty words back and forth. He had taught her all the names for his male organ pressed inside her, all the names for her own female parts, all the names for the act in which they were engaged, until her blood ran so hot she couldn’t think. He had turned her over and finished them both off in a frenzy, her back against his front, his teeth nipping her neck, like animals. Afterward, he had curled his big body around hers and caressed her with his broad and loving hand. More sleep, and then one of them had begun again, she couldn’t remember whom, or perhaps it had been mutual: a mutual waking and lovemaking followed by mutual collapse.
He was still collapsed. She listened to his breath, his heartbeat in the intimate black night. Was that the very faintest hint of a snore? She smiled and hugged the sound to herself. She rolled her memory back and recalled it all again, from start to finish, clarifying the details. Cataloging. Four times, then. He had made love to her four times. Four glorious, pounding, breathless times.
No wonder contentment seemed to roll off his unconscious body.
Four times tonight, once last week. Five times altogether. It wasn’t much, really, to last her a lifetime. But she would remember each one.
The darkness in the room was not yet subsiding. It must be well before dawn.
She had to leave.
Before she could tempt herself into another minute, and another five, she lifted Ashland’s arm from her middle—his right arm, with its rounded end that seemed so natural to her now, a normal and beautiful part of Ashland’s body. At one point last night, during one of the slow and sleepy interludes between congress, she had asked him what it felt like, his phantom hand. He had nudged the end of his arm along the underside of her breast, lifting the soft plumpness, and said, “As if it wants to touch you, and can’t.”
Her heart contracted again at the memory. She sat up, laid his arm carefully in the sheets, and drew up the bedclothes, hardly daring to breathe for fear of waking him. The ever-wakeful, ever-watchful Duke of Ashland.
He didn’t stir.
She slipped out of the bed and the bedroom. The sitting room was chilled, the fire nearly out. Her skin, accustomed to the cocoon of warmth she’d shared with Ashland, prickled with goose bumps. She drew on her clothes, shivering, and crept from the room, leaving her blindfold and her false chignon on the mantel behind her.
She wouldn’t need them anymore.
* * *
Freddie was waiting for her in the stables, as he’d insisted. He lay curled in a pile of straw in the corner, snoring peacefully. She changed into her men’s clothes, packed her dress in the knapsack, and shook his thin shoulder gently.
“Did you tell him?” Freddie scrambled for his spectacles.
“No.”
He swore. “Where’s your pluck, Grimsby? He’s not going to take your head off. He loves you.”
“He doesn’t love me. He’s never claimed to love me.”
“Well, of course he wouldn’t say the word out loud.” Freddie snorted.
“I took off the blindfold and my hair. He didn’t recognize me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him outright.” She led the way out of the stable and into the snow, three inches deep and building. “I just couldn’t.”
“Women,” he said.
They trudged in silence down the deserted road, guided only by the dark lumps of buildings along the way. The snow glowed faintly on the ground, a ghostly landscape. Emilie walked with her head bent downward, and still the stinging flakes caught her cheeks, her eyelids.
At the Anvil, they collected their horses and paid off the stableboy generously. “Pardon the observation,” said Freddie, swinging up in the saddle, “for I’m not well versed in these sorts of matters, but you don’t seem particularly happy. All things considered.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Again, I speak without experience, but aren’t women in love supposed to be beamy and delighted and that sort of thing? You look rather . . . downcast.” He paused delicately as they turned into the road. “Everything all”—cough, cough—“all right?”
“Quite all right. We . . .”
He flung up his hand. “God, no. No details. This is bloody awkward enough as it is.”
“I wasn’t going to give you details. For heaven’s sake,” she added, blushing at the recollection of those details. “I only meant to say that we were quite in accord. But of course it can never happen again.”
