Unmasking the Duke, page 24
His jaw actually dropped. “That is what you think?”
She dragged her gaze free of the growing intensity of his.
He said, “So I followed you here to Maida, worried sick for your safety, for…what?”
“Kindness,” she whispered. “Your sense of what is right. But this would not be right. Not anymore.”
Her hand had fallen from his arm when they had turned to face each other, but he reached out slowly and took it back. Stepping closer, he drew her hand up and placed it on the back of his neck.
“Look at me, Kitty.”
Knowing it was a mistake, she looked anyway.
“Never in my life,” he said deliberately, “have I pursued a woman from kindness. I followed you because I love you and want to marry you. I let you go last night for all sorts of honorable reasons, none of which were to do with your birth. But if you knew the effort it took to drag myself away, let alone go to sleep with such raging arousal, you would pity me, not run from me.”
He released her hand, and for some reason, she let it lie at his nape where he had left it. One arm slipped loosely about her waist. He cupped her cheek. “I’m no revolutionary. But your birth matters not one jot, not to you and me.”
“But it does, Johnny! You must see…”
“Call me a coxcomb,” he interrupted softly. “But I think you liked me long before I mentioned Cousin Margaret to you.”
“You know I did.”
“And as I recall, I kissed you before I realized you were the woman I was looking for. Attraction was always there between us and grew quickly into something much more, something we have no right to ignore, for our own sakes, for each other’s. What right do I have to cause your unnecessary suffering? What right do you have to cause mine?”
She stared at him, the somehow novel idea that she could cause him pain echoing around her mind like a cry in the darkness. The duke was just a man.
Just a man…
A desperately beloved man who even now lowered his head and took her mouth.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There was nothing she could do about it, nothing she wanted to do. Helpless in her wondrous new discovery, under the onslaught of his warm, silken mouth, she could only hang in his arms, absorbing his love and the sweet pleasure of his kiss.
Until, with a sob, she grasped his hair between her fingers and kissed him back with all her hurt and anguish and passion. And sweet, desperate happiness. The kiss became another, deeper, and with his coat and her cloak thrust aside, she plastered herself to his body in a purely instinctive need to be closer to him.
His hips moved, and his legs, walking her backward in a luscious full-body caress. He swung her off his feet, lowering her to the ground in one arm while the other was busy about something she could neither see nor care about when she was so absorbed in kissing him.
She landed on cushions and blankets by the side of the pond. By the time she realized he was unfastening her cloak, his greatcoat was gone.
“What are you doing?” she murmured hazily against his lips.
“Seducing you,” he whispered, “since it’s the only way to convince you that I love you beyond anything the world could ever throw at us. And because I want to so badly that I will explode before I can lay my hands on a special license.”
A gurgle of laughter escaped her, immediately lost in another deep, sensual kiss that she could feel right down to her toes. He tugged blankets over them, making their space cozy and warm despite the cold. There was little moonlight, but the glow of the lantern showed her his beloved face, his throat, and shoulders as he tugged off his cravat and wriggled out of his coat and waistcoat and shirt.
With eager, wondering hands, she explored the breadth of his shoulders, the hard muscle moving beneath smooth skin as he freed her from her gown, kissing each new area of skin he uncovered, his mouth open and hot, worshipping, unbelievably arousing.
The massive heat from his body seemed to have invaded hers as he caressed her naked breasts and curled his tongue around her nipple. She gasped, arching into him, and as if he had been waiting for just this moment, he tugged her gown and underclothes over her hips and free of her. She pushed at the waist of his pantaloons, wanting only more of his skin against hers.
In moments, the hot ridge of his naked arousal pressed against her stomach, and his hands, his wonderful, tender hands, smoothed over her hips and thighs, moving slowly, teasingly inward to what had become the raging core of her desire.
His breathing was ragged. There was more than a hint of desperation in his clouded, hungry eyes. Perhaps it was reflected in hers, for at his first touch between her thighs, she moaned and pushed into his fingers. He caressed, and her whole body shook in wonder, and then he was within her, huge and shocking.
Staring down into her eyes, he gave her a moment to get used to it, then gently rocked. The world began to spin off its axis once more, and she clung to him, her only anchor as they became one sweet, achingly joyous whole.
*
Johnny was an experienced man. He was used to giving and receiving uninhibited pleasure. But this, with Kitty, was different and new. She had no idea how to please a man or herself until he showed her, and yet her immediate enjoyment of his caresses, her desire to touch him, to pleasure him, too, moved him as no other woman ever had, intensifying his arousal and his joy beyond anything he had ever known.
Love, it seemed, was the ultimate pleasure, in the physical as every other aspect of life.
And she took the hurt along with the bliss, trusting and passionate and…Kitty.
They lay together on his bundle of carriage cushions beneath the blankets, her tangle of hair trailing across his chest.
“Now, will you marry me?” he asked, running her hair through his fingers.
She nodded once, smiling, then propped her chin up on his chest. “Was I being foolish?”
“No more than I with my over-complicated notions of my own honor over your needs. Tomorrow, I’ll see about the special license.”
“Will I come back with you to the townhouse?”
“That would be improper,” he said with mock primness. “You would have no chaperone since Aline has been persuaded to stay at the embassy, showing off her unpregnant state until word gets around that she is definitely not carrying any possible Hagerin heir.”
“And then she’ll be safe?”
“I believe so. Why don’t you stay with your uncle, and we can be married here quietly before I take you home to Dearham Abbey as my bride? Perhaps, in the spring, we could go on a wedding journey to France and Italy and Greece. Maybe even Constantinople since we have friends there.”
“We do?”
“Lord and Lady Wenning who, you might say, were responsible for our first meeting.”
She smiled and kissed his chest. “You don’t even remember that.”
“Actually, I do. I was drawn to you, you know, but you were too respectable for me to trifle with.”
“And now I’m not?” she teased.
He grinned. “Not after what you have just done. And no one married to Johnny Dearham could be considered entirely respectable, but I suppose we will just have to change minds.”
“Starting with my uncle’s. What if someone comes up here looking for us?” She didn’t move, though, and neither did he, except to roll her and lay his head on her breasts.
“I don’t think your family is that daft,” he said.
In the end, it was the cold that drove him, reluctantly, to sit and gather their clothes. They dressed each other, and he pinned up her hair, and then, leaving the cushions and blankets under the tree, he put his arm around her waist, and they walked together toward their new life.
Epilogue
Three days later, the Duke of Dearham’s light traveling coach ate up the miles to Dearham Abbey, just a little too quickly for Kitty. Despite her husband’s assurance that they had the whole family’s support, she could not quite believe they would welcome her return as the duchess without serious misgivings, at the very least.
So, she chattered about other things, about Renwick’s Hotel, which had opened to the public two days ago, and where she and Johnny had spent their wedding night, in tasteful if luxurious comfort. Of course, the thought of her deliciously wanton wedding night still made her blush, so she said hastily, “I was glad to see Toby working there. I believe Uncle Bill will finally whip him into shape.”
“Well, he has no room for slackers,” Johnny agreed. “But I think the hotel will do very well with the richer travelers. Especially with the poorer using the other entrance so that they don’t offend the wealthy.”
“No, but the poorer traveler will still be happy to be under the same roof as nobility.”
Johnny moved and covered her hand, which was nervously folding the material of her gown into tiny, unnecessary pleats. “Kitty. Stop worrying. In any case, they’ll be gone soon, and we’ll have the whole place to ourselves for weeks. Look, there’s the Abbey.”
She hung onto his hand as they bounced along the hard, frosty road well into Dearham land and then turned up the gracious drive to the house. Probably to distract her or give her courage or both, he bent and kissed her. So by the time the carriage pulled up at the front of the house, she was pleasantly dazed.
Footmen hurried down the steps from the house, closely followed by Martha and Lord Calvert with the children. By the time the carriage door was opened, and the steps let down, the dowager herself had appeared in the portico, escorted by Lord Peter.
As Johnny handed Kitty down, she saw that everyone, even the dowager, was smiling. Martha ran to her, laughing. “Welcome home, Your Grace!”
“Oh, my, that’s me,” Kitty said with awe, hugging Martha back.
Everyone was embracing Johnny or slapping him on the back. Peter and Calvert kissed Kitty’s cheek, and the children clung to her hands, dragging her up the steps to where her mother-in-law gravely waited.
Kitty’s heart thudded as she curtseyed. “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” she blurted.
And the dowager’s lips twitched into a genuinely amused smile. “For what, my dear? Finally taming my son? On the contrary, we are in your debt.” She drew Kitty to her, kissing her cheek, then turned and walked her into the house, where the entire staff and Great-Aunt Augusta seemed to have assembled.
Johnny was beside her once more. Peter shouted, “Three cheers for the duke and duchess!”
The cheering almost deafened her. She couldn’t stop smiling as Johnny led her between the applauding servants, across the hall, and up the staircase.
“You see?” Johnny whispered in her ear. “Everything is fine.”
And she realized at last that everything was. More than fine. It was joyful.
About Mary Lancaster
Mary Lancaster lives in Scotland with her husband, three mostly grown-up kids and a small, crazy dog.
Her first literary love was historical fiction, a genre which she relishes mixing up with romance and adventure in her own writing. Her most recent books are light, fun Regency romances written for Dragonblade Publishing: The Imperial Season series set at the Congress of Vienna; and the popular Blackhaven Brides series, which is set in a fashionable English spa town frequented by the great and the bad of Regency society.
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Lancaster, Mary, Unmasking the Duke
