The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) (20 page)

His eyes met hers with a warm greeting.

“Hullo, Minnie.” He didn’t smile. He didn’t lean down to her. But when he whispered, “I wish you’d call me Robert,” his voice was almost a caress.

“Robert.”

“This,” he whispered, in a solemn tone of voice, “is where I would say something exceedingly clever, had my brains not been turned to paste.”

“How do you seduce anyone if you can’t talk at this stage?” she asked.

“I—” He stopped, shook his head, and flung his hands out in frustration.

It’s a Lane family tradition. When you’ve backed the other fellow into a corner, you give him a kiss to show there’s no hard feelings.

“I see how it is,” she said softly.

“You do?”

She didn’t. She couldn’t see anything at all. She didn’t know what to do about Stevens, what to do with the future that appeared to be crumbling before her eyes. This was the exact opposite of the moment when she would have kissed a chess piece.

But looking into his eyes, she saw not endings, not the finality of marriage to a man who didn’t know her, not the gray certainty of some future workhouse. She saw beginnings.

It was utterly impossible, this attraction between them.

“I do see,” Minnie said. “You don’t seduce women.”

He gave her a half smile. “Heh. Well. About that…”

“
They
seduce
you.”
And then, before she could think it through—before she could outline the
shouldn’ts
and the
nevers
—she popped up on her toes. There were only inches between them, and Minnie closed the distance without thinking.

He made a soft exhalation of surprise. His lips were warm on hers, and after that first moment of shock, his arms closed around her.

“Like this,” he murmured, and then his lips were not just pressed to hers, but moving along her mouth, coaxing the kiss from her.

His kiss was not an end, either, but a vibrant new thing, brilliant with possibility. His lips met hers, captured hers, over and over. When their tongues met, his hands came to either side of her face, holding her close, bringing her to him so roughly she feared she might break.

He kissed her and she pressed against him, her hands against his chest, his waistcoat buttons digging into her. Her fingers slid under his scarf, pulling him close.

And then he stepped away. Minnie opened her eyes to the courtyard, to the pump.

He smiled. “I believe that is the first time I’ve ever commanded your full attention.”

“Robert.” She swallowed awkwardly.

“In answer to what you said… You’re right. I don’t just owe you an apology. I can only repeat what I have told you before. I won’t leave you worse off than I met you. I know you’re worried. I know I can be thoughtless. But I don’t
stay
thoughtless, Miss Pursling. There’s a great deal I can do, and I won’t let anyone hurt you. My word on it.”

She shouldn’t believe him. It was impossible for him to simply assert that. He’d already ruined her inside, made her question the bleak landscape of her life. He’d made her hope. She felt as if she were floating in the clouds, now. And that meant the ground was such a long, long way down.

“I shouldn’t believe you.” She ran her hands over her face. “I should go give your letter to Mr. Charingford right now.”

“You should have done it two days ago.”

She felt a shy smile take over her face. “I know.”

She handed him back his paste pot. Their fingers met as she did, and her whole body sang in response. And for the first time, Minnie realized that he was too clever by half. She hadn’t overmatched him. He’d handed her the key to his downfall…and made it nearly impossible for her to use it.

Chapter Thirteen

B
Y THE TIME
M
INNIE SNUFFED HER CANDLE
that night and slipped between her covers, all the emotion of the day had passed from her. She felt as if she were standing in the aftermath of a wildfire, the terrain around her blackened and burned as far as the eye could see. She could almost smell the smoke, could feel the hidden embers inside her that had not yet burned to cold ash.

“Don’t fall in love with him, Minnie,” she warned herself. But the room was dark, and her bedsheets had not yet warmed from her body heat.

If only he’d been less handsome, less wealthy…and not at all a duke. A blacksmith. A bookseller. Someone else with that keen mind, those piercing eyes, that brilliant smile that seemed to be made for her alone.

Instead, he was one of the highest peers of the realm. He could have his pick of thousands of women. In fact, he was probably picking a woman right now—that
was
the sort of thing dukes did, was it not? Dukes entertained women as mistresses, choosing from blond and brown and black hair, depending on the whim of the evening, taking whatever they wanted and leaving a handful of coin as memory. Being a duke meant that one had a perpetual harem at one’s fingertips. All one had to do was ask for it.

The thought should have disgusted her, but for some reason she imagined Robert—no, she had to think of him as the
duke,
not as a name, not as a person—looking over a passel of girls offered by a thin-faced proprietress. She imagined his gaze settling on some girl with honey-brown hair and a larger-than-usual bosom.

“Her,” he would say. “I want her tonight.”

I want you.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, to imagine that his desire—whatever inkling of it he had—would persist long enough for him to purchase a substitute. She writhed in her bed. But she couldn’t get the notion out of her mind.

He might be in bed with her at this very moment. His hands would brush her breasts, like so. His lips would find not the palm of her hand, but her neck, her lips. There would be no hesitation, no holding back. There would be nothing but his rock-hard want.

His body would cover hers, and she would surrender to him. She would spread her legs, wrapping them around him…

Those thoughts were enough to warm her bed, but once she’d started the imagery, she could not shut it off. It was her own fingers between her legs, her own hand against her nipple. But she imagined him wanting her as much as she wanted him, taking her in her imagination the way she could never allow in real life. He plunged into her, hard; she shook as she brought herself to the brink. And when she came, biting her lip to keep herself from screaming, it was his face that she saw.

The bed was too hot after that, so hot that she threw back the blanket and let the cold air wash over her, honing her nipples to hard points once more. But the cold didn’t bring the clarity she so desperately needed.

She stood, crossed the room to the washbasin, and poured from the pitcher. The water was ice-cold; the washcloth rough against her skin.

Maybe he had picked a woman tonight who looked like her. Maybe he hadn’t even picked a woman, but had sat in his chamber and done to himself what she had just done. The thought left her with a deep wistfulness.

If only…

“There are no ifs,” she told herself sharply. “Only what is.”

This was the reality that she had to accept: What had just happened—that was the closest she would ever come to making love with the Duke of Clermont. One night, she might think of him, and if she were very lucky, he might spare a thought for her in response. Her throat tightened with yearning.

It didn’t matter.

She’d learned long ago that her own emotions never mattered. Things were what they were, no matter how she felt about them. And this particular emotion… This one had sent her reeling far enough off course.

Still, she fumbled open her curtains. On another night, she might have looked down—down at the cabbage fields, down at the half ring of crushed gravel in front of her great-aunts’ cottage.

Tonight, for the space of time it took her heartbeat to return to normal, she looked up. Up at the quarter moon, gleaming through the fringe of clouds, up at stars that twinkled for queen and peasant alike. She looked up until the clouds covered the moon and cut out all the light.

I
T WAS MUCH LATER THAT EVENING
when Robert walked the streets of Leicester again—this time with Oliver beside him. The fog had descended, mixing with the coal smoke to form an unholy pea soup, one that clung to his coat. Somewhere, a church bell to his right began to chime the nine o’clock hour; it was joined shortly by its neighbors to the left, and then those behind him, before him—a chorus of bells that seemed all the more eerie within the quiet grip of the mist.

“What is it?” Oliver finally asked. They’d been walking since the church had rung the half hour without saying a word.

Robert clenched his fist in his pocket.

“I am trying to do the right thing,” he finally said.

The town was quiet. Strange, how sharply the factory whistle divided the days here. One moment, you could not escape the rattle of machinery; the next, it fell still and silent, like some noisome behemoth collapsing in its tracks. It left a curious silence in its wake, one louder than the quiet of a countryside. He could almost feel his teeth rattle with the sound the machinery did not make.

“Is something going awry?” Oliver glanced at him.

“There’s this woman…” Robert let out the words on a great whoosh of air, and his brother cackled aloud.

“God, I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. Sebastian mentioned her and was shocked when I had no idea what he meant. Who is it?”

Robert told him. Not everything—he couldn’t tell his brother about the handbills, as that was a risk that he insisted on taking alone. But about Minnie—how she seemed so quiet until she spoke to him. How she turned him upside down.

“I kissed her. I can’t forget it,” he said. “I can’t do it again. I know how these things are done, and this isn’t right.”

“It’s not right?” Oliver asked mildly.

The silence seemed to hold an edge now. They rarely talked about the circumstances of their brotherhood, but it stood between them. Oliver’s mother had been a governess when the Duke of Clermont had visited her household. What choice did a governess have when a duke pursued? If she said yes, he would have her. If she said no, he would have her.

“I don’t know what right is,” he finally said. “I’m a duke. She’s the great-niece of a woman who has a mere pretension to gentility. If I do something wrong here, you’re the only one I trust to punch me in the stomach.”

Oliver shook his head. “It wouldn’t come to that.”

The last of the bells faded in the distance. Robert could still feel her kiss, could still feel the want rise in his blood. “It might. You know who my father is. The sort of man he was.” His voice dropped. “And I want her.”

There it was, said aloud. He wanted. He didn’t just want her body. So few people knew who he was, what he desired. And yet Minnie had accepted him at his word. She hadn’t bowed or scraped to him; instead, she’d told him that she overmatched him.

More than that. He’d spent so long hiding how he felt, what he wanted. He had to work in Parliament to pass every bill that remotely advanced his goals, even while he gnashed his teeth at the slow pace of progress. The House of Lords bickered over the correct threshold for property ownership in voting while Robert chafed at the notion of any property threshold at all. They muttered about the privileges of peerage, when he wanted them all removed. But stating something so radical would have alienated them all. And so he kept it in. He argued minutiae. He voted for bills that made life a little more bearable when he wanted to scream at everyone.

Minnie, now… There was a woman who knew what it was to hide what she felt. And he wanted her so badly, so damned badly.

“I don’t trust myself,” he finally said.

Oliver shrugged. “Why would you trust me, then? I have as much of Clermont in me as you do.”

“You…” Robert stopped, turned to his brother. “That’s different.”

“Same blood.” His brother took off his spectacles. “Same eyes. Same nose.”

“But you…your…” He stumbled for an explanation. “I can be a right bloody bastard. You of all people should know that. And why you gave me a chance, I will never know.”