How to Tame Your Duke (20 page)

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.

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.

T
he 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.

*   *   *

E
milie 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.

*   *   *

F
reddie 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.”