She wore breeches tight as skin, her long, muscled legs on display for everyone to see, feet planted firmly in shining black boots.
Her hair was gathered in a tight knot on top of her head. Her face, with its crooked nose and severe brows, was plain and exposed. Her collars were short, so that the expanse of her brown throat was clear.
She held a golden leash and at the end of it was a small, familiar pig wearing a jacket to match hers.
She was like something new and badly understood that was going to change everything. Like electricity.
Her eyes found him through the crowds of people who had fallen still. There was no sentimentality or softness in her gaze. There was only that same gesture she’d made once before, that reached inside his chest and claimed him.
Then she looked away and found another target. He’d had glimpses before of the way her eyes turned to molten lava, but never like this. He followed her line of sight and found Lady Marmotte, who was no longer making her way towards Jude. Who looked just a little bit uncertain.
Katherine handed the leash to Lydia, which was when Jude first realised that she was surrounded by her family and Barton’s. The strength of BenRuin behind her, the cool disdain of Lydia, the quiet of Tom.
She walked towards Lady Marmotte, and Jude couldn’t look away from her incredible legs. He felt fierce with knowing. She stopped in front of the other woman, whose black costume seemed suddenly irrelevant. She simply looked at Lady Marmotte, every insolent line of her body clear to everyone watching. One by one she pulled the fingers of her white kid-skin glove from her left hand.
Then she lifted her right arm, which Jude had seen her use to split logs, and hit Lady Marmotte across the face with her glove. Nobody spoke, and Jude became aware of the music still playing into the horrified silence, like a single candle lighting the bottom of a well. Katherine’s eyes thinned, head on the side like a bird of prey.
‘It is customary to state your terms,’ Lady Marmotte finally said, with an admirable coolness that was at odds with her red cheek. ‘And to introduce yourself, when your adversary hasn’t the faintest clue who you might be.’
Katherine’s lips curled up into a nasty smile and she said, ‘I am Katherine Sutherland. Granddaughter of the Earl of Barton, and future Duchess of Darlington.’
Jude gave a shocked laugh. He felt as though God had clapped His hands once, startling, inside his chest.
Lady Marmotte’s eyes flew to him, wide.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, but she’d already seen something on his face that dismayed her.
‘I do not like the way you are going after Darlington,’ Katherine said. ‘And I want you to stop.’
But Lady Marmotte was the woman who’d cowed society into accepting her, despite her promiscuity and her very public divorce. She drew herself up, and didn’t let the silence betray her into speaking before she was ready.
‘Pistols at dawn, then?’ she said, her tone faintly ironic – sophisticated beside Katherine’s plain speech.
Katherine shrugged and didn’t give an inch. ‘If we must.’
Liverpool – who, with Louisa beside him, had been doing his best to ignore the scene and draw his guests into polite conversation – stepped forward at this. ‘Ladies,’ he said in a mild voice, ‘threatening illegal activities within the hearing of your Prime Minister is going it a shade too far.’
There was a badly contained delight in Katherine – as though she wanted to discover just how many illegal things she could suggest before Liverpool threw her out. Lady Marmotte wasn’t paying Liverpool any attention; her eyes were speculative on Jude, and he thought,
Oh, damn
.
‘I will meet you on one battlefield only,’ Lady Marmotte said to Katherine, in exactly the right haughty tones. ‘Come to my piquet party next week. You and I shall play for your . . . future husband’s maidenly honour, or whatever this is about exactly.’
Katherine flushed a little, and for one sick moment Jude thought she was going to back down. She had lost everything once before, because of a card game.
Then she stood taller and stronger than ever, and the flush made her seem so human. ‘When I win,’ she said, ‘you’ll never involve yourself in Darlington’s fortunes again.’
Lady Marmotte’s bored sigh didn’t hide her triumph from Jude. Not for a second. ‘And when I win my only prize is to send Darlington’s bride to him a pauper and a disgrace? It will do, I suppose.’
Jude couldn’t be sure how well Katherine understood the political context of her actions, but she couldn’t have chosen a better place to stage this little scene.
‘In the interests of peace,’ Liverpool said, still in that mild voice, ‘I shall attend your party, Lady Marmotte, and personally ensure that the terms of the wager are kept. And now I rather think my wife would like to dance a waltz.’
Lady Marmotte conceded to Liverpool’s interference; she understood the context entirely. ‘Just one more thing,’ she said, and Jude’s breath caught roughly in his chest.
‘Every player opens with a bet of twenty thousand pounds – gold standard. Don’t bother to show up with less than two hundred thousand in your pocket.’
Katherine drew herself up and – was that one of Jude’s own haughty expressions on her face? ‘I don’t have such an amount,’ she said.
‘Then this is a waste of my time. Come with the money, or you forfeit our wager.’
Katherine opened her mouth angrily, and Lady Marmotte said, ‘Don’t worry,
chérie
. I’m sure something will fall into your lap.’ Then she lowered her voice and said in a venomous whisper, ‘And don’t think for a second I’ll let you accost me like this a second time.’
Lady Marmotte swept away to the women who pretended friendship, which was perhaps as good as friendship to a woman like her. Katherine stood alone, and there was something defeated in the line of her shoulders.
Jude stepped up behind her and ached to wrap her up against him.
‘The waltz has begun,’ he said.
She turned and gave a small laugh, and her expression was so stupidly wary for a woman who had just declared to the world that she was going to marry him.
‘I can’t dance, remember?’
‘Oh no, darling fox, I let you get away with that once before. I will hold on to you, and you will follow my lead, and we will dance.’
Her hands had reached for him already, so she couldn’t exactly say no.
‘I don’t have two hundred —’ she said, stepping forward.
‘If I had it,’ he said, ‘it would be yours. In a heartbeat. You know that. If my title had been recognised I could have it on credit tonight, but they’re suspicious of me, Katherine.’
‘Oh,’ she said in a very small voice.
‘I have properties,’ he heard himself say. ‘Unentailed properties. And I have . . . well. You’ll go with as much armour as I can make for you.’
‘It’s not the first thing I would have asked for, after —’ She lost her nerve, looked away for a heartbeat.
‘After engaging yourself to me?’ he said, his lips laughing and close to her ear.
She placed her hand flat against his collarbone and pushed him away, glaring. ‘Yes.’ And God, she should have known already that he would never ask her to take it back. Not for anything.
‘I know,’ he made himself say lightly, and then guided her in among the other couples.
He held her the entire correct, aching distance from himself and tried to ignore the temptation to pull her up against him, his thighs against hers, so that every movement would be a hot slide of muscle against muscle.
She was no good at following his lead.
‘You really cannot dance,’ he said, and smiled brilliantly at her.
Her hand on his shoulder curled up into his hair and she held him in a rough fist, but her gloves were soft on his skin. He turned his face, blindly seeking, and found a piece of skin on the inside of her wrist.
He had thought . . . But here she was. She had made this being together irrevocable.
BenRuin was watching them, his fury an almost intimate thing. But Katherine had declared herself publicly, ensuring the worst thing Jude could do was leave her alone. If he stepped away – as BenRuin silently demanded – he would ruin her utterly.
He pulled her closer and brushed one gloved hand across her face. Her eyes closed as he covered and uncovered them, like a cat giving itself over to being stroked. Her eyes opened again, and were hot and golden.
Let them all see it: the Duke of Darlington was smitten.
He stood out the next two dances with Katherine close and warm by his side. It was a statement – he fully endorsed Katherine Sutherland’s claim to him. But more than that, it was how it had to be. If she was here, then he would be here beside her.
Lydia brought Porkie over when Katherine caught her eye, and Katherine handed Jude the leash and said, ‘Here’s a little pig who missed you terribly. Don’t ever leave him behind again.’
He barely had a chance to reply, because the same people who had given him a wide berth earlier were suddenly unbearably curious. Men he had known most of his life, powerful men who struggled to puzzle out the pieces of their own lives – estate, income, wife, mistress, nightmares, triumphs, bloody despair – so that they would fit in some sensible way, tried and failed to make sense of Katherine. They could understand only that Darlington had called something extraordinary to himself, and that they couldn’t do the same. She made them uneasy, the way Jude had always made people uneasy, and she stood by his side.
She seemed to have gathered arrogance around her like armour. She cared so little for the opinions of these people that they became desperate to please. She looked down her nose at Castlereagh and spoke to Clarence in that clear, cutting fashion Jude knew so well.
Clarence looked struck, as Jude had been struck the first time she spoke to him.
He pulled her a little closer. She was his – she had declared herself publicly and couldn’t take it back.
Barton came and spoke to Jude, and he kept a speculative eye on Katherine and called her ‘niece’. He listened more readily to Jude than he would have otherwise, and they agreed to meet tomorrow at the club, with some of Barton’s cronies. Barton didn’t have a lot of power in Parliament, but it was a beginning. It was headway, made by speaking directly to people instead of manipulating them into action.
He looked sideways at Katherine and couldn’t help an evil grin. He had her to manipulate people for him now, apparently.
‘Katherine,’ he said, low and drawn out and warm. He watched the shiver play over her skin. ‘Did you buy your ancestry back just for me?’
‘Of course I did,’ she said, without looking at him. ‘Idiot. You could hardly have married a nobody from the country.’
‘A shame you couldn’t rustle up a fortune from thin air as well.’
‘Not yet,’ she said.
BenRuin came not long after, and wouldn’t look at Jude.
‘We’re going home now, Kit,’ he said. ‘Come.’
Jude would eviscerate him. He opened his mouth to punish BenRuin for speaking to Katherine – his Katherine – like a dog being called to heel. Katherine’s warm, naked fingers closed around his wrist and held him quiet.
She pulled gently on him, and he turned to her.
‘Good night, love,’ she said, and smiled for only him in all the world.
He would have argued – letting her leave him now felt like an argument he was losing spectacularly – but she looked tired. She had not been brought up knowing she was superior to every other being on earth.
He hadn’t been sure, when BenRuin was on his way to the Manor, that he could take Katherine’s strength for himself. He knew it now.
‘Good night,’ he said, and watched her refuse BenRuin’s arm and walk on her own out the door in long strides.
Kit paced her bedroom and her body shuddered and shook. She was exhausted. She was spilling energy into the quiet night.
She kept seeing his face, over and over. She was remembering the exquisite pain of being held by him and not held. His lips brushing her exposed wrist. His eyes burning up with need.
So close now.
She just had to win against Lady Marmotte.
If she lost, he would probably marry her anyway. She didn’t think either of them would be any good without the other. But she would be an embarrassment, a liability. And that bloody Marmotte woman would only have more ammunition to bring against him.
He could lose everything, and she wasn’t nearly stupid enough to think that she could weigh against so much loss.
Her window slid open. Jude said, ‘Bugger,’ and fell over the sill on to the floor.
BenRuin had been watching Lydia all evening – ever since Katherine had —
He shook his head, watched his wife pour herself a large brandy and scrub a self-conscious hand through her hair.
She didn’t
seem
upset.
She was a little bit like a stranger to him, since she’d cut off her hair. It was unsettling – put him on his toes around her, made him desperate, all over again, to please her. She was different from the icy, perfectly coiffed woman he’d lived with for more than a year. She was prickly and approachable and she flushed when he came near. He didn’t always know what to say, and her eyes were still wary most of the time, but they both
wanted
, and he didn’t think that had ever been true before.
They wanted this uncomfortable, awkward, warm thing.
‘Care for a drink,
husband
?’ she said, holding up the decanter. She used to invest that word with ironic scorn. It was still ironic, but there was a kind of defiance to her now.
You are my husband
, she seemed to say.
Do you have a problem with that?
The gorgeous, belligerent thing.
‘Please,’ he said, and lounged against the wall across from her.
When she handed him his glass, he closed his fingers around hers, and waited until she looked up at him. And as hard as she had been trying lately, he could see in her eyes how part of her was desperate to escape the warm clasp of his hand.
‘Are you upset?’ he asked, making his voice as gentle as he could.
‘What are you talking about, James? Should I be —? Have you done something to – you didn’t let Tobin buy Mrs Church that horrible cheap-looking brooch, did you? Will none of you listen? A mermaid wearing seashells is a terrible present, even when the seashells are made of diamonds.’ She said that last loudly, and as though she’d said it a hundred times already and been roundly contradicted each time.
For a stunned second he had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Katherine and Darlington,’ he said stupidly, and with far less tact than he’d intended. ‘It was so public and he seems to be honouring. Well. And you. And he.’ He clenched his free hand against the wall and was carefully not violent at all. ‘If he broke your heart,’ he said through his teeth, ‘I will break his face.’
‘Oh, James,’ she said.
His head cracked around to her as though she’d slapped him.
She looked the same as always, and he wondered if he’d imagined that loose tenderness.
She slipped her hand from his, and for a moment he thought she was going to leave – always just beyond him, just out of his grasp. But then she started talking, and he realised she simply needed her hands for gesturing, because Lydia really loved to speak and she would use her whole body to do it if she could.
‘Darlington is not a man you fall in love with – unless you’re Kit, I suppose, but she has terrible taste in just about everything, so it shouldn’t surprise any of us, really. In fact,’ she said, warming to her theme, ‘Darlington is about as tacky as that mermaid brooch. He has been worn all about town, and is a terrible flirt, and terribly insecure, of course. What do you think of me,
husband
? You should know by now that I have impeccable taste.’
She was being careful, and her hands were now clutched up in her skirts, but he didn’t know if he could be careful back. It made even less sense than before.
‘Then why —’ He bit the words back. Bit his tongue and tasted blood. Clean, simple. Blood he understood.
‘I didn’t love him,’ she said. ‘So it didn’t matter.’
He breathed heavily and let the implications of that unfurl through him. When he finally looked at her, she was closer than he’d expected.
‘You always
mattered
too much, James,’ she said, her voice a little unsure.
He closed his eyes. Forced himself to be calm.
‘Don’t do it again,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘Please never do it again.’
There was a deep silence, and then she said, ‘Very well.’
Clean, simple.
She touched his arm and his eyes flew open. She looked white and determined – with nothing like the flushed abandon he imagined when he brought himself off thinking about her.
He stayed very still, and let her stroke her hand up his arm and close her fingers around his shoulder. God, those expressive hands that could barely span him.
When he didn’t move, hardly dared breathe, she came closer, and placed her other hand against his chest. It was such an unconscious, trusting gesture. It became easier to keep himself from pulling her tight against him.
He would be gentle for as long as it took. He would show her that she could trust him. Sex was not the first, or even second thing he wanted most from her.
Her lips touched his – dry, almost chaste.
Christ though, he did want.
He raised his hand, and when she didn’t shy away he touched the backs of his fingers to her throat and stroked her. He leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers again; this time it was more like a kiss.
Then he let her go.
There was something very like disappointment in her eyes, and his face broke into a grin. He couldn’t hold it back.
‘I suppose you may come and read to me a little,’ she said. ‘I haven’t the patience for it, but Tom’s new book is said to be exceptionally good. I will tell you when I’m tired and don’t need you any more. And then you may kiss me goodnight, if you wish.’
God, he’d never met a woman as ballsy as she. Except her sister. Maybe it was a Sutherland thing.
She swept out of the room, expecting him to follow like an obedient pet, and he had every intention of doing so when Tobin caught his arm outside the door.
‘James,’ he said in a low voice, when he was sure Lydia couldn’t hear.
‘Unless half of Scotland is on fire,’ said James, ‘now is not the time.’
‘I think it might be worse. Darlington’s carriage is out in the mews.’
‘I came because —’ Jude said, and Kit had him up against the wall and forced his mouth open with a kiss.
She could hear the desperate sounds she was making, and she almost pulled back, but then he moaned, deep and helpless into her mouth, and she pushed harder into him, and tried to take every bit of that sound from his lips and tongue.
They hadn’t been able to do this in the ballroom, when they were touching for the first time in weeks. He leaned back into the wall, taking some of her weight onto himself as he enveloped her in his arms.
His shoulders, his chest, his arms, his hands, all worked on her, strong and insistent, pulling her closer, always closer. A firm, possessive grasp around her nape, dissolving into gentle fingertips stroking up under her jaw. He pulled her into the hot wet of his mouth.
Her hands curled around his collars, crushed them in her fingers.
She only realised when he pulled her head back from his that he’d wrapped her long hair tight around his arm, and she couldn’t move her head an inch without his permission.
‘These breeches,’ he said, and his other hand stroked over her hip, on to the swell of her arse. He pushed one of his legs between hers and pulled her tighter in against him. He didn’t stop stroking her – thigh, hip, arse – and the sensation of skin on almost-skin made her want to, need to, arch her back, let her head fall, eyes fall closed.
But his grip on her hair was implacable.
He stroked up inside her shirt, his hand flat and warm against her back. When he stroked back down, pulling her even closer in, he started rubbing himself against her.
‘They’re so fucking indecent,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about this all evening.’
Her lips opened in desperate need, and she pulled, hard, on his collars.
He pulled back on her hair just to the point of pain, to keep her face an inch from his. Like they were caught in a contest. His whole body was the warm, subtle clench of muscles. She couldn’t look away from the expression on his face.
His free hand closed around the front of her throat. Even with the things he was doing to her, there was something unbearably intimate about the intent way he watched her – the way his palm felt the mechanism of her body every time she swallowed. His thumb stroked her bottom lip, a slow, smearing slide of skin.
‘You are mine,’ he said, each word distinct.
She glared back at him, struggled against his hold. He pulled harder so that her whole scalp stung. She was alone with him and he was not gentle. He was not kind. He was not simple, or easy.
She loved him so desperately it was a kind of disease in her.
‘Kiss me, you bastard,’ she said.
She was suddenly free to move, and she slammed her hands against his chest, shoving him into the wall. He shoved back.
They kissed, and she was becoming lost in him, and kissing wasn’t enough.
She felt his arm moving between them, and he unbuttoned the fall of her breeches with practised ease. His fingers found the slit in her underclothes. She fell still against him, her face in his neck, and the only thing in all the world was the slick, combing slide of his fingertips.
He pulled her easily in and held her, and did not relent.
It disconcerted her, still, how he was different this close. The man who sat across the room reading the paper in careless, aristocratic tones was not the same man whose breath was loud against her ear, whose skin was damp against her lips, whose chest moved hard against hers.
He began to murmur her name. He gathered her closer and his voice was unguarded, and she didn’t know how it was possible for the one man to be so achingly sweet when his fingers were so unforgiving.
But then, this man was Jude.
Her body remembered movement, and tried to express her need. She touched her fingers to his lips and felt the slide of her own tongue when she kissed him.
He reached down to unbutton his trousers; she realised for the first time that they were both still fully clothed – boots, waistcoats, coats snug around their shoulders, the fall of coat-tails taking up their desperate movement. His cravat and collars crushed, his lips bruised red.
His arm swift and sure between them.
He didn’t apologise, or try to make this more comfortable. His eyes were deep and unshuttered.
She could barely move, his arms too tight around her, her breeches around her thighs. Nothing to distract her from being tangled up with Jude, as he buried his head in her neck, and pushed himself naked inside her, and made a sound she would never, ever forget.
Jude’s forearms rested on the sheet, taking some of his weight off Katherine. He pushed her hair back from her face with both hands and kissed her temple, her cheek, the corner of her lips, her neck.
Even the warm, languorous press of his mouth against her, even the way his body covered hers, was inadequate to express this.
He leaned over the side of the bed and pulled something from the breast pocket of his coat. He tied the ribbon around her neck, and let the heavy iron key lie flat between her breasts. She flinched when it touched her skin.
‘A key to the Grosvenor Square house?’ she asked, her voice a debauched scrape that made his whole body tense in delight. The sounds she had made. The absolute abandon that had meant he was not alone, even when he was entirely, viciously himself.
‘It’s what I came here to give you,’ he said, and kissed her again.
He hissed when the cold iron was pressed between their chests, and she laughed into his mouth and pushed him off. He lay on his stomach beside her.
‘What is it, then?’ she said, twisting it between her fingers. The dull grey surface hardly reflected any light.
‘That’s what Lady Marmotte wants,’ he said. ‘You could turn up at the game with five hundred thousand, and it still wouldn’t be enough.’
Kit sat up, her movements sharp. ‘What does it unlock?’
He said, ‘Proof that my father could never have fathered me, of course.’
She went very, very still, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t pretend she hadn’t heard, or make him repeat what he had practised saying so that he could say it as if it didn’t matter.
‘The box is held by my solicitors. Nobody living knows what’s in it but you and me. Lady Marmotte suspects – God, there have been rumours my whole life – but she has no solid proof.’
‘Jude,’ she said. ‘You have to destroy – what is it, papers?’
‘The steward’s papers from Holbrook Park. Entirely innocuous, unless you know what you’re looking at. The Duke’s signature on countless pieces of paper; requests, disputes, invoices. Over a six-month period during which he could have had no access to my mother, if he was at Holbrook Park.’
‘Why haven’t you destroyed them?’
He felt his lips twist into the familiar pattern of self-loathing. ‘I didn’t even know – not for sure – until Father died and I inherited his personal papers. I went through everything, searching for the smallest hint of affection. I had the mad idea that he might have written to me in secret. Something to prove that he was a stoic bastard but, I don’t know, beneath it all . . .’ He let his hand gesture his meaning. ‘Instead, I found irrefutable proof that he hated me. I find I can’t bring myself to destroy it quite yet.’
‘What was your father’s full name?’
He looked up in surprise. ‘Hallam St John Augustus Durham.’