Thank Christ.
It was real, and he had made his choice.
She was his, and he was not letting her go. There would be no annulment. There would be no turning her over to the Home Office. She was his wife, and he had planted his cock and his seed inside her to solidify that claim.
His actions ought to fill him with a deep sense of shame, for he loved his brother and he loved the League, and his duty to the Crown had always come first, without a single regret on Leo’s part. And the shame was there, undeniable, salt poured into a festering wound. But it also filled him with an equally deep sense of satisfaction, for he cared about Bridget O’Malley in ways that terrified him more than facing a hundred Fenian bombs about to detonate did.
For the first time in all his years in service to the Crown, Leo faced a conundrum.
A rather unusual and troubling conundrum.
He wanted Bridget in his life, at his side, as his wife, more than he wanted to run the League. If he could not have her and the League both—and his formidable sense of honor said he could not—then he would need to give up the League. His mouth went dry at the thought.
But then the door to the bathing chamber opened, and the soft sound of bare feet padding toward him on carpet reached his ears the moment before Bridget appeared, black hair wet and trailing down her back, clad once more in her chemise. Even in the dim light, the dampness of her skin rendered her chemise transparent. He could clearly see the fullness of her breasts, the dark-pink peaks of her nipples, the mound between her legs.
Her eyes went wide as a furious blush stained her cheeks. “Oh! Leo. I… You are awake.”
He thought of how responsive she had been, how she had given him exactly what he needed—a combination of stubborn defiance and delicious submission—and how she had been wild and unashamed in her sensuality. The image of her cupping her breasts and pinching her nipples as he licked her pearl made him hard all over again. He stifled a groan, shifting beneath the blankets to alleviate his discomfort.
“I am very much awake,” he said wryly. This woman was made for him, and she was his Achilles’ heel. They had much to discuss, for he knew she remained distrustful toward him, and she had not divulged everything she knew to him. He would need to change that.
“I had a bath,” she said softly. “You needed your rest, and I didn’t wish to wake you.”
He noted how she hovered awkwardly on the periphery of the chamber. “Come here, Bridget.”
He had not been certain, knowing her as he did, if she would accept his command or if she would show him her stubborn side. To his surprise, she listened, crossing the chamber and not stopping until she reached his bedside. She smelled of his soap and shampoo, and his scent upon her made his cockstand even harder.
“We can still have the marriage annulled,” she said on a rush.
He caught her hand and tugged her gently, forcing her to join him on the bed. With his free hand, he swept a few stray wet tendrils of hair from her face. “I meant what I said. You are mine now. There will be no annulment.”
Her gaze searched his, her expression troubled. He leaned forward and kissed the furrow between her brows to make it smooth. A raw, unprecedented surge of tenderness hit him as he looked at her. With her hair wet, her face pale, clad in only a thin scrap of linen, she was more vulnerable than he had ever seen her before. Not even when she had been injured had she been so open to him.
But she was still troubled. “It was a moment of weakness for both of us, I suspect. You need not fear I will expect you to bind yourself to me forever because of one mistake.”
“It was not a mistake.” He caressed her silken cheek, the contact of her skin beneath his sending a fresh tug of desire to his groin. For this woman, he was weak. From the moment he had first laid eyes on her, it had been that way, and nothing—not discovering the truth, not her mad antics on behalf of her cause—nothing changed that. “I want you as my wife. Our situation is a complicated one, I will grant you, but if you are honest with me, I can formulate a plan of battle. I can see we both make it through this unscathed.”
It was not precisely what he meant to say, and as soon as the words left him and she stiffened beneath his touch, he knew it had been the wrong choice. “Did you bed me so I would tell you everything you want to know?”
“No.” Damn it, was that all she thought of him? Why would she give her body to a man she did not trust? He caught her chin in a gentle yet demanding grip when she would have looked away. “I bedded you because I have been half mad with wanting you from the first time I saw you. I want to help you, Bridget. I can help you. But you need to trust me.”
“Trust you,” she repeated. “How can I? You are the man who threatened to take me to jail, who told me he would break me. Namhaid, you are my enemy.”
Bridget O’Malley was like a wild creature, ready to take flight or claw her way to the death if she must. He wanted to protect her. To soothe and console her. To wrap her in his arms and let her know she would never need to fight alone again, that he would fight for her now. That they could fight together, for each other.
He did the only thing he could think of doing then, lowering his mouth to claim hers. The kiss began chastely, but she opened beneath him, moaning, and his tongue sank inside to tangle with hers. Chaste was not a word that existed between Bridget and Leo. She was his, and the sooner she admitted it, the sooner she resigned herself to that fact, the better for the both of them. Thus far, they had been attacking their mutual problem as opposites. But if they worked together, they would be stronger, the outcome far better.
And he needed that outcome the same way he needed her. He had not experienced such an overwhelming need for a woman before her, aside from Jane, and even that had been a mere flickering candle compared to the raging inferno he felt for Bridget. She had changed him.
He tore his mouth from hers when everything in him screamed to deepen the kiss. “I am not your enemy, Bridget. I am your husband. I mean those words more than I have meant any others I have ever spoken.”
She stared at him, her lips swollen with his kisses, bright eyes solemn. “You are a duke, Leo. I am the illegitimate daughter of a Dublin tavern wench. I believe in Irish Home Rule, and you are determined to do everything in your power to stop it. Even if I were to trust you, I do not see how we can overlook such vast differences.”
She was not wrong about the obstacles facing them, but being himself, he had already begun weighing all their options in the days before he had taken ill. It was what he did—he planned, studied, strategized, researched, worked to get to the heart of a problem and pluck it out by its root. None of the barriers were insurmountable. There was a way around everything if one was daring and creative enough to do it.
“Look at me, Bridget O’Malley Carlisle,” he commanded, refusing to allow her eyes to stray from his. “I am a duke, but you are my duchess. I do not care who or what you were before we wed. And even if I did, I am the son of a woman who has never cared for another person in her entire life. How is it my right to judge anyone else? She bore me out of duty, and when I was a child, she hurt me in spite and with a selfish need to garner attention for herself. I come from a poisoned union. I too believe in Irish Home Rule, and the only thing I am attempting to stop is the subversive campaign of violence being waged by those who mistakenly think killing innocents is the means by which they will obtain their goals.”
The furrow between her brows had returned, but this time it was deeper. “Your mother hurt you?”
He had not intended to mention his mother’s sins. Indeed, it had happened so long ago, and unlike the dark moods that continued to plague him, he had become adept at keeping that awful part of his past from his mind. “Yes.”
This time, her touch was on him, gentle and comforting. Her fingers on his jaw. “Tell me, Leo.”
He closed his eyes, a wave of nausea returning to him along with remembrance. Purging it from his mind, forgetting it had ever happened, had been th
e means by which he had carried on with his life ever since his father had banished her to the Continent after the last time. He did not realize he was trembling until he felt Bridget’s arms close around him. Until she urged his head to rest above her solidly thumping heart. Until her hand stroked lovingly over his hair, again and again.
He would not embarrass himself by weeping.
He would not.
“Leo,” she whispered. “Tell me, please.”
“When I was a lad, I suffered from violent illnesses,” he began, hating to revisit the hideousness of his past and yet feeling somehow soothed by unburdening himself to her. “I would be healthy one day, and the next, I was violently ill, vomiting, unable to hold down any food, covered in a rash. It went on for years. Sometimes, I was healthy for a year at a time. When I was away at Eton, I was hale as a horse. And then I would return home, only to grow ill again. My—Mrs. Ludlow, my brother Clay’s mother, she suspected my mother after a time and had her watched.
“My mother was soaking fly papers to obtain the arsenic in them and poisoning my food. The doses were always small enough to make me ill and never kill me, but…she was not kind to me, and I always knew she had no love for me. The day her treachery was revealed was the day I realized my own mother loathed me.”
“Oh, leannán.” Her arms tightened around him. “I am so very sorry. I have heard of such a thing, mothers poisoning their own babes, but I never could have imagined…”
He pulled back, made uncomfortable by his revelations. Aside from Clay, their father, Lily, and the dowager Duchess of Carlisle, no one else had ever known the truth. His father had forced his mother to leave for the Continent in exchange for not sending her to jail for her crimes, fearing the scandal and the harm it would cause his family.
“I do not want you to pity me,” he said hoarsely. “It was a long time ago. I only told you so you would see that I may have been born to become the Duke of Carlisle, but I too have my demons. I am no better than you. No different.”
“I do not pity you.” Her gaze searched his, her hand cupping his jaw once more to stroke it gently. “I ache for you. I ache knowing the one woman who should have loved you and protected you most was the one who was doing you harm. How dare she do such a thing to you? If she were here now, I would claw her eyes out for hurting you. I would take my knife and—”
He silenced his fierce warrior wife with his mouth, kissing the rest of her words away. Kissing her and kissing her, with gratitude and tenderness and raw, pure need. He kissed her as if this was their first and their last, putting all of himself into it, trying to show her how much her compassion meant to him.
How much she meant to him.
He pulled his lips away and pressed his forehead to hers. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you for sharing that part of you with me.” She kissed him slowly, tenderly. “Thank you for reliving your pain to tell me the truth. I am so very sorry, mo chroí.”
My heart, she had called him. He knew enough of the language of her homeland thanks to intercepted dispatches and various communications he had received, both ciphered and raw.
Leo pulled back to take her in, her midnight hair drying in luscious skeins of curls around her face, her retroussé nose and blue eyes and pink lips utter perfection. “What does that mean, those words you said just now?”
She did not hesitate. “My parsnip.” Her nostrils flared, almost imperceptibly.
His lips twitched. The woman would never learn her lesson. He kissed her again. “Mayhap one day soon, you will trust me enough to tell me the truth. Until then, I am, as ever, your faithfully devoted parsnip.”
Bridget stared at him, eyes wide like a doe caught in the wilderness. For a moment, he thought she would turn and flee. But then her lush mouth rippled with mirth. The smile she gave him was roguish. “I trust you, my faithfully devoted parsnip, else I would not be here. But this is difficult for me. I have been alone for so long, and you are the embodiment of everything I have always believed was wrong.”
Her confession should not have felt like a blade between his ribs, but it somehow did. Despite what she said, she was not ready or willing to trust him entirely. Not in the way he would need her to if they were to both make it through his plan unscathed. And in Leo’s mind, anything less was unacceptable.
She would not make this easy, but then, she had never made anything easy between them. Not from the day they had first crossed paths. And he had wanted her all the more for it.
“You are not alone any longer,” he told her, and he had never meant words more. “I am your husband, and I will do everything in my power to keep you safe.”
A shadow of something—worry, or perhaps fear—darkened her countenance before flitting away once more. Her lips compressed for a moment to a fine line, almost as if she struggled with herself. “My heart,” she said on a rush. “Mo chroí means my heart.”
“I already knew that,” he confessed. The feeling they had crossed boundaries, that they had made definitive, real progress, could not be subdued. Hope rose within him, hope they could make their union work. That she would open to him. Trust him. And hope that one day, if he were so fortunate, she would love him as he loved her.
He stilled. His heart stilled. Everything in him stopped. Froze.
He did not love Bridget.
No.
He lusted after her. He liked her. He admired her, yes. He respected her mind and her cunning and stubborn determination. He enjoyed her naked beneath him in bed. Her cunny was a thing of devious, devilish magic, and he could not wait to sink inside it once more. She had been so tight and wet, and she had milked him dry of every last drop.
His cock surged beneath the bedclothes, demanding attention.
All those things were true. But love? Love was a fantasy, a fiction, an implausibility. It was a chimera latched on to by few who truly experienced it, and millions more who never had a chance of finding it. Rarer than a diamond. More dear than gold. Love was impossible.
“What else do you know?” she asked him, dashing his thoughts with her honeyed voice.
And that was the precise moment he knew for certain. As he sat there in bed, wrapped in her embrace, their lips a breath away from the next soul-searing kiss, nothing between them but her chemise and her determination to cling to her homeland loyalties, the most stunning, staggering, horribly awful realization struck him. It happened in much the same manner he imagined a man about to be run down by an omnibus experienced. One moment, he was on his feet, alive, going about his day, and the next, he was staring down his own demise, unable to move in time.
Boom, he was struck. The force of the blow sent him reeling. He flew through the air figuratively, landing on his metaphorical arse in a pile of allegorical horse dung.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He loved her.
He loved Bridget O’Malley, the Duchess of Carlisle, and there was no turning back now.
“I know that I want you.” It was the most honesty he could give her for now.
Until he determined where they stood—and where he would stand with the League, given his marriage to a known Fenian sympathizer, who had a brother in jail for plotting the death of the Chief Secretary for Ireland—he did not dare offer more. He could not hide the facts from the Home Office and his agents forever.
Everything had changed for him now their marriage had been consummated. The truth would have to be faced, and when it was, he had no doubt he would pay a substantial price.
But that day had not yet come, and Bridget was all soft, warm, womanly curves in his arms. Her lips were only a scant inch from his, awaiting his possession. Repercussions could wait. For now, he had her, and while he had once considered her a burden, he now saw her for the gift she was, the light to his darkness. So he kissed her again.
She made a sweet sound of surrender, her mouth moving with a frenzy to match his own, her arms twining around his neck. The weight of his responsibilities and duties fell away, replaced by
her silken skin, her lush lips, her tongue moving against his. They would find a way, he vowed. He would save them both.
Their kisses deepened, hands rediscovering each other’s bodies as though they had not just made love mere hours before. She was on his lap, her chemise riding high around her creamy thighs, legs splayed. Through the bedclothes, his straining cock pressed into the moist heat of her core, and he could not resist thrusting into that delicious friction. Wanting more, needing more.
He swallowed down her moan, coasted his palms up her hips, skin on skin as she rocked against him. Her body had been awakened, and though he had been no innocent, in a sense, his had as well. Never before had he experienced such a deep, abiding need. A hunger so fierce it threatened to shatter him into a thousand jagged pieces of himself. Desire so potent it made him forget everything and everyone but her.
His hands were on her waist now, guiding her as she ground against his cock like she was riding him. Oh how he wished she were, her tight, drenched cunny clenching him like a fist. But she was likely sore, he reminded himself, and he had no wish to bruise the tender flesh which had only been breached for the first time that morning. There would be more mornings, more nights—a lifetime of them—to satiate the desire roaring through him.
This was about Bridget. About giving her pleasure. About watching her come undone. He kissed down her throat, licked her ear, tongued the smooth dip behind it until she gasped, writhing against him. Then lower, a starving man attempting to consume the feast laid before him. Through the fine barrier of her chemise, he latched on to a nipple and sucked.
She caught fistfuls of it and yanked it over her head until she was naked. He allowed himself the glorious pleasure of looking upon her for a moment. Her midnight hair was a wild tumble down her back, her eyes were wide, pupils dilated, mouth swollen from kisses. She had not stopped moving over his cock, and with each aching pass, her breasts, full and tipped with hard pink nipples, swayed like offerings. Her cunny was spread over him, glistening with the evidence of her renewed desire, the sweet jewel hidden in her folds visible with her every undulation, then hidden again.
Heartless Duke Page 20
