His fingers dipped into her folds, giving her the pressure she wanted, rubbing over her in fast, delicious whorls. He kissed his way to her ear, licking, biting. “You are mine forever, banshee.” Down her throat next, sucking, raking his teeth along her sensitive skin. He reached her breasts, suckling one peak into his mouth.
“Yes,” she cried out, the hot suction sending a surge of wetness to her core. She felt it seep from her, and then his finger was there, slicking the moisture over her channel, delving inside her. His thumb found her pearl as he stroked, bringing her to the precipice with such ease.
“Say it,” he urged, quickening his pace, a second finger joining the first. He sucked her other nipple. Nipped it.
“Oh, Leo.” She clenched on him, the first spasm beginning to unfurl. Bliss, white-hot and uncontrollable, tore through her as she gave in, riding his fingers, watching him suckle her breast. “I am yours. Forever.” Her voice cracked. Her body cracked—perhaps even her soul cracked—as the rush slammed into her. Pure, molten release.
And then his fingers were gone, replaced by the thick head of him. Her legs opened wider, hips tipping to welcome him. He slid home in one quick, deep thrust. They sighed as one at the beauty of it.
He was inside her, and she was stretched wide, filled. The last strains of her climax ebbed. But then he kissed her again, and he moved, withdrawing almost entirely so only the tip of him remained inside her. For a moment, her flesh was hungry, bereft, longing. He slammed into her again.
“Forever,” he whispered into her mouth, withdrawing his cock.
In his low, delicious baritone, it was a promise, a prayer, and a benediction all in one. “Yes.”
“Always.” He thrust once more.
It was slow, steady torture of the most depraved and divine sort. She could do nothing but meet him halfway, with her words as well as with her body. “Always.”
He pulled back until he slid from her body entirely, his pulsing cock against her slick entry. “Promise me you trust me enough to always seek me out first. If you are in danger, if you are in trouble, come to me Bridget.”
She closed her eyes, unable to meet his gaze when she made a promise she was bound to break. “I promise.”
His clever fingers found her pearl once more, working the swollen nub as his cock stroked over where she wanted him most, denying her and torturing her at once. “Look me in the eye when you make me your promise, Bridget Carlisle.”
Her eyes opened at his command, at the intensity of his voice. His handsome face was harsh, jaw a grim, tense angle. His eyes seemed to see straight through her. For a moment, she was convinced he knew she would leave him. That he knew no matter how much she loved him, no matter how well he pleasured her, she would always be a Fenian, and he would always be the man bound by his honor, duty, and loyalty to a Crown that sought to keep her homeland beneath its thumb.
“Bridget.” Something in his expression shifted then. Some of the severity faded. He seemed softer somehow. More vulnerable. “I love you.”
His words stole her breath. She stared at him, stricken, feeling as if she had just been hit by a locomotive. But then he moved, flexed his hips, and he was inside her once more, deep, so deep. And she was helpless, so helpless.
“I love you too, Leo,” she confessed.
He stilled for a beat. It was as if time stopped. There was only the two of them, ensnared in each other’s gazes, reveling in the enormity of their shared emotions. He loved her. She loved him. They loved each other.
His mouth was on hers. She kissed him back with the desperation clawing up from within her. He moved again, thrusting in and out, faster, harder, his fingers working their magic. She came apart violently, her body tightening on his, shaking beneath his onslaught, and it was even more beautiful than before. One more surge of his cock inside her, and he stiffened, crying out his release as a burst of warmth rushed inside her.
In the aftermath of their wild joining, he untied her, kissed her wrists, and carried her to the bath. They bathed in the massive tub, Leo at one end and Bridget at the other. He washed her as if she were a child, incapable of taking care of herself. And she let him, trying to erase from her mind all memory of the promise she could never keep. They had each other for now, these stolen, precious moments.
It would have to be enough.
Chapter Eighteen
Leo arrived at the residence of the Duke of Strathmore obscenely early the next morning. A bleary-eyed butler greeted him and led him to Strathmore’s billiards room. He had not sent word ahead of his visit, but it did not matter. Griffin, a fellow League member and one of Leo’s most trusted men, suffered from a familiar problem—an aversion to sleep. Regardless of the time of day or night Leo called upon him, Griffin was always awake.
With night came the demons lingering in a mind’s darkened shadows.
Leo knew it all too well.
So it was no surprise when he entered the billiards room to find Griffin wearing rumpled white shirtsleeves and black trousers from the night before. He was sprawled in an overstuffed chair, cup of coffee in hand.
“Carlisle,” he greeted, shifting as if to rise.
Leo held up a staying hand as he crossed the threshold. “Do not stand on my account.” He settled into a chair opposite him and waited for the butler to disappear, leaving them alone, before continuing. “Rough evening, Strathmore?”
Griffin’s lip curled. “Rough year would perhaps be more apt. I have not slept in three days, and I am thinking if I go a fourth, I’ll be sticking my spoon in the wall at last.”
“Not as soon as that, I hope,” he said mildly, accustomed to the duke’s grim moods, for they so often mirrored his own. Trauma had a way of tearing a man apart from the inside out. “You are one of the best men the League has.”
“The ranks of your soldiers are declining.” Strathmore raised a brow. “First Trent and Leeds. Now your own brother. Who will be next to go? You?”
It was not out of the question. He held Griffin’s stare, unflinching.
Griffin sat up straighter, sloshing hot coffee over his hand in the process. “Goddamn,” he howled, reaching for a napkin and frantically dabbing at his reddened skin. “A fine morning this is. I’ve burned myself, and you are sitting before me, telling me you are leaving the bloody League.”
There it was, the vocalization of the realizations that had been swirling through him ever since he had married Bridget. Realizations he had been reluctant to acknowledge, for the way they would necessarily rearrange his life as he knew it.
He expected to feel a tremor of uncertainty hearing those words aloud for the first time. Certainly, he had anticipated he would feel the lash of fear, the bitter sting of regret. Some trepidation at the gaping maws of change facing him. The League had been his life for over fifteen years. It had been his albatross and his momentum, his saving grace and his dogged duty.
Instead, where the heaviness in his heart ought to lay, he felt only lightness. He was not the same man he had been when his sense of duty had led him into the League. If he needed to leave now, he was prepared. There had been a time when he had clung to it as if it were his life source because he had been terrified of who and what he would be without its comforting force.
But comfort could so easily turn into a cage. Comfort had a limiting effect on what and who a person could be. And he found he no longer wanted to be Carlisle, the leader of the Special League, the man who was owned by his duty and his toils, the man who had no time for a wife or a family of his own. For little Bridgets and tiny Leos. He wanted those babes, goddamn it. With her.
He just needed to be able to trust her first. To convince her she could trust him.
“Are you going to deign to answer me, Carlisle, or are you going to remain silent and brooding, interrupting my morning coffee?” Strathmore asked insolently.
He sighed. “My departure from the League may be a necessity.”
“Sodding hell.” The duke made a wild gesticulation
with his cup, resulting in another shower of scalding liquid, this time raining on his lap. “Fuck.”
“Always a man of scintillating conversation.” Leo could not resist the jibe. Even so, he was concerned. Strathmore was a decided ruin this morning, more so than he had been of late. “Are the nightmares growing worse?”
Once, heavily influenced by whisky, Strathmore had confessed he still suffered nightmares from his time in captivity in Paris more than a decade before.
“To Hades with the nightmares, Carlisle. Tell me you are not leaving the League.”
He pondered the notion of his departure yet again, turning it around in his mind, and any angle from which he approached it, he only felt surprisingly free. Content. At peace.
“I cannot tell you that, and I will explain why directly.” He paused. “First, I must have your promise everything I am about to share will remain between the two of us alone. I am keeping the Home Office and the rest of the League in the dark. If you find issue with that, advise me now, and I will take my leave.”
“I am loyal to you,” Strathmore assured him darkly. “Though only Christ knows why. Tell me what the hell is going on, if you please.”
He took a deep breath. “I married a Fenian.”
Strathmore, who had the misfortune to have just taken a sip of coffee, spat the dark liquid into the air and all over his already besmirched trousers. “Tell me you are jesting! I beg you.”
“Capital thing that your trousers are black,” he observed, perhaps unkindly. “And no, I am not jesting. Nor would I about a matter so grave.”
“Why? How? Jesus, I had not even realized you’d wedded anyone. Did she hold a pistol to your head? Threaten to slit your throat? Cudgel you over the head and give you amnesia?”
He was not surprised Griffin was unaware of his matrimonial state. He had not bandied it about. In general, aside from his libidinous parties, he kept to himself. He showed a façade to London and threw himself into his work for the League. Few people, aside from those who had attended his ill-fated fête and the Duke and Duchess of Trent, knew he had a wife at all.
“I married her to save her,” he said then, realized as he said the words aloud it was the truth. He had not married her because the Duke of Trent had forced his hand. He had married her because he had seen in her the other half of his heart, and he had been selfish and greedy, and he’d allowed his avarice to triumph over even his duty to the League. “But first, I shot her. I had received information she was involved with the ring of Fenians responsible for planning and carrying out the Phoenix Park murders.”
“Holy God, Carlisle.” Griffin gaped at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You are truly the madman everyone says you are.”
“Yes,” he agreed, inclining his head, “I am. And you, my friend, ought to seek out church this Sunday. I cannot help but feel you and the Lord have some grievances to work out. Your language certainly suggests it.”
“You married a bloodthirsty Fenian, and you are suddenly concerned about the state of my soul?” Strathmore chuckled. “I shall worry about my eternal damnation and leave you to fret over yours. I cannot help but think wedding and protecting a murderess is a far greater sin.”
“Take care. You are speaking of my duchess.” Those his tone was calm, beneath his skin raged a seething, protective inferno. He would allow no man to disparage his woman before him. Not even if it was a man whose aid he needed to recruit. “And she has never murdered anyone.”
At least, not that he was aware of. Good God, what a thought. He ought to be troubled this omission did not concern him more than it did. But the heart was a strange and fickle organ, and it loved who it loved. And he loved Bridget. Christ, how he loved her.
“You said she has ties to the ring responsible for the Phoenix Park assassinations,” Griffin reminded him, outrage underscoring his tone. “How can you defend such a creature?”
It was a question that had plagued him initially, driving him mad as he sought the answer, so he did not hold the asking of it against the duke. “I believe the ties are forced. Her brother is Cullen O’Malley, one of the ring of suspects imprisoned for the plots. I believe her connection to the ring extends from him.”
“You believe.” No fool, even though he looked like hell and had just passed several sleepless nights, Griffin hit upon the fact Leo most wanted to bury beneath other information. “Are you telling me you do not know for certain what her ties are? Have you not asked? Have you not investigated on your own?”
“I have asked,” he admitted grimly, his mind flitting to all the times he had attempted to extract information from his reluctant, stubborn, rebellious, maddening, beautiful bride. “She has not been forthcoming. And of course I have investigated. I’ve been making discreet inquiries with my sources from the moment I realized who her brother was. I’ve turned up nothing thus far, save a mountain of evidence against him.”
“I beg your pardon.” Strathmore’s tone was incredulous now. “The omnipotent Duke of Carlisle has married a Fenian, who refuses to disclose the nature of her relationship to the barbarous murderers who slayed the Chief Secretary of Ireland and his undersecretary? And you are simply accepting her lack of cooperation?”
He swallowed. When phrased in such bold, confronting fashion, he could not deny the answers to Strathmore’s queries. “Yes to both of your questions.”
“Have you taken complete leave of your senses?”
Yes. It was painfully apparent he had. Falling in love made a man lose his wits faster and more thoroughly than any other condition.
He ground his jaw. “No. I merely know my wife. Better, even, than she supposes I do. I know she is involved, but I also know there is a good reason for it. A reason she refuses to divulge to me. That is why I need you.”
“Me?”
“You.” Here was his second plan, about to be sprung into motion. “I need you to reach all the men we have planted within the Fenian ranks. Let them know Bridget O’Malley has married me, and make certain they spread the knowledge with their Fenian contacts. I would do this myself if I was certain we could trust them, but it is imperative no one know I am the source of the information, and I do not dare put my faith in anyone but you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you are the best we have in our ranks,” he said honestly. Strathmore had been through hell on earth, and he had survived. He was damaged, but he had survived. And he was honest, loyal, and brave. There was no other man he would entrust with this all-important task, aside from Clay.
“Why not Arden?”
Leo stiffened at the mentioning of the Duke of Arden, who had been determined to take Leo’s place for the last two years at least. “He and I have no love lost. I do not trust him, Strathmore. I do not have any intention of losing my wife. We need to flush the Fenians from their nest and put this to rest.”
Griffin was oddly alert for a man deprived of slumber. “What if she is guilty?”
“She is not guilty,” he gritted. Every action he was taking was predicated on that truth. He wanted her to be free to love him. Wanted to be free to love her as well. “But regardless, when this mission is completed, I am relinquishing my position. The actions I have taken in recent weeks have not been in the best interest of the League, and I know it. I also know the time has come for me to take a step back.”
“For your sake, I hope she is not guilty, Carlisle.”
“She is not,” he repeated. And he believed it. He believed it to his marrow. He knew Bridget O’Malley, and not just every delectable inch of her body, but her heart as well. She was stubborn and fierce and fiery, independent, strong, and sometimes foolish. Brave and inspiring and beautiful and his. She was not a murderess. She believed in Home Rule, but as for the rest of it, he could find no evidence she had ever had a hand in the atrocities that had happened in Dublin. She was not guilty. And he was going to set her free of the burdens of her past and prove her innocence, even if it cost him the League.
; She meant more to him than that. More to him than anything. Than anyone. And here was a realization that should take his breath. Make fear grip him. Yet again, all he felt inside was peace. Rightness.
Strathmore nodded. “I am more than happy to give you the aid you need. The information will be spread by the end of the day. But Carlisle, you need to have armed guards in place, on the chance these villains do not approve of her marrying an Englishman.”
“I have men in place as we speak.”
“Of course you do.” The duke paused, his gaze sharpening. “Did it occur to you these fiends may come after you specifically for taking one of their own?”
He was not untouchable. They had come after the Duke of Burghly, had they not? Yes, the thought had occurred to him, but he didn’t give a damn. He would do anything for Bridget. To protect her. To keep her. To make her his forever. “Let them come for me if they dare. I will be ready.”
Strathmore stared at him in silence for so long, Leo fought the urge to twitch. And then he finally broke the silence. “Why did you shoot her?”
“She was attempting to abduct Clay’s son.” He admitted this only out of necessity.
“Jesus.” Griffin shook his head. “I realize I have not slept in three full days, but this is lunacy, even by my standards. Please tell me Clay knows you married the woman.”
Leo wished he could answer in the affirmative. “He does not.” And it was something he needed to rectify. He loved his brother, cherished him, and as far as he knew, Clay, his new wife, their son, and his mother were still in Oxfordshire, in a state of bliss he hated like hell to interrupt. But it was inevitable, a reckoning he would face as stoically as all the rest of what was to come.
“Oh, hell.”
“Precisely.” Leo’s tone was grim. He wished suddenly for a coffee. Or a whisky, even if it was unseemly early for such an indulgence.
Heartless Duke Page 24
