The only other guests were Nathaniel’s friends, Lord Swinton and the Earl of Berwick, along with their wives. However, the wedding was no less festive for the small guest list. Anna had been wary of Lord Swinton at first, because of his connection to Bridget, who had betrayed her so terribly, but she found that his wife was quite pleasant, and did not seem to object to being friends with a ballerina.
When it was finally time to return to the townhouse, Anna allowed Nathaniel to lead her to the carriage.
“After you, Your Grace,” he said, addressing her by her new title for the first time. Anna could not stifle the giggle that came to her lips. She was a Duchess now, and she could hardly believe it.
A moment later she found herself inside of the carriage with her husband. The compartment doors were shut, and the curtains were drawn, and she wanted nothing so much as to fall into his arms then and there. Nathaniel was staring at her, his eyes dark with desire, and she knew that he was thinking the same thing.
It was only a short ride to the townhouse.
I ought to be able to control my desire for a quarter of an hour, but I do not think it will be possible.
Just as she thought that she might burst with her desire for him, Nathaniel leaned forward and kissed her.
His kiss was passionate, but tender. It filled her with a yearning that she could not fully understand, and she suddenly felt as if every inch of her skin was begging for his touch. She moaned with pleasure at the thought she might soon enough be granted that wish.
It seemed as though only seconds had passed when they arrived at the townhouse, and sprang apart just in time to avoid scandalizing the coachman who opened the carriage doors.
“Please have the luggage brought into the foyer,” Nathaniel instructed the coachman. “It can be unpacked tomorrow. The Duchess and I are not to be disturbed.”
“Very good, Your Grace,” the coachman said, bowing slightly.
Anna’s heart was still racing from their kiss in the carriage, but it had begun to beat even faster at Nathaniel’s instruction that they should not be disturbed.
She barely took in her surroundings as Nathaniel led her up the stairs to the master bedroom. She could focus on nothing but the feel of his hand holding her own. His skin was warm to the touch, and as soon as they had entered their room and shut the door, she ran her hands over his body, wanting to feel more of his skin.
Nathaniel began to unlace her gown, and Anna reached down to help, pulling it over her head. She began to tug at his clothing as well, untying his cravat and pulling his shirt up and out of his breeches. A moment later they stood in front of each other, naked and vulnerable, but Anna felt completely safe.
Nathaniel was staring at her as though he had never seen anything so beautiful, and she thought much the same of him, His strong arms wrapped around her and pulled her close. She could feel his desire, pressing against her, and she felt a surge of warmth between her legs, which was something quite new.
As they moved to the bed and Anna laid down, she trembled with desire, so much so that she forgot to frightened of the unknown. When Nathaniel laid on top of her, the pressure and warmth of his body made her sigh with pure bliss.
He kissed her again, just as passionately as before, but soon his lips moved away from hers, down to her throat, where they gently teased her, and then further down still. He took her right nipple in his mouth and sucked it gently, then swirled his tongue around it, causing her to gasp loudly.
As he trailed kisses further down her body, Anna suddenly realized what he intended to do, and the mere thought of it made her whole body tingle. When he spread her legs wide, and kissed her most intimate places, she could not stop herself from crying out. Her muscles seemed to be tightening and releasing without any conscious effort, and the sensation was unlike anything she had ever experienced.
Suddenly, she felt a great release of tension as waves of pleasure rolled over her body, leaving her deeply satisfied, but somehow still eager for more. Nathaniel looked up at her from between her thighs, a wicked grin upon his face.
“Did you enjoy that, Your Grace?” he asked.
“I…did…Your…Grace,” she said, still breathing heavily.
“Well then, we shall have to see if we can repeat the process,” Nathaniel said, but he did not kiss her there again. Instead he kissed her belly, tracing his way up her torso with his lips and tongue, until her was lying on top of her once again.
Now his hand was moving between her legs, stroking her gently, and then more firmly, until finally she felt a finger sliding inside of her, and then another. She tilted her hips to allow him easier access, and Nathaniel removed his hand. His hips were now poised over hers, and she reached down to take him in her hand.
He was larger than she had realized, and for a moment she thought that he could not possibly fit inside of her, but soon she felt the tip of him at her entrance, and the stretching sensation was more pleasurable than painful as he entered her slowly.
She gasped when he pushed inside of her, farther than his fingers had been.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked, frozen in place, with a look of fear upon his face.
“No,” Anna said, “please do not stop.”
She raised her hips further to meet his thrust, and they both gasped with pleasure. They soon found a rhythm that suited them both, and Anna felt the tension building up inside of her once again. She could see that Nathaniel must be experiencing something similar and soon he cried out with pleasure and she felt the spasm of his release, followed immediately by her own.
They fell asleep naked, in each other’s arms, with the bedclothes tangled around them. Anna felt happier than she ever had in her life.
* * *
Two days later, Anna had to return to the theater for another performance. She had not spoken to Bridget or Mr. Bamber since the night in his office when they had revealed their betrayal, and tonight would be no exception. Bridget had tried to talk to her the following day, and Anna had turned away from her, ignoring her entirely. She had not tried again since.
In spite of this, Anna thought that she had been dancing better since reuniting with Nathaniel. She had been happy enough with her earlier performances, but had found no joy in them. Now she felt as though her whole body was celebrating with each movement, and she suspected that this made for a more compelling performance.
Tonight was a particularly special show as her mother would be attending. She had seen Anna dancing around their cottage all of her life, but she had never seen her perform on stage in a proper theater. Anna hoped that her mother would be proud of what she saw.
She managed to avoid Bridget and Mr. Bamber before the show and during the interval, much to her relief. After the performance she changed quickly and went to meet her mother and husband in the lobby. She would no longer be attending the backstage salons after each performance, which was something of a relief, as she had never much enjoyed them.
When she walked out to the lobby, she saw Nathaniel and her mother standing side by side. Nathaniel looked very much at his ease in such a grand setting, but her mother was very obviously out of place. Still, her mother’s face lit up at the sight of her, and Anna beamed back at her.
“That was wonderful, my lovely,” her mother said, wrapping her arms around her daughter. “Truly wonderful. I do not think I have ever seen anything so beautiful.”
“Thank you, Mama,” she said, beaming with pride. “You flatter me.”
“She is right, though,” Nathaniel said. “I believe this was your best performance yet.”
Anna smiled at him, and the three of them walked out of the theater together.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Anna sat by the fire in the drawing room of her London townhouse, waiting for Nathaniel to return home. He had been at Parliament today, debating a piece of legislation about the standardization of weights and measures, about which he was strangely passionate.
Anna was knit
ting, and wondering whether the legislation would pass as she waited for him. After some time, her fingers began to ache, and she put her knitting down. In its place, she picked up a letter she had received earlier that day. It was from Bridget, with whom she had not spoken in nearly a year.
Shortly after her wedding to Nathaniel, Bridget had come to the townhouse, and begged to speak to Anna. Against her better judgement, Anna had agreed and they had sat down, in this very room, to talk. She had wanted desperately for her friend to say something, anything that might explain away what she had done.
But of course, there could be no explanation for such a betrayal, and Bridget had only repeated the things she had said when she was first discovered.
“It is easy for you to say that you would never do such a thing,” Bridget had said toward the end of that meeting. “You are a Duchess now, you will never want for anything. We cannot all be so lucky.”
Anna knew that she was lucky, and that most women who started out in her position were not. She could sympathize with Bridget’s concerns about her future, but she also knew that nothing could have compelled her to betray a friend as Bridget had betrayed her.
Bridget had left not long after that, with both parties seeming unsatisfied by the conversation. Anna had not heard anything from her since that meeting, and had been surprised to receive her letter today. She had been putting off opening it, though she could not really say why.
Finally, she decided that it was time to see what her former friend might want from her, and she cracked the sealing wax and unfolded the letter.
Dear Anna,
I hope that this letter finds you well. Perhaps you will throw it into the fire without ever reading it first, but I sincerely hope that is not the case.
I realize that nothing I can say or do will ever make up for the way that I betrayed your trust. I am truly sorry for that, and I hope that someday you may find it in your heart to forgive me, though I do not think that I will ever find a way to forgive myself.
I expect that you are wondering what it is that I want from you. I assure you that I want nothing more than to tell you how sorry I am for hurting you, and to congratulate you on your happiness. I hope that you and the Duke have found joy in one another.
I understand that your husband has bought the ballet company from Mr. Bamber, and I want to wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. With you as the director, I am sure that the next season will be the company’s greatest yet. And I trust that you will pay all of the dancers what they are owed, unlike your predecessor.
If you should ever find it in your heart to forgive me, then I would be ever so pleased to receive a letter from you. But if you cannot, I understand completely. In either case, I wish you all the best that life has to offer.
Sincerely,
Bridget
Anna read the letter through twice, not knowing what to make of it. She sometimes found herself missing Bridget, in spite of all that had happened between them. She liked some of her new aristocratic friends well enough, and she especially liked Lady Berwick, who had not been born into the aristocracy, but none of them understood her the way that Bridget had.
She contemplated whether she might ever be able to trust Bridget again, but she did not see how she could. Deciding that no good could come of reaching out to her former friend, she placed the letter on the table beside her and began to massage her temples.
A moment later, she heard the front door open, and the familiar sounds of Nathaniel greeting the butler. She sat up in the loveseat and turned to face the door, eager to see him once again, though it had only been a matter of hours.
Nathaniel entered the sitting room with a wide smile on his face, and Anna knew at once that the legislation he had been working so hard to implement must have passed.
“You look quite happy,” she observed.
“Indeed, it was a most successful day in the Lords.”
“Well, I am very glad to hear that,” Anna said. “Does that mean that the weights and measures bill has gone through?”
“Indeed it does,” Nathaniel replied with a smile.
Anna had never been particularly good at feigning interest in politics, but she took genuine pleasure in seeing her husband happy, so she was pleased any time he had a political victory.
“And what about you, my love?” Nathaniel asked. “What have you been up to today?”
Anna held up her knitting to show him what she had been working on. Nathaniel studied it closely, a slight crease forming in his brow.
“I’m afraid those socks will be much too small for me,” he said, bemused.
“They are not for you,” Anna said.
“Well then, who are they for?” he asked. “They could only fit…”
He looked from the knitting to his wife’s face and back again. When he focused his gaze on her once again, Anna was smiling at him broadly. She put her knitting down, took his hand in her own, and placed it gently on her belly. It was still flat and firm, but she had seen the family’s physician to confirm what she already knew.
“They could only fit a baby,” she said quietly.
“They could only fit a baby,” Nathaniel repeated, his smile brightening his whole face.
The End?
Extended Epilogue
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Preview: Addicted to a Rascal Duke
Chapter 1
Lady Sophia Appleton was reading. Or, to be more accurate, she was both reading and hiding.
The large library at her family home in Mayfair was the perfect place to engage in both these activities. It boasted many shelves with nooks inside that allowed one to curl into an armchair and escape from the world for whole hours at a time.
At the moment, it was not the whole world that Sophia was trying to escape from, but rather her father. She knew he wanted to speak to her, and she also knew that whatever he had to say, she would not like it. Because it would be about marriage, and she had never liked any of their conversations about marriage.
Her father, the Duke of Wellingson, a stoic, harsh man who rarely smiled and never laughed, was going to try to convince her to marry someone. He had been doing this for the past two years and had the unfailing ability to choose a gentleman who invariably was the exact opposite of the sort of mate Sophia would choose for herself.
She supposed she partially understood his fixation on the subject. As the only child and heir to the Wellingson fortune, which included properties in Dorset, Essex, Newcastle, and Cheshire, Sophia’s choice of husband was of great importance to the family. If she married well, she would elevate their family’s standing in society to the very highest echelons. If she married poorly, she would sour the family’s good name and attract the censure of the many members of the ton who thought that daughters should only be entitled to small properties and pin money, rather than whole fortunes.
And yet I cannot stand the idea of Papa choosing me a husband.
Looking down at the book nestled in her lap, she knew the reason. Her views on marriage had been formed not by society, but by the volumes that surrounded her in the library. Shakespeare, Austen, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Wordsworth—they had all taught her about sweeping love stories, star-crossed lovers, men and women fated to end up together from the first.
Sophia had spent a good part of her life devouring these and a myriad of other stories in everything from novels and serials to poetry. She had been a truly terrible student as a child and had forced no less than five governesses to quit, all of whom complained that she cared not a fig for sums or Latin, but wanted only to read, and quietly, without inte
rruption.
Back then, she was fascinated by fairy tales, and even now, she longed for a happy ending for herself. She wanted to find her own prince, and she was certain that whatever gentleman her father was planning to present her with next would be the very opposite of her imaginings.
Her suspicions were proved correct when, half an hour and three chapters of Persuasion later, her father found her, tucked between the bookcases holding the history and nautical texts. She had chosen those two sets of shelves in the hopes her father would not look for her there, since Sophia had no interest in either subject. But alas, she had been foiled.
“Sophia, dear, put that book down right now and sit up straight,” her father instructed. “You’re practically horizontal on that chair, and it isn’t the least bit becoming. Proper young ladies most certainly do not sit in such a fashion.”
The Art 0f Pleasuring A Duke (Steamy Historical Regency Romance) Page 27
