Willful Depravity

by Ingrid Hahn

  When she obeyed, it was without qualm or hesitation.

  He pushed up her skirts, kicked a booted foot between her slippered feet, and pushed her legs so wide, the lips of her quim spread open. Behind her, his once-good arm hanging pathetically by his side, he worked clumsily with his falls with the other, then placed the blunt tip of his cock against her entrance and began to ease his way into her body.

  …

  Giles had no sooner crammed in as much cock as her body could take, when light filled the room. Outside, clouds must have blown away from the sun, for it poured through the stained glass, washing them both in brilliant colors.

  It was like heaven itself sanctioned their deviance. There was no less fucking involved in what they were doing than ever—the raw physicality of the act, the potency of each sense being set to life, and the burning fervor of urgent need.

  Quite without noticing, emotion had crept in. His heart and his cock had forged an alliance—one that could never be broken. This would never again be something he could do with just anyone. Him, the Marquess of Ashcroft. Ruined by one woman. Who would ever believe it? He hardly did—except the powerful truth of it shone from his being. Because everything he was, everything he would ever be, was inexorably bound to the love he had for this woman.

  No, not had. That was the wrong way of describing his changed self. It wasn’t something he’d acquired. It was what he was—he was love.

  He moved inside her, his cock sliding in and out of the wet warmth, her body moving against his, meeting his every thrust. His bollocks pulled tight against his body, and his stomach clenched. He was full to bursting, and his body wanted nothing more than to fill hers with his essence. Whatever stamina he’d once possessed he would have to earn back through careful practice and cultivation.

  In short, a lot more fucking.

  Giles moaned with pleasure. He’d been right all along. He’d been born to fuck. What had been missing, though, was the realization that he’d been born to fuck her.

  “Forgive me.” With enough grasp on reality left somewhere in his mind to remind him that they were not married, and even had they been, he had no right to risk making her pregnant without her permission. He withdrew.

  Orgasm took him, the climax breaking in powerful bursts. The gratification was so profound that it made every other orgasm seem meager in comparison.

  They sagged to the floor in a breathless heap.

  In the intimacy of what had well and truly been lovemaking, God help him, he reached to gently cup her face. “Patience.”

  Her expression went soft, and her eyes fell nearly shut but not quite. “Giles.”

  There were so many things he needed to say to her. Profound things—the sort he’d never imagined saying to another. And he certainly never imagined feeling quite so…vulnerable as he did so.

  Avoiding rushing in too deeply too quickly, Giles picked up a stray thought. “Will you ever tell me what the V stands for?”

  “Victory.”

  “Victory? Not Victoria?”

  “Not Victoria.”

  “And you laughed when I suggested Vesta?”

  “Victory is for Nelson’s ship. I consider myself lucky. I could have been Horatia. But my father thought Victory was a better homage. My grandfather insisted that if I was to be named after a ship, I needed something respectable for every day, and said he liked Patience. My parents took the suggestion and I became Patience Victory.”

  “Thank goodness for your grandfather.”

  She shrugged. “’Tis of little matter. I wouldn’t rename myself if I could.”

  He sensed there was more meaning behind the bare surface of the words. This wasn’t the time to probe them, however. He had to say what needed to be said. He’d never been a coward in his life. Until he’d broken his arm.

  That ended. Now.

  “You know, when Silverlund dragged me to the church, it forced me to look inside myself. To my surprise, there wasn’t worm rot and brimstone.” Giles turned his head to gaze at her. “But a vast chamber…filled with nothing.”

  Miss Emery glanced back at him, brows pulled together in confusion, cheeks rosy from the exertion of pleasure. “Nothing?”

  He had her exactly where he wanted her. Curiosity piqued, attention fully on him. For what he was about to say, he wanted imprinted on her heart forever.

  He reached to finger a curl framing her face. A difficult color to do justice to in mere paint, a thousand different shades upon each individual strand. “Nothing but love for you.”

  Chapter Thirty

  They left through the vestry door and rushed to Holbrook’s carriage. Patience allowed Ashcroft to hand her inside. Instead of following her in, though, he shut the door behind her and spoke to the driver. Her stomach went hollow.

  She let down the glass and leaned out the window, calling to his back as he returned to the church. “Where are you going?”

  The horses began to trot, and the wheels rolled.

  “I’m finishing this.” Ashcroft glanced back over his shoulder. A wind picked up, scattering the detritus strewn about the narrow lane. A tiny whirlwind of dust appeared at his feet, twirled, then vanished.

  “But I want to stay.” A visceral longing in Patience made her never want to be parted from Ashcroft ever again. It was like being torn in two.

  “I promised I’d have care for your reputation.”

  “Oh, hang my rep—” She cut herself off. There wasn’t time for squabbling, because she’d quickly be swept away. “What does anything matter if we’re not together?”

  “That’s why I must put an end to this.”

  “We must do it together.”

  “I need to do it myself.” He raised his voice as the distance between them grew. “I’ll send word to you as soon as I can.”

  The carriage turned a corner as the last word was out of his mouth.

  Patience sat back in the seat and bit her lip. If he shuffled her away before facing difficult situations…that meant a barrier stood between them. A huge one. Was it his arm? She buried her face in her hands. What that fall had cost them. If he didn’t find a way to rise above it, they wouldn’t have a future.

  The thought chilled her from the inside out, like a breath of frost cutting down from the frozen north.

  …

  The rest of the day, the morning at the church haunted her thoughts. All afternoon. All evening. And all into the first part of the night. Hour after hour after hour.

  And no message came from him, making everything all the worse.

  Her parents said nothing, which, judging from the wordless glower of one and the silent warning look of the other, seemed to have been at her father’s insistence and her mother’s reluctant agreement.

  Patience peered out the window of her bedchamber. It was a damp night, and the faint drizzle made halos grow from lights lit next to doors.

  “I hate not knowing what’s happening.” She was alone and spoke to nobody in particular.

  Motion below caught her attention. A person was…running. Holding on to his hat with one hand as he practically flew down the walk through the square. Her brows pulled together ever so slightly at the odd sight.

  Someone was ill? Surely whatever message he carried was intended for another house.

  When he took the steps up to the tea shop below the rooms in which the Emerys lived, a hundred horrifying thoughts cut loose through her mind like a whole colony of bats rushing from a cave.

  Patience fled from her room as the man began banging on the front door.

  One thought made her bones brittle with cold—that the messenger came to tell her that Ashcroft was dead. That his father had killed him. Being a duke, Silverlund would never see justice for the act.

  No. No. No. Foolishness. She couldn’t think such things. And besides, Ashcroft was Silverlund’s sole offspring. The duke could not be so mad as to slaughter his heir.

  Could he?

  She ran down the stairs and reached the
door ahead of her bewildered father. His face was rumpled from sleep, and he was still pulling on his jacket. She threw open the door…and immediately drew back in confusion.

  The face that met hers was pale, his eyes wide with terror. The man was both unexpectedly familiar and familiar in an unexpected way. He was from her father’s shop.

  One word came from his lips. “Fire.”

  …

  In the first hint of dawn light, Patience wandered adjacent to the smoldering ruins, damp and shivering. The reason half of London wasn’t burning now was because of the rain. The blessed, holy rain. After tonight, she’d never again have a word to say against it. Her father’s shop was gone, but the city wasn’t being consumed. Nobody had been hurt and, if they were careful when they cleaned up the soaking, charred mess, nobody would get hurt.

  When they’d arrived, the flames were already high. Her father had stumbled from the hack. She’d reached for him, expecting him to clutch his chest and crumple to the ground at the sight. He was nearly eighty years old, after all.

  Apparently, he was not as frail as she fretted he might be. Instead of collapsing, he’d gotten to work straight away, shouting directions and leading his workers, who slept above the shop, with energy and purpose.

  This had been her father’s whole life. The source of his pride. It had turned an unwanted infant, left to die, into a proud tradesman with income greater than his expenses.

  Patience’s neck prickled as if lurking nearby was an unwanted presence. She peered into the darkness around her, left and right, slowly searching the shadows. Nothing. Instead of relaxing, she shivered. A wind blew the smoke away from her, but the stench remained. Burning wood soaked by a fresh rain. It was in her hair, her nightclothes, the wrap someone had thoughtfully tossed about her shoulders before she’d been swept into the confusion, and her skin. It landed her squarely back to that night when Silverlund had come to Glenrose.

  She shivered again.

  Then she turned. A figure stood back in the shadows directly behind her, tucked between two other buildings cluttering the land upon the river’s edge. “You.”

  “I think it’s high time you understood that you need to stay away from my son. Think of this as my final warning.”

  Her lips parted, but no sound emerged. She swallowed and tried again, voice shaky. “You’d go to such lengths?”

  “I’ve been spending time thinking about a conversation I once had with that cur of a boy I am forced to call a son. A conversation about leverage. Specifically, when to use it. I believe I might have given him the impression that I’d rather hold on to leverage than take advantage of what I had.” He stepped forward. “This is your fault, you know.”

  “No, it’s not. You did this.”

  “Oh, don’t be a fool, Miss Emery. Of course it is. I had to do it. You forced me. You dallied where you had no right to dally, proving yourself as stupid as the rest of your sex for little more than the fleeting attention of a powerful man.” He gave her the sort of look a farmer gives his pigs upon the cold morning of slaughtering day. “And the powerful man’s hard prick. You know, of course, that my son used you. He’ll tire of you soon.” The duke nodded. “That’s his way.”

  He held up a stack of paper in his hands and released them all at once. A gust of wind scattered the leaves. Some stuck to rain-slick surfaces, while others tumbled into the street. “Just when I think you aren’t disgraceful enough—your birth, your manner, your person—I find this frightful drivel.”

  One of the pages he’d tossed caught at her feet. The corner fluttered, and rain splattered the surface. The title showed clearly enough, even in the scant light. The Haunted Tower. So he’d discovered her writings, had he? Well, it wasn’t so much of a secret as all that, though Elizabeth and she did write under a nom de plume.

  She raised her chin at him. If he thought he could make her feel shame—about her size, about anything she’d done with Lord Ashcroft, or about her writing—he was in for a sorry surprise. “There is nothing objectionable about me, Your Grace. If you fail to see that—”

  “If you heed my warnings, this will go much better for you from this moment forward.”

  The Miss Patience Emery she’d been before the night the Marquess of Ashcroft had strolled into her life like a hungry tiger—that Patience would have withdrawn. She’d have crumbled and cowered, afraid…angry with herself all the while for the injustice.

  That Patience was gone. She’d taken Ashcroft’s strength, resilience, and absolute disdain for bullies and made it her own. Just like when the marquess had parted her legs and managed to open her eyes, he’d also brought her fully into herself. She was stronger. No longer willing to demur. No. She was going to fight…and fight until her last breath, if need be.

  The night the duke had burned the paintings, Ashcroft hadn’t broken. It had taken an unfortunately literal break to reduce him. But together, what they’d done in the church had brought him back to himself. She was sure of it. If she crumbled in the face of horrifying adversity, she did not deserve Ashcroft.

  So she stood tall. Her hands didn’t shake. Her voice didn’t tremble. There was fear in her depths. Of course there was—she hadn’t gone mad. But she was master of the emotion, holding it at bay instead of letting it drown her in its black waters. Tapping into the force of the fear, she steadied herself.

  “You might have the leverage to terrorize my family, but you do not have the leverage to use your twisted words to shake my faith in what it is your son and I share. You have no power here.” She paused and laid heavy emphasis on the next words—emphasis that was nothing akin to deference. “Your Grace.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The morning after his near collision at the altar, Giles glanced up from where he sat at his desk, dictating notes to his new secretary, Mr. Leland. The duchess stood in the doorway. He rose to greet her. “Welcome, Mother. You should have sent word that you’d be returning from Bath early.”

  “There wasn’t time.” Her eyes, wary, if not outright frightened, went to his broken arm. “The duke did this to you?”

  She was an average-size woman, with a fair complexion, and hair now more white than the copper it’d been in her youth. Deep lines surrounded her sable-brown eyes. Being near her was always like curling close to a crackling wood fire on a dark winter night.

  As a boy, he’d known with a child’s pure, unwavering certainty that his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. His opinion hadn’t changed, merely expanded to count one other among the exalted rank.

  “Unfortunately for him, no. He did not. I fell from a horse.”

  She let out a shaky breath.

  Giles caught his secretary’s eye and gave the man a little nod, dismissing him. “Thank you for your help this afternoon, Mr. Leland. See to the message, please.”

  “I will indeed, my lord. Pray don’t hesitate to call for me if you need me again later today.” The man bowed and left.

  Giles shut the door, leaving him alone with his mother. “I’m sure he wishes he had.”

  “What? Oh, your father, you mean.” She glanced at him, mild confusion on her face, from where she’d been staring in dismay at the empty walls. She didn’t agree or disagree, but frowned. “You took them all down?”

  “How was it that I was allowed to grow up left-handed?”

  “Because I wasn’t. And I vowed long before you were born that no child of mine would suffer what I suffered under fools desperate to change me. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You never told me why you wanted to marry the duke. I can’t see any other possible inducement than the title and status, but you don’t put faith in either.”

  An easy enough thing to have no faith in once one had attained the station in life to which one aspired.

  “Oh, Giles. That was so long ago.”

  “Is it painful?”

  “It’s not painful so much as…” She gave him a hard look, mouth set in a line. “Well, I suppose
it won’t hurt you to know that I didn’t want to marry him.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “I had to. To cover up the scandal.”

  “Scandal?”

  “I tried to run away. Elope with a stable boy.” She shook her head, the way her lips turned down at the corners making her appear both abashed and very far away. “It was foolish. Of course, I was caught, but not until we were almost to the border.”

  “You were ruined.”

  “And needed a husband.”

  “But why the duke?”

  “My father was an earl; what’s so curious about my marrying a duke?”

  Giles grasped for the ray of hope the new information about his mother’s elopement opened. “I don’t mean to impugn your honor, Mother, but you weren’t…you didn’t already carry me when you were forced to marry him, were you?”

  She went soft and patted his cheek gently. “That’s why I’m forever grateful I married the duke, devil take the man. Because of you.”

  “Don’t be absurd.” Giles wasn’t quite following what she meant, but there was no room for gratitude in the enormity of the mistake of her having married the duke.

  “You wish the duke had never set eyes on me. I know, my love. I know. It does you credit. But it also does me an injustice.”

  “I would never do such a thing.”

  “Don’t be shortsighted, Giles.” She gave him a slightly irritable look, the sort mothers bestowed when they expected more from prized offspring.

  Impatient, he shook his head. “Tell me what you’re driving at.”

  “Of course you’re the duke’s son. I never, er, did anything before marriage, and I never strayed during, either.”

  “But I don’t see—”

  “I’m grateful to him because I would never wish for another child but you, Giles.”

  He glanced away. She’d meant to reassure him, but she hadn’t. “You deserve better than me.”

  She tenderly placed a hand on each of his cheeks and turned him to look at her. “Deserve has nothing to do with it. I’m your mother. You’re my child. You grew in me and almost killed me when you came into the world. I suckled you until you were four. You slept in my bed.”