Don't Tempt Me

by Loretta Chase

  He heard them as he and Zoe climbed the stairs.

  He was aware—oh, very well aware—of his wife walking alongside him with all the light and life gone out of her, and he knew he’d killed her happiness and humor and delicious insouciance.

  He told himself she was making too much of it. The trouble was, he knew why she made so much of it.

  Her freedom was precious to her, far more precious than it was to other Englishwomen, who simply took it for granted, the way he’d taken his servants and his smoothly running household for granted.

  He remembered what she’d said that first day, after she’d proposed to him and he’d declined.

  I was married from the time I was twelve years old, and it seemed a very long time, and I would rather not be married again straightaway.

  Yet she had married again, straightaway, because he’d lacked the will to resist temptation.

  She’d never had a chance to be courted by other men.

  She’d never had a chance to decide for herself which of them she truly wanted.

  He’d wanted her, and he’d had to have her, and that was that.

  Still, he’d hardly condemned her to a life of misery. Being married to him offered more freedom than most other women had, including other aristocratic women. No doors were closed to the Duchess of Marchmont. She would never lack for money to buy whatever she wanted. She could still flirt with other men and dance with them.

  And she could go where she pleased, to a point.

  Until tonight.

  I want fun, she’d told him that day in Hyde Park after she’d raced with Lady Tarling. I want a life. In Egypt I was a toy, a game. I was a pet in a cage. I vowed never to endure such an existence again.

  He watched her enter her apartments, then he walked on to his.

  He told Ebdon he would not be going out this evening, and ordered a bath. The odor of Bow Street seemed to cling to his skin as well as his clothes.

  The bath should have calmed him. It didn’t.

  The new valet had laid out a clean shirt, pantaloons, and stockings. The duke stood and gazed at them for a long time. He felt so weary, suddenly, not in his body but in his mind and heart, as though he’d carried a great burden, inside, for an endless time.

  “Give me my dressing gown,” he said.

  He didn’t bother with the clothes readied for him, to be worn under his damask dressing gown: the full costume of “undress.” He shrugged his naked body into his dressing gown and slid his bare feet into his slippers. The maroon leather mules had pointed, upturned toes, in imitation of Turkish fashion.

  Like a pasha’s. Like the men in another world, who kept their women caged.

  “Plague take me,” he said.

  “Your Grace?” Ebdon was obviously baffled. He bore his confusion like a man, however. No weeping or fainting or trembling. Merely a slight crease between his brows.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Marchmont said.

  He left the dressing room, crossed his bedroom to the connecting door, and walked in.

  He found his wife in her bath, her face on her arm, resting on the linens draping the tub. She was weeping.

  “Oh, Zoe,” he said.

  She’d been so lost in misery that she hadn’t heard him approach—another bad sign. She was losing her old skills. She didn’t care. She was too wretched to care. She loved him, and she wanted to be a good wife. She knew he only wanted to protect her—but she couldn’t bear this, to have the walls close in on her again, so soon.

  She wiped her eyes and looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s mad to feel this way, but I can’t help it.”

  He simply reached down and lifted her up, out of the bathtub. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it about her, then he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. He buried his face in her damp hair.

  “You’re all I have left,” he said. “You’re all I have left.”

  His voice was hoarse, broken.

  “Lucien,” she said, her face against his chest.

  “You’re all I have left, Zoe,” he said. “They’re all gone—everyone I ever loved. Gone forever. You, too, I thought. But you weren’t. You came back from the dead—and if I lose you, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  She held him tightly, as tightly as she could.

  His parents. His brother. Gone.

  He’d had her family, but it wasn’t the same.

  Everyone I ever loved.

  You, too, I thought.

  She was one of them, one of the loved.

  Loved. He loved her.

  It was as simple as that.

  Her heart lifted, the way it always used to do when she caught sight of him, when Lucien came back from school to spend the summer with them. When he came, her world brightened.

  “Lucien,” she said softly. She had learned Latin and Greek, and she knew lux was the Latin for “light.” Her heart lifted, because he was the light of her life and had been from the first day she met him. “Oh, Lucien, we’re both a little mad.”

  “No,” he muttered into her hair. “You’re the mad one. I’m completely sane.” He lifted his head and drew away a little and looked down at her. “Let’s get you out of that wet towel.”

  He got her out of the wet towel and dried her off with another one, in front of the fire.

  He played lady’s maid, kneeling before her, the towel in his hand. He lifted one slim foot onto his thigh and gently dried it, and she shivered.

  He looked up, and there she was, all creamy skin with touches of pink in the special places, and a dusting of gold between her legs. She was all curving womanliness, and she was looking down at him, her blue eyes filled with something he couldn’t put a name to. How could he, when he’d never troubled to read a woman’s gaze?

  In her case, perhaps, he didn’t need to. Perhaps, after all, they simply understood each other. Perhaps they always had.

  He slid his hands up from her foot, up along her calf to her knee and along her thigh, and up, to the downy place she had so many names for.

  “Your Golden Flower,” he murmured, lightly drawing his hand over the feathery curls, still damp after her bath. “Your Palace Of Delight.”

  “My Secret Abode,” she said. She slid her fingers into his hair. “My Hidden Treasure and my Throne of Love and my Lion’s Head.”

  “Your Lion’s Head?” He caressed her so lightly.

  She made names for the caresses, too: the Teasing Feather and the Gentle Glove and the Fire Touch.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “This part of me is very dangerous when hungry for lovemaking.”

  She combed his hair with her fingers. “My lover’s hair is like silken candlelight,” she said softly. “My lover is the candlelight in the night and the first rays of the sun on the horizon and the last rays, too. My lover is my light.”

  He looked up, his gaze locking with hers. “I had better be this lover you’re talking about,” he said.

  She laughed and let go of him. She stretched her arms above her head, stretched like a cat, and he watched her beautiful breasts lift. She was completely at ease in her body, in her nakedness.

  How could he think of stifling a soul so free?

  “My lover leaps upon me, like a tiger,” she said.

  He caught hold of her buttocks and pressed his mouth to her Hidden Treasure, and he felt her tremble.

  He caressed her with his mouth and his tongue and felt her fingers tighten in his hair while her body vibrated with pleasure.

  Then, after he’d driven her to the peak and made her cry out, he slid his arm behind her knees and brought her down.

  Her eyes were dark and unfocused, her face flushed.

  She gave way to passion in that unhesitating, liquid way of hers. She caught his mood—or he caught hers—and simply yielded to feeling.

  Tonight the feeling was stormy.

  She sat on the rug and opened her legs, and he crawled between them. She pushed open his dressing gown and rak
ed her hands over his skin, and it was his turn to tremble while she explored him, running her fingers over muscles that bunched under her touch. She explored him as though he was new to her, a lover she’d never seen before…and yet as though, too, she knew him as well as she knew herself, and knew he belonged to her.

  From the first she’d been this way, unhesitating, as easy with his body as she was with her own.

  But there was more between them tonight than simple possession.

  You’re all I have left.

  There it was, the thing buried in the deepest recess of the hidden place in his heart, in the dark cupboard he hadn’t been able to keep shut since the day she returned. He’d uttered the words, and they still beat in his heart.

  She was all he had left, and she was precious to him.

  He raked his hands over her, too, in the same way she touched him. He moved his hands over her skin, over her firm breasts and along the delicate angles of her collarbone. He traced the circle of her waist and the swell of her hips, the fine bones of her wrists and ankles, and she stretched and moved under his touch, the restless tigress tonight.

  He caught hold of her hair with one hand and grasped her chin with the other and kissed her hard. She broke away, and made as if to pull away. He pulled her back, and she let her head fall back, and she was laughing, in that way she did, low and beckoning. He pushed her thighs apart, and thrust into her, and she laughed again, and wrapped her legs about his waist.

  We’re both a little mad, she’d said, and perhaps they were.

  They joined this night in a maddened way, in a long, ferocious coupling, as though there was no more time left, as though this was the first time and the last time.

  That, at least, was what he thought of it later.

  Now, though, while he was inside her, there was nothing in his mind, nothing in the world but her and this moment and the heat and pleasure of the lovers’ storm they made.

  It raged and quieted and raged again. Then she cried out, again and again, words he didn’t understand and one he did: his name. Then he let himself spill into her, and he sank down onto her. He lay there, for a moment, feeling her heart beat against his chest. Then he rolled off her and onto his side. He pulled her up against him and buried his face in her neck.

  She lay there, listening to his breathing quiet.

  She was dear to him and he was dear to her, and this was what was most important.

  Karim had doted upon her and showered her with jewels, but to him she was only a pretty toy. If she had displeased him, he would have given her away—or even had her killed—without a second thought.

  “There was no bond,” she murmured.

  “That was English,” he said, “but I couldn’t quite make it out.” His voice was low, sleepy.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Sleep.”

  “How can I sleep at a time like this?” he said.

  She turned her head a little, but she couldn’t see him. She felt him lift his head, though. He brushed his cheek against hers.

  “I thought I understood what had happened to you,” he said. “But I understood only a part. When you told your story to John Beardsley, I thought I’d heard all there was to hear. But I think it was all I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to know any more. When you vanished—”

  His voice caught, and he paused. “If I’d been there, Zoe, I’d have found you. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t bear to think of that. And so I made myself stop. I—I don’t know what it was, exactly. But I stopped. Thinking. Caring. It was harder than I let on, to carry on, after Gerard died. When you were gone, perhaps I simply lost heart.”

  She hadn’t realized. All she’d known, when she first saw him after her return, was that he wasn’t the same. She hadn’t been the only one damaged by her captivity. Her parents had suffered. Her brothers and sisters, too, though perhaps not as deeply, because they were starting families of their own.

  “I caused more pain than I knew,” she said. “I told my family I was sorry, but I didn’t understand what the trouble was. I didn’t understand why Mama had grown so nervous and flighty or why my sisters and brothers were so angry with me. They said I made a disruption, and I thought the disruption was my coming back. But the disruption was my disappearing, and the years Papa spent trying to find me, and what happens to a family when they can’t know for certain what’s become of a loved one.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Everyone knows that now. Everyone knows you didn’t run away.”

  He knew the story itself: the stroll through the Cairo bazaar and the maid who’d sold her—the maid who’d claimed Zoe had run away, and whom everyone had believed, because Zoe was famous for running away.

  “As though I were so mad as that,” she said, “to run away in a crowded place, where no one spoke my language. But everyone except Papa would believe I would do such a mad thing, because I was the wild daughter, the rebellious one. I’m daring, Lucien, but even at twelve I had some sense.”

  He kissed the nape of her neck. “Not much, but some,” he said.

  She smiled.

  “I should have got the truth out of that maidservant,” he said, “if only I had been there.”

  “Even if you had got it out of her before they killed her, would that have made a difference?” Zoe said. “Once they had me, do you think they’d give me up? Have you any idea how valuable I was?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know how valuable you are.”

  “I was a rare, rare creature to them,” she said. “I learned this later—that I was like one of the magical beings in the Thousand and One Nights. The slavers had followed us from Greece. They knew they’d get a lot of money for me: White slaves are valuable—and I wasn’t merely a Circassian but an English girl. My coloring was different. Everything about me was different. How many twelve-year-old, blonde, blue-eyed European girls turn up in that part of the world? Especially during that time, when Europe was at war. They knew the pasha would pay a fortune for me, for his sick son. For the magic. The slavers knew Yusri Pasha would believe I would have the power to arouse his favorite son Karim’s desires at last, and he would produce sons.”

  “And none of this would have happened but for an easily corrupted servant,” Marchmont said.

  “They had all the reason in the world to make it happen, one way or another,” Zoe said. “They offered her more money than she could hope to earn in twenty years. If they hadn’t got to her, they would have got to someone else in our party. They would have found a way. They were very determined.”

  “I should have been there,” he said.

  She turned to him then. “You were seventeen years old. What would you have done that Papa didn’t do?”

  “I would have found you,” he said. “I always found you.”

  She turned round fully and rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. His fingers threaded through her hair. “No,” she said. “They killed the maid to make sure she’d say nothing. If you had found me, they would have killed you without hesitation. For years, I was terrified that you or my father would burst into the palace and be killed. Even when it became obvious that I was useless—that I couldn’t cure Karim and he’d never sire sons—even then they wouldn’t have given me back. He was his father’s favorite, and I was Karim’s favorite toy, and they’d kill anybody who tried to take me away from him. If you’d found me—and they’d killed you, what would I have done, Lucien?”

  He said nothing for a time, only kept drawing his fingers through her hair, caressing, soothing.

  She lifted her hand and laid it over his heart, and felt its reassuring beat while she lay there, safely snuggled against his big body.

  “I worry that you’ll be killed in a carriage crash,” he said after a long silence. “I worry that you’ll fall ill so suddenly, as my parents did, and die. I worry that you’ll fall off your horse and break your neck, the way Gerard did. I worry that you’ll die in childbed. I try to push these thoughts from my mind—I
used to be so good at not thinking. But since the trouble with the servants began, I’ve become…” He paused. “Not Aunt Sophronia—not yet, I hope. But I seem to be not altogether rational.”

  “All of those things you worry about can happen,” she said. “They can happen to me and they can happen to you—except for the childbed part.” She grinned up at him. “Unless you die of fright when I grow as gigantic as my sisters.”

  He moved his head back to look at her. “If you grow as gigantic as they, I shall certainly die of fright.”

  She pulled away from him to use her hands to draw a big mound over her belly. “The women of my family tend to become as big as houses,” she said. “Very round houses.”

  Though the room was dimly lit, she had no trouble seeing the laughter dance in his eyes.

  “You’re picturing it,” she said.

  He nodded. His lips trembled. Then it burst from him: a great whoop of laughter.

  He rolled away onto his back and laughed and laughed.

  She laughed, too.

  This was the boy she’d known so long ago, the boy who’d fallen down laughing when she tried to hit him with a cricket bat.

  She remembered how, when he’d finally sobered, he’d stood up and marched to her, and plucked her up off the ground as easily as if she’d been a rag doll. He’d carried her, kicking and hitting and calling him names, back to the house and up to the schoolroom and plunked her into a chair.

  “Learn something, you stupid girl,” he’d said, and walked out.

  And she had learned something: Greek and Latin, because that’s what boys learned and she was determined to know what boys knew. She’d learned not only how to do sums but harder kinds of mathematics, like geometry and trigonometry. She did this not because she enjoyed the subjects but because boys learned those things—and she was determined to show him. She’d never been the best or most conscientious student. Still she’d learned some things that most girls didn’t know: how to hide fear and how to think logically and how to jockey for position and how to be dogged and how to fight when one had to. Such knowledge had helped her survive the harem. It had helped her escape the harem. And it had helped her remove a blight from this great house.