You May Kiss the Duke

by Charis Michaels

  She tried to turn, to see his face, but he burrowed deep against her neck. She stared at the ceiling, waiting for more pain or less pain or some other sensation that no one had ever mentioned. He was petrified inside her and above her and silent. For an indeterminate number of minutes, they hovered there, fraught and breathless, and Sabine realized that she could engage her brain again. The pleasure had abated.

  It was not so terrible, the pain. Tight and new and nothing like the swirl of sensation and mounting . . . something that made her press and arch and beg him to reach this point.

  She was confused by the cause and effect of her body’s want and the resulting dissolution of all pleasure, and she was frustrated with Stoker for burying his head, departing from her for all practical purposes, in this of all moments.

  But perhaps this was what he was trying to warn her against all along. This stabbing moment of pain? That made no sense; it was unpleasant but it was hardly worth demanding some jewel or service in exchange. All the lovely moments leading up to it had been an equal trade in her view, and even now, it was not terrible, being so very close to him, locked in his muscled arms, with the glorious heavy weight of him pressing her down, safe and secure, into the bed, his face against her neck. It was so far and away, more intimate than their long talks or even the emotional theatrics they had navigated tonight. All of it was essential, she thought, including this, especially this, and she would tell him all about it, if ever he—

  All of a sudden Sabine realized that the pain had subsided to a tiny sting of sensation, and the flicker of pleasure had returned, now rapidly overshadowing. She breathed deeply and moved her right leg, pressing Stoker’s hip with her knee.

  She’d meant to animate him, but instead she set off a spill of sensation inside her own body. She squeezed again. Now she pressed the other knee. More—better, so much better. Sabine experimented with a small thrust, raising her hips as before.

  Stoker swore into her neck when she did it, a long, breathy sound that ripped from somewhere deep inside him.

  Sabine smiled and continued to move, delighted that the sensations had resumed and the pain was gone. After the third or fourth rock of her hips, Stoker’s body answered back with a thrust of his own.

  This, Sabine realized, was even better.

  “Oh,” she cried.

  Against her neck, his breath had begun to saw in and out. His excitement stoked hers, and she felt herself get caught up in the thrilling mix of urgency and pleasure and the rising pressure of before. Stoker was up now, pressing above her slowly, inch by inch, centering over her while his hips thrusted.

  He rose so slowly and evenly, she thought for a moment they had reinjured him, that his wound or ribs hurt, but then she caught sight of the expression on his face—an eye-closed twist of restraint against desire—and she realized he was invoking all of his strength to hold himself back.

  “Stoker?” she panted.

  His eyes remained shut.

  “Stoker?” she repeated, her voice high and desperate.

  “I’m sorry,” he rasped.

  “It’s not a moment for sorrow,” she managed. “Please.”

  He laughed without humor. “Do not say that.”

  “I will say it.” She surged upward with her hips. “It’s what I want. Stop restraining.”

  “You don’t know what you want.”

  Now it was her turn to growl. “Do not tell me what I want.” She grabbed him by the hips and moved his body in rhythm.

  Something seemed to snap inside him. He didn’t let go so much as hurtle forth. His thrusts increased in speed and strength; he fell against her bared breasts, slavering them with sucks and nips. If he kissed one, he touched the other. This attention shot a new jolt of desire through Sabine, and the drive of his body was suddenly, exactly, perfectly right. She heard herself cry out and call his name. She screamed yes! more times than strictly necessary, but she didn’t care. Every care and inhibition and anxiety left her, pounded away by Stoker’s body and the command he took of their combined pleasure.

  His ferocity allowed her to lie back and receive and receive and receive, and her only thought was that she could take him forever—except they were building toward something that had a definite end; she could sense that now. She knew it as surely as she knew the next thrust would take her another rung higher.

  She matched Stoker thrust for thrust, reaching for each rung, delirious with the anticipation. When finally, she reached the top, Sabine experienced an explosion inside her body—an actual explosion; why hadn’t her friends been more clear about this?—and she surged up one final time, floating on a mist of sensation and release and languid, molten yes . . .

  Stoker sensed her release and finally opened his eyes, watching her with something like disbelief, but the look of rapture on her face was clearly too much; he tore his gaze away and drove into her again, only a few more thrusts, and then he cried out, seeming to float on the same mist before he collapsed on top of her, panting.

  By some miracle Sabine managed to muster the strength to toss her boneless arms across his back and hold him, opening and closing her hands on fistfuls of his loose shirt.

  “Well done,” she said after a moment. “I think. Would you say, Jon? Well done?”

  “Oh my God,” he breathed, and he rolled off her and lay beside her, staring at the ceiling. He fastened the buttons of his trousers quickly, efficiently, without sitting up. He jerked his waistcoat back in place.

  “You may cover yourself,” he said softly. He reached out with a weak hand to tug ineffectually at the side of her skirts.

  Sabine dropped an open hand over her eyes and rolled her head back and forth on the pillow.

  Now this? she thought as her levitating heart sank.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Stoker had ravished her, plain and simple. He’d worn his boots—his bloody boots were on still—as he’d pummeled her virgin body. He’d ripped her silk gown like a lunatic.

  They were in a strange bed, in an anonymous room, with only a low fire, no basin to wash, no wine to dull the pain, no lady’s maid to attend her.

  He’d ravished her. As he’d known he would, given half the chance. And now it was true.

  It felt wrong; he’d known it was wrong. But self-control was but a faint notion in the corner of his mind, a discarded tool he’d forgotten how to use. And yet while he was in the moment, it had also been . . . glorious.

  He sat up, cringing at the pain in his rib. He deserved the pain. He deserved to suffer a relapse and perish by morning. He deserved the bloody Duke of Wrest to seek him out and shoot him with his own gun.

  “Will you lie back down with me for a moment?” she asked quietly, reaching for his hand.

  “Let me call a maid to attend you,” he said.

  “I don’t want a maid.”

  “Your dress is in ribbons.”

  “So it is,” she said.

  She sounded irritated. He glanced at her, trying to seek out her face. The fire had burned nearly to ash and the room hung in shadows. He was glad; he could not look at what he’d done to her dress. He didn’t want to look at her body. He’d feasted on the sight of her body like a blind man who had just been given sight. He dropped an arm over his eyes, trying to erase the image of how he must have looked, staring down at her.

  Sabine said, “It was worth it. To me.”

  “What was?” He struggled to follow the conversation, and he owed it to her to behave like an articulate person in this moment. He owed her whatever she wanted.

  “The ruined dress. I’m not sure how I will get home, but perhaps if we hide here until—”

  “Elisabeth can loan you a dress,” he said and then he pressed his arm against his eye sockets until he saw stars, realizing what he’d said. He made an anguished sound.

  “What?” Sabine demanded. Now she sounded angry.

  “I can’t face Elisabeth with this request. I’ve delivered so many girls to her who required new dre
sses because some . . . brute had ripped away their very clothes.”

  “Stoker, we will not entertain this line of thought,” she said tightly.

  “It’s not a way of thinking, Sabine. It’s the precise animal behavior I have fought my entire life. I am no better. I am the same. Elisabeth was a fool to think she could truss me up and send me to school and pretend that I have any place acquainting myself with well-bred ladies.”

  Sabine gave a shout and bolted from the bed so quickly, Stoker jumped too. They squared off across the twisted coverlet and decimated pillows.

  “That,” she said, gesturing to the bed, “was too . . . wonderful for me to allow you to proclaim it a . . . a gap in your character.” She glared at him, yanking up her corset and clutching her bodice to her chest. “You did not inflict animal behavior on me, Stoker, we made love. You are my husband, I am your wife. We are realizing our . . . relationship in an unorthodox way, but we are married. We have spent the past six weeks together, and I have said that I love you and I mean it. There is a world of difference between making love to your wife and attacking a strange girl.”

  “Did we make love?” he asked. “Or did I go out of my head, risking your safety, paying no regard to injury, spoiling your dress. I . . . I unfastened my breeches like a randy soldier with only three minutes to spare and a guinea for your trouble.”

  “Is that really what happened?” she challenged, pulling pins from her hair. He’d never seen it long and loose, and he was momentarily distracted by the sight of it dropping around her shoulders in black rolling waves.

  She smiled. “You see, I am happy. We’ve shared this moment. I am taking down my hair because I am a real woman who is irritated by hairpins after four hours, and I feel as if we have passed the point of your not seeing me perfectly coiffed and kempt and pilloried by pins.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, staring at her hair.

  “At the threat of assuming what you think, Stoker, I believe that you have positioned me on this pedestal in your mind—perfect and tidy and proper, but that is a character, not a human woman. I am not perfect. I am not tidy and I have very little use for propriety. Obviously. We are learning our authentic selves.”

  “My authentic self is not for your knowledge.”

  “If you withhold yourself from me in that way,” she said, “we are doomed.”

  “Then doom it is,” he said, his heart ripping in two. “Just look at you. Look what I’ve done to you.” He gestured to her dress.

  “You must forget about the gown,” she sighed. “Perhaps you will buy me a new one. I have been told that you are among the richest men in England.”

  “Is that what you want?” This, he understood.

  Sabine screamed and reached to tug off her slipper. “No!” she cried, hurling the shoe at his head. She took a deep breath. “Stoker? Did you hear me cry for help in bed? Or for you to stop?”

  He thought back, his face burning at the memory of his passion. It had been a wave of glorious relief and cresting guilt. A blur of her nakedness and his red-hot desire. He’d been out of his head.

  She slid from the bed with a thump. “Did you hear me shout, ‘Stop, Stoker, please, I beg of you?’ Did I lie there like a carp on a plate, quietly enduring while you pounded away?”

  He stared at her, distracted by the terrible memory of him “pounding away.”

  “No!” she shouted, rounding on the bed. “I did not. What did I do instead?”

  He watched her limp to him, her gait uneven in one shoe. She stooped to remove the remaining slipper, and he braced, ready to dodge.

  “No, truly,” she continued. “I will not provide the answers to this. I want you to tell me. What were my reactions when we were in bed together?” She nodded to the scrambled bed. “Just now. Not ten minutes ago. I would like to hear it.”

  “You . . . kissed me,” he said.

  “Did I? That’s happened on three occasions now, hasn’t it, so it hardly qualifies. Something new.”

  “You called my name.”

  “In horror?”

  “Well—”

  “Did I also say some version of, ‘Please,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Oh!’ ‘More’?”

  Her voice was flat and matter-of-fact. It was almost comical the way she rattled off such intimate exclamations. But she did not look amused. She looked angry. Stoker endeavored to take her seriously, to answer her outrage, to be contrite. It was his fault entirely. And yet, he could not deny that she’d said these very things.

  He ventured, “It’s no excuse, but when you say these things, Sabine, in the heat of passion, it magnifies my struggle to hold back.”

  “I believe that is the idea of succumbing to passionate lovemaking, Stoker. I am no authority—”

  “Yes!” he agreed, “you were a virgin, and you’ve no idea—”

  “What I was going to say was that I am no authority on anyone’s pleasure but my own! I should like to be an authority on yours, but it would appear we must devote considerable time to assuaging your guilt instead.”

  “I have been broken,” he said, turning away. He heard the hyperbole as it left his lips, but he couldn’t stop. He believed the bloody hyperbole. “I am too broken for you.”

  “Do not,” she said. Her voice was so vehement, he turned back. She marched across the room to a wardrobe on a far wall. Grabbing the knobs, she hurled it open and rifled through drawers and shelves, looking for—what? He could not say.

  She pulled out a garment—a boy’s morning jacket—and shoved it back inside. She resumed her search, speaking to the open furniture. “You asked me earlier not to pity you, and now I must ask you to refrain from pitying yourself.”

  “It’s not pity, Sabine. I cannot describe my struggle beyond saying that I want what isn’t decent. I don’t come to the bed with no despair in my life—”

  She spun around. “I know it doesn’t warrant as much, but I was beaten for nine months by a sadistic uncle who is now trying to blow up England.” She turned back to the wardrobe, pulled out what appeared to be an ivory choirboy’s robe, and shoved it back.

  “You said he never touched you in that way,” Stoker said, rising from the bed.

  “I suppose a slap across the face, or a fork to the hand, or a boot to the ribs is not horrible enough.” She pulled out a small dark suit and shoved it back. She turned on him. “This room must belong to a miniature vicar.”

  Stoker held up a finger. “When I first came to you, you shrank away from me. I could barely lift my head from the pillow, I was completely harmless, and yet you resisted any closeness. Because of Dryden, you could not be crowded or trapped.”

  She closed the wardrobe and looked around the room. His jacket was in the middle of the rug in a wad, and she snatched it up and shoved into it. “Yes, when you first came to me, but then we learned each other. I saw, among other things, that you posed no threat. I found I wanted to be close to you. Now I find I want to be crowded and trapped by you.”

  He swore and turned away. She said the most incendiary things.

  “I’m sorry but it’s true.”

  “And what if mental damage caused by Dryden surfaces at a later day? What if a situation that you cannot yet conceive—my God, there are so many situations about which an innocent like you cannot conceive—triggers some memory that you have long hidden, something that will rise up and haunt you?”

  “There is always that danger, I suppose,” she conceded, “but this has not been my experience. It’s been years, Stoker, and now I rarely think of Dryden.”

  “Except every day when you investigate him. We are here tonight because of Sir Dryden.”

  “Yes, but the investigation is meant to get rid of him so that I can return home.”

  “How will he haunt you after that?”

  “Not at all, I hope!”

  “There is a toughness about you, Sabine, but you are not invincible.”

  “Perhaps, but I am also not a victim,” she shot back. “When you d
elivered me to London after our wedding, I went over and over what had happened in my mind. I walked the city from one end to the other, and while I walked, I reckoned with my father’s death and my mother’s decline and how Dryden took advantage of it all. I looked at each episode from every angle. Was I culpable? No. Could I have handled his aggression differently? Perhaps, but I was doing the best I could at the time. Would he have killed me if you hadn’t come? Possibly.”

  “A conviction of treason is too good for him,” Stoker mumbled.

  Sabine pressed on, “But you did come, and I made the incredibly reckless and risky decision to leave home with a stranger rather than remain with a known tyrant. Perhaps that decision saved you and me both, and what luck. But I have not buried or disregarded my memories of Dryden. You must trust me when I say that I have reckoned with it and moved on. It was the long walks, I think. When my meanderings turned from angry thoughts and tearful resentment to writing and drawing, the healing began.”

  “Of course it did,” he sighed. “You’re so . . . practical.”

  “Oh yes, I’m so very practical,” she said, but the words came out almost like a purr.

  She had settled on a window seat and was running her fingers through her hair, settling it over her shoulder in a shiny cascade of black. She glanced at him and raised a suggestive eyebrow. She said no more, but her message was clear. How practical had it been to make love—here, now? How practical had it been to find themselves shut up in a room while revelers danced downstairs? And yet she claimed it was exactly what she wanted. Stoker looked at the tussled bed, her torn dress. Could she actually want this?

  “I just don’t know why,” Sabine sighed, “all of this must be so painfully tragic. I’ve told you in no uncertain terms that I am unharmed. Stop telling me how I’m meant to feel, when I could not be clearer about what I want, and when and how.”

  “What about what I want?” he gritted out.

  “Stoker,” she said, her voice weary.