by Eva Devon
Cool air blew against the damp skin of her body when he broke away, a stormy gaze boring into hers. Was he going to stop? Pull away? He wouldn’t be so cruel, would he? He’d told her to use his given name!
But with a fraught growl, his mouth descended to where he’d left off and kissed its way down her body, lingering over each of her breasts until she was certain she’d go mad. By the time he lifted himself above her, she no longer had a rational thought in her head. She was a blinding mass of need and raw desire. When his body finally slid into hers, it pinched, but his careful preparation had soothed the way.
“Hold still,” he rasped, his voice hoarse with strain as his breath sawed out of him. “Get used to me.”
It wasn’t his words as much as his thoughtfulness that melted her. Once she’d adjusted to accommodate him, Isobel sucked in air as he began to move, withdrawing almost all the way before easing back in.
“Is this too much?” he asked.
“No, you’re perfect.”
Winter stilled, but she didn’t have time to feel embarrassed by the blurted admission before he repeated the motion, making her gasp. With each pass, it felt better. Sensation upon sensation built inside her with every stroke until he reached between them to caress a spot that made her see stars and she cried out as pleasure took her.
A few short thrusts later, and Winter groaned what sounded like her name, though she couldn’t be sure, his huge frame withdrawing completely from her and then going rigid with what she imagined was the culmination of his own release. Breathing hard, he slumped forward, his large body blanketing hers. It was strangely nice, though the moment did not last.
Her husband lifted off of her. For an unguarded moment his eyes met hers, a flare of shock evident before he rolled away. Isobel did not feel slighted when he stood and reached for his trousers. She could only remember the tenderness of his touch, and the kindness he’d displayed with her inexperienced body. Her husband had to care to be so gentle and considerate.
Isobel draped herself in the warmth of everything she felt and smiled to herself.
One day, perhaps soon, she would tell him she loved him.
Chapter Two
Chelmsford, England
3 years later
Oh how she hated that bloody, black-hearted jackanapes!
The brisk morning wind teased the pins from Isobel’s hair, blond tendrils lashing into her face as she galloped at a breakneck pace across the moors. She was in a fine froth, and she pushed her mare Hellion to go even faster. Faintly, Isobel heard a voice calling out from somewhere behind her, but she couldn’t turn back now. Nothing but a grueling ride would cool the heat in her veins.
According to the newssheets she’d read that morning, her husband was up to his disreputable exploits in London again, while she, the poor, pathetic—and any number of other uncharitable descriptors—country mouse of a wife remained at home in pious, devoted silence.
Devoted, my furious foot.
Her maggot of a marquess had abandoned her here.
After their wedding, Isobel had assumed she and Winter would live together in Chelmsford. It was his father’s ducal seat, after all, and his family home. Old bitterness, buried down deep, spilled through her. How foolish and utterly naive she’d been! Her caring new husband had bedded her and then left her.
That. Same. Night.
She’d gathered—albeit after a lot of weeping and the shattering of her rose-tinted spectacles—that her husband might not have held as grand an affection for her as she’d had for him. That what had seemed so special to her had not meant a thing to him at all, because right after he’d done his duty, he’d absconded like a thief in the dark.
Isobel snarled out an oath as her mare’s hooves pounded the dirt, putting much needed distance between them and those dratted newssheets at the manor. It was a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky, but Isobel hardly took notice, so intent she was on outrunning her fury.
In the beginning, she had thought Winter’s absence would be for a day or two. She had waited like a besotted fool for weeks before Mrs. Butterfield had taken pity on her and explained that the marquess was very busy with his business in London and very rarely came to Kendrick Abbey. And if he did come to the country, he had his own estate in Chelmsford—Rothingham Gable.
Even then, she’d been so sickeningly naive, wondering why a husband would choose to leave his new wife at his father’s ducal residence instead of his.
Perhaps he was performing restorations.
Perhaps he wanted to surprise her.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
She’d learned the unpleasant answer a few months later from a loose-lipped maid—her heroic, honorable, noble husband was apparently renowned for hosting wild house parties at Rothingham Gable. Bacchanalian revels, the maid had confided with suffocated giggles. Of course, that had all been long before he’d been married, the maid had hastily assured her.
Of course, a heartsick Isobel had echoed.
Now, three years and five months later, with the barest minimum of correspondence from the marquess, she learned more about her vagabond husband from the London gossip rags than from the man himself. Isobel had had enough. This time, he’d purportedly engaged in a dawn duel. Over an opera singer of all things.
She scowled as she slowed and dismounted, letting Hellion cool off and graze.
How dare he disrespect her so?
As the Marchioness of Roth, she’d held her head high and pretended her callous husband wasn’t such an empirical ass. She’d been patient. Honored her vows. Respected his wishes. Brushed off his antics as youthful folly. Buried the hurt that his coldhearted desertion had caused. Told herself that eventually, like all highborn gentlemen, Winter would come to his senses and require an heir. Then she would have a family, even if her rakehell of a husband did not want to be involved.
Someday.
Someday had never come. Swallowing her bitterness, Isobel paced back and forth, the rich smell of grass and earth doing little to calm her down. Even the cheery sound of laughter from the children of the tenant farmers down the hill didn’t make her smile.
As year after year passed, she convinced herself that she wasn’t bloody miserable each month she spent cooped up like some forgotten mare put out to pasture, with only her pianoforte and her useless accomplishments to keep her company. Isobel remembered with acute shame what she’d primly told her sister years ago: a young lady should be accomplished in the feminine arts. Music, and dancing, and whatnot.
Well, she was eating a large serving of crow and whatnot at the moment. No one had ever explained to her younger and vociferously green self what whatnot had meant. If it meant dealing with a husband who had dumped his wife in Chelmsford while he gallivanted in London and pretended he was an eternal bachelor, then she’d be an expert in the matter.
“He’ll grow out of it, dear,” Mrs. Butterfield had told her. “All men sow their wild oats.”
So she’d let him sow. Acres and acres of it. But this was outside of enough.
A bloody duel. Over someone who wasn’t his wife.
Isobel clenched her fists together, staring mindlessly over the tops of the tenant cottages to the spire of the village church in the distance. Clarissa, her dearest friend and lady’s companion, had suggested that some of the accounts of gambling and indecent revelry might be false—salacious stories sold newspapers, after all. But even some stories had to have a modicum of truth to them. Isobel thought she’d become desensitized to her husband’s antics, but clearly not.
Rage and hurt bubbled up into her throat.
“Damnation, woman!” Clarissa wheezed as she reined her horse to a lathered stop where Isobel stood at the edge of the rise overlooking the lake. “I never should have taught you to ride.”
Her sweaty best friend dismounted, her dark mess of curls sticki
ng out in every direction, and her green eyes knowing, full of sympathetic anger. Isobel’s own eyes were dry as she greeted her. She’d shed enough tears for that pigeon-livered rogue of a husband. He did not deserve another drop from her, not a single one.
“I take it you read the newssheets,” Isobel said. No need to beat around the bush. There was only one reason that her friend would follow her mad dash from the house.
Clarissa nodded and remained silent. After three years of shared confidences, particularly about the subject of the Maggot of Roth, she well knew when to let Isobel vent. She had enough opinions of her own about Isobel’s scoundrel of a husband, but at times like this, she was the more level-headed of the two of them.
“They exaggerate everything,” Clarissa said in a soothing voice. “You know this. Those abominable liars write what they want to write.”
“Then why wouldn’t Roth dispute them, if that were the case?”
“Perhaps he thinks them amusing? Men don’t worry about those sorts of things.”
“Those sorts of things,” Isobel repeated. “He fought a duel, Clarissa. Over Contessa James of all people.”
Clarissa pulled a face. “Maybe he’s acting out,” she suggested mildly.
“He’s a grown man. How much acting out does he need to do?”
“Men mature differently than women,” her friend replied with the patience deserving of a saint instead of her usual speak-first-think-later temperament. “And he’s never recovered from his sister’s and mother’s deaths—you also know that as well as I do. Everyone knows that it left him in a terrible state. It’s the reason he and the duke don’t get along.”
“Grief shouldn’t make a man an absolute steaming arse-rag.”
Clarissa’s eyes sparked with reluctant approval, her mouth twitching at the inventive slur. “Shouldn’t have taught you to swear, either.”
“You shouldn’t have taught me a lot of things.”
Clarissa was the daughter of the Duke of Kendrick’s private solicitor, Mr. Bell, and the youngest of six, the other five all boys. From the moment she and Isobel had been introduced nearly three and a half years ago, they’d been inseparable, and everything Clarissa learned from her rambunctious brothers, she’d taught to Isobel.
And that meant everything.
Isobel had been so sheltered that when the incorrigible, boisterous, and entirely too bold girl had asked her with a saucy grin if she was up the pole yet, her eyes had gone wide and her mouth had gaped. “It only takes one time, you know,” her new friend had said knowingly. “To get with child.”
“No,” a scandalized Isobel had stammered. “I don’t think so.”
“What were his kisses like?” A curious stare had followed. “Did you stick your tongue in his mouth?”
“No!”
“Then you’re doing it wrong.”
Isobel had stopped blushing after the first life lesson—one involving how babies were made. That had been eye-opening, to say the least. Not that she hadn’t had a thoroughly erotic introduction to marital relations with her own clodpole of a husband, a union which had not borne any fruit of the newborn variety. By design, she’d learned since, as the marquess had withdrawn and spilled in the sheets. Perhaps, that, too, had been a blessing in disguise.
Though deep down, Isobel did not deny wishing for children of her own and a family to care for one day, blessing in disguise or not.
Thank God for Clarissa, the only light in what had promised to be a lonely and dismal existence. From then on, her self-ordained best friend had encouraged her to ask her anything, as in anything. And since it was much too shameful to voice certain inquiries out loud, Isobel chose to pen secret letters to which Clarissa provided answers in lewd, graphic, and gleeful detail.
After the first letter asking about what it was like to truly kiss a man, the impish Clarissa had replied with a scandalous masterpiece dedicated solely to the vagaries of kissing, including tongues, spit, and fish-faced puckers that had made the two girls dissolve into irreverent giggles.
Eventually, what had started out as naughty but instructive letters between friends had turned into a surprising windfall. Isobel’s sister Astrid, an authoress herself, had taken one look at the stack of scandalously frank correspondence, burst into laughter, and sent them off to her publishing man of affairs. While Astrid mostly published essays about women’s rights with the steadfast support of her own husband, her visionary publisher had seen opportunity with the Dearest Friend letters. That had been the start of The Daring Lady Darcy.
All anonymous, of course.
Said publisher didn’t want to go to prison.
Lady Darcy’s instant success had taken them all by surprise. As it turned out, wicked advice to ladies of quality had been a shocking novelty, and the modest publication had risen to instant notoriety. From recipes to fashion to needlepoint, to physical and emotional intimacy, to scandalous erotic advice, there was no stone left unturned, no subject left untouched. The frank periodicals flouted decency, but readers were greedy for more.
“I should write Lady Darcy a letter on disemboweling unsuspecting husbands,” Isobel said, then with a grin, she added, “And hiding a body without getting caught.”
Clarissa cackled, eyes sparking with glee. “I’d have to do some research, but why not? I bet our readers would love that. What do you think of ‘A Lady’s Guide to Mariticide’?”
Isobel laughed with her friend, the hottest part of her anger draining away. She could always count on Clarissa to make her smile.
Thundering hooves interrupted their amusement.
“Your ladyship!” A panting groom rode out to meet them.
Isobel schooled her features into calm. “What is it, Randolph?”
“His Grace is in residence!”
Oh, good Lord, she had completely forgotten her father-in-law’s arrival!
Strangely, Isobel had developed a fondness for the duke over the years. Having lost her own parents in a terrible carriage accident, she had gravitated to the stoic man. Besides her sister, who had her own life, Kendrick was the only family she had. Eventually, they had bonded over a shared love of music as well as their common bedsore of a connection—his estranged son and her equally estranged spouse.
Isobel stepped over to where Hellion was grazing. She glowered at Clarissa. “You could have reminded me,” she accused without much heat.
“How could I when I forgot as well?”
“Some friend you are. Come on.”
Clarissa shook her head. “Not a chance. You enjoy the Duke of Derision by yourself. He positively loathes me. Besides, I need to cool my horse and my sore behind after chasing your shadow for the last half an hour.”
“He doesn’t loathe you.”
Clarissa’s eyebrows shot upward. “He called me a witless pest, Izzy.” Her eyes widened as she clutched at her chest with dramatic flair. “Witless. Me? Doesn’t everyone know that I am the undeclared Goddess of Eternal Wit? For shame!”
Isobel snorted. “That’s a mouthful.”
“Well, you know what they say about more than a mouthful.”
“No, Clarissa,” Isobel said, her lips twitching, “what do they say?”
She tapped her lips with a finger. “Something I might need to consider for our next batch of letters. Speaking of, I should get started. ‘More than a Mouthful’ is a memorable title, don’t you think? Or perhaps, ‘Ladies Gobbling Bananas.’”
“Clarissa!” Heat flooded Isobel’s cheeks. Sometimes her best friend was too much.
“What? It’s a natural part of life, or so my brothers declare in secret. All men enjoy it, I bet.” She wrinkled her nose. “Even the duke. Perhaps we should send him a copy and see if we can get him to crack a smile?”
“You wouldn’t!”
Isobel pinned her lips between her teeth. If the duke had any
inkling of her secret life as Lady Darcy, he would implode. As much as he cared for her, Lady Darcy’s intrigues weren’t the done thing for a lady of quality. The duke was a fastidious man who was a stickler for decorum.
That said, most people didn’t appreciate her father-in-law. Underneath all that aloof, brooding reserve, he had a heart that beat fiercely for his sons, even though his firstborn seemed to be convinced the duke was the devil. From what Isobel could garner from the tight-lipped upper servants, they’d been on the outs since Winter was a boy…a divide that had only worsened in recent years.
Isobel sighed and mounted her horse. She wasn’t sure she was up for company, but she turned Hellion around, stroking the mare gently. Hellion was the foal of her sister’s prized thoroughbreds, Brutus and Temperance, and had been a belated wedding present from the Duke and Duchess of Beswick. At first, Isobel had been terrified of the horse, but the truth was she’d been so lonely that she’d learned to ride out of sheer necessity.
At least the mare had stuck around.
Because Hellion was loyal, unlike a certain fickle, spineless marquess.
Arriving at the stables in short order, she slid from the horse with a soothing word and a caress, and threw the reins to a waiting groom, before dashing toward the kitchens. With luck, she would have a few minutes to freshen up and change before greeting the duke.
“Goodness, watch out!” a voice exclaimed as she barreled to the stairs.
Isobel slowed, narrowly missing a collision with one of the Fairfax twins. Violet and Molly had shown up six months ago with a note from their late father’s solicitor citing the duke as their guardian. Kendrick had read it without blinking and told Mrs. Butterfield to take care of it. He’d ignored his wards ever since, though he hadn’t batted an eyelash at allowing them to stay. At two-and-twenty, they were only two years older than her, and Isobel suspected he might have done it for her sake. Outside of Clarissa, female company was in short supply.
“Sorry!” Isobel caught her breath before climbing the stairs at a more sedate pace. “I forgot the duke was back today and with everything this morning, I’m a mess.”
