Her voice trembled on the last few words.
He noticed.
But he was also absorbing the rest of what she had just said. Anger returned to him. “I would have saved you. I never would have bloody well left had you not gone to your father. Tell me something, Duchess, did you ever spare a morsel of sympathy for me? Did you know even a moment of guilt whilst you slept in your warm bed and your father’s henchman sliced open my face and left me for dead?”
Her lips parted. For a beat, she said nothing, simply stared at him, eyes wide and unblinking, traveling to the scar on his cheek before returning to his. “What did you say?”
“This,” he said, tapping his scar, “is the last gift you left me with. This and the book. As you can see, I still bear both.”
She shook her head slowly. “I do not understand, Clay.”
Was it possible she hadn’t known? That when she had experienced her change of heart and ran to her father to confess their plan of running away together, she had imagined her father would not retaliate against Clay? Could it be true she hadn’t realized the depth of her father’s hatred for his, and vicariously for Clay?
He ran a palm over his cheek, the scar feeling suddenly as if it scorched his flesh. “When you told your father about what we planned, did you not think he would take action? Did you truly imagine he would not make me pay for daring to try to take you from him?”
Chapter Nineteen
It was as if she had stepped into a dream.
A nightmare.
She must be sleeping, trapped helplessly inside the nonsensical meanderings of her mind. That was the only explanation for what was happening now. For what Clay was saying.
Your father’s henchman sliced open my face and left me for dead.
This is the last gift you left me with.
His words, bitter and dark with accusation, echoed in her mind as his gaze trapped hers. But how could it be possible that her father had…what? That her father had paid someone to attack Clay?
“No,” she whispered, her hand flying to her mouth in an attempt to hold back a sudden, violent sob.
His mother’s words at dinner returned to her as well.
Do you know, Your Grace, how my son’s face was scarred?
He was attacked from behind, cudgeled over the head, and woke to the knife on his cheek.
The man responsible has not been imprisoned.
That meant…my God, it meant…
“No,” she said again, louder this time. “No, I will not believe it.”
“You will not believe what?” He was before her, his expression fierce, jaw rigid, eyes burning with intensity. But when he took her face in his hands, it was with the gentlest of touches. “Tell me you didn’t know. Tell me you didn’t know he would send someone after me.”
“I…” she began, only to falter. She reached up, stroking slowly over the vicious scar. A scar he wore because of her. But his explanation did not make sense. “I never told my father, Clay. I never told anyone what we had planned. Even when you didn’t come for me and my mother’s carriage found me, it was because she was traveling to visit my Aunt Charity and not because they knew I was eloping with you.”
He stilled. “Of course they knew, Ara. They knew because you confessed everything to them. It was all there in your letter. Perhaps you have forgotten what you wrote in the years that passed since, but I can assure you I have not.”
Icy tendrils of dread shot through her. Nothing made sense. And yet it did. “Clay, I never wrote you a letter. How did you receive it?”
His lip curled. “The man who attacked me from behind while I waited for you was kind enough to slip it inside my coat.”
Dear God.
Her mind struggled to comprehend the gravity of what all these unfettered revelations meant. “But you were not there when I arrived, Clay. I waited for hours.”
She wanted to believe he had been there, that he had gone to meet her with every intention of making her his wife, just as they had planned. But if that was the truth, it also meant he had been savagely attacked and taken away before she had arrived. And worse, that it had all happened because of her, that her own father was responsible. The dread blossomed and grew, spreading in her chest, lacing around her heart.
“You went to meet me?” he rasped, his voice low, redolent with a host of emotions she could not identify.
There was no way to answer other than honestly. “I waited and waited for you.”
“Ara.” He closed his eyes for a moment, wincing as if he were in physical agony. “Bloody hell, Ara. All this time…all these years, I thought…the damned letter said you felt guilty and ashamed, that you did not wish to shame your parents or your family. It said you never wanted to see me again, that you were going to marry someone from your station, that you had seen the error in your judgment. That I was beneath you.”
Each sentence he uttered was worse than the last, sinking into her with the painful proficiency of an assassin’s blade. Dear God, little wonder he had loathed her on sight. He had spent all these years thinking she had jilted him because she was ashamed of him, that she had been complicit in her father’s plan to have him attacked.
She caressed his scarred cheek slowly, tenderly. “I would never say those things. I never did. The letter was not from me. Tell me what happened, Clay. Please, I need to know.”
His eyes slid closed once more. A long exhalation escaped him, as if in preparation. When his eyes opened again, they glinted with so much naked pain she almost had to look away. “I was waiting for you. I was early, and it was dark. I heard a footfall behind me, and then pain exploded in my head. When I came to, my hands were bound, and then he was carving my face.”
“No, Clay.” The pitiful denial was all she could manage to say, and it was not a denial of his story but of what had happened to him. What had happened to the both of them.
Tears blurred her vision as she thought of the young man he had been, handsome and honorable and sweet. Of the Clay who had given her his heart and his body. Of the man she had loved waiting for her as he’d promised, only to be so brutally beaten, his beautiful face cut and marred for life. How betrayed he must have felt, how alone.
He gathered her to him, tucking her head beneath his chin and holding her tightly against his warm, bare chest. His heart thumped into hers in steady reassurance. She wrapped her arms around his waist, holding him every bit as much. And then she wept. She wept for the Clay and Ara they had once been, she wept for the lies they had believed, she wept for the time they had lost.
He held her in his strong, beloved embrace, his hands stroking over her back in comfort. He held her as if she were the one who had endured what had befallen him rather than the opposite.
“Do not cry for me, Ara mine,” he said softly, kissing her crown and breaking her heart with the old diminutive he had once given her. “I have had eight years to heal.”
Eight years.
That was how long they had been apart.
Eight years too long.
She could never regret knowing Freddie—he had been a light in a time of bleak darkness for her. But she did regret all the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years she had spent living her life without Clay in it.
“Please believe that had I known—had I an inkling—I would have done anything and everything within my power to keep you safe.” She understood why he had believed her complicit all this time. They had been so careful with their assignations. How else would her father have known when and where to find Clay? Of course he would have believed her guilty. He had been given a letter he thought was from her. “I wrote everything in my journal. My mother or father must have been reading it without my knowledge. I never told them about that day. I never would have. You were all I wanted, all I needed.”
He was still all she wanted, all she needed.
But she kept that to herself, for whatever it was that had sparked to life between them, she had no inkling of where it would go.
If it could be anything more than these precious, stolen moments. She did not dare believe he still cared for her all these years later. They had both changed.
So much had come between them. And for all that the connection they shared had never faded, they were both very much strangers to each other in so many ways.
“I believe you, Ara.” His hands continued up and down her back, soothing her. Calming her. Making her feel cared for in a way only he could. “I believe you.”
She held him tighter still, her face buried in his hard chest, and even with the shock of everything she had just learned, even with the specter of the men who wanted her dead haunting her, she had never felt more comforted and protected. She had never felt more at home.
Clay woke to a dream.
It was a dream he’d had countless times over the years. He was lying on his back in his bed, and his bed was dressed with the most sumptuous of linens, and his mattress was a soft cocoon around him. He had slept more deeply than he had in as long as he could remember.
Most miraculous of all was the lovely feminine form draped over him. One of her legs was tangled with his. Her breasts were crushed to his side, her head lay on his chest. Copper-colored curls spilled over him like fire.
He plucked a curl between his thumb and forefinger, rubbed it slowly, pulling it straight and then letting it fall to his chest. Summer roses in bloom perfumed the air, and it was coming from her. Roses with a dash of something else. Sunshine? The gloriousness of the sun? The sweetness of Ara?
All of it.
He stroked her hair. Watched her sleep. Tried to ignore his cock, which was painful, erect proof he was not dreaming. Rather, he was awake. He was awake, and he was grateful. So bloody grateful.
And angry too. So bloody angry.
Angry at himself for believing Ara would be capable of such treachery. For leaving when he should have remained and demanded answers. It did not matter that he’d been beaten and carved like a damned Bayonne ham. He ought to have known better. He ought to have been the man who married her.
He had missed so much.
Watching her belly grow full with his child. Loving her. Thousands of kisses and nights spent with her in his bed. Holding his son in his arms. Seeing the lad toddle on his legs for the first time. Hearing the lad call him Father.
Damn it. He wanted the lad to know he was his father.
He wanted to be a part of Ara and Edward’s lives forever, and not just as their protector but as husband and father. He wanted to give her another babe, a daughter with her ethereal eyes and fiery hair. Another sylph for him to love. And then at least a half dozen more babes after that.
He wanted them to be what they were always meant to have been. A family.
He swallowed down the lump in his throat, still playing with Ara’s hair and listening to the rhythmic sounds of her breathing. The vehemence of his emotions as he held her in the early morning light surprised him. Their late-night revelations had rocked him.
But not just him. They had rocked Ara as well. She had been shocked to realize the full extent of her mother and father’s betrayal. She had spent eight years believing he had taken what he wanted from her—her innocence—and then fled to the Continent, leaving her to contend with a babe in her belly, parents who threatened to turn her out, and scarcely anyone to trust.
Mutually drained, they had fallen into bed, holding each other. Inevitably, comforting had turned into something more. Their mouths had fused, and their hands had begun to wander, and he had rolled her gently to her back, sliding home inside her as she writhed beneath him.
She stirred on his chest now, making sleepy kitten noises in her throat that were so bloody adorable he could not contain his smile. His fingers sifted through her hair, discovering her bare back. It was too soon, he knew, to feel this much for her again. But he could not seem to help himself where she was concerned.
She had ever been his weakness, and nothing had changed.
She moved restlessly, and then woke with a jolt. “Clay!”
He could not seem to stop grinning as she blinked sleep from her eyes, her cheeks flushed, her lips full and pink and deuced inviting. “Ara.”
Her brows shot up her forehead. “I am in your bed.”
His grin deepened. He could not help it. “Aye.”
“I should return to…the other chamber,” she stammered, blushing furiously. “That is, to the chamber you assigned me. Over. There.”
“Or you can remain in this chamber,” he said, feeling wicked. One hand found the sweet nip of her waist and the other found her thigh. He guided her until she was atop him. “Right. Here.”
As he said the last, he rocked against her, suppressing a groan when he felt her slick heat on his cock. She gasped, her own hands flitting to his shoulders to steady herself. “Clay, what are you doing?”
For a widow, she was certainly an innocent.
He did not mind being the one to debauch her. In fact, it would be his greatest pleasure. In this moment, there was no pain, no danger, no impediment to them both getting what they so badly wanted and needed—each other. What they had been denied all these years.
“I am attempting to keep you here with me for as long as possible,” he admitted, moving a hand between them.
His fingers parted her, found the bundle of flesh that was so deliciously responsive, and stroked. She bucked over him, a gasp tearing from her throat. Aye, this was a dream to be sure. A dream to be waking up with her in his bed, with the chance she could be his again.
But he could not rush either of them, he knew. So, he focused on this simple truth between them: pleasure. His need for her. Her need for him. It was the one thing that had never dimmed, despite the betrayals each thought the other had committed. It had always been there, humming beneath the surface of their every interaction. And now it was theirs to unlock.
“Oh,” she said as she rocked over him, dragging his hard cock over her seam.
Oh indeed.
He was going to spend all over her if she continued this torture. “I need to be inside you, Ara.”
No sight had ever been more beautiful or more arresting than Ara nude and astride him. Her hair was a vibrant cascade of curls down her back, her full, pink-tipped breasts thrust forward like ripe offerings. He could not resist sucking a rosy nipple into his mouth. Perfection.
“Clay,” she gasped, undulating her hips again as she shuddered against him, finding her release as he rubbed her pearl and gave her breast a gentle bite.
He waited until the waves of pleasure had subsided for her, and then he gripped his cockstand, positioning himself at her entrance. “Do you want this?”
Her blue-violet eyes were steady on his, her pupils dark, large, and glazed with desire. “Yes.”
No hesitation, and thank God for that. He thrust upward and brought her down on him at the same time. In one breath, he was deep inside her, and she was hotter and wetter than she had ever been. She clenched on him. It was just so bloody good.
So bloody…
Damn it, he could not even think. His entire world became the connection between their bodies. The pleasure burst open inside him like a firework display on the inky canvas of a night sky, one moment blank and the next color, spark, boom. They found their rhythm, his hands on her hips helping to set the pace. Showing her how to move, how to ride him.
Bursts of memory shot through him as he rocked beneath her sensual onslaught. He remembered the first time he had seen her watching him in the trees. He remembered their first kiss. Remembered the night he had made love to her before the crackling fire when he had been certain he would be her husband in two days’ time and the future was theirs. Recalled their goodbye kiss in the moonlight, the way it had felt to love Ara, as if the sun shone only for him. As if he were as lofty as a cloud.
He shook himself from the past. Her cunny was so slippery, tightening on him so deliciously it took his breath. To hell with the past. He wanted her future. He wanted her mornings, he
r days, her nights. He never wanted to leave her bed, her side.
Because he had not stopped loving her.
The realization hit him. He did not just want to make a life with Ara and Edward. He loved her. Had always loved her. Would always love her. Araminta Burghly was his, and he wasn’t going to let her go. Not ever. Soon, she would be Araminta Ludlow, just as she was always meant to have been.
The thought made his ballocks draw tight, and he almost spent inside her then and there. He surged deep, and she clenched around him once more, a shudder of release sending her collapsing to his chest. Their mouths fused, and he rolled them both to their sides, withdrawing from her body at the last moment to fist his cock and spill his seed into the bedclothes.
In the aftermath of their swift passion, they lay together, their sweat-slicked bodies intertwined. Their gazes locked and held. A small, shy smile curved her full lips.
“Good morning, Clay.”
He kissed her nose, adoring the smattering of freckles on the delicate bridge. “Morning, Ara mine.”
Her lips parted. Sadness clouded her gaze. “I never thought to hear you call me that again.”
He ground his jaw against the reminder of what had been robbed from them. “You have always been mine, Ara. From the moment we first met beneath the shade of the trees until this very moment. Nothing has changed.”
And yet, everything had.
Truth could be so strange, as freeing as it was confounding.
Tears shone in her vibrant eyes, clinging to her long, dark lashes. “I am so sorry, Clay.”
The tears spilled down her cheeks in slow, fat droplets.
He kissed each one, licking his lips, tasting the salt of her pain. “Do not cry, darling. And do not be sorry. I am not sorry at all. Rather, I am glad.”
“Glad?” Her brows arched.
“Glad you are here. Now. We cannot change what has happened, but we can grow stronger from it.” He smoothed a stray tendril of hair away from her face and admired her, the sylvan goddess from so long ago back in his arms. “We can go on, as we must.”
Nobody's Duke (League of Dukes Book 1) Page 22
