by Anna Cowan
She was being careful, and her hands were now clutched up in her skirts, but he didn’t know if he could be careful back. It made even less sense than before.
‘Then why —’ He bit the words back. Bit his tongue and tasted blood. Clean, simple. Blood he understood.
‘I didn’t love him,’ she said. ‘So it didn’t matter.’
He breathed heavily and let the implications of that unfurl through him. When he finally looked at her, she was closer than he’d expected.
‘You always mattered too much, James,’ she said, her voice a little unsure.
He closed his eyes. Forced himself to be calm.
‘Don’t do it again,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘Please never do it again.’
There was a deep silence, and then she said, ‘Very well.’
Clean, simple.
She touched his arm and his eyes flew open. She looked white and determined – with nothing like the flushed abandon he imagined when he brought himself off thinking about her.
He stayed very still, and let her stroke her hand up his arm and close her fingers around his shoulder. God, those expressive hands that could barely span him.
When he didn’t move, hardly dared breathe, she came closer, and placed her other hand against his chest. It was such an unconscious, trusting gesture. It became easier to keep himself from pulling her tight against him.
He would be gentle for as long as it took. He would show her that she could trust him. Sex was not the first, or even second thing he wanted most from her.
Her lips touched his – dry, almost chaste.
Christ though, he did want.
He raised his hand, and when she didn’t shy away he touched the backs of his fingers to her throat and stroked her. He leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers again; this time it was more like a kiss.
Then he let her go.
There was something very like disappointment in her eyes, and his face broke into a grin. He couldn’t hold it back.
‘I suppose you may come and read to me a little,’ she said. ‘I haven’t the patience for it, but Tom’s new book is said to be exceptionally good. I will tell you when I’m tired and don’t need you any more. And then you may kiss me goodnight, if you wish.’
God, he’d never met a woman as ballsy as she. Except her sister. Maybe it was a Sutherland thing.
She swept out of the room, expecting him to follow like an obedient pet, and he had every intention of doing so when Tobin caught his arm outside the door.
‘James,’ he said in a low voice, when he was sure Lydia couldn’t hear.
‘Unless half of Scotland is on fire,’ said James, ‘now is not the time.’
‘I think it might be worse. Darlington’s carriage is out in the mews.’
‘I came because —’ Jude said, and Kit had him up against the wall and forced his mouth open with a kiss.
She could hear the desperate sounds she was making, and she almost pulled back, but then he moaned, deep and helpless into her mouth, and she pushed harder into him, and tried to take every bit of that sound from his lips and tongue.
They hadn’t been able to do this in the ballroom, when they were touching for the first time in weeks. He leaned back into the wall, taking some of her weight onto himself as he enveloped her in his arms.
His shoulders, his chest, his arms, his hands, all worked on her, strong and insistent, pulling her closer, always closer. A firm, possessive grasp around her nape, dissolving into gentle fingertips stroking up under her jaw. He pulled her into the hot wet of his mouth.
Her hands curled around his collars, crushed them in her fingers.
She only realised when he pulled her head back from his that he’d wrapped her long hair tight around his arm, and she couldn’t move her head an inch without his permission.
‘These breeches,’ he said, and his other hand stroked over her hip, on to the swell of her arse. He pushed one of his legs between hers and pulled her tighter in against him. He didn’t stop stroking her – thigh, hip, arse – and the sensation of skin on almost-skin made her want to, need to, arch her back, let her head fall, eyes fall closed.
But his grip on her hair was implacable.
He stroked up inside her shirt, his hand flat and warm against her back. When he stroked back down, pulling her even closer in, he started rubbing himself against her.
‘They’re so fucking indecent,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about this all evening.’
Her lips opened in desperate need, and she pulled, hard, on his collars.
He pulled back on her hair just to the point of pain, to keep her face an inch from his. Like they were caught in a contest. His whole body was the warm, subtle clench of muscles. She couldn’t look away from the expression on his face.
His free hand closed around the front of her throat. Even with the things he was doing to her, there was something unbearably intimate about the intent way he watched her – the way his palm felt the mechanism of her body every time she swallowed. His thumb stroked her bottom lip, a slow, smearing slide of skin.
‘You are mine,’ he said, each word distinct.
She glared back at him, struggled against his hold. He pulled harder so that her whole scalp stung. She was alone with him and he was not gentle. He was not kind. He was not simple, or easy.
She loved him so desperately it was a kind of disease in her.
‘Kiss me, you bastard,’ she said.
She was suddenly free to move, and she slammed her hands against his chest, shoving him into the wall. He shoved back.
They kissed, and she was becoming lost in him, and kissing wasn’t enough.
She felt his arm moving between them, and he unbuttoned the fall of her breeches with practised ease. His fingers found the slit in her underclothes. She fell still against him, her face in his neck, and the only thing in all the world was the slick, combing slide of his fingertips.
He pulled her easily in and held her, and did not relent.
It disconcerted her, still, how he was different this close. The man who sat across the room reading the paper in careless, aristocratic tones was not the same man whose breath was loud against her ear, whose skin was damp against her lips, whose chest moved hard against hers.
He began to murmur her name. He gathered her closer and his voice was unguarded, and she didn’t know how it was possible for the one man to be so achingly sweet when his fingers were so unforgiving.
But then, this man was Jude.
Her body remembered movement, and tried to express her need. She touched her fingers to his lips and felt the slide of her own tongue when she kissed him.
He reached down to unbutton his trousers; she realised for the first time that they were both still fully clothed – boots, waistcoats, coats snug around their shoulders, the fall of coat-tails taking up their desperate movement. His cravat and collars crushed, his lips bruised red.
His arm swift and sure between them.
He didn’t apologise, or try to make this more comfortable. His eyes were deep and unshuttered.
She could barely move, his arms too tight around her, her breeches around her thighs. Nothing to distract her from being tangled up with Jude, as he buried his head in her neck, and pushed himself naked inside her, and made a sound she would never, ever forget.
Jude’s forearms rested on the sheet, taking some of his weight off Katherine. He pushed her hair back from her face with both hands and kissed her temple, her cheek, the corner of her lips, her neck.
Even the warm, languorous press of his mouth against her, even the way his body covered hers, was inadequate to express this.
He leaned over the side of the bed and pulled something from the breast pocket of his coat. He tied the ribbon around her neck, and let the heavy iron key lie flat between her breasts. She flinched when it touched her skin.
‘A key to the Grosvenor Square house?’ she asked, her voice a debauched scrape that made his whole body tense in
delight. The sounds she had made. The absolute abandon that had meant he was not alone, even when he was entirely, viciously himself.
‘It’s what I came here to give you,’ he said, and kissed her again.
He hissed when the cold iron was pressed between their chests, and she laughed into his mouth and pushed him off. He lay on his stomach beside her.
‘What is it, then?’ she said, twisting it between her fingers. The dull grey surface hardly reflected any light.
‘That’s what Lady Marmotte wants,’ he said. ‘You could turn up at the game with five hundred thousand, and it still wouldn’t be enough.’
Kit sat up, her movements sharp. ‘What does it unlock?’
He said, ‘Proof that my father could never have fathered me, of course.’
She went very, very still, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t pretend she hadn’t heard, or make him repeat what he had practised saying so that he could say it as if it didn’t matter.
‘The box is held by my solicitors. Nobody living knows what’s in it but you and me. Lady Marmotte suspects – God, there have been rumours my whole life – but she has no solid proof.’
‘Jude,’ she said. ‘You have to destroy – what is it, papers?’
‘The steward’s papers from Holbrook Park. Entirely innocuous, unless you know what you’re looking at. The Duke’s signature on countless pieces of paper; requests, disputes, invoices. Over a six-month period during which he could have had no access to my mother, if he was at Holbrook Park.’
‘Why haven’t you destroyed them?’
He felt his lips twist into the familiar pattern of self-loathing. ‘I didn’t even know – not for sure – until Father died and I inherited his personal papers. I went through everything, searching for the smallest hint of affection. I had the mad idea that he might have written to me in secret. Something to prove that he was a stoic bastard but, I don’t know, beneath it all . . .’ He let his hand gesture his meaning. ‘Instead, I found irrefutable proof that he hated me. I find I can’t bring myself to destroy it quite yet.’
‘What was your father’s full name?’
He looked up in surprise. ‘Hallam St John Augustus Durham.’
‘I curse the name. I curse the blood that has already dried in his worm-eaten body.’
‘Lead-lined casket, I’m afraid. Are you always this bloodthirsty?’
‘If anyone tries to hurt you,’ she said, as though he was being thick and he should understand this already, ‘I will kill them.’
And perhaps he shouldn’t, but he felt like swooning when she threatened murder instead of crying all over him in pity.
‘So,’ she said, and let out a long breath. ‘I really, really have to win this game, then.’
He shrugged. Right now, the only important thing was that she’d declared war on a dangerous, spiteful woman and Jude could give her the bargaining chip that might give her a chance.
She was frowning at the key, still turning it. ‘Do you know who your natural father is?’
‘Was,’ he said. ‘I’m fairly certain it was John Hardwicke.’
She stared at him. ‘The poet? The one who was butchered in a cathedral? That John Hardwicke?’
‘The very same.’
She stared for another shocked moment, and then she threw back her head and laughed. Her lovely small breasts lifted, her ribs pressed up against her skin. Her muscles flexed in that unapologetic way that would never cease to shock him. Her throat was a long, brown line.
She subsided back down to the mattress, and stroked one hand across his cheek with easy affection. ‘How perfect,’ she said. ‘How very like you, to have such a man for a father.’
‘Yes, well. He could have obliged me by not dying when I was a boy.’
‘Fathers aren’t terribly obliging creatures,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘Though I suppose there’s my uncle, Lord Barton. And the Squire, despite his every other deficiency.’
‘Let’s never mention the Squire again while we’re naked in bed. Ever.’
She punched him on the shoulder – and it hurt. It felt almost like that day down at the lake when he was a boy. The gardener’s fists forcing his heart to pound blood through him, forcing him to be alive.
‘Also, I —’ He frowned. It’s not difficult, he told himself crossly. Don’t be so ridiculous. He growled in frustration, and buried his face in the pillow. ‘I love you,’ he said, and felt hot blood flush up the back of his neck.
There was nothing for a long, awful moment. And then there were her fingers carding through his hair. And her voice that was so, so careful. So light.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Me, too.’
And then he could let his shoulders relax, just a little.
It felt all wrong to leave that warm bed and pull his clothes back on. Even though Katherine helped him with his fastenings and he stole kisses wherever he could, and just before he slipped back out the window she held him tightly, and he thought she might not let go.
He started to think about obtaining a special marriage licence, as he walked down the street to his waiting carriage. He couldn’t wait three weeks to be hers. He was not being dramatic to think so, merely truthful.
A footman opened the door for him, and he leapt gratefully inside. He was exhausted, he realised. Bone-tired and ready to be in an anonymous hotel in Rome, watching the effect of Mediterranean sunlight on Katherine’s skin. She would enjoy travelling. She would want to visit all sorts of dry, academic places, and he would oblige her and then feed her cheese and wine and olives until she grew fat and happy.
The ride home seemed interminable. When they finally arrived, he sprang out of the carriage with a muttered curse at his driver —
— and a split-second later a part of his brain that predated civilisation told him to run.
Now.
He hit the ground running, and the rest of his brain caught up. This wasn’t his street. This wasn’t even remotely his part of town.
The first cold fingers of fear reached into his gut when his foot slipped on something soft, almost sending him face-first into the cobblestones and God knows what else. Then he turned a corner, and it was so pitch-black he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face.
He felt fingers on his elbow and thrashed wildly, opening and closing his eyes, terrified because he couldn’t tell the difference. The dark was a crushing, suffocating thing. His lungs faltered. Fingers grasped at his hair and the only sound was his sobbing breath as he shook them off. He spun, suddenly unsure which direction the carriage lay, and a lantern opened in his face.
He shaded his eyes against the light and gradually made out the man who carried it. He was given enough time.
‘Lord BenRuin,’ he said, his voice thin. ‘We must stop meeting like this.’ His hands were like moths in the outer circle of the lantern’s light.
‘You’re a difficult man to get to in private.’
‘A shame I can’t offer you brandy,’ he said, fighting for control. ‘Or indeed anywhere to sit.’
‘You and I had a discussion about what would happen if you took advantage of Miss Sutherland. Do you remember it?’
‘Vividly.’
‘Then you understand what I am going to do to you.’
‘My Lord,’ Jude said, in the voice that had brought men more powerful than BenRuin to their knees, ‘if you wanted to touch me so badly, all you had to do was ask.’
‘There is a reason I’m not going to disembowel you right here. You make it almost impossible to tell you what I must tell you. Please shut up, and let me speak.’
Jude motioned for him to continue, and his hand barely shook at all.
‘You . . . I didn’t . . . I understand now why Lydia needed . . . you. The only bastard immoral enough to trespass where none was welcome.’ BenRuin spat the words like bloody nails.
Jude, who read the souls of men, had expected almost anything else.
‘I will not – will never thank you for s
educing her. But I know her better now than I did previously.’
‘Well, well, well,’ Jude said, a jeweller inspecting what he had been given.
‘That’s why I won’t disembowel you.’ BenRuin stepped forward, so that his smile was very, very clear. ‘But I told you not to go near Kit, and you stole into my own house to take what you wanted. You know this is the least of what you deserve.’
Unseen hands held Jude fast, from behind, and the second before BenRuin’s fist hit him in the face he thought, I wanted this, once.
The lodgings were in a handsome blue-stone building. A respectable woman, who wore the lilac silk of long mourning, showed Kit into a sitting room and carried her card up.
Mr Albert Shrove had done well for himself.
The door had been left open, so she was aware of the muffled discussion taking place at the top of the stairs. When Mr Shrove appeared in the doorway, he bent and unbent Kit’s card between his fingers. He didn’t wear gloves. She thought, from nowhere, that his long, fast fingers would be an asset to a man who added columns of numbers for a living.
‘I wasn’t sure you would see me,’ she said, standing.
He bowed and said, with impeccable manners and a broad Northern accent, ‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Sutherland. Meg can write to me of nothing else since the Prime Minister’s ball. Neither can the papers, apparently. You’ve captured the nation’s imagination.’
‘If a girl from the country can come to town and claim a duke, then anyone may – that’s what they’re selling, isn’t it?’ She smiled at him and sat. ‘Please close the door, Mr Shrove. Your landlady said we’d have some privacy down here.’
She didn’t know if it was her words or her unpolished accent that calmed him a little, but he pressed her card down flat on the table by the door. He sat opposite her.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘This is more than a little awkward – you not quite the Duke of Darlington, me not quite the duchess of the same title. Our suits entirely opposed to one another.’
