by Lenora Bell
“How high will the water go?”
“We will connect the engine to the water main and quickly raise steam pressure—we hope to shoot water out of the hose up to ninety feet in the air.”
“Ninety feet. My goodness.”
Finally. He’d impressed her.
“Power. Projection.” He lifted his arm and made a fist. Her gaze wandered to his bicep. “Enough water pumping to douse the deadliest blazes.”
“I do comprehend the magnitude of what you’re trying to accomplish. And I applaud it, and I’ll do my part to uphold the standards of your name.”
“That’s better then.”
“But—”
“There’s a but. How could there not be?”
“Just hear me out. I had a realization about the twins today. You think of the children’s life in France as squalid, dirty, and regretful. When they think of it as freedom. They may have been poor, but they were happy. They were free to be themselves, to explore their talents, they lived with the wide sea and the wide blue sky.”
“But they didn’t have enough to eat.”
“Yes, but they had their nurse, Amina, who let them roam freely. And they had the seashore where they were happy entertaining the holiday-makers.”
“England has seashore.”
“Your Grace.” She laid a hand on his arm. Instinctively, he flexed his bicep again.
“Ever since they arrived here in England, they’ve been told they’re bad. That their very existence is somehow wrong and shameful.” She met his gaze, her blue eyes blazing with molten iron. “Please don’t box them in with too many rules. Please don’t clip their wings.”
“If you’re suggesting that I should have let them continue reading palms in Hyde Park—”
“No.” She squeezed his arm. She was standing very close.
He could smell her delicate floral scent, even here in the foundry, where it always smelled of sweat and coal smoke.
“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” she said, her eyes earnest. “Only let them be children, Your Grace, instead of symbols of your venerable dukedom. Let them make mistakes. It’s how we learn. How we grow.”
He placed his hand over hers. So soft, her skin.
So seductive, her scent.
“You must have had a very repressive childhood, Miss Perkins. You speak as one who chafed against a great many rules in her day.”
“I had a very pious childhood with stern dictates. I was told that I was inherently sinful. That God was a wrathful God, and he would smite me down if I misbehaved. If I—” she lowered her eyelashes “—indulged my carnal nature.”
Sweet Lord. She must be a clergyman’s daughter. It was always the vicar’s daughters who had the most to rebel against.
Her words saturated his mind with the need to show her that carnality was actually a very good thing.
His hand still covered hers. He wanted to cover her with his whole body, push her up against a wall. Ride with her faster than a speeding steam engine, racing to a shattering release.
“Why did you bring me here, Your Grace?” she asked with a saucy look in her eyes.
“To impress upon you the importance—”
“No, no, that’s why you think you brought me here. Why did you actually bring me here?”
“I suppose I was somewhat . . . heated.”
“Yes. You were irate with me. Why else?”
“I give up, why did I bring you here?”
“You’re not going to admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“The real reason why you dragged me here, away from your house, away from your children. Why the door is locked. Why whenever I touch your arm it’s bulging and hard as steel.”
“Er . . .” Something else was hard as steel. And it wasn’t his bicep.
“Just admit it,” she insisted.
“I don’t know what you’re driving at but—”
“You brought me here to kiss me.”
“No, I didn’t.” Clever woman. Too clever by half.
They glared at each other.
Steam hissed somewhere. Men shouted.
She was daring him to kiss her.
But he couldn’t do that. It was against his code of conduct. Topple one rule and they’d all collapse.
This was a battle for his very soul.
“Oh for Heaven’s sake,” she said, heaving an exasperated sigh.
And then she twined her hands around his neck, pulled his head down, and sealed her lips to his.
Chapter 13
When Miss Mari Perkins kissed a man, she went all in.
Her kiss stoked his body into blazing arousal.
Gone was the starched and proverb-spouting governess. In her place, the firebrand he’d sensed when he first met her.
The smell of her, sweet and warm. The oasis of her neck, her little chin jutting against his jaw.
The taste of her mouth, heady and complex as the aged brandy he hadn’t tasted in a decade.
Her slight, feminine curves melting against him, like wax pouring into a mold.
Everything he’d denied himself for so long. Comfort, surcease . . . pleasure.
“Oh,” she drew back slightly. “Oh that’s . . .” She dove back for more.
Her enthusiasm made his blood pump so fast he felt lightheaded.
He couldn’t think. Couldn’t remember why this was wrong.
He kissed her with the pent-up longing that had built since the moment he met her.
She felt so good. So right. The silk of her skin. The velvet of her tongue. He untied her bonnet and lifted it off her head, never breaking the deep kiss.
This was madness.
She stiffened his cock but she also quickened his heart. Made him long for more than just her body.
The near terror that had swamped him when he stood outside the nursery returned, but this time instead of the blind urge to flee, to run away, he wanted to immolate himself in her fire.
Make this count. Make this last.
He shifted his good knee between her thighs, wanting to touch her with as much of his body as possible. Needing to give her pleasure.
She moaned, opened her legs slightly to give him access.
That soft little moan brought him back to his senses.
They were at the foundry.
There were dozens of men outside the door.
He wrenched his mouth away, hearing his breathing rasp and echo through the chamber.
What in blazes was happening here? His thigh was between her legs.
So his rules and scruples just melted away when a woman kissed him?
“I didn’t lift you into my carriage to bring you here to ravish you,” he said.
“I know.”
“We shouldn’t be in here with the door locked,” he rasped. “You should have a chaperone at all times.”
“I’m not one of your aristocratic ladies, Your Grace. I’m my own chaperone. I kissed you because I wanted to.”
“I understand. You’re the vicar’s daughter. Raised on psalms and proverbs in the countryside.” He stroked his knuckles down her cheek.
One more touch.
“You want to be a little bit bad,” he said. “A little bit wild.”
If this tenderness he felt for her was purely physical, he could blame it on deprivation. Starvation for a woman’s soft touch. But their kiss had felt almost spiritual, in a way.
He’d heard church bells ringing.
Heard Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus with a full choir at Westminster Abbey.
He’d kissed a vicar’s daughter, who was also his servant, and an innocent.
He was thrice damned.
So why did the fiery footpath to hell feel like the first glimpse of Heaven he’d ever had?
She wanted to flirt with danger.
He’d been talking about power and pumping water and putting out fires, and some primal part of her mind had simply taken over.
She’d realized that he wanted to kiss her, but his rigi
d rules were thwarting his desire and that she must be the one to kiss him first.
And so she had.
And now . . . his knee was between her thighs. She was riding the hard muscles of his thigh.
He’d been saying something about how they should stop and they should leave. But his knee was still there, belying his words.
She didn’t want to leave. Not just yet. And so she kissed him again.
When she’d imagined a gentleman’s kiss she’d always imagined a courtly peck on the cheek. Or a chaste kiss on the lips, followed by a pronouncement of devotion.
She’d never imagined . . . this.
Rough and tender at the same time.
Wild yet skillfully controlled.
She’d never imagined a tongue in her mouth, either. The duke’s tongue, filling her mouth, pressing inside, making her moan.
It was exhilarating, transporting. Like she was riding one of his engines, flying faster than racehorses. Riding fast and hard away from London, into endless possibilities.
If they’d met when she was sixteen.
If he’d been a farmer.
Or she’d been a debutante dressed in white.
She kissed him wearing the skin of a different Mari, one with infinite possibilities.
His hands were on the back of her neck, angling her into his kiss. Which left her hands free to unhook the front of her pelisse, because she needed more space to breath.
He helped her with the last of the hooks and the garment pooled on the wooden floor, spreading at her feet like water.
One of his hands covered her breast through the fabric of her gown, thumbing her nipple.
Heavens, that felt good.
It wasn’t like her to do something so unheeding. Behind her was the evidence of his ambition and before her was the man himself, built on just as grand a scale as his steam engine.
He kissed with the same intensity as his conversation, a call to arms.
To his arms.
More, please. More, more, more.
Kiss me forever.
Afternoon sun slanted in the high windows and striped across their bodies. The engine behind her was hard and solid and the man in front even more so.
His hands caressed the sides of her waist and so she slipped her hands inside his coat.
When she touched him he flinched, tensed, but she soothed her hands over his sides, behind to his back, to the hard ridges of muscle, the dipping valley in the center.
He kissed her neck, the soft brush of his lips under her ear making her shiver.
She gave herself up to the kiss.
She’d been yearning for something to happen.
Around the corner. In the duke’s arms.
Something’s beginning, the hammers pounded on iron somewhere in the distance.
If you’re brave enough to chase it, the steam hissed.
He broke away from her, breathing heavily.
“Mari.” He clasped her cheeks in his hands. “We can’t.”
Can’t what?
“We can’t kiss,” he clarified. “Not in here with the door locked and dozens of men outside.”
The moment was gone. Melting like ice shavings on lips. She could feel it slipping away.
The impossibility setting in.
Duke.
Governess.
He set her away from him and bent to retrieve her pelisse. Draping it across her shoulders, he assisted her into the garment.
Mari retied her bonnet. He smoothed his cravat and adjusted his trousers.
“We kissed, Your Grace. And the Lord did not smite us. Hell did not open up to swallow us.”
“Not this time. And there will never be a next time.”
Besieged by the devilish duke? Ha! More like mauled by the lascivious lady.
As they walked back through the foundry to the courtyard, the men cast sidelong glances.
Was she marked somehow? Lips swollen. Cheeks flushed.
A dampness between her thighs.
The memory of his kiss like heated metal branded across her mind.
Luckily, they didn’t encounter Mr. Grafton again, for then she would have been forced to speak and be polite, and she wasn’t sure her social graces had yet returned.
She hadn’t thought about it properly through. She hadn’t thought about what happened after the kiss.
How awkward it might be to see Banksford at the breakfast table the next day, now that she knew what it felt like to have his tongue stroking inside her mouth, and his hand covering her breast.
He’d said never again, as if he were ashamed of the kiss.
Back in the courtyard, Edgar lifted her into the curricle and waved to a groom. “Please take Miss Perkins to my residence.”
The groom nodded. “Very good, Your Grace.”
So that was it? No talking about what had happened. Bundle her into the carriage and send her away.
“Don’t you think we should talk, Your Grace?” she asked.
“About what, Miss Perkins?” His face was deliberately devoid of emotion.
About what? About that kiss. About the dozens of new emotions jumbled in her heart. “You don’t think there’s anything to say?”
Moving away, he motioned to the groom and the carriage began to move.
She had been dismissed.
Had it meant nothing to him?
She’d begun thinking of him as somehow, not less than a duke, but perhaps as a man instead of a duke. But here was a very blunt reminder that she mustn’t think of him as anything but his rank and his position in society.
He was her employer and her social superior.
She was a plain, ordinary middle C in a city full of aristocratic grace notes.
He waved politely, dismissively, as the carriage left the foundry yard, as if they hadn’t just shared a kiss that had burned with the light of a thousand signal flares lit on a mountaintop, warning of an impending battle.
Or perhaps, to the duke, the kiss had been merely ordinary? A spark from the hearth, easily stamped out before it burned a hole in the carpet. Nothing immense, or important, or even meaningful in any serious way.
Whereas for Mari, the kiss had been filled with meaning. It marked a division in her life.
Before the kiss, she’d only read about and imagined such daring acts. After the kiss, she knew that leaping into the fire was not only possible . . . but pleasurable.
All of the secret desires she’d suppressed her whole life had suddenly surfaced, all at once.
Apparently, she had a wanton side.
And not just a side.
A front, back, and everything in between.
This had been a warning. Playing with dukes, a girl was apt to get burned.
No more wild imaginings like the ones she’d experienced in the duke’s arms. That she could be someone else. That they could be equals.
None of it was true.
All of it was impossible.
She must bottle up these desires.
Label them impossible. Place them on the shelf in her heart next to a host of other impossible things.
Kisses. Love. Children of her own.
All impossibilities.
Her fate had been sealed the moment she’d been left at the door of the orphanage.
And the duke’s fate had been sealed from birth as well.
Handsome, wealthy, born to privilege, he must marry well and produce a legitimate heir with the proper bloodlines.
It may be more difficult to avoid the duke than she’d planned, but she must focus on the tasks at hand—educating the children and discovering the truth about her past.
And when she did encounter him, she now understood that she could help him as well.
He didn’t believe that he could be a good father, but she sensed that wasn’t true.
He already loved his children, he just needed to open his heart enough to be vulnerable with them.
She was certain Michel and Adele could learn to care for him. He
r job here was to help them become the joyful, loving family they were meant to be. Create new bonds that would last a lifetime. And then she would leave.
She was a fortress, alone and self-sufficient.
One day she would walk out the duke’s iron gate.
And never return.
Stupid, lusting oaf. Edgar banged his forehead against his desk at the foundry.
She was his servant. Under his protection.
He’d failed her and he’d failed himself.
“That was a very pretty sort of girl. The governess, was she?” asked Grafton, entering Edgar’s office.
Edgar straightened. “Yes.” He picked up a pencil and pretended to be busily drawing.
The pencil snapped in half. “Damn.”
“Your mind’s not here,” Grafton said. “Maybe it left with the governess?”
“Ungh,” Edgar grunted noncommittally.
“Never brought any of the other governesses round to meet me before.”
“Confound it, man.” Edgar threw down the broken halves of the pencil. “If you’ve something to say, just say it.”
Grafton grinned. “Tsk, tsk. Rather touchy on the subject, are we?”
Edgar scraped his palm over his eyes and then down across his nose and mouth. “You’ve no idea.” He abandoned all pretense of working and settled back in his chair. “I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m going mad, I think. She’s just so good with the children and she’s so . . .”
“Pretty?”
“Lights up every room she enters. She doesn’t keep her opinions to herself, either, let me tell you.”
Grafton snorted. “So I observed.”
“I knew I was going to regret hiring the lady. I knew the second I laid eyes on her that she would drive me mad by inches.”
“Wouldn’t be the first beautiful governess to turn a nobleman’s head, now would she?”
“That’s the bloody problem. My father had a nasty habit of ruining servants. Scullery maids, upstairs maids, governesses . . . he tupped anything in skirts. No pretty girl was safe from him. It sickened me. I did what I could to stop it but I was gone at school much of the time . . .”
“I remember,” said Grafton. “You spoke of him sometimes. Your voice always held such revulsion. I thought that you were better off, because you had a real father, but then I began to wonder if perhaps my situation was preferable.”
