Her brow furrowed. A sprig of hair fell over her forehead. His control – such as it was – slipped a little bit more, and he raised his hands to her head, smoothing back her impossible hair. His fingers tangled in it, and the remaining pins popped out, pinging against the parquet floor. He watched her hair spill over her shoulders, down her back, in a chaotic miscellany of spirals and corkscrews. The fire burning in the grate next to them seemed colorless next to this unnatural mass, alive with an inner light. It was out of order, and any attempt to smooth it was fruitless. The curls just sprang back to life once his fingers left them. It was a war he could never win.
With great effort, his hands fell back to her shoulders. He dug his fingers into her tender flesh, anchoring himself to her, his knees weak.
“Did he hold you like this?” he whispered.
She shook her head, staring up at him with apprehension and something else not unwilling that heated his blood.
“No? But I thought I saw it was so.” He adjusted his embrace so that his arms encircled her waist, the whisper of silk against satin. “Like this?”
“Close,” she murmured.
He lowered his head – what was he doing? – and brushed his lips over hers. She tasted of sherry. Her lips were soft, full. They affected him like opium. He drew back before he lost his mind.
“Like that?” he said huskily.
“’Twas … ‘twas longer. Deeper,” she whispered. Then she licked her lips with her tongue.
Hell. Hell, Hell! That did it.
He kissed her again without restraint, squeezing her against him, his mouth hard and punishing. She cried out and attempted to move away once more, but he followed her with his body and raised his hand to the nape of her neck, so that he could hold her in place. He kissed her and kissed her until all the fight went from her, and she clung to him as desperately as he clung to her. When his tongue demanded entrance, her lips parted eagerly, welcoming him inside. She was hot and wet and sweet, her mouth to him the embodiment of all the sin and temptation and gluttony he’d always spurned but secretly craved. He thrust into her in a parody of what he wished to do with another part of his anatomy, which had long since grown rigid and impatient with need.
When she began to kiss him back, learning quickly under his tutelage, her tongue tangling with his, her teeth nipping his bottom lip, teasing him, enticing him, he lost the last vestige of his sanity.
He moaned against her sweet mouth and clutched one of her breasts in his hand. It was full and soft, and its peak tightened underneath his palm.
They stumbled across the room. He hit something hard with his backside, and something crashed to the floor. Oblivious to everything but her, he spun her around and lifted her onto the desktop he had hit, never breaking their kiss. He moved between her legs, enveloped by her heat and softness, and stuck his hand down the front of her dress clumsily, like a green lad. He could not stop himself. He had to know what she felt like.
He groaned. She was soft as silk, heavy and ripe in his hand, her nipple rigid with desire. She made some sound in the back of her throat and arched into him, filling his hand even more completely with her flesh.
It was almost too much. He nearly came right then, just from the feel of her breast, so full, fuller than he’d ever known before. He pressed himself against the juncture of her thighs, reveling in her soft heat, the feel of her hands on him, feather light, searching his torso, his shoulders.
He wanted to see her, not just feel her. He couldn’t think past his need. He withdrew his hand and began to fumble with the buttons on the back of her gown. He tore his mouth from her own and concentrated on his shaking fingers.
He cursed. He could not make them work. A button popped off, and then another, and then in his clumsiness the fabric tore.
He cursed again.
Then he made the mistake of glancing at her face. She was dazed from kisses, her lips swollen, her eyes glistening. She stared at him strangely, as if she’d never quite seen him before. She was afraid and a little repelled by the intensity of their passion, but she was aroused as much as he. He knew that if he succeeded in getting her dress off of her, he would take her, and she would let him. She was powerless to stop the force of her own instinct, much less his.
They were like animals.
His stomach soured with self-disgust.
God, he was like a bloody beast in the field. She made him less than what he was, and so twisted with primeval urges his brain turned to marmalade. He hated this loss of reason, he hated this disconcerting vibrancy of emotion she engendered. It had no place in the carefully ordered citadel he’d so painstakingly erected out of the mire of his childhood. She was excess and disorder and unfathomably dangerous to the foundations of his very identity. She demanded of him something beyond the physical—her spirit called out to his like a siren’s song, and if he let himself too near it, he would be destroyed. Rutting with her on a desktop would satisfy an immediate need, but he knew instinctively his thirst for her would not be quenched. It would grow worse.
He could not do this.
Yet even with all of these imprecations running through his head, he still couldn’t keep his hands off her, he couldn’t keep his body from trying its best to take its animal satisfaction, whether he liked it or not.
He tried her buttons again. His fingers still would not work.
“Montford.”
His name, whispered against his ear, finally succeeded where his will had failed.
His hands fell away, and he stepped back, out of the circle of her skirts and the heat of her body. It was like stepping out of an enchantment. He was still painfully aroused, and he was glad of the shadows filling the room, hiding his loss of control.
She seemed to come back to herself as well. Her eyes focused, her body tensed. She glanced down at her ruined bodice, then up at him, one hand raised to her lips, the other covering the tear at her bosom. Her face heated with shame.
He turned away, tried to draw breath into his lungs. “I shall leave at first light.”
“Yes.”
He hesitated. “The Countess shall be here within the week. If you decide your … suitors here do not … suit, you will accompany her to London. I shall have my solicitors convey the terms of our arrangement in writing and provide what funds you shall need for London. You can contact me through him. I do not think it necessary for us to meet again, Miss Honeywell.”
She didn’t answer.
He did not run out of the room. He couldn’t with the damned pole between his legs. But he wished he could. He wished he could run all the way back to London and forget Miss Astrid Honeywell had ever existed.
THOMAS NEWCOMB was one of the few of the Duke’s servants who actually liked his employer, one of the fewer still who was not afraid of him. Newcomb was an ex-boxer who could well take care of himself, if it came to falling out of the Duke’s favor. However, Newcomb knew that this was highly unlikely for two reasons: a) the Duke rather liked him, and b) the Duke was, beneath his cold, remote exterior, a bit soft-in-the-heart. Newcomb’s own position attested to this.
After a precipitous end to his boxing career, he’d fallen on hard times and into bad company. The Duke had caught him out in a swindle at Tattersall’s, where Newcomb had been successfully selling rum goods to the young bucks. Instead of giving him over to the constable, the Duke had offered him a job. He said he’d liked Newcomb’s eye for horseflesh, but Newcomb knew the Duke need not have done what he did. Most of his class would have had Hiram drawn and quartered or transported to some tropical colony. The Duke had seen something in Thomas Newcomb that not even Thomas Newcomb, who had given up on himself long before, had seen at the time.
The Duke had saved him.
It was high time he returned the favor.
It had been clear to Newcomb for a long time that the Duke was slightly … er, off. Those of His Grace’s station called him ‘aloof’ and ‘eccentric’, but as far as Newcomb could tell, those were fancy wor
ds for ‘unhappy’ and ‘cracked’. For all of the Duke’s power and money, Newcomb didn’t envy the man. The Duke conducted his life as if walking a very thin tightrope above a very deep chasm. Newcomb had never encountered such a stuffed-shirted, self-flaggelating, thoroughly miserable geezer in all of his years.
Newcomb’s opinion of his employer happened to coincide with the Viscount Marlowe’s own assessment: what the Duke needed was a good roll in the hay. And Newcomb, whose take on the married state was rather different than the Viscount’s (Newcomb had recently wed Nora, the love of his life), went a step further in his opinions. The Duke needed a wife.
Not that frosty ice-princess the Duke had contracted to make his duchess. But a real woman, who’d give the Duke a merry chase and knock some life back into him. The Duke was a well-made, well-set-up bloke, and every bit as red-blooded as the next fellow. It just needed the right bit of skirt to make the Duke realize he wasn’t made out of granite.
This was an opinion Newcomb had harbored for years. He’d watched and waited for the Duke to finally meet his match, but he’d watched and waited in vain. Until now. Newcomb had known the moment he’d seen the Duke look at Miss Honeywell that first day, when His Grace had been on his arse in the mud. His certainty had been reinforced when he’d come across them pulling out each other’s hair in the library, their clothes suspiciously disordered.
Miss Honeywell had succeeded where every other female in the Kingdom had failed. She’d undone the Duke. She’d reduced him to a bundle of frayed nerves. He was like a puddle at her feet, and the poor man didn’t even realize it.
Newcomb was thrilled. In his opinion, Miss Honeywell was the best thing that had ever happened to the Duke.
But when the Duke appeared at his door in the servant’s wing of the castle late in the evening, Newcomb knew that the course of true love was not running as smoothly as he had hoped. The Duke never came to his room, and the Duke never looked so discomposed as he did now. His fine evening clothes were wrinkled, his cravat stained with something red, and his eyes were anything but calm. He looked … torn, distraught, and, to be perfectly frank, a bit frightened.
Newcomb knew immediately Miss Honeywell was the cause.
“First light,” was all the Duke said. “I want to be off at first light.”
Newcomb agreed and, ignoring all social conventions, offered the Duke some of his whiskey, since the poor bloke looked as if he needed it. The Duke refused the offer and left him abruptly. Newcomb watched him walk down the hallway in the wrong direction, reach the end, curse, and turn around. He wisely shut his door before the Duke reached it again, in case the Duke saw his broad grin.
Newcomb waited another half hour before he left his room for the stables, his decision made. It was not an easy one, for he had no wish to prolong his stay in Yorkshire. He was anxious for his wife Nora’s sharp tongue and soft embrace. The sooner he was back in London, the sooner he could get on with the business of procreation. He wanted a daughter. Nora wanted a son. Hopefully they would one day have several of each. And he could not bloody well start on such lofty endeavors with over a hundred miles separating the appropriate body parts.
For another, Newcomb took pride in his position as head of the Montford stables. He saw to it Montford had the best horseflesh in London and the latest models of equipage as befitting his station, even though His Grace, owing to his peculiar aversion to moving conveyances, rarely deigned to travel in them. And Newcomb was quite fond of the new town coach he himself had purchased a month ago. She was a dashing machine, her brass fittings shined to a high polish by his own hand, the ducal crest boldly emblazoned on her doors. Newcomb had the same abiding affection for the coach that captains had for their ships. He’d even named the bloody thing after his own wife. He would take no pleasure – indeed, he would be acutely pained – in what he was about to do.
When he reached the stables and set aside his lantern, he found a heavy sledgehammer in the tool room and approached his pride and joy, grim-faced but resolved.
He was doing this for the Duke’s own good, he told himself as he lifted the sledgehammer over his head.
One day in the distant future, the Duke would thank him, he told himself as the sledgehammer descended against the front axel.
He didn’t stop until the axel was shattered beyond repair.
Chapter Fourteen
IN WHICH THE DUKE’S HOLIDAY IS EXTENDED
MONTFORD DID not sleep at all that night, acutely aware that two doors down from him a certain female lurked, cutting up his peace. He tossed and turned and was unable to think of anything but what had happened between them in the drawing room. He could still taste her in his mouth, though he had scrubbed it raw. He could still smell her on him, though he had bathed and changed. He could still feel the weight of her breast in his hand and the warmth of her body pressed against him. And every time he recalled the sounds she had made deep in her throat as he kissed her, he broke out into a cold sweat.
His arousal would not subside. It was there, tormenting him underneath his sheets, mocking him. He thought about relieving himself, but that thought filled him with shame and rage. He wouldn’t give himself the satisfaction – he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. He’d not pleasured himself since he was a green lad. He wasn’t about to stoop so low as to behave like a randy adolescent merely because some impertinent chit had got into his blood.
He’d take a mistress as soon as he arrived back in London. Araminta Carlisle bedamned – his future duchess was not going to satisfy this black craving. No, he’d find some buxom widow or courtesan and take care of this little problem of his.
A redhead, he decided. With generous breasts. He’d not had one of those, and he was certain it was the novelty that had him so drawn to this particular female.
Yes, that was it.
But this solution offered no solace to his aching body. It didn’t want some random woman. It wanted one woman. One completely unsuitable, frightful-looking woman who angered him with her very existence.
He hated her.
He hated this place and cursed himself for ever stepping out of his London palace.
He fell into an exhausted stupor around dawn, when he was supposed to be high-tailing it back to London. By the time he dragged himself out of bed, it was well past mid morning and approaching the noon hour. He felt as if he’d been run over by a mail coach.
His only consolation as he crept downstairs was that his erection had subsided out of sheer exhaustion, and that the castle seemed to be empty. He could not face any of the Honeywell clan – he could not face her again. He’d likely lose his mind.
Newcomb was waiting for him down by the stables. His coachman’s face was grim, and he could not quite meet his master’s eyes. This was unusual in his normally frank, no-nonsense servant. Montford felt his first prick of apprehension.
“’Tis some bad news I have for you, sir,” Newcomb said, leading him into the stables.
Montford froze in his boots when Newcomb indicated the carriage and the unmistakable crack in its axel. “What the bloody hell?”
Newcomb thrust his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “Must’ve happened on the trip up, only it didn’t give way ‘til recently. Didn’t notice it til this morning myself.”
Montford was dumbstruck. He turned to his coachman in disbelief. “Didn’t notice it? You, Newcomb? I find it hard to believe.”
Newcomb furrowed his brow. He looked affronted that his skill at his job had been maligned, and just the slightest bit … guilty?
But surely not.
Surely Montford’s nerves were so shattered by the past three days he was merely seeing things that weren’t there. Newcomb was a high-stickler when it came to his job. He’d never purposely sabotage his precious carriage.
But someone had. The idea that this was the result of an accident on the journey north seemed flimsy.
Someone did not want him to leave Yorkshire.
An absurd idea
. Everyone including himself wanted the Duke of Montford on the King’s Highway back to London. That was made perfectly clear the day before when he’d nearly been assassinated.
Unless whoever had shot at him yesterday had done this for some nefarious reason as yet understood.
Which made no sense whatsoever.
He pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t having a bad dream. “This looks deliberate,” he said.
Newcomb’s brows shot up in surprise. “You think someone did this on purpose?” He snorted in disbelief.
“It’s a little convenient, don’t you think? And you yourself said you hadn’t noticed anything wrong until this morning.”
Newcomb shook his head determinedly. “It was a hair-line fracture that didn’t snap loose for some time. I remember myself that bit of rough stretch we had outside Hebden. Must’ve happened then.”
Newcomb seemed bloody sure of his theory. So sure of himself, in fact, that Montford was increasingly suspicious. He narrowed his eyes on his driver. “I suppose this shall take some time to fix.”
Newcomb nodded and trained his eyes on the carriage. “A week at least.”
Montford’s heart sank. “A week! Damnation! I’ll not stay here another week! I’m leaving today. Saddle up one of the grays.”
Newcomb looked alarmed. “They’re carriage horses, not saddle bred. You’ll not be riding one of them back to London, Your Grace.”
“Then I’ll buy a horse in the village.”
Newcomb shook his head vehemently. “It’s Sunday. No place open.”
“They’ll open for me,” Montford muttered.
“Don’t think so, Your Grace. It’s the Festival today.”
Montford growled and clenched his hands. Oh, yes, the bloody Festival. That was where everybody was.
“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but you look a bit green about the gills,” Newcomb said with some concern and a whiff of amusement.
“This is a damned nightmare!” Montford roared, pointing at the broken carriage. “How am I supposed to stand another day in this godforsaken place?”
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