And he allowed himself one release from this exertion. A town house on Charlotte Street where one could, at last, drop the demands of authority and the pretense of self-control. Where one could drop one’s very self to the floor and be used accordingly. Without this relief, his true self bubbled over—all disorder and sentiment and grief.
And sometimes, like tonight: rage.
“If you aren’t tired, I believe you have duties to perform,” he said, knowing it was vile and not caring. “Come to bed.”
Poppy reached out and ran a finger down his cheek. Her eyes were cold.
“Ah. You wish to lay claim to your marital rights?” She smiled with false sympathy. “I suppose I would be eager to exercise them too if I had had to pay so handsomely to secure what decent men can get by simply asking.”
He stepped closer. “I did try the ‘making love’ approach, if you recall. My wife claimed she has no taste for it.”
She raised a brow. “Judging by the nature of the book I found in your study at Westhaven, one wonders whether you have a taste for it yourself.”
He froze. He knew exactly the book she meant.
At the idea of her reading it, his cock roused instantly to life. So, too, did his anger at the idea that she was once again nosing through his private things.
He leaned in so his face was an inch from hers. “Be careful what you might discover, Poppy. I cannot promise my tastes confine themselves to books.”
He waited for her to ask him what he meant. But she only drew up with that feline smirk.
“Ah. Is that why you had to buy yourself a duchess? No one else would have you?”
She was provoking him. And it was working.
“As I recall, I rescued you from ruin when I could have had a proper lady. Not this”—he ran his hand down the dingy lace trim of her dress, letting his thumb crudely linger on the flesh above her breasts—“mess.”
Her expression went so black he worried she might slap him.
Instead, she barked out a mirthless laugh, as though she found even his attempts at cruelty ridiculous.
“Ah. The gallant man. How heroic.” She walked around the desk until she was flush with him and smiled. “Is that what you need to hear me say to enable your virility? What a strong and fearsome lord you are? Is that what you have wanted all along, Your Grace?”
She slid her hand down to the swelling in his breeches.
“Oh, my, I can see that it’s working. You’re so eager I don’t know that we’ll have time to get you to a bed.”
They locked eyes. Hers flashed with challenge. She was waiting for him to deny it. To apologize. To retreat.
He wasn’t going to.
He spread his thighs, making his arousal plain.
If she wanted the truth she could have it. Nothing made him harder than a woman who saw him for the wretch he really was.
She reached down and took the falls of his breeches in her two hands. Not breaking her stare, she smiled. Then she ripped.
Tiny buttons scattered quietly to the floor, the only sound in the room. Other than the one that gave up the game: he moaned.
She smirked and wrapped her fist around his cock.
“I suspect, Archer,” she said, running her hand along his length, “that you are about to embarrass yourself with how pitifully you want me.”
It was certainly a tempting thought.
“You want to, don’t you?” she asked, taunting him with long, fluid strokes. “You want to spend right here on your precious papers.”
She thumbed the tip where, indeed, the likelihood of such an event was presaged by a leak of male excitement.
“But then, that would violate the terms of our agreement, wouldn’t it, Your Grace? Isn’t that why you saved me? Because you knew I was adept with seed?”
Even as she said it, she was lifting up her skirts.
She pushed him back, so he was not just leaning against the desk, but was splayed on top of it.
She spread his thighs to make a berth for her knee and poised herself above him, her quim a hairbreadth from his shaft.
Could she smell how badly he wanted this? Could she read his mind?
“Fuck,” he cried out, because he had to say something to keep from coming at the thought of what was happening. He jerked up, to feel her with his cock. But she was faster, flitting out of reach.
“If you want it—beg.”
“Please,” he got out, dying for it.
“Please what?”
“Please fuck me, Poppy.”
She adjusted his cock until the angle pleased her.
And then, as she had once done in the bathing tub that had a place among his fondest memories, she sank down and took him in.
It was then that he realized there was more to her than she let on.
For she was so wet you’d have thought she’d been sitting at his desk teasing herself for hours. Imagining using him just like this.
She liked it.
And so she won the game. For that was all it took for him to explode inside her, barely one thrust deep.
“Fuck,” he yelled again. He smacked the side of the desk with the force of it. “Fucking hell.”
She did not release him.
“Don’t move.”
She put a hand beneath her dress to feel herself and rocked against him, hard, until she buckled with a shivering, shaking sob that rang out in the quiet house.
She slid slickly off him and primly returned her dress to rights, while he lay there, panting, paralytic.
“You may have your desk back, Your Grace,” she said. “I’ve taken what use I had from it.”
Poppy left her spent husband splayed out on the desk and walked blindly to her bedchamber, where she bolted the door behind her and stood in shock at what had just transpired. At what he’d said to her. At what she’d done to him. At how he’d thirsted for it. And how she had.
Numb, she removed her clothing and got in bed.
Since she had known the Duke of Westmead, he had been tightly coiled. His manner brought firmly into line.
Only that first night that he’d touched her, in his study, had she ever seen him waver. Even when he’d told her of his wife and child, he had fought so hard to keep a grip on himself that grief had had to exit him by an explosion of force, unbidden.
Tonight the mask had finally slipped.
He’d been filthy. Disrespectful. Mean. He’d deserved the contempt he’d gotten.
And if she was not mistaken, he’d relished getting it.
He’d given her a clue. Another sight of something he kept hidden. A darkness in him that spoke to something equally dark in herself. A part of her that had been waiting all her life to see the pictures in that book, because it answered instincts deep inside of her she did not trust or understand.
They could not go on like this.
Because the darkness of that scene was hateful. Its pleasures, such as they were, a slinging of anger back and forth.
The words he’d said to her were cruel.
The things she’d done to him were insulting.
They would not have felt so vital were they not a symptom of a bitter war that she was losing.
The fact that she’d enjoyed it left her lonely and afraid. She longed to knock on his door and apologize. To curl up beside him in the dark and say that she was sorry and confused and sad and ask him what that coupling had meant and why this marriage hurt so much.
She could not imagine what he’d say.
They’d done altogether too much talking. Whatever this ragged thing between them was, conversing served only to make it worse.
And yet, despite all that, she touched herself, remembering how he’d shuddered as she’d grabbed him. How his eyes had flashed with something dark and raw and wild she’d never seen in them before.
She brought herself to satisfaction twice before she slept, remembering.
And when she awoke, it was with two words burning bright in her mind, like a lighth
ouse viewed from a roiling sea, the only hope of her salvation.
Never. Again.
Chapter 24
City of London
December 5, 1753
“My sister and the Rosecrofts are back from Paris,” Archer told his wife one cold December morning as they shared a carriage to the counting-house.
Poppy looked up from a letter she was reading. “How lovely. When will we see them?”
“Hilary is busy assembling her household, but I asked Constance to Hoxton for supper this evening.” He paused, as he had grown careful not to make assumptions on her time. “I should be very glad if you could join us, if you are able.”
“Yes, I will look forward to it. However, I must look in on the works at Hammersmith this afternoon, and will not be back in London until evening. Don’t wait for me. I will arrange to take a separate conveyance home.”
The carriage rolled to a stop on Threadneedle Street. Archer handed Poppy down, his touch the faintest press of flesh on flesh. Mere courtesy. Polite.
“I’m off to a meeting at Parliament,” he said.
She smiled. “I wish you well with it.”
He watched her go inside, cursing himself for allowing it to get this way: so scrupulously, unremittingly polite.
It had begun the morning after that night that had shattered their marriage into two separate acts.
He’d awoken with an inchoate, sickened dread he used to suffer after nights of heavy drinking in his youth. It took one long, groggy moment for the memory of what had happened the night before to catch up with the feeling near his sternum that it had been unsavory. When it did, he was sharply, violently awake. He no longer had an appetite for breakfast.
He had dressed himself slowly that morning, taking care to put the Duke of Westmead back in order. He had lingered, dallying with his shaving water, gathering the courage to say what he’d resolved to say as he’d lain in bed the night before, shaking with the weight of what had happened.
He was going to be honest with his wife.
He was going to confess.
His only question was how to do it.
He must begin by apologizing for letting his temper boil over and bleed into his desires, and for insulting her. He hated that he’d done it. He hated what he’d said the night before. The acts that it had led to had been a mockery of what he really wanted.
What he wanted was not angry. It was as tender as it was unmerciful.
He would explain about his tastes, and what they meant to him. He would acknowledge they were considered odd and must be practiced with discretion. He would describe the pleasures that were possible between two lovers who understood each other’s needs and limits.
He would apologize for hiding what he craved and for intending to go on with it without her knowledge. He would admit that he’d always taken comfort that the ritual was performed by a practitioner for a fee, kept strictly separate from his life, because he could not stand to be so vulnerable before anyone he cared about more deeply. He’d thought that to allow his wife such intimate knowledge of his soul would be beyond endurance.
But he’d been wrong.
Because when he looked at Poppy, he could not separate his body from his heart.
He wanted to trust her with his whole self, if she would have him.
And he wanted her whole self in return.
She did not have to give it to him. He would make that clear. She need not share his predilections. She owed him nothing. But if she gave him her heart, he would guard it like a treasure, whatever she decided.
He took Elena’s key from around his neck and put it in his pocket. He would tell her what it was. And if she wanted this secret part of him, she could have that too.
He’d squared his shoulders, inhaled, and walked downstairs to the breakfast room, feeling like he might vomit from sheer nerves.
But Poppy had not been at her usual spot at the table.
Gibbs informed him she had risen early and gone out.
Queasily, he’d proceeded to the counting-house. He was relieved when he found her there, alone, deep in concentration at her desk.
As he had stood there, fingering the key, trying to think of how he might begin, she had looked up, her green eyes a glassy bay, and her face a picture of despair.
“Yesterday was a mistake,” she said quietly. Politely. “I regret it very much. I hope you’ll agree it’s best forgotten.”
He had stood there, stricken with a temporary speechlessness.
“You were right to suggest we keep our distance,” she added. “I should not have challenged you on that matter. I won’t intrude on your privacy again.”
She had returned politely to her work, not bothering to look up when he finally murmured a foggy “of course” and walked away.
He’d returned the key to the cord around his neck. And if in that moment he felt cowardly, by afternoon he was grateful she had spoken before he had revealed the depth of his misreading. Before he’d irrevocably destroyed how she saw him.
They rode home together in a carriage many hours later and were polite. They took supper in the house and discussed her nursery: still polite. She retired early, to her own room, tediously, insufferably polite.
The days went politely on, and the night that had so shaken them was not spoken of again. But, damn it, it was felt. For as autumn gave its polite way to winter, and the air grew unseasonably cold, they still had not recovered from it.
Poppy was subdued and serious, no matter how he tried to mend the rift between them. She worked from sunup to late evening at the counting-house, gaining influence and respect among the architects and builders who worked at her direction. At night she wrote to gardeners and botanists around the world, detailing the premise of her subscription scheme. She said little to him of her work or her ideas, except when she wished to learn of a detail about finance. Covenants. Insurance. Risk. His knowledge of these concepts and his advice on how to execute them to her best advantage were all she asked of him.
And what he asked of her was, once or twice a week, permission to join her in her bed. The act was as brief and awkward as such an intimacy could be. A transfer of seed from him to her. Polite. It left him feeling sickened. And for all that, it didn’t take.
He had gotten his marriage of convenience. Now he saw he was a fool for wanting it. He missed Poppy, the companionship they had shared.
He made attempts at recovering it, when he could pry her from her work. He took her to the opera, to the theater, to Vauxhall and Rotten Row. She was gracious but unmoved. He took her shopping, to the elegant arcades along Lombard Street and the vivid stalls of Cheapside. She brought home nothing more than plants.
His house—before her merely a place to work and sleep—bloomed with plants. Pots and jars and vases of cut flowers appeared just so, like weeds springing from the earth after a rain, making Dutch still lifes of every room. His study amassed piles of books on botany and bits of chalk where she did her garden sketches late at night and little bowls of citrus fruit that gave off a pleasant scent. He began to find pressed flowers between the pages of his books.
He was grateful for this invasion. Her presence in his home was like Persephone’s in the underworld, a light amidst the darkness. Which made him her Hades, coaxing her here against her nature, plying her with pomegranate seeds. Tempting her to stay forever.
Because, by God, in that moment, in the counting-house, when she had looked up at him with empty eyes, he’d been certain—certain—that she’d leave him.
It was a mercy that instead she’d merely resolved to pretend it hadn’t happened. He returned it by promising, with every word he said to her, to be better. To live as though that night was not suspended in their every polite word.
For one thing was very clear. If he slipped and showed her that part of himself again, it would destroy what little of them remained.
He would never show her.
He would rather have a bit of her than nothing.
He would rather be scrupulously, miserably polite.
Poppy arranged herself at her sunny desk on the top floor of the counting-house and sorted through her lists. She had begun to understand why her husband had such an intense drive for order. When one was responsible for complicated details with limited time and thousands of guineas on the line, one could not make a muck of one’s papers.
She filed the latest missives in a tray for her secretary. She made notes in her ledger for requests for certain cuttings and seeds that would inform her decisions on what to grow and import and noted the coordinates along the overland distribution route.
That sorted, she unlocked the drawer of plans and found the draftsman’s scroll with the latest designs for Hammersmith. She made a few notes on the irrigation system and jotted down questions she must go over with Mr. Partings this afternoon.
She paused and smiled. Sometimes it still shocked her, the precious thrill of her autonomy.
For all the ways her marriage was an exercise in loneliness, it was a triumph in this one dazzling way. Westmead had not dissembled. He had given her complete control over her affairs and the stature to enact them without brooking any quibbles. Duchesses did not have to prove their right to make decisions, in the way that other females did.
Without that constant struggle, she was building something marvelous. It felt fierce and good to have been exactly right about herself. But it did nothing to counteract the aching weight that pressed down on her chest whenever her thoughts turned to her husband.
She restored her papers to their various places and locked the drawers behind her. These cabinets contained the priceless fruits of months of work—the shipping routes, the greenhouse plans, the planting schedules—and she so feared them being lost or stolen she took them home with her at night. Now that her dream was so close within reach, the thought of losing even an inch of ground made her nauseous.
The Duke I Tempted Page 20
