He ignored that. “Good night to you.”
“You haven’t yet answered my question.”
“Welshing,” he said coldly, “is the duke’s special privilege.”
“Very well, don’t answer. But I will ask it anyway: why do you read Austen if you lack all hope for yourself? Why torment yourself with happy endings if you don’t believe one is possible?”
He stared at the books. This had gone too far. Why did she think she had the right to speak to him in this manner?
Why did he constantly invite it?
“You have every advantage.” Her voice was fervent. “There is no reason you can’t go back into the world, have everything you feel you’ve been denied. I tell you—if I had your advantages, I would remake myself!”
The taunt in her voice speared him like a hook into his chest. Yes, she probably goddamned well would remake herself. She had no notions of respect, of boundaries, of her own place. She had no idea of limitations. He looked over his shoulder to sneer, to deliver her the acidic set-down she so badly needed.
But the sight of her robbed him of words. She stood with the novel hugged to her chest, a tall, long-waisted girl with coloring like the autumn, hair as red as turning leaves, and there was no taunt in her face. Her expression, rather, was pale, resolute, hopeful. Daring him to be as brave as she was. She was constantly daring him, as though it were not the most galling, impudent, presumptuous business—
“Can you imagine,” he said, and did not recognize his own voice, the animal viciousness in it. “Is it possible you have lived long enough, hard enough, to guess—that I would devour you in a bite, I would use you, discard you, if it meant I could experience, for a single moment, that idiotic naïveté in your face? A fool’s bliss: that is what it is, Olivia. And life will break you of it. And I would break you of it, right here, if I could have it back for myself, for only a moment, God help me. Your stupid faith in something better.”
Her lips parted. He had shocked her. Good. She believed in happy endings. She thought fairy tales had some connection to reality. He wanted to do more than shock her.
He realized he’d stepped toward her when she leapt back. He made himself halt. Fisted his hands at his sides. This leaping, flaming need that wracked him so suddenly was not lust: it was far darker, a more ravaging consumption. His nails bit into his palms.
But hope was a drug, was it not? And yes, he was a fiend in withdrawal. No drug would ever feel more exotic to him, or cause him to shake harder for the want of it, than hope. What a false and desperate appetite. Else why would the poor squander their coin on lotteries, and rally to the rumors of tears appearing on the cheeks of wooden idols? How did they profit from such delusions?
But if he tasted her, he might have a moment’s fix. He might.
“A good thing Jones is seeking out a replacement.” His voice came out as a growl. He did not believe in fairy tales. He was not going to ravish this naïf. To hell with her. “You will not find a happy ending in this house, I promise you.”
“Nor will you,” she breathed.
“You are baiting the wrong man, little girl.”
“Will you never go out again?”
He lunged at her. She remained stock-still, staring up at him, wide-eyed, unflinching. It infuriated him. “Do you fancy yourself a do-gooder?” The words tore from him in venomous chunks. “Have you conceived, somehow, that you might help me?”
“No,” she whispered. “Or—I don’t know; I only mean to say that you—”
“You are my servant. You do understand that, Mrs. Johnson? It is possible I will not give you a reference. You are insolent and unmindful of your station; in good conscience, I could not recommend you.”
Her expression darkened. He wondered why he had wanted so much to put a shadow in it. The look did not suit her better than hope.
“That is unfair,” she said flatly. “And you are not an unfair man.”
“Am I not?” His laughter burned his throat. “Are you really such a fool?”
“No. I am not.” Her shoulders squared. God damn her, she was rallying; that bloody light was entering her face again. “Even at your darkest, you did nobody evil. And at your best, the good you did the poor, the—the authority with which you guided your party, and the nation no less, through troubled times—and the noble example of your statecraft—you could have all that again, and I don’t understand—”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. Slammed his mouth onto hers. He drank her gasp of surprise and bit her soft lower lip, though some shred of sanity kept him from drawing blood. He wanted her to squeak, and she did.
She tried to break free. His grip on her arms tightened; he was hurting her, yes. Here is reality. No sugarcoating it, no romanticizing it: there is no one to protect you. He licked into her mouth and tasted her tongue. She had recently drunk tea, sugared, and she smelled like roses, always roses—
Her fingers threaded through his hair. Her lips, her mouth, moved beneath his. She was . . . kissing him back.
Had she caught fire, he could not have been more bewildered. He did not deserve this kiss. His grip went slack.
She stepped into him. The tight, hot grasp of her hands fell from his hair to his nape, to the breadth of his shoulders. She kissed clumsily, with the same blunt, aggravating enthusiasm, the same desperate fumbling hope, that he had wanted to punish with this lesson: this lesson in disappointment.
But this did not feel like disappointment. She was warm and impossibly, miraculously tall. The angles and swells of her body matched perfectly to his, her breasts crushing into his chest, her waist—his baffled hand fell there—sweetly curved. She smelled like the garden in summer; she kissed his neck and her hair came into his nose, flowers and greenery, fresh and young.
He took her by the waist and slammed her into the bookshelves. “Fine,” he snarled into her mouth. “Take it, then.” He was so good? “Then take it.”
“Yes,” she whispered back.
Yes? He understood nothing of her. He was furious with her, at how she would let herself be used, and by what kind of man. He shoved his hand into her hair, his fingers ripping through her plait, and yanked her head back to expose the tender length of her throat. She let him do it. She was an idiot to let him do it; to let him rake his teeth down this vulnerable stretch of skin.
She shuddered against him. She moaned.
He reached down, grabbed the thin lawn of her robe, hauled it up. Her calf was hot, impossibly soft; he massaged the muscle there, sliding his palm up to the tender space behind her knee, damp, secret; and then to the curve of her inner thigh, pliant, giving, a sweet surrender. She squirmed against him. Resistance? “Too late,” he growled.
Ah, God, she yielded; her thigh sagged in compliance, then hitched higher, brushing over his hip. He grabbed her ankle, set her bare foot on his thigh, and cupped her quim in his palm, pressing firmly.
She cried out. “Yes,” he said through his teeth. He could feel the plumpness of her lips through her drawers, the dampness of her. The sensation made it feel difficult to breathe; he groped for the slit in the undergarment and then hissed out a breath when he found the heart of her, slippery, her lips so easily parted.
She turned her face into his throat, and he gripped her head to hold her there as he laid his finger atop the throbbing bud at the top of her vulva. He pressed, rotated, and she stiffened, throwing her head back hard against the spines of books.
He met her eyes, his thumb still pressing, teasing that place at the apex of her quim. Her hair was coming down, a wild fiery halo around her pale, pale face. Her lips parted, trembling; he leaned forward and licked them. “Am I still a good man?”
Her mouth formed a single syllable. She tried twice to speak it. “Yes,” she whispered.
“No.” Did she not learn? He felt for her opening, eased a single finger inside her, biting back an animal sound as she closed around him, as a sob ripped from her, breathy, nearly a moan. She was tight; she tightened fu
rther as he probed more deeply. She put the back of her hand to her mouth. “Do you feel me?” he asked.
Wide-eyed she stared at him over her palm.
“Say it.” He meant to speak sharply, but his voice was slowing, growing languorous. God, the feel of her . . . “Do you know what I want with this part of you?” He made himself use the filthiest word. “Your cunt. Do you know what I wish to do with your cunt?”
She swallowed. “I . . .”
“I want to fuck you,” he said. “With my cock—and all my fingers, and my tongue. Go deep inside you, every inch of you, Olivia. I want to use you up. I will make you scream, and beg me to stop, and then I will bend you over and fuck you again. This is where hope leads you: do you understand? It leads you to ruin, and I will enjoy it. I will ruin you for pleasure, and I will make you come for me, and hate yourself in the end for doing so.”
She took a ragged breath. “I—you are not—you want to be so much worse than you are!”
“Worse?” He fluttered his thumb over her clitoris, and she gasped. “Watch me,” he said. He dropped to his knees, and gripped her hips as she began to slump; he pinned her in place against the bookcase as he lifted her hem, parted her folds to expose her, and laid his tongue to her. He licked her in full.
The taste of her . . .
She cried out. Dimly, he heard it. But suddenly, he was only here, in the darkness, caught in his own trap, drunk all at once on the taste of her. She tasted like . . . the ocean, everything female; fecundity, life, creation; salt and copper, he thought his cock would burst. The dam broke and his hunger roared up through him, taking possession. He forgot his aim, forgot everything but this need, only this: to taste her more deeply, to paint his tongue and his lips with the scent of her.
He sucked her clitoris until her hips bucked, but it was not enough. He was an animal, yes, too long denied; he pushed his tongue into her then, as deep as it would reach; he had promised he would do it, but now it was only for himself. Take it, he thought.
She twisted beneath him. “Oh—oh—oh!”
She came against his lips, throbs that he could feel, her whimpering breaths igniting parts of him, base and all-consuming desires that he had not felt before. He had not known.
It was that, in the end, that made him draw back. That which kept him from opening his fly, and finishing what he had started. For suddenly, as he held her in place, as he watched her recover her senses, he realized he did not know what he had begun, here.
This was like nothing in his experience.
She was nothing like Margaret.
Margaret had never made him feel like a ravening beast.
Margaret had never made a noise.
His thoughts doused his ardor like ice water. He slowly stepped away from her, prepared to catch her if she fell. But she straightened off the bookcase. She met his eyes. She held them, when any other woman would have looked away.
It was he who turned away from her then. He who did not know where to look.
The thought gave him an odd panic. He made himself pivot back toward her. She was leaning against the bookcase, watching him, her lips parted, her face flushed, her braid unraveling over her shoulder. He had a vivid flash of what she would look like with that braid unbound, strands of fire falling across her bare white breasts, gazing up at him from his bed with this same startled revelation in her eyes.
When she reached up to touch her lips, her hand visibly trembled.
Jesus Christ.
He wanted to yell at her. The words were like solid chunks in his throat, making it impossible to swallow. Have you no care? No sense?
He would have liked to punch the bookcase—he deserved the pain. But she stood against it, and that would frighten her.
How was she not frightened already? From their first meeting, when he had thrown the bottle—how had he not managed to frighten her yet?
“You are not fit for service,” he said.
She blinked as though puzzled. As though he might have said anything else: as though he could have thought of anything to say in that moment that would make sense.
Only this made sense, a cheating and low kind of sense: he was the Duke of Marwick, and she, a domestic. Whatever that made him—a swine, a cad, his father’s son—so be it. He retreated into the role, away from the intolerable confusion.
“Leave service,” he snarled. “Find a husband. Make a hash of your own home instead of meddling in others’.”
Now, at long last, she looked away. A bright flush crawled up her cheeks. Her reply was barely audible. “That would be a happy ending, indeed.”
He recoiled. And then made himself laugh, though the sound burned his throat. “And now I know you’re a fool. Good night to you, Mrs. Johnson.”
It was his library. But she remained behind as he shut the door on the sight of her, alone and straight-spined by the bookcase.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The hour before dawn was always the quietest. Olivia slipped back into her small room and lay down, pretending to herself that she would be able to sleep.
Instead, she listened to the sound of her heart. That it should beat so steadily seemed impossible to her, as though nothing had changed tonight, as though she had not changed. As though whatever had happened might have faded, leaving no physical effect.
She knew there was nothing so rare or complimentary in what had just transpired in the library. A master seducing his servant—it was a tale so old that it had become a cliché. And so, too, was its corollary: the servant welcoming his attentions. Feeling his touch like a miracle. Hungering and praying for more.
She stared hard at the pictures on the wall, seeing them in her mind’s eye though the darkness kept them shrouded. In the village tableau, a couple strolled the lane: a wife who wore her collar buttoned to her throat, and a husband, plump and florid, who would inspire no heated dreams in any woman. There was a message in the picture: what a far distance lay between decency and desire.
Decency held no moral weight for her. Her mother, after all, had taken up with a man knowing he would never marry her. That did not make Mama a bad person. She had lived gently and with grace, and Olivia had no doubt she rested now in God’s arms.
But while she did not count decency a virtue, it was the safer route by far. All her plans centered on it. She was not some foolish girl who dreamed of love. What she wanted was something real, something durable: a home in a little village where people would know her name and nod to her in the street. These were the things her mother had never had. The local gentry had not acknowledged Mama. The merchants and postmaster had taken her money politely, but they had never smiled at her.
Olivia aimed for such a place, where she would be known, and welcomed, and smiled upon. But her longings . . .
She slipped her hand beneath the loose sleeve of her nightgown and ran her fingers up her arm, testing herself. The gooseflesh rose again, for in her mind it was Marwick’s hand that stroked her.
He had shattered her tonight. And he’d been right to warn that she would like it. Like it? What a pallid word for what he’d made her feel! And how easy it was, in the darkness, to touch herself and pretend it was his touch, and feel the shivers build anew . . .
Was she tuned to him now, like a violin refashioned for one player? She could believe it. The Duke of Marwick: like a planet, he exerted his own field of gravity. He had shaped politics, molded the nation. Why should he not reshape her, too?
She made a fist. Replaced her hand at her side and stared up, dry-eyed. The ceiling had a single crack in it, which she could not quite see in the darkness, but she could sense. Likewise, she could sense the crack deep within her.
The longer she stayed here, the wider and deeper that crack became. He was kind and then cruel, blind and then unnervingly insightful, offensive and then, without a moment’s warning, so gentle that her heart could break. He had been a great man once, and he would be so again—she did not doubt that, even if he did. His intellect was too sha
rp, his restlessness too strong, to submit to this self-made prison forever.
He had been wronged. She knew the full extent of it—which itself was a cause for shame. He had known too much deceit already, and he did not deserve any more of it. He would never forgive her for deceiving him. But trickery was all she had to give. He thought himself the danger to her? She meant to betray a man who had already been horribly deceived. And she would not be able to forgive herself for it, any more than he would.
But if she walked away empty-handed, what then? Eventually he would step back into the world, which would be waiting for him, glad to rearrange itself to orbit around him once more. And she? She was no planet. She was a speck of dust. The world would not even notice her. She would be blown onward, never able to settle in her village. For all it would take was a single visit from Bertram for the townspeople to cease nodding to her, cease smiling.
* * *
The next morning when Olivia woke, she was certain she was falling ill. Her head felt stuffed with wool, and her eyes ached. She breakfasted in her rooms, and would gladly have stayed there the rest of the day, avoiding the duke like a coward—but with only her thoughts for company, the prospect quickly grew intolerable.
She decided to check on the maids’ rounds of the public rooms. In the formal drawing room, she found Muriel beating the curtains while Polly held a vase up, by one hand, to dust.
“Careful!” she cried—and then came forward to rescue the vase from Polly’s awkward grip. “I’ll do this. Give me the cloth—you see to the rest of it.”
She pretended not to see the mystified look the girls exchanged. It felt good to be occupied, busy with something other than her thoughts. The vase was fashioned of turquoise enamel, delicate birds fluttering within compartments delineated by silver wire. No doubt it was priceless. Probably nobody had admired it in months.
She ran her cloth around the vase’s mouth. She had never coveted treasures, but it came to her that there might be a peculiar reassurance in owning priceless things. If you left treasures behind, people would always notice you had gone. They would wonder where you were, simply because they wouldn’t understand how you had brought yourself to abandon so much.
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