Claiming the Courtesan

by Anna Campbell

  Kylemore followed her inside and slammed the door after him. The shades were drawn, but even in the gloom, he saw that the gaze she turned on him was stony. The formidable control, so familiar after a year together, was back in place. She meant to freeze him into letting her go.

  Too late, my lady, he thought with a bleak spurt of humor. I’ve been frozen all my life. This particular demon is only at home in snow and ice. He heard the coachman shout to the horses and Ashton’s blasphemous protest as the coach rolled into motion. The scheme had proceeded with perfect smoothness. But then, his plans usually did.

  Kylemore scooped up several lengths of cord from the bench beside him. “Put out your hands.”

  “I will not be bound.”

  God, what a woman she was. Most females would be caterwauling to the skies by now, but his mistress sounded as though she attended afternoon tea, not her own abduction. He knelt before her, balancing himself against the coach’s swaying. “I’ve tied you up before. You enjoyed it.”

  Of course, the cheap jibe didn’t rattle her. He hadn’t imagined it would. She merely settled her rain-clear gaze on him. “I consented to those games, Your Grace. An important difference.”

  “Not to me.” He let a superior smile curl his lip. In truth, he felt rather superior. Having gotten what he wanted, he’d happily fling back his head and shout his victory aloud. “Put out your hands.”

  She shrugged and did as he bid. “I suppose if I don’t, you’ll order your thug of a driver to shoot me.”

  He tightened the knots. “I could gag you as well, you know.” Negligently, he flipped her skirts up to her knees. “I find myself less than beguiled by your wardrobe, madam.”

  With displeasure, he surveyed her thick cotton stockings and sturdy halfboots. Practical, but far from alluring. The Soraya he knew had worn only silk next to her skin.

  Silk. Or him.

  “I wasn’t out to beguile,” she snapped as he tied her ankles together.

  He pulled down her skirts and returned to his seat with an urgency he hoped she didn’t note. This woman was in many ways a stranger, but she still exercised the same heady tug on his desires, damn her. But he had some control, Devil take it. He wouldn’t throw her on her back and tup her the minute he had her in his power, no matter how his starving senses screamed for him to do just that.

  A silence fell as he fought and won against his unruly passions. He resented this effortless hold she had over him. He always had. But nothing in six years had broken him of his addiction to this one exquisite woman. He craved her the way his father had craved opium. Would his particular obsession prove just as fatal as his sire’s?

  Broodingly, he stared across at her, taking in her shuttered expression and the way she gracefully braced herself against the lurching motion, even constrained as she was. She clearly meant to deny him tears, protests, tantrums. Perhaps she saved them for a more telling moment.

  But when, a long while later, she did speak, she used the same unruffled voice as before. “Just what do you want of me, Kylemore?”

  He settled back against the squabs with a faint smile. “Nothing too onerous for a woman of your talents.” He let his smile broaden as intoxicating satisfaction flooded through him, headier than the strongest liquor. “You’ve given me three months of misery and trouble, madam. Now it’s only fair you recompense my efforts with sensual pleasure.”

  Chapter 4

  “Kidnapping is a capital offense,” Verity said steadily. Never let him see you’re frightened, her mind chanted in time with the creaking carriage. Never let him know you’re weak.

  Kylemore remained unconcerned, damn him. “No magistrate will lift a finger to save a common whore from supplying what her patron has paid for. Especially if her patron is one of the greatest men in the kingdom.”

  His insulting description of her shouldn’t rankle. She had sold her favors for money. All the same, his dismissive words hurt. Daunting to realize quite how much they hurt.

  She fought to conceal her unwelcome reaction. The ruthless autocrat sitting opposite wanted her to play the hysterical female, weeping and begging for mercy, but she’d promised herself the day she’d left London that she’d never be this man’s—any man’s—puppet again. The Duke of Kylemore didn’t yet realize that compliant Soraya, with her silken sensuality, was gone forever. Instead, she’d become a creature of iron and ice who would submit to no man’s demands.

  She’d cried, alone and afraid and grieving, when her parents had died. She’d raged and wept when necessity had compelled her to become an old man’s mistress. Tears hadn’t helped on those occasions. They wouldn’t help now. Instead, she must be cunning and observant. She must think and plan and wait. In this alone she was like Kylemore: Control was her refuge and her weapon.

  Circumstances had forced her to learn to interpret men. This particular specimen might be more opaque than most, but she could tell the duke was stubbornly set on this reckless course, even though heaven knew no good could come of it.

  She moistened a dry throat. “My brother will have the law on you.”

  “The same brother who pimped for you in London?”

  She’d defend Ben even if she’d never stoop to defend herself. “That’s not true. He protected me.”

  The monster had the nerve to smile at her again. The curve of that beautifully shaped mouth conveyed a mixture of condescension and disdain. “You hardly need protecting from the man who has been your acknowledged lover for the past year. No, my dear Soraya, you deceive yourself to expect rescue from that quarter.”

  “Don’t call me that!” In their hated bonds, her hands curled into fists. She took a deep breath to quell her stormy reaction. Never let him see. Never let him see, she repeated silently. She spoke more calmly. “My name is Verity Ashton.”

  “As you wish,” he said without any great interest. “But don’t imagine anything else has changed, because it hasn’t.”

  The smile developed a tinge of smugness. Because of course, he had seen. He was an astute man with an uncanny ability to read her. From the start, he’d known that beneath her composure, she was scared and bewildered and furious.

  None of which meant she must admit defeat. She straightened her spine, sent him a glare of virulent, but unfortunately impotent, hatred and turned her head away.

  They covered several miles in increasingly oppressive silence. She tried to concentrate on her physical woes. But while the cords constraining her were tight, the silk didn’t chafe anything except her pride. It was more uncomfortable trying to balance against the vehicle’s motion, but even that eventually became automatic.

  The duke studied her with unwavering intensity. She endured his inspection as the coach swayed along the road, stealing her away from Whitby and her shattered dreams of contentment. With every second, the tension between them wound tighter and tighter. A tension heavy with her fear and his unrelenting purpose. And something else she didn’t want to acknowledge. The sexual awareness that always quivered between them was almost tangible in the dimly lit carriage.

  Verity had no illusions about her ultimate punishment.

  He wanted her. He’d take her. He was angry enough to hurt her. Nor had she missed the significance of those few moments when he’d knelt at her feet. The catch in his breath. The swiftly hidden tremor in those elegant hands as he’d bound her.

  He was still in thrall to his lust. Of course he was. Why launch himself on this lunatic path otherwise?

  His need was a weakness the great Soraya would have immediately exploited. But until she had no other choice, Verity refused to descend to cheap harlot’s tricks, however many spiteful names Kylemore cared to call her.

  The duke was strong and ruthless. Any thin veneer of decorum that existed between them in London had disintegrated to nothing. She sensed he’d been pushed so close to the edge that he’d do anything. Anything.

  But he wouldn’t prevail, she told herself bravely.

  And wished to heaven she
believed it.

  “I didn’t betray you,” she said, as much out of a need to break the screaming silence as out of any great wish to communicate with him.

  His eyes in the gloomy interior didn’t even flicker. “Yes, you did.”

  “Our contract was for a year. Everything you gave me was legally mine. You know about Ben now. I was never unfaithful.”

  “Fortuitous for you—and him—you weren’t.” The duke spoke with an indolence she didn’t trust as he stretched out his legs in the well between the two benches. If one disregarded the banked fires under those lazily lowered eyelids, he was the picture of relaxed control. “You speak of quibbles. Inessentials. In your heart, you know you betrayed me when you left. In your heart, you knew I’d seek reparation.”

  The problem was she had known. Because of this knowledge, she’d fallen in with Ben’s scheme to disappear into the night with him as though they’d been a pair of housebreakers. She’d spoken no promises to Kylemore, but every time they’d made love, every time he’d produced an empress’s jewel to adorn her, she’d committed herself to stay. Legally, she’d been free to go. On a personal level, she’d deceived, then abandoned, him.

  Unspoken guilt had nagged at her ever since she’d left. But she realized now she’d been wise to flee him and his obsessive desire. What had been unwise was allowing him to find her again.

  “If I admit that’s true and beg your forgiveness, will you let me go?” she asked without any expectation he’d agree.

  He laughed softly, and the deep sound sent a chill of apprehension along her spine. “No, that’s too easy, madam. Although I vow you’ll do both before I’m finished with you.”

  Unhappily, she was sure she would too. She spoke quickly before the thought lodged in her mind and chipped away at what little courage she had left. “How did you find me?”

  “With more difficulty than I anticipated, I must say. I compliment you on your cleverness.”

  It didn’t sound like a compliment. She shivered although it wasn’t cold inside the closed carriage.

  He went on. “At first, I tried all the obvious places. But if you’d taken a new lover, everyone concerned was damned discreet about it. My inquiries turned up no information about your whereabouts at all.”

  “That must have been—”

  “Humiliating? Yes, it was.” He cast her a level look from under his sharply marked brows. “I’ve already said you have a great deal to make up for.”

  “I owe you nothing,” she said with a staunchness even she found unconvincing.

  He ignored her interjection. “In the meantime, my agents searched across the country, concentrating on the fashionable towns. It never occurred to me you didn’t plan to continue your profession.”

  “Why?” she asked sourly. “You believed I was so madly in love with my manservant that I absconded with him.”

  The annoying smile, which had come and gone ever since he’d seized her, reappeared. “What I understood to be your affair with Ben Ahbood hadn’t prevented you trying to bleed me dry. Why would it stop you hooking your claws into some other gullible source of income?”

  “You don’t think very highly of me, do you?” she asked through stiff lips.

  “On the contrary, my dear. I have the greatest respect for your business acumen,” he said dryly. He folded his arms, his fathomless dark blue stare still probing her every secret. “Your only truly foolish act was to refuse my offer of marriage and run away. You must know you couldn’t find a more generous provider.”

  Inwardly, she recoiled at the contempt in his drawling voice. Oh, he wanted her, all right, but he despised himself for it. And he’d make her pay for his weakness.

  “I only had one thing to sell. You can’t blame me for getting the best price I could,” she said.

  “No. And you can’t blame me for getting value for my money.” Clearly feeling he’d stemmed any insubordination in the lower orders, he proceeded with his explanation. “I started to think about wills and legacies. Sir Eldreth was a rich man and a bachelor. Likely he made provision for you. Especially considering your touching display of loyalty. And I remembered you waited six months before taking your next lover. It argued an independent income of some kind.”

  “Perhaps it argued discrimination,” she retorted, bitterly resenting this cold accounting of her life.

  “Not when Mallory was your next choice. The man’s a nonentity.”

  “He was always kind to me,” she returned just as sharply.

  Unimpressed eyebrows arched over Kylemore’s deep blue eyes. “A woman like you needs more than kindness. We both know it.” He reached across to lift the blind on a gray world.

  The light was unforgiving on his handsome face, revealing marks of tiredness and strain. He looked as if he’d tormented himself close to madness since she’d disappeared. She found the idea more terrifying than flattering to her vanity.

  He let the flap fall, enveloping them in twilight once more. “It’s raining again. We shall have a wet journey north.”

  “North?” she asked, although it hardly mattered where he took her. Her eventual fate at his hands would be the same in London as it would be in Outer Mongolia.

  “Yes. We visit one of my properties in the Highlands. It’s the only place I’m sure we won’t be disturbed. It’s the only place I can rely on the staff not to spread word of your presence.” This time, his smile held only gloating anticipation. “My revenge is a purely private concern.”

  A weaker woman would have started screaming then. But Verity clung with difficulty to her self-possession. He was determined to intimidate her, that much was obvious.

  The pity of it was he succeeded.

  He paused, as if waiting for her reaction. When she denied him a response, he looked a little chagrined.

  You’ll face more such disappointments, she told him silently with the first satisfaction she’d experienced since this nightmare started. Get used to it.

  He made a dismissive gesture with one pale, elegant hand, as if wordlessly denying her capacity to affect him. “Where was I? Ah, yes. Sir Eldreth’s will. I got hold of it and noted a large annuity to a Miss Verity Matilda Ashton. Inquiries on his estates and amongst his cronies revealed Miss Ashton was neither a relative nor a family retainer. In fact, nobody knew who she was. By the way, Matilda doesn’t do you justice. It’s hard enough seeing you as Verity—particularly given truth isn’t exactly your strongpoint. But Matilda!”

  “It was my mother’s name,” Verity said, trying not to let his needling scratch at her control.

  “Ah.” He released a derisive puff of breath. “I hope she was a worthier citizen than her daughter has turned out to be.”

  “She was.”

  Thank God that gentle, devout woman had died before she saw what Verity had become. Her mother believed everlasting hellfire awaited a harlot at the end of her path. Verity had no intention of confiding that morsel to the overbearing tyrant opposite her.

  “It was then a minor matter to arrange for certain less scrupulous contacts to break into Sir Eldreth’s solicitor’s office and steal Miss Ashton’s direction. You enjoy the delightful result of my enterprise.”

  How she hated his smooth, superior voice, with its hard consonants and clear vowels. The coward who skulked in her soul whispered she could never succeed against someone with a voice like that.

  Courage, Verity, she told herself, fisting her bound hands in her lap. He hasn’t won yet. Although he undoubtedly will if you convince yourself he’s invincible.

  “You’ll soon tire of rape and compulsion.” Baiting him was risky, but she had to establish some power of her own in this cruelly unequal contest.

  “You mistake me, madam,” he retorted smoothly. “My desire is for a partnership in the fullest sense of the word.”

  In spite of all her fear, she gave a scornful crack of laughter. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

  His intense expression didn’t lighten. “I think
you’ll find we’re all beggars when it comes to desire.”

  At last, he offered her some advantage, and she was desperate enough to take it. “I was a whore, Your Grace. Whores tup for money, not for pleasure. You confuse me with some fine lady who chooses where she lies down. I spread my legs for men because they pay me to do it. In your case, they pay me a fortune.”

  Even in the poor light, she saw he whitened under her taunts. “More than that lay between us and you know it.”

  It was her turn to sound superior now. “I’m glad Your Grace thought so. I’d fear my skills failed if you hadn’t.”

  Yes! This was what she must do. Fight him. Insult him. Make him scramble to keep up. Soon, he’d weary of her acid tongue and her obstinacy. He wanted exciting, compliant Soraya, not her pigheaded facsimile, Verity.

  He must have guessed her intention. “Making me angry won’t convince me to release you. Although it might make me less…careful.”

  Anger surged up, clean and powerful as the waves she’d watched on the seafront that afternoon. “I don’t want your care! I don’t want anything from you. I despise you.”

  Strangely, her outburst only made him calmer. “Have a thought for your safety, madam. Where we’re going, I could do away with you and not one soul would utter a word of protest.”

  She shrugged sullenly. “So kill me. Kill me now and save yourself the inconvenience of a long journey. Threats won’t change the way I feel.”

  As she should have expected, the challenge didn’t dent his self-assurance. “Perhaps not. But I’d hate to end this particular drama just when it’s getting interesting.”

  Balancing himself against the lurching with an ease she resented, he crossed the carriage to share her bench. Verity cringed into the corner before she could stop herself. The seat was narrow, and while he wasn’t a heavyset man, he had plenty of lean strength to fill the available room. His legs lay alongside hers, and their heat seeped through her thick black skirts.

  But she was a fighter. She’d had to be.