He raised the candle higher and studied her sleeping face against the creased pillow. Even in the uncertain light, he saw the tearstains on her cheeks. The regret and guilt inside him coalesced into one roiling black mass. She hadn’t cried once during this whole ordeal, but he’d made her cry tonight.
How she must hate him. For his clumsiness. For his blind need. For the way he couldn’t help wanting her. Any man worthy of the name would let her go. But the prospect of losing her made everything within him howl in anguished denial.
Let her go? As if he could. Even the thought of her leaving his bed made him want to break something.
He blew out the candle and placed it on a cabinet. Slowly, he bent to brush aside the blanket and pick her up. He thought she still wore the shabby white nightgown before he remembered he’d destroyed it in his anger. No, the rough cotton garment under his hands was a man’s shirt she must have found somewhere. She whimpered, a broken, husky sound that furrowed his heart until he remembered he possessed no such organ.
Then she awoke. “No!” she cried, immediately struggling. “Let me go! Don’t touch me, you devil!”
His grip tightened as he tried to ignore the slide of her barely covered skin on his and the way her scent, warm and heavy with sleep, teased him.
“Never.” He knew his damnation lay in the word.
“Leave me in peace,” she whispered, finally going still in his arms. “That’s all I ask.”
“I can’t.” He heard the sadness in his voice. “Hush now.” Hitching her higher, he carried his prisoner back to her bed.
In the bleak hour just before dawn, Kylemore woke hard and ready.
A kind man, a good man, would leave his mistress in peace, let her sleep, grant her a reprieve. But she must know now she could expect neither kindness nor goodness from her cold lover.
Although cold was the last word he’d apply to himself at this moment.
He shifted to ease his aching erection, disturbing Verity, who stirred from her troubled doze. Neither had slept well. This house would forever put genuine rest out of his reach. And he couldn’t forget the woman who lay such a careful distance away from him.
Even asleep, she didn’t want to touch him. A fleeting memory arose of that strange moment when she’d woken in his arms on the journey north. For one brief instant, his world had spun smoothly on its axis before everything had gone reliably awry again. It had been awry ever since.
With a fatuous optimism he should have known better than to feel, he’d thought sex with her would bring everything back into kilter. But after what he’d done to her in this room tonight, he felt even more lost and adrift than ever.
Although that wouldn’t stop him from having her now.
He flung the sheet to the base of the bed and reached out to place his hand on Verity’s shoulder, feeling the delicate bones and hollows. She was naked—he’d snatched the shabby shirt from her body when he’d returned her to his bed. Now the sweet scent of her skin curled out to urge him closer.
Her skin was so white that even in the darkness, he could follow the graceful curve of her back and waist and the flaring splendor of her hips. Need ratcheted up another notch, became unbearable. His hold tightened.
“No,” she said indistinctly, keeping her back to him and hunching against the edge of the mattress.
“Yes,” he said firmly and rolled her onto her back, releasing another eddy of her tantalizing essence.
To him, it would always be the scent of paradise. And he could brook no delay before he achieved this particular heaven.
Surprisingly, he felt no resistance in her. He moved over her, supporting himself on his elbows. “Put your arms around me.”
Her arms stayed stubbornly at her side.
Ah, he understood her game now. She meant her sullen acquiescence to shame him into leaving her alone. Foolish chit. She should know better than that.
Still, he didn’t immediately thrust inside her. Although the brush of her silky thighs against his hips and the teasing heat of her sex so close to his arousal measured the remotest limits of his control.
But he refused to act the mindless savage again. He’d done that last night. And he’d made her cry.
He’d hurt her, and in spite of three months of dreaming nothing but revenge, he was piercingly sorry. The recollection of tears drying on her pale cheeks gentled the hand he cupped around her breast. The gesture became one of aching tenderness.
Her skin was cool and smooth beneath his fingers. He tested the glorious roundness of her breast, then bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth. Immediately it pebbled hard under his lips.
Triumphantly, he recognized this as familiar—it seemed Soraya wasn’t totally lost to him after all. She tasted like ripe raspberries, and he gorged himself on her summer sweetness, licking and laving and sucking, listening to how her breath hitched with every marauding caress.
She didn’t want to respond to him, he knew. But she couldn’t help herself.
He turned his attention to her other breast. Lengthy delay was beyond his capability, after so many empty months of wanting her and last night’s unsatisfactory coupling, but even so, he was desperate to erase the memory of his earlier brutality. Something in him wanted to cherish her. She was so small and brave and beautiful.
So he made himself linger over her breasts, learning again their taste and texture. And his hand made a slow, stroking journey down the slight arch of her stomach to the plumpness of her mound. As his fingers tangled in the soft hair there, she stifled a moan of pleasure and moved restlessly under him. He gave his own moan as her thigh inadvertently brushed his cock. He’d reached a stage of excitement where even the rasp of the sheet on his skin threatened to send him over the edge.
He couldn’t wait much longer. He dipped his fingers lower, to the secret recesses of her body.
A carillon of victory joined the desire pounding through his veins to create a thunderous symphony of desire. She was hot and wet, ready for him. He wanted to taste her there, to see if she was as succulent and delicious as he remembered.
But his restraint was fraying. He had to take her now or lose his mind. He withdrew his hand and poised himself to possess her.
She hadn’t stopped fighting him. He knew that in his bones. But he had dominion over her body for now, and she wouldn’t deny him at least her physical capitulation.
With a groan that seemed to rise from the soles of his feet, he slid into her, feeling her muscles resist, then relax to accept his entry. Her inner passage was slick and tight around him, drawing him deeper.
No other feeling in the world rivaled this. Would ever rival this. He clutched her closer, as if daring fate to take her from him.
Against his chest, her nipples formed hard little nubs. Clumsily, he grabbed her knees and bent them up around him to ease his penetration. He was deep enough inside her to touch her very heart.
He waited for her to rise to meet him. She always had. Except for last night.
But she lay still beneath him, her breath emerging in distressed little gasps. He lifted his head to try and read her expression through the darkness. He caught the silvery glint of her eyes as she stared fixedly up at the ceiling. And there was no mistaking the tension in the slender, unmoving body under his.
After a moment, he realized her will would withstand any magic he worked on her senses. How could he bear the mental barriers she raised against him at this moment of greatest intimacy? He had to destroy them or go mad.
He began to move, establishing the slow, intense rhythm that he knew drove her wild. He exerted every ounce of his skill to woo her into surrender. After a year as her paramour, he knew her and he knew what gave her pleasure.
He wanted her so desperately that holding himself back was agony. The need to seek his own release threatened to snap his spine, incinerate his brain, tear every nerve from his body.
But still he persisted. Gritting his teeth, he harnessed every shred of control to force
her to admit defeat in this, if nothing else.
But no change in angle or touch or pressure could make her participate in the journey to ecstasy. Her body recognized his mastery, but with every stroke into her hot depths, he felt her will defy him.
Damn her. She wouldn’t cheat him of this. This, the only part of her that he could still reach.
Anger corroded what little command he still held over himself. His movements became more ferocious as the force inside him gathered, built, ignited. He’d meant to be gentle with her, but those intentions disintegrated under the titanic force of his passion.
Still she didn’t move to join him. Still she didn’t give any acknowledgment that she wanted him, wanted this, although her body was slippery with musky perspiration and every time he thrust into her, she clasped him harder.
Knowing he couldn’t hold on much longer, he pounded into her. Through the inferno in his mind, he heard her moan. Whether in discomfort or pleasure, he didn’t know.
Even if it killed him, he had to break her resistance.
He had to wait.
He couldn’t wait.
He couldn’t wait…
At last, at last, on the very edge of his breaking point, she began to tremble in his arms. She was almost there. He skated his hand down to touch between her legs.
With a strangled cry, she reached out to cling to his shoulders, digging her nails in hard. He ignored the stinging pain. It meant nothing compared to the fact that she held him of her own volition.
He took a great shuddering breath as her sleek inner muscles clenched in the prelude to her climax.
She finally lost control and convulsed around him. He kept still, luxuriating in her quaking pleasure.
Even in his own extremity, he knew what this meant. She wanted him. He didn’t suffer this tempest of desire alone. Burying his head in the curve of her neck, he drowned in the sensations of her shivering peak.
She was his. She’d never escape. Never.
But too soon, it was over, and her exhausted sighs rattled hot against the side of his face.
Then all awareness of everything except his own crisis abandoned him and he was lost. His sinews and bones tightened almost to pain as he spilled himself inside her in a blinding explosion of rapture.
For what felt like forever, he emptied the bitterness and yearning in his soul into her prone body. He shuddered over her until his limbs lost their strength and he collapsed on her, utterly spent. His heart pounded as if it wanted to break out of his chest. His head held nothing but the hot scent of her.
Slowly, reality returned. Gradually, the torrent of his blood quietened and calmed, although blinding pleasure still thrummed steadily through his veins.
His weight must have been crushing her, but she made no protest. Her hands had slid off his shoulders after her climax and now her arms extended stiffly at her sides. She was trembling.
Bitter disappointment was a rusty taste in his mouth and worried at the edges of his physical satisfaction.
He’d forced a climax from her, but in the desolate reaches of his mind, he recognized that in the end he hadn’t really vanquished her. He wanted her complete surrender. He wanted her willing in his bed. He hadn’t even come close to either goal.
Soraya had always sought her satisfaction with an openness he’d found bewitching. Verity had lain in contemptuous silence beneath him until he’d finished.
He rolled off her. She exhaled on a muffled sob and scrambled across the mattress to curl up as far away from him as she could.
He didn’t have the strength to protest. His chest heaving as he fought for air, he stretched out next to her. His muscles still quivered from the powerful sex, and sweat chilled his bare skin. He raised an unsteady hand to brush his damp hair back from his forehead and wondered what the hell would become of the two of them. And then asked himself if he cared.
A long time afterward, he finally dredged up the energy to speak. “Your coldness won’t deter me.”
The sound of his own voice was almost shocking after the wordless coupling. First light seeped into the room through the drawn curtains, and he saw how she’d gone back to huddling on the edge of the bed.
“I have nothing but coldness for you,” she said woodenly.
He couldn’t see her face. He didn’t need to. He knew the pride and suffering it would convey. “Soraya is a woman who understands pleasure.”
“Soraya never existed.”
Ignoring how she flinched away, he leaned over her. He’d expected her to appear composed and distant, but he read only vulnerability in her lush mouth and shadowed eyes. “You’re wrong. You are Soraya.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No, I am Verity.”
“You are Verity and Soraya.”
He bent his head to kiss that soft mouth. For a moment, her lips moved against his, and he thought he’d won. Then she jerked away.
In the growing light, she looked exhausted. A man with any compassion would leave her alone.
Hell, a man with any compassion would never bully her into his bed in the first place.
“Soraya still exists in you and I mean to find her.” The words were a vow.
She merely shook her head once more. He rolled away from her in impatience and sat up. With a disgusted gesture, he flung the sheet up to cover her nakedness.
In truth, he wanted her again. After so long without her, he was still far from sated. But the compassion he denied he possessed prevented him acting totally the selfish libertine, much as he wanted her to think that was all he was.
After the long night, he sensed she was very close to shattering. Once, he’d have said nothing short of cannon fire could rattle the gorgeous Soraya. But this woman, still flinching away from him in rejection, had fewer defenses than his exotic mistress.
Of course, one day he might have to break her.
But not yet. Dear God, not yet.
Kylemore paused at the top of the waterfall that tumbled from the cliff at the end of the glen. The afternoon light was dazzling on the rushing water, but he was blind to the scene’s beauties.
Instead, he brooded upon his mistress. That was nothing new. His mistress had dominated his thoughts since she’d left him. And for a considerable portion of time before that, if the truth were known.
Would he ever be free of this damned inconvenient itch for the chit? She didn’t know it, but she wasn’t the only one struggling against unwilling captivity.
He sat back against a rock familiar from his childhood and stretched his legs along the sun-warmed ground. It dismayed him how clearly he remembered so many things here, despite having left when he was seven years old for his unhappy sojourn at Eton. He’d thought time would have softened the painful memories. The hope had been unfulfilled.
He’d had a long walk up to this spot, and he’d need most of the rest of the day to return. Just as he’d intended when he’d set out this morning.
Although he wasn’t hungry, he took some bread and cheese from his pocket and bit into it. Scotland had the ability to kill his appetite, he discovered.
Below him spread the pitched jumble of roofs that made up the hunting box and its surrounding buildings. Originally, this lonely glen had contained only a crofter’s cottage. His grandfather had used the simple house while stalking the estate’s abundant deer. Of course, the isolation meant this was a lunatic place to want to live. But his grandfather had been an obsessive hunter.
Not for the first time Kylemore reflected that every Kinmurrie seemed to fall victim to some particular mania. By all reports, his grandfather had spent increasingly long periods here, slaughtering the local wildlife and avoiding his fiercely Calvinist duchess.
Unhappy marriages. Another Kinmurrie specialty. At Kylemore Castle, likenesses of people who had quite clearly loathed each other lined the portrait gallery.
The hunting box had undergone extensive renovation, of course, when his father had become a permanent resident. The estate’s isolatio
n had made it the perfect location for hiding the sixth duke’s unsuitable and dangerous proclivities.
Those renovations meant this was also the ideal place to imprison Soraya. Or Verity, as Kylemore increasingly thought of her.
Damn. He was thinking about his mistress again. He flung the rest of his meal aside with a disgruntled gesture.
Discontentedly, he considered the house. What was Verity doing now? Still lying in her bed like a wounded animal, the way he’d left her?
The thought settled like a cold stone in his gut. She’d looked so broken and lost this morning. The image pained him beyond endurance, which was stupid, as he’d carted her all this way to teach her a lesson.
But how he hated to see the great Soraya brought so low.
Except somehow she was no longer his disdainful, worldly mistress. And therein lay a large part of the problem.
The woman he kept against her will wasn’t the woman he’d used with such businesslike passion in London.
At first, he’d thought her recent reluctance just some trick to make him pity her, relax his guard, perhaps even let her go. But her distress last night and this morning had been real. He’d stake his dukedom on it.
Not that he’d particularly regret relinquishing that poisoned inheritance.
He realized that after all these years of studying Soraya, of hunting her as his grandfather had hunted the glen’s deer, he didn’t understand her at all. And until he knew what made her the way she was, he’d never completely possess her.
He had to possess her or he’d go mad.
If he wasn’t mad already.
Clearly, some split existed in her mind between Soraya and Verity. Which was absurd. She was the same person. The way he ached for her attested to that. This new, more complex version of his mistress still exercised the same inconvenient fascination over him—more strongly, if anything. Two unsatisfactory couplings only spurred him to demand a greater share of her. To demand everything.
And he’d make sure that was what she gave him before he was finished. Everything.
In a state of nervous determination, Verity sat on the window seat in her room and waited for the duke. He’d been away all day. Now it was evening and she knew in her bones he’d come to her.
Claiming the Courtesan Page 13
