When he reached for her hairbrush, a horrible thought occurred to her. “You’re not going to spank me?” she asked in dismay. For some reason, that would be the final humiliation in a night filled with humiliations.
His soft laugh grated on her nerves. “No, although you might enjoy it.”
With sure fingers, he reached up and let down what remained of the knot she’d twisted her hair into earlier. Her dash into the bushes had tangled it into an impossible mess. Slowly, thoroughly, he began to smooth the long black strands into order.
She stood motionless under his attentions. For a long time, the room was quiet as he concentrated on his task, his face calm and serious, as if brushing her hair were the most important thing in the world.
Eventually, he put aside the brush and gently pushed her down onto the bed. She lay staring upward and listened to him tug the clothes from his body. For all her denials and refusals, she was back where he wanted her.
She fought the urge to burst into tears.
It was like last night. Tomorrow night would be the same. And the night after that.
And every night until he tired of this cruel game.
Without extinguishing the candles, he lay down next to her. She waited for him to part her legs and claim her. But tonight he seemed determined to take his time. Perhaps because after this morning, he knew pleasure was the worst punishment he could inflict. He wanted to make her pay for her abortive attempt to escape him.
Verity turned her head and watched him raise himself up on one elbow in a characteristic pose. As he made a leisurely inspection of her prone form, the ghost of a smile curled his lips. The room was silent except for the crackle of the fire and the soft susurration of her nervous breathing.
She stiffened in silent rejection of what that smile promised. After everything that had happened, she could remain unmoved if he merely rutted over her, seeking his own release and ignoring hers. She was staunchly certain she could resist a thoughtless lover.
But now he promised to be anything but a thoughtless lover. He reached out to stroke his hand across her body, learning its shape and texture. It was as though touch were the only sense available to him.
He sighed with a pleasure she couldn’t mistake as he trailed his fingers across the hollows of her collarbone and down her arms. He touched her belly and her shoulders and her legs. His hand was warm and gentle on her naked flesh.
Against her will, her pulse quickened after each seemingly casual brush of his fingers. His gaze was intent and serious as he studied the intricate, meaningless patterns he drew on her skin, patterns which made every inch of her sing.
She closed her eyes and told herself he’d done this before. On so many long, languid afternoons in Kensington.
The first time he’d shared her bed, he’d taken the trouble to arouse her. She’d been surprised at his care. Then shocked at her reaction.
With Eldreth, she’d gradually learned to tolerate sex. She’d quickly decided that if she had to earn her living on her back, she might as well make the best of the bargain. But the Duke of Kylemore had unveiled a dazzling new world of sensuality—a world which beckoned so strongly that she’d been frantic to escape its pull by the time she’d left him.
Now she fought to stay unresponsive under Kylemore’s touch. Surely, she knew all the weapons in his arsenal of seduction. Familiarity must blunt their effectiveness against her.
But here, his touch seemed different. Just as Kylemore seemed a different man in many ways, some too subtle even to describe.
Gently, he shaped her thighs, her flanks, her arms. As if testing what a woman was. Her heart fluttered within her like a trapped bird. The light skimming hands were tender and astonishingly arousing.
Verity’s nipples tightened. The reaction was immediate and uncontrollable, and she had no hope of hiding it from him. Her uneven breathing caught, then resumed an even more erratic rhythm as she tensed, waiting for him to touch her breasts.
But he concentrated on parts of her she’d never before considered particularly erotic. Although she knew from her year as his lover that her whole body offered him the promise of delight.
Only after long minutes of silently enduring his attentions did she realize he deliberately avoided her breasts and between her legs.
Nor had he kissed her.
He meant to demonstrate his superiority. Of course he did. She’d never fooled herself that this was anything but a quest for supremacy. That insight helped her beat back the shimmering response his fingers created wherever they glanced.
You abducted me, she chanted in her mind. You think you own me. You want to destroy me. You’re nothing but a selfish brute.
The litany went on, eventually overcoming the spell of his caresses. Her wanton body might strain to surrender to him. The memory of the ecstasy he could call forth was imprinted on her skin. But her head and her heart were stronger, and they would prevail.
As her own arousal faded, she became more aware of Kylemore’s. He breathed unsteadily, and his touch lost its effortless mastery. Next to her, he radiated heat like a great fire. His hand wandered down her stomach, tantalizingly close to her sex.
Then there was nothing.
After a moment, she opened her eyes. He still leaned on one bent arm, watching her. His face was flushed and his eyes were dark with desire. Although she’d long ago abandoned modesty as a luxury a whore couldn’t afford, she fought the urge to cover herself with the sheet.
“This isn’t working,” he murmured, lifting his hand to brush a few stray strands of hair back from her cheeks.
How she abhorred the false tenderness of the gesture. Loathing lent her response an acid edge. “I told you I wasn’t willing.”
He ignored her interjection. “I’m too disturbed myself. I find the strategy I’ve chosen…distracting.”
“What do you want from me? Sympathy?” she gritted out.
In the candlelight, he was almost sinfully beautiful. His narrow face was thoughtful under the wing of black hair that fell across his brow. It lent him a boyish air she knew was a lie.
His gaze dwelled on her as though she were a philosophical problem he was compelled to solve. “I’m trying to stir you into a frenzy of lust,” he said consideringly.
The idea was so ridiculous that she couldn’t restrain a scornful laugh. “You must know that won’t happen.”
“You shouldn’t make challenges you can’t live up to.” He tugged at a lock of her hair in gentle reproof. “You’re far from unaffected now. But I can’t concentrate on driving you out of your mind while I’m so unsettled myself.”
Part of her wished he’d just get on with it and take her. Another part dreaded his possession. Every time he gave her pleasure she didn’t want, he chipped another piece of her soul away. Soon there would be nothing left.
“Perhaps you should go away and think about it,” she suggested without any expectation he’d heed her.
His own huff of laughter contained a trace of genuine humor. “And perhaps not.”
Strange that after all the turbulent emotion, they should speak almost like friends. This was something new. Soraya had always treated the duke with the distance due his rank, even when she’d used her mouth and hands and body to bring him to climax.
It was doubly strange when at any moment the duke would be inside her. The flickering light gilded the strong, lean lines of his body and left her in no doubt at all of his rampant readiness.
As he rose above her, she searched desperately for her hatred and anger. Both had receded further than she’d have believed possible.
He bent to kiss a long scratch a thorn had left on her neck, and they receded even further.
“You’re hurt,” he whispered.
Yes, she was, but not in the way he meant.
“It’s nothing,” she said, making her tone hostile.
The spurious intimacy of the warm bed in this candlelit room sapped her ability to resist. When she stopped resisting, he’d
destroy her. His scent surrounded her, reminding her irresistibly of other occasions when she’d lain next to him willingly.
“Let me kiss it better.” He lifted one of her hands and deliberately pressed his mouth to each mark. Her hands had borne the brunt of her wild flight into the shrubbery.
For a moment, she remained quiescent. Absurd, but his kisses did soothe the sting. She realized how close she came to wavering, and she snatched her hand away.
Yet again, Kylemore summoned tenderness to vanquish her. She had to conceal just how vulnerable she was to that particular ploy, although he was frighteningly perceptive and he’d probably already guessed, damn him.
“Stop it!” she snapped. “There’s no need to dress up what you intend to do to me in pretty words or gestures.”
He caught her hand again and gently but inexorably unfurled her fingers. He studied them for a long time.
“Soraya had perfect skin. Verity has calluses.”
He swept his thumb across the rough area at the base of her palm. By now, she was so sensitized to his touch that the caress tingled right through her and down to where liquid heat pooled in her loins. She shifted uncomfortably against the cool sheets.
“I’m sorry if that offends you,” she said with feeble sarcasm. “I never pretended to be anything but a peasant.”
He kissed the place he’d just touched and she experienced another of those unwelcome inner tugs. Surely he couldn’t seduce her with a mere kiss on the hand, could he?
“Actually, I don’t think we ever discussed your background. An oversight I intend to correct very soon. I take it from your brother’s execrable accent that you’re originally from the north of England.”
She frowned up at him, so annoyed that she didn’t even try to draw away as he lowered himself between her legs. “I don’t exist purely for your entertainment, Your Grace.”
He braced himself on his arms and stared down at her with a breathtaking mixture of amusement and hunger. “Entertainment is a flimsy word for what we share, don’t you think?”
He moved back slightly to clasp her hips and angle them up toward him. But still he didn’t take her. She hated to admit the pause tantalized her. It must just be that she wanted the long torture over.
Why did he take the trouble to linger over her like this? Her availability to him couldn’t be clearer.
She struggled to adopt Soraya’s cool tone. Not surprisingly, given her trembling awareness of the massively aroused male poised above her, she failed. “A mistress is only a rich man’s plaything.”
“This particular mistress seems a considerably graver matter than that,” he said gently.
He tensed and finally—finally—slid into her. Her gasp mingled with his deep groan of pleasure.
For a long moment, he was still. Then he began to thrust into her, deeply, fully and with a relentless drive she couldn’t help but recognize. His skin against hers burned hot, belying the teasing edge to his words. As did the implacable fierceness of his possession.
Her body had only just adjusted to his size and heat when he gave another groan and lost himself inside her.
Verity lay panting beneath his weight. They were still joined. She felt uncomfortable and sticky.
And that couldn’t be frustration skulking in her heart, could it? After such extended preliminaries, she’d imagined he’d make more of an effort to bring her to completion.
Hadn’t he mentioned sending her mad with lust? Her obdurate soul had looked forward to denying him.
Although perhaps this businesslike coupling had been an inadvertent rescue. For a few moments before he’d taken her, her soul had been about as obdurate as blancmange.
She raised her hands from where they lay at her sides and gave him a push. His bare skin felt like warm rock under her palms. It was the first time she’d touched him of her own free will all night. “Get off me, Kylemore!”
He lifted himself on both elbows, although he didn’t break the connection between their bodies. “Oh, we’re not finished yet,” he said softly.
He moved his hips suggestively, and she felt him swell inside her again.
“Oh, yes, we are,” she insisted, squirming in protest.
“That was nice. Do it again.” A wolfish smile, familiar from London days, creased his face. That particular expression had always warned her he meant to launch some inventive piece of love play.
And she’d always gone along with him. But not tonight.
She was very near the end of her resistance. She knew it. He knew it. A glance into his intense indigo eyes told her he considered victory already his.
Verity made herself remember everything she had at stake. Her self-respect. Her future. Ben and Maria’s future.
She deliberately sought the cold obsidian center of herself. The obsidian center that had helped her survive as a demimondaine. The center where no one reached her. The center that was utterly Verity and which Soraya had never touched.
Closing her eyes, she waited, secure in the knowledge that her true self was safe from him.
There was a silence. Kylemore must have noted and understood how firmly she was now locked away from him. He might possess her body, but the real Verity was as inaccessible as the moons of Jupiter.
She heard him sigh. Then he began to move within her, slow strokes as powerful and endless as the tide. After a few seconds, he reached out and raised her knees so his penetration went deeper, surer.
She could have told him it didn’t matter. She was isolated in her inviolable sanctum.
Except her cold black center was neither as cold nor as black as she longed for it to be. She was too aware of his scent and the evocative sounds of his body moving in hers. She closed her eyes more tightly and clutched her inner bastion.
Kylemore’s heat beckoned to her. It took all her willpower to keep herself from sliding against him, answering that rhythmic rocking of his body with her own warmth.
A moan escaped her. She wanted it to be a furious protest, but it emerged as a mew of pleasure. To stop herself reaching for him, she fisted her hands into the rumpled sheet beneath her.
“Open your eyes, Verity.” His low voice teased across nerves raw with sensual excitement. “Open your eyes.”
“No,” she said stubbornly, knowing any surrender, however small, would lead to ultimate defeat. She turned her head away to deny the almost overwhelming temptation to obey him.
“Open your eyes.” When that had no effect, he continued almost dreamily, “I can keep going all night, you know.”
She whipped her head around and met his gaze. It was dark and intent and steady. She couldn’t doubt he meant what he said.
Her lips parted on a wordless sob. She couldn’t keep fighting him. As if to underline that thought, her inner muscles clenched to draw him deeper.
This time, he was the one to close his eyes, and his sigh was a long aah of appreciation. He dropped down against her and rubbed his beard-roughened cheek upon hers in a gesture almost more intimate than the sex itself.
Against her will, she arched into him, her breasts brushing the hair on his chest. He reached down to stroke between her legs. No deceiving herself this time that her cry conveyed anything but pleasure.
With a broken exhalation of defeat, she began to move with him in the heady dance of passion. As she rose to meet his next thrust, she heard him give a low growl of triumph.
And why not? What price her defiance and hatred now?
But the thought was distant, unrelated to the climbing spiral of tension inside her, tension that built higher with every thrust of his powerful body into hers. She twined trembling arms around him and threw her head back as the storm within her gathered.
By now, Kylemore’s inhuman control faltered. His slow, powerful pace changed, became faster, more relentless. She hardly noticed. Her own response rose, tightening her muscles, compelling her to cling to him even as he drove into her for the last time.
She broke in his arms on a peak
higher, purer, more distressing than anything she’d ever known before. Kylemore’s groan of release underscored the shockingly exquisite turbulence. Her body leaped greedily to devour every second of rapture, every ravishing sensation.
He flung her up to fly free among the stars. While her heart lingered behind to grieve.
When some shred of control returned, tears dried on Verity’s cheeks. She clasped Kylemore as if she’d die before she let him go. His rough breathing warmed her ear.
She had no idea what that fiery encounter had meant to him apart from providing yet more evidence that physically, she had no defenses against him.
Their lovemaking had turned her every hope to ashes.
In spite of her bravery and determination, he’d required a mere two days to have her panting and begging in his arms.
Two days.
How he must laugh. How he must gloat over his quick victory. Soraya had held her own against him for a year. But Verity, with so many more reasons to deny him, had crumbled before half a week was out.
Although she knew it was too late for any pretense of distaste or reluctance, she unwound her arms from his back.
He raised himself so he could see her.
She searched his face for triumph, but he looked as shaken as she felt. Or perhaps her own reaction was so overwhelming that she imagined she saw its reflection in him. Her body quaked with after-tremors, and the memory of mind-shattering bliss ran sluggishly in her veins.
“I hate you,” she said clearly.
Something flickered in his eyes, but she was too tired and heartsick to try and read it. He lifted himself off her, then, surprisingly, left the bed.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly, bending to pick up his scattered clothes.
He was right. It didn’t. He’d already demonstrated that by proving she was as vulnerable to him as she’d ever been.
More.
She stared up at the heavy beams that crossed the whitewashed ceiling and told herself she wouldn’t cry. Although more tears couldn’t worsen her humiliation.
The door opened, then shut behind him.
It was much, much later and she’d fallen into a disturbed sleep when the first tortured cry woke her.
Claiming the Courtesan Page 15
