“Never,” she insisted.
Then astoundingly, she reached up to drag him down for another kiss. Their mouths dueled and parted, then met again, this time for what felt like eternity.
This was like no kiss he’d ever shared. This spoke of passion and anger and misery and an endless battle for supremacy.
And pleasure. Pleasure so intoxicating that it made his head spin.
Curling his arm around her slim waist, he bowed her back to press his mouth to her pale throat. Her pulse pounded wildly beneath his lips. The wanton blood beat a relentless rhythm of temptation that beckoned him as opium had beckoned his father to ruin.
He tasted each shuddering breath she took. The sensation was unbearably intimate, as though she lived by his kisses alone. Her hot scent swirled, luring him to further importunities. His nostrils flared as he tested her building arousal in the most primitive way.
Her fingers clutched convulsively at his flesh. Her nails scraped across the crisp hair on his chest, teased a nipple. She rubbed her lithe body in its silk dress against his bare torso as though she wanted to climb into his skin. His excitement leaped another notch to reach an unbearable pitch.
At last, he’d scratched beneath Verity’s surface, perhaps even deep enough to unearth Soraya, although Soraya would never fall victim to such violent need. The woman in his arms quaked at the very edge of control.
If only he could force her over that edge.
With an unsteady laugh, he twisted her around and flung her onto the bed. She gave a strangled cry as she bounced upon the mattress. Before she could roll away, he climbed on top of her and shoved her down onto the covers.
“I hate you,” she hissed.
“So you’ve said. The repetition risks becoming tiresome,” he said in a deliberately bored tone even while the hot blood thundered through his veins.
“Repetition doesn’t make it less true,” she said savagely. Her eyes glittered with fury and unshed tears as she stared up into his face.
God knew what she saw. Certainly, he’d abandoned any remnant of the civilized man he’d once considered himself. He’d treated her roughly before, but this verged on something darker and they both knew it. Straddling her, he clamped his fingers around her dress’s elaborately embroidered collar.
He briefly recalled his pleasure at choosing the lovely gown from the modiste. It had cost a sultan’s ransom, but he hadn’t cared. He’d been too captivated picturing the vivid color against his mistress’s flawless skin.
“I will not bear this.” Her breath emerged in panting gasps, and her mouth glistened damply from their fierce kiss.
“Oh, yes, you will,” he grunted. “You will bear me.”
One massive wrench. The extravagant dress and the shift underneath split to her waist. Her magnificent breasts spilled free.
Her nipples were hard and puckered, tempting as ripe berries. He bent his head and tongued one rosy peak. Her taste immediately flooded his mouth, heightening his rampant excitement. She moaned, and even through his blind arousal, he heard despair in the muffled sound.
He rolled her nipple in his lips and drew hard on it. She was exquisite. Perfect. Perfect for him. He slid his hands along her flanks and turned his attention to her other breast.
He had to take her. No delays. No hesitation. Now. The demon in him strained to meet its equal in the demon he knew she leashed within her.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he muttered with one last drowning trace of consideration.
“You hurt me just by existing!” she cried.
In wordless denial of what she said, he claimed her lips in another urgent exploration.
Through her frenzy of rejection, her hands curved like claws around his bare shoulders. The savage who lurked within him exulted to know he’d bear her mark.
He kissed her again, using his tongue and compelling her participation.
He shoved up the skirts of what was now the expensive rag she wore and stroked between her legs. She was already wet. Soon he felt the rush of her response against his probing fingers.
She groaned into his mouth and at last kissed him back. He ripped at his breeches to free himself and thrust into her full length.
She gasped and lay still. Her life-giving heat surrounded him. The muscles in her sleek inner passage tightened as if she meant to keep him inside her forever.
He’d meant to brand her as his in the most basic way. He’d meant to show her he really was the heartless beast she believed him to be. But as she lifted her hips to accommodate him, the radiant sweetness of the moment defeated him. The old hankering to possess and pleasure seeped through his frenzy and tempered his rapacious lust.
His touch automatically gentled, and instead of ravaging her like a conqueror, he held himself above her, basking in the exquisite moment.
She was everything he’d ever wanted. This, this was what he lived for. This was worth the eternal damnation he courted with his sins against her. He’d fight through hellfire itself if this ineffable joining was his eventual prize.
He clung to the glorious stasis as long as he could. Then he began to move, each stroke deep and deliberate to emphasize his mastery. She sighed and released her death grip on his shoulders, sliding her arms around his back.
Ridiculous to find that reluctant embrace so affecting. But it did affect him. More than her practiced caresses in London ever had. Her hands began to stroke him in time with his thrusts, tracing his straining spine, going lower to knead the tense muscles of his buttocks. He knew she was so lost to the sensual pull and release between them that she had no idea she was touching him.
The incendiary heat in his loins threatened to explode, but he battled to contain himself. He needed her to cede her ecstasy to him almost more than he needed his own release, even if delaying his own satisfaction damn near killed him.
He pushed the pace. And this time, she matched him. She moaned again, the sound sweet in his ears, and wrapped her legs around his hips, urging him closer. Then he became blind and deaf to everything except the delicious friction of moving in and out of her body.
Soon, he felt her quiver with the onset of her crisis. He tried desperately to harness the instant when she gave in to him, when he at last held sway over her.
But it was impossible. The familiar whirlwind snatched him up and swirled him to the skies.
And as ever in the conflagration of desire, questions of ownership and domination dissolved to ashes.
Kylemore gradually returned to awareness to find Verity lying silent and unresisting beneath him. Tears marked silvery trails across her ivory cheeks and clumped her thick black lashes together around her dazed gray eyes. She didn’t need to tell him she despised herself for what had just happened.
If his goal had been to return their interactions to their simplest level, he’d failed utterly. She still held him in thrall. Every time he took her, hard, fast, or slowly, tenderly, the bonds uniting them twisted tighter.
He was a barbarian, but he’d willingly go through all the turmoil and trouble again just for these precious moments in her arms.
He hadn’t found Soraya in the end. He hadn’t reawakened the daring, uninhibited lover she kept locked within her, the lover he remembered from London.
Yet when he made love to this woman, who opposed him with every ounce of her soul, he touched emotional depths he’d never sounded before.
He broke away from her slowly, reluctantly. She gave a soft grunt of discomfort.
He’d been brutal. But he hadn’t missed, even in his drive to completion, that she’d reached her own peak. It hadn’t been last night’s dazzling explosion, but at the height of the tempest, she’d embraced him. He’d made her confront the truth that she could no more deny him than he could deny her.
Her body had opened to his. While she’d kept her mind and heart closed.
He told himself her body was all he wanted.
The declaration sounded laughably hollow. The feverish encounter had b
itten more deeply than the fleeting demands of flesh alone ever could, however much he wished it otherwise.
She took a shuddering breath as he settled at her side. He fought the urge to stroke the damp black hair back from her brow. She wouldn’t welcome his tenderness, he knew with piercing regret.
They lay in tense silence for a long moment. Then, without glancing in his direction, she rose from the tumbled bed, gathering her ruined dress around her.
She looked sad, crushed, used. She looked beautiful and as necessary to him as breathing.
Exhausted as he was, he reached out and caught at her crushed skirts. “Where are you going?”
“To wash,” she said desolately.
“Stay with me.”
“Yes.”
He frowned. Such easy agreement seemed unlikely. “Yes?”
She looked at him fully. Her eyes were flat and lifeless as he’d never seen them before.
He’d summoned passion from her. But at what cost?
“If I run, you’ll only find me. So I will stay.”
“Good.” He let her go, hating himself as she hated him, however tightly she’d clung to him as she’d ridden out her climax.
When she raised her hand to brush back the heavy fall of hair, he noticed a ring of bruises circling one slim wrist.
“I’ve hurt you,” he said, loathing himself even more.
She glanced at the marks without interest. “They’re from last night. They don’t matter.” She turned away, her head bowed under the tumbled mass of hair. “Nothing matters.”
He’d fought like a madman to crush her defiance. Why, now that he’d succeeded, did such grief slice into the heart he denied he possessed?
Chapter 14
Kylemore crawled into the dark hollow in the bushes where he’d always been safe. Outside, the monster rampaged closer and closer, then it began tearing at the protective wall of branches and brambles.
When it found him, it would kill him.
He shrank into the darkness, trying not to breathe. The monster already knew where he was, but maybe in the blackness, he could disappear.
But of course, he couldn’t disappear. The monster reached out its terrifying white hands and twisted them into the front of his torn and soiled shirt.
Kylemore whimpered with horror. Thorns at his back dug at his flesh, preventing escape, even if the impossible happened and the monster let him go. He whimpered again, despising his weakness, despising his stupidity in getting caught.
The monster gave its mad laugh and tugged him forward.
More pain awaited, he knew. The monster would cut him into pieces and feed him to the dogs, just as it had promised so many times before. Before, when he’d managed to escape.
But this time, he hadn’t been so lucky.
“No! No, Papa! No, please! I promise I’ll be good. Just don’t hurt me! Papa, no!”
But the long white hands that were larger, crueler versions of his own dragged him onward.
“No!” he sobbed. “Please.”
The long white hands shook him.
But they no longer bit like talons into his flesh. Instead they were cool and gentle. He opened his eyes to find Verity leaning over him in the darkness. For a moment, he was too disoriented to be ashamed of his trembling and his tears.
“Kylemore, wake up. You’re having another nightmare,” a soothing voice said.
No monster then. He was safe.
This particular monster had died twenty years ago. Coming back to reality, he blinked and took a deep breath. His chest hurt, as if he’d been running for hours.
“A nightmare,” he repeated and abominated the croak in his voice.
He’d suffered bad dreams right through Eton. His hardier schoolfellows had tormented him endlessly about his sobbing and moaning in the night. Those bad dreams had continued into early manhood. He thought he’d trained himself out of them. The memories hadn’t overtaken him for years. Cold Kylemore, the magnificent duke, permitted no vulnerability to rattle his sangfroid.
It was this glen. He should never have returned. Coming back to this house had been the final test to see if he’d become as impervious as he so desperately wanted to be.
A test he spectacularly failed.
His body was slick with sweat, and he shivered. He felt so alone that he thought he’d die.
With a wordless groan, he wrapped his arms around the woman who hated him and buried his head in the softness of her breasts. Immediately, her haunting scent filled his senses, and his racing heart calmed.
How did she imagine he could ever let her go? She was the only being in creation who gave him this peace. Verity was all that stood between him and madness. It was the intolerable and eternal burden fate placed upon them both.
For a long moment, they lay entwined in silence. He anticipated her rebuff. What a pathetic admission that in his whole life no one had given him kindness or comfort he hadn’t bought. Until she’d come to his room yesterday. When she’d offered up her strength and warmth as lights against the dark.
He didn’t deserve her generosity. Even in his overwhelming need, he recognized that. He tightened his grip on her slender body, braced for mockery and rejection.
“Shh, Kylemore,” the woman in his arms murmured. “You’re safe here.” She shifted up toward the headboard so he lay more comfortably against her.
Astonishment clawed at him, banished his ability to speak. She abhorred him, wished him dead.
So why was her voice so soft? Why was her touch so gentle?
“Shh.” She smoothed the hair away from his damp brow with a tenderness that cut him to the bone. “It was only a dream.”
Such consolation was sweet indeed from the woman he wanted above all others. But for once, his craving for simple human warmth exceeded his craving for sex.
His own mother had never held him like this. His own mother had never touched him in affection as far as he could remember.
He lay motionless while Verity’s cool hand brushed across his hair. Each slow stroke drew out a little more of the dream’s lingering dread.
She smelled like everything good in the world. Baking bread and mown grass and the countryside after rain and the clean air above the waterfall at the top of the glen.
Yet she smelled like none of these, but purely herself.
If she sent him away now, he thought he’d scream like the terrified boy who had fled in fear of his life from his own father. But she didn’t send him away. Instead, she curved around him to shield him from the house’s dark shadows.
She crooned soft nonsense in his ear. It was the most enchanting sound he’d ever heard. He pressed up against her, his fingers tangling in the nightdress she’d put on before sleeping. Gradually the nightmare receded.
Still he didn’t move away. He listened to the even tenor of her breathing, while her warmth slowly seeped through his cold, cold soul.
What was she thinking? He sensed no condemnation or scorn, although he deserved both after the wild, destructive passion he’d conjured between them earlier.
“I was born on a farm in Yorkshire,” she began quietly after a long silence. “My father was a tenant to Sir Charles Norton.”
She paused, as if waiting for some reaction, but Kylemore didn’t speak, afraid that if he did, she might stop.
Astounding to think that she finally offered him a clue to her mystery. Astounding she offered her secrets when he least deserved such a gift.
“My brother, Benjamin, is five years younger than I, and I have a sister, Maria, five years younger again. My mother’s health wasn’t strong, and I cared for the little ones.”
She would have been good at that, he thought. At her most basic level was a nurturing instinct. Witness how she succored him now, even after everything he’d done to her.
Her voice was calm and level, as if she read a fairy tale to a child. The night crowded in, inviting confidences.
“My father wasn’t much of a farmer, but we managed wel
l enough until I was fifteen and fever swept the moors.” Here the calmness faltered slightly, but after a longer hesitation, she went on. “Both my parents died within a week of each other. There was no money, and I was too young to take over the farm, even if Sir Charles would have rented it to a female. We had no family to turn to for help. So I found Ben and Maria a place with a woman in the village and I became a maid up at the big house. I didn’t earn much, but it was enough to keep the children from going hungry.”
And it had been unending drudgery, Kylemore knew.
Perhaps because the only people who had shown him any kindness as a boy had been servants, he was unusually aware of conditions below stairs. A fifteen-year-old rustic would have obtained only the most junior post in a great household. And junior maids did the roughest, hardest, most unpleasant work.
“I wasn’t happy, but I was determined to endure.” Another hesitation, one fraught with emotion. She stopped stroking him. “Until…”
Kylemore raised his head from where it rested on her breasts. In the gloom, he just discerned the perfect line of her cheek and jaw above him. The candles had long ago burned down to unlit stubs. The lack of light emphasized other senses. Touch, smell, hearing.
“What is it, Verity?” he coaxed. “Until what?” He shifted up so she lay in his embrace now. She hardly seemed to notice.
Her body was tense, where before there had only been supple ease. She shook her head.
“This is stupid,” she said in a voice that grated. “I don’t know why I’m telling you. What interest can a man like you have in the life of a whore?”
“Don’t call yourself that!” he snapped, then he forced himself to speak more temperately before he aroused the self-protective caution she usually hid behind. “Tell me what happened, Verity.” He no longer clung to her as his only refuge but held her fast to give her the strength to go on.
“Sir Charles was old. A widower. Kind enough in his own way. Life was bearable. Until that summer.” Her short, choppy sentences revealed her agitation. “His son John came down from Cambridge. By rights, he shouldn’t have known I existed.”
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