Claiming the Courtesan

by Anna Campbell

  In the mirror, he watched the light fade from her shimmering gray eyes. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said listlessly and returned to fiddling with her hair.

  The formal address stung. It always had. But it smarted more today. He sighed and rose from the bed. Her expression indicated that he was unlikely to coax her back into it any time soon.

  “Verity, allow me my secrets. This isn’t a matter for frivolous chatter,” he said heavily, drawing on his breeches. Obscurely, clothing felt like armor against her attack.

  She set her brush down on the table with a sharp click. “I wasn’t making frivolous chatter. Your precious secrets give you nightmares. When you scream, you call out for your father.”

  With jerky movements that indicated temper, she began to wind the thick black hair into a knot. He strode forward and took her busy hands in his. Bending down, he stared at her in the mirror. The slippery strands tumbled into disarray around her shoulders.

  “Stop this, Verity.”

  “I’m trying to do my hair,” she said crossly.

  “It will wait. Or don’t do it at all. I prefer it loose.” He released her hands and stroked his palms down the side of her head until he held her face looking straight ahead into the glass. Defiant silver eyes met his.

  “Can’t we just enjoy what we have?” It was a plea. “We’ve only just found one another. Don’t spoil it.”

  Her fine dark brows contracted in displeasure. “Soraya was paid to do what she was told, Your Grace. I’m afraid your next mistress is a woman of more independent character.”

  He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Soraya was no wilting violet either. Your memory plays you false, mo leannan.”

  “Stop using those outlandish foreign words to me,” she snapped, irritated even further by his humor.

  “It’s English that’s foreign here, mo cridhe.” He bent to kiss her glossy crown.

  “As you wish, Your Grace,” she said woodenly.

  She shook her head, dislodging his grip. He stayed behind her for another moment, then swung away to pace the room.

  “Devil take you, you won’t play me. Sulk as much as you like, but you won’t make me your toy.” He wouldn’t accept this. His whole life, he’d fought his mother’s self-serving machinations. He’d be damned before he accepted similar manipulation from his lover.

  “As you wish, Your Grace.”

  Calmly, she returned to doing her hair. She ignored his request to leave it down. Pleasing him plainly wasn’t her priority. The more agitated he became, the more composed she appeared.

  The chit meant to provoke. And, damn her, she definitely provoked.

  Looking cool and remote, she turned on the stool and faced him when she’d finished pinning up that luxuriant mass. “What is Your Grace’s pleasure now?”

  It was Soraya’s voice and he hated it. He bit back a blistering setdown.

  Because he read what she hid beneath her tranquility. And what he saw made his barren heart ache.

  God, he’d hurt her. He couldn’t bear it.

  He’d sworn nothing would hurt her again. He’d sworn that on his life when he’d brought her home from the mountains.

  This moment revealed the value of his oath.

  To save her from hurt, he’d injure himself, he’d injure others. He’d fight, lie, steal, kill. He’d do anything.

  Anything except reveal his shame.

  Hell, this wasn’t worth it.

  She wasn’t worth it.

  He snatched up his shirt and tugged it over his head. Then he turned on his heel and marched to the door. Let the baggage pout at not getting her own way. When they were back in London, he’d buy some pretty bauble to soothe the sting.

  He stopped on the threshold. Oh, Lord, how he deceived himself.

  Soraya would be content with such sops. He could only satisfy Verity with tribute more costly than even the most precious diamond.

  Verity wanted his quivering, inadequate, vulnerable soul. And she wanted him on his knees when he offered it.

  Damn her. Damn her to hell. He couldn’t do this.

  But what did his pride matter when he’d made her unhappy?

  Nothing. Less than a single speck of dust.

  Still, he couldn’t bring himself to watch her face while he told her. Once, she’d loathed and despised him. With good reason.

  After the miracle that had flowered between them since last night, his courage failed at the prospect of reviving her contempt. Slowly, he moved across to the window and looked through the bars onto the rain-swept glen.

  “Madam, I will speak of this once and once only.”

  His voice was low with the control he exerted. The humiliations he’d endured since his mistress ran away last spring paled in comparison to this bitter moment.

  He waited for her to say something, perhaps encourage him to go on. If she called him Your Grace again, he honestly thought he might strike her. But she remained silent, though he felt her gaze trained steadily on his back.

  He curled one hand hard against the window frame. “My father, the sixth duke, was a debaucher, a drunkard and an opium addict. The poisons he’d taken since his schooldays gradually but inexorably sent him mad. My mother had him confined in this glen to avoid the scandal of committing him to a lunatic asylum.”

  He paused for her to make some conventional expression of surprise or dismay or even denial.

  She said nothing. Perhaps he’d already shocked her into speechlessness. Worse was to come, he grimly and silently told her.

  He wished he didn’t need to say more.

  He steeled himself to continue. “My father’s retinue included Hamish and a twelve-year-old mistress called Lucy. And my infant self. He had some idea snatching the heir would spite my mother.” He used the same flat voice. “He never understood his wife. He hated her, but he certainly never understood her.”

  As though appearance of distance made it so in fact, he spoke quickly, unemotionally. Because, of course, the pain and fear still fed on him. They were close as his own skin.

  Closer.

  He no longer saw the rain-sodden view outside the window.

  Instead, his head filled with the long, dark nights of debasement and imprisonment in this house. Long, dark nights that insidious memory melted into one endless night. He took a deep, shuddering breath, bracing himself to reveal the rest.

  “When the mania was upon him—and it grew increasingly more severe—he became violent. Everyone within reach was at risk, but he took a particularly virulent hatred to me. Perhaps because I look so much like my mother. At his worst, he tried to kill me. Several times, he tried to kill himself.”

  He paused, the memories rising as poisonous as any adder. His voice was bitter as he continued. “He died in Lucy’s arms when I was seven. The poor little bitch didn’t know that his foul diseases would finish her a year later. After my father’s death, my mother sent me to Eton while she evicted most of the tenants to starve or emigrate.”

  He paused again. Surely, Verity would say something now. Protest, express sympathy. Scoff, even. But the taut silence extended.

  And extended.

  Perhaps she gloated to see him brought so low. His mother would have relished the moment. She’d made it her lifetime’s work to crush his pride and turn him into one of her creatures.

  She’d never succeeded. But Verity could destroy him with one word.

  Christ, he was so very tired of pretending to be the great Duke of Kylemore. He found a bleak freedom in owning to the truth behind his sham magnificence.

  The silence continued.

  Christ, what was wrong with her? Why the hell didn’t she speak? Surely his pathetic confession deserved some response.

  A gust of wind spattered cold rain against the windowpane.

  What was the use of hiding? He had to face her. He was no longer the frightened child he’d once been in this glen. Even so, making himself turn tested the limits of his courage.

  As he moved, he ha
rdly dared to look at her. What would he find in her face? Contempt? Pity? Triumph?

  Or worse, indifference?

  Slowly, his eyes traveled up from the trailing green hem of her dress. She hadn’t shifted from her dressing stool, and her heavy hairbrush dangled in her lap. Reluctantly, he met her gaze.

  And finally, finally, understood her silence.

  Disbelievingly, he searched her beautiful face. Her eyes were stark with sorrow, and tears glittered on her cheeks.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said brokenly. She smiled shakily and held out one trembling hand in his direction.

  His lonely, doubting heart opened to the beckoning gesture. He crossed the room in a couple of steps and stumbled to his knees at her side.

  “Verity…” he whispered and buried his head in her lap, his arms lashing around her waist. The brush slid to the floor as she bent over him and surrounded him with warmth.

  “It’s over. It’s over. I’m so sorry for what you went through. I’m so sorry.” Her voice was husky with crying. “But you must have been such a brave little boy.”

  She kept murmuring over him, stroking his hair with a tenderness that made him want to weep.

  But he didn’t weep. Instead, he clung to her as the only good thing in his life. He stopped listening to her words and just let her endless compassion flow through him and melt the frozen emptiness at his center.

  Closing his eyes, he surrendered to the welcoming blackness. A blackness full of sweet Verity.

  And in that blackness, the truth that had skulked in his heart right from the beginning finally made itself heard.

  He’d fled what he felt for so long that even now he resisted the inevitable moment.

  But it was too late. The truth clawed into the light. He could do nothing to silence its clamoring insistence.

  He’d had such a hunger for this woman’s body because he had an even greater need of her soul.

  She fulfilled him in ways he only started to understand, although his heart had always recognized her as his other half.

  He’d committed crimes against her, used her, wanted her, hated her, mistreated her.

  All the while, she’d been his only hope of redemption.

  He knelt beside her, clutching at her like a man lost on a stormy sea. She’d faced hardship, loss and violence. She’d confronted them all with courage and an endless willingness to sacrifice herself for those she loved. She hadn’t resorted, as he had, to the easy defenses of cynicism and indifference.

  He loved her with every fiber of his being.

  He loved her.

  The oppressive weights of his solitude and anguish fell away. It wasn’t even important that she didn’t love him. Instead, he just felt the joyous relief of trusting himself to her and knowing she wouldn’t betray him.

  She’d seen the worst of him. Yet she accepted him.

  One day, he’d tell her of the long, difficult years at Eton, where he’d arrived as a barely literate savage after inheriting the title. He’d been mocked, beaten and bullied by other boys only too quick to sense his essential isolation.

  Thank God he’d inherited a good brain from his harpy of a mother. By the time he’d left for Oxford, his academic brilliance and cool noninvolvement had been the envy of his classmates. They’d never guessed the years of lonely training that had created Cold Kylemore out of the frightened barbarian dragged kicking and screaming from the only home he’d known.

  He’d tell her about the ruin the shallow, self-obsessed creature who’d borne him had perpetrated in his name on the tenants while he’d stood by, powerless to stop the devastation she’d wreaked.

  He’d threatened to grow into an equally shallow, self-obsessed creature.

  What would have become of him if he hadn’t surrendered to his curiosity about the woman who’d set tongues wagging the year he’d come into his inheritance? If he hadn’t met a pair of wary silver eyes across a crowded London salon?

  His need for Soraya—Verity—had always been his one weakness. He’d spent years struggling to break free of her.

  Thank the Lord he hadn’t.

  Yes, one day, he’d tell her all of this.

  Or maybe he no longer needed to. He had her understanding and forgiveness already. He felt it in her touch, in her soft voice as she whispered tender comfort over him.

  And he had the privilege of loving her.

  Chapter 21

  Verity noticed the change in the duke immediately. Her ruthless lover didn’t exactly turn into an ordinary man, but his manner took on a new ease and lightness.

  Nightmares no longer broke his sleep.

  If the horrors of his childhood haunted her instead, that was the price of love. She should have immediately guessed monstrous deeds had occurred in this place, but she’d been too wrapped up in her own tribulations to notice the signs.

  The bars on the windows, obviously installed years before her arrival. The duke’s noticeable skittishness and reluctance to spend time inside. The house’s air of long neglect and unspoken misery.

  His dreams.

  Oh, yes, his dreams should have alerted her. Even in London, she should have suspected anyone who maintained such inhuman control must hide suppurating wounds deep within.

  She didn’t gull herself into believing those wounds were near to healed. But she prayed this new gentler, more open man had a chance to become whole at last.

  The new Kylemore was inclined to play the slugabed. She didn’t mind. Reward enough to watch the exhaustion and tension fade from his fine-boned face. Every night, he slumbered with perfect trust in her arms while she wept over the agonies he’d born so bravely and in such isolation. Wept in heartbroken silence. If he caught her crying, those preternaturally perceptive eyes would divine her secret love.

  A week after the duke’s devastating revelations about his childhood, Verity came downstairs one morning to discover him in the hallway. He balanced a stag head under each powerful arm.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Making a pyre from our stern chaperons.” He dropped his burdens without ceremony and came over to take her in his embrace. “Unless you’d like to keep them,” he murmured into her hair.

  “Heaven forbid.” He was in his shirtsleeves, and the long muscles of his back flexed under her stroking hands.

  Andy tramped in from outside and grabbed a pine marten and a particularly lugubrious badger from a pile she now noticed near the door. He hardly glanced at the entwined couple. She supposed he, like everyone else in the valley, was inured to the sight of her in Kylemore’s arms.

  Still, she blushed. It was absurd. She’d been a courtesan for thirteen years, yet during these last days, in spite of the wildest debaucheries of her life, part of her felt pure and reborn. Almost virgin.

  A virgin with her first love.

  Well, she thought with another concealed smile, while she was woefully far from a virgin, he was most definitely her first love.

  “Can I help?” Ever since Kylemore’s confession, she’d itched to strip the wretched memories from the house. Perhaps then he’d find peace.

  Reluctantly, she drew away from him to watch Andy sling his load into a handcart at the door. “Kylemore?” she prompted softly.

  He’d asked her to use his Christian name, but she didn’t feel comfortable with the intimacy. It was nonsensical, when he treated her body as his private pleasure ground.

  “You don’t have to work as my skivvy, mo leannan.”

  “I’m sure if a duke of the realm can get his hands dirty, a peasant like me can too,” she said dryly.

  Without waiting for his agreement, she went into the parlor and gasped at the chaos. Hamish and Angus stood on stools in front of adjoining walls, wrenching the parade of animal heads down with crowbars and brute strength. They greeted her, then went back to their task.

  “Your grandfather clearly wanted his trophies to hang until the crack of doom,” she said and promptly sneezed as the large
st of the heads crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust.

  “Here.” Kylemore passed her a handkerchief that cost more than she’d have earned in a year as a servant. “I wasn’t joking about the dirt.”

  “Apparently not,” she said after blowing her nose. “I’ll look after the smaller things.”

  She turned to the massive glass-and-mahogany specimen cases, which displayed examples of the valley’s wildlife. She’d hated these poor, stiff, dead animals from the moment she’d seen them. She reached in with great satisfaction and tugged out a stuffed weasel.

  Clearing the room took most of the day. Once, she’d never have believed the magnificent Duke of Kylemore would lower himself to such menial work. At the very least, he wouldn’t have subjected his perfect tailoring to such despoliation. But now, she wasn’t surprised to see him work diligently and uncomplainingly beside his servants.

  How she’d misunderstood him in London. And she’d always considered herself a clever woman!

  As Hamish, Angus and Andy carried out stag’s head after stag’s head, something new seeped into the atmosphere. Something that felt like happiness.

  But for her, it was a happiness tinged with regret. It was a happiness that couldn’t endure.

  Verity carefully straightened from the bottom shelf of the last case. She put a hand behind her aching back. To think she’d once worked like this every day as a maid in Sir Charles Norton’s manor. She must be getting old.

  She turned her head and caught Kylemore studying her from the corner. His dark blue eyes held a familiar glint that sent blood pounding low and heavy in her belly.

  Perhaps she wasn’t that old after all.

  They were alone for the first time that afternoon. After a murmured discussion with the duke, the others had disappeared to consign the last gruesome decorations to the bonfire.

  He stepped over the only remaining detritus, a quartet of remarkably bloodthirsty hunting scenes, and crossed to her side. With one elegant hand, he tilted her chin toward the light flooding through the large windows on her left.

  “You have dirt on your cheek, mo cridhe.” A gentle smile flickered across his face. “Soraya would be ashamed of you.”