Without warning, the kiss gentled, his touch featherlight on her swollen lips. Beswick’s mouth was warm and pillow-soft and so reverently tender that she ached at his extraordinary gentleness. It was completely at odds with the needy ferocity of the first, and Astrid couldn’t decide which she liked more.
He cradled her jaw in his large hands, grazing her cheeks, her jaw, her brow with his lips. His voice against her ear was an agonized rasp. “My God, you are lovely.”
Astrid blushed, but his mouth sought hers again, and she pushed herself up on tiptoe to meet him, greedy for more of the sensations bursting like wildfire inside. When he licked deep, ribbons of pleasure unraveled in her veins, making her gasp against his mouth. She clutched at him, at those broad shoulders, winding urgent fingers into fabric and slanting her mouth on his, desperate to match the delicious, decadent flex of his tongue.
He tasted of brandy and spice and his own special brand of sin.
She wanted more.
Never had she felt such an intense reaction to a man’s kiss—the weightlessness of her stomach, the trembling of her limbs, the liquid heat between her thighs. The all-encompassing storm of it barreling through her.
“Thane,” she whispered.
With a low growl at her plea, he drew her up against him, giving her exactly what she wanted. More of him. Their mouths crashed into each other, ferocious now. Hungry. His lips teased hers, his tongue dominating her mouth with deep, delectable licks. Desire shook her. Her senses quaked and crumbled.
She was caught up in his universe, filled with combusting stars and streaking meteorites, her own need climbing in its pursuit of pleasure. Incoherent moans burst from her as she reached up to cup his jaw, fingers connecting with roped, raised skin. Her eyes flew open as she froze in place, her palm recoiling in shock.
Instantly, he jerked away, breaking the kiss, his golden eyes blazing like twin suns, his lips full and swollen.
“Thane, I—”
“Enough,” he rasped. “That’s enough.”
Beswick stepped back, eyes feral, and Astrid had the sudden urge to calm him as she would a wary, skittish Brutus. She watched as his knuckles skidded across the curve of his lower lip almost in wonder, and the unconscious act made her heart squeeze. His fingers slid to the deep scar that carved into his left cheek only to fall away. Pain, anger, and raw need swirled in those beautiful eyes, regret and shame swift to follow.
He’d flinched because she had touched him. Had she hurt him somehow?
“I’m sorry,” Astrid whispered.
“Don’t. Pity. Me.” The words were doused in agony and no small amount of anger. Then all traces of emotion bled from his face. “I should not have kissed you.”
Inexplicably hurt, she responded in kind. “It was just a kiss, Your Grace.”
But even as she said it, Astrid knew it for the lie it was. There was no just a kiss with a man like him. Even now, her lips felt like they’d been conquered, like they still belonged to him…no longer hers. She fought the urge to run her fingers over them.
Instead, she peered up at him through her lashes…and a lump formed in her throat. Beswick looked bitter, his beautiful mouth twisted into an ugly, distorted shape. She couldn’t tell whether it was directed at her or at himself. With him, one could never be sure. Cold and remote one minute, hot and entreating the next, his humors were impossible to read or predict.
Either way, his regret was clear.
Squashing the spreading ache in her chest, Astrid turned and pretended to inspect the downy petals of a striped orchid. “One would think you’d never been kissed before.”
“As you have?”
There was a subtle shift of tension in the fragrant air that made the hairs on her nape stand at attention. Those hunter’s eyes speared her, something dark flashing in them, and Astrid bristled. She had nothing to be ashamed about. There wasn’t much lower to fall when one was already ruined and well acquainted with rock bottom.
“I’ve had my share,” she said softly.
Her share she could count on one hand—one or two hasty ones with Beaumont that had made her skin crawl and bile pool in her throat. And once later, long after the scandal, in a moment of reckless defiance with a stranger, when she’d felt nothing but indifference. Not that she had to tell him that. Let him think what he wanted.
Everyone else did.
Chapter Nine
Astrid slammed her pillow over her head and screamed. Every nerve ending in her body, particularly the ones centered between her legs, was on fire. For the third night in a row, she was hounded by some of the most erotic dreams she’d ever had in her life, involving a silken-tongued duke and a decided lack of clothing.
Though she knew he’d regretted kissing her—they’d parted soon thereafter in awkward silence, and he’d been avoiding her ever since—Astrid wished she could say the same as a wicked pulse throbbed low in her belly just from the memory of his lips, his scent, his taste. Regret, unfortunately, was the least of her opinions.
In her fantasies, Beswick was a demanding lover whose hot, talented mouth trailed wet kisses down her entire body, from her lips to her breasts to where it ached the most. Dream Duke didn’t stop there, either.
No, Dream Duke strummed her womanly parts like a violin.
Staring up at the darkened ceiling, Astrid pressed her damp thighs together and half giggled, half groaned into the pillow. God, she was shameless! Though she was an innocent in the ways of passion, she’d attempted to explore once with a nice-enough young man she’d met at a country fair, telling herself that if she was going to be accused of being ruined, she might as well know the crime, but she hadn’t been able to go past a single kiss.
Unsurprisingly, she had not cared to try again, at least, not until recently. With a scarred, fractious, broken duke who had the emotional proficiency of a flea.
Astrid screamed into the pillow again and kicked her feet for good measure.
Despite not having seen Beswick for days following their interlude in his conservatory, for which she was thankful, he wasn’t ever far from her thoughts. Or dreams, clearly. But something had awakened in her at the duke’s touch. Something dark and demanding, as if the thread of sin that had shadowed her fall from grace had been resurrected.
Astrid kicked off the covers in a fit of frustrated pique, her damp skin cooling in the night air, and then realized that she wasn’t alone. There was a lump beside her in the bed. She nearly shrieked and then remembered that her sister had climbed into bed late last night with a nightmare of her own. Astrid doubted with a sour scowl that Isobel’s night terrors were of the erotic naked-duke variety.
“Are you well?” Isobel murmured, her voice thick with sleep, when Astrid sat up and eased herself to the side of the mattress.
“Yes, Izzy. Go back to sleep. It’s early yet, not even dawn.”
Through the upper window, the moon was still visible, the first hints of light now starting to speckle the inky skies to the east. Going for a walk or ride would be out of the question. It was still too dark. Perhaps some warmed milk would help. She yawned and stretched, feeling the contracted points of her nipples scrape against the soft lawn of her night rail. Her body tingled from top to bottom, the memory of her dream lover’s hands making her blush. A cold bath would be a better choice. An ice-cold dunk in the Arctic preferably.
“Where are you going?” Isobel whispered when Astrid stood with an aggravated groan.
“To fetch some milk from the kitchen,” Astrid said, pulling on her wrapper and tightening the sash about her waist.
If I don’t get hopelessly lost, that is.
She’d spent most of the last three days inundating herself with work and navigating the mazelike twists and turns of the abbey. It was getting easier but not by much. Counting the hallways under her breath, she made her silent way toward the servants’ staircase
Though she enjoyed cataloging the priceless antiques, she knew the work was a temporary fix at best. And not if their uncle discovered them first. Patrick had learned that the Everleighs had hired Runners to find them, no doubt at the insistence of the Earl of Beaumont. Astrid shivered. If that were true, it wouldn’t take long for them to be found. Any of the servants at Everleigh House could have seen them packing their trunks or observed which direction the wagon had taken.
If push came to shove, they would have to leave England. Maybe they could go north into Scotland. They didn’t have much money, but perhaps Beswick might be persuaded to lend them the funds until she came into her inheritance. The idea wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility. It was clear that he didn’t lack for coin if he was playing cricket with priceless antique Ming dynasty dishware.
If he wasn’t amenable, she would find another way. Go to London and find a destitute lord for a husband, if she had to. And if that didn’t work, she could get a job in some remote village in Northern England. Perhaps Chetham’s Library in Manchester would not be opposed to a female librarian, though Astrid suspected that tiny male brains would explode in simultaneous solidarity should such a progressive thing come to pass.
Astrid came to a halt, peering down an unfamiliar hallway.
Where on earth are the dratted kitchens?
Good God, she was lost again. She glanced over her shoulder, noticing that the wall paneling had turned to beveled stone in the light of her candle. It’d been unnoticeable in the dark. She’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, but she couldn’t think whether it’d been an extra staircase or one on the same floor.
“Better to go forward than back,” she murmured to herself and winced as the eerie echo of her voice came back to her. It would not do to think of ghosts while she was walking about alone in a deserted abbey in the middle of the night.
Shivering slightly, she hurried down the wide hallway and found herself in a gallery she recognized from the shields and weapons that adorned the walls. Beswick’s family had descended from generations of fierce Viking warriors. She could easily imagine the duke dressed head to toe in armor and wielding one of those broadswords or axes hung across those massive crests. His wide shoulders beneath her fingertips had been compact and hard with muscle.
Astrid slowed, studying the portraits of his ancestors in the next hall. Beswick favored them with his dark hair and burning golden eyes. She moved along the gallery until she came to the paintings of the family. A blond toddler in the arms of a beautiful blond woman stood next to a swarthy dark-haired man who bore a resemblance to the current duke. Beswick was nowhere in the portrait.
Several paintings later, she found him. This time, the blond boy was older, and the woman in the portrait was auburn-haired with a swaddled infant in her arms. The duke was the same, though his dark hair held a spate of gray at his temples. The next frame depicted the half brothers. The younger child beside him wore a sullen scowl on his face as if he wanted to be anywhere but there, standing still for a painter to immortalize him.
Astrid bit back a smile. The young Thane would have been about twelve or thirteen, but his square jaw was already pronounced and those uncommon amber eyes of his already burned with inner fire. A lock of burnished brown hair curled onto his forehead.
She lifted a hand to his youthful, unmarred face, her fingers tracing the rounded curve of his cheek. He looked nothing like the man now, of course. Beswick had been to hell and back—a journey that had taken more than its pound of flesh and left its imprint upon him. He was no less alive for it, though Astrid knew he carried more than his fair share of pain. But she mourned for the boy he’d been and for innocence lost.
Fate could be ruthless.
Astrid supposed she was the same. Her scars, however, were twisted ropes hidden on the inside of her body and encasing the organ currently beating in her chest, while his were on the outside, visible to all.
Would things have been different if Beswick hadn’t gone to war? His appearance wouldn’t have been altered, but would he have been a softer man? She couldn’t countenance it. He had too much strength. Too much innate dominance.
Would she have been different if she hadn’t met Beaumont? Or would she have been happily married by now with a child or two of her own? Before her ruination, her bloodlines and her dowry would have ensured a suitable match.
In a perfect world, they could have both been happy.
But perfect worlds did not exist. They both had the marks—metaphorical and physical—to show for it.
Leaving the gallery behind, Astrid entered another corridor. This one she instantly recognized. It’d been the one she’d stalked down when she’d first met the Duke of Beswick. A very wet, very naked duke. She felt a shame-faced grin creep onto the corners of her lips—that particular combination of words didn’t seem to want to be erased from her lexicon.
Even though she could have easily found her way to the kitchens now that she knew where she was, her feet followed the path toward the bathing chamber. It was unlit, the air chill against her skin, but no less impressive. The water looked black, reflecting the darkness beyond the paned windows. She hadn’t had the time to appreciate the architecture before—she’d been too concerned with an eyeful of nude male musculature—but the space was truly magnificent.
Much like his conservatory.
Astrid wondered if he had designed and built this room as well. She had never seen the bathing chamber’s like, though in some Turkish and Roman history books, she recalled drawings of similar public baths.
The thought of Beswick floating at the pool’s center like some indolent pasha slipped into her mind like silk.
Lord above, but she was obsessed with ducal nudity.
Kicking off her slippers, she wandered to the edge and dipped her toe into the water. To her suddenly over-warm skin, it was delightfully cool. She wouldn’t dare go in, but the temptation was too much to resist. Discarding her wrapper near her abandoned footwear, she sat at the edge and hiked up her night rail to her knees. A fit of nerves made her glance over her shoulder, but nothing stirred in the shadowy corners of the room.
She sighed at the sublime feel of the water on her submerged legs. There was something decadent about the soft splash of the water lapping at her bare skin. The urge to wade in grew, but it wasn’t just a matter of bravery; it was a matter of logic. She had no idea where the servants kept the toweling, and she also didn’t know if she could find her way back without dripping everywhere. As such, she contented herself with submerging her feet and watching the dawn’s fingers creep across the sky.
Astrid had no idea how long she sat there staring through the windows, watching the sunrise, but it was incredible. Like experiencing nature’s artistry coming alive with long, elegant brushstrokes. Pale-gold swatches, tinged with pink and orange, appeared first, catching on the edges of the trees and gilding them in light. And as the sun chased away the darkness, the shimmering hues spun and danced, bathing the world afresh in color.
A distant clatter reached her ears—one of a household awakening—and Astrid launched to her feet. Her toes were the texture of prunes.
“Blast it!”
Her faithful candle had near burned down to a stub. Grabbing her slippers and dressing gown, she almost skidded on the wet floor but righted herself with a gasp. The echo of her gasp reached her, but she was too focused on not being discovered by the waking staff that she put it down to the room’s acoustics. She made her way to the foyer at the front of the abbey.
From there it was a simple task to find her bedchamber.
…
“There you are, Your Grace, good morning,” Culbert said, making Thane’s cramped body flinch painfully as the butler walked into the room that Lady Astrid had vacated only moments before. “You should have summoned me to light the hearths. Did you fall asleep in here again?”
“Good morning, Culbert.”
Thane blinked, uncurling his long body from the position it’d been in for the better part of an hour. The oversize chaise was situated in the far corner of the room, designed as a sitting area, and he’d been occupying it for most of the night. He’d been about to ring for the butler to light the stone flues when the object of his fantasies had wandered in. Thane had been shocked. Had he summoned her with his lewd thoughts?
But no, Astrid hadn’t been a figment of his lust.
Thane had almost alerted her to his presence, as any gentleman would have, but then she’d approached the pool. He’d held his breath while the wheels turned in her head. She’d dipped one dainty toe in and then discarded her wrapper.
Thane couldn’t have announced himself even if he had wanted to.
The silhouette of her body limned in moonlight had stunned him to silence. Long and lithe, she’d walked like a nymph to the water’s edge and crouched down. She moved like a silken ribbon caught in a breeze, with an elegant and fluid economy of motion. An outstretched leg, an exquisitely arched foot. The curve of a sleek calf as it sank from view. She moved like music. Like poetry. And he’d been spellbound.
She’d sat there and watched the sunrise.
He’d sat there and watched her.
Watched the shadows creep from that regal profile as the dawn’s light replaced them. Examined the curls that had sprung free from her bedtime braid, haloing the beautiful oval of her face. Seen the way her lips had parted in astonished delight and the soft rise and fall of her breast. Heard the erotic sounds of water sloshing against skin and wished he could be the one at her feet. Caressing. Lapping. Enveloping.
He’d gone as hard as stone.
And stayed that way.
“Shall I have the footmen light the hearths, Your Grace?” Culbert asked.
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