The Duke of Desire Read online

  He continued to thrust, pulling his mouth from hers as he watched her arch and writhe beneath him. His pace increased. She felt that through the haze of her pleasure. When she opened her eyes, she saw the strain on his face, the edge of that control he always maintained.

  “Please,” she whispered, begging for his pleasure now that she’d had her own.

  He let out a low, raw sound of animal pleasure and then he withdrew. His seed splashed between them as he cried out and she lifted up to kiss him.

  He collapsed over her, their tongues tangling wildly, then slower, then sweetly as the high of passion faded. Only then did he gather her in his arms and roll to his side. She was splayed half on top of him, their legs tangled as he just…held her, his fingers combing through her hair gently. Almost hypnotically.

  “If you keep doing that, I shall fall asleep,” she said with a nervous laugh.

  His fingers didn’t stop. “And what would be wrong with that?” he whispered.

  She tensed and looked up at him. In the heat of a moment, she had declared to herself that she loved this man. In this new moment that felt even more true.

  “I-I would think a man like you would normally be pushing his lovers out the door after he…finished,” she said.

  He cupped her chin and drew her up for a kiss. She relaxed against him, the storm in her mind quieted for a moment by his touch. At last he drew back.

  “I suppose normally I would. But these aren’t normal circumstances.” He shifted beneath her. “Stay with me tonight, Katherine. Let me make love to you over and over again. You can sneak back out before the servants begin their duties for the day. No one will be the wiser.”

  She swallowed hard. He was offering her more passion. More connection. More of everything but his heart, which she could not dare ask for.

  And she wanted to give it. Soon enough this would all be over and she knew what she would regret if she walked away tonight.

  “Yes,” she whispered, then braced herself on the pillows to kiss him again. “Yes, yes, yes…”

  Words she kept saying as he rolled her on her side and took her once again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Robert had been trying to deny it to himself in the three days since Katherine surrendered her body to him, but the truth was impossible not to feel. He had a spring to his step as he walked beside her now, trailing behind the group of their friends and her aunt on their way to a picnic by the lake. She laughed at some silly thing he’d said and the music of that sound tickled his ears.

  He was becoming far too comfortable with a woman in his life. That should have terrified him, and yet it…didn’t. The days with her felt peaceful, easy. The nights filled with passion as one of them snuck to the other’s chamber so they could make love until dawn. Leaving her as the sun rose and pretending it had never happened was the only pain he felt in the affair.

  He shook his head at that thought. Desire had always been something he could rely upon. Control, even. It came, he slaked it, it faded and he was finished. But with Katherine something was…different. His body might be satisfied as she drew his pleasure from him with her sultry, sensual passion, but his mind?

  That never seemed fulfilled. He always wanted more. More and more of her.

  Something about his demeanor must have changed, as well, for his friends had stopped haranguing him about the wager he’d made and teasing him about her. Oh, they still watched. They seemed patently incapable of not watching, but they did not interfere. Which made him just as nervous as the fact that he desperately wanted to hold Katherine’s hand right now.

  “Oh no,” she whispered, leaning closer and making him so very aware of the sweet scent of her hair. “You are disappearing into your head, Roseford. Do come back.”

  He blinked. She knew him so well now that she could see that too. See it and draw her to him with just a whispered word. Part of him wanted to turn tail and run away from that realization. The other? Well, that was the part that seemed to be in charge and it forced him to stay just where he was.

  He leaned in closer. “Perhaps I am simply reliving every moment of last night,” he whispered. “Especially the part where we pleasured each other with our mouths and then you begged me to take you from behind.”

  Her eyes widened, and she glanced up at the group ahead of them. But that was another thing that had changed. While Katherine was still proper, of course—she could be nothing but—she no longer scolded him about potential damage to her reputation.

  “You are a shameless cad,” she whispered, laughter thick in her voice.

  “And you love it,” he retorted, then edged away to a more proper distance as they reached the picnic blankets that had already been laid out by servants earlier in the day.

  He stared at the scene before him. Although most of the party events had been reserved for the adults, today the families were together. Bibi toddled around the blanket in front of Emma and James. James smiled at the little girl, laughing at her endless chatter, coaxing even more from her. From time to time, he leaned in to kiss his wife’s neck and rest a hand on her belly.

  Isabel was moving to take her place on a different blanket. Matthew held her arm, easing her down as they both laughed at her increasing size. Helena was sitting on the same blanket and she smiled at Baldwin, something knowing that made Robert wonder if they, too, would soon have an announcement for the group. The foursome was sharing their blanket with Katherine’s Aunt Bethany, and Robert’s gaze moved to her. She was important to Katherine, a slender tie to the mother she had lost as a girl. And he liked the woman. She was as sharp and kind as her niece. And protective. He knew she watched him, and he didn’t mind it as much as he once might have.

  As for the others, they were scattered on another two blankets and seemed to be making a game of passing Charlotte and Ewan’s gurgling five-month-old son, Jonathon, and Simon and Meg’s nine-month-old son, James, back and forth between them. Meanwhile, Graham reclined with his head in Adelaide’s lap, their seven-month-old daughter Madeline curled up sleepily on his chest, sucking her thumb and patting his face from time to time.

  Once upon a time, Robert might have found this wholesome, family scene a bit stifling. It was why he’d initially turned down James’s invitation to this event. Where was his place here? And yet now he felt something else stirring in his chest. He might have called it longing, but that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?

  “Katherine!” Charlotte called out from one of the blankets. “Come and sit. I want to talk to you about Christmas plans.”

  Katherine gave him a little look, her face bright with happiness, then slipped off to take her place beside Charlotte and Ewan. Robert remained standing, staring as Charlotte handed off Jonathon to Katherine.

  She shifted the child into a more comfortable position and began to talk to him. Baby talk, though Robert could not hear it from this distance. In that quiet moment, a wave of emotion slammed into him.

  Could he have this? This thing that had bewitched his friends, his family? He’d never been able to picture it, so he always avoided the exercise. But now…there it was, ten feet away from him, holding someone else’s child.

  He saw a lifetime in Katherine face. He saw her expression as he took her around the world, sharing all his favorite places with her. He saw her smile as they shared their home with their friends and her beloved aunt. He saw her standing in his bedroom, ready for his touch, only she would never leave. He saw waking up beside her until he was gray and slow and forgetful of everything except for her.

  He saw a life. And it was no longer stifling or unpleasant or constricting or terrifying. It looked…perfect.

  Katherine kept glancing at him as she talked to Ewan and Charlotte. At last she handed over the baby and got up. He knew everyone was watching as she made her way to him. But he couldn’t move. He was frozen.

  She reached him and tilted her head as she looked at him. “I was teasing earlier about you bei
ng in your head, but you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Why don’t we walk?”

  He nodded. It was all he could do when the source of all his consternation was standing in front of him and the last thing he wanted to do was escape her. Escape with her—that was another story.

  She took his arm, smiled back their friends and said, “His Grace and I will be back. Don’t drink all the wine!”

  There was laughter as the group went back to their lives and Robert stumbled after the woman who was becoming the center of his. They walked for a while. Normally a silence between them was comfortable. Today he felt the weight of it. It made him hear his own thoughts, and right now his mind was screaming at the top of its lungs about things he had never considered.

  They turned onto a winding path that took them into the deeper woods. He felt her hand tighten on his elbow as he took her over fallen logs and down a little hill. In the distance, a tiny cottage roof peeked up over the bramble of trees, and he stopped as he stared at it.

  “Meg and Simon’s cottage,” he muttered.

  Her eyes went wide as she lifted on her tiptoes. “Is it? Meg has told me a little more about the beginning of her marriage to Simon. That caused quite the upheaval in your group of friends, didn’t it?”

  Robert pressed his lips together hard. “It nearly destroyed us. At the time, I was shocked that Simon would let such a thing invade his sense of brotherhood. Now…”

  She tilted her head. “Now?”

  He looked at her from the corner of his eye. Now he understood it more. He couldn’t say that out loud.

  “Well, they are happy,” he said instead. “Graham suffered for it a while, but now he clearly loves Adelaide to distraction, as you and I were witness to. I suppose it worked out in the end.”

  She nodded. “It did, it seems. The friendship between the two men appears to have been repaired, as well.”

  “Yes. And better than ever,” Robert agreed. “Like the place where they were torn apart, the injury to their friendship ended up healing stronger.”

  “Hmmm.” She paced away from him, closer to the little cottage. “I wish all wounds healed that way.”

  He nodded, his mind turning on his own points of damage, as well as hers. He knew them well. She had confessed them, trusting him with them, trusting him not to make them worse. Had anyone else in his life ever done that so completely? Had anyone else ever believed in him the way she apparently did?

  She faced him after a moment and said, “What was it that made such a terrible look come on your face a few minutes ago?”

  He stared at her, with afternoon sunshine filtering down over her face. She almost glowed in it, like he’d pictured an angel would do when he was a child. But she was real. She could be his.

  And in that moment, he began to speak. “There are so many rumors about me.”

  She blinked, as if surprised by that topic. Then she smiled slightly, pink entering her cheeks. “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Not just about my…expertise. My past.”

  The smile left her face. “I suppose that is true. Though the ones about your sinful talents tend to outweigh the rest.”

  He looked toward the cottage again, lost for a moment in thought, but never doubting what he was going to tell her. Why he needed to say it. The words were hard. Painful.

  Necessary if there was to be any of that future that kept reaching out to tempt him.

  “Yes, I suppose that is by design. I said it to you a few days ago, that sex can create a distance, a screen over what one might wish to conceal.”

  She was quiet a moment. Then she stepped toward him and reached up to cup his cheek. It drew his eyes to her and her dark gaze snagged his, holding there. Filled with warmth and empathy. “And what would you want to conceal?”

  “My mother,” he choked, hating the pain that tore through him as he said those two words. Knew what he would say next. “She is not buried in a proper place on my estate. My father would not allow it. She’s buried at a crossroads instead. Someplace unmarked, I practically need a map to find her.”

  Her lips parted. “A crossroads,” she repeated. “Robert?”

  He nodded, for he saw she understood the meaning of that loaded statement. Saw it crash over her lovely features, reflect back his own pain.

  “She killed herself.”

  Katherine stared at Robert, torn to shreds by the expression on his handsome face. He was so good at covering how he felt with a wicked smile or an arched brow or a playful laugh. But she saw through it all now, that charisma he used as a shield.

  He lowered it and let her inside to where pain ruled.

  “Suicide,” she repeated, her voice shaking. “Oh, Robert.”

  He tensed and his gaze flitted away, like he was seeking a path where he could run away. But he didn’t. He stayed before her, cutting his heart out and offering it to her. She knew what a meaningful gift it was.

  And she drew a breath and took both his hands in hers. “Tell me,” she whispered.

  His breath went ragged and he eased down onto a fallen log. She took a place beside him, remaining silent as she allowed him a moment to collect his thoughts and find whatever horrible words he needed to say.

  “Victoria,” he whispered. “That was her name.”

  “Lovely,” Katherine whispered.

  “I knew she and my father were troubled. He was…well, I have inherited his worst qualities, I suppose. Philandering was what he did, his number of affairs uncountable in their number. Christ, there are nearly a dozen by-blows whose support my estate ensures.”

  Her lips parted. “Your half-siblings. Do you know them?”

  “Some. In passing.” He bent his head. “She knew about them, too.”

  There was bitterness in his tone, and she flinched at it. “Your mother. How?”

  His gaze flitted up to her, his mouth turned down in a frown. “He told her. Crowed to her, that craven bastard. When they would argue, which was often, he loved to cut her with those facts.”

  “And you overheard them?” Katherine whispered, thinking of her own loud, ugly childhood.

  He nodded. “Sometimes. But more often than not, she would tell me all about it herself.”

  “How old were you?” Katherine gasped, shocked to hear not only of the cruelty of Robert’s father, but of the indiscretion of his mother.

  He gazed off in the distance again, leaving her, returning to his childhood, reliving what she could not see but felt pulsing in him. “The first time I recall her telling me about it all I was five, maybe six. And I was ten when she died.”

  “For four years, she burdened you with her pain?” Katherine asked softly.

  He looked at her, almost shocked, like he hadn’t considered that part of it. But he didn’t pull away. “I suppose now that I’m an adult, I can see that it would be a burden for a child. But when I was a boy, I only wanted to help her. Make her smile, make her laugh. Make her forget him.”

  “But you couldn’t,” Katherine encouraged gently.

  “No.”

  Silence hung between them. Heavy. As meaningful as any words they had ever said. She drew a few calming breaths and then took his hands in hers.

  “How?”

  “She took laudanum. She said it was for the pain, and I suppose it was.” He blinked, but the tears still gathered in his dark eyes. “The pain in her heart. It numbed her to it all. It put her into a stupor where no one could retrieve her. And it got worse and worse.”

  “She took too much?” Katherine asked. “Could it have been an accident?”

  “No.” He bent his head. “As a boy I didn’t even realize what she’d done. My governess woke me one day to tell me she was dead.”

  Katherine sucked in a breath. “With no more delicacy than that?”

  “Not much more. My father didn’t hire servants to be soft on me. She woke me, told me to dress, and by the way, your mother is dead. Died in the night.”<
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  Katherine felt her tears begin to fall but made no effort to wipe at them. She clung to Robert instead, pressing any strength she’d ever had into him. Seeing how deeply he was hurting and how much he needed to say these things.

  “My father was vague,” he continued, his voice thick. “An illness, he told me. He hardly looked up from his desk to say it. I was not allowed to see her, to say goodbye, to be at her funeral, nor even to know where she was buried. I used to sneak out, searching for her in the family graveyard at my estate and she was not there.”

  “You must have been devastated,” she whispered.

  “I was, but showing it was not an option. It was not long after that I was sent away to school. My father did not allow me to speak of her on the rare occasions I was let home. My questions went unanswered. Until I turned twenty.”

  Her breath felt heavy now, difficult to draw as she waited for the next part in this terrible, terrible story. “You pressed him,” she whispered.

  “Yes. We were in London, and I admit I had been drinking. It was April—April is when she died, and I have never handled the anniversary well.”

  Katherine blinked as her mind was brought back to that night on the terrace three years before. That had been April, too. Robert had been drunk then. Had that been around the anniversary of his mother’s death?

  He was still speaking and she forced focus. “I was so bloody angry. I confronted him. I was screaming at him as he stared up at me, almost impassive. I vented all my rage, railed at him for probably five solid minutes with hardly a drawn breath. And when I had no more energy, he rose up before me and told me she had killed herself. He told me how weak she was, how worthless. He told me where she was buried and why she was buried there. Then he called me her son, told me I was as bad as she was.”

  Katherine jerked a hand to her lips, tears streaming over it as she stared at his blank face. “Oh, Robert. That is terrible. What did you do?”

  “I hit him,” Robert said softly. “As hard as I could. I spat on him. And then I walked away.”