A Duke Never Yields (41 page)

Leonora drew close and held out her arms. “I do the blanket, Abigail. You take the good signore to his bed, to his comfort. He is looking like a man who has travel long.”

“Quite,” said Wallingford.

*   *   *

W
allingford walked down the familiar corridor in a daze. From the tiny arched windows came the faint sound of the revelry in the courtyard, the
oom-pah
of that wretched tuba. The worn old stones passed by his eyes in a blur.

Your son.
He had a son. A tiny scrap of vibrant humanity, brought to life in Abigail’s body by his own seed, in a precious act of love. His son. His brain caressed the unfamiliar word.

Wallingford stopped and shut his eyes, and little Arthur’s blinking black gaze stared into his soul, his tiny warm head burrowed into his heart.

Something tightened around his hand. “You’ve nothing to say?” asked Abigail, very gently.

Abigail, his wedded wife, who stood beside him, fragrant with milk and warmth and candlelight, her hand holding his.

Wallingford shook his head, lifted her into his weary arms, and carried her without words down the corridor into the east wing. The ladies’ wing, where Abigail’s room lay.

The door stood ajar, exactly where he remembered it, tucked into the corner at the near end of the hallway, the farthest from the stairs. He began kissing her even as he kicked the thick wood open with his foot. She moaned and kissed him back, hard and impatient; her hands went to his hair, his back, his collar, dragging at his stained jacket. He staggered at her onslaught, and the door clicked shut against his back.

Abigail’s lips slid across his face. “You came back,” she said, and her voice was thick and choked. “You came back.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Oh, God, every day, every night I hoped . . .” She broke apart and cried quietly on his shoulder.

“Don’t, love. Of course I came back.” Gently he eased her down, holding her against him, until her slippers touched the stone. His body marveled at the shock of her, at warm, living Abigail crying into his shirt. He stroked her back and her hair, and his heart seemed to swell from his chest and surround them both. “Of course I came back. My wife. Of course I came back.”

Abigail’s hands stole around his waist. Her breasts pressed against his ribs, ripe flesh nearly bursting from the bodice of her absurd costume. A year ago, he had removed this same dress from her body in the boathouse, as the moonlight spilled across the lake; his fingers remembered, and found the hooks at her back.

The bodice loosened. Abigail’s head fell back, exposing her beautiful throat to the faint silvery light from the window. He kissed her warm pulse, kissed her chin and ear, while his hands worked the dress from her body and fumbled with her stays.

The dress fell away, the stays dropped to the floor, and Abigail stood before him at last in her delicate chemise. The tips of her breasts were dark against the white linen. God, it had been so long! He wanted to savor her slowly; he wanted to ravish her in an instant. His hands shook with it.

Abigail’s eyes opened. She reached for his shirt, yanked down his braces, tore at the buttons. “For God’s sake, stop staring and take me to bed.”

At the word
bed
Wallingford’s thoughts snapped. He captured her mouth, and together they staggered across the floor, shedding clothes, laughing and kissing, crying out at the unfamiliarity of it all. They reached the bed; he tumbled naked atop her, his stiff cock brushing her belly, and bent his head to kiss her deeply. “Ah, God,” he muttered, over the roar of his hot male blood.

Abigail’s body shifted beneath him, spreading open. “Please. Oh, God, now!” she said.

He laughed against her lips. “What, already? I thought you liked me to . . .”

“Now, Wallingford!”

Well, one didn’t dare disappoint one’s wife, after all. Wallingford lifted himself on his elbows. Abigail’s hands found him, cradled him, lodged his head just inside her.

He sucked in his breath. She was so slick, so slippery. Her hips tilted eagerly upward.

“It’s all right?” he said, between his clenched teeth. “You’re . . . you’re healed?”

“God, yes!”

He thrust his hips and buried his prick inside her.

She sang out. “Wallingford! Oh, God!”

His brain reeled. A year, a year since he’d last occupied a woman’s body. A year since he had felt her yielding flesh, the softness of her belly and breasts against his skin, her legs tightening around him, the sweet suck of her sheath as he drew back and shoved up her again. His balls prickled with urgency; he forced himself to slow, measured thrusts, to control the rise of pleasure in his own body. He watched Abigail’s half-lidded eyes, heard her keening cries. “Every night,” he whispered, “every night I dreamed of this. Every night, I thought of you. Only you, Abigail.”

She made a desperate noise.

He drove harder, at the same deliberate rhythm. “Only you. My wife. My love.”

“Yours,” she gasped out, writhing, meeting his thrusts with her eager hips.

“You, Abigail. You.”

Her tension rose up; he could feel it in the clutch of her gathering muscles. He lifted himself higher, angled his hips, quickened his pace. He drove into her without mercy, over and over, matching her desperation with his own. Her fingernails dug into his waist, and the pain combusted with the impossible concentration of pleasure to send him nearly mad. By brute force he held back the climax that thundered in his groin.

“
You
,” he said again, and her body arched, she cried out, and at last, at
last
he set himself free, spending with almost violent intensity into the spasms of her release. A roar echoed in his ears, and he realized, as he sank shuddering downward, that it came from his own throat.

“Welcome home,” whispered Abigail, a little breathlessly.

He couldn’t move. He opened his eyes into the bedsheets and closed them again. He wanted to say,
It’s good to be home
, but all that came out was the last word.

“Home,” he groaned.

Her hands traced his back, like the wings of butterflies. “You’ve lost weight. You’re as hard as a rail.”

Wallingford turned his head. His heartbeat still slammed against hers. “And you’re rounder. Full and soft.” He shifted his body and laid his hand over her breast. “Delectable.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Mind?” Wallingford lifted his head. Abigail’s eyes were wide and rather worried. “Mind? My God. Look at you. I leave you a girl, and now you’re a woman. You’re lush. You’re perfect. The mother of my child.” His voice, for some reason, cracked slightly on the last word. He was still inside her; gently he drew himself out and gathered her in his arms.

Her head burrowed against his chest. How exquisite, how unspeakably luxurious, to feel Abigail’s silken hair again on his naked skin. “I wish you could have been there, when he was born,” she said softly. “Finn was ready to ride out and scour the steppes to find you, but I told him . . . I told him . . .”

“What, love?”

“I told him there would be plenty of time when you got back. Newborns only eat and sleep, you know. And then . . . well, that . . . God willing, there would be more children after this one.”

Wallingford stroked her hair, her shining moonlit hair, willing himself to stay in one piece. “You had faith in me.”

“I had faith in you. I knew you. I knew how strong you are, how true you are. And in those darkest hours, Wallingford . . .” She stopped. He went on stroking. The noises from the party had died away; the musicians were perhaps putting away their instruments, the villagers fading in pairs into the orchards and vines. Abigail’s back moved up and down beneath his forearm. “In those darkest hours, when I was so lonely, and I could feel our baby moving inside me, and I needed you so much I could hardly breathe . . .”

Another pause. Wallingford’s tears rolled down his cheek and disappeared into her hair. He wanted to say something, to comfort her somehow, but he couldn’t speak.

She whispered, “I remembered your face, your eyes, when you said those vows to me in Siena. And I said to myself, Wallingford would never break his word.”

He kissed her hair, where the tears had fallen, and summoned his voice. “I would never break my word.”

“Mmm.” Abigail lifted her knee, crossing her leg possessively over his.

“I was too jolly tired, for one thing,” he said, more lightly. “Earning one’s bread is damned hard work, it turns out. Harvesting from sunrise to sundown. And tanning hides. I spent a month on that, in the winter. That was Poland. I don’t know what I was thinking. Bloody near wore myself out.”

A giggle. “Was it worth it?”

“Yes. I’ve got a fine pair of gloves for you, somewhere in my bags.”

She turned to face him and put her arms around his neck. “Make love to me again.”

He chuckled. “Already? You weren’t properly satisfied just now?”

“Well, as a practical matter, Arthur will be needing another feed in a few hours, and I should try for a little sleep at least. So it’s now or never until morning.”

“Then rest, darling.” He kissed her. “Rest for now. I’ll bring him to you when he’s ready.”

“But I want you.”

He laughed again. “And I want you. But we have a lifetime now. And you need your rest.”

“So do you.” She nestled back into his chest.

“So do I.” He reached beneath his back, found the blankets, and worked them up to cover his wife and himself in the narrow bed. Her damp skin clung to his; his wetness mingled with hers. “We’ll have a daughter next,” he said.

Abigail snorted. “You won’t know what to do with a daughter.”

“Of course I will. Who better? Simply keep her under lock and key, and admit suitors only under rigorous application. And no bloody dukes, that’s for certain.”

“Horrid chaps, dukes. I quite agree.”

Wallingford’s cock was still stiff, but his brain was drifting pleasantly into sleep. Abigail’s scent wound around him; her soft body curled into his under the warmth of the austere Tuscan blanket. His skin still radiated with the glow of long-sought sexual release. “Perhaps if we raise her here, out in the Italian mountains . . .”

“Mmm.”

A faint trill of laughter drifted through the open window and then dissolved in the night. Wallingford’s eyes wandered to the patch of dark sky. Probably the entire valley had heard him with Abigail a moment ago, in the noisy throes of passion.

He decided not to voice this thought.

Silence, heavy and peaceful. God, how lovely it was, to be falling asleep in his wife’s bed, with the rattle of London omnibuses like a distant dream from another life. Perhaps they should live here, raise their children here. Perhaps . . .

Abigail shot upward. “Quite!”

“What’s that?” he muttered sleepily. He extended one long and work-hardened arm to pull her back where she belonged.

She shrugged off his fingers. “You said
quite!”

“I did?”

A pair of hands shoved at his shoulders. “Back in the nursery. You said
quite!
You did!”

“Abigail, go to sleep.”

“When Leonora said she would take the baby, and you should go to bed because you were tired after your journey! You heard her! You
answered
her! You said to her,
quite
!”

Wallingford rose on his elbows, feeling rather cross. “Who the devil’s Leonora? The woman in the nursery, you mean? The one who was looking after . . .”

His words froze in his throat.

“Yes,” said Abigail. “Leonora. Signorina Monteverdi.”

Wallingford fell back on his wife’s pillow and stared at the ancient wooden beam above. He pictured her again: a lovely woman of some indeterminate age, surrounded by an invisible glow of tranquility, lifting his son from Abigail’s arms in gentle reverence.

Her eyes, he remembered, were as dark as his own, and soft with love.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered.

Abigail sank down upon his chest, kissed his lips, and put her wet cheek against his.

“In fact,” she said, “quite the opposite.”

Turn the page for a preview of Juliana Gray’s next book

How to Tame Your Duke

Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

PROLOGUE

London, England

October 1889

A
t two o’clock in the morning, as a cold autumn rain drummed against the damask-shrouded windowpanes of his Park Lane town house, the Duke of Olympia was awoken by his valet and told that three ladies awaited him downstairs in his private study.

“Three ladies, did you say?” asked Olympia, as he might say
three copulating hippopotamuses
.

“Yes, sir. And two attendants.”

“In my study?”

“I thought it best, sir,” said the valet. “The study is situated at the back of the house.”

Olympia stared at the ducal canopy above his head. “Isn’t it Ormsby’s job to take care of such matters? Turn the women away, or else toss them into the upstairs bedchambers until morning?”

The valet adjusted the sleeve of his dressing gown. “Mr. Ormsby elected to refer the matter to me, Your Grace, as an affair of a personal nature, requiring Your Grace’s immediate attention.” His voice flexed minutely on the word
immediate
. “The attendants, of course, are in the kitchen.”

Olympia’s ears gave a twinge. His sleep-darkened mind began to awaken and spark, like a banked fire brought back to life by a surly housemaid. “I see,” he said. He continued to stare into the canopy. The pillow beneath his head was of finest down encased in finest linen, and cradled his skull with weightless lavender-scented comfort. Beneath the heavy bedcovers, his body made a warm cocoon into the softness of the mattress. He removed one hand from this haven and plucked the nightcap from his head. “Three ladies, did you say?”

“Yes, sir. And a dog.” The valet made his disapproval of the dog apparent without the smallest change of voice.