Beauty and the Duke (9 page)

“I have traps set up around my laboratory,” she explained.

He stepped into the vestibule. “Rats?”

She reached around him, her skirts whispering against his legs as she shut the door behind him. “You can say that. One can never be too careful of wily family members.” She led him down a short corridor and stopped at another heavy oak door that would have required a battering ram to break down. “Unfortunately, the only culprit I have thus far ensnared is my cat. Poor Beast has yet to forgive me for turning him green.”

“
Beast
?”

The first hint of a smile turned up her lips. “If you see him, he will probably startle you,” she said as if she were his own proud mam. “I had one occasion where a lady fainted. But he really is a pussy cat.”

“Indeed.”

“The fairer feline population loves him. His orange progeny run rampant on the Abbey grounds. He has helped us control our rat population.”

Once inside the sizeable room that could pass for a vault, she lit two lamps, the smell of sulphur briefly eclipsing the other unpleasant smells that came with being around dead creatures and relics of the past. The walls were lined with wooden shelves bowed by the weight of dusty artifacts and wooden crates filled with petrified bones.

“I have to keep everything down on this stone floor,” she said as if in explanation of the visual chaos surrounding him. She shut the door behind him. “The weight of all of this petrified bone would cause the floor above to collapse.”

His interest moved to the surrounding workbenches. They were standing on a dais that looked as if this room had once served as a classroom. Four rows of parallel wooden workbenches ran thirty feet deep into the room.

“You will have to pardon the smell,” she said, sliding out of her cloak and laying it on the table next to the door. “I don’t usually bring anyone here. The dust makes people sneeze. Twice a year, I have to bomb the place with a cyanic compound to kill the vermin or they will eat everything. Once, they ate Aunt Sophie’s mummy.”

Shaking his head, Erik laughed. “And to think your family looks perfectly normal on the outside.”

She suddenly stood in front of him, her chin level with his shoulders. “I’ll take the books now.”

Her hands brushed his. Just a whisper of a touch, yet, even through his gloves, he felt warmth flow through him. He did not pull back. “Tell me where you want them,” he said.

He thought she might balk. She pointed to a cluttered table against the wall. “Over here.”

He set down the books and she stood each one perfectly aligned with the others, certainly not concordant to the disorder surrounding him. But some people’s chaos was another’s harmony. He had a feeling everything in this lab, as in her life, had its proper place.

“Your sister’s fossils are here.” She led Erik down
two wooden stairs to one of the wooden countertops. “I have finished cleaning each one. If your sister is to become a collector, she will need to know how to care for her finds.”

“Would you remove your hat?”

The intimacy of his request startled her. “Pardon?”

“I have a desire to see a person’s eyes when I am speaking. That is all,” he said simply, setting his gloves aside.

If he was going to negotiate for his future, he would bloody well look in her eyes when he did it.

Her hands slid a hat pin from its mooring in her hair. Carefully easing the hat from her hair, she presented him her face, spectacles and all. His gaze touched the freckles on her nose and then her lips. “Is this to your satisfaction?” she asked when he failed to reply.

“It is.”

She turned abruptly and began setting each of Becca’s fossils on a piece of soft fabric. Instead of staring at her, he took in various bins. “Is everything here yours?”

“Everything in the bins will one day be donated to various museums around the world,” she said without looking at him. “I still have to finish cataloging what is on the shelves. To answer your question? No. Only some of what is here is mine.”

He leaned a hip against the dusty countertop and, folding his arms, looked around for a possible sighting of Beast. After a moment, he found Christine staring at him.

“What is so amusing?” she asked.

He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from her face. She looked out of place in this dusty hell pit. Like a solitary cornflower blossom on a gravel drive. His mouth crooked faintly. “I don’t know what is more amusing.
That you ensnared a furry thief or that you named your cat Beast. I could use Beast’s appetite for mice and rats at Sedgwick Castle.”

Dropping her gaze from his, she finished wrapping Becca’s fossils as if she were caring for pieces of fragile porcelain.

After a moment he said, “Have you ever been to Scotland, Christine?”

“Papa and I attended a lecture once in Edinburgh,” she quietly said as she continued wrapping the fabric around the fossils. “My great-grandparents were Scots. Aunt Sophie was born near Dunipace.”

“The reputed home of Merlin,” he said, waiting for Christine to turn her head and look at him.

Her hands paused in her task. She turned her head and looked up at him, her eyes a smoky blue in the light. “Most consider Merlin a myth.”

“Like dragons?” he challenged. “Beasts larger than a house? Do you want to know what Scotland is to me?” he asked, not wanting to digress, needing her to understand what he offered. To Erik, Scotland would forevermore be his home. “She is raw and moody. A fortress in a cloud. Brilliant summer sunsets. Storm-lashed coasts. She is like a temperamental queen, exciting and more beautiful than anything you will ever see.”

She returned her attention to the fossils, but her hands were no longer steady. “We both know why I am here, Christine.”

She snagged a length of twine from the shelf and wrapped it around the cloth. “It occurred to me while I was attempting to sleep last night that neither of us has been ourself.”

“Do you think there might be a reason for that?”

She snapped her head around to peer up at him, eyes wide. “Do you?”

It wasn’t a question he’d expected to be thrown back into his face. In fact he’d meant it rhetorically. But neither was it a question he could answer with clarity. “Last night, I asked you to marry me. I came here today to press my case in the hopes that you would listen to everything I have to say.”

“You need not—”

“In any case, you will listen. You owe
me
that.”

Drawing in her breath, she accepted his pronouncement with more calm than he had expected. Shifting his feet, Erik forced himself to look away. He picked up a stone egg atop the shelf level with his eyes. “Fossils are like rocks to me, Christine. Only when they are mixed with human remains do they take on importance.” He studied the fossil egg, before setting it back down. “I meant it when I told you I needed other answers.”

“You are referring to the human remains that you found with the fossils.”

“You have never been the focus of malicious gossip. A circumstance that does not particularly bother me, but words can be a cruel thing. In Becca’s case, they are worse. She was the last person to see Elizabeth alive. She has no idea that the remains I found probably belong to Elizabeth.” With his backside to the countertop, he folded his arms but he did not look away from Christine.

Her lashes threw ragged shadows that shifted behind her spectacles as she blinked. The dull amber light coming from the single lamp by the door emphasized the height of her cheekbones and the bow curve of her lips.

“My first marriage, I hardly remember,” he said quietly. “I wanted the vows done with so I could leave England. We had not yet reached Scotland when she became ill. My condolences to you and your family for
her loss, but that is the way of it. I did not poison her or wish her ill.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“Some claim I am cursed, which brings me to Elizabeth.”

He looked away and wondered why it was suddenly so difficult to speak, why he’d lost the words he’d come to say. But he needed Christine to believe in him. After the most fleeting pause, he continued. “Elizabeth was the youngest daughter of the only man I ever considered a father, a man I looked up to for counsel on more than one occasion while growing up. I will not lambaste her character or tell you that the faults in our marriage belonged to her. They did not.

“Our relationship, if it was anything at all, was…tempestuous.” And that was putting it as kindly as he could in describing the mother of his child. “After a particularly unpleasant argument, which she accused me of adultery, I took my daughter and left. For the record, I was never unfaithful. By the time I returned to Sedgwick, Elizabeth had already been gone two months. A year ago her bones started washing up on the riverbank along with those of your beast.”

“Why are you telling me this, Erik?”

“Because after last night I have come to realize you and I are both still looking for something. I am no philosopher who contemplates the stars and speaks in antidotal verbiage that people find poetic and pretend to understand. Whatever happened between us might be in the past, but not forgotten. Last night proved that to me. I don’t claim to know much about love. I doubt you do either. From what little I’ve seen of love in my life, it is overrated anyway.”

She looked down at her hands lying folded atop the fossils. Erik studied her profile, defined by the
pale light and a mood he wanted to understand. He wrapped his fingers gently around her chin and turned her face. “It is important that you do not believe what most say about me. And if I offended you last night—”

“I’m not offended, Erik.”

“Then marry me, Christine,” he said softly, his eyes locked on hers with a deep intensity. “Marry me and I will give you your dream. I will give you your beast of Sedgwick.”

C
hristine tried to turn away, but Erik’s hand wrapped around her arm and stopped her retreat. “No, Erik,” she said. “You can’t know what you are doing. What you propose is mad.”

His touch was neither harsh nor gentle, only unrelenting in purpose. “Would you believe my intentions more honorable if I knelt at your feet spewing romantic sonnets worthy of a Shakespearean melodrama instead?” She turned her head away, but he placed his hand beneath her chin, then splayed her cheek with fingers that should have been soft and unworked.

Instead, they had calluses like a man unafraid of toiling work. He smoothed the side of one hand across her cheek. “Neither of us has the luxury of time for me to court you properly,” he said. “I have to return to Sedgwick.”

“You need an heir. I don’t know the least about children. I am merely convenient to this marriage you will ask of me.” No longer sure of her own mind and unable to comprehend his, she struggled to make sense of the turmoil he created within her.

“Ours would be no marriage of convenience, Christine.” He placed his palms on the countertop, trapping her between his arms. He smelled of sun
light, like the woodsy, warm pine needles, the kind that had cushioned her that long-ago day near the lake near her uncle’s home in Somerset, where Erik had taken her to the ground and made love to her with his mouth. When she had been too young, too foolish.

“Look around this room, Christine. I can give you what you want. Legitimacy. Respectability among your peers. Your beast of Sedgwick. Tell me this is not enticing to you. I have an estate littered with the bones and artifacts of the past.”

“I do not believe this is happening.”

He placed his hands alongside her head, and with her back against the countertop, he gently held her face to his gaze, removed her spectacles and set them behind her. “You do not think me capable of proposing? Or you do not believe any man capable of wanting you?”

A soft sound escaped her lips.

He pulled her against him while one hand slipped to the nape of her neck, not to hold her captive but to angle her head. “A partnership between us doesna have to be boring, Christine.” Slowly he bent and kissed her, a breath against her lips. “It will be ours to do as we please.”

He pressed her to the countertop, his kiss breathy, like a hot, humid dawn. The taste and texture of him swept through her. Her own rapid heartbeat melded with his almost as if some unseen force had wrapped them in its palm, and all she was conscious of was the rhythm of his tongue striking hers. She clung to him because she didn’t know what it was she wanted, and he pressed her no further than she was willing to go. Just enough to lay claim to her willingness at least in this. She could never assert he’d forced her or seduced her.

But she could not do this. She had not thought this
through. Had she?

“Erik…”

“Don’t.” His breath coming faster, he rested his forehead against hers as if he, too, fought for control. “Don’t turn away.”

She shook her head. Pins had loosened in her hair. “This isn’t right….”

“This is as right as it gets between us,” he said, his voice urgent, and then he kissed her again.

He stepped into the juncture between her thighs and she nearly cried out. He was as fully aroused as she. A low sound of pleasure threaded from her throat. He enflamed her with feeling so intense it was almost painful.

She sank against his chest, his warmth as close to heaven as she had ever remembered being. She curved her arms around his neck. His hands roamed down her back, cupped her bottom and brought her up hard against his sex. She tasted more than him in her mouth. She tasted lust. Her own. She tore her mouth from his and took a step backward.

She touched a finger to her bruised lips. Confusion beset her. Looking up at him, she felt her chest constrict.

“Christine…”

She didn’t want to need him. Wanting him was dangerous. “Why did you have to return? Why did you have to come to Sommershorn Abbey?”

She spun and practically ran to the door. She’d opened it only an inch before he slammed it shut and twisted the key in the lock.

“Lord, Christine.” His heat limned her back. “Is a future with me so horrible to contemplate? Am I some wretched beast to be shunned by you as well?”

“No.” She pressed her forehead against the oaken
panel and fought against the stinging in the back of her eyes. “But we’re not ourselves right now. Or we would not be doing this.”

He braced his hands on either side of her head. “I have not been more myself, more confident of my decision, since the moment I saw you at Sommershorn Abbey, Christine. I know you felt it, too. This is not wrong.
I
am not wrong.”

Groaning, she luxuriated in the feel of his chest pressed against her back. One strong forearm beneath her breasts held her to him. His erection was hard against her bottom. “I want to be inside you, Christine,” he rasped against the corner of her mouth. “Deep inside you. I want your body to know mine again. I want to feel you around me.” He pressed the heel of his hand against her most intimate place. “Tell me you don’t feel the same.” He splayed his other hand across her jaw and into her hair. “Tell me, Christine,” he breathed.

With her cheek against his shoulder and the other moist with his breath, she turned her head. Lifting her chin, she sought his lips. He murmured her name as she opened her mouth to receive his thrusting tongue. With a predatory intensity, he’d eroded the certainty of her feelings, scraped at the heart of her emotions, made her forget his ruthlessness and the past.

Made her forget everything but this.

Beneath her bodice, her breasts grew heavy. Her head spun. His taste was like an intoxicating shot of scotch consumed in a rush, warmer and more invigorating with each draught she stole from the glass. She let him touch her anywhere he wanted. Her breasts. Her lips. Between her legs. Especially between her legs.

Even through her skirts his touch burned and ex
cited her in every wicked way possible. She plundered his mouth, burning for his touch, no longer feeling submissive but assertive in her own needs as well.

She was on fire. Ravaged by heat. Lost in her own sensuality. And with her back still pressed against his chest she raised her arm and curled it around his nape, pulling his mouth hard against hers. Need drove her to rub her bottom against his sex.

He drew breath through clenched teeth. Then he was no longer kissing her. If one of his arms had not been holding her pressed against his chest, she would have collapsed to the floor in a puddle of muslin. He turned her roughly and pinned her hands against the door. Their moist breath came in gasps.

“God, has it been so long for you, Christine?”

It had been forever since she had allowed herself the freedom to feel this way, to let everything go as if tomorrow didn’t matter.

His eyes dark and intense, he lowered his mouth to hers. “Say no, Christine,” he rasped against her lips. “Or I’ll nae be stopped.”

“Don’t stop.” Her lips brushed his cheek and then his lips again. “Don’t…” She no longer cared about tomorrow or the consequences of this moment. “…stop.”

“Shh.” The faint whisper was a vibration against her cheek.

His hands moved beneath her skirts, eased up her thighs past her silk garters. She watched breathless as he raised her skirts and found the slit in her drawers. She felt heavy, weighted between her legs. Hot. Alive. He passed two fingers through her moist curls, arousing a feeling so intense she barely caught her voice against crying aloud.

For a timeless moment, he stared into her eyes in such
gentle opposition to her racing blood that she stood on her toes and pulled him into a kiss.

His finger slipped into her slick flesh, then another. She shut her eyes and heaved a breath. Bending, he guided himself between her thighs and caught her weight against the door. Her skirts weren’t enough of a hindrance to impede his movements. His member, burning and heavy, pressed into her, filling her with an unrelenting pressure that stole her breath. He withdrew, gripped her bottom with one hand and lifted her higher onto him.

He pushed as deep as he could go. And stopped.

“Christine…” he uttered from deep in his throat.

Her thighs closed around his hips. With her back pressed against the door, he braced one hand next to her shoulder and thrust again, driving deeper. His body rocked against hers. Slowly at first as if savoring the pleasure of their rhythm. The sinews of his arms moved against her palms. Her lips parted. She heard her own soft moan and opened her eyes. He was watching her, his eyes heavy-lidded and dark in the shadows just beyond the light.

She felt branded by his possession, and wanted to brand him in return. His breath grew more ragged with each thrust of his hips. “Come to me, Christine.” He spoke low and close, nudging her thighs wider, brushing his lips across hers. With each rocking thrust, blood rushed to her center and pulsed like a heartbeat. “Come to me now.”

“Yes…” Her panting breaths steamed against his lips.

“Let me give you everything you want.”

She wanted only to feel more. Every nerve ending seared her. Fire spread across her flesh.

The tension between her legs intensified. Her fingers
entangled in his hair and she couldn’t stop a sobbing outcry. “Yes.”

His lips pulled and suckled. His tongue probed her mouth deeply, making love to it as he did to her body. Somewhere she thought she heard voices in the hallway outside the door. He must have heard, too, because he said, “Quiet, love.” He breathed roughly without breaking rhythm. “The door is locked but not impervious to sound.”

Helpless in her release, she pulled him into another soul-searing kiss and rode the currents of pleasure, arching her back as she came with the force of one blissful wave after wracking wave crashing on sand. His grasp tightened on her hips and he held her down on his sex, his guttural groan muffled against the naked curve of her shoulder where her gown fell open. She felt the shudder of his breath against her ear, and a white-hot rush flooding inside her, drenching her. Their breathing rasped in the heated silence.

Even as her mind-numbing pleasure eased to tiny pulses between her legs, she quietly sucked in air and listened to the voices fading outside in the corridor. Erik’s forehead rested against hers. With his penis still heavy and thick inside her, they remained pressed against one another, breathing shallowly. In the aftermath, neither moved.

“What just happened between us?” she said when some semblance of sanity tried to reassert itself in her mind.

“I don’t know.” His voice sounded amused. “I think I just
fooked
you against the door.”

A part of her welcomed his devil-may-care attitude and the way he could spurn convention. Yet, in many ways, Erik Boughton was as conventional an aristocrat, and archaic in behavior, as the new Queen
herself.

When he finally eased out of her and lowered her skirts, she fell forward against his chest. Bereft of strength and aching with a new tenderness, she inhaled the musky scent of sex still wet between her legs even as she absorbed his heartbeat against her cheek.

What had he done to her? Wading through the mist of her emotions, she understood nothing but the feel of the shimmering rainbow that still seemed to surround her. She didn’t want to let him go.

He spoke against the soft shell of her ear, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I will procure a special license. I think it wise that we be wed as soon as possible.”

She pulled back. Her hands trembled as she worked to repair her clothes. “I need time, Erik.”

His shirt hung loose and unbuttoned from his trousers. He looked as ravaged as she felt. “Time?” He laughed as if to say that ten years was more than enough time.

“I have…I have responsibilities to attend to at the abbey,” she said.

“I won’t force you, Christine,” he said quietly. “You’ll come to me willingly. Or you’ll not come at all. Do ye understand?”

He would have no martyred wife in his bed. Theirs would be a marriage in truth, a partnership as he had said. A promise. Her eyes filling with tears, she touched the frown line bracketing one corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Christine?”

Erik was halfway to his horse when he stopped. “Devil take it.” He did an about-face on his heel.

He’d be damned if he was going to allow Christine to
walk away from him…
again
.

She, who braved a man’s world with spear in one hand and a shield in the other, like one of Sparta’s warriors at the pass of Thermopile. The woman who pampered old bones and relics as if they were her children, who set traps for thieves and named her cat Beast. She had fled him as if he were the plague.

One thing was for certain, he told himself as he traipsed through an overgrown garden in search of a path that would take him to the front of the house. He would be deceiving himself if he thought today’s passionate sexual tryst precluded her from having any choice in the matter of her future. She did have a choice. At the moment, she was exercising that choice not to marry him.

Fifteen minutes later, feeling like a supplicant as he followed an addlepated housekeeper into the drawing room, he ran into Joseph Darlington and his blushing bride, Amelia. Their presence shocked him. He had not expected to see Darlington back from his honeymoon so soon. They sat in the drawing room having tea with Lady Sophia, Christine’s maiden grandaunt.

The housekeeper announced his name and that he was here to see Miss Sommers. The angelically blond Amelia leaped to her feet first and dipped into a curtsey. Mr. Darlington rose. Only Lady Sophia remained seated.

“Your grace,” Amelia replied. “We have not seen Miss Sommers.”

“Perhaps she is still in the laboratory,” Mr. Darlington replied. “I believe that was where she was fifteen minutes ago.”

Amelia was studying the toes of her shoes. Remem
bering the noise he’d heard in the hallway when he and Christine were against the door, Erik looked from her to Darlington. He suspected these two had heard everything.