Claiming the Courtesan (12 page)

Even if it killed him, he had to break her resistance.

He had to wait.

He couldn’t wait.

He couldn’t wait…

At last, at last, on the very edge of his breaking point, she began to tremble in his arms. She was almost there. He skated his hand down to touch between her legs.

With a strangled cry, she reached out to cling to his shoulders, digging her nails in hard. He ignored the stinging pain.
It meant nothing compared to the fact that she held him of her own volition.

He took a great shuddering breath as her sleek inner muscles clenched in the prelude to her climax.

She finally lost control and convulsed around him. He kept still, luxuriating in her quaking pleasure.

Even in his own extremity, he knew what this meant. She wanted him. He didn’t suffer this tempest of desire alone. Burying his head in the curve of her neck, he drowned in the sensations of her shivering peak.

She was his. She’d never escape.
Never
.

But too soon, it was over, and her exhausted sighs rattled hot against the side of his face.

Then all awareness of everything except his own crisis abandoned him and he was lost. His sinews and bones tightened almost to pain as he spilled himself inside her in a blinding explosion of rapture.

For what felt like forever, he emptied the bitterness and yearning in his soul into her prone body. He shuddered over her until his limbs lost their strength and he collapsed on her, utterly spent. His heart pounded as if it wanted to break out of his chest. His head held nothing but the hot scent of her.

Slowly, reality returned. Gradually, the torrent of his blood quietened and calmed, although blinding pleasure still thrummed steadily through his veins.

His weight must have been crushing her, but she made no protest. Her hands had slid off his shoulders after her climax and now her arms extended stiffly at her sides. She was trembling.

Bitter disappointment was a rusty taste in his mouth and worried at the edges of his physical satisfaction.

He’d forced a climax from her, but in the desolate reaches of his mind, he recognized that in the end he hadn’t really
vanquished her. He wanted her complete surrender. He wanted her willing in his bed. He hadn’t even come close to either goal.

Soraya had always sought her satisfaction with an openness he’d found bewitching. Verity had lain in contemptuous silence beneath him until he’d finished.

He rolled off her. She exhaled on a muffled sob and scrambled across the mattress to curl up as far away from him as she could.

He didn’t have the strength to protest. His chest heaving as he fought for air, he stretched out next to her. His muscles still quivered from the powerful sex, and sweat chilled his bare skin. He raised an unsteady hand to brush his damp hair back from his forehead and wondered what the hell would become of the two of them. And then asked himself if he cared.

A long time afterward, he finally dredged up the energy to speak. “Your coldness won’t deter me.”

The sound of his own voice was almost shocking after the wordless coupling. First light seeped into the room through the drawn curtains, and he saw how she’d gone back to huddling on the edge of the bed.

“I have nothing but coldness for you,” she said woodenly.

He couldn’t see her face. He didn’t need to. He knew the pride and suffering it would convey. “Soraya is a woman who understands pleasure.”

“Soraya never existed.”

Ignoring how she flinched away, he leaned over her. He’d expected her to appear composed and distant, but he read only vulnerability in her lush mouth and shadowed eyes. “You’re wrong. You are Soraya.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No, I am Verity.”

“You are Verity and Soraya.”

He bent his head to kiss that soft mouth. For a moment,
her lips moved against his, and he thought he’d won. Then she jerked away.

In the growing light, she looked exhausted. A man with any compassion would leave her alone.

Hell, a man with any compassion would never bully her into his bed in the first place.

“Soraya still exists in you and I mean to find her.” The words were a vow.

She merely shook her head once more. He rolled away from her in impatience and sat up. With a disgusted gesture, he flung the sheet up to cover her nakedness.

In truth, he wanted her again. After so long without her, he was still far from sated. But the compassion he denied he possessed prevented him acting totally the selfish libertine, much as he wanted her to think that was all he was.

After the long night, he sensed she was very close to shattering. Once, he’d have said nothing short of cannon fire could rattle the gorgeous Soraya. But this woman, still flinching away from him in rejection, had fewer defenses than his exotic mistress.

Of course, one day he might have to break her.

But not yet. Dear God, not yet.

Kylemore paused at the top of the waterfall that tumbled from the cliff at the end of the glen. The afternoon light was dazzling on the rushing water, but he was blind to the scene’s beauties.

Instead, he brooded upon his mistress. That was nothing new. His mistress had dominated his thoughts since she’d left him. And for a considerable portion of time before that, if the truth were known.

Would he ever be free of this damned inconvenient itch for the chit? She didn’t know it, but she wasn’t the only one struggling against unwilling captivity.

He sat back against a rock familiar from his childhood and stretched his legs along the sun-warmed ground. It dismayed him how clearly he remembered so many things here, despite having left when he was seven years old for his unhappy sojourn at Eton. He’d thought time would have softened the painful memories. The hope had been unfulfilled.

He’d had a long walk up to this spot, and he’d need most of the rest of the day to return. Just as he’d intended when he’d set out this morning.

Although he wasn’t hungry, he took some bread and cheese from his pocket and bit into it. Scotland had the ability to kill his appetite, he discovered.

Below him spread the pitched jumble of roofs that made up the hunting box and its surrounding buildings. Originally, this lonely glen had contained only a crofter’s cottage. His grandfather had used the simple house while stalking the estate’s abundant deer. Of course, the isolation meant this was a lunatic place to want to live. But his grandfather had been an obsessive hunter.

Not for the first time Kylemore reflected that every Kinmurrie seemed to fall victim to some particular mania. By all reports, his grandfather had spent increasingly long periods here, slaughtering the local wildlife and avoiding his fiercely Calvinist duchess.

Unhappy marriages. Another Kinmurrie specialty. At Kylemore Castle, likenesses of people who had quite clearly loathed each other lined the portrait gallery.

The hunting box had undergone extensive renovation, of course, when his father had become a permanent resident. The estate’s isolation had made it the perfect location for hiding the sixth duke’s unsuitable and dangerous proclivities.

Those renovations meant this was also the ideal place to
imprison Soraya. Or Verity, as Kylemore increasingly thought of her.

Damn. He was thinking about his mistress again. He flung the rest of his meal aside with a disgruntled gesture.

Discontentedly, he considered the house. What was Verity doing now? Still lying in her bed like a wounded animal, the way he’d left her?

The thought settled like a cold stone in his gut. She’d looked so broken and lost this morning. The image pained him beyond endurance, which was stupid, as he’d carted her all this way to teach her a lesson.

But how he hated to see the great Soraya brought so low.

Except somehow she was no longer his disdainful, worldly mistress. And therein lay a large part of the problem.

The woman he kept against her will wasn’t the woman he’d used with such businesslike passion in London.

At first, he’d thought her recent reluctance just some trick to make him pity her, relax his guard, perhaps even let her go. But her distress last night and this morning had been real. He’d stake his dukedom on it.

Not that he’d particularly regret relinquishing that poisoned inheritance.

He realized that after all these years of studying Soraya, of hunting her as his grandfather had hunted the glen’s deer, he didn’t understand her at all. And until he knew what made her the way she was, he’d never completely possess her.

He had to possess her or he’d go mad.

If he wasn’t mad already.

Clearly, some split existed in her mind between Soraya and Verity. Which was absurd. She was the same person. The way he ached for her attested to that. This new, more complex version of his mistress still exercised the same inconvenient fascination over him—more strongly, if anything. Two
unsatisfactory couplings only spurred him to demand a greater share of her. To demand everything.

And he’d make sure that was what she gave him before he was finished. Everything.

In a state of nervous determination, Verity sat on the window seat in her room and waited for the duke. He’d been away all day. Now it was evening and she knew in her bones he’d come to her.

During the endless dreary hours since she’d woken, her only companions had been the silent and ever-watchful giants and the little maids who had helped her dress and served her dinner in the parlor. As the day had limped on toward twilight with no sign of her arrogant lover, she’d stifled her unhappiness and instead summoned righteous anger.

He had no right to treat her as he did. She couldn’t allow this situation to continue. The duke wasn’t a heathen savage. Surely she could dredge some chivalry from his black soul and persuade him to release her.

She wore the least provocative of the gowns Kylemore had ordered, a dashing cobalt merino with black military-style frogging—not totally inappropriate, as she intended to fight.

She resented the loss of her widow’s weeds, although the dress had been ruined past repair on the rough journey to this godforsaken wilderness. At least it had been hers, paid for with her own labor, no matter if the money had originally been Kylemore’s. She abominated the way every moment in this valley leeched away a little more of her independence.

As she watched the light fade over the loch and the mountains, the magnificence of the landscape struck her as ominous, hostile to humanity. No wonder so few people lived in this oppressive emptiness. She shivered and drew her cream
cashmere shawl closer around her, although the evening wasn’t cold and a fire burned in the grate.

Kylemore paused in the doorway, and she saw him take in the scene with one single, scowling glance.

“What is the meaning of this?” he snapped. “Take off that dress, let down your hair and get into bed now.”

Clearly her defiance hadn’t escaped him. She’d expected him to be annoyed; she’d even planned on it.

He moved across to lean against the dresser. She rose and linked her hands in front of her to control their trembling.

“I’m tired of being led like a lamb to the slaughter, Your Grace,” she said firmly. “Your claim on my body ceased at the end of our contract in London.”

“I told you what I want.” He folded his arms implacably over his half-open linen shirt.

He wore country clothes. Plain shirt, buff breeches, tall boots. He looked as if he’d been outside all day, as though he still carried the freshness of the wind with him. The uncertain golden light shed by the candles and the fire glanced across his collarbone and hinted at the black hair on his chest.

She was dismayed to realize she sidled away from him like a mare scenting a stallion. This was ridiculous. She was letting his physical presence distract her from what she needed to say. For all their decadent play in London, she was more aware of him as a man here than she’d ever been before.

“You’ve got what you want. You’ve had your revenge.” She forced herself to hold her ground. “Let me go. You must stop this…this gothic horror before it gets out of hand.”

A sardonic smile twisted his lips. “Is that the best you can do?”

Startled, she met his eyes fully for the first time. She’d expected to see anger, but instead, he looked tired and terrifyingly cynical. And deeply unhappy.

As if realizing she perceived more than he wished her to, he straightened and crossed the room to stare moodily out the barred window.

“I assume you’ve been concocting that little speech all day.” His voice dripped sarcasm. “What did you expect it to achieve? The offer of a peaceful night to yourself and a quick trip home tomorrow? For such a concession, at least conjure up a tear or two. A man would be a monster indeed to say no to beauty arrayed in weeping distress at his feet.”

How she hated that superior drawl. With an effort, she kept her voice steady. “If that would work, I’m certainly willing to try it.”

He turned to look at her. Cynicism had conquered whatever else he felt. “Don’t waste your time. Or mine. We both already know I’m a monster.” He gave her clothing a slashing wave. “Stop this nonsense. I can have you out of that fiercely elegant ensemble and under me in five minutes flat and we both know it.”

His eyes were so cold that she shivered again. But she refused to let his threat, phrased in a tone of bored indolence, cow her.

“No.”

“You still don’t understand, do you, Verity? And I’ve always considered you such a clever little poppet. You have no power. You have no rights. You belong to me. This isn’t London. This is a forgotten corner of a feudal domain. And I am its lord. There’s nowhere to run. There’s no one to help you. If I want you—and we both know I do—I take you.”

She was powerless to control her rapid, shallow breathing, even though she knew it betrayed her rising fear. “You think because I’m a whore, I must accept any man with coin to pay for my services?” she asked hardily.

“No. I think because you’re mine and you’ll always be mine, you should surrender to the inevitable.”

Still she didn’t yield. “Whatever else I am, I’m a sovereign soul. I am no man’s creature.” She’d repeated those words over and over to herself all day in a futile effort to bolster what little courage she retained.