Maiden Lane [6] Duke of Midnight (31 page)

“Yield, sweet, sweet Diana,” he whispered in her ear. “You are so hot, so wet for me, I would stay here within you forever, holding you, compelling your submission.”

She tried to get her arms beneath her, to somehow
push herself back against him, but he only chuckled, pulling back just enough for her to feel the head of his penis stretch her entrance before shoving back into her again. He suddenly thrust his arms under her, holding her tight as he found one breast and cupped it. His long legs braced on either side of hers, squeezing and immobilizing her.

“Diana,” he murmured in her ear, licking. “Diana, you are everything I’ve ever wanted and shall never have.”

Tears pricked at her eyes and she opened her mouth to sob.

“That’s it,” he said. “Weep for me. Bear my pain. Take my come. For I can give you nothing else.”

And he thrust into her in hard, sharp punches, each movement striking against that place within her. She gritted her teeth and bowed her head into the pillow. It was too much. Too little. A continual assault against her senses.

He laid his cheek against hers and she felt something wet between their skin. “Come, o Diana. Wash me in your passion.”

She tensed and shuddered. Once. Twice. Thrice. Like a seizure. Like a piercing of the soul.

Like the death of hope.

He sagged onto her, heavy as lead, but she was loath to make him move. Something had happened tonight to make him so wild. Something dreadful.

She turned enough so that she could stroke the back of his head, feeling the shorn hair brush her palm. “What is it? What has happened?”

He rolled off of her, but wrapped his arms around her as if he couldn’t stand not to touch her. “I met him tonight, the man who killed my parents. Met him and lost him.”

Her heart stopped. “Oh, Maximus…”

He laughed, a dry, awful sound. “He’s a highwayman who calls himself Old Scratch. My mother…” She heard him swallow before he tried again. “My mother was wearing the Wakefield emeralds the night she died—a fabulous necklace with seven emerald drops that hung off a central diamond and emerald chain. He must’ve broken it up after he stole it, for it was several years after her death before I saw the first emerald drop—on the neck of a courtesan. It’s taken me years, but I’ve collected the pieces one by one: the central chain and five of the seven drops. Last night I saw something emerald pinned to Old Scratch’s neck cloth, but I couldn’t get close enough to be sure. Tonight I did. He wears one of my mother’s emerald drops. I asked him about the other, and do you know what he said?”

“No,” Artemis whispered, a dreadful feeling welling in her chest.

Maximus’s lips twisted. “He told me to look within my own house.”

Artemis sat up. “Oh, dear God.”

Maximus stared at the single emerald drop in Artemis’s palm. She’d hastily donned her chemise before running back to her room without telling him why, only to appear moments later with her hand fisted around something.

Now he wondered if he should feel betrayed. “Where the
hell
did you get that?”

“I…” Her hand clutched the pendants protectively. “Well, it certainly isn’t what you may be thinking.”

He blinked and raised his gaze to her face at her indignant tone. Her beautiful gray eyes were wary. They’d made love not moments before, and yet the bed felt cold now. “What am I thinking?”

She raised her eyebrows haughtily. “That I’m somehow involved with the murderer of your parents.”

Stated baldly like that, it was obviously preposterous. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Tell me.”

She cleared her throat. “My brother gave it to me on our fifteenth birthday.”

He stiffened. “Kilbourne?”

“Yes.”

Maximus looked down, thinking. The murderer had been cautious. Maximus had only discovered the first drop nearly ten years after the murder. By tracing back through the sale of the drop, he’d realized that the jewel had only been originally sold months before. Unfortunately, that drop had been a dead end—quite literally. The owner of the original pawnshop where the emerald drop had been sold was found lying in a pool of his own blood.

Maximus had bought the last pendant over three years ago. Likely the murderer had begun to realize that Maximus was collecting the jewels—and that they might provide a link back to the murderer.

But if Artemis was correct, then the jewel she wore had come into the possession of her brother
before
the other drops had begun to be sold.

Before the murderer knew how dangerous the jewels were to him.

Kilbourne might have the clue to help him find the murderer. He might even know the murderer himself.

Maximus’s head snapped up. “Who did your brother get it from?”

“I don’t know,” she said simply. “He never said. I didn’t realize it was a real emerald until I tried to pawn it a couple of months ago.”

He stared at the emerald for a long moment before rising from the bed and going to the iron box on his bedside table. He took the key from a hidden drawer in the table and opened the box. The top held a shallow tray, perfectly fitted to the inside. He’d had it lined in black velvet. On it lay what remained of his mother’s most prized possession: the Wakefield emeralds.

He felt Artemis come up beside him to look, and then she took his hand and pressed the emerald pendant into his palm. He wrapped his fingers about her hand for a moment before letting go, suddenly realizing what she’d given him: the missing piece to Old Scratch. With this he might be able to find who the man really was. Maximus swallowed, reluctant to look at her, for it wasn’t only gratitude that swelled within his chest.

Gratitude was the least of the emotions he felt for her.

He laid the pendant in its place beside her sisters.

“There’s one still missing,” she said, leaning her head on his arm.

The pendants lay in an arc around the central chain with one noticeable gap.

“Yes. The one Old Scratch wears at his throat.” He closed the box and locked it again. “When I have it, I intend to have them all reattached.”

“And then you’ll give it to Penelope,” she said quietly.

He flinched. Truly, he’d never thought that far ahead. Finding and restoring the necklace, bringing his parents’ murderer to justice, and achieving some kind of redemption occupied all his thoughts. He hadn’t considered what—if anything—came afterward.

But she was right. The necklace belonged to the Duchess of Wakefield.

He turned to look at her, this woman who had given her body and perhaps her soul to him. This woman who knew him like no other on earth. This woman he could never,
never
honor as he should.

As he wanted to. “Yes.”

“Penelope will like it,” Artemis said, her voice very calm, her beautiful eyes wide and unblinking. She was always brave, his Diana. “She loves jewels, and the emeralds are magnificent. She’ll look gorgeous in them.”

Her very bravery broke something inside of him. She showed no trace of jealousy, no rage that he might bed another woman, and somehow that made him want to break her, too. To make her say how obscene this was. To make her put her rightful claim on him.

“She’ll be magnificent,” he said cruelly. “Her black hair will make the emeralds glow. Perhaps I’ll buy her emerald earbobs to match.”

She watched him steadily. “Will you?”

And he knew somehow, no matter what happened, that he’d never buy Penelope Chadwicke emerald earbobs. “No.”

He shut his eyes, breathing. If she could withstand this, then so could he. At least he’d
have
her—no matter that it would be only partially and badly. He could not give her up, so he vowed to take what he could of her.

Maximus closed and locked the box before taking Artemis’s hand and pulling her gently down beside him in the bed. He arranged the covers over her as tenderly as if she were a queen and he a lowly cavalier. “I’ll ask your brother in the morning.”

She huffed and laid her head on his shoulder. “I know you think Apollo is a murderer, but he couldn’t have
been part of your parents’ murder. He was much too young.”

He reached to pinch out the candle. “I know. But he may know the murderer—or someone who does. In any case I must question him.”

“Mmm,” she murmured sleepily. “Maximus?”

“Yes?”

“Did you have my room searched at Pelham House?”

He tilted his head to peer at her face in the dark. She seemed perfectly serious. “What?”

She traced a circle on his chest with her finger. “The morning you sent the messenger to inform me you’d rescued Apollo, someone searched my rooms.” She knit her brows and looked at him. “When I realized that the emerald was real, I started wearing it all the time. I just didn’t know what else to do with it, it was so expensive. And then when I got your signet ring I strung it on the same chain.”

He remembered the chain she’d been wearing when she’d given him back his signet ring. He frowned. “Then why haven’t I ever seen the emerald on you?”

A blush rose in her cheeks. “I took it off before we’d…
Anyway
. I left the woods at the abbey, after you’d already raced off, and I forgot to put my fichu back on. My necklace was visible for a moment, with both the emerald drop and your signet ring on it.”

He understood at once. “Any of the guests could’ve seen it.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“If one of them saw the emerald on you,” he said slowly, staring into the darkness about the bed, “and then searched your room looking for it, then the murderer
might have been at Pelham. Might’ve eaten at my table.” The mere thought filled him with hot rage.

She stroked his chest as if to soothe him. “Then it could be any of the men?”

He considered. “Watts is younger than I.”

“Surely it isn’t he, then.”

He nodded. “That leaves Oddershaw, Noakes, Barclay, and Scarborough.” Scarborough, who had been a friend of his parents’.

For a moment they were quiet, contemplating the possibilities.

Then he stirred. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

He shook his head, for a moment unable to speak. Finally, he cleared his throat and said huskily, “For believing me. For telling me all this, even when I was initially foul to you. For being here.”

She didn’t answer, but her hand moved on his chest until it lay exactly over his heart.

And there it stayed.

M
AXIMUS OPENED HIS
eyes the next morning to the warm scent of Artemis in his arms. For the first time in a very long while he’d neither dreamed nor woken in the night, and he felt, in body and soul… content.

He leaned forward to nuzzle his lips against the nape of the sleeping woman he held. She was so warm, so soft, in sleep, with none of the prickling edges of the maiden warrior she showed when awake and alert. He loved that maiden warrior—the woman who looked him in the eye and told him they were equals—but this sweet, vulnerable lady made his heart ache. Like this he could imagine
that she would yield to him, come softly into his arms, and agree to all that he said.

The mere thought made him huff a breath of laughter against her hair.

She stirred, making a small moaning sound. “What time is it?”

He glanced at the window—bright with the sharp, new light of day—and made an estimate. “Not more than seven of the clock.”

She exclaimed and tried to move away from him.

He hugged her tighter.

“Maximus,” she said, her voice gruff with sleep. “I have to leave at once. The servants will be up.”

He bent and licked her neck. “Let them be up.”

She stilled, her face turned away so he couldn’t see her expression. “They’ll see me. We’ll be discovered.”

He pulled back a little to try and see her face, but her hair had fallen over it, making her look like a naiad in mourning. “Does it matter?”

She turned then to lie on her back, looking up at him. Her dark brown locks fanned out around her serious face, and a bold nipple peaked from beneath the sheets. He noticed that she had a triangle of tiny moles just below her right collarbone.

Her dark gray eyes were lovely looking up from his pillow. “Then you don’t care if everyone knows?”

He bent to taste those moles.

“Maximus.”

He swallowed and raised his head. “I’ll buy you a house.”

She lowered her eyes so that he could no longer see their gray depths, but didn’t speak.

His contentment was leaching away, an urgent need to
make her agree taking its place. Something very like fear was freezing his heart. “Either here in London or in the country, though if you’re in the country I won’t be able to see you as often.”