The Dastardly Duke (13 page)

“That sounds quite dangerous.”

When had his arm found its way to the back of the sofa just behind her shoulders? When had his fingertips begun to caress the skin on her neck? Hannah drained what was left of her brandy and fanned herself. It was warm in front of the fire. She was grateful when the duke, seeming to read her mind, gently pushed her shawl from her shoulders.

“I do not think Lucy could get into danger with Charles,” she replied. “He loves her, after all. He means to marry her. And he is a thorough gentleman.”

“No man is impervious to temptation, Miss Gregory.”

The lips she had been reading so intently were suddenly on hers, caressing her mouth with exquisite gentleness. Somehow, this act seemed most natural, for the danger she had sensed earlier had vanished in the face of this tormented man’s surprising and humble gentleness. Hannah sighed contentedly as the masculine arm behind her shoulders tightened reassuringly and his hand toyed shyly with the lace trim on her gown.

When the kiss moved from gentle to insistent, Hannah could only marvel at the way her body had grown so lethargic and heavy as to need the support of his arm. A mesmerizing passiveness swept over her, and she wanted only to relax against him and feel this closeness between them. She felt safe, trusting, in a way she never had before.

Only when his fingers slipped under the lace trim to push aside the shoulder of her gown did a troubling awareness begin to nag at her. Only when his lips abandoned hers to nibble at her earlobe, then to trail tantalizingly down the sensitive skin of her neck, did Hannah think vaguely that something was amiss.

But then he stroked her hair and murmured something she had not a prayer of catching. The warm breath against her ear reassured her befogged brain, and when the hand that had rested so carelessly at her waist moved to the curve of her breast, Hannah could only sigh in pleasure and marvel that anything could feel so absolutely right.

Was it the brandy or her new understanding of his loneliness that robbed her of all fight? It mattered not—not when the silence that imprisoned her no longer seemed so empty. Under his careful ministrations, other senses rushed to fill the vacuum.

His lips felt like roughened satin against her skin, his warm breath like the kiss of life itself. Heady scents of brandy and sandalwood held her captive, and the midnight of his eyes spoke of masculine secrets that made her tremble. Every nerve in her scalp tingled as he stroked her hair, freeing it from its encumbering combs.

When he clasped her face between his hands, covering her mouth with just a hint of violence, Hannah fairly shook in anticipation. He seemed to know that she yearned for more than just a gentle touch. His lips bruised hers, demanding her own passionate response in payment. His hands ran the length of her back, cupping her buttocks, settling her down on the sofa as he covered her with his body. The bodice of her gown slipped away.

Hannah knew she ought to have protested when his knee separated her legs through the skirt of her gown, but she was long past rational thought or deed. The storm of sensation that held her in its grip left her helpless with longing. In the deafening silence of this intimate touching, the Duke of Claridge had made her his slave.

When his lips moved against her ear once more,
Hannah
did not need to hear to know the question he asked. A small kernel of joy emerged from the dense web of her desire.

“Yes,” she murmured recklessly. “Yes, my love.”

Julian’s hand turned to stone over the very soft orb of flesh that was her left breast. The passion boiling in his veins chilled to ice.

“I should not have said that.” Her voice was strained. As she looked up at him with those impossibly intense gray eyes, Julian felt more like a bastard than he had in his nearly thirty years on the earth.

He did not understand why he felt like a heel. She had played right into his hands, bought his tale of loneliness and his inability to find a woman who understood him. She had been more than willing to admit him to the silky portals that scores of men had already sampled.

It was nothing to seduce a prostitute—it should not have been necessary to go to such lengths at all, but he had and he had enjoyed the game. Until now, when she had broken the rules and mentioned that word in her moment of surrender, turning it all to sand and dust.

“Forgive me,” he said, more angry than apologetic as he pulled her up from the divan. He averted his gaze as she repaired her bodice.

“No, no. It was my fault,” she said, speaking rapidly, nervously. “I did not mean
love
, exactly. I am not sure I know why I said it, Your Grace, but I would never—”

“Under the circumstance,” he muttered dryly, “I believe you might call me Julian.”

But she had not seen him speak and so went on chattering in a way that left him no doubt that she was mortified and miserable. Why a woman of her experience should feel so was another matter, but Julian had no desire to examine it. When a man bent on seduction has the tables turned on him, he is in no mood to reason it out. Julian had figured her for an easy conquest, and she proved herself that, but somewhere between his sympathetic tale of woe and the stroking of her silken tresses he had gotten caught up in something he did not fully understand.

Possessing Hannah Gregory had suddenly become the most important thing in the world.

“I am very confused.” She was looking at him with eyes so deep with wonder that a man could lose himself in them.

“That makes two of us,” he muttered.

Looking at the mantel clock, he discovered that it was one in the morning. Not an impossibly late hour, by any means, but one at which certain things had to be decided.

“Good night, Miss Gregory,” he said, putting her shawl around her shoulders as if she were some delicate virgin and hustling her out of his study like a man trying to rid himself of the plague.

At the door she paused to look at him. Her lips were swollen from his kisses, and her hair tumbled across her shoulders in disarray. Her repaired bodice exposed rather more of her curves than it had before their activities on the sofa, and that infernal shawl provided entirely inadequate covering.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“And I, Miss Gregory, am an idiot.”

With that, he closed the door in her face.

“Miss Gregory plays the clavichord.”

The book of sermons Lady Huffington had been reading fell from her lap onto the floor with a loud thump.

“No,” she protested, her voice cracking. “It cannot be.”

Higgins picked up the book and placed it on the table next to the chaise longue. “I heard her in the music room this morning. Her playing was tentative, as if she had not done so in a long time.”

Lady Huffington scarcely seemed to breathe as she absorbed this information. “Perhaps she was only toying with the thing,” she ventured at last. “Very few people truly know the clavichord these days.”

“That is so,” Higgins agreed. “But she plays like an angel.”

The countess frowned. “You said she was tentative.”

“At first. The longer she sat at the keys, the more confident she grew. The tone was pure, her
tremblement
exquisite.”

“Truly?” Lady Huffington sighed. “How I have longed to hear—” She broke off suddenly, and made a great show of examining her book.

Higgins regarded her for a long time, and anyone who thought the dour lines etched permanently into his face would have been surprised to see the softening of those stony features.

“Perhaps Miss Gregory would play for you.”

“What?” The countess looked up, horrified. “I would never allow that rude young woman to do such a
thin
g
To give her the satisfaction
...”
Her voice trailed off as she saw something unsettling in Higgins’s gaze.

“It has been a very long time, my lady.” Both of them knew he was not referring to the three days in which the countess had been ensconced in her chamber.

‘Too long,” he added quietly.

Chapter
Twelve

It was only a variation on a simple nursery rhyme, a folk song her mother had loved. Yet even her mother’s old clavichord had eloquently conveyed the tune’s wistful yearning. On this magnificent instrument, with its resonant rosewood and ivory and tortoiseshell keys, the song would have broken hearts.

The Mozart variation Hannah had discovered amid the volumes of music wove a brilliant contrast of passages. The andante possessed a spare simplicity articulated by long melodic lines and a subtle phrasing that demanded a performer’s utmost skill.

Coaxing from the keys what must have been a splendid vibrato, Hannah vowed not to lapse into self-pity. It was enough to sit at this beautiful clavichord and do what she had never thought to do again—touch the keys and know that music resulted, whether she could hear it or not.

She was surprised at how much of her knowledge of the clavichord came back—the short octave with which piano makers had so disdainfully dispensed, the tremolo that imparted an insistent pathos in the slow movements. Above all, the delicacy of touch and constancy of pressure needed to prevent an alternation of pitch.

With the world of sound lost to her, other worlds had opened. Her fingers were more sensitive to the nuances of the keys. Her eye took in the composer’s markings at a glance, hearing them in the part of her mind that remembered sound. Perhaps deafness had made her a better clavichordist, for nuance and technique were the keys to mining the instrument’s deep expressiveness. But though she had been accounted quite excellent in her girlhood, Hannah did not delude herself that standards of excellence in a Cheshire village approached those of London.

Suddenly ashamed of her temerity in daring even to touch such a splendid instrument, Hannah allowed her hands to fall back into her lap. She did not know why she had come to the music room this morning, nor seated herself at the keys in search of what she had always found there—solace and clarity of thought.

Confusion from the events of last night cluttered her brain. She had been on the verge of the unthinkable—giving herself to the Duke of Claridge. But why? What about that scant hour in his study had touched her heart, when she had so defiantly girded her defenses against him?

Was it his loneliness? His moving tale of growing up a virtual orphan, rejected by the father who could not be troubled with fatherhood? Had pity been at the root of her capitulation?

Hannah did not think so. Indeed, she almost wondered whether she truly believed his sorrowful tale. A prudent woman would question why the duke had opened his budget to her when he had rarely shown her anything but disdain, when he was known to be a man who used women uncaringly. Perhaps seduction had been his intent all along—though why he would target her was a mystery, when he must have had access to all manner of beautiful and elegant females.

If there was one thing that deafness had given her, it was the ability to listen to the silence, to inner thoughts that could not be denied. Truth was all that mattered, and the truth of the matter was that she had not cooperated in her own seduction because of pity for the duke or
naiveté
at what might lie behind his words. There was only one reason: she had desired him.

She wanted this cynical duke who was miles above her in social standing and years beyond her in experience. The lust that she had thought beneath her when she encountered it on the streets was all too appealing amid the marble sculptures, polished oaken banisters, and gold leaf that abounded in this ducal household.

But it was not his riches that attracted her. It was the man himself and the dark and dangerous masculinity that, even as it stalked her, intrigued her more than anything ever had.

Fraud that she was, she had not been able to admit that fact to herself last night. She had dressed it up in compassion and told herself that he needed her, when the truth was that she needed him.

Wanted him, she corrected.

As for love—that awful word that she had uttered, repelling them both—she no more knew its meaning than he did. Her parents had given her love, but they were long gone. Certainly her father had not loved her enough to remain in this world after he disgraced himself. And no man in those terrible months with her cousins and the time in that Covent Garden boardinghouse had looked at her with anything that might have passed for true affection.

Hannah put her head in her hands, knowing that she was giving in to self-pity after all, but powerless to stop.

The tentative touch on her shoulder made her jump. Had someone actually witnessed her moment of weakness? Horrified, she turned.

“You play very well.”

Lady Huffington stood before her, an air of resolve about her stern features. Though her eyes were unreadable, her lips trembled slightly. “I wonder if you
might ...
continue for a while.”