The Duke's Holiday (21 page)

He felt as if he had run a mile. He could not draw a decent
breath. She had stunned him. “Your first kiss,” he repeated in a strange voice.

She held his gaze. “You do not believe me. But I expected
that, of course. I know what you think of me.”

She must have seen something in his face that she did not
like, for she made to move away from him. But he could not let her go. His
hands were on her shoulders instantly, then around her forearms, and he was
pulling her towards him. She resisted, of course, raising her hands to his
chest as if to shove away from him, but he wrapped his arms around her,
crushing her in his embrace. She was warm and soft in all of the right places.

He was intoxicated, maddened, by the touch of her. He
spread his hands over the small of her back, feeling the ridges of her spine
beneath the satin gown, the swell of her backside. He wanted to move his hands
lower and cup that delicious softness, but he refrained. She was trembling, and
her eyes had become uncertain, her expression as skittish as a wild animal
who’d been cornered. He remembered that look from when he had touched her in
the library so inappropriately, and now he knew what it was.

She was innocent.

“I believe you,” he murmured. And he did. He’d thought her
a strumpet, but she wasn’t.

Desire electrified every molecule of his body. He wanted
her even more than before, and he was ashamed and confused because of it. He
was
not
a despoiler of virgins. He
did
not
lust after innocents.

Except that he did. He wanted to consume her.

And he felt a primitive rage that Sir Wesley had touched
her first. It was one kiss, but it was her first, and it had been lost to him
forever.

Mine
, an inner
voice shouted inside of him.
Mine, mine,
mine!

“What are you doing?” she asked in a shaky voice, pushing
against his chest.

He took in a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “Providing
a basis for comparison.”

Her brow furrowed. A sprig of hair fell over her forehead.
His control – such as it was – slipped a little bit more, and he
raised his hands to her head, smoothing back her impossible hair. His fingers
tangled in it, and the remaining pins popped out, pinging against the parquet
floor. He watched her hair spill over her shoulders, down her back, in a
chaotic miscellany of spirals and corkscrews. The fire burning in the grate
next to them seemed colorless next to this unnatural mass, alive with an inner
light. It was out of order, and any attempt to smooth it was fruitless. The
curls just sprang back to life once his fingers left them. It was a war he
could never win.

With great effort, his hands fell back to her shoulders. He
dug his fingers into her tender flesh, anchoring himself to her, his knees
weak.

“Did he hold you like this?” he whispered.

She shook her head, staring up at him with apprehension and
something else not unwilling that heated his blood.

“No? But I thought I saw it was so.” He adjusted his
embrace so that his arms encircled her waist, the whisper of silk against
satin. “Like this?”

“Close,” she murmured.

He lowered his head – what was he doing? – and
brushed his lips over hers. She tasted of sherry. Her lips were soft, full.
They affected him like opium. He drew back before he lost his mind.

“Like that?” he said huskily.

“’Twas … ‘twas longer. Deeper,” she whispered. Then she
licked her lips with her tongue.

Hell. Hell,
Hell
!
That did it.

He kissed her again without restraint, squeezing her
against him, his mouth hard and punishing. She cried out and attempted to move
away once more, but he followed her with his body and raised his hand to the
nape of her neck, so that he could hold her in place. He kissed her and kissed
her until all the fight went from her, and she clung to him as desperately as
he clung to her. When his tongue demanded entrance, her lips parted eagerly,
welcoming him inside. She was hot and wet and sweet, her mouth to him the
embodiment of all the sin and temptation and gluttony he’d always spurned but
secretly craved. He thrust into her in a parody of what he wished to do with
another part of his anatomy, which had long since grown rigid and impatient
with need.

When she began to kiss him back, learning quickly under his
tutelage, her tongue tangling with his, her teeth nipping his bottom lip,
teasing him, enticing him, he lost the last vestige of his sanity.

He moaned against her sweet mouth and clutched one of her
breasts in his hand. It was full and soft, and its peak tightened underneath
his palm.

They stumbled across the room. He hit something hard with
his backside, and something crashed to the floor. Oblivious to everything but
her, he spun her around and lifted her onto the desktop he had hit, never
breaking their kiss. He moved between her legs, enveloped by her heat and
softness, and stuck his hand down the front of her dress clumsily, like a green
lad. He could not stop himself. He had to know what she felt like.

He groaned. She was soft as silk, heavy and ripe in his
hand, her nipple rigid with desire. She made some sound in the back of her
throat and arched into him, filling his hand even more completely with her
flesh.

It was almost too much. He nearly came right then, just
from the feel of her breast, so full, fuller than he’d ever known before. He
pressed himself against the juncture of her thighs, reveling in her soft heat,
the feel of her hands on him, feather light, searching his torso, his
shoulders.

He wanted to see her, not just feel her. He couldn’t think
past his need. He withdrew his hand and began to fumble with the buttons on the
back of her gown. He tore his mouth from her own and concentrated on his
shaking fingers.

He cursed. He could not make them work. A button popped
off, and then another, and then in his clumsiness the fabric tore.

He cursed again.

Then he made the mistake of glancing at her face. She was
dazed from kisses, her lips swollen, her eyes glistening. She stared at him
strangely, as if she’d never quite seen him before. She was afraid and a little
repelled by the intensity of their passion, but she was aroused as much as he.
He knew that if he succeeded in getting her dress off of her, he would take
her, and she would let him. She was powerless to stop the force of her own
instinct, much less his.

They were like animals.

His stomach soured with self-disgust.

God, he was like a bloody beast in the field. She made him
less than what he was, and so twisted with primeval urges his brain turned to
marmalade. He hated this loss of reason, he hated this disconcerting vibrancy
of emotion she engendered. It had no place in the carefully ordered citadel
he’d so painstakingly erected out of the mire of his childhood. She was excess
and disorder and unfathomably dangerous to the foundations of his very
identity. She demanded of him something beyond the physical—her spirit
called out to his like a siren’s song, and if he let himself too near it, he
would be destroyed. Rutting with her on a desktop would satisfy an immediate
need, but he knew instinctively his thirst for her would not be quenched. It
would grow worse.

He could not do this.

Yet even with all of these imprecations running through his
head, he still couldn’t keep his hands off her, he couldn’t keep his body from
trying its best to take its animal satisfaction, whether he liked it or not.

He tried her buttons again. His fingers still would not
work.

“Montford.”

His name, whispered against his ear, finally succeeded
where his will had failed.

His hands fell away, and he stepped back, out of the circle
of her skirts and the heat of her body. It was like stepping out of an
enchantment. He was still painfully aroused, and he was glad of the shadows
filling the room, hiding his loss of control.

She seemed to come back to herself as well. Her eyes
focused, her body tensed. She glanced down at her ruined bodice, then up at
him, one hand raised to her lips, the other covering the tear at her bosom. Her
face heated with shame.

He turned away, tried to draw breath into his lungs. “I
shall leave at first light.”

“Yes.”

He hesitated. “The Countess shall be here within the week.
If you decide your … suitors here do not … suit, you will accompany her to
London. I shall have my solicitors convey the terms of our arrangement in
writing and provide what funds you shall need for London. You can contact me
through him. I do not think it necessary for us to meet again, Miss Honeywell.”

She didn’t answer.

He did not run out of the room. He couldn’t with the damned
pole between his legs. But he wished he could. He wished he could run all the
way back to London and forget Miss Astrid Honeywell had ever existed.

THOMAS
NEWCOMB was one of the few of the Duke’s servants who actually liked his
employer, one of the fewer still who was not afraid of him. Newcomb was an
ex-boxer who could well take care of himself, if it came to falling out of the
Duke’s favor. However, Newcomb knew that this was highly unlikely for two
reasons: a) the Duke rather liked him, and b) the Duke was, beneath his cold,
remote exterior, a bit soft-in-the-heart. Newcomb’s own position attested to
this.

After a precipitous end to his boxing career, he’d fallen
on hard times and into bad company. The Duke had caught him out in a swindle at
Tattersall’s, where Newcomb had been successfully selling rum goods to the
young bucks. Instead of giving him over to the constable, the Duke had offered
him a job. He said he’d liked Newcomb’s eye for horseflesh, but Newcomb knew
the Duke need not have done what he did. Most of his class would have had Hiram
drawn and quartered or transported to some tropical colony. The Duke had seen
something in Thomas Newcomb that not even Thomas Newcomb, who had given up on
himself long before, had seen at the time.

The Duke had saved him.

It was high time he returned the favor.

It had been clear to Newcomb for a long time that the Duke
was slightly … er, off. Those of His Grace’s station called him ‘aloof’ and
‘eccentric’, but as far as Newcomb could tell, those were fancy words for
‘unhappy’ and ‘cracked’. For all of the Duke’s power and money, Newcomb didn’t
envy the man. The Duke conducted his life as if walking a very thin tightrope
above a very deep chasm. Newcomb had never encountered such a stuffed-shirted,
self-flaggelating, thoroughly miserable geezer in all of his years.

Newcomb’s opinion of his employer happened to coincide with
the Viscount Marlowe’s own assessment: what the Duke needed was a good roll in
the hay. And Newcomb, whose take on the married state was rather different than
the Viscount’s (Newcomb had recently wed Nora, the love of his life), went a step
further in his opinions. The Duke needed a wife.

Not that frosty ice-princess the Duke had contracted to
make his duchess. But a real woman, who’d give the Duke a merry chase and knock
some life back into him. The Duke was a well-made, well-set-up bloke, and every
bit as red-blooded as the next fellow. It just needed the right bit of skirt to
make the Duke realize he wasn’t made out of granite.

This was an opinion Newcomb had harbored for years. He’d
watched and waited for the Duke to finally meet his match, but he’d watched and
waited in vain. Until now. Newcomb had known the moment he’d seen the Duke look
at Miss Honeywell that first day, when His Grace had been on his arse in the
mud. His certainty had been reinforced when he’d come across them pulling out
each other’s hair in the library, their clothes suspiciously disordered.

Miss Honeywell had succeeded where every other female in
the Kingdom had failed. She’d undone the Duke. She’d reduced him to a bundle of
frayed nerves. He was like a puddle at her feet, and the poor man didn’t even
realize it.

Newcomb was thrilled. In his opinion, Miss Honeywell was
the best thing that had ever happened to the Duke.

But when the Duke appeared at his door in the servant’s
wing of the castle late in the evening, Newcomb knew that the course of true
love was not running as smoothly as he had hoped. The Duke never came to his
room, and the Duke never looked so discomposed as he did now. His fine evening
clothes were wrinkled, his cravat stained with something red, and his eyes were
anything but calm. He looked … torn, distraught, and, to be perfectly frank, a
bit frightened.

Newcomb knew immediately Miss Honeywell was the cause.

“First light,” was all the Duke said. “I want to be off at
first light.”

Newcomb agreed and, ignoring all social conventions,
offered the Duke some of his whiskey, since the poor bloke looked as if he
needed it. The Duke refused the offer and left him abruptly. Newcomb watched
him walk down the hallway in the wrong direction, reach the end, curse, and
turn around. He wisely shut his door before the Duke reached it again, in case
the Duke saw his broad grin.

Newcomb waited another half hour before he left his room
for the stables, his decision made. It was not an easy one, for he had no wish
to prolong his stay in Yorkshire. He was anxious for his wife Nora’s sharp
tongue and soft embrace. The sooner he was back in London, the sooner he could
get on with the business of procreation. He wanted a daughter. Nora wanted a
son. Hopefully they would one day have several of each. And he could not bloody
well start on such lofty endeavors with over a hundred miles separating the
appropriate body parts.

For another, Newcomb took pride in his position as head of
the Montford stables. He saw to it Montford had the best horseflesh in London
and the latest models of equipage as befitting his station, even though His
Grace, owing to his peculiar aversion to moving conveyances, rarely deigned to
travel in them. And Newcomb was quite fond of the new town coach he himself had
purchased a month ago. She was a dashing machine, her brass fittings shined to
a high polish by his own hand, the ducal crest boldly emblazoned on her doors.
Newcomb had the same abiding affection for the coach that captains had for
their ships. He’d even named the bloody thing after his own wife. He would take
no pleasure – indeed, he would be acutely pained – in what he was
about to do.