Vexing The Viscount (24 page)

He didn’t stop when he reached her thin hymen. A shard of pain lanced her for a moment. She made a little moan, but he grasped her hips and pushed forward. The pain receded as she closed around him, drawing him deeper.

“It’s wonderful,” he said.

He began to move, slowly at first and then with gathering vigor.

“Lie back,” he ordered. She was unhappy to let go of
him, but she did as he bade. Then he splayed one hand over her belly as he continued to rock into her. His hand moved south and she decided, in matters of the flesh at least, that it was safe to obey Lucian unquestioningly.

“I want another chance to find the right place.” He stroked between her legs again.

Daisy gasped.

“That it?”

She could only nod while he moved inside her. The heat, the friction, the joy of his hardness against her softness—there was almost too much for her senses to take in at once.

A fresh surge of moist warmth bloomed inside her. She raised herself on her elbows to watch him. Their gazes locked. A muscle ticked along his jaw. His mouth was drawn tight in a rictus of effort.

Then something inside her began to coil, tightening almost unbearably, and she grasped at the edge of the desk to anchor herself. She chanted his name, a talisman against the madness growing within. Her legs tremored as he plundered her, pushing her closer to some unseen end.

Then the coil snapped and she unraveled like a frayed whipcord, her body shuddering with the strength of her release. He arched and pressed deeply into her. As she pulsed around him, his seed spurted into her like a hot fountain. She collapsed back onto the desk and stared upward, unseeing. Lucian came to rest atop her, his head between her breasts. They lay quiescent together, her hand stroking his head, his breath warming her nipple.

When Daisy read the thoroughly detailed description of a woman’s “seat of bliss” in Blanche’s journal, she’d done some exploring on her own, touching herself tentatively but she’d never ventured past a sense of titillation and unfulfilled desire. It seemed Blanche had not been as forthcoming in the details of ecstasy, after all.

It was just as well. Daisy wouldn’t have believed her.

Her heart still galloped in her chest, but her breathing was returning to normal. Daisy blinked several times. The duke’s ornately painted ceiling wavered overhead, and then the classical scene slowly came into shadowy focus.

“Jupiter!” she whispered.

“Lucian,” he corrected, and gave her breast a soft nip. “Though if you choose to think of me as a god, who am I to argue?”

Daisy gave his hair a playful tug. “You conceited oaf!”

“Conceited oaf? How can you say that when you were practically singing my name a moment ago?”

“I don’t sing,” she said.

“You were mightily close to it,” Lucian said, drawing lazy circles around one of her nipples. It started as a supple pink mound but crested under his touch to a stiff peak.

He’d softened inside her but not slipped out. She clenched around him once, and he hardened in an instant. Her body responded to his quickening with a dull throb.

How was he able to make her need him so quickly?

“Want to give me second chance?” he asked. “This time I’ll try to make sure you remember my name.”

She chuckled and rocked herself against him, wishing she could feel all his bare skin against hers, but there was a masked ball going on not a hundred steps away. This was the best they could manage for now.

“There is no danger of my ever forgetting your name,” she assured him.

But in only a few moments, he led her back into the madness of lust so utterly, she was within a pinch of forgetting her own. He drew their loving out this time, driving himself into her, claiming her, stretching her thin on a rack of need, pulling back when he sensed she was close and then restarting till she pleaded for him to let her go.
Finally, he released her into the bright white light of completion.

When she came to herself, she was flat on her back on the Duke of Lammermoor’s desk once again, still looking up at the painting of assorted classical beings.

“Well?” Lucian propped himself on his arms and grinned down at her.

“You are amazing,” she said softly. All her joints felt wobbly and loose. Her muscles were so relaxed, she didn’t possess the will even to sit up. “Where on earth did you learn that?”

“Blanche was a good teacher as far as kissing goes,” he said. “But I picked up a bit from all those mosaics and vases. Roman art is pretty explicit, you know.”

“Yes, very explicit,” she said distractedly, staring upward over his shoulder. “It’s Jupiter.”

She felt his belly jerk in surprise.

“I’m talking about the ceiling, silly.” Daisy raised herself enough to drop a kiss on his forehead. “Take a look, Lucian. It’s the god Jupiter and a group of naiads and dryads. And there’s something else.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the ornamented vaulted ceiling overhead, then straightened and glowered at her. “Next time we do this, I’m going to make sure there are no paintings on the ceiling to distract you.”

“Next time,” she repeated, her heart skipping like a spring lamb. She pressed a kiss to the base of his throat. “Oh, yes, there definitely needs to be a next time. And then perhaps we can arrange matters so you’ll be in a position to admire the ceiling. But look at that, Lucian.” She pointed upward. “Do you think you could light another candle or two? I think there’s something important here.”

He tucked his shirt back into his breeches and, grumbling under his breath, lit candles. When he held it aloft and looked up, he began to see what had captured Daisy’s
attention. Along with the representation of Jupiter, there was a large figure on one side of the painting—a water god with a long tongue lolling from his mouth. The tongue became a river, and Jupiter and his coterie of nymphs were sailing a pleasure craft on it.

“‘O, whither is the cherished flown?’” Daisy recited.

So Lucian wasn’t the only one who’d obsessed enough over Caius Meritus’s love poem to have committed it to memory.

“‘Up the long, wet tongue, I veil my own,’” Lucian finished. “The tongue is a metaphor for a river. Caius Meritus took the treasure upriver.”

“And not just any river.” Daisy’s tone grew more excited by the moment. “
The
river. The Thames. When the tide is right, a small barge can go fifty miles inland with very little effort. Caius could never have traveled so far in a wagon, not with every Roman on the isle searching for him.”

“You’re right,” Lucian said. “When he was apprehended on the river, he must have been riding the tide back out.”

He looked up at the huge map of Britain on the wall behind the duke’s desk, then back at Daisy. She was sitting up now, leaning back on her palms, gazing at the ceiling. Her lips were kiss-swollen, and at some point in their passion, he’d left a love mark on her white neck. Her nipples peeped rosily above the frothy lace bodice of the courtesan’s red dress, and her skirt was still hiked to her spread knees. One stocking sagged to her ankle. Her heels drummed absently against the walnut desk. Lucian had never seen a more wanton or beguiling creature in all his life, and she seemed not to even realize she was.

Somehow, he had to make her his. Permanently.

He’d have to make sure she never wore that costume in public again. In fact, when he escorted her out of the library, he was going to drape his highwayman’s cape over
her. But he hoped she’d wear that red gown for him again.

Many times.

His gaze settled on her bare knees, and a new thought coursed through his brain. “‘Her legs she spreads.’”

Daisy pulled her knees together reflexively.

“No, don’t.” He stepped between them and rested his hands on her thighs. “I very much like your legs just as they are.”

He kissed her again and, with supreme effort, finally pulled back. “If the wet tongue means a river, what if the
she
in Caius’s poem is also the river? ‘Her legs she spreads’could mean a fork.”

Daisy nodded slowly. “‘And ankles crossed, my treasure she wraps between her knees.’”

He grinned and snugged her legs around him. “Don’t you love it when poetry has double meanings?”

She smiled back at him, hooked her ankles behind him and squeezed him with her thighs. It felt wickedly good. Then her smile faded and a frown knit her brows. She released him and gave his shoulders a slight shove. Daisy hopped down and padded around the desk in stocking feet. She lifted her long skirts to keep them from trailing the ground without her tall shoes and gazed up at the map on the wall.

“‘Between a river’s knees’might mean an island. You know, the way the water flows on either side and then joins again. ‘Ankles crossed,’you see.” She traced the snaking line of the river with her finger. “But the Thames is simply pockmarked with little islands. Which one?”

“I think Meritus has told us.” Lucian came around the desk to stand behind her, slipping his arms around her waist. He dropped a kiss on her bare shoulder and inhaled her heady jasmine scent. “‘Where pagan blade points to goddess sheath.’What would the Romans consider pagan?”

“Druids,” Daisy said. “There must be an island with roots in druidism.”

“There may be several,” Lucian admitted. “Even though the Romans outlawed the Celtic religion in the first century, it’s hard to legislate people’s beliefs. I’ve no doubt that even by the time Quintus Valerian Scipianus was proconsul, there were still hidden centers of druid worship.”

“To this day, there’s a spring near Dragon Caern where the local folk leave offerings of grain to the god of the place,” Daisy said. “Uncle Gabriel says it does no harm, and the people seem to need to do it.”

Lucian stiffened at the mention of her uncle. He’d listened for so long to his father’s rants against Gabriel Drake, the ingrained resentment was as hard to relinquish as the simple folks’need to worship the Old Ones.

“So, of all the islands that may have an ancient connection to the Druids, how will we discover which is the one Caius used?” She clapped her hands together. “Oh, I know. The Society of Antiquaries might have some useful information in their reference library.”

“No,” Lucian protested. After hearing Sir Alistair and Lord Brumley plotting their treason, the last thing he wanted was to let them know he’d made progress on the Roman hoard. In fact, he intended to let all the workers go on the morrow with the tale that he’d failed to find what he sought. That should throw Mr. Peabody of the scent.

“If there’s a chance the Society has the information we need, why ever not?” Daisy demanded.

Lucian couldn’t very well explain that his father was in danger of becoming embroiled in a treasonous plot with men from the Society. So far, Avery hadn’t warned of any contact by the traitors, but his father came and went at all hours. There was no way to know for certain whether Fitzhugh or Brumley had approached his father without Lucian asking the earl point-blank. Given his strained
relationship with his father, Lucian wasn’t prepared to broach the subject with him.

Oh, by the way, you haven’t taken up with any treasonous wretches lately, have you, Father?

Wouldn’t that just curdle the earl’s milk?

“I can’t go to the Society.” Lucian couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone, not even Daisy, that he feared his father might be tempted into sedition. He reached for the first plausible excuse that came to mind. “The last time I darkened their hall, I was shouted down as a charlatan.”

“But now you can prove you’re not,” Daisy noted.

“At this point, we still have merely conjecture. The only way to prove we’re right is to recover the treasure.” Lucian pinched of the candle flames one by one, throwing them into stark shades of gray.

“And how will you find out where to search if you don’t inquire at the Society of Antiquaries?” she asked with deceptive sweetness, bringing their conundrum’s vicious little circle to its full end.

“I don’t know.” Lucian knelt to help her fasten the buckles on those ridiculous shoes. “But I mean to find out.”

And he meant to find a way to end his father’s hatred of the Drakes once and for all. He might defy his father in the matter of wedding Clarinda Brumley, but given the depth of his father’s loathing, Lucian’s taking Daisy Drake to wife would be too much to expect the earl to accept.

Unless Lucian found another way, there was little hope for him and Daisy. And life without her at his side was too much for
him
to accept.

Lucian’s note arrived shortly after she broke her fast, letting her know that he had an appointment with the gentleman who held the classical studies chair at Oxford. The professor was in town and had invited Lucian to meet him at White’s later that day for coffee and a circumspect chat. Lucian’s letter was brimming with hope and enthusiasm.

And left her completely in the dark. His choosing an exclusively masculine haunt like White’s in which to meet meant she could not accompany Lucian. She couldn’t even “accidentally” cross his path.

“How like a man,” she grumbled to herself.

And if the professor had no knowledge of ancient druidic sites on the Thames, the day would be totally wasted. Of course, Lucian promised to call on her at her new home later this evening to let her know what he’d learned.

That promise sent her musing about whether lovemaking in her thick new featherbed would exceed her experience on a duke’s desk.

It bothered her a little that Lucian hadn’t made any declaration of affection for her. She could hardly count the brief “my love” uttered in the extremes of passion, but there was time yet. There was endless new ground for them to explore together, and she had no doubt that if Lucian didn’t love her now, he soon would.