The Clarendon Rose (25 page)

Tightening her jaw and hoping her blush was not too visible, Tina pulled away and turned to look at him, all thoughts of delving into the subject of his discussion with Lord Sebastian fled.

Their gazes met and held.
 
“Shall we, my dear?”

Her hand closed into fists.
 
This is what she had wanted—what she had waited for.
 
So why was she suddenly petrified by the notion?
 
What if I’m not stimulating enough for a man of his jaded tastes?
 
What if he—
 
“But it’s only late afternoon!” she blurted.

“Would you rather we retired to the salon and waited until later?” he asked, his tone tinged with irony.
 

She swallowed.
 
“No, I suppose I wouldn’t.”

He held out his hand and she placed her smooth fingers against his callused ones.
 
Then, he began leading her up the stairs.

“H-how is it that you have these calluses on your hands, Clarendon?” she asked, trying to distract herself.

He smiled at her, but the intensity in his eyes never wavered.
 
“I often sought to distract myself with physical labor, particularly once I decided to relinquish the worst of my vices.”

“Vices?”

He shrugged.
 
“Opium.”

“Did it work?”

“No better than the opium.
 
The nightmares always came back.”

“They always do, don’t they?” she murmured.

“And what would you know of nightmares, Tina?”

“We all have them, do we not?”

They had reached the corridor that led to the ducal apartments.
 
Clarendon paused.
 
Turning to look at her, he hooked a finger under her chin.
 
His frown darkened at whatever he saw.
 
Then, he shook his head.
 

“No, Tina.
 
I don’t think everyone has them.
 
Not like we do.”
 
He lifted a stray tendril of hair from her cheek.
 
Tina drew in a breath at the brush of his fingers against her skin and suddenly, something shifted between them.
 
The creature that had been stirring deep inside her raised its feral head and stared at him out of her eyes, only to see an answering ferocity in his own gaze.

“The way you were watching me over the luncheon table…” he growled, his tone ragged.
 
“God Tina, I don’t know how I would have restrained myself if you had insisted we wait.”

His hands curled around her face, then slipped up to tangle in the
coiffure
Jane had worked so hard to get just right.
 
Leaning in, he pressed his mouth against hers, hard, so that her teeth ground against her lips.
 
She wrapped herself against him, opening her mouth to his tongue, his urgency rousing an equal response from within her.

She bit at his lower lip and he groaned, one hand slipping from her hair down her back, arching her body against his.
 
She took a step backward and some distant remnant of consciousness acknowledged the immobility of the wall against her shoulder blades.
 
But her mind was lost in the onslaught of sensations assailing her, making her want to press closer against him still.

She leaned back, her fevered hands slipping between their bodies as she fumbled at the buttons on his vest before grabbing at the fabric and pulling, hard.
 
The soft ripping sound, as the material yielded to her grasp and the buttons went flying, barely penetrated her awareness.
 
Then, her hands were against the fine fabric of his shirt, tugging it out of his pantaloons with fevered thoughtlessness.

“God, Tina,” he began, his mouth brushing against hers as he spoke.
 
He cupped her buttocks, squeezing them as lifted her against him and she felt the hard swell of his erection pressing on her thigh.
 

She bared her teeth, filled with a wild abandon.
 
Then, letting out a low growl, she reached under his shirt to the muscled heat of his torso, her fingers curving into claws as she drew them across his back, hard enough to leave marks without drawing blood.

His eyes widened a moment in surprise, before narrowing.
 
Dark flames flared as he watched her.

“Damned vixen,” he muttered.
 
His lips curved in a smile that was all sharp teeth and untamed beast.
 
He stepped back, grabbing her arms and extricating them from their hold on his body.
 
“Come,” he added, pulling her along the corridor.

Still lost in the haze of her desire, she followed, stumbling a little as her body coursed with excitement.
 
Her entire consciousness oriented around the feel of his strong, rough grip on her wrist.

He opened the first set of doors they encountered.
 
After pulling her into the room, he released her just long enough to close the doors behind them.
 
He turned back to find her right there, ready for him, her hands already reaching up to remove his coat and the remains of his vest.
 

She flung them away and pressed against him once more, even as he breached the low neckline of her dress with one hand, squeezing one of her full breasts.
 
She let out a moan, her head falling back to bare the column of her neck.
 
He fell on it, lost in her fierce beauty as his teeth nipped at the taut flesh and one hand reached for the lacings that held her dress to her body.
 

Somehow, they found the bed, having discarded her dress, his shirt—anything that yielded to their fevered grappling—along the way.
 
He pushed her onto the softness of the mattress, but even as she touched the coverlet, she was already half up again, her fingers working at the buttons of his pantaloons as he loomed over her.

He lifted the fabric of her chemise, drinking in the sight of her full breasts and the silken expanse of her torso, devoid of stays, for she had always detested the restrictive garments.
 
She took the chemise from him and pulled it over her head, even as he started on her stockinet pantaloons.
 

Once she had been divested of her undergarments, he groaned at the vision of her creamy thighs, spread before him like a feast of exotic delights.
 
He brushed her hands away from where they fumbled at his pantaloons, and began working at the buttons himself as he leaned into the blossom of her essence, nipping and licking, drinking in the sound of her soft, panting gasps as they grew steadily louder and became moans, then shorter, sharper screeches of pleasure.

Her hands found his shoulders, nails digging into them as she cried out her pleasure and he was flooded with the spicy aroma of her arousal.
 

“Clarendon!” she screamed.
 
“Edward!”

He pulled away, eager to join her, fumbling impatiently at the buttons until they finally yielded and he freed the hard tumescence of his penis, plunging into her moments before he reached the point of his own release.
 
Then, they clung to each other in the wilderness of their own savage pleasure garden, fused to one in a passionate storm of their own creation.

Afterwards, they lay together.
 
Tina experienced a surge of possessiveness as she felt his limbs tangled in her own, his deep, sleeping breaths against her neck, his tousled hair against her cheek.
 
Nothing—
nothing
had prepared her for what they had just shared.

Now—finally—she understood the force that had swept her mother up in its whirlwind.
 
Now she truly knew why Emily had decried the wantonness of her own nature.
 
And now, too, she understood the real dangers of the course she had taken in marrying the duke, for did she not already hate all the other women—and she knew too well that there were many—who had shared such dizzying intimacies with him?
 
And had he not warned her that his desire for her was like as not no more than infatuation?

She closed her eyes tightly, frightened by the force of her own feelings—already wondering how she would manage to stay sane, stay calm and accepting, when their marriage acquired fashionable proportions and he decided to take a mistress to sate his baser passions.
 

It wasn’t a matter of trusting him, for she already knew he was not the sort who would stay true to his plain wife.
 
It was a matter of rebuilding the trust in herself and her control over her own destiny, for too late, she realized how right she had been in thinking him a dark angel that first day in the library.
 
Too late, she understood how much she had truly relinquished in marrying the duke—in allowing him to possess her body, and with it, her soul.

That’s what those dreams were about—the ones I’ve been having this last week.
 
I fear my own helplessness against him.
 
I’m probably more vulnerable with him than I ever was with my stepfather, because Clarendon has the ability to hurt my very self, rather than just my body.
 
And I’ve
given
him that power.

And so, as he slept, Tina busied herself with her latest project: repairing the storm damage and preparing for the next onslaught of wild weather.
 
She began building walls, shoring up her expectations and sandbagging her emotions in the hopes that when the worst came to pass and he began to lose interest, she would be ready.

But, when he woke, raising his head to look at her, a tender smile tilting his lips as he lifted a hand to trace the line of her jaw, something inside her melted at the look on his face and she found herself smiling in return, despite her many fears and misgivings.
 

How will I do this?
she asked herself, even as she reached out to cup his cheek in her hand, feeling the rasp of his evening stubble against her palm.
 
How will I survive this?
 

But she already knew the answer to both questions.
 
She would love him and bask in his attentions for as long as he saw fit to lavish them upon her.
 
And when he turned elsewhere, she would survive because she had no other choice.
 
She only hoped that she would be strong enough to endure it with grace.
 
And, that such a time will be long in coming,
she thought as he leaned in to kiss her and the fire inside her kindled once more.

Clarendon smiled at the feel of her cheek against his chest, her head tucked into the curve of his arm.
 
In the fading light of evening, he examined the room where they had made such furious—and later, such voluptuous—love.

Given that this wing, on this floor of the manor, was devoted exclusively to the two sets of ducal apartments, there were only two possibilities as to whose bedchamber they were using.
 
As it turned out, they had ended up in the apartments that traditionally belonged to the Dukes of Clarendon.

He frowned as he glanced about, almost wishing that his mother had indulged in her zest for atrocious redecorations, for this had been his father’s room and the décor was a reminder of him.
 
“Was this where he died?”

He felt her move against him, and despite the dim light, he saw that she shook her head.
 
“No.
 
He began using one of the rooms on the ground floor when he worked late and was too tired to climb the stairs to these apartments, back when he first began to feel his illness.”

Clarendon felt something in him relax as Tina continued, “As his condition grew worse, he decided to keep to that room because he preferred the light there.
 
It was in another part of the manor and it got the late afternoon and evening sun.”

He swallowed.
 
“You probably knew him better than I did.
 
What was he like?
 
I left before I really had the chance to know him as a person, rather than as my father.”

She shifted, moving her arms so they lay across his chest, before propping her chin on her fist.
 
Now, he could see her face.
 
In the fading light, her eyes looked enormous and shadowed, her lips, soft and full.
 

“He was a man of profound integrity, humor and kindness,” she said.
 
“He was always scornful of convention if it went against what he considered to be good sense.
 
He thought the prevailing notion that the nobles should pay only the most peripheral attention to the holdings entrusted them was sheer irresponsibility.
 
I even heard him remark once or twice that the moment that attitude achieved common acceptance was the moment the nobility had outlived its usefulness.”

“So that’s where you acquired your unconventional views of the world,” he commented, marveling that he had never once suspected in his youth that his stodgy father would have held such radical opinions.
 
He had thought his father a fossil—tied to the land and to the plodding everyday mundanity of duty and obligation.
 

It had only been in the intervening years that he had come to recognize the kind of strength, persistence and compassion it took to live life as his father had done.
 
And it was in those years he began to understand that while those qualities did not have the glamour and flash of the grand, heroic gestures he had admired in his youth, his father’s brand of honor and heroism was far more difficult and far-reaching than those brief acts of courage.

Tina sighed.
 
“In a sense, yes.
 
But Uncle Charles never tried to convince me of his views or impose them upon me.
 
He simply encouraged me to discard the trappings of conventional opinions when they seemed to go against what made proper sense or seemed logical.
 
I came to agree with many of his outlooks and developed a few unconventional views of my own by following his method.
 
But he also taught me the value of discretion in airing such opinions.”