The Scandalous Love of a Duke (10 page)

“It doesn’t matter.” He reached out a hand to her, but she knocked it away.

“It does matter, when your choice to ask me here was made in a moment.” Ah, so she knew the truth of his affection, too, then.

“Well, you said I was bad.” He laughed, not knowing what else to say or do.

“I take it back. You are not bad, just spoilt.” She was half-dressed already and she turned her back to him, wordlessly asking him to re-lace her corset.

“Spoilt?” He began pulling at the threads.

“You’ve always had everything you want. You wish for it and you get it, John, including me.”

Her assessment stung, and he pulled her corset over-tight and felt her wince. “I have not always had everything I want, Katherine.”

She bent to pick up her dress.

He reached for his own clothing and began dressing too. He had not had a mother for the first ten years of his life. He was hardly spoilt.

She did not reply.

His heart beat steadily.

It was so strange to know she had cared for him all this time. The only time he had thought a woman loved him she had made him look a fool. Naïve and gullible, he had fallen hard and she’d cut him loose in a month. He’d been torn in half. He’d thought his heart broken. But then time had taught him it was only his pride which had been wounded. His feelings
had
merely been lust. He’d fallen in
lust
with numerous women since. Women whose names he could not even remember and whose faces had become a blur.

Katherine’s feelings were probably just lust.

He tucked his shirt into the waistband of his trousers and then began tying his cravat.

But others cared for him, his mother, Mary, his stepfather. The error was in John.
Because I do not believe in the fanciful notion of poetry!
If “love” was real, his mother would have been there for the first ten years of his life? The crushing despondency which always came on the back of his recurring dream flooded in.

He reached for his waistcoat and put it on. It had not looked like lust in Katherine’s eyes though. Her eyes had shone like his mother’s and his sister’s did when they looked at him. Affection. Yes, there was affection, like, regard.

She was dressed he saw when he turned about, lifting his coat to put it on.

She stood near the door, wearing the bonnet he’d bought, looking beautiful and utterly bereft.

He’d hurt her.

His arms slipped into his sleeves.

“I should not have come here.”

That grasped a hold of his attention.

“I am just amusement to you.”

“You are not!” He crossed the room in an instant and gripped her hands, which hovered before her waist. “Truly, Katherine.”

Then his hands lifted and braced her cheeks. “I am touched that you have cared for me for so long. I cannot say the same to you. You know it would be a lie if I did. I did not notice you before, Katherine, but I have seen you now.”

Her eyes held his, shining with questions she did not speak.

Did she want promises from him, declarations and vows he would never be able to speak? He wasn’t that person. He did not know how to love. But he was willing to let her try and prove to him that it was real for her, that she felt for him what the poets spoke of. Did she know how to love?

“Will you meet me again tomorrow, Katherine, here, at the same hour?”

She nodded, but she looked as though she did not wish to.

John leant back in the armchair, his elbows resting on the arms. He had a glass of port balanced in one hand, and one ankle rested on the opposite knee.

The house was silent, and seeing as there was no one here to care but himself, he’d lit a thin cigar.

He was sitting in the library, looking up at the life-size portrait of his grandfather, digesting the events of the day.

He could not fathom why his pragmatic, intolerant grandfather had kept a man like Wareham on all these years.

John drew on the cigar, let his head fall back, and blew the smoke upwards.

Wareham had left without a word of complaint, according to Finch. No one here knew why Wareham had gone. John had not even told Finch the details. It was no one’s concern but his.

He’d written to Harvey the minute he’d returned from seeing Katherine, informing him Wareham had been dismissed, and asking Harvey to advise all the other stewards Wareham had gone and to find a replacement.

John had a feeling he’d missed something though. He sipped his port and his mind swung to childhood memories. Ghosts always haunted him at night here, just as they’d done in Egypt. But tonight he called them forward. He was so sure there was something he’d forgotten.

The problem with memories was they came with the feelings which supported them. Feelings he was not allowed as a child but had had none the less: loneliness, isolation, emptiness and hurt.

He stared at his grandfather’s image and took another drag on the cigar.

John had been intensely glad of his capacity to hide and bury his feelings today.
Perhaps I ought to thank you
.

He lifted his glass in a mocking toast.

Now he was in the old man’s place, it seemed he was learning to understand the method behind the old man’s madness.

Neither Wareham nor Katherine can have known quite how much they disturbed him.

It was a blessing.

But John pushed that thought aside, it was not what he wished to consider. He wanted to know what he was forgetting. There was something… it was on the very edge of his conscious thought.

Wareham had always hovered when John had reviewed the books in his youth, leaning over John’s shoulder in an ominous, almost threatening, way. Wareham had never once left John alone, and when John had reached the end of each page, Wareham would check the lines John had written and total them.

“Bloody hell!”

John stood. He’d checked none of the totals.

He threw the remainder of the cigar into the empty hearth and put down his glass, then left the room.

The clever bastard.

Wareham had never once taught John to add up the columns or check the totals. He had not wanted John to consider them.

How long had Wareham’s fraud been running? It was years ago that he’d shown John the books.

John’s heart beat harder as he jogged upstairs. He was certain this was it.

In his private sitting room, he withdrew the key to his safe from his waistcoat pocket.

He had the ledgers on the desk in a moment and ran his finger down the first page, mentally calculating quickly. His count and the figure did not match. He checked it. It still did not.

Turning the page, he checked another total, no match, and the next, still no match. He looked at several and none of them tallied.

Oh my God.
Wareham had been fleecing the old man for years.
The bastard
. The old man would be rolling in his grave.

The differences in the sums were miniscule, but add every page together, and times that by years, it must be hundreds, perhaps thousands.

John’s fingers swept back his fallen fringe, and he remembered Katherine’s fingers sweeping it back from his brow earlier as she’d said goodbye.

It was strange thinking of her. Why this moment?
And I have wanted you like this since I saw you swimming in the lake before you even went abroad.
Perhaps it was the thought of the length of time?

Wareham had secretly hated John all this time, while Katherine had secretly loved, or lusted, or whatever it was she felt.

John pushed the thought of her aside, and sat down to write another letter to Harvey, certain there must be copies of these ledgers somewhere. Wareham would have needed to keep track of how much he stole.

There must be an account somewhere, too, an account from which Wareham must have made the loan which had never been repaid.

Of course, he could not have asked Harvey to manage the issue of the defaulted loan when it had been made from stolen money. It must have been paid from his own account not the duke’s.

Now all the detail slotted into place.

~

When Katherine entered the room at the top of the tower, John was sitting in the armchair. He’d already removed his coat, waistcoat and neckcloth.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” he charged. His eyes were like bright diamonds as he glared at her, and his fingers were toying with a long, jet-black rook’s feather, twirling it in the air.

He said no more, clearly waiting for her to speak.

He was in an ill mood she could see, and his ill moods obviously intensified his arrogant and spoilt nature. He didn’t smile and there was no welcome in his eyes as there had been yesterday.

She had only come back because when he’d asked her to yesterday, and said that he had noticed her now, she had seen the old John in his eyes, the youth she’d tumbled head-over-heels in love with, and he’d looked vulnerable. Yet that vulnerability was hidden, buried deep beneath the stance he held now.

She undid the ribbons of her bonnet.

Yet vulnerability was probably the reason he was sulking over her lateness – and why his posture was like stone. He obviously did not like people seeing it.

He looked detached and austere as she faced him. She guessed he was not. He had become hollow and heartless, to her eyes. But her soul said he was lonely and sorrowful. This is just what life had made him while he’d been abroad.

He’d brought a bottle of wine. It stood open on the table, with a single glass beside it. He’d clearly been here long enough to have a drink.

She hadn’t realised she was so late.

“My mother had errands she wished me to run.” Katherine felt angry with herself for giving excuses. What did it matter? It was her choice to come or not. She was not a servant to be ordered to attend him at a given time.

She set her bonnet aside and removed her gloves.

“I see,” he answered bitterly.

Oh, he was infuriating today.

She undid her spencer and slid it off, remembering him saying he hated it. It was that comment which had made her call him spoilt. Let him live her life and see how he felt about someone insulting the coat he wore each day. But of course that would never happen, his were cut and tailored on Savile Row, and he probably had three dozen.

“I thought you’d changed your mind, after yesterday.”

It
was
vulnerability then. She looked back at him and tried to see it beneath his hard exterior. She could not. He was sliding the tip of the feather down one cheek and across his chin, watching her.

“Obviously not.” If he was going to act like a child, she would treat him like one. “But you are sulking because I’m late.”

“I’m not sulking. I do not sulk, Kate. If I wished to sulk, I would pay someone to sulk for me.”

She poked her tongue out at him, knowing he was referring back to her accusation that he was spoilt. She put her spencer down, then crossed the room and bent to kiss his brow, smoothing back his hair. He still didn’t move.

“May I have some wine?” she asked, drawing away.

“If you wish.”

She did. She poured it for herself and said, with her back to him, “If you are not sulking, then you are angry with me.”

“No.”

“What are you then?” She turned back, gripping the full glass.

“Hungry for you. Take off your dress.”

“A ducal command. How romantic.” He was in such a strange mood today – studying her – uncommunicative. Had something happened which he was taking out on her? He genuinely seemed upset.

“I am not romantic. Do not expect it of me.”

She had not. But she was not stripping on his whim.

She turned and looked out through the window, sipping her wine. The only house visible was Pembroke Place. The pale-stone Palladian mansion reminded her of how far apart their worlds were. It felt as though she was living in fiction. She could not really be here.

“So are you going to undress?” he asked, behind her.

Ignoring his petulant tone, and his order, she sipped her wine again.

“Do you still want me?” There was an odd note to his voice now, one that did sound like a child. His ducal shield was slipping.

She turned back and met his hard, judging gaze. “I was not late on purpose, John.”

“No?”

“No.” Indignant anger tightened like a knot in her chest. “I had things to do. My absence would have been noted if I had not done them first.”

“Is it some lesson to me?”

“Of course it must be to do with you, it can be nothing to do with me, because everyone knows even the sun only circles the earth to pass about you.” She sipped her wine and hoped the jab hurt him as he’d hurt her yesterday.

He had not taken his eyes off her, but nothing in his expression showed a response to her words. She had said it to make him angrier. She wished for some reaction from him. At least let him prove he was human.

She drank the last of her wine, set the glass down and went to him. Then she leant forward and kissed his lips, her fingers bracing her weight on his shoulders. He did not kiss her back.

She pulled away and still faced his chilly look, but behind it she knew there was insecurity and need, though she was sure he would never admit it openly.

She kissed him again and this time his hand came up and braced the back of her head as his lips opened and he kissed her in return. It was a stubborn and demanding kiss. It didn’t matter, she had needs too, and they pulsed into life, exhilarated by the anticipation which clutched in her stomach.

When she ended the kiss because it was too awkward bending down, he said again, “Take off your dress.”

She may be a bastard by birth but John Harding had become a bastard in nature.

However, she chose to comply, because beneath the skin of the duke was the young man she had adored, and
he
needed her. She began undoing her dress.

That young man had been kind and thoughtful towards her, as much of a brother as Phillip had been. This man, she didn’t know. He was a stranger in John’s body really, and yet she knew the boy and the youth were within him. He needed her to help him find who he was again. This was not John.

The black feather still brushing his cheek, John watched her, feeling control slipping through his fingers like sand. She undid her buttons and then slid her arms free so her dress hung from her waist, before pushing it off over her petticoats. His heart pounded so loud he heard it in his ears.

“And the rest,” he prompted, waving the feather in her direction,
because everyone knows even the sun only circles the earth to pass about you
.
Her words had cut again. Why did she think him spoilt? He was not.

Once she’d undone the tapes of her petticoats they slid to the floor, and then she walked towards him and turned so he could help with her corset. His mouth dried at the defiant look he saw in her eyes. He liked her timidity, but he rather liked her in a defiant mood too. It made her blue eyes glow and her skin flush pinker.

He unlaced her in a trice and she needed no prompting to continue. She slipped off her chemise, baring her breasts before removing her underwear and revealing all. He’d seen her yesterday, yet today he still felt awed, and heat pulsed into his groin. She had long, slender limbs and her curves were beautifully slight, yet perfectly formed.

When he looked from her body back up to her face, she was watching him.

“Come here.” The heat in his blood had warmed his voice.

She came and stood between his parted thighs.

He began playing with the feather he’d found where he’d left his horse, drawing circles on her tummy.

She shivered.

He brushed it across her hip, then down her outer thigh, before running it back up her inner thigh.

He saw her muscle jolt.

When he looked up, her eyes were closed, but then they opened and her hands cupped his cheeks so he could not look down again.

He did not cease his caresses but let the tip of the feather touch her intimately. The reaction on her face was shock, but then her body relaxed and she bit her lip.

She could hide nothing from him this girl, she did not even try, and there was that fierce burning look of love in her eyes.

Katherine
.

He ran the feather in and out between her legs, testing her. He had a desire to make her hate him today, to prove that love was wrong – to fail him, because he did not deserve to be loved. If love was what she truly felt?

He’d had the dream again last night.

He set out to torture her, and perhaps it was cruel, perhaps he was spoilt, but he didn’t care. He’d thought she wasn’t going to come and he’d not been able to bear the thought, and so it was better the truth was out and she let him down now rather than in the future.

“Touch me,” she pleaded after a while, as he danced the very tip of the feather about the point where she was most sensitive.

He did not comply but carried on, holding her gaze with his eyes and her mind with his wicked game. Let her see how bad he was, let her know and then decide if she could love him.

He tormented her for a little longer, just to prove the point that he would not be told. If anyone was the master it would be him. But then he did a thing he knew would shock her virginal soul and used his mouth and tongue, bracing and kneading her buttocks while he pleasured her and himself, and her fingers clasped in demure shock clutching fistfuls of his hair.

He made her climax like that, teaching her just how base her passion could be, and she did so on a fractured cry, her muscle quaking in his hands.