The Scandalous Love of a Duke (28 page)

“She said she was your first, I think you would remember that.”

His lips pursed.

He was her first. She would never forget that night.

“She was my first, yes. It happened in Paris, the summer I left England. She chased me for a week. It is her thing – to break young men in. She broke me. Is that what you wish to know? Or do you want explicit details?” She did not answer the vindictive taunt. “She was the first, but she was not the only,” he went on, clearly warming to the theme. “There were many. I had a colourful reputation abroad. I can list names if you wish?”

He was deliberately provoking her, she knew, because he did not really wish to speak of this.

“It is what young gentlemen of noble birth do. We are sent abroad on the tour explicitly to sow our wild oats and plough as many furrows as we wish out of the sight of our mamas and the judgement of society. There are whores on every corner at the tourist destinations, even in the arches of the Colosseum. I am mortal, and I was young.” His piercing gaze bored into her, challenging her to comment or to judge.

When she did neither, a deep sigh left his throat. “I thought I was in love with her, with Elizabeth Ponsonby, if you must know. Now I know it was only ever a youth’s infatuation. But when I found her with another man and realised I was nothing to her, I went on a rampage of carnal revenge, behaving just like her. I felt better for it for a long while. It took me years to realise that I was only hurting myself. And still more years to know I never loved her in the first place.”

His shoulders shrugged. “She has been chasing me again for a few weeks. It appears I am to her taste once more since I acquired my title. I have already told her once, before tonight, I am not interested. Yet for the sake of her vanity she cannot accept no.”

Katherine looked out the window, not really seeing.

“I was one among many, Katherine. Everyone behaved like that abroad.”

Does he think that makes it better?
“I learned that tonight,” she answered, facing him again.

His eyes flashed with anger. “Framlington. He is as bad as his sister. Keep away from him.”

“The people you mix with are all false, John. I don’t like them.” Suddenly her courage of earlier ebbed, her love seemed too sparse to change anything. She needed him to love her back. She realised she was crying.

John moved across the carriage and his arm came about her. “Katherine, I cannot change my past.”

Her head fell against his shoulder and she nodded. She knew it. It was just the turmoil of all this sudden change affecting her.

His fingers gripped hers in her lap. “I did not mean to upset you. I have not been with another woman for years, and I never felt for Elizabeth even a hundredth of what I feel for you. Knowing you has proven to me how shallow my feelings for her really were.”

A sob left her lips.

“I was alone in Egypt, Katherine. I’m not that person anymore. I will be faithful to you.” His pitch urged her to believe him. She looked up at him, and noted the bruise on his cheek again, and the healing cut in his lip.

“Katherine, I love you.” She looked into his pale eyes. They shone with sincerity. “Believe me…” They were John’s eyes, and they bore the plea she’d seen in the parlour at home when he’d offered for her.

“I know,” she whispered in return. But she did not know if he knew how to love. “I’m just tired. Everything has happened so fast…”

He held her gaze, “And you are reliant on a man who has let you down already. He did not come to your marriage bed and now he has introduced you to his former mistress. I’m sorry, Katherine. I want you to be happy but I cannot change the past, sweetheart.” He brushed a kiss on her lips, gently.

Her arms reached about his shoulders as she returned it just as gently so she did not hurt his lip. It was an intensely sweet kiss. It was nothing like the lustful, hungry kisses she had shared with him before.

When the carriage finally halted at the door of his,
their
, townhouse, they were still kissing in leisurely devotion.

He pulled away and smiled slightly a moment before a footman opened the door and another set down the step.

John offered his hand, before his footman could, and climbed down first. But when her foot left the step he let her hand go and instead swept her off her feet, whispering, “Another thing I was remiss over yesterday, a bridegroom is supposed to carry his bride over the threshold, is he not?”

She smiled up at him, clinging to his shoulders as he carried her up the steps and into the grand hall. A clock struck twelve somewhere in the downstairs rooms and she looked over his shoulder just to check his coach had not turned into a pumpkin. It had not.

Mr Finch bowed deeply, but John did not set her down, and she was blushing intensely as he crossed the black and white chequered marble floor, speaking over his shoulder at the butler. “Tell Smithson I will not need him, Finch.”

The heels of his dancing shoes rang on the marble as he walked, and then he was climbing the stairs with her still in his arms.

“You may set me down,” she whispered. “Your staff are watching.”

In point of fact they were not, they were doing anything but watching, schooling their faces to a blank as they looked everywhere else but at the stairs.

“They are paid well enough to see and hear nothing, Katherine, and if they dare to gossip they know they’ll be dismissed within hours.”

When they reached the state chambers, John kicked the door open and then shut it again with his heel. He let her feet slip to the floor when it was shut and then gripped her nape and kissed her once more. His other hand held her waist.

Breaking the kiss after a while, he said, “You’re mine, Katherine, I’ll not be cuckolded.” His pale eyes glowed with the intensity that was all John.

“And you are mine, John Harding,” she answered. “I’ll not be made a fool of.”

He smiled, and she knew they had just made another promise to each other as important and as solemn as their marriage vows. His finger tugged loose the ribbon which tied her cloak and it fell to the floor.

She felt breathless. It had been such a long time since the night at Pembroke Place and the hours they’d spent in the tower.

“I already know I am yours, Katherine. I have been since Grandfather’s funeral. You are all I think of. I am your slave, darling.”

His fingers slipped her dress from her shoulders, leaving the short, puffed sleeves draped lower down her arms.

Her heart thundered with anticipation. All the feelings she had known in the bright tower room and in his shadowed bedchamber flooded back.

As his eyes held hers, his fingers trailed across the top curve of her breasts.

She wanted to touch him but there was a foot between them and his gentle exploration seemed to will her not to breach the boundary he’d set.

“I’ve missed you,” he stated as his hand slid into her bodice.

“Missed my body,” she answered in a husky voice.

“Missed
you
.” His fingers slipped free of her bodice and then he moved closer so he could reach about her and undo the buttons at her back. He looked over her shoulder, watching his fingers work as he did so.

She looked up at the ceiling and faced some Greek scene of women lying all about a chaise-longue dining on fruit.

His lips touched her neck as her dress fell slacker and her breasts seemed to press more firmly against her corset.

He could make her feel such delicious things and she was free to love him without guilt.

Her arms lifted and settled on his shoulders as he bit and nipped at her neck.

He was making no effort to rush, her dress hung open at the back but his hands merely gripped her waist as he kissed her neck.

She kissed his earlobe and his hair and stroked her hands across his back.

A part of her could not believe she was with John again. She was his wife.

His hands lifted and kneaded her breast over the cloth of her gown as his lips came back to hers. The kiss was gentle, by the necessity of his sore lip, but the gentleness was excruciatingly blissful. She felt as if she was drowning in the emotions he induced in her.

When he broke the kiss, she was breathless again.

Holding her gaze, he drew her dress down and, smiling at him, she slipped his evening coat from his shoulders.

He took it off.

Everything in his expression spoke of a devotion and desire which was beyond physical. He needed her. She knew he did. He was letting her in to view all his vulnerability and know him for who he was, letting her know he loved her.

He leant over her shoulder again and unthreaded her lacing. She began unbuttoning his waistcoat. They then stripped each other systematically and slowly, peeling off layers. When it came to the last, she watched his naked body, sitting on the edge of his bed as her foot rested on his muscular thigh and he rolled down her second stocking.

He kissed the sole of her foot once it was off. Then with one hand still gripping her foot, the other braced her neck and he kissed her lips once more. She melted inside. His gentleness was sublime. It had not been like this in the tower, nor in his bed at The Place.

“Lay back,” he whispered when he broke the kiss. She did, with her legs still dangling to the floor.

He knelt before her and she throbbed there, burning with need and damp heat as he paid homage with his mouth.

If she could simply forget the world beyond his bedchamber, she would have the most wonderful marriage. She was in ecstasy. Her first flood drew close, the wave rising, about to break, but then he ceased and stood and half leant over her and the wave washed away without a crest.

One hand parted her naked thighs wider, and his other hand pressed down on the mattress beside her, and then there was pressure between her thighs where she had only known it once before.

It was not painful. It felt right. Though the sensation of pressure also felt like stretching, it filled her and completed here, the other half of her whole. But it challenged her and overwhelmed her too, to have him there, within her body, where his child already grew.

He was still standing on the floor, leaning over her and pressing into her, slowly, gently.

Her fingers lifted and touched the bruise on his cheek as he withdrew.

John.

His movement expressed tenderness, and longing, and a need to relish, but with each movement he gained more depth, pressing a little deeper, urging her legs a little wider.

John.

His thrusts developed a stronger but still slow rhythm. She became breathless again and her fingers gripped his lower arms, while her calves gripped at his back.

She was panting in time with his rhythm and no longer able to see the painting on the ceiling above as her vision clouded, all she could focus on was John, on his face as he looked down at her. The look in his eyes was a caress too.

John.

The pattern he was weaving charmed her senses, assailing them. She had never imagined this could feel as it did. She felt cherished by him, and yet that gentleness drove her wild with need.

“John.”

Her fingernails cut into his forearms and her head pressed back into the bed as she closed her eyes and gripped his hips with her legs.

His movement quickened and sharpened. She broke all about him, tumbling over a cliff into drifting heaven.

“I love you,” he whispered, increasing his tempo to allegro, moving more swiftly, but there was still a blissful planned determination about it as he delivered these swift, short, sharp strokes, making her pant for more and cling to his shoulders instead of his arms.

He was breathless too, his breathing was heavy and rasping and she could feel and smell sweat on his skin. She liked his smell and liked his body weight coming down more heavily on to her as he neared the end.

“John!” She broke again a moment after his weight fell fully on her and his body clenched in spasm.

His forehead rested on her shoulder.

Her fingers ran though his hair.

When he lifted off her and withdrew, she felt cold.

But he walked about the bed and then pulled the covers down. “Slide in.”

She did, feeling tired.

He climbed in beside her, leaving the candles burning, then set his arm about her shoulders and kissed her temple. “I love you, Katherine.”

“I love you too,” she said, pillowing her head on his shoulder.

“Even after all I have done. I’ve treated you badly.”

“Yes, but love cannot judge. It is why I turned Richard away after you left, I couldn’t marry him when I still loved you.”

“I am going to make you happy,” he said to the air above her, as though it was another vow. “You can trust me, Katherine.”

“I am going to make you happy too.” Her fingers cupped his cheek, though she was too tired to lift her head. “Be yourself with me. I don’t want you to be like the people I met tonight.”

She fell asleep.

“Goodnight,” Mary called in the hallway.

Her mother answered, “Sleep well.”

The sound pulled Katherine out of sleep.

The Duke and Duchess’s suite of rooms extended to the left, and although there were guest rooms opposite, his family used those stretching from the landing to the right.

It wasn’t Mary’s voice that had woken Katherine though. John had disturbed her. He was breathing heavily, as though he was running, and beneath her palm his skin was damp and hot and his chest muscle twitched.

She rose onto her elbow.

In the candlelight flickering from a stub, she could his eyes moving rapidly beneath his eyelids. Then he gasped and his arm flailed, pushing her away as he sat up suddenly.

“No!” His cry echoed about the room.

He was fully awake then and one leg hung from the edge of the bed as he sat up, while the other curled before him and his fingers gripped the covers as he fought to catch his breath.

“What did you dream?” She sat up too, holding the sheet to cover her breasts.

He glanced at her as though he’d forgotten she was there and he looked as though he did not quite understand where he was.

Jenny had had dreams like this as a child, disorientating nightmares. Sometimes she’d woken everyone, shouting at shadows.

“Nothing.”

She heard a clock chime three after midnight somewhere in the house.

John got up and drew in a deep breath, then he crossed the room to a decanter and poured a glass of brandy, his back to her.

“John?” she said softly. “Tell me what you dreamed. It always made my sister feel better when she spoke of bad dreams.”

He turned and the orange light of the flickering candle illuminated him, gilding the firm muscular contours of his chest and limbs.

He sipped his brandy.

“I’m not a child. I told you, it was nothing.”

His ducal guard was up again, and his voice was disparaging, it was as though he slipped in and out of his armour without even knowing he did it. It was not nothing, though, otherwise why would he now be on his guard.

She had a feeling he’d dreamed of something which touched reality. He would hardly be scared of imagined monsters, not John.

His hand shook when it swept back his fringe, and he took another sip of brandy. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“John?”

He smiled at her, as he walked back across the room, but it was obviously a false smile. “Honestly, it was nothing, just my head playing tricks.”

She made a disbelieving face at him. But he just smiled more broadly. “If you wish to chase away my demons, make love to me again.”

The bed dipped as he climbed beneath the sheets, but he made no move to touch her. Instead he slotted the pillows behind him and sat upright against the headboard. His mood had darkened behind his smile. He seemed more like the John of those hours in the tower. He was so hard to read.

“Sit astride me.”

Yes, he was the John of the tower, all brooding sexual intensity.

His smile turned wicked as he beckoned her with his fingers. Ignoring his belligerence, she smiled back. She was going to save him from these dark elements of his character. She was going to set him free of his chains and help him to stop retreating into this person who denied human feeling. He
was
feeling.

Her fingers brushed back his hair as she straddled his slender, muscular hips, while the backs of his fingers brushed over her stomach, as though he thought of the child.

She kissed him gently, a kiss of love, she did not let him deepen it but just gently adored his lips with hers as her breasts brushed against his chest and the backs of his fingers drew circles on her stomach.

After a while though, impatience seemed to grasp him and, his hands bracing her head, he ended the kiss, his pale gaze boring into hers. “Make love to me. I need you to.”

Need? She really thought he did need. He looked as though he wanted to escape into her. She would let him do so. She was here for him always now.

As she lifted and impaled herself, she felt his sharp outward breath on her cheek.

Had he been escaping from something when they’d been in the tower room too? He’d said on the way home, he’d lived alone in Egypt. And at The Place he’d said that he felt isolated amongst his family. Had he turned to her then to have someone? No wonder he’d written those desperate letters to her, if that was so. He did need her.

His hands on her hips helped her move, rocking her forward and up, and then down and back, and his breathing was heavy.

The movement began weaving its spell inside her again. It spun up like a wind, gently spiralling and gathering.

Her fingers braced the back of his neck, and her weight was on either shin beside his hips. Her toes curled under to give her more control, guided by him.

He was looking down, watching their joining, absorbed in it.

It felt wonderful to know she could distract him like this, that if he trusted no one else, he was beginning to trust her. She quickened her movement and took the lead from his hands. His grip fell away and instead his hands fell on to her thighs, not clinging but merely feeling and letting her have control.

He was relaxing, and he looked intoxicated as he lifted his head.

Then his hand was at the back of her head and he kissed her hard, once, no matter his damaged lip, before gripping one breast and bringing it to his mouth.

Her head fell back and she worked to please him, lifting and lowering, seeking to free him.

She still fell before him, and when she did, his fingers gripped her hips hard once more and ended the encounter by lifting and dropping her body with hard, aggressive movements until he shattered too.

They were panting and clinging to one another, warm and sweaty again, wrapped in each other’s arms, when she came back to reality.

Katherine lifted her head and said in a quiet voice, “When Phillip came today he told me I do not value myself, that I think I am unlovable. He blamed it on his mother and mine, because they both let me down. But he said he loved me, and Richard had loved me, and that you could too.”

“I do, Katherine.” John’s fingers brushed her hair back from her brow. “Why would you think your real mother did not love you?”

“Because she took her own life rather than staying with me. She could not have felt for me, could she?” She heard the heartache in her voice, even after all these years of life with no mother. How could you long for a person you’d never known? But she did. “When we did what we did in the tower, and your chamber, I imagined that I knew her and I could feel a part of her, because I was feeling what she felt.”

His eyes narrowed in a look of confusion, but she carried on, wishing to get this out, knowing that if she spoke, perhaps it would cease its hold on her, as if it were a nightmare like John’s. And perhaps, if she spoke, he’d speak too.

“When I watched you when I was younger and felt an urge to be close to you, I felt it then too, I rejoiced at the fact I had something of her in me. And Phillip’s mother always told me I would fall like my mother.” His fingers stroked through her hair. “Sins of the fathers, she preached to me. I
wanted
to be like my mother.”

She sighed. “Then I fell with child just as she’d done and didn’t understand her at all. How could she have left me alone to face life by myself with no mother or father and no one to love me? I would not have given my child up. I could never do what she did. She didn’t love me…”

He held her gaze and stroked her hair again, “And she was probably, desolate, Katherine, and terrified and not thinking clearly. She was probably in a deep black hole and did not know how to climb out of her self-pity. She probably thought you would be better off without her—”

“With no one to love me?”

“With a family who could give you food and clothing and a roof. Things would have been very different for you, Katherine, if she’d lived. She would have had to keep working, and not many employers would welcome a woman with a naturally born child to keep. You and she would have probably ended up in the workhouse.”

Katherine climbed off him and moved to sit beside him. His arm came about her and she curled into his side, her hand resting on his chest, while one leg slid over his. She wished to climb into his security. But he was only secure in this room, tucked away from the servants and society. She had become a part of his
secret self
. She had not really broken down any of his walls.

His fingers slipped through her hair again. “There is nothing sinful about you, or your behaviour, Katherine,
nothing
. Everyone feels attractions, you were young and growing from a girl to a woman, of course you would feel something for boys—”

“Not boys,” she interrupted, “just you.”

There was a slight sound of humour in his throat and his fingers stroked though her hair again. “Then I am very flattered, and a very lucky man to have discovered such devotion, and you cannot think yourself sinful, only in love. I knew it in the summer and I took advantage of it. It was wrong of me. But you saw the world I came from last night and—”

“And you knew no better…”

“I did know better, but I chose to grasp something which was precious. I should have done it honourably, Katherine, I should have courted you from the first—”

“A bastard dairymaid’s daughter—”

“A beautiful woman, with a heart of gold, who loves me, when I do not deserve to be loved. A woman who I knew was valuable from the moment I saw her at my grandfather’s funeral, when I did not even recognise her… Katherine?” he said, when he clearly realised she was crying, and then he was kissing the crown of her head and wiping her tears away with his thumb. “I love you. If I’m honest, I probably loved you instantly that day I met you in the road, or perhaps it was that first moment when I saw you at the funeral.”

“I do believe you love me,” Katherine said through her sobs, “but, at the moment, I believe it with my head not my heart, John, my heart is too used to being unloved, and insignificant.”

“You are not insignificant now either, you are a duchess, and is that not a measure of how much I love you?”

She breathed deeply, wondering how he’d ended up comforting her, when she had begun comforting him.

“We are a pair, aren’t we?” he whispered to the air. “Both hungry for love, and unsure of it. I think we were meant to be together. I wish I had known it before I went abroad.” His hand stroked over her hair again and she felt him looking up at the ceiling beyond the canopy of the bed and felt as though he wished to say something more, but he did not.

Instead, his fingers tilted up her chin and then he was kissing her gently, and a moment later he pressed her back down onto the bed and came over her and made love to her once more.

A sense of complete devotion filled her as he did so. She forgot about everything beyond his bed and his room. Here, she was happy.

~

A gentle knock struck on the connecting door leading to Katherine’s rooms.

She woke, curled on her side, with John’s weight at her back.

She felt sick.

“Stay there,” his deep voice commanded as he moved. The knock had obviously woken him too.

He climbed off the bed and she heard him moving about the room but did not turn for fear the sickness would run away with her.

“Come in!”

As the door opened, John appeared on her side of the bed.

He wore a red silk dressing gown and bore a porcelain chamber pot, which he put down on a chest beside the bed.

“Your Grace, I was asked to bring Her Grace’s tray early.”

“Bring it over here, Esther, please. Thank you.”

John took the tray from the maid’s hands.

She lowered in a deep curtsy. “Is there anything else, Your Grace?”

“Nothing, thank you, Esther. That will be all.”

The maid backed out the room. She had kept her eyes lowered the whole time, not looking at either of them, deferring. But still the outside world rushed in and formed a wall in between her and John. They would never just be them. There were servants and family and visitors and tenants…

He set the tray down beside the chamber pot and the scent of ginger tea and freshly toasted bread filled the air. She felt hungry.

“Do you want some cushions behind you so you may sit up?”

She nodded and rose carefully so he could set them there.

“You look green.” He handed her the plate of toast. “Eat this first then sip the tea. Is it always this bad?”

She nodded tentatively. “Most days.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and when she’d eaten a little of the toast, handed her the tea.

She shook her head at him and smiled. “So attentive, John Harding. This was thoughtful of you…” She called him that deliberately, she did not wish to think of him as a duke here. He must have ordered all this yesterday.

His fingers swept her hair off her brow. “Just seeking to make you as spoilt as me so you can stop casting accusations.”

She laughed and realised she was actually feeling less sick. Oh, it felt good to have him here – to have someone being kind to her.

Kind? She remembered Mr Wareham.

Could John be kind? Mr Wareham had given his life to John’s grandfather and John had summarily dismissed him. “Why did you discharge Mr Wareham?”

She had asked him once at Jenny’s party and he’d not answered.

“Where on earth did that come from?” John felt as though she’d punched him in the gut. He did not wish to think of such things here with her. Let his duties sit beyond his bedchamber door.

“I was thinking that it was kind of you to recognise my needs, but then I remembered Mr Wareham, and I remembered that kindness is not always your forte, John.”

He sighed. He did deserve that from her though. “Perhaps not.”
Damn
. She may have good reason to judge him badly, but still, that she judged him to be the guilty party, hurt. But her words had let duty invade the room and it gripped a hold of him. He supposed he ought to face it. Much as he wished to, he could not stay with her. Without saying a word, he rose and walked to his dressing room.