The Scandalous Love of a Duke (30 page)

“How are things?” he asked when they let go of one another.

“Well.”

Taking his hand, she then pulled him to a sofa at one side of the room where they could talk more privately, and John’s family seemed to respect this, they left them to speak.

She told Phillip in a rush about the ball last evening.

When John entered the room a little later, she did not look up.

Nor did she look at him through dinner. He was at the opposite end of the table to her, and Phillip was beside her. She talked endlessly to Phillip though, and in between courses she gripped his hand.

He told her John had offered him work. He told her their father had written back to him and asked him to watch over her and ensure she was happy, and that Jenny had sent congratulations too.

When they’d finished eating, John’s mother stood, and Katherine realised it should have been her role to notice it was time for the woman to leave. Oh, she had so much to remember and learn. She finally looked at John then, he was rising out of respect because his mother and his elder sisters had done so. He smiled at her as she stood too, as much as his scabbed lip allowed. She smiled back.

How was she to help him simply be himself when he would be out every day, beyond her reach?

Taking the reins of responsibility from his mother, Katherine turned and led the way from the room, leaving the men to their port and cigars.

~

John walked into the drawing room an hour later. Edward had sent John’s brothers up to bed after a quarter-hour. Once they’d gone, the conversation had turned to the developments with Wareham. Thus they’d stayed at the table longer than normal as they’d lost track of time. He’d let Katherine down a fifth time.

He was struck by a domestic tableau as he entered.

Katherine was sitting at his grandmother’s pianoforte. It was an instrument on which he’d learned to play as a child. Her fingers ran across the keys with significant ease.

John hated the damn thing.

He stopped just inside the room, motionless, unable to move as both Phillip and his father walked past. It was as though the sound flipped his daytime into the terror of his dreams. The wash of childhood insecurity swept through his veins, confusing his rational mind.
What the hell is happening to me?
he cursed as he forced himself to walk on.
I am not a snivelling child now. For God’s sake, stop this
.

Forcing his ill memories away, he crossed the room and took the seat beside Katherine on the stool. His eyes followed the movement of her fingers.

She had a very real skill. He hadn’t known she played so well. But even so, the pleasant sound grated on his nerves like fingernails running down a blackboard.

He looked up, searched for the notes she played on the sheet music, and then followed them across the lines. When he turned the page for her, his fingers were shaking.

On the edge of his consciousness he could hear Mary and Phillip talking, and his parents occasionally joining in. The younger girls had been sent to bed too.

He was extremely glad there were no other guests.

Stiffly, he turned the page again, trying to force himself to like the music but it hinted at so many days he had been alone in this house with his grandparents, not understanding how he fitted into the family.

Katherine was absorbed in the music, reading it from the page and transporting it through her fingers into notes. Mary and his parents laughed at something Phillip had said. John felt his muscles contract.

He forced himself to keep breathing and turned the page again. But the tremor in his hands had increased. He was unravelling at the seams once more.

“Why don’t you sing for us, John?” Mary called as Katherine’s piece drew to its conclusion with a complex flourish she mastered easily.

His fingers fell away from the music to his thigh and he felt an inner panic swamp him. He cursed violently in his head, using every language of swear words he knew. This was ridiculous. His rational thought knew that. But the problem was there was this other part of him that was irrational and tied up with the damned dream from his childhood. He’d always thought once he’d known where his mother was, the dream would pass on and these feelings of weakness, inability and unworthiness with it. But no. Life was not to be as kind to him as that.

“Yes, John,” Katherine stated, her fingers resting on his thigh.

He gritted his teeth and stood. “Forgive me. There are some papers I ought to review. Excuse me.” His gaze reached to his parents and Mary. Then he glanced at Katherine and nodded, before looking at Phillip. “Phillip.”

Phillip nodded back and John then left the room, escaping into privacy where he could nurse his madness in secret.

Katherine felt bewildered as she watched John. He looked upset.

The more time she spent with John, it seemed she understood him less.

She wondered whether to go after him.

“I should be on my way,” Phillip stated across the room.

Katherine turned an apologetic smile to him. He was standing, and Mary and John’s parents had risen in response.

Katherine stood too.

“John is such a killjoy,” Mary stated. “He will never sing, and his voice is the best of us all.”

“Mary,” John’s mother admonished, pressing her fingers to her daughter’s arm to silence her. There was something wrong. His mother knew it too.

Phillip came across to Katherine and took her hands, to say goodbye.

“I’ll walk down with you,” she whispered.

“I’m glad you came,” she said, as they left the room.

“Thank John for inviting me.”

She nodded. Then as they walked along the hall she asked, “Why does John dislike singing so much?”

Phillip’s gaze fell to her as she looked up at him, though they did not stop walking. “It’s not my place to say. Ask John.”

“But you know?”

“Not really, I only know pieces of his past that would make it likely. I doubt Mary knows the history of it at all, she’s so much younger than John.”

There was a clue in his words, John’s dislike must stem from his childhood.

She accompanied Phillip downstairs but said nothing else. Her mind focused on how to open a conversation with John.

~

John sat at his desk in his private sitting room. His elbows on the solid wood and his head in his hands as he fought the monster of emotion roaring in his head. It was an irrational fear but it was uncontrollable. His head was spinning in a dark pit of pain.

He was not a child anymore, and it shouldn’t matter. But it did,
God
it did. The memories and the ensuing pain were unbearable. It was as though he was ten again, driving away with his grandfather in that damn coach and leaving his mother and all happiness behind, as though someone had ripped his innards out.

Pull yourself together
. But he could not. The unfeeling ice cold wouldn’t come.

Thinking of his grandfather and himself as a small boy, he remembered craving some sign, some slight signal of connection or approval, and gaining none.

The image slipped to the horde of his younger brothers and sisters with whom he could achieve no mental or emotional connection.

What of his child?

A bitter lancing pain pierced his chest and he sat back with a groan of despair.

Katherine stood at the door to the room. He’d thoughtlessly left it open. She was watching him, wide-eyed and hesitant.

It was dark, no candles burned. But silver moonlight seeped through the curtains, bleaching the room to white and black. Shadow and light. That was himself and Katherine. She was the light.

His lack of comment obviously gave her courage. She stepped into the room and walked towards him. “What is it, John? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He would not humiliate himself by admitting to a pathetic childish weakness.

“It is not nothing now, any more than it was nothing last night when you woke.”

His lips twisted in a distasteful expression, yet the knot of anxiety was already easing within him. He shrugged. “Nothing important
then…”

“No?” Her eyes were dark in the lowlight.

God, I love this woman
. The grace of her movements, the pitch of her voice and her understated beauty were all a balm to his battered, jaded soul.

She stopped before him and her hands braced his cheeks. She had such a soothing, gentle touch, and her hands were warm and grasped a hold of his senses. She leant and kissed him.

His eyelids fell. Her kiss was like a cold compress pressed on a graze. It healed his pain.

He took a breath and opened his eyes.

She
had
been angry earlier, he’d realised that over dinner when she had barely looked his way. She’d just concealed it, for whatever reason. But her anger was deserved.

His fingers gripped at her hips, and looking up, he met her gaze. “I am sorry about this morning.”

“You are getting very good at saying sorry, John, but you cannot really be sorry if you repeat what you have already apologised for.” She was right of course, but there was no way he was prepared to discuss the turbulence currently inside him, not with her, not with anyone.

Her thumbs brushed across his cheekbones and his gaze fell to her stomach. He laid his cheek against where their child grew – another infant who would be hungry for love. Perhaps the child would never receive it from him.

Her fingers slid through John’s hair and his breath fractured. He wished he could cry but, of course, such sentimentality had been physically beaten out of him a long time ago.

“John?”

He shook his head, he didn’t want to speak. “Just love me, Katherine.” His words were brisk and harsh.

Her fingers stroked through his hair as he kissed her stomach through the fabric of her gown and his hands slipped to her buttocks. He could smell her sex through the layers of cloth. She was aroused already. “Undo your dress,” he whispered, looking up and meeting her gaze.

His hands had begun working up her skirt.

Between orders and assistance, he rapidly stripped her while he only removed his evening coat. At the last he removed her shoes and stockings as her feet rested on his thighs one by one and her hands gripped his shoulders.

He took pleasure in the relief of commands, seeking solace in the return of control and influence.

Once she was fully naked and vulnerable, he looked up and met her gaze again, smiling. One bare foot still rested on his thigh. His fingers ran upwards and over her knee then they slipped under her thigh and ran along the inner surface. When he reached her juncture, his thumb pressed against her while his fingers entered and began teasing her senses.

Her grip tightened on his shoulders and her gaze held his. He somehow knew she understood. She knew he needed to play master. She was letting him, as she’d let him in the tower room, which meant she was mastering him, and not the other way about.

He didn’t care.

His fingers worked with more determination, claiming all of her attention, and her eyes closed and then her head fell back and she was panting. He watched her, lost in her as she was lost in what he did.

When she came, he used his mouth and tasted her, and once he was satisfied, he stood and lifted her onto the desk, bid her undo his flap and took her like that – he dressed, she naked – driving into her as she sat on the unrelenting desk and clung to his neck.

Katherine knew he was escaping into her again. She relished him turning to her for comfort, even in this form. It was a pattern she had recognised now. She simply gave –
and received.
Oh yes, she received in equal measure to what she gave.

His hands braced her hips and the force of his thrusts had her spinning into ecstasy, she felt dizzy and disorientated.

Her fingers gripped his neck, lacing at his nape as the torrent of his emotion washed over her, and she bit her lip, holding back the cries of pleasure and sighs which ached to be free of her throat when her heart raced and her skin grew over-hot.

She opened her mouth, she couldn’t not anymore, and fractured cries left her throat. While he drove her senses mad, pleasure singing, humming, through every nerve.

There was aggressiveness to his claiming, anger and bitterness, as there had been in the tower room that second time. His was a violent, desperate love, but it was love. She really did not doubt it, not at all anymore. She had seen the image of herself through his eyes and she looked beautiful in those sketches of her naked. She did not believe she really looked like that but he thought she did.

She broke again and he fell with her, his muscle locking as his seed spilled into her.

He kissed her hair, her brow. She stroked his head and neck.

“John,” she whispered. He didn’t move but she heard his breath suddenly crack and her hand braced his cheek only to feel the damp line of a tear.

Instantly he withdrew and turned away, securing his flap, and then his shirtsleeve swiped across his face.

When he turned back, there was no sign of emotion. He’d shut her out again and set up his ducal walls between his feelings and her.

She sensed he wished to let her in, but did not know how.

She felt as though the two of them were drifting alone on a desolate sea.

“Shall we go to bed now?”

She nodded and then found herself caught up in his arms, her clothing was left strewn about the sitting room for his servants,
their
servants, to find and pick up.

She felt treasured in his firm grip though, cradled.

Once he’d set her on the bed he undressed in silence, intermittently glancing at her as she moved beneath the covers.
He loves me
, she thought, watching him.
He does love me
. Alone in his rooms there was nothing wrong between them, everything felt right.

When he was naked, he picked up the lit candle which burned on the mantle and put it down beside the bed. Her eyes followed his movement, admiring every line of his anatomy.

He slid beneath the covers then reached for something his side of the bed. The candle flickered as he turned back. “I thought we could look at this.” It was his sketchbook. “I’ll explain the pictures to you. Perhaps one day I’ll take you there. But not about Europe though, Katherine, it holds too may ghosts for me.”