"Rubbish. I only want to provide for you, to make you comfortable . . ."
"This is ridiculous. I am perfectly comfortable."
The mantel rattled under his fist. "The bride of the Duke of Ashland does not live in some hovel with relatives who do not treat her according to her due."
"I am not your bride."
"You will be."
"Even if I were, should I instead live under your keeping before marriage? Your avowed mistress before the world? Every door would be shut against me!"
"I would exercise the utmost discretion. I don't go out in society, and the house itself is remote."
"The idea is lunatic." Emilie tossed the papers into the armchair behind her, and in the next instant she was seized in Ashland's embrace, his hand cradling her face.
"What is lunatic," he said, in a fierce whisper, "is the idea of seeing you only once during each week, less perhaps, burning for you every other endless damned night, until the wheels of the English legal system can be made to free me from that betraying, unnatural bitch I once called a wife. I want a home with you, Emilie. I want to give you all the ease and luxury you deserve. I want to sleep next to you at night. I want to reach for you when I wake up in the morning. I want to feel our child growing in your belly, and I don't want to wait-God only knows, a year, two years, more even-to claim you as mine."
She was breathless, churning. He surrounded her with his heat and his demands, his tantalizing vision of a passionate future. He crowded out her outrage. He crowded out her reason.
"You don't even know me." His lips were so close, she brushed them as she spoke. "I might be anyone."
"You are Emilie. That's all I need to know." Ashland kissed her softly. "I spoke in haste, just now. I'm too used to giving orders. I was afraid, you see, that if I asked, you'd say No."
"I still said No."
"If I ask you instead, will you answer differently?" He was nibbling her now, tiny, exquisite movements of his mouth around hers, eating her alive, bite by bite. Another moment, and she would die from it.
"Ah, you don't understand." She laid her arms lightly about his waist, and her chest glowed when he didn't flinch at her touch. "You don't understand."
"I understand everything. I understand that I can't live without you. That I can't live without this." His fingers went to the fastening of her corset and released her body from its cage. He pulled down her chemise and enclosed her breast with his hand, rubbed the tip with his thumb. Every nerve of her body burst into tingling life. "Can you, Emilie? Tell me you can live without this, and I'll stop. I'll walk away."
"No." She tugged at his coat. "No, I can't."
"Emilie, listen to me carefully. I'm going to take you right here on this chair, hard and fast, because I shall go mad if I don't have you now." His mouth replaced his hand, and he suckled her breast with sudden strength, making her cry out needfully. "And then I'm going to take you to bed and make love to you slowly. I'm going to kiss every precious inch of you, from every angle. I'm going to see how often I can make you spend, and how hard. I'm going to take hours. And then I'll let you sleep, and in the morning you'll wake up to me sliding back inside you."
His words made her blood heat to boiling strength. She was turning molten, a liquid pool of desire, her brain churning from the images he stirred there. Already her limbs were heavy and loose, preparing to receive him. "Wait." She put her hands on his chest. "Wait."
"I can't wait. I've been imagining this all week, imagining you sitting in this chair with your legs spread apart, open for me." His arm went beneath her bottom, and he was lifting her and settling her gently in the chair, drawing her chemise up to her waist, spreading her legs. "My God. Like this." He parted her with one thick finger and eased slowly inside her, all the way to the knuckle.
"Ashland!" She dissolved into the chair.
"God, look at you. Soft and wet . . ."
Emilie's hands fluttered at his shoulders, urging him on despite the throb of warning in her head. "Ashland . . . wait . . . I can't . . . I meant to speak to you first . . . I . . ."
"So beautiful." His tongue flicked her nub, just above his knuckle.
She gasped out, "Children, Ashland . . ."
He lifted his head. "What's that?"
"Children. I can't. We can't . . . I . . . It's impossible."
Ashland drew his finger gently from her body. "What do you mean, Emilie?" His voice was almost too low to be heard. "What do you mean? Do you not want children?"
"I . . . It isn't that, it isn't you . . . but I can't. Not now."
A heavy pause rocked between them. "Emilie, I've told you already. I've laid it out in writing, legally binding. I will recognize our children as mine. I will give them my name. I will provide generously for any child with whom God chooses to bless us. You needn't worry." He said the words in a curiously emotionless tone. The tone, she knew, of his deepest feeling.
"Children need more than a banker's draft," she heard herself whisper.
He exploded at that. "Good God, Emilie. Do you think I wouldn't be a father to them? My God, I'd dote on them. I'd spend every possible minute with them and with you."
"But you have a son already."
"Whom I love with all my heart. But he's nearly grown. And I rather think he'd welcome the company."
What had Freddie said? I'd always rather fancied a brother. Or even a sister.
Ashland's child in her womb, in her arms. The four of them, a doting family. Laughter over dinner, chess and conversation in the library. Emilie's chest squeezed so tightly, she couldn't breathe.
"In any case," Ashland went on, more softly, "you may already be with child by me."
"But I may not. And I can't take that risk again. Not yet," she added, purely to appease him, for there could never be another time.
Not after he knew the truth.
He remained still, breathing quietly into her skin. "Very well. That is your right, of course. I can take steps to avoid conception."
"What steps?"
"I can decouple before spending. Or there are more secure means, if you prefer."
She could hardly think, with Ashland's body hovering over hers, hot with masculine power. The word decouple sent another surge of desire through her belly. "What means are those?"
He sighed and straightened her chemise, and then his body heaved away from hers. "Wait here a few minutes."
As if she would leave. As if she could leave.
The door clicked shut. Emilie sat in the chair without stirring. In her black cocoon, every sense was unnaturally sharp. She could trace each tingling nerve, each concentration of heat, each symptom of sexual arousal that Ashland had awakened in her body. There was not a single parcel of her flesh that didn't scream with the need to feel him inside her. She wanted him so badly, she hurt with it.
You are Emilie. That's all I need to know.
Emilie forced her body from the chair and felt her way to the mantel. The fire was hot and steady, glowing against her bare legs. One by one, she plucked the hairpins from her chignon and laid them on the cool marble. The false knot, her former glory, fell away into her hands. She idled it about for a moment, measuring the silky mass, before placing it next to the hairpins. With shaking fingers, she untied the blindfold, folded it into a neat square, and set it atop the golden luster of the chignon.
The hotel was oddly still this evening. Even the wind had died away, heavy with falling snow, making the air seem hollow in its absence. The room, the elegant private suite of the Duke of Ashland, lay around her, every stick of furniture dear to her, though she had scarcely ever seen it. It was the smell she knew best: lemon oil and tea leaves, the trace of smoke, the snow-clean and tea-spiced scent of the duke himself.
Emilie stared into the round bull's-eye mirror above the mantel. Her face gazed back at her, distorted by the convexity of the mirror, enlarging her blue eyes and diminishing her shorn hair and her jaw and chin. Herself, only different, deformed. She shook out her hair, combed it through with her fingers. Emilie, the disguised and ruined Emilie, the Duke of Ashland's lover. In that strange and unnatural face, not a trace remained of the studious and bespectacled princess of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof, with her outward virtue and her inward restlessness.