How to Tame Your Duke(42)

"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.