The Dissolute Duke(28)

Another cry had her up on her feet and she walked to the door, placing her ear against the wood and listening. No footsteps hurried along the passageway, no hint of someone else hearing and helping. An owl called from the trees that marched in a line up a hill near the mansion, plaintive and lonely. Otherwise there was only silence.

Her feet were becoming cold on the parquet floor and she was about to get back into bed when a further sound came. This time she recognised the voice. Her hands opened the door and she was through it in a second, slipping through the unlocked door of the adjoining chamber. For a second dizziness made her clutch at the oak, this room familiar somehow and dangerous.

A candle burnt on a low bedside table and her husband was caught in a tangle of sheets, his hard body brown against the white, not asleep and not awake, but somewhere in a halfway place that was haunting.

‘Wake up.’ She shook him, the opened shirt he had on drenched in sweat, but his hand pushed her away. Not gently, either, but Lucinda had been raised in a house full of brothers and she pushed back.

‘Wake up.’ Louder now and more insistent. The bottle in front of him was drained and the smell of strong drink lingered around the room.

On the floor lay a book in Italian, the corners on one page turned down. A pile of other tomes in English, Italian and French sat in a nearby pile: Voltaire, Rousseau, Dante, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith and Machiavelli’s Il Principe. Another flash of him reading this same book came to mind, the room draped in shadow save for a single candle. Before. She strained to recall other things, but could not.

‘Taylen. Taylen. Wake up.’ He came to in an instant, one moment boneless and the next ramrod stiff, the distant and vigilant Duke back in place.

The redness in his eyes was marked, the green of his iris darker against the colour. ‘I shouted out?’

‘Loudly. No one else came.’

Looking away, he reached for a fob watch positioned near the candle and checked the time. When his shirt dropped down a little as he stretched, Lucinda gasped. A whole row of scars slashed into the smoothness across the top of his back and she could barely believe the damage.

However, if he saw her looking he gave no sign of it, shrugging his shirt on further, fingers on the collar pinching both points of it inwards. His hands shook so much Lucinda thought that he would not be able to hold it closed.

All his rings had been stripped off, save their wedding ring and she wondered what that might mean. Sweat glistened on his face and his hair was plastered to his forehead, a worrying unsteadiness visible as he pushed himself up.

‘Are you drunk?’

He laughed at that and shook his head. ‘If only it was that simple …’

‘Nightmares, then? When I was a child I had—’ He stopped her with an impatient flick of his hand.

‘I will ask Mrs Berwick to place you in another room in the morning. That way you will not be disturbed again.’

‘This happens every night?’

‘No.’ He was so quick in his answer that Lucinda knew he lied.

‘Exercise helped me. My mother insisted I rode each day for hours and after that I slept so much better at night.’

She could tell he was listening and so she carried on. ‘I was a wilful child, you see, and always in trouble. My mother thought it would have been best had I been a boy, but I wasn’t.’

A slight upturn of his lips had her carrying on.

‘My brothers would be assigned each in turn to watch over me. Ashe and Taris were far older than I was and they took the duty seriously. Cristo was more my age and seemed to get in worse scrapes than even I was capable of. Alice was not a woman to be too bothered with children, you see. Her garden was her great love.’

‘And your father? Where was he when all of this was going on?’

‘Overseeing the running of the estate. Ensuring the lineage of the Wellinghams remained financially viable. He died of a heart condition when I was young. I would probably have been a disappointment to him had he lived.’

‘Were I a father I would hold no impossible expectations of my children.’

A father! There it was again, that same old hint of why they were both here. She could see he also was reminded of the fact because his eyes turned smoky and he pushed himself up out of the bed.

He had fallen asleep in his clothes and his boots, the rumpled linen of his shirt sticking to his skin where the sweat had gathered. The nightmares had carved deep lines of desolation across his face. Almost as deep as those on his back. Could they be the marks of a careful and judicious beating administered to a child with as much hatred as was possible?

She held her breath with the enormity of it all, watching as he poured himself a generous glass of a drink that did not look alcoholic and finished the lot. Her nightgown felt insubstantial and she wished she had stopped to put on the matching negligee. Outside the moon was low and the night was dark, a mounting wind throwing the branch of a tree against the glass in his window.

‘Tomorrow I shall take you riding … sedately.’ For a moment she could not quite understand what it was he spoke of. Then she did.

‘My mother will be smiling down from Heaven.’

‘Or warning you away from me as all your brothers have done and hoping like hell that you heed her.’

‘You keep on telling me that you are not safe.’

Walking to the window, he pulled back the curtain of heavy burgundy velvet.

‘Come and look, Lucy.’ It was the first time he had called her the name that her family did and she went across to him. He did not touch her, but positioned himself behind, his breath warm against her neck.

‘As far as the eye can see it is Ellesmere land. From the hills against the sky here to the place where the moon shines on the lake there and behind the house a thousand acres yet again rising through the valleys. This is the safety that my father squandered and my mother cared not a jot for. This was the reason I took the money from your brother to disappear after our wedding. It was never meant as a slight to you.’

‘A precious bequest?’

She felt him nod.

‘If it were Falder I would have done exactly the same.’

‘Thank you.’ His hand came down upon her shoulder, the pressure gentle at first and then building as it slid across silk and shadow to rest on the sensitive skin at her neck. She wanted to lean in and keep him there, all the pent-up loneliness bursting forth into a simple need.

He was dangerous and difficult and menacing. He was also the only lawfully wedded husband she was ever likely to have. When he turned her slowly, the greenness in his eyes was darkened by half-light and gentle honesty, a man woken up by his past and trying to come to terms with his present.

His confession of faithfulness in the Beauchamps’ salon made her braver and she brought her arms up around him. She could feel the welts of the old scars, the cotton in his shirt hiding nothing. Drawing one finger along the length of a twisted ridge, she suddenly had an image of the past. She had wanted him then as she did now.

‘I remember pieces. I remember this.’

His only answer was his mouth upon hers and then she forgot everything as his tongue slanted inwards. Pure masculinity found her essence through touch and taste and she knew in the first second of his onslaught exactly what it was all those society women who watched him through their hooded glances had known.

He was both tempered steel and quicksilver, the opposites melding wonderment and delight and he wanted from her what men like him had wanted from a woman through the centuries since the very beginning of time. The quiet kiss she had thought to offer was overtaken by a storm of sensation.

There was no sense in it left, no moderation, no limit on the depth of her feeling, no careful prudence. All there was were heartbeats and warmth. Unable to understand what was happening, she simply closed her eyes and let him take, the magic finally in her grasp.

Her bosom heaved as he moved closer, drawing his thumb along the edge of her throat and across the bones of her chest. When he sucked at his forefinger and ran it fast over one nipple, she arched back, her nightgown leaving nothing hidden, and the languid glassy abandonment of passion showed in her eyes before she closed them. His woman. Paid for and bought. Legally bound until the very end of time. No confines on anything. He could use her exactly as he willed.

He wanted to rip away the rest of her clothes and have her there now upon the floor, emptying himself into her time and time again until there was nothing left of three years of desperation and urgency.

The more worrying thought that a woman like this could in some way inveigle herself into a corner of his heart confused him. He felt as if he could tell her things he never wanted another to know and break covenants that he had always kept.

Carefully he pushed her back, his thumb running across the soft line of one cheek and then the swelling of her lip. Bewilderment lay in her eyes, demanding explanation, but the nightmares always left him exhausted—too exhausted to deal with the complex labyrinth that was a relationship.

‘Why is it like this between us?’ Her question, dredged from the depths of need.

‘I do not know, sweetheart, but now is not the hour to find out. It is time you were back in your bed.’

She looked away, pulling the silk of her gown back into place at her neck, a prim and proper covering of what had been there only a moment before. Her hair had escaped the loose plait she had worn when she had entered the room and fell in waves across her shoulders, the paleness caught between candle and moonlight and the length emphasising her slim height as it fell to the curve of her waist.