This Duchess of Mine(14)

“I believe you’ll enjoy my wooing,” she said, her voice as smug as a little girl with a pocket full of boiled sweets. “Perhaps I’ll let you steal my pawns.”

He was too hungry to consider her teasing, even to care about it. The carriage was finally, finally, coming to a halt. He curbed himself, drawing on years of self-control practiced in front of the House of Parliament. Of course he wouldn’t throw his wife on a bed and leap on her like a wild dog.

Jemma left the carriage before him, bending down to avoid striking her head on the door. Her bottom swayed for a tantalizing moment in the doorway of the carriage. Even given the absurd panniers she wore, the rounding of silk at her rump made him reckless, drunk with the need to touch her. He was in the grip of a raging passion that threatened to turn him into a man that he didn’t recognize.

He didn’t recognize her either.

In the flick of an eyelash she lost that edge of sensuality and hunger he saw in the carriage. She greeted Fowle at the top of the steps, looking regal, as if she hadn’t just been rescued from a yacht at the very moment of disaster. As if she was as cool and uncaring as any other duchess out for tea.

Elijah took the steps two at a time. Jemma glanced over her shoulder at him as she handed her gloves to a footman. “I was just telling Fowle that Mr. Twiddy will be arriving tomorrow to—”

Since he’d lost his mind, he backed straight into the drawing room, grabbing her wrist and swirling her with him, slamming the door in his butler’s face.

“Elijah!” Jemma said, sounding amused. “I assure you that—”

He swooped on her. Took her mouth with all the desperate wish he had to claim her, to make her his. In every sense of the word. He possessed her mouth, kissed her savagely, with all the fear he felt when he saw her on the Peregrine, standing there unprotected, without him. Anything could have happened to her. Anything.

“You’re mine.” His voice had nothing in common with a statesman’s even tenor. It was deep, savage, knowing.

“I—”

He took her mouth again, stealing her words, telling her silently that she had no choice, that he would be the one to pleasure her, that the danger they had just gone through was only a shadow of what would happen if she ever tried to push him away.

“I let you go, years ago,” he said.

“Yes,” she gasped. Her voice had a breathy catch in it, an echo of desire that reverberated deep in his body.

“I will never let you go again.” His voice grated with the truth of it.

She looked shocked. He didn’t give a damn. Then she started smiling, and something deep inside his heart relaxed. That was a wicked smile. There was anticipation there…

“You can woo me tomorrow,” he said, voice guttural, unrecognizable. “Tonight is another kind of event altogether.”

She had been shocked but was recovering herself now. “So no chess?” Her pout said that she knew precisely what her deep bottom lip did to him.

“Jemma.” He said it low and soft. His heart was dancing a wayward rhythm, and urgency gave his voice an edge.

“I must take a bath!” she said, laughing. He had her backed against the door, hunkering over her like a great beast.

“No.”

“Indeed, Elijah, I must insist. I have been thrown into a boat and splashed with river water. I am…” She paused and gestured with mock horror. “…not myself.” Vulnerability glimmered deep in those exquisite eyes of hers.

“You’d be beautiful to me if you were bathed in mud,” he said. “Let’s call for the bath and I’ll act as your maid.”

Even in the dark, with no light other than that filtering through the windows, he could see a stain of color in her cheeks. “I bathe alone, always.”

He bent closer. “After tonight I shall know every nook and cranny of your body, Jemma.” His voice roughened. “Bathing will just hasten the process.”

“You have a great deal of confidence in yourself,” she said, looking a bit uncertain, not like the arrogant duchess who had ruled Paris with her wit and beauty.

He smiled. “You see? You’re getting to know me better already. There’s no need for a courtship between us.”

But his wife was no malleable young miss. She pulled back. “I will welcome you in my bedchamber in one hour, Duke.”

He couldn’t protest again. They weren’t children. His Jemma might have taken a lover or two in Paris during the years they were apart, but clearly she had granted the poor Frenchmen no real intimacies.

So he kissed her again. With all the knowledge he had that she was the only woman for him, that she’d been so for years.