How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Read online

  In fact, his movement over her most intimate place incited a strange, almost … rosy sensation. One which poured and crept over her skin in a languid, heated blush.

  Without her permission, her legs parted wider and his appreciative husky moan washed her in warmth.

  He drew a quick finger lower, carefully laving through the slippery substance he found there. Just as Alexandra gasped, her protestation died on a strangled breath as he parted the ruffles of flesh protecting the silken peak and he grazed it with a featherlike stroke.

  Alexandra’s entire world blurred. She lost control of her limbs as they seized with shivers, but not of the usual sort. A needle of foreign, frightening pleasure lanced her with such force, her body locked with it. She was suddenly afraid if she moved, if she breathed, whatever he’d just done would never happen again.

  But it did. His fingers explored the pliant ridges of her sex and teased around the now-throbbing peak. Slipped and slid over it, beneath it, discovering her mercilessly as he emitted a carnal encouragement at each unbidden jerk and gasp.

  Some of the dark, erotic sounds, she realized, were too high-pitched to be coming from him, but surely she’d never made such noises.

  Beneath the clever ministrations of his fingers, something inside her core melted, twisted with exquisite, rapturous heat. His fingers were so incredibly wet, gliding over every tender recess, leaving sweet trails of pleasure in their wake. Teasing her, driving her to the brink of. Of …

  Something.

  Alexandra’s hips lifted from the bed, as a visceral jolt seized her. “Piers?” she gasped.

  “Let it come, darling,” he breathed. “Don’t fight it. Embrace it.” All his movement centered on the throbbing peak then, awakening from her body an unholy delight.

  “I … I…” It tumbled over her like a rogue wave, seizing her limbs and dragging her away from herself, from shore, from any solid ground. She lost herself in the wondrous, terrifying power of it as he coerced her into throbbing, thrashing, delicious spasms of incomprehensible pleasure. Just like beneath the water, every sound was both amplified and muffled. Every movement dreamy and slow. She surged against ecstatic pulses of bliss until they reached a fevered pitch, and her body twisted to escape them.

  Her husband kept her thigh captive with his own as he pulled her head above the water, so she could breathe. His stroking fingers slipped away from her bud, lower, to explore the cascade of moisture he’d elicited.

  Alexandra could do nothing but lie there, limp and misted with sweat. Marveling silently as she tried to remember how to move her limbs. Tried to decide if she ever wanted to.

  All this time, her body had been capable of such bliss. All she’d needed was a man tender and skilled enough to find it.

  He played with her still, gliding through slick flesh until he circled the tender opening with his fingertip, emitting another savage growl. “God, you’re…” His finger paused, tested, and probed with increasing urgency. “You’re so…” He breached her, only slightly, then further.

  Alexandra gasped. Froze. Expecting it to hurt, expecting any number of terrible things.

  Instead a gentle, aching pleasure goaded her intimate flesh to make way for him, until he’d sunk in to the knuckle.

  She spent a moment wallowing in relief until she heard his low curse. Felt the strange sensation of his finger inside her.

  “Fucking hell,” he bit out.

  And then he was gone. Not just his hand, but all of him, leaving her alone on the bed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Piers didn’t dare speak as he blindly riffled about in his trunks at the foot of the bed.

  “W-what’s wrong?”

  He ignored her question. Disregarding the soft note of uncertainty laced beneath the lingering throaty tones of a passionate afterglow.

  Where in the fuck had his valet packed his…?—Oh, there it was, thank God.

  He seized the box containing his cheroot and grappled it open. Cursing his unsteady fingers, he lit it and dragged in a burning breath.

  He caught the outline of her beyond the glowing bead at the end of his smoke.

  She’d risen to her elbow, dragging the coverlet over her, as though she needed modesty in a nearly black room.

  Christ, but she was flawless. She really was.

  As he took his next smoke, he inhaled the intimate scent of her lingering on his fingers.

  His mouth flooded with moisture.

  His veins flooded with murder.

  Piers did his best to keep the tumultuous heat from his voice when he could finally unclench his jaw enough to say, “I’ve been tricked a few times in my day. By some of the best in the world. But you. You put every double-crossing con man and swindler to absolute shame.”

  Her silent astonishment became a tangible thing reaching out to him in the dark.

  Even now, he ached to soothe her. To ease her distress. The protective instinct she’d aroused within him was so powerful that even the surge of his fury couldn’t fully contain it.

  “I—I don’t understand.” Her voice wavered with perceptible confusion.

  “You claimed you’d never even been kissed?” he exploded.

  “I haven’t!” she insisted. “Hadn’t. Not until—”

  “Well, you’ve certainly been fucked,” he snarled. He stalked to the doorway, needing more distance from her body, which called to him still. “It’s hard to imagine how you’d manage one without the other.”

  He waited. Her silence screaming across the darkness, creating a cavern between them where only a few paces truly existed.

  Where were her maidenly protestations? Couldn’t she at least deny it?

  His mother always had.

  Every time she’d been caught in a compromising position in a darkened corner with one of his father’s so-called friends at a soiree. Every time she’d abandoned them for weeks on end, galivanting with a younger man, a more handsome one, giving only the most imperceptible of concessions to decorum.

  She would, at the very least, adamantly repudiate all involvement.

  Of course, everyone had still been aware that the unparalleled beauty Lady Gwyneth Atherton, Duchess of Redmayne, was a faithless whore. Women held their husbands closer when she’d walked into a room. They’d kissed both her cheeks then whispered malice the moment her back was turned.

  And worse, everyone had likewise understood that her husband, Piers’s father, had been pathetically besotted with her. That when the money had run out, or the passion, or the novelty, she’d abandon her current lover and sweep back home to Castle Redmayne reeking of gin and unmentionably shameless things.

  As a boy, Piers would rejoice upon her return, he’d missed her so. He’d been inured to the whispers, but not to his lovely mother’s doting. She’d present him with a gift, her azure eyes sparkling as he opened it. She’d lean down to embrace him, expecting his adoration, his forgiveness, which he both quickly provided.

  His kind father would be so delighted to see her, so overwrought with joy at holding her … and then her inexorable melancholy would set in, and the cycle would begin again.

  Until one day, when Piers was sixteen, Gwyneth had gone to Italy with some dashing count fifteen years her junior, and had stayed away nearly a month longer than usual.

  Upon her return, his father had ordered a feast prepared. They’d all celebrated and enjoyed the spectacular wine she’d brought back with her. It’d been a lively, lovely evening.

  Piers had found his father the next morning, hanging by the neck off the very balustrade from which he’d announced his engagement to Alexandra.

  His mother had met her next lover at the funeral.

  Still, even in the face of accusation, Gwyneth Atherton had adamantly controverted her frivolous dalliances. Had maintained that the gossips were particularly jealous of her wealth and status. Or that a man she’d denied had started malicious rumors.

  Lies. Always lies.

  Rose had been such a breath
of fresh air when contrasted to his mother’s honeyed tongue. She’d been brash, bold, and brutally direct. He didn’t care for a woman’s supposed purity or virtue. In fact, his former fiancée hadn’t been a virgin, either, but she’d announced it to him right away. Admitted she was also a slave to her passions, and had desired none so much as him.

  He’d fallen for her impish ways and her challenging honesty. He’d believed her when she’d spoken of love, of marriage—when she’d claimed his title meant nothing to her—because she told uncomfortable truths. He’d assumed her the antithesis of his mother.

  How wrong he’d been. For they’d both been liars.

  One had merely denied her actions, the other justified them.

  The years had taught Piers not to care so deeply, and not to forgive so willingly. His eyes had been opened to every calculated gesture of the feminine sort. Or so he’d thought. He’d become hardened to the coy machinations of sycophantic damsels in need of a husband.

  Or wanting a duke.

  It was why he’d chosen Francesca.

  Partly, yes, to honor the wishes of a departed father, and partly because she hadn’t particularly wanted him. Theirs would have been a comfortably contemptible life. He’d never have expected affection from her. Only children.

  He’d vowed so long ago that his interactions with women would forever be biological and acquisitive. Until a sweet, seemingly innocent archeologist had, once again, taught him the abject agony of hope. She’d charmed him, captivated him so thoroughly with her artless, beguiling naïveté.

  What he wouldn’t give to be Ramsay in that moment, all cool composure and stone-faced dispassion.

  But then, passion had always been his downfall, hadn’t it? Since Piers was a boy, he’d chased his appetites with a rampant enthusiasm bordering on recklessness. He didn’t consider the consequences, because they rarely applied to him.

  Nothing was ever denied him. Not just by the status of his birth, but by the force of his will. He wanted what he wanted. He did what must be done to get it.

  He possessed an incessant need to conquer everything. To climb the tallest mountain, to explore the deepest trench. To forge the longest river. To pit his own strength and skill against the most lethal of apex predators.

  And for what?

  What did it mean to him? What sort of man had it made him? Why did he care?

  Why did he care so fucking much about everything and everyone?

  This weakness of his had earned him nothing but wounds. Deep, unhealed sores wrought by the elegantly sharpened claws of nature’s absolute craftiest creature.

  Frailty, thy name is woman.

  God, but his wife was an entirely excellent sort of fraud. A consummate actress. An ingenious observer of men. She’d known just what to do, exactly what to say, how to touch the only tender, masculine parts of him he’d managed to salvage. How to reach past the barriers he’d erected around his heart and play upon the chivalric tendencies he’d always been prone to.

  Even now, as her silence condemned her, he found himself praying she’d say something perfect. He willed her to explain away the swirling abyss of suspicions tainting his every tumultuous thought.

  He itched to light a lamp. To gauge her reactions and assess her expressions.

  What good would it do? He’d been pitifully hopeless at that thus far.

  Besides, if he looked at her now, naked and lovely, her lips and hair glossy and lush …

  He might throttle her.

  Or make love to her, despite everything.

  What a foolhardy fuck he was, to play white knight to her damsel in distress.

  The fire of his temper had begun to fade in the quiet dark, smothered by cool fingers of ice. With each silent moment that passed, a frigid wall made of memory and misgiving barricaded his ribs, turning his very core into a monument of glacial bitterness.

  He drew in a breath of velvet smoke, imagining he exhaled all his growing devotion for her. Three days, he’d only known her three days, how had he become so beguiled in such a short time?

  Would he never learn?

  “You’ve nothing to say for yourself? No explanations, no excuses? I should think a brilliant woman as fond of lists as you are would have a contingency plan for just this occasion. Did you think me such a lackwit that I’d not notice?”

  “That’s not it…” She let her words trail into the dark once more.

  “Then tell me why,” he demanded. “Why you felt you needed to lie to me in the first place.”

  “I didn’t lie,” she stated carefully. “I never claimed to be a virgin. You inferred that on your own.”

  “But you claimed not to—” He broke off, pinching at his temple against a stabbing ache.

  She was right. By God, she’d been right. He’d asked her if she’d ever really been kissed, and she’d denied it.

  “Really” was such a broad term, wasn’t it? Open to so much interpretation.

  So why mislead him? Why act like the innocent ingenue when she’d had a previous lover? A terrible suspicion curled in his gut, cording his muscles taut with disgust.

  “Have you gotten yourself into trouble?” It’d happened to him before, when a mistress of his had become pregnant. He’d been all of twenty and three, awaiting his bastard child with almost rampant anticipation.

  A child who’d appeared early, apparently sired by an Asian lover.

  Bloody hell, was it happening again? “Did you mark my need of an heir, and grasp at the opportunity to make another man’s child a duke?”

  Had that been her reason all along? Why her behavior had been so strange? He thought of her blurted marriage proposal, her artless seduction, her offer to resume even after they’d been interrupted by Rose.

  Had her intention been to get him inside her no matter the circumstances?

  “I’d never!” she cried. “Please. It’s not that—” She broke off, swallowing a note of hysteria before asking, “What are you going to do?”

  The anxiety in her voice tugged at him, which brought his rage surging back.

  “I’m not going to annul the marriage, if that’s what you’re asking. Not until I can be sure one way or the other. Despite how I look, I’m not a monster, you know.” His voice belied his claim, as it could have belonged to the coldest demon in hell. “The terms of our agreement haven’t changed. Funds in exchange for heirs. Isn’t that how you so charmingly put it?” Because, damn his soul, he still wanted her. Still burned for her. Despite the bleak poison curdling what was left of his heart, his body insistently throbbed for the ambrosia he’d found between her thighs.

  As was her bedeviling way, she’d aroused more desire in the dark than an entire household of painted French courtesans lit by golden lanterns.

  “Then … should we … resume?” She sounded as though the prospect of a night in his arms held as much joy for her as a night spent in the iron maiden.

  Had she always felt thus? Revolted by him? Perhaps Rose had been brutally honest back at Castle Redmayne. Perhaps she’d seen what he did not.

  He frightened and disgusted the woman who’d done her level best to seduce him. But, come to think of it, her repugnance had been evident in their every interaction. Hell, she’d nearly shot him at Torcliff. Her ridiculous lists. Her visceral reaction tonight when he’d established intimacy …

  Fucking hell. She’d asked him to douse the bloody lights. What validation did he need beyond that? She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  How had he been so blind?

  Because genuine feeling had glimmered in her eyes when she’d cupped his face and called him handsome in the darkness of her doorway.

  He’d believed her.

  And, just like that, he was no longer angry at her. Only at himself. Had there ever lived such an absolute dupe?

  “How long until your monthly courses?” he asked on an exhausted sigh.

  “I—I’m sorry … Pardon?”

  “I’m not unsympathetic to the woman
’s plight.” He summoned into his voice an unperturbed tranquility. “I do not insist on being the first man who’s fucked you, but I do insist on being the unquestioned father of your child.”

  “I’m not with child,” she vowed. “Please. I can’t explain, but I can swear to you that—”

  He wanted no more empty promises. No more lies. No more secrets. No. More. “I’ll ask you only once again.” A foreign, acerbic vehemence crept into his tone, one that had sent warlords and beasts alike scurrying away in fear. “When are you scheduled to bleed next?”

  “Ten days.” Her voice had become so small, that something withered inside of him, as well.

  “Ten days,” he clipped. “Very well. When it arrives—if it arrives—I’ll come for you after.” He snapped up his jacket and shirt and stormed out into the night.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It’d taken Alexandra an alarming portion of the next morning to search the entire first- and second-class decks for her missing husband.

  Where could a duke hide on a ship?

  And what would happen once she found him?

  She should have dressed and gone to him last night instead of awaiting his return, sobbing quietly until exhaustion claimed her.

  His valet had awoken her upon discreetly sliding into their rooms to obtain some of his things.

  As Alexandra hunted, she berated herself. For such an educated woman, she could certainly be a magnificent dunce. How had she overlooked such a tiny detail as her missing virginity? She’d read about a hymen in certain texts and had known she no longer possessed one. However, it’d never once crossed her mind that a man would notice.

  That he’d be so furious.

  That he’d draw certain conclusions.

  It had never crossed her mind because she simply would never have considered such a deception. Despite her terrible secrets, she’d never been a devious woman. She was a scientist, after all. She dealt in facts and data. Fictions and fibs never served her but the one.

  The one keeping her neck from a noose.

  What sort of woman would try to pass off her bastard as a duke’s heir? As any man’s child, really. To do something so shameful was abjectly unforgivable.