Claiming the Courtesan (11 page)

Now he was going to take her.

The outcome had never been in doubt. What he hadn’t expected when he’d plotted his revenge was that his body and his heart would be so divided about his intentions.

Damn her.

“Goodnight, Your Grace,” Hamish said to Kylemore’s retreating back as he unsaddled the big gray horse.

The duke slammed open the door to Verity’s room with such force that the curtains billowed and the fire flickered wildly in the grate. It was late and she lay awake and afraid in the large bed. She knew there was no escape.

There had never been any escape.

How right she’d been to feel wary of the Duke of Kylemore from the moment they’d met. She’d been tragically wrong thinking she could manage him. Now she faced the consequences of that calamitous error of judgment.

Still, she refused to shrink before him like a cringing
coward. She raised herself on her elbows against the pillows and tilted her chin.

“Good evening, Your Grace,” she said coolly.

Never let him guess how hard she fought to keep her voice steady, she prayed silently. Her heart thundered with fear, and only the outer limits of her will kept her from raising the sheet against her chest like a shield.

He stared across the room at her as if he hated her. She suspected he did.

“Good evening, Your Grace,”
he mimicked cruelly. “By all means, let us preserve the formalities, madam.”

She couldn’t entirely read his mood. She was familiar with how he looked when intent on sex. As the object of his desire for more than a year, she ought to.

That wasn’t how he looked tonight.

He supported one arm high against the doorframe, a picture of male power and beauty in his loose white shirt and tight dark breeches.

She’d always recognized the Duke of Kylemore as an unusually handsome man, but for many reasons, she’d never allowed herself to dwell on his attractions. Tonight, his physical splendor struck her with the force of a blow. She worried at her bottom lip before she realized it was a fatal admission of nervousness.

He straightened his lean body and sauntered toward her, kicking the door closed behind him. She flinched as it crashed shut.

“Don’t bother asking for mercy. You’ve had a week to prepare for this.”

She’d had a week to recall her loss of control the last time he’d kissed her. Which was just what the monster had intended. Whatever happened tonight, she swore she wouldn’t surrender to him as she had that stormy afternoon in Yorkshire.

He loomed above her at the side of the bed. The strongly marked black eyebrows lowered over his dark blue eyes.

“Where the hell did you get this?” He extended one long-fingered hand and flicked contemptuously at the neckline of her plain white nightdress. “I’m sure I never ordered such a rag from Madame Yvette.”

“One of the maids lent it to me,” she said sullenly.

She’d been surprised to find ready for her an armoire full of clothes from Soraya’s favorite modiste. Yet again she’d reflected on the planning the duke had put into bringing her here. She hadn’t stood a chance.

Included in the luxurious wardrobe were nightdresses so filmy as hardly to justify the name of clothing. She’d needed a flurry of sign language to convince the maids she much preferred to borrow something less revealing. She’d needed a good five minutes to divert the girls’ horrified attention from the diaphanous garments in the first place.

“Take it off,” he said, still frowning. “This game has gone on long enough. I’m your lover, madam. You’ve never evinced distaste for me before.”

He was right. And he was utterly wrong.

Kylemore might think he had her where he wanted her. Kylemore
did
have her where he wanted her, but she wasn’t going to deliver herself gift-wrapped for his delectation.

No, he’d find little enjoyment in her bed tonight. Or not if she could help it.

She looked away to where the fire blazed in the grate. “Things have changed. I’ve changed,” she whispered.

She heard the rustle of linen and turned her head to see him tugging off his shirt. The smooth skin of arms and shoulders gleamed golden as he dropped the garment carelessly to the floor.

“No one changes that much,” he said with such confidence
that she curled her fingers into her palms to stop herself from attacking him.

Her one goal had been the chance to abandon her detestable career, yet here she was about to lie beneath a man in another loveless coupling.

She had a terrifying glimpse of a future where she’d never be free and she must play Soraya forever. Abruptly, unable to bear another moment of this torment, she flung the sheet aside and lay back.

“Go on,” she said stiffly, closing her eyes. She wouldn’t add to his triumph by begging for mercy. “Take me.”

Damn him, she should have known she couldn’t rattle him with such theatrics. His response was a softly derisive laugh.

“Oh, no, madam. That’s too easy.”

She clenched her fists at her sides and told herself she’d endure this, as she’d always endured before.

But the words had lost their power. She listened to the slide of fabric on skin as he shucked the rest of his clothing.

She didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to. She already knew what he looked like naked.

Tall. Slender, with the long, powerful muscles of a born swordsman. A light scattering of black hair on his chest. And the heavy, erect penis he’d soon thrust inside her.

For such a lean man, the duke was remarkably well endowed—yet another indication of how laughably inaccurate his cold nickname was. Kylemore’s body spoke of driven, even uncontrollable, passions. Although he’d never before lost control with her.

Until tonight.

What was about to happen carried no deceiving gloss of courtesy or civilization. This man wanted to brand her as his in the most primitive way. She felt the mattress sag as he
knelt on the bed, then the heat of his body, shocking in spite of the familiarity, when he straddled her.

“You keep up the pretense of reluctance,” he said drily.

“It’s no pretense.” She still refused to look at him. If she couldn’t see him, perhaps she could hide from what he did.

“Yes, it is,” he insisted.

The sudden shift of air should have warned her. With one powerful tug, he ripped the nightdress from neck to hem, leaving her exposed to his gaze as she’d been exposed so many times before. She fought the urge to cover herself with the tattered shreds of the gown, with her hands, with the sheet.

His face was strained and determined in the candlelight. She’d never seen him like this. He’d always approached her with eager anticipation, but there was no joy in him now. The odd thought crossed her mind that he fought his own deepest nature when he came to her in anger.

Then she looked down at his sex, hard and avid and seeking, and she dismissed her naïveté with the scorn it deserved. His nature was clear. It was to conquer and subdue. That was all there was in him.

“Anything you take, you take as a thief,” she said bitterly.

Her insult angered him, she saw, as the blue eyes narrowed. But it was too late to reconsider the wisdom of taunting a man who held her at such a disadvantage.

“I’m no thief, madam,” he said harshly. Then fleeting, turbulent emotion darkened his intent gaze and his tone softened into velvety enticement. “Verity, think what you do. It doesn’t have to be like this. The pleasure we shared was a miracle.”

Pleasure.
The word slashed at her like a sword, while deep within, a tangled knot loosened as the inevitable, unwelcome memory awoke of his body moving in hers with
delight. So many familiar elements here conspired to vanquish her. His clean scent, his alluring heat, his cursed, lost beauty.

“That implies something freely bestowed,” she said through taut lips. “You know that was never true.”

“I know that was
always
true.” The danger in his soft voice sent a shiver, not entirely of revulsion, through her. Oh, how she wished her response was as simple as revulsion.

“Never.” God help her, she lied.

His brows contracted, and fool that she was, she read sorrow rather than fury in his face. “Well, if I must take you as a thief, then I shall be a thief.”

He pushed her legs apart, moved between them and thrust inside her.

There had been no preliminaries. Verity tensed, but her betraying body had already prepared for his possession.

He rammed into her hard and gave a groan that echoed the defeat in her heart. For a long, dark moment, she lay pinioned under him. The world had shrunk to the man above her. It felt of him. It smelled of him. His weight held her motionless.

He withdrew and plunged back into her once, twice. Then he jerked convulsively as his control broke and his essence spurted into her. He seemed to shudder over her forever before he groaned once more, then rolled away.

It was over. He’d taken her quickly, carelessly, irrevocably. She was once again the Duke of Kylemore’s lover and she wished she were dead.

She took her first full breath for what felt like an eternity. The air still smelled like Kylemore. Like Kylemore and sex. She needed to wash. Slowly, as if she were an old woman, she got out of the bed.

Her movement roused him enough to reach over and grab her arm. “Where are you going?” He lifted himself up on one elbow to look at her. “If you run away from the glen, you’ll die in the mountains. It’s hard country out there, and people unfamiliar with it don’t survive.”

She thought now that he’d taken her, he’d sound victorious, gloating. After all, he’d gone to a world of trouble to get her on her back in this bed. But his voice was flat and devoid of emotion.

“I’m not running away,” she said dully, despite herself clutching the remnants of her nightdress around her as if she’d been a violated virgin.

A laughable notion,
she thought sourly. But she didn’t feel like laughing. She felt like crying, as she’d cried when she’d first sold herself.

She lit a candle with shaking hands and left the room. Only later did she think how strange it was that he didn’t try to stop her.

O
n unsteady legs, Verity found her way downstairs to the kitchen. The banked range shed enough light for her to fill a kettle and heat some water. Her ruined nightgown provided little protection against the night air, but she was so numb that she hardly noticed the cold. Between her legs, she was sticky and wet with Kylemore’s seed.

The sensation was unusual. The duke had never spent himself inside her. In London, they’d used sheaths, or she’d satisfied him some other way. An old courtesan she’d known in Paris had taught her the tricks of a whore’s trade. Verity had learned, even while her heart had despaired, because she’d had to.

But tonight Kylemore hadn’t cared about planting a bastard in her womb. Perhaps he meant that to be part of her punishment. He wanted to give her a permanent reminder of him. She could have told him that was one revenge he’d never have.

Like an automaton, she poured warm water into a bowl
and began to wash. The sheer banality of her actions gradually coaxed her soul back from the shivering hell where it had retreated. But still, she couldn’t bear to contemplate that moment when he’d invaded her body.

With trembling hands, she wiped herself with the ragged remains of her nightdress, then pitched it into the fire. To cover her nakedness, she tugged a man’s shirt, probably Hamish’s, from a pile of fresh laundry. She threw the dirty water in the drain and lit a candle, then went in search of somewhere to sleep. That morning, she’d noticed a chamber on the upper floor that contained a roughly made up cot.

Slowly—she ached all over, even though he hadn’t hurt her—she mounted the stairs in quest of a place that didn’t contain the Duke of Kylemore. She was frightened, but the fear was strangely distant, as all her emotions had been strangely distant since she’d left him. Perhaps he waited at the top of the stairs to force her back into his bed. But mercifully she made it into the humble room without encountering anyone.

She crept between the sheets and pulled the blanket high around her shaking body. Only then, in the spurious security of this narrow cot, did she begin to cry, great, gulping sobs that scraped her throat as they emerged. Sobs too loud and too heartbroken to muffle in the pillows, much as she tried.

He’d used her coldly, without care or feeling. He’d rammed into her as if he owned her. When she’d been his mistress, he’d never treated her with such callousness. Then, he’d wanted her to share the pleasure, to become his willing partner as they’d explored the world of sensuality.

But he’d used her tonight as if he loathed her.

As he must loathe her.

And the worst betrayal of all?

She’d recognized the contempt he’d expressed with each action. Even so, her traitorous body had fluttered with the
beginning of response, a response owing nothing to Soraya’s practiced wiles and everything to Verity’s lonely soul.

Kylemore stirred with a startled grunt from the deathlike sleep into which he’d plunged after sex. He was alone in Verity’s bed, and the smell of their coupling surrounded him.

This was, of course, familiar.

Less familiar were the guilt and regret that lurked in the sordid vacuum within him where most men had a heart.

Tumbling his mistress had always left him with an inner peace nothing else in life offered. When she’d gone, she had snatched away his only source of happiness. He’d been desperate to get it back, like a child who had lost his favorite toy and cried until it was restored.

Well, he had his favorite toy back and he still felt like crying.

His rage at her disappearance. Three months of miserable celibacy. Her insults. All these might explain what he’d just done to her.

Nothing could excuse it.

Groaning, he sat up. He’d pounded into her like a wild animal. He’d simply lost control. Never had he treated a woman so.

With a shudder, he remembered pouring himself into her. At that moment, he’d wanted to drown her in his essence, fill her utterly so no trace of anything but him remained in that slender body.

His conscience winced to recall what he’d done, but his unruly flesh rejoiced in how it had felt to take her fully, uninhibitedly, for the first time. Always, he’d been careful to spawn no bastards to suffer the cursed Kinmurrie blood. But in those frantic seconds when he’d pumped all his unhappiness into Verity—and to his shame, it had indeed only been seconds—no thought of future consequences had intruded.
The world shrank to contain just him and the woman, and his body claiming her in nature’s most basic way.

It had been glorious.

But now he felt sick and sad and tired of the game.

He gave a harsh laugh. The game had only started. He couldn’t give up now. His desire wouldn’t permit it, whatever the better man inside him insisted he do.

Would his mad urge to possess this woman end in his destruction? Right now he hardly cared.

Kylemore found Verity easily, although he was surprised that of all sanctuaries, she’d chosen his room. But then, she probably hadn’t known it was his. Her room was larger and better furnished, befitting the house’s main chamber.

He raised the candle higher and studied her sleeping face against the creased pillow. Even in the uncertain light, he saw the tearstains on her cheeks. The regret and guilt inside him coalesced into one roiling black mass. She hadn’t cried once during this whole ordeal, but he’d made her cry tonight.

How she must hate him. For his clumsiness. For his blind need. For the way he couldn’t help wanting her. Any man worthy of the name would let her go. But the prospect of losing her made everything within him howl in anguished denial.

Let her go? As if he could. Even the thought of her leaving his bed made him want to break something.

He blew out the candle and placed it on a cabinet. Slowly, he bent to brush aside the blanket and pick her up. He thought she still wore the shabby white nightgown before he remembered he’d destroyed it in his anger. No, the rough cotton garment under his hands was a man’s shirt she must have found somewhere. She whimpered, a broken, husky sound that furrowed his heart until he remembered he possessed no such organ.

Then she awoke. “No!” she cried, immediately struggling. “Let me go! Don’t touch me, you devil!”

His grip tightened as he tried to ignore the slide of her barely covered skin on his and the way her scent, warm and heavy with sleep, teased him.

“Never.” He knew his damnation lay in the word.

“Leave me in peace,” she whispered, finally going still in his arms. “That’s all I ask.”

“I can’t.” He heard the sadness in his voice. “Hush now.” Hitching her higher, he carried his prisoner back to her bed.

In the bleak hour just before dawn, Kylemore woke hard and ready.

A kind man, a
good
man, would leave his mistress in peace, let her sleep, grant her a reprieve. But she must know now she could expect neither kindness nor goodness from her cold lover.

Although
cold
was the last word he’d apply to himself at this moment.

He shifted to ease his aching erection, disturbing Verity, who stirred from her troubled doze. Neither had slept well. This house would forever put genuine rest out of his reach. And he couldn’t forget the woman who lay such a careful distance away from him.

Even asleep, she didn’t want to touch him. A fleeting memory arose of that strange moment when she’d woken in his arms on the journey north. For one brief instant, his world had spun smoothly on its axis before everything had gone reliably awry again. It had been awry ever since.

With a fatuous optimism he should have known better than to feel, he’d thought sex with her would bring everything back into kilter. But after what he’d done to her in this room tonight, he felt even more lost and adrift than ever.

Although that wouldn’t stop him from having her now.

He flung the sheet to the base of the bed and reached out to place his hand on Verity’s shoulder, feeling the delicate bones and hollows. She was naked—he’d snatched the shabby shirt from her body when he’d returned her to his bed. Now the sweet scent of her skin curled out to urge him closer.

Her skin was so white that even in the darkness, he could follow the graceful curve of her back and waist and the flaring splendor of her hips. Need ratcheted up another notch, became unbearable. His hold tightened.

“No,” she said indistinctly, keeping her back to him and hunching against the edge of the mattress.

“Yes,” he said firmly and rolled her onto her back, releasing another eddy of her tantalizing essence.

To him, it would always be the scent of paradise. And he could brook no delay before he achieved this particular heaven.

Surprisingly, he felt no resistance in her. He moved over her, supporting himself on his elbows. “Put your arms around me.”

Her arms stayed stubbornly at her side.

Ah, he understood her game now. She meant her sullen acquiescence to shame him into leaving her alone. Foolish chit. She should know better than that.

Still, he didn’t immediately thrust inside her. Although the brush of her silky thighs against his hips and the teasing heat of her sex so close to his arousal measured the remotest limits of his control.

But he refused to act the mindless savage again. He’d done that last night. And he’d made her cry.

He’d hurt her, and in spite of three months of dreaming nothing but revenge, he was piercingly sorry. The recollection of tears drying on her pale cheeks gentled the hand he cupped around her breast. The gesture became one of aching tenderness.

Her skin was cool and smooth beneath his fingers. He tested the glorious roundness of her breast, then bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth. Immediately it pebbled hard under his lips.

Triumphantly, he recognized this as familiar—it seemed Soraya wasn’t totally lost to him after all. She tasted like ripe raspberries, and he gorged himself on her summer sweetness, licking and laving and sucking, listening to how her breath hitched with every marauding caress.

She didn’t want to respond to him, he knew. But she couldn’t help herself.

He turned his attention to her other breast. Lengthy delay was beyond his capability, after so many empty months of wanting her and last night’s unsatisfactory coupling, but even so, he was desperate to erase the memory of his earlier brutality. Something in him wanted to cherish her. She was so small and brave and beautiful.

So he made himself linger over her breasts, learning again their taste and texture. And his hand made a slow, stroking journey down the slight arch of her stomach to the plumpness of her mound. As his fingers tangled in the soft hair there, she stifled a moan of pleasure and moved restlessly under him. He gave his own moan as her thigh inadvertently brushed his cock. He’d reached a stage of excitement where even the rasp of the sheet on his skin threatened to send him over the edge.

He couldn’t wait much longer. He dipped his fingers lower, to the secret recesses of her body.

A carillon of victory joined the desire pounding through his veins to create a thunderous symphony of desire. She was hot and wet, ready for him. He wanted to taste her there, to see if she was as succulent and delicious as he remembered.

But his restraint was fraying. He had to take her now or
lose his mind. He withdrew his hand and poised himself to possess her.

She hadn’t stopped fighting him. He knew that in his bones. But he had dominion over her body for now, and she wouldn’t deny him at least her physical capitulation.

With a groan that seemed to rise from the soles of his feet, he slid into her, feeling her muscles resist, then relax to accept his entry. Her inner passage was slick and tight around him, drawing him deeper.

No other feeling in the world rivaled this. Would ever rival this. He clutched her closer, as if daring fate to take her from him.

Against his chest, her nipples formed hard little nubs. Clumsily, he grabbed her knees and bent them up around him to ease his penetration. He was deep enough inside her to touch her very heart.

He waited for her to rise to meet him. She always had. Except for last night.

But she lay still beneath him, her breath emerging in distressed little gasps. He lifted his head to try and read her expression through the darkness. He caught the silvery glint of her eyes as she stared fixedly up at the ceiling. And there was no mistaking the tension in the slender, unmoving body under his.

After a moment, he realized her will would withstand any magic he worked on her senses. How could he bear the mental barriers she raised against him at this moment of greatest intimacy? He had to destroy them or go mad.

He began to move, establishing the slow, intense rhythm that he knew drove her wild. He exerted every ounce of his skill to woo her into surrender. After a year as her paramour, he knew her and he knew what gave her pleasure.

He wanted her so desperately that holding himself back
was agony. The need to seek his own release threatened to snap his spine, incinerate his brain, tear every nerve from his body.

But still he persisted. Gritting his teeth, he harnessed every shred of control to force her to admit defeat in this, if nothing else.

But no change in angle or touch or pressure could make her participate in the journey to ecstasy. Her body recognized his mastery, but with every stroke into her hot depths, he felt her will defy him.

Damn her. She wouldn’t cheat him of this. This, the only part of her that he could still reach.

Anger corroded what little command he still held over himself. His movements became more ferocious as the force inside him gathered, built, ignited. He’d meant to be gentle with her, but those intentions disintegrated under the titanic force of his passion.

Still she didn’t move to join him. Still she didn’t give any acknowledgment that she wanted him, wanted this, although her body was slippery with musky perspiration and every time he thrust into her, she clasped him harder.

Knowing he couldn’t hold on much longer, he pounded into her. Through the inferno in his mind, he heard her moan. Whether in discomfort or pleasure, he didn’t know.