My Dangerous Duke (21 page)

“I’m sorry.” Her breathless whisper inflamed his senses as she drew back a small space. “You looked like you—needed that.”

“I did. I do.” He nodded and drew her back to him.

But before she would let him claim her mouth, she looked into his eyes, then moved higher, pressing a soft kiss to his latest scar. He closed his eyes as her lips lingered above his left eyebrow.

Then he felt her lips glide slowly down the side of his face until they reached his waiting mouth. Passion raced through their hands and lips as they kissed with an intensity that told him she had dreamed of this as much as he had. She clutched at his waistcoat; his hands clasped her waist, in turn, as though with a will of their own. He couldn’t fight it anymore.

When he pulled her astride his lap, she did not protest. His heartbeat slammed as she lifted her arms around his neck and went on kissing him endlessly.

He felt the softness of her lush breasts against his chest and reveled in the intoxicating glide of her sweet tongue caressing his. He could not believe she was doing it, but could not bear for her to stop.

Want raged in his blood, swelling his member to full arousal as she knelt across his lap. He knew the moment she discovered it there, waiting for her, throbbing between her legs; he felt the fiery thrill of her excitement in response. Her fingers dug into his shoulders.

He absorbed in delight her sharp intake of breath when the gentle pressure of his hands on her hips guided her needy core against the hardened ridge of flesh straining the placket of his trousers.

She moaned against his mouth as she began rocking slowly against him. Instinctually, her body knew what to do with him. Rohan began unfastening the back of her dress before he even noticed what he was doing. He didn’t care anymore. He could not contain himself. Every atom of his being had to feel her bare, silken back beneath his hands.

A moment later, her loosened bodice crumpled down about her elbows. He ran his hands hungrily up and down her naked back, then he took her now-exposed breasts in both of his hands. She did not protest but welcomed his touch with a dreamy smile. At the back of his mind, he wondered what the hell he thought he was doing.

She kissed him again, and tugged away the length of black cord binding his hair as she did so. She drove him slightly mad raking her fingers through his hair. Breathing heavily, he dragged his mouth away from hers and lowered his head to taste the milky throat that had tormented him for so long.

She sighed with pleasure as he sucked and kissed her neck. She hugged his head and, beneath her skirts, spread her legs wider to sit more firmly on his lap. He understood better than she did that she wanted fucking, but he was not going to do it.

No, no, he was not. No, indeed. He was not that lost to all decency, surely. That bereft of judgment.

That much of a Beast.

She dragged her fingertips down his chest and began unbuttoning his waistcoat. With the damp heat of her core penetrating through their clothes, warming his deprived cock, his control was hanging by a thread with the sheer, wild unreason of his lust for her.

The next thing he knew, her exquisite hands were on his bare skin. She had bared his chest, exploring him, and when she slipped her fingers down into his shirt, eagerly caressing his stomach, he trembled as her dainty hand inched down toward his waist.

It took all his will, but he found a shred of strength to stop her from going any lower. He knew he would lose his mind if she touched his cock, as she seemed very curious to do. He ended the kiss, pulling back from her in a ragged haze of lust. “Kate—you know this isn’t wise,” he panted.

“No—I know—yes—you’re right.” Her chest heaving, she did not remove her hand from inside his clothes.

“You should go to bed. Go on, now, sweet.”

Her fingers curled into the light furring of hair on his chest. “Don’t you—”

“Please. Go, Kate.
Run,
” he growled at her, removing her hand from inside his shirt as his body throbbed. “Now. Before I change my mind.”

She went motionless, holding his gaze, startled confusion warring with feverish arousal in her eyes. Innocent temptation incarnate, she still sat on his lap, her hair mussed by his fingers, her unfastened gown falling around her bared shoulders in an alluring state of tousled sensuality.

Craving her, Rohan closed his eyes. Could she not see he was trying as hard as he could do the right thing for her sake? “Go to bed, Kate.”

Hurt, reproach, and confusion at his perceived rejection flickered in her green eyes.

“As you wish,” she forced out in a raw whisper, and finally obeyed. Getting up from his lap, still holding her loosened gown to her chest, she fled the room in a rustle of skirts and a chastened patter of running, slippered footfalls.

He stared after her in wicked yearning, the taste of her still lingering on his tongue. He sat for a moment longer, brooding as he gazed into the fire.

Maybe he should send down to the village for a proper whore, he thought as sanity gradually returned.

That was when he realized he was worse off than he thought. For the only one he wanted now was Kate.

 

The kiss had been a mistake.

Kate was mortified that she had let her desire for him run away with her like that. To think that, of the two of them, it was the Beast who should prove the better behaved!

Unable to face him the next day, she avoided him, more or less hiding in the library, while Rohan was elsewhere in the castle, doing Lord-knew-what.

Chastened for having made his job of protecting her all the harder, the least she could do, she thought, was to try to make herself useful. All morning, she worked at putting the haphazard, vast collection of books in the Warrington library in some kind of logical order.

Apparently, this was a task no one had bothered with in about a hundred years.

Trying to keep Rohan out of her thoughts, wondering endlessly if she should apologize for throwing herself at him when she saw him, she traveled from shelf to shelf, rearranging the books by language, by historical period, by size, as was practical, and above all, alphabetically, by the writer’s last name.

She had found multiple titles by individual authors scattered willy-nilly through the collection. It made her want to pull her hair out. Obviously!—an individual author’s body of work all belonged on one shelf, the works arranged, in turn, by whatever system was most suitable: by volume number, alphabetically by title, or by the year of publication, or, in the case of the playwrights, works grouped by genre—tragedies with tragedies, comedies with comedies, histories with histories, and so on.

All the while, he lurked at the back of her mind, a large, looming shadow of temptation, haunting her, even though she knew her preoccupation with this man was nothing but foolish.

Soon all this would be over. O’Banyon’s letter would arrive, bringing an end to her sojourn at the castle. In due time, Rohan and she would surely get to the bottom of why she had been kidnapped and who was out to get her; once these people had been dealt with, the two of them would go their separate ways. And then what?

She would probably never see him again, so why set herself up for unnecessary heartbreak? Logic sounded the alarm that she must quash her budding infatuation with him now. She had to fight it. The intelligent thing to do was to keep her thoughts fixed on her eventual, yearned-for goal of finally going home.

No matter how much she might want him, how secretly giddy she might feel around him these days, it was important to keep it front and center in her mind that she could never truly have him.

Rohan was a duke, too highborn for her. She could never be more to him than a favored mistress … though, lately, truth be told, that didn’t sound so bad.

She was a grown woman. She could do as she pleased, and who was going to scold her? She had never been much of an active participant in the outer world in the first place to care if anybody out there disapproved.

Instead, after all those lonely years cooped up in her cottage, she finally felt connected to someone.

Someone wonderful. How was she supposed to ignore the kind heart she had discovered beneath the Beast’s intimidating exterior?

How was she not to be swayed by a man who had saved her life, who had pledged himself to her protection, talked to her like a true friend, and charmed her daily—a big, beautiful man who had already given her an unforgettable taste of pleasure that first night in his bed?

Did he think her made of stone? God help her, but she wanted more. Last night, she had so needed to taste his mouth again, to caress his splendid chest and arms, desperate to get as close to him as she could.

And when he had opened up to her about losing his mother as a child, she had been overwhelmed with tenderness. Her caring for him had to spill out somehow—she had only kissed him because she thought her heart would burst if she didn’t
do something
to show him how much she felt for him.

Well aware of how intensely he watched her every day, she thought he would have liked it. But instead, he had pushed her away. Kate was so confused, unsure if he had been rejecting her or protecting her.

Of course, everything Rohan had done stuck to the single theme of keeping her safe, yet self-doubt plagued her. Maybe he had stopped her because she had not acted like a lady, crawling onto his lap like the little harlot Caleb Doyle had first told him she was. Maybe Rohan had decided that she somehow was not good enough for him.

She knew she was an oddball, too. Only an eccentric bluestocking would take such pleasure in rearranging books.

Kate’s jumbled thoughts continued as she sorted through the shelves. Though her mood was morose with her embarrassment over the kiss, the library itself was a comfort despite the dust tickling her nose.

The tick-tock of the nearby grandfather clock was a welcome companion in the quiet, soothing her nerves, along with the steaming cup of tea waiting for her on the nearby table.

“Oh, you don’t go here,” she murmured to a stray translation of Tacitus on the next shelf.

She pulled it out and carried it across the room, placing the historian with his fellow Romans, but on her way back to the spot where she had been working, her glance happened upon a title that brought a wry look to her face.

Dante’s
Inferno.

She was still highly curious about Rohan’s involvement in that Inferno Club. By now, thankfully, she knew firsthand that her initial theory about the club’s consumption of kidnapped virgins was naught but a Gothic figment of her overactive imagination.

But then she paused, her faint smile turning to a frown as she noted an unacceptable situation.

“Dante Alighieri, what are you doing all over the place?” she chided, going closer.

The three parts of the Italian’s peerless
Divine Comedy
had been shoved in carelessly on different shelves all throughout one bookcase: the
Inferno
, the
Purgatorio
, and the
Paradiso
.

“You should be together!” she mumbled. It did not occur to Kate that she was talking to the books as she busily rolled the library stair over to the fourth tall bookcase on the eastern wall.

She set the brake, stepped up onto the wheeled stair, and reached up to pull out the
Inferno
to put it with its siblings.

But then, the most curious thing occurred.

When she tilted the book’s spine toward her and started to slide it out, it stopped—and at the same time, she heard a mysterious click inside the wall somewhere. She gasped and yanked her hand away with a small cry.

It was not a book at all! Egads, it was some kind of lever! She stared at it, openmouthed, just as Sergeant Parker dashed into the doorway.

“Are you all right, miss?”

“What?” she looked over, quickly trying to appear nonchalant.

“You cried out.”

“Oh—I almost tripped off this little library stair, that’s all.” She managed a self-conscious smile.

“Do you need help getting down?”

“Oh—no. No. Thank you. I’m fine. That will be all.”

“Do be careful, miss.”

“Yes, of course—I will. You may go!”

With a terse nod, Parker returned to his card game with Wilkins in the hallway. When he had disappeared, Kate turned back to the
Inferno
in wonder.

She could barely contain her excitement, for she knew all about such things from reading Gothic novels! Dear Lord, she thought Mrs. Radcliffe made all that stuff up, but Rohan was right—he was living in one. A castle complete with a ghost and a curse, and now, surely, some kind of secret passage.

Kate’s heart was pounding. From her perch on the library stair, she looked all around the room, trying to find any sign of some hidden passageway opening up.

Nothing so far.

Perhaps she should try the other two parts of Dante’s masterpiece. Quickly jumping down from the stair, she tried the same thing with the
Purgatorio
. Cautiously, she pulled on the spine, but again—
click!
—the book would not come out any farther from its spot, attached to the back of the bookcase somehow. It was actually a second lever only disguised as a book.

Her heart pounded as she bent down to see if the third volume, the
Paradiso
, would be the key to activating whatever mystery the secret levers helped conceal. She pulled it forward. This time, however, there was no click.

She furrowed her brow.
Hm, what did I do wrong?
Some kind of puzzle or pattern?
Perhaps you have to pull them in a particular order.

She experimented with possible combinations, hopping up onto the library stair again and again, and jumping back down to pull the levers in all six different orders.

When nothing availed, she thought of one last possible approach. It took a certain gymnastic talent and a spread-eagle stretch, balancing precariously on one foot on the library stair; but when she succeeded in pulling all three levers simultaneously—the lowest one with her right foot—suddenly, a mysterious sequence of muffled mechanical sounds began to whir and slide and creak behind the wall.