The Unclaimed Duchess (9 page)

“Is this an insult, wife?” Rhys finally asked when he regained his composure.

“No!” Anne raised her hands, almost in a plea, and started to speak again. But then she stopped, tilting her face and examining his so closely that Rhys almost turned away. Finally she smiled. “
You
are teasing me?”

He shrugged as he set aside his now-empty plate. “You're surprised?”

Anne wiped her hands on the linen napkin in her lap and nodded. “It isn't your normal demeanor, I admit.”

Rhys turned his face. His
normal
demeanor. How often he had found himself pondering that very thing over the last week. Being here, knowing the truth about himself, it made every moment of his life run through his mind in a constant stream. And so often he saw images of how dismissive he had been of others, just as he had initially been with Stuart just that morning. He recalled times when he had been cold, unfeeling…even cruel.

Had the victims of his actions really deserved what he said or did? Was his coldness and distantness truly warranted?

“I suppose I am…” He hesitated, uncertain of how to describe his behavior. “I am
stiff
under normal circumstances.”

Anne frowned, and he saw that she was thinking of his past as well. She claimed to love him, and perhaps that blinded her in some things, but she was an intelligent woman and she had to see his lesser qualities. What did she think of him then?

“Formal. You are formal.” She shrugged. “But that comes with your title, doesn't it?”

Rhys couldn't help but cringe at that reminder.
His behavior had been caused by the assumption that he held one of the highest titles in the land. That somehow his birthright had given him more cause to behave in a prideful and superior manner. He had called that propriety and convinced himself it was the way to command the utter respect the Waverly name deserved.

“My title,” he said softly. He sounded raw, his voice empty.

She nodded, unaware of the undertones to the path of this conversation. “Yes. Being a duke comes with great responsibility. Even before your father's passing, I saw you transform from the boy you once were and shoulder those things with enormous seriousness.”

Rhys rubbed his eyes. He hadn't always been serious. He could remember running through the countryside here with not a care in the world. It was only when his mother stopped bringing him to this place, when his father…when the
duke
had become the main guiding force in his life, that he had stopped laughing and started feeling the disdain his birth allowed him.

“But,” he said, almost more to himself than to her, “there are many of my rank who are not so…
formal
, as you put it. Like Simon. Simon is a duke and he is…different.”

Anne leaned back, looking at him for a long time
before she spoke. “You know, I cannot recollect the last time you called him Simon. I've not heard you refer to him as anything but Billingham for years.”

Rhys nodded. Yes, he had always called those of rank by their titles and insisted others do the same with him, even close friends. But now it was different. Simon was more than a friend. As the days went on, Rhys was beginning to accept that Simon was his brother.

“I-I'm beginning to see him in a different light, I suppose,” he answered.

“You see him differently because of whatever happened between you in London. Whatever drove you here,” Anne said.

She kept her eyes on the blanket beneath them, plucking at a loose thread absently, but there was no denying her tone. Once again she was pressing him for the truth, though perhaps more subtly than before.

Rhys almost smiled. Anne was tenacious, he had to give her that.

“I cannot speak to you about that, Anne,” he said softly. “Someday soon you will understand why. But not now.”

She didn't look up from the blanket, but Rhys saw the muscle in her jaw twitch ever so slightly. His answer was unsatisfactory to her and for that
he found he was truly sorry, but he couldn't give her more. He had to keep her in the dark about his reasons for running. To shield her, even in the smallest way. If he didn't, she would try to protect him and damn herself in the process.

“Well, then I suppose, yes,” Anne said. She glanced at him briefly. “I suppose Simon is less formal than you are.”

Rhys leaned back on his elbows on the blanket, crossing his ankles as he looked up at the passing clouds. He thought about why he was so different from the man who shared his blood.

“We were raised differently,” he finally mused out loud. “My father…the duke, he insisted on my showing no emotion. I was punished when I did. And he drilled me endlessly about the sanctity of rank and the exalted history of the Waverly line.”

Anne moved into a similar position as he on the blanket, only she lay on her side facing him. Dark locks of hair fell across her face and he found he wanted to brush them away. Instead he fisted his hands at his sides and fought the inclination.

“Your father was quite intimidating.” Anne shivered. “I imagine he must have been as much so to you, especially as a child.”

Rhys nodded. Just as images of his own life had been sweeping through his mind, now pictures of his
father's behavior crowded his thoughts.

“He was,” he said softly. “He was a stern man, he could even be spiteful when it suited him. Any hint of kindness or empathy I showed to others was discouraged by him.”

Anne's forehead wrinkled, and a deep sadness entered her stare. “Because he believed empathy and kindness were a weakness.”

Rhys nodded, but found himself exploring his wife's face. “And yet you are filled with both and no one could call you weak.”

To his surprise, pink colored Anne's cheeks and she dipped her chin with a smile that was filled with pleasure at his compliment.

“I suppose that is how
I
was raised.” Anne shrugged one shoulder. “And perhaps our upbringing decides all about us.”

Rhys shut his eyes, blocking out the beautiful scenery, blocking out Anne's open and kind face. He wished he could block out everything else. Forget what he knew and what he was.

“That is what I thought, too,” he said softly. “But now…”

He trailed off, but his eyes came open when he felt the soft touch of Anne's fingers on his cheek. She had moved closer, her body touching his and her palm gentle as she cupped his chin.

“Now?” she whispered in soft encouragement.

Once again he felt a strange and powerful longing to confess his secret to her. To ask her to be a friend to him as she had been a friend to so many others. To let the love she claimed to feel for him soothe and comfort him.

“Now I don't know anything anymore,” he said, his voice barely carrying as he kept his gaze locked on her.

Tears filled her eyes, and Rhys stared. They weren't tears for her own broken heart. They were for him. Not out of pity, but a genuine desire to end his pain.

So when she leaned down and wrapped her arms around him, holding him gently and offering the comfort he refused to ask for, he allowed it. And when she drew back and pressed her mouth to his, he didn't pull away from her kiss.

He couldn't have. At that moment he needed her as much as he needed breath, and he was too weak to keep up the pretense of anything else.

D
espite her decision to seduce him, Anne hadn't made plans to kiss Rhys during their picnic. Seduction was best left to nighttime in a bed, not in full daylight and outside!

However, when she stared down at him, she had seen all the pain he normally kept inside. The loneliness he might not even recognize he carried with him. Her first and best instinct was to offer him comfort.

But now, with his arms tightening around her back and his mouth demanding more and more from her kisses, she was beginning to see that this moment was the perfect one for temptation.

She angled her head and relaxed into the kiss, meeting Rhys's questing tongue with her own. He let out a low groan beneath her and his fingers fisted against her back. His reaction emboldened her and she sucked his tongue gently, drawing him into her
mouth the way she wanted his body to come into her own.

He allowed it for a long moment, exploring her and tasting her, but just as she felt the wire of his control fray, he pulled his head back. He shifted her away from him as he pushed to his feet. As he turned, she saw the evidence of his desire, but still he shook his head.

“I'm sorry, Anne,” he murmured, his breath coming as sharp and hard as her own. “I can't do this.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, this utter rejection hurting and embarrassing her all over again. But then she straightened her shoulders. Rhys had already admitted he wanted her. She could see that was true. This refusal to make love to her had nothing to do with her desirability.

It was evident the time had come to fight, truly fight, not just for the right to make love to her husband, but to keep him. To love him.

“Please,” she whispered, her hands shaking as she lifted them to the scooped neckline of her gown. One by one she released the buttons there and finally tugged her dress open. Her breasts bounced free.

Anne flushed as he slowly turned and stared at her. How in the world had it come to this? She was
outside
in the bright, unyielding sunshine, her body bared like she was selling it along Fleet Street in
London. Anyone could come upon them and see how desperate she had become, but it didn't matter. Not anymore.

“Please,” she repeated, and hated that her voice cracked slightly.

He let out a low curse beneath his breath and she thought he would walk away, but to her shock he instead dropped to his knees on the blanket before her. He drew in a breath and it shuddered out as he looked at her. Then one big hand came out so slowly that it was almost like it wasn't in his control, and he reverently cupped one of her bare breasts.

Anne couldn't help but shiver at the feel of Rhys's slightly rough, but warm hands on her skin. Her body came alive at the feel of them, of him so close to her after having been denied so long. Just like that morning when he had curled himself around her and touched her, then shockingly tasted her until she shattered, her body instantly readied itself for his invasion.

“Rhys,” she whispered, her voice shaking with desire and anticipation.

He had been staring at her naked breasts, but the sound of her voice seemed to shake him from that trance. His gaze shifted until their eyes met, and for a long, charged moment they held there. His hand remained on her bare flesh, but Anne could read noth
ing in his eyes about what he would do next. Rhys had returned to his expert ability to hide himself, hide his heart, from everyone near him. If he was warring within over whether to move forward or to once again back away, she could see none of it.

Finally he shook his head, and her heart sank.

“When I married you, I had no idea you would become an embodiment of all temptation to me,” he whispered without breaking the contact of their gazes.

Anne started, lifting her hand to cover her lips. He had never been so bold with her. Even his admission that morning that he wanted her had been made reluctantly, but this was different.

“Anne—” He released her breast and gently cupped her cheeks with both hands. Tilting her face, he whispered, “One fact has not changed: I can't make love to you.”

She moaned in pain, but when she tried to turn from him, he wouldn't allow it.

“But there are
other
things we can do. Other ways to please each other, to put out the fire that torments me every moment I'm near you. Normally I wouldn't ask you, a lady, my wife, to do these things, but now—”

Before he could finish, Anne shifted. She pushed herself up on her knees, dragging her body against
his before she pressed her lips to his. The kiss was desperate, it was sloppy and had little finesse, but she poured herself into it. She poured her desire, her fear, her love into it as she claimed his mouth and accepted his offer with her body.

Then she drew back. “You can't break me with your passion, Rhys. I long for it as much as I long for your heart.”

His lips pursed and she hurried to keep him from denying her love again.

“I know you believe you can't give me that heart,” she said. “But I'll take whatever you
can
give. Just teach me how.”

She said the words and she meant them, but she hated herself for baring her soul even more than she had bared her body. For revealing, once again, just how lopsided their connection was. Rhys knew she loved him, that she needed him, that she longed for him. And she knew nothing except that he desired her despite himself.

But before she could dwell on that too much, Rhys kissed her once again, stealing her breath and her thoughts with an ardor and desperate passion she had never before felt from him. It was as if he had been waiting, holding back, and now he had some kind of permission to let loose his need on her.

His mouth was rough, but she didn't care about that.
She relished the way he claimed her, driving his tongue into her with hard, harsh, driving thrusts that made her blood boil and her limbs weak and boneless. She made no protest when he pushed her backward, laying her down against their picnic blanket and covering her body with the hard length of his own. She certainly didn't refuse him when he moved his lips from hers and began to suck and taste the column of her throat.

He feasted on her, his tongue moving over her in the same rhythm as his gently flexing hips and she felt both movements pulse between her thighs. Just like that morning, her body grew wet, tingling as she became overwhelmed with the urge to open her legs to him. She wanted to feel them joined as one, to be his wife in every way.

But Rhys had her pinned and she couldn't open herself. Yet somehow that only increased the throbbing, urgent pressure between her legs. She moaned softly as Rhys glided away from her throat and tasted the delicate frame of her collarbone, then lower, lower until his breath steamed over her bare breasts.

There he stopped, and when her eyes came open she saw he was staring at her naked skin again, his gaze dark and dangerous. He pinched one nipple gently and Anne arched beneath him, crying out as she turned her face away. Her breath was difficult to find now, she panted it out in heaving gasps as
he toyed with her nipples and sent great bursts of pleasure to ricochet throughout her body.

But that feeling was nothing compared to when he dropped his head and gently sucked one hard peak between his lips. Anne fisted her hands in the blanket beneath her, arching her hips as her breath left her, her voice left her, and all that was left was Rhys and his mouth and his tongue as he swirled it around and around the sensitive tip of her breast.

She had never felt such a thing before, never been so swept away by feeling and desire and need for more. She no longer cared that they were lying out in the open on a blanket. In fact, as Rhys moved his mouth to her opposite breast, she found she liked the gentle swish of the breeze on her bare skin. She only wanted more.

And like a mind reader, he gave her more. More tugging of her sensitive nipples with his lips, his tongue, even his teeth. More stroking against her with his hard body. More of his hands sliding along her flesh, opening her gown farther, pulling it away to reveal her body to him and his passionate ministrations that took her to places she had never imagined, even in her most vivid fantasies.

Finally she was naked, splayed out beneath him like a wanton on the blanket. Yet Anne felt no need to cover herself or turn away from Rhys's blatant stare.
Instead she shifted, moving into the light, showing herself to better advantage and reveling in the way he caught his breath. In the way he wet his lips and trembled as he reached for her.

“I want to taste you again,” he murmured before he kissed her. “Even as you taste me.”

Her eyes went wide even as his tongue breached her lips. Rhys had never been a vocal lover. Oh, he had been gentle, he had softly explained and soothed the first time they made love on their wedding night, but that was different. This statement, “I want to taste you, even as you taste me,” was a sensual promise. A wicked threat that made her body pulse wildly and the intense sensations throbbing through her all the more powerful.

And it made her think of his actions earlier in the day, when he had licked and sucked her until she lost all control and sense. Could she do the same to him? Could she take his power and give him pleasure in return just by touching him with her mouth? The idea of such an act was a foreign thing, but not unpleasant.

He pulled away and cupped her face, looking down at her with an intensity in his stare she had never before seen.

“I'm sorry, it's too much,” he groaned. “I shouldn't have asked for something so bold.”

Anne stared at him. What he wanted implied passion. This was an act that he put outside the bounds of a “perfect wife” or a “perfect duchess.”

She didn't want to be those things. She wanted to be his woman. In every way. Even if it meant doing something that made her belly stir with nerves.

“I want to be bold,” she breathed. “I
want
what you have asked me for.”

He stared at her for a long time, the struggle between desire and propriety on his face. She waited for propriety to win, as it had for so long, but for once it didn't.

“You must promise me that if you don't like this, you'll tell me,” he said, brushing her cheek with the back of his hand gently. “I'll stop immediately, no matter how far we've gone.”

She was taken aback, once again, by his deference to her and her desires, but she managed to jerk out a nod. “Yes.”

No sooner had the word left her lips then he dropped his mouth back to her skin. Once more he stroked his tongue along a languid path down her body, pausing to suckle her breasts until she was weak, then gliding down to tease the sensitive, ticklish skin of her belly.

She tensed as he glided lower, lower, and she felt the rough brush of his stubbly chin against her inner
thigh. She shivered as she waited for him to kiss her there in that sensitive, private place where she ached so keenly. But instead he rolled away onto his back.

Rhys shook his head as he stared up at the sky. Although she had said yes, had promised to tell him to stop if she didn't want this, his hesitation remained. He had compartmentalized
lady
away from
lover
for so long that he wasn't certain he could bring the two together. And he feared when Anne fully realized he wanted her to place his cock into her mouth, she would recoil.

“Rhys?” she asked, her voice shaking as she struggled to sit up and stared down at him.

God, she was a vision. The sunlight danced off her pale, naked flesh, making her like a goddess in some classic painting. And he ached to claim her. Not just pleasure her, but take her. Bury himself deep within her until she sobbed with pleasure and swore she would never love any other man.

But that was selfish. And so was this.

“I promise you,” she murmured. “I want you so much that my body aches for it. And I don't just want to receive pleasure, Rhys. I want to give it. If you'll deny me everything else, please don't deny me that.”

His lips parted in surprise. Surprise that shifted to
shock when his wife moved down the blanket until she sat beside him. Then she reached out and delicately cupped his hard cock through his trousers.

Rhys's eyes came shut. He hadn't been touched by anyone but himself since their honeymoon, which seemed like an eternity ago. That morning just the brush of her backside against him had nearly unmanned him, but this…this was something entirely different. Even through the heavy fabric of his pants, her touch was like fire. And he arched his hips against her hand almost without the ability to control himself.

“This is right,” she whispered, her voice soft and seductive as she unbuttoned the top of his fly and parted the fabric.

Her fingers slid along the skin she had revealed and Rhys clenched at the blanket beneath him as he let out a curse. She smiled before she repeated the action again and again until she freed his cock from its confines.

“I'm your wife and there is nothing more
right
than this.”

He could have protested, but when her soft fist closed around his tight, throbbing flesh, he lost all ability to speak. To reason. This felt too good and he let out a guttural moan as she stroked down over him once, twice.

Rhys surrendered, too weak from pleasure to do anything else. He squeezed his eyes shut and let her brush down over him, without argument, without direction. And though she wasn't experienced, with each stroke she grew bolder and more accurate in her touch. She seemed naturally attuned to his body, giving him more when he needed it and less when he danced too close to the edge of release.

The pleasure stirring in his loins boiled hotter and hotter, stealing his breath and making him growl ever louder with desire. But just as he thought it all might be too much, he felt the heat of her breath against his cock, and then the wetness of her tongue shocked his eyes open.

He stared, wide-eyed, down his body and watched as his wife, the woman he had always thought of as the “perfect lady,” closed her lips around him and sucked him into a heated heaven.