The Devil in the Duke: A Revelry’s Tempest Novel

by K. J. Jackson

  Her gaze travelled up his body until her eyes locked with his. She managed one unsupported step away from the wall, her chest splintering at both the horror and beauty of the reality she knew in her heart. Horror that she had just lived without this man for ten years. Beauty that he was before her now, still as desperate for her as she was for him.

  Her lips parted, her voice cracking. “For all I don’t remember, Logan, there is one thing that is undeniable—you are my always, my true everything. That, I remember.”

  He launched himself at her in that breath, his body ramming into her in one swoop, wrapping her to him. Her shoulders slammed against the cottage wall. Every shred of self-denial he’d suffered during the past week released in a raging, crushing hold.

  His body shaking around hers, he encapsulated her fully, not giving her air to breathe, room to move.

  She didn’t care.

  This was right. This was what had haunted her dreams for years. This man holding her like it was always meant to be.

  A moment of eternity passed and he loosened his hold slightly, enough for her to wedge her arms free from their bodies. She reached up and wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck.

  All the invitation he needed.

  His lips came down on her in a hard kiss that sank into her, shaking her to her bones. The heat, the woodsy scent of him, his lips demanding on hers, his tongue finding way to plunge into her and send sharp pangs running through her core—all of it intoxicating. How had he managed to hold it back this past week? Had their positions been reversed, she would have kissed him like this that first day—ripped his clothes off whether he remembered her or not.

  He pulled from her lips suddenly and it took several breaths before her eyelashes fluttered and she could find his face through the pounding haze that had enveloped her body.

  His steely grey eyes, darker, more dangerous than ever, pierced her. “Are you really back to me, Sienna?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t move, didn’t reply. It was deep in his eyes, the disbelief. He thought she was lying.

  Her hands came forward, clasping his face between her palms. “You don’t believe me. It’s either that or I died to you ten years ago and your love for me died then as well. Which is it, Logan?”

  His eyes darkened. “Death could never stop my love for you, Sienna.”

  “Then you don’t believe me. You don’t believe I remember.”

  “It’s all I’ve wanted for the past week, Sienna, for you to remember. And now that you say it...I just…I just want it to be true so badly that I cannot trust it—you—myself.”

  Her fingertips curled along his cheekbones. “The feeling in my soul—that you are my world—that my heart is beating so furiously just because I am near you, kissing you. I may not have all the memories, but I have the feeling. It’s something I couldn’t deny even if I wanted to, Logan.”

  “Do you want to deny it?”

  “No. Heavens no. But I don’t know what I can do to make you believe me.”

  His head dropped forward, his eyes hidden for a long moment before he lifted his chin, his heated gaze meeting hers, the low rumble of his voice vibrating against her body. “That moment when I part your legs and the air reaches you. That moment when you are bared to the world, trusting that I will take care of you. Your eyes. How you look at me in that one moment. How you’ve always looked at me in that moment. That’s when I know I have you. When you will always be mine and only mine.”

  She shifted to press her face close to his, her lips brushing his with her breathless words. “Then remove my dress, Logan.”

  His last kiss curled her toes—every wicked thought of what she could do to a naked man taking hold in her mind.

  This kiss left the last in shame, searing her from head to toe. His body pressing against hers, his member already hard and long, nudging into her abdomen through their clothes, his tongue thrusting, exploring, pulsating into her mouth. Her folds went wet, begging for him, for their clothes to cease their barrier.

  His hands were quick.

  While his kiss was sending her body into a mad frenzy, his fingers worked far too many buttons to count. Her skirt and petticoat fell, the jacket of her riding habit ripped back off her arms, her chemise and stays slid down her body.

  The stockings and boots he left.

  He knew exactly how to undress her. His fingers trailing along her curves, sending ripples of carnal fury to every nerve in her body. And all she wanted was more. Him. Him deep inside her.

  Her hands dove between them, unbuttoning the fall front of his trousers and setting his cock free. No hesitation, she grabbed him. She’d never touched a man before—except she had. The second her fingers wrapped the length of his member, felt the silky cords that ran along his shaft, the ridge of the head, she knew it. Knew she’d done this a thousand times before.

  That his body was hers.

  His mouth had moved down her neck and a growl shot from him, rumbling into her skin as her fingers tightened around his length.

  “Damn, Sienna. Damn your hand.”

  Her hand stilled. “I shouldn’t touch you?”

  “Yes. Hell, yes. It’s just been so long since you’ve…since your fingers have wrapped around me.”

  She smiled into the top of his head and squeezed harder.

  His face jerked up, a wicked gleam in his eye burning bright. “You’ve never been patient. I wanted you inside this cottage, at the least, lying down where I could see your body that has haunted my dreams for so long. Where I could worship it.”

  Her left hand ran through his dark hair, gripping a swath of it at his neck. She kissed him, her lips parting his, her tongue delving into his mouth, tasting. “We don’t have time for that, Logan. I want you. Now. Here.”

  She wedged her hands upward, stealing away his overcoat, waistcoat, and linen shirt. Her fingers ran along the skin of his chest, trailed along the ridges of muscles low on his stomach, avoiding the scab where she had gutted him. She looked at him, a breathless smile on her face. “Now.”

  “You are a demanding one.”

  “Yes? I do want what I want, I guess.”

  He chuckled and his right hand came down in between them, teasing down her stomach, lower and lower until his fingers slipped into her folds.

  Nerves aflame, an instant wave of need swept through her with the motion, sending her mouth dry, her tongue begging for more. He plied her folds, her nubbin, her soft screams at every swipe of his fingers sending him faster, sending her own hand downward to stroke his cock.

  Her breath flew into madness, scream after scream tumbling from her mouth. Through the pounding in her head, the building waves she couldn’t control, her body lifted. Logan’s arm had gone under her backside, lifting her and positioning her against the outside of the cottage.

  Lifting her right leg, she slipped her right thigh up his body, resting heavy on his hip bone as she pulled her left leg up the other side of him. Bared, open to him, she wrapped her legs around his backside as his dark grey eyes searched her face, her soul. She met his look, not hiding the slightest bit of what she was feeling in that moment.

  She was his. She would always be his. And she knew it.

  It flickered in his eyes. The recognition. The belief.

  He plunged into her. No word, no warning, and it was the most delicious thing she’d ever felt. The length of him filling her, so wide she didn’t know how her body stretched to accommodate him.

  His other hand went under her backside, supporting her fully as he withdrew and slammed back into her.

  This was no longer exploring. No longer caressing. This was hard and fast—a brutal need that had been ten years in the making. He needed to be crashing into her just as much as she needed it.

  Stroke after stroke, her back slammed against the wall of the cottage, the pain of it only heightening the fire in her nerves. Every time he slid out, her breath stopped, the savage desperation for him to be back inside of her
swallowing her. The building in her core pitched higher, her nonsensical screams filling her head, filling the air around them.

  He withdrew, this time for a long moment, the thick tip of him poised just inside her entrance. He held it. Held it until she was clawing at him, her legs around him tightening, kicking.

  He drove into her. Drove her body over the edge, sending her splintering into a million stars with one final scream, his name on her lips.

  His body shuddered at her scream, a ferocious growl escaping his throat to twist with her cry.

  His body collapsed against hers, smothering her to the wall.

  She was back.

  At least in this, she was back.

  And they both knew it.

  { Chapter 6 }

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I am not.” Her voice, soft and muffled into his chest, warmed his heart.

  “You are.” His fingers stroked down the length of her red-blond hair, twining along a russet strand. He had forgotten how much that one little motion meant to him—her hair long down her bared back where he could twist it in silent contemplation for hours. He didn’t care that splinters from the rough wood of the cottage were digging into his back, not while she straddled him, spent, her naked body entwined with his.

  He ran his fingertips along her shoulder blades, checking for any splinters that may have embedded into her skin. He hadn’t meant to take her that fiercely, her body slamming into the wall. But they had always been a force he couldn’t control—merely manage, at best—when they were naked together.

  When he’d spun them and sat, he’d needed to collapse to the ground just as much as her limp body did.

  Wrapping her hair along his palm, Logan tugged her head back so she had to look up at him. “You’re trembling and I want to know why.”

  She grinned. “You can’t just let me revel in our bodies being meshed like this for a few more minutes?”

  He could see right through the smile she had conjured to cover up whatever her quaking was about. “Not when I’m worried about why you’re shaking. Tell me.”

  She shrugged, her shoulders bumping into his upper arms. “It was nothing, just another image that suddenly appeared in my mind that didn’t make any sense.”

  “What was the image?”

  She sighed. “You aren’t going to stop your insistence, are you?”

  “No.”

  “The name, Bournestein, how you said it the other day—it popped into my mind. I never met my uncle in all these years, my grand—” she shook her head, looking at his chest “—the woman that claimed she was my grandmother and was taking care of me at Roselawn, she said Bournestein was my uncle, my mother’s brother, and that he was the one that supported the estate. She said he was very generous.”

  She craned her neck to look up at his face. “Is that true? You must know him? Who is he? I get an image of a man a half head shorter than you with half a head of hair and a barrel chest descending down into a belly. And purple flashes. Why do I see purple flashes? Is he wearing purple? It sounds bizarre, I know, but the name Bournestein—it’s so familiar and my mind keeps going back to it.”

  Logan’s body started to stiffen and he had to force his muscles to relax. He kissed her forehead. “I would prefer you remember on your own, Sienna. I don’t want to confuse your memories.”

  She shifted in his arms, her index and middle finger poking at his chest. “Tell me who he is. The emotions I feel flash so distinctly with the other snippets of memories I’ve had—fear, love, danger, hatred—even if I can’t place the fragments into actual, full memories. But the purple—with the name Bournestein and those purple flashes—I cannot figure it. The emotions I sense are all in a jumble and such drastic opposites that there is no clear overriding emotion attached to the name.”

  His hand stilled in her hair. That was the last thing he wanted to hear.

  He wanted to hear her say hatred. Pure hatred. Only hatred for the name Bournestein.

  He leveled his voice. “I think these snippets of memories are ones that you need to allow your own mind to work out for you, to expand into full—”

  “Why? Why not just tell me, Logan? You obviously know what I’m talking about. Who is Bournestein?”

  Logan looked away from her, staring for a long moment at his horse on the edge of the clearing around the cottage. “It…it is complicated, Sienna. And if you don’t remember who Bournestein is, you are better off without the complications.”

  “That isn’t fair, Logan.” She grabbed his face in her hands and dragged his attention back to her. “You know everything and you’re just being cruel by holding it back.”

  “I’m not being cruel, Sienna. I’m attempting kindness.”

  Her hands dropped from his face. “But you don’t know what this is like—the gaping holes in my head that are all mysteries, nothing more. I lost my life—I lost you—and if I had only remembered…”

  “But you did. You do remember me now. At least your heart does. That is what’s important.”

  His fingers lifted to tuck a stray lock of red hair behind her ear. As selfish as it was, she remembered him, and if she never had another memory of the past surface, that would suit him well. But he did sympathize with her frustration. “And you’re correct—I don’t know what it’s like. But maybe your mind is doing exactly what it needs to in order to keep you sane.”

  “Keep me sane?” She leaned away from him. “I won’t be sane if I know who Bournestein is?”

  Logan stifled a sigh, his palms coming up to rub his eyes. His hands sank and he centered his gaze on her. “Do you trust me, Sienna?”

  “Yes.” Her answer was immediate, no reservations in her blue eyes. That, at least, was to his favor.

  “Then believe me when I tell you, whatever you have in your mind about Bournestein, it is better left at rest—a forgotten memory.”

  Her face fell, her mouth clamping shut.

  His hands settled on her upper arms, rubbing. “Sienna, I can’t imagine what is going through your mind, or how frustrating it must be to not understand all those memories in your head. But I think your brain is only trying to protect you—to not overwhelm you with years of forgotten memories. I think you need to wait. Be patient and your mind will tell you what it needs to when it needs to.”

  It took her a long moment before her eyes lifted to him. “Why do I suspect I’m not the patient type?”

  He chuckled. “As verified a few minutes ago, you aren’t. You want what you want when you want it.”

  “Oh. I thought that was maybe just because I had this in front of me.” She motioned with her fingertips to his bare chest. Sudden worry cut across her brow and her eyebrows lifted. “Am I a harpy?”

  He grinned. “Nothing of the sort. You are a very determined person, that is all.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t feel like I’ve been that way for the last ten years. I suddenly feel like I was in a very placid dream—a bubble—that replayed the same unperturbed scene day after day. I would sketch. Go to the village. Grandmother would make me practice my stitches, since apparently, I had forgotten how to sew.”

  “You sew now?”

  “Yes, of course—wait—” Her eyes widened. “Am I so terrible at it because I never knew how to do it?”

  Logan nodded, a slight grin on his face. “You were determined to never learn how. I used to have to stitch my own buttons.”

  Her hand went down in between them, her fingertips gentle atop the crooked stitches holding together the wound in his gut. “And you’re terrible at it as well.”

  He laughed.

  Her fingertips left his healing wound, lightly skipping from one scar to the next on his chest and belly. “These scars, are they from the war?”

  “Many of them.”

  Her lips pursed into a frown. “I don’t like seeing them, seeing them mar your skin, seeing the pain you must have endured.”

  He wrapped his hand over her fingers on his ches
t. “There’s no need for your eyes to darken—the pain of them is long past.”

  Her head twisted around, looking toward his feet. He’d kicked off his left boot and pant leg, but his right boot was still in place, his trousers bunched around the leather.

  “Your right foot is the one that was maimed? I haven’t even thought on it since you mentioned it, you hide the limp so well. But that pain hasn’t stopped in all these years, has it?”

  “It is manageable.”

  “Can I see it? I don’t want any of you hidden from me, Logan.”

  He inclined his head toward his boot.

  She extracted herself from his arms, her naked body moving down his limbs. She didn’t turn from him—stayed facing him as she crouched in the grass by his feet. A silent cue she wasn’t about to hide anything from him. His heart swelled—a trait she’d never lost.

  Her hands wrapped around his boot, wedging it from his foot. She spun it in her hands, reaching in to feel the extra support ingrained into the boot that let him stand normal.

  Her arm elbow deep in his boot, she glanced at him. “The padding and the shape—this boot is a marvel.”

  “It is.”

  Her look went down to the boot as her hand nosed around the inside of it. “Does it have springs under the wood?”

  “It does. It’s the eleventh rendition of the design.”

  “Your shoemaker is a wonder.” She extracted her hand from the boot.

  “He is. And he does the same for all my guards.”

  Setting the boot aside, she tugged off his trousers and moved to sit on her calves.

  In spite of himself, his breath caught, lodging in his lungs. He was facing the only person in the world whose opinion on his injury he cared about.

  Her hands soft, her fingers traced up along his foot from his toes, slow, almost sensual as though she meant to seduce it. She lifted his foot to her lap, turning it over and back and forth, her fingers exploring the wide sunken dip along his heel where bone was removed. Her fingers trailed again and again along the lines of long-healed scars.