My Last Duchess

by James, Eloisa

  There was Rodney. After that letter to her father, there would be no escaping Rodney.

  There would be no “happily ever after” for her. Life with Rodney would be . . . whatever it was.

  But if she managed to seduce Wick, she would have memories, at least. Still, she would have to be subtle . . . he had a will of iron, and mere sensuality would never break it.

  One ethical question kept bothering her. Did she have the right to try to overcome his resolve? Wick’s enormous reserve and his adherence to honor stemmed from the same place: his illegitimate birth. If she succeeded in persuading him to make love to her, was she tarnishing that quality he held so dear?

  With a wry little smile, she thought about the knight in shining armor her girlhood self had dreamed of. There was no man more born to being a maiden’s champion than Wick. He was all that was honorable, good, and true.

  In the end, she decided that as long as she didn’t cause Wick to break his code of honor, she could not do an injustice to him. And that meant he had to make love to her not because he desired her, but because she needed him—or rather, the act—to save her . . . to rescue her. In making love to her, he would become the instrument of her salvation.

  Chapter Eight

  That night Phillipa put Jonas to bed and then sat down in the nursery rocking chair, facing the door. If he didn’t come by . . . by nine of the clock, she would try to find him. She revised that when nine o’clock came and went. Ten o’clock . . . eleven . . . Finally the nursery door opened.

  With one look at Wick’s face, Philippa flew into his arms like a bird to its nest. Except this bird was in danger of being eaten alive, so perhaps that wasn’t a good analogy. His hands were rough, unsteady, and urgent, as if he already knew what she had to say. As if he guessed that it was to be her last night in the castle.

  Yet it wasn’t long before he pulled back. She would have been angry if she couldn’t see raw lust fighting with regret in his eyes. “I’m no Rodney, taking a maiden in the stables,” he said, reminding himself as much as her.

  If she was to execute her plan, now was the moment.

  “I’m no maiden,” Philippa reminded him. And: “I need you.”

  Every inch of her body was aware of the coiled strength of his. The way he held himself utterly still, not twitching or fidgeting.

  “I wrote to my father,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I couldn’t allow him to worry about me any longer. It was thoughtless and unkind to give him such anxiety.” Jonas made a snuffling sound in his cradle, like a baby piglet. “My father will take me home, of course.”

  Wick made a sudden movement but stilled.

  She swallowed and looked back up at him. “He will come to retrieve me, and take me home to Rodney. That’s what he must do, because I—I was fool enough to lie with Rodney in the stables.”

  “Ah, Philippa,” Wick said. And then she was enveloped by his arms.

  “I know,” she said carefully, “that you would help me if you could.”

  He held her, warm and close.

  “If I had, if I had slept with another man, perhaps Rodney would refuse to marry me.” It sounded absurd. She gave up and started over. “If I—”

  He interrupted her. “Philippa.”

  “I know,” she said miserably. “I know you’re too much of a gentleman to do what I am asking.”

  “You are only playing at being a nursemaid, Phillipa. You will go home and be a lady again. But I have never had a gentleman’s rank. Servant or bastard . . . either one is ineligible to marry you.” His voice was fierce, as ferocious as a wolf in winter. “You ask the impossible.”

  “I’m sorry! I should never have suggested it.” Her words caught on a sob. “I didn’t think of it that way. It’s just that I thought that you . . .”

  “You knew that I desired you and thought I might help you escape from an odious marriage. I cannot have this conversation with the young prince in the room,” Wick stated. He walked across the room, bringing Philippa with him, and opened the door to the corridor.

  Her heart was breaking. It had all gone wrong. She had insulted Wick. Of course, he couldn’t do as she asked. It was as ridiculous as the idea that he should marry her. He was the son of a grand duke. She was a fool—a stupid, naive fool from a small village, and she should have stayed there. Though if you looked at it another way, he was a servant, and she was a lady. The outcome was obvious.

  Besides, her idea was ridiculous, born of desperation. Obviously Wick would never, ever, sleep with an unmarried lady—even if she had begged him.

  Her cheeks were burning, as she followed Wick into the corridor and shut the door behind her.

  But she came from strong stock, and she would not crumple. “I apologize for asking you to do something so insulting to your sense of honor,” she said, keeping her voice steady. And she even managed to summon up a wisp of a smile. “I know you are no debaucher of maidens.”

  He did not return her smile. “My father was as much. My mother worked in the castle’s laundry. I cannot, ever, act as he did.”

  Philippa nodded. “You are not like your father. And you mustn’t think twice about Rodney. I shall explain everything to my father, and I will make him understand.” She would not burden Wick with the truth: that her father would marry her to Rodney willy-nilly.

  “I could kill Rodney, if you wish. Perhaps I should do it whether you wish me to or not.”

  She blinked and saw that his eyes were entirely serious. She let out a muffled laugh. “No! Rodney is . . . Rodney is not terrible. I exaggerated the matter when I told you about him. I will tell my father that I don’t wish to marry Rodney, and that will be that.”

  She held out her hand. “I have heard that fine ladies in London shake hands.”

  He looked down at her hand in the dim corridor. “Are you a fine lady?”

  “No, but I wish I were, for your sake.”

  “So you could buy me?”

  Her hand dropped. “Buy you?”

  “I’m pretty, in my own way,” he said neutrally. “Ladies have indicated that they might be willing to support me in a grander fashion than does Gabriel.”

  For a moment she didn’t understand him, then a flash of rage went through her body. “Now you have insulted me, as surely as I did you,” she snapped. “I think this conversation has gone quite far enough.” She turned to open the door to the nursery.

  His hand shot out, held the door shut.

  “Wick,” she said, staring at his hand against the dark wood, “I must enter that nursery. I should pack. I am leaving tomorrow.”

  She didn’t feel him move, or sense a flash of his arms, nothing . . . and yet suddenly she was spun around and found herself wrapped in his arms.

  “I would let you buy me,” he said finally, his voice hoarse.

  She managed a shaky smile. Then she took a deep breath and put her hands on his face, drawing his lips to hers.

  “How much?” she whispered.

  “I’ve been told I’m worth a fortune.” His voice had a bleak note.

  “I haven’t much money.” Her tongue stole out, ran along the seam of his lips, tasted that wildness that he concealed with his upright body, his unmoving face.

  “There’s a special rate on . . . I’m going for a ha’penny,” he whispered against her lips.

  This time she kissed him.

  Philippa didn’t know how long they stood in the corridor. With her eyes closed, her only sensations came from the press of Wick’s powerful body, the drugging sensation of his mouth, the way his hands shaped and teased her.

  Then she became aware he was saying something. “I didn’t mean to insult you by talking of the women who offered to buy me.” His voice was low and rasping. “But I am constrained. I cannot ask you to marry me. The only conceivable relationship between a butler and a lady is if she . . . engages his services.”

  She swallowed, biting her lip when she saw the pain in his e
yes. “But I would marry you.”

  The words had tumbled from her lips. “If you were to ask,” she added quickly.

  “I am a servant, with a grand lineage on one side but no wealth,” Wick said bleakly. “And the truth of it is that I . . . I love you, Philippa.” It was his turn to cup her face in his hands. “Which means I cannot make you a servant. If I could marry any lady, any woman in the world, from queen to beggar, I would never choose another than you. And I mean that.”

  Philippa’s lips trembled. “I love you too,” she whispered.

  “But I cannot marry,” Wick said, his eyes searching hers, begging for understanding. “If I were a different person, and this a different place and time, I would have had a wedding ring on your finger a week ago.”

  “Oh, Wick,” she whispered, collapsing forward against his chest. A tear dampened his shirt.

  “I would give anything to call you mine.” His voice was harsh and true.

  “Then I shall have to buy you,” Philippa said, brushing away that tear and another that followed it. She pulled back and caught his eye, because this was important. “I am not a child to be handed from one man’s hand to another.”

  His brows drew together. “I do not—”

  “You do.” She said it clearly, not angrily. “I love you.”

  He swallowed hard.

  “And I am perfectly capable of making up my own mind about the disposition of my body.”

  “I know.”

  She opened the door at her back. “Then come.” She held out her hand.

  His voice emerged strangled from his chest. “Philippa, I cannot—”

  “If you love me, if you respect me as a person who owns myself and my own body, who is servant to no one and owned by no one . . .”

  “A gentleman wouldn’t,” he said hoarsely.

  She smiled at that, picked up his hand. “You just told me, sir, that you are no gentleman.”

  He followed her, through the darkened nursery, to the door at the far end, through the door.

  From a chair at the side of the bedroom, she snatched her reticule, and opened it. “If the only way I may have you is to buy you . . .”

  He let out a half groan, half laugh. “Philippa!”

  She reached out, caught his hand, and wrapped his fingers around a ha’penny. “Then I own you. And although you didn’t ask, my price was very low. I was yours from your first kiss. I suppose you could say that I came for free.”

  The hunger in his eyes made her feel more beautiful than she had in the whole of her life.

  Still, he remained motionless, exercising that infernal self-control of his.

  She let the silence grow, then: “I have bought a house, but not possessed it.” She was quite sure that the look in her eyes rivaled that of any light skirts on the streets of London. “And I am sold, but not yet enjoyed.”

  There was another beat of silence in the room, during which Philippa’s heart drummed in her throat.

  “That was a terrible pun,” Wick observed. There was something deep and slow in his voice. She bit back a smile.

  He put one hand to his perfectly tied cravat. Philippa held her breath.

  Eyes fixed on hers, he slowly, slowly lifted a fold of snowy linen, over, up, over, through . . . she saw his hands from the corner of her vision, because she was drinking in his expression, the taut desire that shaped his face.

  Then she raised her hands to the cord that held her wrapper together. A moment later, she was wearing only a light muslin nightgown. One glance down at her chest and she felt herself turning pink with embarrassment. Instinctively, she folded her arms over her breasts, hoping to flatten her nipples before Wick saw them.

  She couldn’t tell if he had. He shrugged off his heavy coat and put it over a chair.

  “You,” Philippa said, and cleared her throat. “You look . . .”

  “Without that livery,” Wick stated, “I am a man, nothing but a man.”

  Joy sparked her heart. “Do you wish me to remove my nightgown?”

  He straightened, a shoe in one hand. “If you’re having second thoughts, I’ll leave.”

  She gasped no, and a smile quirked the corner of his mouth. Then she added: “I think I would feel more comfortable with my nightgown on.”

  Wick nodded. He dispensed with his other shoe, pulled off his stockings, then paused, hands on his waistband.

  Philippa realized her voice had died. It was just that his body was so taut and muscled, like nothing she’d seen or imagined. It was a wicked smile he threw her, the kind that seducers threw maidens . . . though she was no maiden.

  “I should probably warn you,” Wick said, but she hardly heard him. He removed his breeches, and now his hands were on his smalls.

  “What?” she breathed.

  “It could be that Rodney and I don’t—” Still his hands didn’t move.

  “Don’t what?” she said, unable to imagine what he was getting at.

  “Don’t resemble each other.” His smalls hit the floor, and Philippa’s mouth fell open. She instinctively fell back a step, ending up against the wrought-iron bed frame.

  “Oh dear.” Her voice came out in a squeak. The memory of Rodney’s member flashed through her mind: Rodney’s little member, she now realized. There was no comparison.

  “I gather we don’t,” Wick said, a wry, yet tender note in his voice.

  “No,” Philippa breathed. “You don’t.”

  Chapter Nine

  Wick hadn’t known—hadn’t dared to think—about what was about to happen, and what it would mean for him. But as laughter gathered in his chest at the look in Philippa’s eyes, the helpless, desiring, appalled look on her face, he knew.

  He meant to have her, to have and to hold, any way he could. Whether that meant becoming a butler in her house, or a gardener in her fields . . . He had to be near her.

  This funny, delicious, intelligent woman had walked into the castle and straight into his heart and she would never leave it, as long as he lived.

  But that was a problem to be worked out tomorrow. Just at present, he had to pry his beloved off the bed railings.

  “Darling,” he said, walking closer.

  Philippa flicked her eyes to his face, then back down. The agonized doubt on her face almost had him doubling over with laughter, but he couldn’t do that. Instead, he swept her up in his arms and lowered her onto the bed.

  She lay in the path of the moonlight coming through the window; it flowed across the floor, up and over the bed, spilling on the window and splashing light over her white-blonde hair as it spilled over the pillow and down the side of the bed. She looked ethereal, like a fairy and not an Englishwoman, some sort of fabulous sprite he’d captured and brought to his bed for the night.

  He sat next to her on the bed. “Why did you ask me whether you should undress?”

  “Rodney didn’t, that is, he undressed but he didn’t remove my clothes.”

  “Rodney,” Wick stated, “is a fool and a bungler. I don’t suppose he used a French letter either, did he?”

  “No.”

  “It will prevent your being with child,” he told her. “Our child.” There was a little stab to his heart as he said it. He would give anything to have his baby growing inside Philippa, to watch her stomach round, to see her eyes in the face of a little boy or girl . . . But since he didn’t know if the obstacles to their marriage could be overcome, the French letter was necessary.

  A ghost of a smile touched her lips, but still, she looked strained and uncertain. He lowered himself slowly until he lay on his side, and gently, very gently, leaned forward to touch his lips to hers. His hands tangled in all that gorgeous hair, drawing locks of it through his fingers like silk spun on Jove’s own looms.

  He kissed her until she opened her mouth to him and turned toward him. He kept kissing her, not moving, letting her body inch toward his, letting her hands take the initiative, slipping from his neck to his shoulders, down his back.

&
nbsp; Her touch made him shake with ferocious need, but he schooled himself. He remained still, telling himself that he must not frighten her. Philippa had already had one unpleasant experience; if he muffed this, she’d likely be put off for life.

  He waited until her eyes flew open, and she said, “Wick.”

  “Yes?” He couldn’t stop grinning.

  “Don’t the gentlemen do more with the strumpets they buy?”

  “What sort of thing would you like me to do?”

  “You should know. And stop smiling at me like that.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said, leaning forward and kissing her lips, her cheek, her feathery eyelashes. “I’ve never laughed in bed with a woman before.”

  “That’s probably because you were more busy than you are now,” she remarked, and he nipped her earlobe, then felt the shudder that pulsed down her body.

  “You look like a fairy, a sprite,” he said, running his hand down the long line of her leg. She seemed to have a fascination with his chest: she was tracing little patterns on it. “But you sound like a schoolmarm.” The last word was strangulated, as Philippa had leaned toward him and was tracing the same patterns with her tongue.

  Slowly, slowly, he slid his hand under her nightgown, over her slender thigh, the tender curve of her waist.

  “I just want to say one thing,” Philippa said, abandoning his chest, much to his regret.

  “Mmmmm,” he said, his fingers gliding over skin as soft as daisy petals. His heart was thudding in a way he had never experienced before.

  “No tiddle-taddling,” she said.

  Wick’s hand was caressing her generous, lush breast, and couldn’t think very clearly. Philippa’s head fell back against the pillow as he brushed past her nipple and a small moan broke from her lips, so it seemed she wasn’t exactly clearheaded either. “Is this tiddle-taddling?” he asked, rubbing that sweet raspberry with his thumb.

  Another strangled moan, a tiny pulse of air, flew from her throat. “No,” she said with a gasp. Then: “You don’t know what it is, do you? I should have known only Rodney would try to engage in something so distasteful.”