Duke I’d Like to F…

by Sierra Simone

  Why was it that Sloreley could cavort with whomever he pleased and could show up to the dinner table with bites on his neck, but she was made to promise all sorts of good behavior when she’d been nothing but well behaved her entire life?

  It wasn’t fair.

  Maybe you’re the one not being fair, she countered to herself. She’d already told herself she would make the best of this, and all successful projects started with determined optimism.

  “So, my lord,” she started, trying to cast about for any topic that would give them common ground, “have you been at Far Hope long?”

  Sloreley didn’t bother looking at her when he answered. “No.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Yesterday. And I’m ready to leave,” he said shortly.

  This surprised her. Far Hope was lonely, yes, and even the interior had an austerity to it that bordered on bleakness, but it was still beautiful for all that. There were stained glass windows in the great hall and the attached family chapel, and there was a library three times the size of Pennard Hall’s. There were sheltered gardens outside that went right to the very edge of the hills, and there were parapeted towers she was told gave expansive views all the way to the far end of the valley. Far Hope had the feel of a place caught out of time, and it had never occurred to Eleanor that someone wouldn’t like that.

  “I suppose you miss London,” she said, trying to keep the conversation going. “Far Hope is quite isolated.”

  “It’s a prison,” he said. He still didn’t look at her. “Like marriage.”

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer her, scratching again at his neck and then taking a drink of his wine. She couldn’t tell if his silence was due to his own inner turmoil or because he simply did not think she deserved a response.

  “It doesn’t have to be a prison for either of us,” she said quietly, deciding to lend him the benefit of the doubt, and also grateful her parents were too occupied with Sloreley’s mother and sister to pay her unusual conversation with her fiancé any mind.

  “But it is. I’m too young to be married,” he complained. “Many dukes don’t marry until they’re twice my age or older.” He glared at his wine glass. “It’s not fair.”

  Almost nothing in their Empire was fair—nothing at all—which anyone with any sense at all would see if they paid any attention. But that was perhaps a conversation for a different time . . . or at least for when Sloreley was sober. “Surely you cannot begrudge your uncle his wishes when you stand to gain so much by remaining in his good graces?”

  “I’m owed the title by my birth as his nephew,” Sloreley said, still glaring at the glass. “I don’t have to earn it by wedding the daughter of some country lord.”

  It was only years of being Serene, Equanimous Eleanor that kept her voice steady and her hands in her lap. “Then why are you marrying me, Lord Sloreley, if I may ask?”

  “Jarrell’s got his fist around my allowance,” Sloreley admitted in a mumble. “If I don’t marry, he’ll cut me off.”

  So it was money. She might have guessed as much.

  She considered for a moment, then decided she had very little to lose by being frank. “Is there any agreement we can come to, together, to make this arrangement more palatable?”

  Sloreley turned to blink at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Only that I imagine some of your objections to marriage come from the restrictions that typically come along with it. I don’t consider myself prudish, and I want to assure you that I will not ask you to tailor your appetites or your pleasure-seeking, so long as you can promise discretion in your private affairs. So long as you allow me the same freedoms.”

  Her heart thudded as she spoke the last part—she had very little practice declaring things she wanted for herself—and though she’d spoken in a low voice, she was still aware of their parents just across the table.

  Sloreley’s face twisted. “What?”

  She was used to putting other people’s comfort ahead of her own, and there was a real urge to undo what she’d just done, to assure him she’d misspoken and hadn’t meant it. Except she had meant it, and unfortunately, this was too important to leave unsaid. “I’ve no argument with liaisons on your part. But I must insist I be granted the same latitude, my lord, that’s all. I know it’s rather unusual, but I have seen people with arrangements like this before.”

  Well, she’d only personally seen it the one time at the Countess of Kellow’s party, but still, there were others. Lady Melbourne, Lady Jersey. The Duchess of Devonshire herself. It wasn’t unheard of, even if one only heard about it through gossip. Not that Eleanor had any plans to be the subject of gossip.

  She would be like the Countess of Kellow instead and evade all whispers.

  “I think if we can both agree to—”

  “Absolutely not,” he sniffed. “I’ll not have any wife of mine embarrassing me—”

  “I have no wish to embarrass you,” Eleanor assured him. “I’d be extremely discreet, as I myself have no wish to be embarrassed.”

  “—and it’s not natural,” he continued. “How else will I ensure my heirs are my own?”

  “That can be negotiated around,” Eleanor pointed out. “I can wait until I’ve born an heir. We can try periods of exclusivity, or I’m told that there are prophylactic measures . . .”

  “No,” Sloreley said, this time loud enough that he startled her parents and his family into looking at them. He didn’t bother to apologize or explain. Instead, he turned to glare at Eleanor and said in a voice only she could hear, “You’re a means to an end, Lady Eleanor. If I must marry in order to inherit, then I’ll do it, but let me make it clear how things will be: you will do as I say and you will behave as I want you to. By Christ, my mother said you were supposed to be easy and biddable.”

  She wanted nothing more than to slosh her cup of wine all over Sloreley’s elaborate wig and snowy-white neckcloth and see how biddable he thought her then. She managed not to, but only just barely, and only by locking her fingers into fists in the folds of her skirt and forcing herself to drag in several long, ragged breaths.

  Sloreley gave her a final glare and then drained his cup of wine, wiping at his mouth with his sleeve when he was finished. A maroon smear was left on his silk jacket after.

  Grateful. Her mother wanted her to be grateful? Because in exchange for her body and her biddability, she would have a title and a fine house?

  No. No, she couldn’t be grateful. Far Hope was compelling in an Ann Radcliffe novel sort of way, with its medieval bones and with the moors all around, but it wasn’t worth this. It wasn’t worth Sloreley.

  The door to the dining room had flung open then, sudden and sharp, and everybody at the table jumped—except for Sloreley, who simply froze with his fingers digging under his neckcloth like a schoolboy caught fidgeting.

  A tall, muscular man stalked into the dining room, his sun-bronzed face spattered with rain. He wasn’t in dinner clothes, but riding clothes, his mud-flecked boots as far away from fashionable or appropriate as possible.

  His features matched the house and the rain outside; they were like something from another time. A time of heathens and heroes. He had roughly hewn cheekbones and a powerful jaw, a high forehead and a rugged nose. His hair wasn’t powdered or curled decoratively—it was black as sin and pulled into a loose queue at his neck, and several strands had blown free on his ride to hang around his face.

  In the glinting light of the candelabras, Eleanor could only make out the silver near his temples and sprinkled throughout the dark stubble covering his warrior’s jaw. A man well into his prime, then. A man old enough to be hardened.

  Eleanor couldn’t stop staring at him. He was so unlike her father, and so unlike every preening youth she’d met in London. His very existence was forceful, his very being an energy that couldn’t be controlled or directed. His eyes were a blue so dark they were nearly black, and his mouth—
r />   His mouth.

  Firm and sculpted and a little cruel.

  Eleanor shivered just to look at it.

  “Apologies for my late arrival,” the man said. “Please forgive me.”

  He said please forgive me like any other man would say fuck off.

  The man strode over to the empty seat at the foot of the table and sat. His eyes met Eleanor’s from across the table—a flash of glittering indigo—and then he gestured for a footman to bring him something to drink.

  “Your Grace,” Eleanor’s father greeted him. “How wonderful to see you. May I present my daughter, the Lady Eleanor Vane?”

  The Duke of Jarrell looked over at her again, and this time, his eyes lingered over her face and neck, and then over the low neckline of her amethyst gown. When his eyes met hers again, his stare was unreadable.

  “My apologies for your impending marriage, Lady Eleanor,” he said. “You are far too good for my nephew, but alas—he is too hopeless for me to release you. You are sadly needed.”

  Her mother gasped softly. Her father sighed and took a long drink of sherry.

  “No one seems to care that I don’t wish to be married either,” Sloreley pouted.

  “Then it’s a good thing I don’t give a fuck about your wishes,” Jarrell replied. “Shall I carve the roast now?”

  And then Eleanor broke the second rule and did something outrageous.

  She fell in love with the duke.

  Chapter Two

  The week leading up to the betrothal ball was miserable.

  Not because the guests for the celebration and wedding had begun to arrive.

  Not even because Sloreley’s mother and sister were just as dismissive and selfish as he was and seemed to feel that Eleanor owed them a great debt for being allowed to marry their precious Gilbert.

  No, it was because falling in love with the duke was the worst—the absolute worst—thing she had ever felt.

  She had prided herself on being efficient? On being serene? Ha! She could barely dress herself now without rushing and fumbling through it to get downstairs on the slight chance the duke would be down there also. She couldn’t make it through teas or tours of the grounds without getting flushed and flustered and restless in a way she’d never been and couldn’t bear—except it was also a restlessness she couldn’t get enough of. It was a restlessness she sought out in the same way she might’ve worried a loose tooth when she was younger. It was a delirium that left her speechless and flushed.

  She watched out her window in case the duke rode past; she listened for his low, rough voice as she walked through the house. When he sat next to her in the drawing room as they conversed with the first of the houseguests, she couldn’t breathe.

  Even in stillness he was arresting; even in the constraints of polite small talk, his cold but raw physicality seemed barely leashed. More than once, she caught his eyes on the wild hills outside when he was supposed to be entertaining a guest, as if he wished himself far away from these tiresome niceties and out onto the lonely, howling lands that made up his estate.

  In every way, he was Sloreley’s opposite.

  In every way also, he was Eleanor’s opposite.

  He was not serene; he was not respectable. His idea of efficiency was brute force, and his idea of patience was not openly growling at his guests.

  And the sheer, bodily presence of him—his long stride, his large, ungloved hands. His silvering hair and his stern, carnal mouth.

  Just the thought of how all of that would feel against her softness—his rough hands on her smooth ones, his hard body against her curves.

  His stubble against her neck . . .

  It was that particular fantasy that consumed her thoughts as she climbed the stairs to the tower one morning, having seen to her mother’s comfort and having made her excuses to Sloreley’s mother and sister for not joining them in the morning room. She’d claimed a slight fever, but truly the only fever she felt was in her blood, which pulsed madly at the idea of the duke’s mouth on her skin. On her neck, yes, but also on her breasts. Her belly.

  Her thighs.

  That night at the Foscourts’, there had been a woman kissing another woman between her thighs—slow, languorous kisses that had made her lover arch and pant. How would that feel to have kisses there? How would it feel to have a woman’s soft lips giving those kisses—how different then, would a man’s unshaven mouth feel?

  Eleanor wouldn’t mind sampling both . . . and then perhaps a few more times each, in the name of the scientific method and all.

  But now her only chance to feel such a thing would be with Sloreley, wouldn’t it?

  An instinctual wave of unhappiness met the realization. For all the desire simmering in her veins at the thought of the duke and his mouth, she had no answering appetite for her actual fiancé. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that or if she even had to feel a certain way about it, but there it was. She felt nothing for Sloreley, not even curiosity, not even academic interest. She could only muster up mild apprehension. A resigned distaste.

  Eleanor emerged from a slender doorway to find the top of the tower and went immediately to the parapet, looking over the crenellated wall out to the narrow valley below. The Hope River, thin and shallow, glinted like a shining ribbon that unspooled all the way out as far as the eye could see. The floor of the valley remained as green as a garden in springtime, while a sharp autumn wind fussed at the moors above it, sending clumps of mist drifting this way and that.

  It was beautiful here.

  Not like Pennard Hall. Not in an obvious way and not in a safe way, because there was nothing safe about it at all. This place was rugged, old, chilly, stern—a spot that seemed to resist the very idea of modernity. She could never make a project out of Far Hope.

  If anything, it felt like Far Hope would make a project out of her.

  The thought was rather thrilling once she voiced it to herself.

  “I used to imagine,” a voice said unexpectedly, “that everything I ever wanted was just beyond that mist.”

  She turned to see the duke coming toward the wall where she was standing. He stopped a few feet away from her and braced his hands on the two stone merlons in front of him, staring out onto his lands, and onto the moors above them that belonged to no one save for God and the King.

  Jarrell didn’t wear an overcoat—only a tailcoat made of gray silk, subtly embroidered but otherwise free of ornamentation—and he was in long boots again, which were glistening as if he’d just come from a walk through the hills. His shoulders strained the seams of his coat, and his breeches hid nothing of his legs, and Eleanor suddenly couldn’t look at him straight-on, because if she did, she’d do something outrageous. Like ask him if he’d like to walk through the hills with her.

  Or if she could nuzzle against one of those muscular thighs. Just for a few hours.

  Serene Eleanor, at least, regained control of her senses and managed to speak. “Was it?” she asked politely, relieved to hear that she sounded normal and not breathless at all. “Just beyond the mist?”

  He turned to look at her, all midnight eyes and that beautiful mouth. “No,” he said after a minute. “It wasn’t.”

  “That’s the trouble with imagining,” she said, tearing her gaze away from his face. “It so rarely leads one to the truth.”

  He made a low noise of agreement. It almost sounded . . . well, sad, if she could believe such a forbidding man capable of sadness.

  “What would be just beyond the mist for you?” he asked her. “If you could reach through it and part it like a curtain, what would you find?”

  He sounded genuinely curious, and so Eleanor genuinely considered his question. Serene Eleanor would have an easy answer, a simple one—the health of her mother, perhaps, or a good deal on lead guttering—but it had been so long since someone had really cared about her answers that she wanted to savor it as much as possible. She wanted to honor it by being honest.

  “A dock with many
ships,” she finally decided. “Or a hallway with many doors. Or maybe a crossroads, one with many byways meeting and signs pointing every which way.”

  “Not,” the duke said slowly, “a room with many books? Or a room filled with many people?”

  She thought for a moment. “No. Those aren’t the same thing.”

  “No,” he agreed with her. “They are not.”

  Wordlessness reigned after that, broken only by the wind crashing against the ancient walls of the house and whipping through the hills around it.

  “It is the possibility itself that is the most potent,” she said after a while. “The potential of anything. When you are standing in one place, it’s almost as if the future is already written, like a branch that’s been pruned of anything deemed not productive. But the ability to go anywhere, to do whatever you please…”

  She trailed off. She shouldn’t say things like this. Not because she thought it better to lie, but because she was supposed to be harmonious. It was why this marriage had been arranged in the first place. Harmonious Eleanor to save everyone’s day.

  But to her surprise, the duke nodded, seemingly not bothered by her open admission that she wished for possibilities beyond what she already had.

  “It took me many years to learn what you already know, Lady Eleanor. And it took me many more to learn the lesson that follows.”

  “Which is?”

  He stared out into the world of silver and rust, his eyes fixed on something she couldn’t see. “That we make our own futures, wherever we are. Wherever we’re starting from, whatever we feel has been…pruned…the future is still unwritten. It may be beyond the mist just yet.”

  His words sank into her, warm and sparking and alive, vital in a way that nothing had seemed vital since she learned she was to be married.

  Still unwritten.