He could have her faithfulness, her duty. Her time and her body. To him, she would surrender gladly, not only because he was a growlingly magnificent man, but because he would treat her surrender the way she wanted it to be treated.
He would give her victories in return.
He doesn’t want you, a soft voice reminded her. He has made it more than clear he has no plans to take you for a wife.
“Two years ago, I was staying with the Countess of Kellow, and I saw people. Together, like you’re describing.”
The duke’s eyebrows raised up in interest. “At Arabella’s house?”
“Yes. Is she part of the Kingdom?”
“Indeed, she is. In my absence, she’s become something of its queen. And what did you do when you stumbled upon her little party?”
“I watched,” Eleanor admitted.
His eyes darkened a little in understanding. “You liked what you saw?”
“Very much.” She searched for the right words. “I didn’t really know before then all the ways that people could be together. I’d found these books when I was younger—smutty books, you understand—but they only ever showed men and women together. When I saw that it could be otherwise—”
She remembered how it felt, seeing the women together in the temple folly, feeling heat curl in her body as her mind crowded full of questions.
“It was like seeing a ballgown under candlelight for the first time,” she tried to explain. “Or a jewel in the sun. Of course, all those extra depths and colors were always there, and the minute you see, you can’t remember what it was like not having seen.”
The duke was nodding with something soft in his expression. “Many in the Kingdom have a marked preference for who they like to share their bodies with, but many others—myself included when I was there—enjoyed pleasure with everyone. It is one of the reasons people are drawn to the Kingdom—and why secrecy and safety are so paramount.”
She thought about this a minute, about the secrecy.
“Does the earl know?” Eleanor asked about Gilbert. “Has he already. . . ?”
Jarrell studied his hands. “No,” he said after a moment. “He does not know. Traditionally, the heir is told on his eighteenth birthday, but as I said, I’d left the Second Kingdom behind after Helena’s death. Our wedding—one of her last good days—was a Second Kingdom affair, and I couldn’t bear to be reminded of it. Of her. And so, when Gilbert came of age to be told, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He didn’t grow up in the valley, he wouldn’t have heard the rumors, and I thought maybe he’d be better off not knowing.”
His jaw tightened, and then he said, “No. No, I’m sorry. That’s a lie. The truth is that I couldn’t bear the idea of talking about it. Of inviting everyone back, of watching everything be as it was with the music and the laughter and the gaiety—everything but Helena. Everyone but my parents and my brother. The Second Kingdom is full of ghosts to me, and those ghosts are best left undisturbed.”
“So…you were never planning to tell your nephew?”
Eleanor wasn’t sure how to feel about this. She’d only just learned of the world herself, and she understood that the duke grieved his late wife dearly, but it seemed miserly to let this way of life wither at Far Hope because of that grief.
She leveled her gaze at him. “If the answer is yes, I think that’s rather shameful. Especially if you are already planning to abdicate. Doesn’t Gilbert deserve the chance to know? To bring the Kingdom back to Far Hope if he wishes?”
She braced herself for his anger or his defensiveness, but he gave her a weary kind of smile instead. “It is shameful, yes. I’d made up my mind to tell him after all. But then, Italy happened.”
“Ah. The Kingdom approves of orgies, but not of equine baptism?”
His smile deepened a little and a rough noise left his throat.
A laugh! Eleanor didn’t know if she’d ever heard him laugh before, and looking at him now, still smiling, his shirt loose around his neck and his cheeks warm from the fire, she could almost imagine the playful young man he must have been before Helena’s death.
“Equine baptism is not so bad, I suppose, if one isn’t bothered by the sacrilege or the stickiness,” he said. Then he grew solemn.
“The Kingdom is mainly for pleasure, but pleasure is serious business. Above all, it must be a safe business, and we’ve already talked about why. It’s rare, but sometimes even families decide not to admit their own into the Kingdom, or they decide to wait until the temperament in question is better matured. Gilbert is frivolous and selfish, but I wanted to give him the chance to improve. I’d hoped that marriage and an even-tempered wife would help.”
“An even-tempered wife,” Eleanor repeated. “That was to be me.”
“I know it’s not enough, but I do regret how I went about this engagement, ordering you like a tonic to fix the family’s ills. I should have known better and done better. I am sorry, Eleanor.”
She inclined her head to accept his apology. She was grateful for it—more grateful still because she didn’t know very many men who would have given it.
“You wanted to leave. Desperately.”
A short nod.
“And if I don’t marry Gilbert? Will you still leave?”
“I’ve planned on it too long not to,” he said. There was something in his voice though, something that was too hesitant and ephemeral to be certainty. Something like doubt.
“And the Kingdom?”
“The Kingdom doesn’t need me or a Dartham or Far Hope. It will survive.”
“But what about you?” she asked. “Will you survive?” If she were Jarrell—if she had access to a world like the one he described—she didn’t know that she’d be able to deny herself a single year, much less sixteen.
He stepped away from the window and sat in a chair by the fire. The orangeish light threw the lines around his eyes and mouth into sharp, delicious contrast. “It’s too late for me, Eleanor,” he said. “At first, people told me that the sadness would pass. That the cure for loneliness was company. But I felt lonelier with people. I felt sadder whenever joy was anywhere near. It was a perverse kind of grief, because time seemed to feed it rather than starve it, and no matter where I went or what I beheld, it was right there next to me, like an extension of myself. It made me into a man I didn’t even recognize—rough and grim and hard—and incapable of so many things that I used to be capable of. I don’t know that I could inject myself back into the Kingdom even if I wanted to.”
He recited this last part as if it were someone else’s story, as if he had rehearsed it to himself many times. But his fingers curled around the arms of the chair, like he could anchor himself to the world if he gripped hard enough. Like the memory of Helena threatened to snap him in half.
“I suppose it’s a sin to grieve this much,” he finished in a murmur. “I had a priest tell me so once. But sometimes I think that if I let it go—let Helena go, let the memory of my parents and brother go—I’ll no longer know who I am. I’ve lived with this too long to live without it now.”
“It seems to me that your sin isn’t grief, then, but fear,” she said. Gently.
His eyes were a near-purple in the firelight, his carved muscles visible under the thin linen of his shirt. Even now, in this modern and sophisticatedly furnished house, he was tense, restless, feral.
Of course, he was.
Ajax Dartham, civilized? Ajax Dartham, mild? It was like asking the moors to become farmland. Like asking granite to become loam. It simply wasn’t possible.
“Do you know yet, Eleanor, what it is like to adore someone thusly?”
Yes, she thought. I do.
“It was more than desire or affection,” he said. “I loved her. Would have died for her. And to watch her die instead in the very place where she was supposed to live and thrive . . .”
“Would she not,” she said softly, “still want you to live and thrive?”
“The priest said that also,” h
e mumbled.
She’d never known a grief like his, and it felt unkind to diminish it. But it seemed to her like such a waste, like a shipment of cracked tiles or garden tucked too far into the shade. If she at twenty could cope with having seventeen different feelings inside herself at once, then surely he could too.
She could not talk someone out of grief, but she could talk someone into sense.
She clutched the blanket to her chest and slowly crawled on her knees to him, stopping only once she was at his feet.
“Ajax,” she whispered. “Ajax, look at me.”
The duke looked. His eyes were still dark—nearly as dark as the sky outside.
“You are not broken. You are allowed to keep living.”
She put her hands just above his knees. His silk-clad thighs were so firm, so warm, and she couldn’t help but slide her palms over the hard muscles, up to his hips and then back down to his knees again. His erection was imprinted on the other side of his breeches—she could make out its length, its ridges, its male topography—and it surged between his hips every time she caressed his thighs.
His hand caught hers and arrested its motion. His eyes were as dangerous as his voice was broken. “Be careful, Eleanor.”
“I’m taking a great deal of care,” she whispered, allowing her fingertips to brush against his thigh again.
The duke reached a large hand down and touched her jaw—reverently, delicately—and hope slashed through her, as hot and bright as the lightning outside the window.
“Can’t you hold it all inside yourself at the same time? The love for who you’ve lost and the possibility of more?” She kept her voice soft. “I wouldn’t ask you to let go. Only to allow yourself more.”
“I don’t know, Eleanor,” he said. “I don’t know if I can ever marry again.”
Although the regret in his voice was palpable, it did nothing to soothe the bruising ache of his reply. But she should not have been bruised, she should have known better—she had known better, after all. He’d never given her any reason to think otherwise. It was only her reaching for more and more, reaching for someone who didn’t want her in return.
He is not the only thing you can have. There is something else.
A life that could be almost completely her own, not as an almost-spinster, but as an almost-queen. She bit her lip, ran through all the different possibilities in her mind, imagined each and every sign at that crossroads, each and every ship waiting at her dock.
Every future beyond the mist.
Then she made her choice.
“I’m not talking about marriage,” she said, nuzzling into his touch. “Make love to me, Ajax.”
He hauled her into his lap as if she weighed nothing and cradled her face in his hands.
“Eleanor….” he murmured. “Sweet Eleanor.”
She met his searching stare, watching the reflected flames sparkling in their indigo depths. He was the answer to a question she hadn’t known enough to ask. He was a dream she hadn’t known enough to dream before she came to Far Hope.
“Please,” she asked. “Please.”
Chapter Ten
Her request was like a hot knife to the throat. How could he say yes?
But how could he say no?
He wanted her like nothing else; with her, he could almost imagine living again, truly living, with all that it entailed.
What a mistress of Far Hope she would have made, he thought with a sear of regret. What a world I could have given her. If he weren’t already pledged to his ghosts…
But it wasn’t only his past that lay between them.
“Give me this,” Eleanor said. She was perched on his lap like a little queen, and there was something very queenly indeed in the lift of her chin and the flash of her eyes. It married quite well with the hunger in her voice and the flush on her chest—and with the subtle squeeze of her thighs and the greedy points of her nipples making themselves known even through the blanket. “I don’t expect marriage afterwards, or a declaration of love,” she added. “I only expect you.”
He let go of her face to sift her hair through his fingers. “You must see that it’s not so easy,” he replied. “What if you wish to marry someday?”
Something sad flitted through her eyes, but it didn’t linger. She looked at him evenly. “If a future husband is upset that I have no hymen, then he may go to hell.”
“He may,” Jarrell agreed. “But it is a consequence, and one we should consider first.”
She gave him a look that many wouldn’t have dared to give a duke, and his chest was about to crack open with all the things he felt for this woman. “I’m not a fool,” she informed him. “I’ve been considering it since the moment I woke up here. Since the moment I ran away in the first place.”
He’d underestimated her again. “Of course,” he murmured. “I just want to be careful with you, that’s all. Careful with your future. It should be your own, and no one else’s.”
He heard his own words then, could imagine her saying them to him instead.
His future could be his own too.
She tilted her head enough to kiss his fingers, which were still tangling gently through her hair. “Trust me. Please. In a few hours, you will escort me away from here—and to the beginning of the rest of my life. I don’t know what will happen after that…but I do know we can have this. We can have right now.” Her eyes were imploring, her cheeks flushed with need. Her words undeniably true.
He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that they could have this moment, they could have right now—that they deserved it precisely because a real future was impossible between them. She would want to leave, and he’d already made plans to. Neither of them would be at Far Hope for long after tomorrow.
In the end, the choice was made much, much easier: she found his hand and guided it under the blanket, pressing his fingers right to the heart of her.
Right to the place that she’d so shamelessly rubbed against him. Right to the place where he’d kissed her so deeply that she’d reached her peak against his greedy mouth.
The place he’d pay any amount of money or pain to be inside of right now.
She was so wet that his fingertips were immediately slicked with her need, and she was so warm that she could have rivaled the fire behind her. And the softness . . . the silky-soft curls and the plush give of her lips . . . the satin of her inner petals…
He already knew the succulence of her, had already tasted her sweetness and felt her delicate warmth against his lips and tongue. But this—the supple heat, the sheer squeeze of her—he had no preparation for this, no defense. For sixteen years, he’d starved himself, and now here was a feast of the highest order, his for the taking. No longer could he deny the marauder within, the raiding pagan.
She would be his.
She would be his.
Without her prompting, he slid his finger as deep as he could, deep enough to seat his palm against her little berry and press against it as he explored her. She gave a long, low sigh and practically melted in his arms, her thighs sprawling open to give him access, her head coming forward to rest on his shoulder. Underneath her plush bottom, his organ was harder and thicker than ever, demanding entrance into the tight heaven he was exploring.
He’d denied himself too long, and may God forgive him for what he’d do next.
With a growl, he withdrew his hand to unfasten his breeches, making quick work of the falls and also of his shirt, needing to feel as much of her soft skin against his as possible. “Up on your knees,” he ordered, giving himself a rough pump as she speedily complied, remaining astride him but lifting herself a few inches off his lap. The blanket he shoved out of the way, pooling it around her hips and pulling it free from her shoulders. He tugged it impatiently to the sides too, needing to see her cunt.
If he was to break his promises, if he was to indulge, then he would not do it by halves. He would not deny himself a single sight or sound or taste. This one night would
have to last him the rest of his lonely, exiled life, and he planned to have his fill.
Once her sex was on display for him, he cupped her, curling a possessive hand around where she was soft and wet. This was to be his. Those delicious breasts in front of him—firm but full, tipped with sweet berry-pink peaks—those were his too. He leaned forward to take a nipple into his mouth, and he relished her gasp as he sucked on it. He relished the unconscious push of her into his hand, as she instinctively sought pressure. Invasion.
He gave it to her, returning his finger to her entrance and slowly sliding inside. He only gave her a moment to adjust before he added a second one, her answering moan shredding what was left of his control.
He needed to fuck.
He needed to fuck this slick little opening; he needed to get inside it and rut; he needed to fill her until neither of them could remember a time when they weren’t joined.
“You’re going to put me inside you,” he said, releasing her breast as he pulled his fingers free. He licked them clean. She tasted good. Like cream with a dash of something earthy and sweet.
“Reach down—yes, like that, wrap your fingers around me—”
His words were cut short as her slender fingers sheathed his root. Her hair, which was every shade between platinum and bronze in the firelight, slid over her shoulders to brush against her breasts as she looked down. Her long eyelashes left fan-shaped shadows on her cheeks, and he couldn’t see her eyes as she took in the sight of him, but he could see the slow, wondering part of her lips. The way her tongue peeped out to taste her lower lip, as if she was thinking about tasting him. He nearly lost it then and there, and she hadn’t even started.
“Good, now put it in,” he said, his voice gone guttural. “Just the tip of me, at first. If you want to stop then, we can.”
“Yes, Ajax,” she whispered. She aligned him with her sex, lowered those plush hips, and—
“Fuck,” he swore viciously, feeling her. The slick, wet kiss of her. It was only the press of his head against her folds, but already he didn’t know if he could keep still, keep himself from sweeping her off to the bed and shoving into her like a beast.
Duke I’d Like to F… Page 8