“And there is the matter of your Lady’s Suffrage Society to consider,” Cleo pressed, always knowing what to say. “If you are ruined and must withdraw from society, all your efforts will be for naught. How are you going to give voice to your cause if you allow yourself to be silenced?”
Blast. Her sister was right on that count, but marriage still seemed like every bit as much of a mistake as allowing herself to be become a pariah. “You do not think marrying Bainbridge will silence me just as well?”
“No, dearest sister.” Cleo’s voice softened. “Far better to be a duchess than an outcast, for your sake just as much as for your cause.”
Bo swallowed, and the knot inside her grew until she couldn’t bear one moment more of this interminable interview. Shooting to her feet, she excused herself and fled from the chamber before she embarrassed herself by bursting into tears as the full effect of her own recklessness collapsed upon her.
pencer cooled his heels in his mother’s favored salon for intimate familial gatherings. Decorated in shades of green—from the damask and the sylvan oil paintings on the walls to the silken drapes and thick carpets—it resembled nothing so much as a depressing venture into an old thicket. But it was private, ensconced deep in the north wing, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake and gardens that gave Boswell House part of its distinction.
The day had dawned unusually bright and rainless, the sun glinting through those windows now with a brilliant cheer that seemed to mock him. He’d woken before dawn, torn from the old nightmares he’d hoped he’d shaken forever. Shuddering, covered in a fine sheen of sweat, he’d been certain his dead wife had called his name in those moments as wakefulness and sleep melded into something indistinct and hazy.
But it had been the dreams again, where he relived watching Millicent raise the pistol to her temple. Where he could see the cloud of smoke, the spatter of blood, the final expression on her face. Where he tried to reach out and was immobile, attempted to speak but could not force his tongue into action.
He paced across the salon, hands clasped behind his back to stave off their trembling, awaiting the last woman he wished to see. At most recent glance of his pocket watch, she’d been thirty-eight minutes and twenty seconds late. He had requested she meet him at eight o’clock. In private, so that they could discuss a plan of action.
But Lady Boadicea Harrington, devotee of lascivious books, didn’t appear to have any inclination of meeting him. She had not replied to his note. He had gone anyway, thinking her lack of response down to her stubborn nature.
It would appear, however, that he was wrong.
That in a matter of less than half an hour, he had undone his every careful attempt to distance himself from scandal, weakness, women, and the madness that threatened to close in on him ever since Millicent’s death. That he had compromised a lady who had no compunction about reading smut in his library or cupping his cock through his trousers—tentative though her touch may have been—and that said lady was wearing his madcap brother’s heart like a battle victory on her bosom, and yet didn’t even feel a hint of compassion for what she had done, for what she would yet do, if she refused his suit, if she—
The door to the salon opened, and in swept Lady Boadicea Harrington in a seductive whisper of silken skirts and soft footfalls. Her auburn hair was coiled into a series of braids, a fashionable fringe on her forehead, and the luscious beauty of it struck him, fiery and glinting in the sun.
She wore a vibrant morning frock of purple velvet, silk, and taffeta shot with cream that should have rendered her gaudy against the green confines of the chamber. Instead, it had the opposite effect, complimenting her, showing her to advantage. She put everything else in the room—hell, she put every woman he’d ever seen—to shame.
The door closed behind her. She stilled, elegant and regal and ineffably lovely. All the resentment festering inside him since he’d seen her last reminded him that she was the reason he was once again battling to maintain a tentative grip on his sanity.
If she hadn’t kissed him…
If he hadn’t kissed her…
If he hadn’t raised her skirts and touched her hot, silken quim…
Damnation, he couldn’t do this. She’d stretched him to the edge of madness.
“Lady Boadicea,” he greeted curtly.
She stiffened, whether at his tone or his presence he couldn’t tell. Her blue gaze, cutting and intense, clashed with his. “Your Grace.”
She didn’t curtsy. Nor did he bow. He supposed this meant they were dispensing with the formalities. And anyway, what did it matter after he’d thrown her skirts up to her waist and slipped his hand inside the slit of her drawers? Ruffled, white, silk, they’d been embroidered with roses. He shouldn’t think of them now. Nor should he think of the prize they’d shielded. She’d been so wet for him.
He swallowed, battling back his unwanted attraction to her. “If you’d arrived but half a minute later, you would have found yourself utterly alone.”
She pursed her lips, considering him in a way he didn’t like, as though she could see straight to the marrow of him and still found him lacking. “I’ve been alone for twenty years, Your Grace. A moment without your company would be neither here nor there.”
Her cutting words found their mark. He strode toward her before he could check himself, as though he needed to be nearer to her. To smell her delicate scent. To inhale her as if she were as necessary to him as the air he breathed.
What in God’s name?
He stopped, four paces away, forcing himself to keep his distance and his cool both. “Twenty years? I daresay you’ve scarcely more than one-and-twenty years altogether.”
“You would be correct.” She pursed her lips, taking inventory of him once again as if he were something that caused her a great deal of displeasure. “What is the purpose of this audience, Your Grace? Do you mean to return my book?”
Her book. That bloody bit of nonsense she’d been so keen on devouring when he came upon her in his library. The leather-bound home for licentious drivel that shocked even his sensibilities. He’d read the first chapter of the volume in question in the midst of the night after his nightmares had rendered sleep impossible. He hadn’t believed his bloody eyes. And damn him if the knowledge that her bright-blue eyes and rapier wit had taken in the same wickedness hadn’t left him inflamed.
The daring of the woman. He wasn’t sure if he ought to be horrified and repelled or if he ought to take her up in his arms and never let her go. As it was, he wanted her so damn much that his entire groin ached and pulsed with a ferocity he’d never even known possible.
He stalked closer. Closer. Until his trouser-clad legs pressed into her heavy skirts, making them bell out behind her. She inhaled sharply, tensing even more, leaning away as he caught her around the waist and hauled her against him. Her head tipped back, leaving her ripe, supple lips a scant distance from his, open and ready, awaiting his claiming.
Temptation was the devil.
“I’ve no intention of returning your book,” he informed her coolly.
“Oh?” Her eyebrows hiked up her flawless ivory forehead, making the slightest crinkle that he found somehow riveting. “Well, it would seem we are well-matched in determination if nothing else, for I’ve no intention of marrying you.”
He couldn’t tell if she was bold or if she was foolish, or both. “How much of it have you read?” he demanded in spite of himself. He shouldn’t want to know. Curiosity ought not to burn inside him like a hearth fire upon which someone had thrown a bucket of lamp oil. But it did.
Her full lips quirked, tipping up at the corners as though she attempted to repress her humor and couldn’t quite manage it. “You read my book, didn’t you?”
Something alarming and unprecedented happened to him in that moment, as he held her against him and accepted the knowledge that this minx could somehow see through him in a manner no one else before her had.
His ears burned. �
�Of course not,” he lied.
She shook her head slowly, and he noted how the light glinted from the hidden undertones of red in her luxurious hair. Her hands went to his shoulders in a familiar gesture that aroused him even more. What the hell was it about her?
Lady Boadicea leaned nearer. Jasmine wafted to him. Her gaze lowered to his mouth for a moment before burning into his once more. “Tell me, Your Grace, did you enjoy the chapter about Lady Letitia and her groom?”
She was beyond any woman he’d ever known in his life. Was she mad? It was a possibility. Having lived with a mad wife, it only stood to reason that he would be drawn to more of the same.
“You’re the most forward female I’ve ever met.” He wasn’t sure if he issued the observation as praise or as condemnation.
A complete smile blossomed on her luscious lips then, and if he’d thought her beautiful before, he’d been wrong. She was stunning. A goddess. A witch. Surely the Lord himself had fashioned her with the sole purpose of one day punishing him for his sins.
Her brow arched. “You didn’t answer my question, Your Grace. I can surmise from the flush on your cheekbones that you were curious enough to read a few pages at least.”
“It’s filth.” He disliked that she could read him, know him, see through to the bloody heart of him, with such dispassionate ease. It rankled. It shook him. It goddamn grated. “I wouldn’t lower myself to allow such rot to fall beneath my eye. Hardly surprising that you did, given your unseemly nature. Of course, when you are my wife, you’ll abstain from all such imprudent leanings toward the prurient.”
“When I am your wife,” she repeated, the sentence punctuated on a low and delicious laugh that he felt down his spine. “You still insist on believing this fiction that you and I will marry? How amusing.”
“Do you know what was amusing, Lady Boadicea? Watching that little book of yours burn in the grate of my library.” Also a falsehood, but he longed to steal the smirk from her kissable mouth. She made him want to be more of a beast than he already was.
That beauty mark of hers taunted him as her words did. The urge to set his lips there, flirting with the corner of hers, beset him. As he watched, the amusement fled from her lively eyes and expressive features. Watching her brilliance fade was rather akin to a cloud passing before the sun on a summer’s day. That he was the source of the sudden darkness wasn’t lost on him, and his momentary victory was hollow for it.
She surprised him by a touch, butterfly-light and fleeting, on his jaw. Just a flutter of her fingers and then gone. But bloody hell, he felt it like a brand. This girl made too free with his person. He hadn’t felt a woman’s soft caress against his skin like this—a lover’s touch—in as long as he could remember. He wasn’t meant to feel this way now, as if something inside him might shatter and the bitterness he’d fought so hard to control would break free at last.
Her intent gaze searched his. “You’re lying. I’d be willing to wager that even now you’ve got it hidden away somewhere with every intention of reading about Lady Letitia if you haven’t already. I cannot blame you, Your Grace. It is a particularly enlightening tale.”
“Unfortunately, I’ll never know.” He kept his tone mild, but inside, he felt oddly discombobulated, as if he’d somehow woke from a long slumber, uncertain of where he was and how he’d managed to find himself there.
She was the most vexing woman he’d ever met. He ought to allow Harry to take his place as he wanted, make her his bride. He ought to be disgusted by her flagrant disregard for propriety, the way she flaunted her smutty books without shame. By no means should he be drawn to her, entranced by her, or want to kiss her bloody well senseless. But even as he had all those thoughts, intended to reassure his common sense that he had worked too diligently to escape his former hell to descend into another, he tugged her nearer to him.
“You want to know, don’t you?” she whispered, and there was her touch once more, two fingers, pressing to his lips in a mimicry of a kiss.
And yes, he did want to know. Thus far, he’d only managed to read the letter from Lady Pokingham to her niece, detailing the birch treatments she’d received from her governess, along with a description of her clandestine walk in a garden with Lord Longwood. Naturally, the walk had turned into a frenzied burst of kisses, Lord Longwood flipping up the lady’s skirts, and sampling her honey pot first with his tongue and then with his tumescent member.
Sweet Jesus.
Lady Boadicea Harrington was a menace. That much was plain as the shoes on his feet. Her insistence on toying with him fueled his ire. He was too damn old and too damn world-weary for games.
He caught her wrist in his grip, breaking the contact between the pads of her fingers and his mouth. “You will cease this nonsense at once, Lady Boadicea. I didn’t invite you here so that you could insult my offer while acting the brazen hussy. I invited you here to sort out the details of how we shall proceed with our arrangement.”
She stiffened at the cold lash of his words. “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you to make you conduct yourself with such frigid condescension, but I have no wish to marry you. Can you not convince your mother and the Duchess of Cartwright that nothing so extreme is necessary?”
Whatever happened to you, she’d said, in a lightly veiled reference to Millicent. The knowledge that Lady Boadicea Harrington was aware his wife had killed herself before him filled him with rage. How dare she flirt with him, touch him, make light of him? He thought then of how she had feigned acceptance of his suit before his mother and the Duchess of Cartwright, how she had even defended him to them.
He saw it all for what it was now: pity.
Something violent and ugly twisted free inside him. He wouldn’t be pitied by this forward chit or anyone else. He set her from him, ignoring the loss of her on his mouth, the unanswered desire to take her lips. Spencer embraced his anger, let it spring free of its cage.
“Do you know what it looks like when someone holds a pistol to their temple and pulls the trigger, Lady Boadicea?” The words were torn from him, a question he had never dared pose to another living soul for fear that it would break him. For fear they’d think him every bit as mad as his wife had been. The truth of it was that sometimes he wondered if the madness had infected him.
Lady Boadicea’s creamy skin went pale as she gave her head a slight shake. “N-no, Your Grace.”
Ah, a stutter. Perhaps he had disarmed her at last. He raised his hands, palms facing the ceiling, embracing the viciousness coursing through him. He wanted to punish her. To make her look at him with anything other than sympathy. “What, no barbs, my lady? No shameless remarks about the tripe you’ve smuggled into my home? Why, I do believe that for once you may be robbed of speech. A rarity for you, surely. Shall I describe the aftereffects of the bullet’s violence to you? Is that what you long to hear?”
“Your Grace.” She pressed the same fingers that had touched his lips over her mouth now, looking as if she may be ill.
But he wasn’t done with her yet. He stalked toward her once more, and not even the sweet scent of her was enough to dispel his wrath. How dare she look upon him with pity? How dare she refuse his hand as though he offered her nothing more than a waltz at a country ball? As though he, Spencer Marlow, the Duke of Bainbridge, was beneath the scandal-courting youngest daughter of the eccentric Earl of Northcote?
By God, he had devoted himself, these last three years, to living an unimpeachable life. He adhered to propriety. He never lost his temper. He repented for his sins. He worked hard to make his estates profitable, to be a good steward of the land and people assigned him. In short, he did everything he could to make amends for what had happened.
“Do you know,” he continued, “what it’s like to watch someone you care for lose their mind, Lady Boadicea? No? I do. What I’ve seen would gut you, my dear, and you’d never again have time for filthy journals or turning up in the library of the brother of the man who’s been courting you and ruining yourse
lf.”
She threw back her shoulders, assuming what he could only imagine was her battle stance. “I’ve no doubt you suffered, Your Grace, and greatly. I’m sorry for that.” She stepped forward, her skirts crashing into him, her finger catching him in the chest. “But none of that gives you the right to be an overbearing brute. And forgive me for my impertinence, but I do recall that I had assistance in ruining myself, as you so blithely refer to your mauling of my person before your mother and her simpleminded bosom bow.”
Something smarted on his chest. Once, twice, thrice, four times. He looked down to find that the termagant was poking him. And hard. He trapped her wrist again in one hand while the other sank into the voluptuous fall of her skirts. He didn’t stop until he found a handful of the lush bum hiding beneath all her fripperies.
The mauling of her person, indeed.
He released her wrist and tunneled his fingers into the silken hair at her nape, angling her head before his mouth took hers. The tense lines of her body softened. She melted against him, falling into his body, her mouth opening. He recognized her surrender, and he took it like an invading army, plundering, owning, making her his. She tasted like sugared tea. Her tongue moved against his, tentative at first, and then with meaning.
He groaned, driving the soft curves of her body into his hard angles as he cupped her arse, holding her to him. His cock pressed into her belly, when where he wanted it most was deep inside her channel. He kissed her hard, open-mouthed, hungry. He kissed her as he’d never kissed another woman before her, told her with his lips and licks and body that she was his.
He staked his claim.
Spencer tore his mouth from hers, his breathing labored. Lady Boadicea was gratifyingly dazed, her lips swollen and berry-red from his kisses. “Did I maul you just now, my lady?”
She blinked. “Your Grace?”
He didn’t answer but kissed her again, taking his time. When had putting his lips to a woman ever been this divine, this intoxicating? He could lose himself inside her. Little wonder Harry had fallen beneath her spell.
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