It wasn’t until the room was truly dark and Devin had lit the fire in the fireplace, then the lamps, that they finally made their way to the table in the corner, Devin clad in a dressing gown, and Viola in one of his exquisitely pressed shirts, the wrist bands turned over many times until she had thick wads of fabric at each elbow.
Binsey had left them a light meal covered with silver domes.
“I’ll ring for fresh food,” Devin said, lifting a dome to reveal plated chicken.
“Nonsense, let’s eat it,” Viola said. “That chicken looks excellent. Do you have a good cook?”
“I think so,” Devin replied. “I don’t pay much attention to food.”
“I do,” Viola said cheerfully.
“I have a French cook at the Northamptonshire estate,” Devin said, uncovering cooked vegetables.
Suddenly Viola thought—for the first time in quite a while—of that awful ball years ago and the gentleman’s threat that his wife would have to live in the country. Despite herself, a shiver went through her.
“What are you thinking about?” her husband asked instantly. She didn’t know why she ever thought Devin’s eyes were cold. Now he looked at her with the same warmth with which he regarded Otis.
Which was sensible, she reminded herself. For all Devin claimed to have no friends, Otis was clearly as dear to him as Joan was to her.
“I was thinking about a bad man whom I met,” she said lightly.
His eyes darkened. “I hope he didn’t hurt you.”
“Not in a physical way,” she said, struggling to explain. “I told you about the angry man.”
Devin made a low noise that sounded like a growl. “Who was it? I’ll teach him to terrify young women.”
“He didn’t threaten me,” Viola said. “He was angry, that’s all, and I had never seen a truly angry man. My stepfather is angry sometimes, but he is always in control. My mother is calm by nature. Aunt Knowe gets vexed, but she’s never enraged.”
“Ah.” He didn’t say anything for a moment. “As I’ve told you, my father was angry a great deal of the time. If you added up the hours, I suspect he was angry for most of his life.”
Viola tentatively reached out a hand to touch his.
“It leaves its tracks,” Devin said slowly. “You chide me for not showing emotion, but I know better than most that some emotion is better kept silent. An angry man can damage those around him if he can’t control himself.”
“What frightened me,” Viola said, “was the idea that all that rage brewed behind a gentleman’s attire and fine manners. I will never forget the way rage boiled out of him.”
“This was the married couple whose argument you interrupted?”
“I wasn’t precisely accurate before,” Viola said. She felt herself turning pink. “You see he was engaged in . . . in an activity.”
Devin looked up sharply. “At a ball?”
She nodded. “A ball at Lindow Castle. It was my first such public event. I wasn’t enjoying it, and I decided to escape through the servants’ entrance.”
“A gentleman was tupping a woman in the hallway, where any young lady might happen on them and be horrified,” Devin said harshly.
There was something ferociously judgmental in his voice. “That wasn’t the part that bothered me,” Viola said. “It was a shock, but I once rounded a corner and came on one of my brothers and his wife looking quite disheveled. I wasn’t a complete idiot, even as a girl.”
“You were not the idiot; he was,” Devin said. He put down his fork.
“That did bother me,” Viola said, trying to explain. “In retrospect, it was almost funny because she wore yellow shoes and it looked absurd. But I was in a state of highly strung nerves—” She broke off. “It all sounds stupid now. I can’t believe it had such a powerful effect on me.”
“But it did.” Devin’s voice was grim, and Viola had a sudden image of him hunting down the man, all these years later, and exacting a punishment.
“Only because I was already on the verge of throwing up in public,” she said hastily. “You see, the woman in question was trying to trap the gentleman into matrimony. He mistook me for a witness who would force the question, I gather.”
“A mistake.”
She waved her hand. “He lost his temper and shouted because he thought I was part of a nefarious scheme, you see. He told her that if they married he would force her to live in the country. It was—”
She broke off. “What’s the matter?”
Chapter Twenty-six
Devin stared silently across the table, unable to answer.
Viola reached out and her warm hand curled over his. “It wasn’t such a terrible experience, Devin. I never told my father because I knew he would be most displeased.”
“For good reason,” he said hollowly.
Fear was curling in his stomach in a way he hadn’t felt since childhood.
He hadn’t given much thought to his marriage: From the moment he met Viola, he knew he had a fierce need to win her, and that was that. It felt right.
Now he realized that feeling “right” was just an inarticulate way of saying “love.” He was in love with his wife, desperately, wildly in love with his wife, and she was telling him that he was the reason for the greatest anguish she’d ever experienced.
His rage had thrown her into such fear that she experienced crippling shyness for years afterward.
A dark feeling swept through him, blurring her concerned expression.
“Devin,” she said, her fingers tightening. “You must not find and punish the gentleman in question. I never told anyone of the episode for that reason: It wouldn’t be fair to him. He didn’t want to marry that woman.”
With a hollow pang, Devin realized that he had wronged his former mistress as well: In his fury, he assumed that Viola was a witness, but in fact, Annabel’s claims of innocence were just. He had launched his fury at two innocent women, one whose only crime was to make love with him in a quiet corridor.
But Viola was looking at him, so he summoned up words, though not the right words. “My father used to threaten my mother with life in the country regularly,” he said numbly.
That wasn’t it, of course.
The threat had come out of his mouth. He had no memory of saying it at all. He searched his memory, and what came back to him was blinding fury at being betrayed.
Not the actual threat, spoken by him.
The very same threat that echoed through the halls of this house and made his childhood hellish and sent his mother fleeing to live far away.
No memory of Viola either, a very young Viola, terrorized by his violence.
“I’m sorry,” Viola said now. “It’s a terrible thing for a spouse to say and for a young boy to hear.”
“The late duke used to hurl insults and threats but for the most part—unless you were foolish enough to take up his offer of a duel—he limited himself to dismissing servants and throwing the odd vase.” It was no justification.
None.
“Is that why your mother would flee the house?”
That dark coiling fear had its talons in him now. Viola would leave him, if she knew. She would be right to leave. He nodded, struggling to shape words, and finally forced himself to speak. “She came and went throughout my childhood. For the most part, she lived elsewhere. She would come home for a time, until there was another battle, at which point her trunks would be packed and she’d be gone again.”
“She must have hated leaving you behind,” Viola said, her eyes a warm hazel.
“No,” he said, before he thought better. “I don’t believe she cared either way. She certainly never considered taking me with her.”
Viola got up and came around the table. He looked up at her. “Push back,” she said, in a tone that implied he was dreadfully slow. She settled onto his lap, tucking her head against his chest, catching up one of his hands and bringing it to her lips.
He looked down at the lush sweep o
f her lashes, her lips, cherry-colored and swollen from kisses, her pointed chin, and felt another wave of inexplicable emotion.
Love—and fear.
With a sudden deep pang, he realized that no matter how indifferent he pretended to be to his mother’s departures, the memory of an entryway full of trunks and a brittle, furious duchess poised to slam out the door was deeply ingrained in his memory.
He could see down the gaping neckline of his linen shirt to the swell of Viola’s breasts, creamy curves just visible through the fine fabric. With the arm that wasn’t cradling her, he reached out for his glass of wine. “Drink,” he said, touching her bottom lip with the rim of the glass.
Viola tilted her head back, and bronzy-brown silken hair fell over his arm in disarray. Smiling at him, she opened her mouth. He tipped the glass, watching the ruby liquid meet her tongue, and the sensuous ripple of her throat as she swallowed.
“Now you.”
Obediently he lifted the glass and took a swallow.
“What do you taste?”
“Wine.”
She poked him. “My mother trained us to know ales and wines. I taste currants and plum, and a very fine plum at that.”
Devin glanced at the wine bottle. “French.” He brought the glass to her lips again and then adjusted her carefully to kiss her afterward. “It tastes like red wine, which is not as sweet as you.”
“This may be the best wine I’ve ever tasted,” she said sometime later, with that beguiling giggle.
“I think you’ve enchanted me,” he said, giving her another sip.
“Imagine me raising an eyebrow. You don’t appear enchanted.” Her eyes ranged over his shoulders. “Perhaps enchanting.”
“Would you ever leave me?” he asked, the words leaping from his mouth without permission. An ache in the pit of his stomach told him that he should tell her the truth. He should confess.
But on their wedding day? To confess to such a degenerate encounter—copulation in a corridor, loss of his temper, shouting words that he couldn’t even remember . . . It would ruin everything.
He couldn’t.
“No, I will not,” Viola said, her eyes on his.
Tomorrow, Devin promised himself, and dipped a finger into the wine and painted her lips.
She licked them and tugged at his neck. “Kiss me again.”
“Are you inebriated, Duchess?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No Wilde is inebriated unless she wants to be.” But she giggled.
“What does a Wilde do if she wants to be inebriated?”
Viola leaned farther back against his arm and took up the wineglass herself. She watched him over the rim with an impish expression before she tipped her head and drank. “She might forget her ladylike deportment.”
“I would like to see that,” Devin said, heartfelt.
“I do feel a trifle boozy, as it happens,” she said, giving him a smile that nestled in his heart. She inched her legs apart. His shirt was rucked up, barely covering her thighs. A rough, needy sound broke from his throat.
And turned into a growl when Viola grinned at him with an expression that he’d never seen before but hoped to the depths of his being that he would see often. Every day. Twice a day.
She dipped her fingers into the wine and slid her dripping fingers under the hem of his shirt.
He stared at the sprinkle of red wine leading to the hem, and at the way her hand obviously slipped between her legs, and the way her head fell back against his arm and she smiled at him with wicked, laughing mischief.
“By God,” he said, dumbfounded, “I married a Wilde.”
Her smile was slow, voluptuous . . . welcoming.
Confession could wait.
She was here, with him. It could wait.
Viola wiggled her fingers, sighed, and laughed when he snatched up the hem of his shirt.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The morning after her wedding, Viola woke up early. Never mind the fact that they were in the elegant precepts of Mayfair; somewhere a cockerel was crowing.
She raised her head looking for Barty before remembering that she’d arranged for her crow to spend his first night in the kitchens. She hadn’t wanted him to be lonely in the duchess’s bedchamber, in case she spent the night with her new husband.
Which she had.
She put her head back on the pillow, silently taking stock of the fact that she had slept with a man. She and Joan had shared many a bed, from the nursery to the night before her wedding, when Joan got teary and declared that she didn’t want to let her go . . .
This was different.
Her husband slept on his stomach, sprawled in the bed, head on his arms, his biceps a seductive curve. His body was long and elegant, the sheet caught around his hips as if he were one of the Greek statues that apparently thronged in his study.
Male fingers were unlike female fingers, she discovered by picking up his hand and examining their tensile strength, the span of his palm, the azure vein that ran down his wrist.
Devin stirred, lazy eyes opening, shifting to his side. She abandoned his hand and nestled against him, reveling in the fact that he was warm and alive, unlike the cold marble of Greek statues. When she had first joined the Wilde nursery, as a small child, she felt as if she’d fallen into a hurricane of activity that swirled around her.
Life with Devin was the stillness in the eye of the storm: a quiet, absorbed, intense space for the two of them, the tall walls of the ducal manor sheltering them from the world.
He leaned over and kissed her, his lips lingering on hers, a hand curling around the curve of her cheek.
“Sore?” he murmured.
Viola felt herself turning pink. She nodded.
He tipped her chin up and kissed her. “This is my first day as a married man.” His hand slid down her spine and over the curve of her bottom, tightening.
Viola stopped feeling embarrassed and pressed closer to him, her plump breasts flattening against his chest.
Long minutes later he raised his head from her lips and asked hoarsely, “Do you think you might feel better after a bath?”
Viola had a hand wrapped around his erection. She’d thrown back the sheets and she was exploring how this unfamiliar body part worked. When she tightened her grip, Devin’s breath caught in his throat. When she twisted her wrist, he groaned aloud.
“I like this,” she said, grinning at him. “It’s fun.”
“‘Fun’,” he repeated, sounding dazed. “I have to—”
Viola stroked him again, adding a little twist at the top. “You resemble a mushroom.”
Devin caught her wrist with his long fingers. “You’re ravishing me, Viola. If you keep going . . .”
“You’ll spend?” she asked. Ignoring his grasp, she slid her hand up and down again, loving the burning heat of his . . . “What do you call this?”
“My cock,” Devin said.
She tried the shape of the word without giving it sound. It was too improper to say aloud.
“Last night I couldn’t see what was happening.” A giggled escaped her. “This is so immodest, first thing in the morning.” She paused, her eyes widening. “Is this why married women have breakfast in bed?”
“Modesty has no place between husband and wife,” Devin said hoarsely. He took her mouth, his tongue tangling with hers, sending shivering bolts of heat through her limbs.
“Am I doing this correctly?” Viola whispered. His response wasn’t intelligible.
Her mind blurred when his fingers wrapped about hers and tightened. When Devin’s breath roughened and his body went rigid, one hand tightening around her arse, she pulled back just enough to watch—but as his breath came faster, she forgot to look down. Instead her gaze caught on her husband’s face.
In the grip of desire, Devin looked younger, his face filled with an uncomplicated pleasure. That’s it, she thought. That’s what she wanted for her marriage. Oh, not marital intercourse alone, but that lo
ok on Devin’s face. He didn’t look austere or ducal. His eyes stayed with hers the whole time, as their hands moved in unison.
He came with a deep, broken groan, and Viola watched with fascination. A minute later he drew in a long breath and pulled the sheet over himself, wiping his chest. “Curiosity satisfied?” Devin asked, his voice a lazy growl.
“Yes,” Viola said. She had a lifetime to learn how to give her husband pleasure. She wanted more: She wanted to be a pair, the way her mother and stepfather were. She wanted a union in which she . . .
“You’re gone again,” Devin said, laughter in his voice.
She shook her head. “I’m here!”
She had to break through his solitary nature somehow. Not by pushing him, or forcing him to act. But somehow opening a door that he would walk through and realize how much he was loved by Otis and Hazel. By Sir Reginald.
The idea fluttered in her chest.
She realized suddenly that she hadn’t cared a jot for Mr. Marlowe; it had been vain of her to think to rescue a man the way one might save a baby crow or a calf.
Devin finished rubbing his chest, flung the sheet to the side, disentangled her limbs from his, and helped her put his shirt back on. He rang for her maid and escorted Viola to the bathing room. She accompanied him silently, thinking hard.
Her husband was himself again, his jaw firm, eyes cool, face ducal.
Yet his eyes softened when she gasped at the magnificence of the ducal bathing chamber, which featured a copper bathtub, softly glowing in the light streaming in the window. “I’ve never seen such a large bathtub,” she gasped.
Devin smiled. “Large enough for two.” He tipped up her head and brushed a kiss on her lips. “Done thinking?”
“Is anyone ever done thinking?”
“No. But you think more deeply than anyone I know.”
Viola hesitated. “Does it annoy you? Joan finds my absentmindedness frightfully irritating.” She hurried to add, “I can try very hard not to think, that is, not to think of other things when I ought to be participating in a conversation. Even my mother says that I test her patience.”
He shook his head.
Say Yes to the Duke EPB Page 23