Until now.
Until this very moment.
He dragged his mouth over her chin, across her jaw, kissing as he went. He wanted to investigate every last patch of her downy skin, from behind her ear to her elbow. He wanted to worship her with his lips and tongue, to taste her, touch her, take her. He wanted…
With a strained growl of frustration—knowing he could not take her, not in this state and not here in the morning room of all places, yet wishing he could—he kissed down her neck, inhaling there the heady scent of lavender, before licking and nipping a path to the hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse slammed into his tongue. He absorbed the frantic beats, tasting the salt and sweetness of her skin, and knew she was every bit as affected by their unexpected, explosive chemistry as he.
Yes, she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
Against all sense, common or otherwise. Certainly against his better judgment. Above all, against his plans. An uninterrupted string of days in a sickbed had told him what he must do, and remaining at Leeds House, swallowing his ignominy and settling into life with a duchess who could not seem to stop collecting mammals was not part of his plans. He needed to prove his innocence, to restore his name again to his fellow comrades, to his superiors, to the Home Office.
This was temporary, he reminded himself. A fleeting respite from the hell of—
All thoughts tumbling through his overloaded mind dispersed in the next instant, for a ball of fur hurtled into his lap and sank its claws into his thighs, narrowly missing his wound. He tore his mouth from Georgiana’s, breath hissing through his tightened lips, hands sinking into a heavily rounded cat belly and—Good, sweet God—distended feline teats. Oh Christ, was the tip of his finger now wet? With cat milk?
The breath abandoned his lungs in one swift rush. Disgusting! Horrible! Beyond the fucking pale. That was what this was. Saints preserve anyone who accepted animals as they were, with their lack of inhibitions and complete disregard for personal space. With their bodies and fur and claws and irrational disregard for anyone who crossed their paths. How dare they think they could trust any other creature, let alone a human?
They most certainly could not trust him.
Could they?
No. He disliked animals. All of them. They were furry, smelly, rude irritants. Flea-bitten reminders of the childhood he’d never enjoyed. Disrespectful creatures who forced him to recall what he’d missed. What he’d lost. What he would never, ever know. He had been groomed to his cold, hard life. And even that had been ripped from him. What was he to make of himself now? Who could he be, sitting here, allowing a bloody disgusting feline to make itself a bed of his cursed thighs? Why would it not cease rubbing itself upon him? He was sure its loathsome hair was everywhere by now.
“Sweet Jesus, the thing is on me,” he managed, holding it lest it attempt to climb his chest or further maul him. The contrary creature continued purring, its soft body rumbling and vibrating, as if it was enjoying itself.
His wife’s mouth opened before she hastily pressed a hand over it. Her emerald gaze was wide. Shocked. Troubled. Confused, unless he missed his guess. His kiss had flummoxed her, and the knowledge pleased him.
She blinked once, twice, thrice. “The thing, Your Grace?”
Something about her use of his title irritated him. Though he knew she had done it before without him giving a proper damn, the way she used it now seemed almost like a weapon. A pointed verbal object, intended to needle him.
“The bloody creature that spawned,” he elaborated. “The furred, roaring thing in my lap that is currently—hell, that hurts—piercing my skin with its finely honed claws.”
Fuck, the beast was kneading his thighs, purring with delight, ramming its face into his stomach with unabashed gusto. He stiffened, hands going into the air. He didn’t know whether he should push the beast to the floor, punt it into next year, throw it upon his wife (who loved the miserable thing and ought not to complain about it being launched at her), or…pet it. Was that the course of action one took with such creatures?
Egad, he could not pet the thing.
Could he?
“Lady Philomena Whiskers has taken a liking to you,” his duchess said in her rich, seductive alto. Approval underscored her words, and he tried and failed not to allow that endorsement to travel straight to his cock. “Pet her, Your Grace.”
Her command echoed his thoughts, and still he paused, his hand hovering over the fluffy, white beast’s back, wishing she spoke of herself instead, like the degenerate he no doubt was. “Pet it? Must I?”
“She likes you,” she repeated, her expression firm, almost rebuking in its stark honesty. “Here.” She grasped his hand in hers, and he could not deny the jolt he felt when her fingers gripped his, with nothing but bare skin and bad intentions between them. The bad intentions were all on his part, naturally.
He resisted when she would have dragged his hand over the white cat’s back. “I do not like felines, Duchess.”
She stilled, a lone dark brow rising. “Why not?”
He swallowed down his nausea, the past. They were strangers. He needn’t reveal himself to her. Indeed, how dare she ask it of him? “Need there be a particular reason?”
Her gaze, so bright and determined and intelligent, burned into his, searching, seeking. Reading, unless he mistook his guess, that which he would prefer to keep hidden. No one looked at him with such scrutiny aside from the Duke of Carlisle, and he was his superior and a bloody spy at that. Some men swore Carlisle could read minds.
Kit had other ideas. The man simply had a way of examining people, of knowing what dirt to dig into, and when to become stubborn, when to withdraw. A better, more matured gift than Kit possessed.
But regardless of all that, he still didn’t understand why the woman he’d married was attempting to plumb the depths of his soul with her vivid green gaze. Was attempting to get him to fall beneath her spell. To win him over. Woo him. Make him her vassal.
He would not do it. To hell with this. He opened his mouth…
“You are correct, Your Grace,” she said, halting any angry words he may have sputtered in her direction with her calm, cool understanding. “There need not be, as you said, a particular reason. Some people do not enjoy cats and their refusal to behave. Others do not like dogs and their territorial, protective, curious natures. And yet someone who cannot even afford a creature the common gesture of reassurance—a palm down the spine, for instance—strikes me as a man who has a particular reason.”
His lip curled into a sneer as he stared at her. It wasn’t that he wanted to put her in her place. It was that he had to. She had overstepped her bounds, broaching topics that he never wished to revisit.
“Get it off me,” he demanded. “The thing is a scant inch from sinking its talons into my wound, and should that happen, I cannot make any promises in regards to the creature’s continued wellbeing. In short, I will murder it without a moment of regret.”
“Truly?” She searched his expression for he knew not what, frowning. “You cannot mean to say that you would injure an innocent cat, the mother of six beautiful kittens?”
He exhaled, glowering as the thing continued to make itself at home upon his lap before he turned his glare back to her. “Of course I mean to say that. I am decidedly not this beast’s home. Nor do I wish for it to continue to attempt to make itself comfortable upon my bloody person, all while piercing me with its dagger-like claws. I. Do. Not. Like. Felines. Are we clear?”
“Perfectly.” She regarded him with ill-concealed disgust.
Had she not just been melting in his arms? What the devil had transpired to so turn her against him? Why had he chosen to reveal his deep-seated distrust and dislike of animals? His father, the reason for his loathing of creatures, had been dead some fifteen years, and he was three-and-thirty. He ought to have been beyond such leading-strings nonsense. And yet he was not. He had exposed himself to the woman before him, and he rather wished he
hadn’t.
“Perfectly,” he repeated, disliking her dismissive tone. It was almost as if he was no longer worthy of her time merely because he was not charmed by a hissing, teeth-and-claw bearing bundle of fur. Lavender scented or no, he could not like the thing, and he would not be guilt-ridden into changing his mind. Not even if his duchess kissed like an angel and the most seasoned courtesan at a whorehouse merged into one beautiful, perfect, delicious amalgamation. “Surely you cannot expect everyone to possess your singular love of creatures, madam.”
“Not love,” she agreed, tilting her head to consider him in a way he could not like. “But there can be no harm in appreciation, Duke.”
“I beg your pardon?” he demanded.
Her expression remained carefully neutral, quite as if he had not just kissed her senseless. As if they had not both been panting for more. It bothered him, hurt his pride, far more than it should. But he could not help himself. If ever any man had possessed a weakness, his had swiftly become her.
The seductress who refused his advances as soon as he didn’t fawn over her cat. And said creature was currently engaged in using him as an alternative log as it honed its nails on his bloody trousers. As long as it did not make contact with his wound, he decided that he would allow this nonsense to continue.
But, inevitably, the moment arrived. He let out a hiss of pain, attempting to deflect the she-devil’s weapons from his sensitive, tentatively healing flesh.
The thing didn’t just sink its claws into his wound. It clawed him up like a scratching post, rubbed its face upon him, and then settled into a semblance of the letter ‘u’ upon his thighs.
“Appreciate the beauty of an infinitely smaller, more fragile being entrusting herself to you, Your Grace,” she said then, shaking him both with her tone, her earnest gaze, and the shocking simplicity of her words. “Here is a creature that need not trust you. She is at her most vulnerable in your lap. You are easily ten times her size, capable of inflicting great harm upon her, leaving her kittens motherless and without sustenance. And yet, here she is, believing in you, trusting you enough to curl up on your lap, reveal to you her vulnerable belly. Is that not a gift?”
Bloody, fucking hell.
He stared at the woman he had married, and in that moment, he realized—quite for the first time—that she was not anything at all as he’d imagined her to be. No indeed. She was wilier, smarter, and gentler, rather reminiscent of a blazing, warming fire. If he touched her, he would get burned.
“Yes,” he agreed, feeling a lump in his throat that he did not like. That he could not swallow, regardless of how he tried. And the next thing he knew, his hand was upon the feline, stroking its fur. Gently. Slowly. Tentative at first. But as the thing purred and arched into his touch, he did so with greater pressure, delivering a series of long, sure strokes to its back. Then its head.
Devil take it, the thing was actually rather endearing, now that he bothered to look at it as something more than a nuisance. He rubbed the side of its face, and the thing rolled itself over in his lap once more, ecstatic.
“Lady Philomena Whiskers has always liked you,” his wife said, sounding puzzled. “I cannot fathom why. Even when you first arrived and were on your sickbed, we could not convince her to remove herself from your person.”
Brief flashes of lucidity in the midst of his delirium returned to him. The creature on his chest. The sounds, the claws. It had been, of all things, the cat. Lady Philomena Whiskers. He refused to say the name aloud, but even he had to admit, privately and never to his ridiculous duchess, of course, that a regal moniker seemed to fit the fluffy white feline.
But the “we“ his wife had uttered returned to him, and he frowned. He did not like Ludlow and his wife in the same sentence. As a team. As a ”we.” As anything, damn it.
He frowned at her, absently scratching the cat in his lap. “You allowed the thing to maul an invalid.”
His duchess firmed her soft, full lips into a compressed line of displeasure. “We did nothing of the sort. Lady Philomena took a fancy to you.”
Snippets of remembrance returned to him for the first time since he’d taken ill. A green-eyed angel with a lilting alto. A comforting presence, reassuring, soothing.
I am here.
Hush, I am here.
He had been deep in the throes of fever, weakened, suffering, and he had been convinced he’d descended into hell. But she had been there, at his side. She had been the calming, sweet angel at his bedside, the panacea to which he’d been drawn.
Of course, she had not been alone. Her feline menace had been there, raking its nails upon his chest.
And the not-butler.
That last thought curdled his stomach.
So many things clamored to his mind, longing to be said. He wanted to thank her for taking care of him in his time of weakness, for he knew it was not something she had owed him. He had never treated—or even, truth be told, considered—her as his wife. She had been a means to an end. The fortune he’d had to wed so that he could go about his days. He’d never wanted to be Duke of bloody Leeds. He had been content in his role as second son, throwing himself into his work with the League.
Richard had changed everything with his abrupt death and his desperate straits. He had wagered and frittered away everything within his reach, leaving nothing but debt and turmoil in his wake. And leaving Kit to pay the price for his love of vice.
Kit had been stationed abroad when news of Richard’s accident reached him. He’d been in New York, making inroads with the Fenians. The League had, for as long as he could recall, been the driving force of his life. The most important part of his every moment. The only reason to wake in the morning with the hope of making his day mean something.
“Duke?” His wife’s hesitant voice interrupted the deep, troubled musings infecting his mind.
He dispelled them, wishing them and the past gone for good, even if he knew it was an impossibility. “I remember you,” he said instead. “When I was with fever. Your voice, your touch. You were there.”
For me, he wanted to add.
But he did not.
There was no use in seeming desperate for her attentions, after all. And he most assuredly was not—would never be—that. Not desperate for anyone, and most especially not for her. Even if she was so lovely that looking upon her made him ache. Even if she was kinder and sweeter than he had ever imagined, with a heart as pure as the fresh fallen snow for taking in not only her creatures but him as well.
It struck him, then, the understanding that she had never judged him. Had never found him lacking or at fault. She had simply been there for him, when he had not done the same for her. He realized as shock unfurled in his chest that it was perhaps the first time in his existence that anyone had been there for him.
Ever.
“I was there,” she agreed quietly, looking at him in a way that made him feel as if he were a puzzle she longed to piece together. He did not like the sensation. He was no one’s puzzle, by God, and he had every expectation that no one—not even a feckless, perfect, humble, beautiful angel like her—could piece him back together into a semblance of anything worthwhile.
“Why?” he asked, the question torn from him. It should not matter. She ought not to matter. And yet he could not escape her any more than he could escape the sun. She was everywhere, blindingly brilliant. Warming. Heated.
Necessary.
Fuck.
This was not what he wished, to embroil himself with any woman and certainly not with the troublesome, maddening lover of creatures before him. Why, he scarcely knew her. Did not even like her any more than he liked the feline in his lap, no matter how loudly the thing was currently purring its delight and regardless of how firmly it butted its face into his abdomen.
Yet here he was, in the charmed, golden morning room, his wife within arm’s reach, a feline snuggling against him with absolute trust, and bitter, abject confusion poisoning his lungs. He did not think he co
uld breathe.
She had not answered his question, and it irked him. He asked her again, forcing her eyes to meet his by gripping her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Why, damn it?”
He tried and failed abysmally to resist gawping at her mouth, so lush and inviting, so ready for his claiming. One kiss had not been enough. She was like an elixir, and he wanted to drown in her, drink her down to the last drop. Hope that she would cure him, even though he knew she could not.
Her brows rose, her expression turning guarded. “Because you needed me.”
Her confession, soft and earnest, made his heart thud in his chest. Made his throat tight. Made the back of his neck prickle with some foreign combination of unease and appreciation. Ridiculous.
Stupid. He pushed any unwanted feeling skittering to the surface down, down, down. Into the depths of whatever remained of his soul. Not only did he dislike being beholden to anyone, he also could not bear the notion of anyone—especially her—thinking him weak.
His upper lip curled into a snarl. “On the contrary, Duchess. I did not need you. I’ve spent my entire life taking great care to ensure that I need no one, and I’m not about to start with some juvenile American farm girl who cannot bear to turn away a stray mongrel.”
She stared at him, the lines of her face remaining impassive. Her lush lips tightened at the corners, the only sign that she was at all affected. He knew a moment of disappointment, followed by the swift spear of shame. What was it about her that brought out the beast in him? Why did he want to pierce her infallible armor of serenity and caring to make her realize that she could not—no matter how many animals she took beneath her wing—save every aimless creature that found its way to her door?
Most of all, she could not save him.
The sooner the both of them realized that, the better off they’d be.
“Is that all I am to you, Your Grace?” Though her sweet voice was calm, almost cool, a slight tremble gave her away. “An American naïf to be pitied and deplored?”
Her Deceptive Duke (Wicked Husbands Book 4) Page 11