Good God.
He had to stop this madness.
“I will never eat out of your hand, madam,” he bit out coolly.
“Perhaps not.” She tilted her head to the side, almost like a little bird, and searched his gaze. “But I do begin to believe you are more bluster than bite, Your Grace.”
He would have stopped petting the cat at that moment, but the thing was so soft, and bringing it delight somehow…calmed him. Yes, that was what it did. Stroking the thing’s long, white fur and absorbing the rumbles of its euphoria somehow sucked some of the rancor from his soul.
Bloody, sodding hell.
He liked the feline.
And he was beginning to believe he liked his wife as well.
This will not goddamn do. Not a bit of it. You are an elite spy. You’ve been trained to combat torture, to survive violence, insurrection, betrayals, to withstand plucked fingernails and broken bones. You will not go weak for a cat and the madwoman you married.
He did not need her. Did not want her. The complication she presented could sod off for all he cared. Except, a strong, pervasive warmth had begun to tingle in his chest. A feeling, when he had been quite certain he no longer owned the capacity for them.
Kit opened his mouth to tell her to take her ridiculous bundle of fur and leave. But instead, his tongue betrayed his mind and said something else entirely.
“This thing cannot be called Lady Philomena Whiskers,” he announced.
His duchess had shifted closer, so near that her skirts brushed the bed and the intoxicating scent of her—lavender and freshness—hit him with full force. So near that she bent down, extended her arm, and gave the creature a thorough scratch on the back of its neck. “Oh? And what would you call her, husband?”
Husband.
When Georgiana’s sweet voice spoke the word, she imbued it with a different sort of meaning. Yet, he was that, was he not? He was the man who had exchanged vows with her, the man who had given her his name. She was his, and something primitive within him roared to the surface now, demanding that he do something about it.
She stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to reveal what he would call the thing if not its ridiculous moniker. “I would call it…” Oh, hell. What would he call the cursed thing? He searched his brain, but it was futile. He hadn’t the capacity for naming furred beings. “Lady.”
Terribly original, you stupid sot.
She pursed her lips, and the urge to catch that full, lush bottom lip in his teeth and nip overcame him. “You do realize you have only abbreviated her name, do you not, Leeds?”
Well, yes of course he did, and now he felt like a true fool. Was he actually sitting here in nothing but a dressing gown, with a feline mauling his chest, rebutting the name of the infernal creature with the woman he had not wished to marry? A hasty surveille of the situation confirmed that yes, indeed, that was the case.
“Philomena is a horrid name,” he informed his duchess as though it was a matter of the greatest import. “And Whiskers is, well, redundant. Anyone can see the thing is a cat, after all. Lady suffices. The rest is womanly nonsense.”
Her brows drew together. “Womanly nonsense?”
Blast. The woman before him would have made an exceptional general. Her ability to rout her enemy and thwart him at every turn was unparalleled. He had no doubt she could have won a war armed with nothing more than a wagonload of puppies and kittens.
She exuded displeasure just now, and he knew he had chosen the wrong phrasing. “Maudlin sentimentality,” he corrected himself.
A lone, dark brow arched. “You may think yourself aloof and impervious, Leeds, but I see you. If you were as cold and detached as you would have me believe, you would not be here now, allowing Lady to roost upon your chest, petting her in such a fashion.”
Yes, he was petting the damn cat. And the truth of it was—he could admit it to himself, if no one else—he did rather did enjoy petting the thing. It was soft, and so easily contented, and…well, that was more than enough to win his favor. He need not go into a stupor internally cataloging the thing’s virtues. The fact of the matter was that the cat liked him. Who the hell knew why, but it did, and that pleased him.
He clenched his jaw, not liking the faraway look that had entered his wife’s eyes.
“You like her,” she guessed softly.
Correctly, blast her.
Perhaps the woman’s lunacy was infectious, and it had begun to rot his brain. That was the only explanation why he should be lying here in her chamber whilst his was overrun by dogs, so affected by the mere touch of his wife’s fingertips upon his thigh that his cock had gone erect, almost springing free of the bedclothes and his robe. And that was not even broaching the troubling attachment he’d begun to entertain for a white feline with rapier-sharp claws and no concept of personal space.
The devil of it was, that wasn’t the only attachment he’d begun to entertain. The other, even more alarming attachment was fast becoming a problem. A big, bloody awful problem that grew with each minute he spent in his duchess’s presence.
“I do not like the infernal feline,” he denied. A lie, but a necessary one. Far too much was at stake—his reputation, his future with the League, possibly even his life—and he could not afford the distraction she would inevitably bring. The desire he felt for her, at odds with the perpetual vexation she also inspired in him, was hot and strong and dangerous. He could not give in to it again. The only course he could take was to keep her at a distance. “You may take it with you when you go. The thing ought to return to its brats by now, I daresay, and I’ve pressing matters to attend to.”
He scooped up the purring cat and held it out to her as Lady wriggled with protest, seeking to return to her lounging place upon him. But his duchess made no move to accept the dubious gift of the squirming feline.
Instead, she smiled, and it was a magnificent smile, the sort that lit her entire face from sparkling eyes to her lush mouth. His heart pounded against his chest. He could not stay the reaction that coursed through him, lust and…wonder. That was the only word to define the way he felt basking in her glow, the true force of her beauty hitting him in the gut.
She wasn’t just beautiful.
Words did not do her justice.
How had he ever walked away from her the morning of their wedding? The present Kit longed to revisit the Kit of seven months ago and kick him in the arse. He had been so swept up in his mission, single-minded in his training and pursuit of infiltrating the Fenian menace. His identity for the mission had been that of an Irish American who had lived abroad, and he had spent hours each night reading books aloud to himself with an American accent tinged with a slight brogue. He had spent the days fighting at the Devil’s Pit, a subterranean club for League members only, honing his fist work and his swordplay both.
He certainly had not courted Georgiana properly. They had been in each other’s presence on few occasions before he made an offer for her. He had seen her at a ball. Danced with her once. She had been quiet but lovely, and she was the wealthiest heiress on the marriage mart. Her past had been colorful, to say the least, her lineage distasteful, but he had swallowed his pride and married her to save himself from the ruination Richard had left behind.
What a callous bastard he was. Single-minded and self-serving. The memory struck him then of her cosseted in her ivory wedding gown, the longest train he’d ever seen on a dress trailing behind her, begging him to stay for the wedding breakfast.
“I do not believe your protests, Leeds.” Her sweet voice, with its lilting American accent he couldn’t help but find appealing, interrupted his tumultuous introspection. “You like Lady. Admit it. I shall not think less of you, I promise.”
He opened his mouth to say he didn’t give a damn what she thought of him. But he looked at the cat he held aloft like an offering. And then his gaze roamed hungrily back to her face, drinking in her radiance. She looked delighted by her discovery, and something unfami
liar moved inside him.
Something changed, and where he had felt only hollowness before, he felt instead a brimming, blossoming warmth.
“Very well, madam,” he grated. “The thing is not as horrid as I initially supposed, but that does not mean its bloody rats are not downstairs crying for her milk at this very moment. Nor does it mean that I do not need to dress for the day and see to the matters awaiting me.”
She shook her head, making a chiding sound with her tongue, and the urge to kiss her barreled through him. He wanted to take that mouth, claim it with all the open-mouthed hunger burning inside him. To stroke his tongue against her disapproval, to turn it into the same all-consuming want coursing within his body.
“That will not do, I am afraid, Leeds.” She pursed her lips in a gesture he found both maddening and alluring. “Lady does not have rats, for one thing. And for another, I will not take her until you admit that you like her. No shillyshallying nonsense or attempts to disguise it.”
He gaped at her, certain he had misheard. “Madam, do you dare to order me about?”
She blinked, then propped her fine-boned hands on her wasp-waist and stared him down. “Yes, I do indeed dare. You married me and abandoned me for half a year, and when you finally deigned to reappear, you were about to succumb to infection from a wound you acquired in a manner which you still have not explained.”
Well, hell. She certainly had him there. He lowered the cat, who wasted no time in sashaying its way back to his chest and curling up. “Madam, I understand that the specifics of our union have not been easy.”
“Easy?” Her brows rose in twin, elegant arches that creased the smooth perfection of her forehead. “Can you not even say my name, sir? You would have me remain something as impersonal as a servant, and yet I have tended to you, washed you and bandaged you, and seen to it that you received the best care I could personally procure for you. Meanwhile, you have been nothing but angry, callous, and rude. I do not owe you anything, Leeds. I paid my debt to you with my dowry and my freedom. If you expect me to bow and scrape to you and treat you as if you are my king, you may as well return to your hunting expedition on the next vessel bound for America.”
His goddess had turned into a Gorgon before his eyes. Yet, he could not look away. And somehow, her rebellious fire did not diminish his attraction to her in any way. Though it did turn him to stone. In one portion of his anatomy in particular.
His mind whirled to dissect everything she had said, all her demands, questions, all her anger and determination. She overwhelmed him and invigorated him, and the strangest thing of all was that there was only one other time in his life when he felt so deliriously alive, his body vibrating with possibility and blood and vigor. That was when he was engaged in a mission for the League.
Kit decided to answer her questions in the order in which they had been posed. He stroked the cat, who had begun purring wildly once more. “Georgiana.”
Color tinged her cheekbones, the only sign that she had lost control of herself. Otherwise, her poise and expression remained unflappable and perfect. “Yes?”
“Your name,” he elaborated. “You wished to know if I could say it. I can.”
She swallowed, her gaze lowering and—unless he missed his guess—landing on his mouth. He felt that stare as viscerally as the brush of her soft lips over his. “And you like Lady Philomena—Lady. You like her. Admit it.”
It had been many years—more than twenty-five—since he had allowed himself to feel any emotion toward an animal. His father’s intolerable cruelty had cured him of the need. And yet in one month, his duchess and her infernal feline had dismantled the old walls he’d erected within himself the day his father had instructed the Head Gardener to shoot his pet tabby for the offense of making a privy of his prized rose garden.
He compressed his lips, disliking the effect Georgiana had upon him, disliking the bewildering softening of himself which seemed as ruinous as it was impossible to stay. “When I was a lad, I had a cat named Whiskers,” he startled himself by revealing. He had not spoken of the cat since the day he’d buried it himself.
She stared. “Surely you jest.”
“Not in the slightest.” His tone turned grim. “The head gardener shot him at my father’s behest.”
Georgiana gasped, her expressive eyes shining with a sheen of tears. “How could he have been so heartless?”
“It was his nature.” Though that was hardly an excuse. Kit had ceased all attempts at making sense of his father’s ruthlessness many years ago. “You wished to know the reason I do not like creatures, and there you have it. Are you happy now, Georgiana?”
She looked stricken. “No, I am not, Leeds.”
“Kit,” he growled. He could not bear the sight of her naked compassion. It cut straight into his heart.
What was it about her that drove him to distraction? He was in a perpetual state of half-arousal, half-irritation in her presence. Not even the aching wound in his thigh or the continued attempts of his rational mind to overrule the rest of him detracted from it.
“Pardon?” She looked taken aback, hovering there at his bedside, and he…
By God, he was tired of being a bloody invalid.
He hoisted the cat from his chest, placed it gently upon the bed, and threw back the bedclothes. The time for a reckoning was at hand.
“My name,” he said grimly, “is Kit. Say it.”
And then he hauled himself from the bed, taking care to make certain his dressing gown did not gape to reveal his raging erection even as he favored his injured leg. She watched him, rooted to the carpet, emerald eyes huge, lips parted.
“Leeds,” she protested as he pursued her without his cane.
He didn’t give a damn about the pain in his thigh. About his limp. Something had forever altered between them. It had begun the moment he had laid eyes on her again for the first time, and like an erupting volcano, it now flowed, molten and dangerous, determined to scorch everything in its path. He was not moving from this chamber until he kissed her.
And until he heard his name in that bloody beautiful voice of hers.
“Kit,” he repeated. “Not Leeds. Kit.”
One step, two steps, three, four, five. He would drag his lame lower body across hot coals to reach her. She backed up halfway across the chamber. He followed, slowed by his wound but determined. He had come a long way in the last fortnight, and though his injury still plagued him and required bandaging, he was strong enough to stalk her without his cane for this short distance. The cat meowed its discontent in the background, but he ignored it, intent upon his prey. He soaked up Georgiana’s face with his gaze, imagined all the depraved things he could do to her body now that he was at last healing.
She was his, after all.
For the taking.
Maybe that was what he should have been doing all along instead of keeping her at a distance. Pursuing her. Wooing her. Seducing her. Maybe, after he was sufficiently healed, bedding her would grant him the clarity he needed to find out the truth and restore his honor.
Six, seven, eight, nine…all the way to seventeen.
Her back was against the wall now, the damask paper a busy contrast to the stark, simple loveliness of her face. He slammed his palms to the wall alongside her head, leveraging his weight so that his good leg and his arms bore the brunt of it. Boxing her in, he lowered his face to hers until the tips of their noses almost brushed. Her breath was uneven, hot, a curtain of sweetness and desire over his mouth.
“My name is Kit. I want to hear you say it,” he demanded.
Her eyes were wide pools of emerald, gold and cinnamon dancing in their luminous depths. “You will injure yourself if you do not take care.”
Stubborn to the last, was she? He was familiar with obstinacy, having spent his entire life plagued by his own. “I don’t give a damn about my wound for the moment. All I do care about is my name on your lips.”
He settled his gaze upon her mouth, finding her
lips parted. The sight of her full lower lip thrust out as if begging him to claim it sent another surge of lust directly to his groin. She was wearing a dress today, and he rather missed the delineation of her limbs in those ridiculous trousers of hers as he sank into the soft billow of her skirts. How he wished for his hands to be filled with the mouthwatering curves of her hips instead of flattened to the wallcoverings.
“Do you truly want to risk tearing open your wound, Leeds?” she asked, breaking through his lustful thoughts. “You are healing well. Now is not the time to take foolish chances, else you will find yourself bedridden for another fortnight.”
She was not wrong, but he didn’t wish to hear protestations or exhortations toward rational thought. He wanted to be mindless. To press his body into hers. To take her lips in a crushing joining that left them both weak. Ever since his return, she had driven him to distraction. Everything about her entranced him.
Even her quirks and her ridiculous affinity for creatures both large and small. The sliver of space between her front teeth, the beauty mark on her collarbone, the way her fine silk bodices never seemed to be without some sort of fur, her crooked smiles, her furrowed brow, every bloody thing that he would have once viewed as an imperfection only served to make him want her more.
Perhaps it was the fact that there were so few barriers between them, as he was clad in only a dressing gown that could part at any moment. Perhaps it was that he had been so long without a woman. Or maybe it was because he had never consummated their marriage, and that grievous omission would haunt him until he sank inside her…
He didn’t know the reason why he was hell-bent upon wringing his name from her supple pink lips. But he was. Full stop.
He couldn’t resist touching her. Transferring his weight to one arm, he removed his free hand and traced her lips. Soft and warm and so damn inviting. His index finger ran across the seam of her lips once before dipping to trace that succulent lower lip. Her mouth opened. Wetness kissed his fingertip.
And he could not help but think about how it would feel to run his fingers over her far more intimately. To lift her skirts, find the slit in her drawers, and tease her hot, slick flesh. He groaned, dropped his forehead to hers, their noses brushing. His fingers remained on her lips, the only barrier that prevented him from kissing her again as every part of him cried out for him to do.
Her Deceptive Duke (Wicked Husbands Book 4) Page 14