A Duke Never Yields

by Juliana Gray

  “Don’t say that. Don’t call me Miss Harewood, in that tone of yours, that dreadful distant tone. You sound exactly like a duke.”

  “I am a duke.”

  She stepped forward, set the glasses down one by one, and curled her hands around the edge of the desk. “You know what I mean.”

  He pinned his gaze firmly to her face, to stop it from wandering fatally downstairs. “Tell me, Miss Harewood, exactly how long you’ve been acquainted with my grandfather, the Duke of Olympia.”

  Her start of astonishment was so instant, so profound, it nearly buckled his chest.

  “Your grandfather? I beg your pardon. Do I know your grandfather?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I don’t think I do, but then Alexandra’s always introducing me to chaps at dinner parties, and I can never keep them straight. What does your grandfather look like?”

  Wallingford wanted to place his elbows on the desk and lean forward, but as Abigail’s bosom happened to be overflowing its bodice exactly at eye level, he forced himself to remain at ease. “Pale gray hair, quite tall, overbearing disposition.”

  “You in fifty years, then, more or less.”

  Wallingford’s mouth twitched. “Breeding will out.”

  “Well, I can’t say for certain. Half the fellows down the pub might be your grandfather, on that description, and the other half are merely too short. Does he dress well?”

  “Exceedingly.”

  “I suppose that rules out a few. But in all seriousness, Wallingford, if I have met him, I can’t recall his face, let alone a single conversation. Why the devil do you ask?”

  Because I suspect my grandfather has played me for a fool.

  “You’re certain?” he asked.

  “Didn’t I just tell you I wasn’t certain? What are you driving at?” Her eyes, behind her mask, looked as if they were narrowing at him.

  Wallingford pressed the pads of his thumbs together with bone-crushing force and said, in a conversational tone, “You haven’t, for example, met him over the course of the winter, and concocted a scheme with him, whereby you gain yourself a ducal coronet, and he brings his licentious disappointment of a grandson to heel at last?”

  The instant the words were out of his mouth, he recognized their absurdity. He reached forward and placed his hand on the portfolio, as if to reassure himself of the reality of what he’d studied throughout the afternoon and evening. Without so much as a bite to eat, his stomach reminded him, with a decidedly undignified growl.

  Abigail, meanwhile, was laughing without restraint. “A ducal coronet? You’re not serious. A scheme with your grandfather?” She collapsed helplessly into a nearby chair. “Are you quite mad, or are you only having a laugh?”

  “Certain facts have come to my attention . . .”

  “And after I rejected you so gracelessly just this morning. Really, Wallingford!”

  “No lady accepts the first proposal.”

  Abigail’s laughter trailed off. She leaned forward in her chair and twisted her hands together. “You are serious. You do mean it.”

  Something about her bewildered tone made his chest give off that infernal buckle again, that crumbling of the brickwork. “I only thought . . .”

  “Was it what I said this morning? I am sorry, Wallingford. I didn’t mean to throw it back at you like that. You took me by surprise, that’s all. I should never have hurt you like that.”

  “Hurt me?”

  She rose with her fairylike grace and flew to his chair, sinking to her knees beside him. “Yes, your tender heart. You’re so abominably ill behaved at times, my darling, I forget just how tender it is. Do forgive me.” She put her hand on his leg, just above the knee. “You know I adore you.”

  Wallingford’s mouth had gone shocked and dry. His every muscle was paralyzed with indecision: whether to embrace her, or to dash away. “Mad girl,” he managed at last.

  “Yes, I am. I’m your mad girl. It’s just that it simply wouldn’t work, marriage. We are so much better off as we are.”

  “As we are? As this?” He made a helpless motion: the library, the castle, the oom-pah of the tuba outside the window.

  “Exactly like this.” She took up his hand from the arm of the chair and kissed it. “Don’t think for an instant I’m not honored, terribly honored. You’re the Duke of Wallingford; you have this extraordinary gift in your power, to raise some fortunate young lady to the highest in the land, and you have offered it to me, you dear and thoughtless man.” She kissed his hand again. “It’s magnificent, and there is some lovely girl in England right now, some sweetly perfect rose of a girl, who longs for that gift, who longs to be your duchess. She’ll be so much better at it than I would.” She laid his hand against her cheek. “But you have my heart, Wallingford. You must believe that.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she laid her finger over his lips.

  “Hush. Don’t say anything. You don’t need to make up any sentimental rubbish. It does tax you so.” She rose in a sinuous motion and picked up the two glasses from the desk. “I missed you tonight. I was looking so much forward to serving you dinner.”

  “Abigail, I . . .”

  “But you must at least share this with me. It’s traditional.”

  He took the glass and frowned at it. “What is it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some concoction or another, a special recipe of Morini’s. Limoncello, I think, and a few other things.” She lifted her own glass. “Come along, my love. Buck up. To . . . oh, let’s see. To love affairs. Long may they prosper.”

  The scent of lemons rose up from the glass to surround his intellect. “To love affairs,” he heard himself say, and he clinked his glass with hers and drained it.

  The liquid burned delicately down his throat to his belly, spreading a lemon-scented warmth into each individual corpuscule of his body. He looked up and found Abigail’s bright eyes gazing at him adoringly from behind her white feathered mask. The entire world seemed to sigh and settle around him. “Oh, that’s very good,” he said.

  “It’s perfectly lovely, isn’t it? Even better than I dreamed.”

  “I want to kiss you, Abigail. May I kiss you?”

  She took the glass from his hand and set it down, together with hers, back on the desk. She turned back and placed her long-fingered hands along the sides of his face, framing him with herself like a work of art. “It’s all I want in the world, Wallingford.”

  Her lips tasted like lemons and enchantment. He wanted to devour them, but instead he kissed her gently, inquiringly, savoring each movement of her mouth, each movement of his. With one arm he reached underneath her and hoisted her into his lap.

  “Oh, it’s divine,” she whispered. Her body melted against his; her arms twined around his neck. He could feel her in every nerve, his pulsing, living Abigail, more beautiful than air. Her feathers tickled his nose; her hair fell against his cheek as he kissed her, and when he rubbed it between his fingers he could not imagine a silk more fine, more perfect and unbreakable than Abigail’s chestnut hair.

  I love you.

  She drew away, and for an instant Wallingford was afraid he’d said the words aloud, and then—because the world around him had mellowed into such a lovely and forgiving place—he was glad he’d said them aloud.

  But if he had said the words, Abigail gave no sign. She only caressed his cheek and said, “Wallingford, let’s go down to the lake. It’s such a beautiful evening.”

  “The lake?” He had been thinking more along the lines of the library sofa, which was certainly wide and well built enough to take on an amorous encounter, though the cushions might resent the abuse.

  “Oh, please?” She lifted herself away from his chest and tugged at his hands. “There are so many people in the courtyard, and I want to be alone with you, perfectly alone. Don’t you?”

  At that instant, the tuba intruded with a particularly emphatic series of notes, attempting a kind of ambitio
us grandfatherly arpeggio. The old windows buzzed in alarm.

  Wallingford rose from the chair in a single effortless heave, carrying Abigail upward with him.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  * * *

  The moon lay high and bright, cradled by the velvet sky. “I believe I could count every star,” Abigail said. “Look at them all, glittering like a diamond mine! Don’t you love the stars in Italy?”

  Wallingford jumped down the terrace wall and held up his arms to her waist. “Every one of them,” he said, and swung her down to the grass beside him. The blood sang in his veins. He bent his neck to kiss her—he couldn’t resist—and when she laughed and flung her arms around him he picked her up and twirled her about in mad circles until they were staggering, laughing, nearly collapsing in the grass.

  At last he took her hand and led her between the rows of grapevines, half running, like two foolish lovers in the blush of youth. The sounds of music and laughter died away behind them, until there was only the soft thump of his feet against the grass, Abigail’s whispers against his skin, the rustle of the warm breeze in the trees nearby.

  When they reached the end of the vineyard, Wallingford turned to her. “Where to? Not the boulders, I hope.”

  “The boathouse,” she said.

  “The boathouse?”

  “I’ve a surprise for you.”

  He didn’t question the existence of her surprise. He didn’t question anything. She might have suggested a balloon ride to China and made it seem like the most natural idea in the world. The rightness of Abigail, the rightness of this night with this woman, surrounded him with certainty.

  He kissed her hands, one by one. “Right-ho, the boathouse.”

  He felt fifteen again, scampering through the moonlit trees, clasping Abigail’s warm hand. Ahead glimmered the lake; they spilled onto the shore at exactly the spot where Wallingford had risen from the water in April to find Abigail waiting and watching. He spared a glance for the enchanted rock where she had curled her supple body into his, had fallen asleep against him in her innocence. Abigail, his Abigail, who thought herself so daring and independent, had tucked her head into his dissolute shoulder, his faithless and unreliable shoulder, and slept like a child.

  She had trusted him.

  The boathouse loomed ahead, a smudge against the trees. Wallingford turned to her, and in the full tide of the lemon-soaked bliss coursing through his body, he found himself putting his hand to her cheek to ask, “Are you certain, darling?”

  She tilted her face upward, and he caught his breath at the way the moon made her white feathers glow, made her eyes glow. “For God’s sake, Wallingford. Do I strike you as the sort of girl who isn’t certain?”

  Wallingford bent and gathered her up in his arms, making her gasp and clutch his waistcoat. He carried her to the boathouse, kicked open the door, and staggered into the darkened room.

  “Oh!” She slid to the floor and pulled his head down for a kiss. He could hardly see her in the faint shaft of moonlight through the open door. “That was magnificent! Close your eyes.”

  “Close my eyes? What difference would that make?”

  She put one finger to each eyelid, and he closed them obediently.

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  He stood there with his eyes closed, grinning like an idiot. He could hear her rustling around the room, could smell the stuffiness of old dust and warm wood. A soft scratch, a few thumps, Abigail’s careful breathing. “What the devil are you doing?” he asked.

  “Open your eyes.”

  He opened them and caught his breath.

  A pallet of wool blankets lay on the wooden floor before him, ringed with cushions. Abigail stood nearby in her mask and her outrageous dress, lit by perhaps half a dozen candles scattered about the floor and the worktable and the stool. The glow turned her skin to living gold.

  “What do you think?” she whispered.

  “You planned this.”

  “Not this night exactly,” she said, “but I hoped that sometime . . . if I could lure you in somehow . . .”

  She stood there so diffidently, so almost shy, her masked face ducking in a most un-Abigailish way. Her right hand plucked at her apron; the other lay behind her back.

  “Oh, Abigail.” He was molten inside, hard as stone on the outside. His fingers shook, he wanted her so.

  “Is it all right?” The candlelight shadowed her cheekbones, making her look almost unearthly in her fairy beauty. “I don’t know much about seduction, practically speaking, and what’s required.”

  The room wasn’t large. In three strides Wallingford stood before her, reached his hand to the back of her head, and untied her mask. He drew it away and saw that her eyes were wet, that her skin was flushed along her cheekbones and the tip of her dainty nose.

  “Abigail, my love,” he said. “I think you know everything about seduction.”

  “Don’t refuse me this time, Wallingford. I’d die if you did.”

  “You’d die?” He kissed her cheeks, her nose. She smelled of the kitchen, of smoke and sweetness and lemon. He untied her apron and let it drop to the floor. He wanted to give her words, loving words, to fill her ears with everything a woman like Abigail deserved to hear on a night like this; but he couldn’t think of any. Instead he kissed her, long and thoroughly, back and forth, until she gasped under his lips and her fingers traveled up his chest to find the buttons of his waistcoat.

  “Let me see you,” she said. “I want to see you.”

  “You’ve already seen me.”

  She laughed. “I want to touch you.” She tore at the buttons, fumbling each one through its hole, kissing him feverishly as she went. The brush of her hands against his chest burned into his center. He touched her neck; he cupped his hands at the back of her head and loosened her hair until it gave way in unimaginably lustrous waves, spilling over his forearms.

  All those long weeks of abstinence crumbled into dust. “Oh, God, Abigail,” he said, and tugged at her sleeves until her shoulders were bare. His fingers scrambled for the buttons at her back, but there were none. “What the devil? Are these hooks?” he demanded, working at the fastenings. Her breasts glowed between them, the tips barely contained by the fabric of her bodice, and he couldn’t think for the lust billowing into his brain at the sight of them.

  “Wait.” She lifted his waistcoat away and tugged his braces from his shoulders.

  “I can’t wait. You don’t know.”

  She laughed and pulled his shirt free. “No, you first. How does this fasten?”

  Wallingford pushed her hands away and unfastened his trousers, letting them fall to the ground in a shameless plop. He kicked them free, tore off his stockings, his drawers. His arousal tented the billowing linen of his shirt.

  “Oh.” She took a step back. Her eyes, round and large, shot upward to his face.

  “Yes.” He took her firmly by the shoulders. His groin felt as if it might burst. Already his ballocks were tingling with eagerness. If he was not inside Abigail Harewood in two minutes, he might disgrace himself. Four months of abstinence, and he could not take the strain of self-restraint anymore, not an instant longer.

  “Turn around.” He must have used his commanding voice, because she turned at once and lifted up that impossibly heavy mane of hair above her shoulders. Her neck curved sinuously in the candlelight, wisping with tiny hairs at the top. He ran his finger down its length to the top of her dress, until he found the fastenings and his hands wrenched desperately at each one, exposing her chemise and stays and petticoats, all the layers of Abigail he must uncover before he could have her.

  At last the dress gave way. He took off her petticoats, grasped the top of her corset and unhooked that, too, until her flesh burst free and she sagged back against his chest, nearly naked, wearing only her delicate chemise.

  “Oh, God, Abigail.” Wallingford slipped his hands upward and closed them around her breasts at last. “Oh, God,” he whispered aga
in, weighing her fullness, heavy and firm in each palm. He brushed his thumbs against the tips, and even through her shift he could feel their hardness, the tiny nubs rasping against his skin.

  “Wallingford!” Her head fell back against his shoulder. “Oh! That feels . . . my God . . . oh . . .”

  He pulled down the neck of her chemise and her nipples popped into view, pink and erect. At the sight of them, right there between his own tanned fingers, Wallingford’s prick gave a warning throb.

  Abigail’s breasts. Abigail’s body in his arms. The hollow of Abigail’s back, cradling his own aroused flesh.

  He spun her around. Her hands worked at the buttons of his shirt; he tried to brush them away, he couldn’t wait another instant for her, but she said, “Please!” and when the shirt was loose enough he yanked it over his head himself and stood before her, fully naked, as he had not stood before any woman in his life since boyhood. He watched her face, her expression of wonder, her eyes dimmed with lust, and thought he might crack down the center.

  “Wallingford, you’re so beautiful, like a statue, only warm and . . . and . . .” She ran her hands along his quivering chest, around the curve of his shoulders, down his back.

  “Touch me.” His voice was inhuman, like a growl. He was a beast, a craven beast, while her fairy fingers smoothed his skin and curved around the sinews of his body. “Touch me, Abigail. Do you see how much I want you?”

  “Yes.” Her hands slipped around his buttocks and found his cock. She touched it lightly, stroked it, and he let out a cry. She looked up. “Am I hurting you?”

  “God, no.” He closed his eyes and forced the words between his teeth. He could hear his pulse in his ears, counted off each beat to steady himself while Abigail’s hands encompassed him, closed around him, ran up and down his length and then touched his tightened balls as if with a feather.

  At that, he reached down and snatched her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but already he was lifting her up and laying her down on the blankets, raising her chemise over her stockings and her silk garters, over her curving thighs. She gasped and put her hand over the apex, but not before he had caught a glimpse of chestnut hair, short and crisp and curling, a delicate triangle pointing suggestively between her snugly closed legs.