Thief of Broken Hearts (The Sons of Eliza Bryant Book 1)

by Louisa Cornell

  The rigid, uncompromising duke was gone. In his place stood the man who’d dared everything to take care of his mother and brothers. The man who’d gone where passion led him, and she wanted passion to lead him now.

  “Stop talking and kiss me, you horse’s arse.” Rhiannon fisted the lapels of his banyan and dragged him against her. Fortunately, His Grace did not have to be told twice.

  He seized her beneath her elbows and crushed her in an embrace so powerful it took her breath away. His lips took hers in a fiery kiss, his groan so deep and dark it forced her to release his robe and curl her arms around his neck for dear life. His hands moved from her elbows around her back and wrapped themselves in her hair.

  He caught her top lip between his teeth, tugged gently and then suckled it. Then his lips burned a path of kisses and nips across her chin and down her throat to the vee bared by her robe. With one muscled arm around her, he lifted her feet from the floor and, with the other hand, loosen the tie of her robe.

  Rhiannon ran her tongue around his ear and bit the lobe sharply. He flinched, groaned, and held her tighter. She reveled in the silk of his hair, its length a reminder of the wild boy she’d fallen in love with at first sight. Love? Oh no, this had nothing to do with love. He’d awakened a sleeping passion in her under the trees by the lake. She was no simpering lady. She loved the wicked sensations, the completely improper hunger his body unleashed in hers, and she wanted more. She held no hope he’d suddenly become the husband she’d dreamed of, but for now, she’d take the husband he’d decided to be. Whoever he was.

  Liar! Foolish, foolish, girl!

  Her eyes met his, and then they both lowered their gaze. He’d lifted her breast from her gapped robe and held it reverently. He pressed a kiss to the curved mound, whispering his lips across the edge of her tightly furled nipple.

  “Tell me no, Rhiannon,” he spoke against her sensitized skin. “Send me away. It will break my heart, but I will go.”

  She traced a path along his neck, down his chest and inside the confines of his banyan until her fingertip found the hardened length jutting against the silk folds of that garment. She bent her head to kiss the back of his neck and then touched her mouth to his ear. “It will break something, Your Grace, but I daresay it is not your heart.”

  He raised his head and curled his fingers around her breast. “You are a wicked, cruel woman, Duchess,” he rasped, then kissed her until she lost the ability to draw breath, to think, or to admit what a truly bad decision she was about to make. She’d lived the last seventeen years for Pendeen. Tonight, she’d live for herself, and tomorrow she’d do what she did best—pick up the pieces and carry on without him.

  “Take a wicked duchess to bed, Your Grace?” She tugged the tie of his banyan free.

  He stared at her, ferocious possession simmering beneath every dignified line of restraint. “You scare the devil out of me, Rhiannon de Waryn, and I’ll take you to bed until you beg me to stop.”

  Backing to the bed, they wrestled her out of her clothes. Endymion dropped them onto the counterpane, wrapped his hands around her waist, and tossed her onto the bed. She lay there, propped on her elbows, and watched him throw aside the quilted banyan. This was no idle London lord. Broad, strong shoulders tapered down into the sinewed arms that had held her so fiercely she scarcely wanted to leave. His chest, sculpted flesh to make a Roman statue weep, sported a light dusting of dark hair leading down to a flat stomach, thick horseman’s thighs and…she didn’t remember him being built quite so solidly…there.

  “My Cornwall beauty, wife,” he murmured.

  She scooted back across the bed. A slow smile curved his lips. He wrapped his fingers around one ankle and held her there as he propped a knee on the bed and crawled to her. Once his face drew even with hers, he released her ankle and used undulating brushes of his chest and thighs to keep her in place. Her body sang with excitement—spinning wheels of fire and ice in her veins, up and down her flesh. She had no strength for escape.

  Endymion kissed her, a chaste press of his lips to her forehead, another to the tip of her nose, another to her chin. He worked his way down her body with more frustrating, brief kisses to her chest, the tips of her breasts, her navel, and to the tangle of curls where her thighs met. He covered her knees with his long fingers, urged them apart, and pressed a far more heated kiss to a place she’d never dreamed of being kissed.

  “What are you—” The rest was lost in a series of incoherent cries over which Rhiannon had no control. He tortured her damp, swollen flesh with his tongue—flicking, swirling, licking, pressing, and holding his tongue against the seat of her pleasure. She tried to move her legs, closer or farther apart, it did not matter. She needed to move. And when she finally did, it was to lift herself into his attentions, pulsing until the rhythm began to give her what she sought. He was merciless, chuckling at her moans and pleading. Growling against her screaming flesh until her body reached for completion, found it, and dragged her into the undertow he’d set loose.

  She called his name, and before her soul returned to her body, he was over her, his mouth at her breast as he slid himself inside her in one slow, stretching, filling slide. She clutched the back of his head, holding him to her as he suckled and matched his thrusts to her desperate rhythm. The sense of fullness was strange at first. It had been seventeen years and only the one time. This was nothing like before, and she found herself wanting more, wanting it never to end.

  Endymion rose on his arms. His rhythm quickened. He lowered his head to kiss her, and suddenly Rhiannon had to strive with him, against him. The spiral of pleasure began to whirl around her once more. The sounds of their flesh meeting, his dark groans, her panting cries—all of it began to spin out of control. His gaze locked with hers. She gripped his forearms for fear she’d fly away into the green forest of his eyes.

  “Rhiannon,” he breathed. “Rhiannon.” Over and over, he gasped her name, until he had no breath left to speak. His eyes closed, his expression one of feral concentration.

  Suddenly her vision went dark and then exploded with colors and light. Her body locked. He threw his head back, an incomprehensible groan exploding from his lips. His arms shook slightly, but still held him above her. She pulled him down, needing the heat he radiated, needing the sense of his flesh against hers to assure her this wasn’t all a dream. She wrapped her arms around him. Kissed the damp hair away from his face.

  He pressed an awkward kiss to her cheek and nuzzled his face into the cloud of her hair spread across the bedclothes. He sighed and then chuckled a moment.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “My arse is freezing, but I don’t want to move.”

  “We can wait a few moments to find our way under the covers.” She stroked his back and began to wonder how she had allowed this to happen.

  “I don’t want to move, ever.”

  “That may prove problematic. I have things to see to in the morning.” Rhiannon winced at the casual tone she’d adopted. It was the most incredible moment of her life, but she did not want him to know it. She could not give him that power. She’d already given in to him. A mere two weeks, and she’d fallen into his bed.

  He raised himself up once more. “Are you angry with me, Rhee? Did I hurt you?” He truly was concerned, which made it all the worse.

  “Of course, you didn’t, you stupid man. It was wonderful. I never knew— Stop smiling at me.”

  “It isn’t every day a man beds his wife for the first time he remembers and she tells him he is wonderful.” He kissed her nose. She batted him away.

  “Oh, for goodness sake.” She scrambled from beneath him and worked her way under the sheets and counterpane at the head of the bed. He propped himself up on one elbow and fixed her with an inquiring stare. She flipped the covers back from the spot on the bed beside her.

  “Are you certain, Rhee? You seem a bit upset for a woman who has been wonderfully pleasured. Lord Voil isn’t the only one who values his tarr
ywags.”

  She rolled her eyes. She wanted to be furious with him. She needed to be. But all she craved was the warmth and weight of his body next to hers as she drifted to sleep. Even if he’d return to London once August ended. She’d survived it as a girl. She expected she’d survive it again. She had no choice.

  “You do have a rather fine arse, Your Grace. I’d hate to see it damaged by frostbite.”

  He made a great show of leaving the bed, walking to the spot she’d indicated, and climbing back in again. He stretched out beside her and pulled her close as he settled the sheets and counterpane over them.

  “I am curious about one thing, Dymi.”

  “Ask me anything, Rhee.” He kissed her hair, which he took great care to spread across his chest.

  “With a wife tucked away in Cornwall since you were fifteen, where precisely did you learn to perform so wonderfully in bed?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Why could I not have married a placid wife of average wit with a complete lack of curiosity?

  Endymion wistfully considered that fleeting thought whilst he tried to compose an answer for the far too quick-witted woman he’d married. An answer that would not undo the entirety of his inept wooing. At least, he hoped his wooing had persuaded her to take him into her bed.

  He could always tell her the truth. The late duke would, no doubt, turn over in his grave.

  “Women do not need the truth. They need to hear whatever gives them comfort. It is all they want or understand.”

  She turned on her side and stared at him expectantly. They occupied her bedchamber. Where did she keep her Manton? He braced himself.

  “My grandfather—ompff! What the devil?” His head had gone fuzzy. His wife had swatted him with one of the half dozen large pillows at the head of the bed.

  “If you say your grandfather dragged you to a London brothel the way he did his two sons, I shall kick you from this bed and march you off the estate at gunpoint.” She pushed away from him, sat up and swept the considerable length and weight of her hair behind her.

  “My father and his brother are dead. How do you know—”

  “Your mother. After your father’s brother died, your mother refused to allow the duke near you. She did not want him to raise you the way he did his own sons. She…told me not long before she died.” She looked away.

  He had so many questions; not that her answers would change anything. His family was gone and Rhiannon was all he had left. His chest squeezed tight and a sort of achy pang, like the hurt of a sudden cold wind, lodged beneath his ribs. The truth. Right.

  “It wasn’t a brothel.” Endymion lay on his back and stared at the tapestry-work canopy over her head. He combed his fingers through her tresses. “He set up a mistress for me in a house on Bruton Street when I was eighteen. After I came back from Oxford, I spent all of my time with my books or with Voil. The duke thought he and I were…”

  His delicate bride, with the sheet and counterpane drawn across her naked breasts, snorted and rolled her eyes. “Even were he so disposed, Lord Voil would not put up with you as his paramour for five minutes.”

  “Undoubtedly. What of you, Rhee? Will you put up with me?”

  “If I had taken a lover all these years? Would you put up with me?”

  Rage roared through him. Primitive and so powerful, he clenched his fists to keep it inside where it belonged. She raised her chin, as bold and defiant as Boudica herself and more alluring than any woman he’d ever known.

  “I’d be furious to the point of madness. Unfair of me, I know. But as you said, I am a bit of an arse.”

  “No, Your Grace, I said you were a complete horse’s arse.”

  “Of course,” he replied and forced his hands open. “So, you did.”

  She worried the side of her bottom lip, a gesture he remembered from childhood schemes and old hurts.

  “I put her aside when my grandfather died,” he confessed.

  “You had the same mistress for seven years?”

  “I was eighteen years old and an idiot, Rhee. She was my mistress the first year. After that, I did not share a bed with her. I only visited her when I needed to escape and find the peace and quiet of a household that would leave me alone.”

  “Escape?”

  “The duke. Great Uncle Richard. Expectations.” Endymion shook his head. “The silence in the house when I disappointed them or asked about the past.” She didn’t need to hear this. Those years were over and their treatment of him had only made him stronger.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why didn’t you share her bed? Why did you put her aside when the duke died?”

  “I was married. I realized that honor in my dealings with everyone else was nothing if I did not honor my vows to you. When Lord Richard found out, he declared it a result of my mother’s Methodist inclinations.” A sudden heat lashed across his cheeks. He was blushing. In all his thirty-two years, he never, ever remembered blushing.

  “Lord Richard is a disgusting, indolent arse,” she declared as she slid next to him and lay her head on his shoulder. Dear God, at the gentle warmth that suffused him.

  “Obviously a family trait.” He put his arm around her. “Am I forgiven?”

  “Hmmm,” she murmured, tapping her chin with her finger.

  “What does that mean?

  “I’m trying to decide. I should be furious and ban you from my bed forever.”

  Endymion lay perfectly still.

  “But as this woman must have been an excellent teacher and saved me from another night like our wedding night…” She ran her finger around his nipple and then across it.

  “Please don’t say another word about our wedding night. I am not certain my manhood can survive it.”

  “Or your stomach, for that matter,” she said with a sly grin.

  He rolled her beneath him and laced the fingers of her hands with his. “Shall I show you what else I learned, Your Grace?” He fused his mouth to hers in a deep, invasive kiss that left them both shaking.

  A shadow rippled across her features for a moment. Then she smiled. The sort of smile Helen must have gifted Paris with, the sort of smile to cause a man to start a war rather than give up a woman he cannot live without.

  “I should like that very much, Your Grace. Very much, indeed.”

  ***

  Endymion hated reading in a moving coach. He especially hated reading estate ledgers in a moving coach when there were so many more inventive ways to spend time traveling slowly along a mud-sodden road toward God only knew where.

  “Are you paying attention, Dymi?” his exasperated wife inquired. His wife he’d much rather have straddling his lap with the skirts of her blue kerseymere gown hiked up around her hips.

  “You have been keeping two sets of accounts for the last seven years and only recording part of the estate’s income because you suspect either my uncle or the estate manager he hired of embezzling said profits from the estate.”

  He wanted to believe her. He wanted to take her back to Pendeen and spend the rest of the evening in her bed. Babcock would get to the bottom of the discrepancies in the accounts. Rhiannon had admitted to underreporting the accounts, but where was the money? Two parts of his body—his brain and his cock—warred, a problem he’d never encountered before, and it irritated him.

  She snatched the ledger from his lap and slammed it closed before dropping it into a leather portmanteau. “I don’t suspect, I know. Apparently, that isn’t good enough for you.”

  “My man of business will—”

  “Ah, yes, Babcock, whom you trust, will go over my ledgers and solve all of my problems. Nothing for me to worry my silly female head over.” She folded her arms across her chest and stared out the coach window into the late afternoon gloom.

  “Would you like to tell me what this is truly about, Rhee? You’ve been nervous and petulant since you kicked me out of your bed and demanded I meet you in front of the house in a few h
ours dressed for travel. Where are we going? And more important, why?” He left unasked the question he most wanted answered.

  Where was the woman he’d made love to most of the night? Where was the woman who’d fallen asleep in his arms and given him his first night’s rest in as long as he could remember? He’d awoken to find her standing in the middle of her bedchamber, wrapped in that tatty, flannel robe, a scrap of parchment in her hand. She’d given him his orders and disappeared into her sitting room to summon her maid.

  “Here,” she said without turning away from the window, that same piece of paper in her outstretched hand. “I received this message last night. We are on our way to Zennor.”

  “Zennor?” His entire body went cold. Zennor, the tiny village he, his mother, and brothers had fled to after his father died, and the duke had them thrown from the house. His mother had gone by the name of Lizzie Bryant, and he and his brothers had used their ordinary middle names rather than the romantic names their father had given them.

  Endymion understood better now his mother’s reasons for trying to keep them hidden. She’d chosen an obscure village close enough, the duke might never suspect. Hiding in plain sight. He remembered now, the rumors had them living in Manchester, with her working as housekeeper rather than a tavern maid in an ancient, rundown inn. He honed his attention onto the message his wife had received.

  The farmer, Wilson, is responsible for the accident at the mines.

  He is to meet his master at The Mermaid’s Tale.

  Tomorrow evening as the sun sets.

  I’ll be watching.

  The Mermaid’s Tale, where his mother had worked. Where she had died, or so he’d been told.

  “She was killed by a customer at the damned tavern she dragged you and your brothers to after your father died. What sort of end did she expect, subjecting all of you to such a disreputable, dangerous place?”

  Lord Richard de Waryn was not known for his sympathetic nature. He’d been hard on Endymion to break him of his lowborn ways. He’d warmed to him as the years went by and these days, like many older gentlemen, he tended to keep to himself.