“Yes, of course. Why would you think otherwise?” What did any of this have to do with her qualifications?
“Is that why you want to cut him out of any find you might make when you know he is as desperate for recognition as you?”
“He has an opportunity in Perth.”
“Yet, you know I can give him a better one in Fife.”
He was right, of course. Though Christine had not seen the other fossils, if they were anything like the tooth, they, too, would be a magnificent discovery. But this was her discovery.
Erik leaned forward, placing his face in the pale amber light. “Then do not for one moment think you and I are not alike in the pursuit of our goals, Christine. We are both selfish.”
“What does that mean?”
“We are both willing to sell our souls for a price. Only I did it a long time ago and have become more adept at the game. You are just beginning your journey. Or are you?”
“You’re…mad!”
He laughed. “Aye, that is what they say. But that is not why you left England ten years ago. Is it, now?”
Her heart racing, Christine recognized too late the trap he had set for her.
“I did not run away from you. I walked. Surely, ye do not still hold that against me?” she mimicked his slight Scottish brogue.
“Ah,” he said quietly, amusement in his eyes. “But that does not explain why ye came back just one more time, now does it?”
“I should think what happened between us that night would explain it with clarity.”
“Just one last fook for old time’s sake? Was that it?”
Christine had forgotten just how far away from him she had run to forget him. Leave it to him to bring out the worst in her. She had never struck a person in her life, but she was suddenly balling her fist, prepared to give him a facer he’d never forget. He caught her wrist in midair. She would have struck him with her knees if she could have moved against the weight of her skirts. Her inability to defend herself only amplified her feeling of vulnerability and defeat and made her more furious. Until she had finally spent herself and he was no longer restraining her as much as he was using his weight to hold her in her seat.
Aware of a sudden burn behind her eyes and his breath against her temple, she lifted her chin.
She expected to see only anger equal to hers in his eyes, but in his dark expression, she saw something else entirely, something that reflected back into her own eyes, primitive and all-consuming. Recognizing that they were both capable of such violence frightened her.
“It is well and good that we finally clear the air between us, Christine,” he breathed against her mouth.
Her lips parted, but whether in protest or invitation, she knew not. He seized upon her hesitation and covered her mouth with his. A hot openmouthed kiss that pinned her to the bench. Like the clever black-hearted devil he was, he swooped between the cracks of her defenses. She made a token effort to deny him. But he dragged her across his lap, bringing her down to the bench beneath his weight.
His tongue swept deeply into her mouth and met hers, a tempestuous battle that shattered all boundaries between them and made her earlier resistance seem childish. As if an earthquake swept through her psyche, the past crumbled, and she was without pride, returning the force of his passion and reveling in sweet desire. He tasted like rich coffee and brandy and hot gratifying sex in an elemental way that made her feel alive.
He groaned, his hand burrowing through her hair, dislodging pins. Their mouths angled, devouring, as if both of them had suffered in hunger for so long. His palm traced her waist and stroked upward to her breast. A tremor went through her and she gave a small gasp of surrender.
Her fingers curled against his chest and pushed. “Nay, Erik,” she protested weakly, “I cannot.”
Closing his fist in her hair, he drew back, their mouths so close they shared the same air. Their eyes clashed and held, crackling hot, but not as much from lust or the physical link they still shared as from the great purge of emotion.
He was like the vortex of a storm swirling around her, sucking and pulling at all of her senses. If she did not anchor herself now…
It was as if the past had snagged her, and the realization that his assessment of her character rang with truth. It was as if, from the moment she put on the ring and opened the door to see him in the corridor, she had gone back ten years to the point where she had been.
The very moment when, amidst the laughter of a thousand people, and from across a candlelit ballroom that glittered with gold-draped walls, she’d first glimpsed him standing alone near the French doors. He’d worn his youth and solitude like a mantle of iron, as if daring a person to tear it off him.
That summer she had tried.
She’d lost her heart to the daring and defiant duke. She had been young and impulsive and so full of her sense of self-importance that she’d believed in fairytales. She would not allow him to steal her dream again. “I was barely eighteen, Erik,” she whispered. “You were about to announce a betrothal to my cousin—”
“You’ve not been barely eighteen since you crawled into my bed the first time.” His eyes burned into hers. “You not only left England, ye left this side of the world. I did not even know where you’d gone for a year.”
She shoved against his chest. “You pined so much for me that you’ve been married? Twice? You correspond with my father but not me? You come here now to hire Mr. Darlington…. You make it too easy to forget we were even friends.” Before they’d been lovers.
That she had taught him the names of constellations even as he had shown her how beautiful the stars could truly be.
“You make it easy to forget everything,” she whispered.
He slid his knuckles beneath her chin and tilted her face into the misty light. “You make it too easy to remember. I am glad to see there is more than ice water still running through your veins.” His tone was a study in composure, where only moments ago he had kissed her with hot, openmouthed abandon.
She splayed her fingers against his chest and felt the beat of his heart on her palms. “Loose me. Please, Erik.”
To his credit, he did. She clamored from the bench back to the other side and straightened her clothing. Her lips felt swollen, pillaged. She felt self-betrayal, having succumbed to him like some demirep willing to sell her soul for a tuppence of pleasure. Or for a chance at his fossils. Shaken to her core, she would not let herself look at him until she had regained some semblance of composure, relieved to find the only damage seemed to be to her chignon, which draped loosely at her nape.
He reached over to the opposite window and raised the shade to look outside. She welcomed the darkness inside the carriage as she removed her spectacles and attempted to clean them. Somewhere across London, a distant flash of lightning marked the storm’s fury, one that equaled the tempestuous, if silent, battle now being waged inside this coach.
She set her glasses back on her nose then raised her chin. Erik was watching her with an intensity that burned with familiar unwelcome warmth.
“I will give you your beast of Sedgwick, Christine,” he said at last. “But it will be as my wife that you will come to Scotland and live in my home and around my sister and daughter. If you want this beast so much, you will wed me to have it. Those are my terms.”
“Marriage.” His words floored her. “Your terms? Just like that?”
As if she were one of his business acquisitions. Just that fast, he had homed in on her one weakness, sweeping down with talons outstretched like the hawk he was. Her eyes narrowed.
This was not a spontaneous decision. Erik Boughton did not act impulsively. He had not become known and feared in London society because he was reckless and soft. The devil duke of Sedgwick played chess like no man she had ever met. And he always played to win.
“Papa never suggested Darlington. He suggested me,” she said calmly as much to herself as she spoke the words to him. “You’ve manipulated me. You must
have known all along if you came to me with that fossil that I could not turn down the prospect of finding that beast. But you wanted more,” she whispered in astonishment. “So you had to make sure I came to you. Make sure I understood what I had in my hands enough to…to…Is this some sort of punishment on your part to even the score between us?”
“No, Christine.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his quiet tone demanding her attention. Nothing else would have forced her to look at him. “But I will admit that the idea of marriage to you began to weigh heavily after your father and I began to correspond last year. You were still unmarried. I am in need of a wife. But this is not something I take lightly. I was not sure until tonight that we would suit.”
“Because we are both selfish?”
“Because we each can offer the other something in the bargain.”
“You could not just ask me to wed you like a normal person?”
“You would have thrown me out of your office on my ear.”
A week ago, she had wanted this discovery more than she wanted anything else in the world enough to sell her soul. Now he was asking her to do that very thing. She suddenly felt sick to her stomach as her thoughts went to the ring. “This entire evening is…it is not real.”
“Real?” He leaned to take her chin and force her to look at him. “What happened between us tonight cannot be bought on the streets of Whitechapel. It cannot be faked. Would marriage to me be so abhorrent?”
“If I don’t do as you say, then you will give the job to Mr. Darlington?”
“No, Christine. I meant it when I told you I needed other answers that have nothing to do with finding your beast. Until I find out what happened to Elizabeth, I am not ready to share that discovery with anyone else but you. Whatever is in those hills will remain there. At least during my lifetime.”
“You would allow the greatest find of this century to be lost?”
She looked away from him in confusion. If he had threatened to give the find to Darlington, she would have been able to maintain her righteous anger, and her decision would have been simple. This she did not understand.
He sat back in his seat. A thump on the top of the carriage gave her a start. The coach began to slow, drawing Christine’s gaze back to the window.
The rain had stopped, but the gaslights cast a wet sheen over the walks and illuminated the cozy elm-lined street now strewn with wet leaves and twigs. She saw the protective high brick wall that enclosed Sommershorn Abbey. She was home.
“You can tell your driver to let me out here.”
She thought Erik would argue. He did not. He tapped the port behind him and gave instructions to his driver. The coach rolled to a shuddering stop. She reached over to open the door herself, but Erik’s hand was on the latch an instant before hers. “My business in London will be concluded the end of the week.”
He was telling her she had until then to answer him.
“I will need to get your fossils back to you before then.”
“Christine…”
Impatient to be away from him, she flung open the door and descended without waiting for the driver to set out the step.
But even as she knew she must not allow the devil duke inside her head, he was already imbedded there like a burr by the time she reached her house and slammed the door. Aware that her own panic was driving her thoughts, she leaned with her back against the door and she shut her eyes—as if the action would block the taste of him from her lips.
Raising the brandy tumbler to his lips, Erik stared up at the stars and drained the glass. Outside his bedroom window, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves mixed with an occasional hansom that was ferrying late-night party-goers to their destinations on wet streets. The witching hour, he thought, leaning a bare shoulder against the sash. Bemused by the path his thoughts had taken, he looked out on a world that rarely had been kind to him. Wearing only a pair of silk drawers tied loosely at his hips, he was conscious of the tension that arced through him, that had been there since he left Christine at Sommershorn Abbey.
He didn’t know what had come over him tonight. Hell, he had taken her into his arms and kissed her as if ten years did not stand between them. As if she had not already fooked up his life once before.
Yet, as he stood there bathed in moonlight, he felt as if he were awakening from a long, dreamless hibernation. He might mentally consign his behavior to the night, but he knew one thing for sure that he had not known until she had opened her mouth and kissed him down to the soles of his feet. He did not regret his decision to make this trip to London.
With the recent bones found on his property, Erik had needed someone who could give him answers. Over the last pair of months, while Scotland was coming out from beneath its winter freeze, Erik had been learning bits and pieces about Christine’s life. With unapproachable stamped across her forehead in bold block letters, her current vulnerability was an oddly compelling contrast to the confident woman he’d once known.
She had never married. Never veered from academia and all things archaeology related, including the infant offshoot of paleontology that specialized in dinosauria fossils. He’d learned about the subject from Christine’s own unpublished manuscripts her father had sent him during many of their discussions last winter about the find on his land. From what Erik had seen of her work and what Darlington had told him, she knew her discipline. Yet despite her extensive knowledge, or perhaps because of it, she’d been shut out of the gentlemen’s network and finally relegated to teaching young girls with no marital prospects skills to survive a harsh world.
When Erik had sought an invitation to the museum gala, in the beginning, he’d told himself it was for Becca. But seeing Christine on the steps of the museum, then at Sommershorn Abbey, and finally again tonight, had brought back more than memories lost in the ugly chaos of his life. Christine still stirred him. And while he could claim beautiful women in his life since he had known her, and indeed had wed two, no one had ever made him feel needful. He had made it a point in his life never to need anything or anyone.
“Erik?”
His sister’s voice in the darkness behind him startled him as he turned. Erik padded to his massive four-poster bed and donned his robe. Belting it at the waist, he turned to the nightstand and lit the lamp.
Becca stood in the doorway, wraithlike in her white robe. He thought she might be asleep.
This wouldn’t be the first time Rebecca had been found sleepwalking in the corridors. An “episode” was what the physician had called it years ago, that began shortly after Elizabeth’s disappearance. And because of the fear she might harm herself or someone else, the doctor had suggested she would be better off locked away in an asylum under the care of people who could better deal with this manner of illness. Erik had fired the physician. But he always kept a maid near his sister at nights.
He turned up the lamp. “What is it, Elf? Another nightmare?”
“I’m not asleep if that is what you are thinking.”
Becca’s maid suddenly appeared in her white nightcap and robe. “I’m sorry, your grace,” she said breathlessly, as if she had been running. She dipped. “I didna hear the lass get out of her bed.”
He shifted his attention from Becca to the maid. “Go back to bed. I’ll see she gets to her room.”
Clutching the edge of her robe, the maid dipped again. “Yes, your grace.”
After the woman left, he allotted Becca his full attention. “My bedroom isn’t the place to talk in the middle of the night.” He swept out his arm directing her toward the adjoining sitting room where he kept an office and conducted his personal affairs. Becca walked past him, and he followed her.
“I am a terrible bother,” she said as he lit the lamp on his desk. “You worry about me. I wish you would not.”
“Becca…” He replaced the dome of frosted glass on the lamp. “Asking me not to worry is like asking me not to care.”
Her attention moved to the desk. She
picked up the unfinished drawings and sketches he’d left there earlier before his distractions had driven him to the brandy.
This was a part of his life most people knew nothing about, one of the pleasures he’d lost over the years and had only recently attempted to take up again. He’d been educated at Cambridge, but many did not realize he’d also spent four years at Edinburgh University and St. Andrews studying civil engineering and architecture. The levy project on his property in Fife was his development, as was a long-ago renovation he’d done to Sedgwick Castle, and he was now attempting to design the new library at St. Andrews. But like most of the activities he’d started these past seven years, he had yet to finish.
“I believe I like this one best.” Becca held up the drawing that had been on top. “It looks less like a medieval cathedral and more like a stone gallery from one of Sir Christopher Wren’s visions, except with your personal touch. You are the best architect in all of Britain.”
Placing his hand beneath Becca’s chin, he lifted her face to his. “As much as I appreciate your faith in my abilities, I know you did not come here to talk about my work.”
Tears filled her eyes. She suddenly stepped into Erik’s arms and pressed her cheek against his heart. “What is it, Becca?” he quietly asked.
“I did have a nightmare,” she said against his robe. “It was terrible. I don’t want to lose you, Erik.”
“Lose me?” His arms held her to him. “What is this about?”
She turned her face away and shook her head.
“Becca…”
“I don’t want you to die.”
His hands tightened on her shoulders as he looked into her face. “Someone told you I was going to die?”
She lowered her gaze to her slippered toe, making circles in the Turkey carpet. “Is it true what they say? You are cursed and no woman—?”
“Who has been filling your mind with nonsense?” His sister scrubbed her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “Look at me, Becca.”
Her troubled eyes met his. “If you must know…Momma came by today while you were out.”
Beauty and the Duke Page 7