Secrets of Surrender

by Madeline Hunter

  Impossible to explain. Unlikely to change. She should accept how it was. She should scold her heart so it did not keep stretching toward something unknown in that aching, restless way. She should—

  “The coats do not fit well when I am here, Rose. For all the tailor’s skill, they become too tight when I come home.”

  His quiet voice flowed to her through the tense silence.

  “I expect that is uncomfortable.”

  “Damnably so.”

  “Then again, perhaps they are always too tight, and you only notice when you come home.”

  “I think that you may be correct about that.”

  She sat up again. His attention had turned to the low fire, and his own thoughts. He stood with one forearm resting on the mantel while he gazed at the flames. Their light illuminated him beautifully.

  The sight mesmerized her. The whole chamber seemed to fill with the glow from the hearth. Its warmth entered her.

  “Actually, I have also noticed that my garments seem tight since I came here, Kyle. Perhaps it is the air. Or the pies.”

  He smiled. “Then you should remove them.”

  “I have no practice in taking off these garments. I was trussed in this corset the day I was born.”

  He looked at her. Her heart skipped and began a rapid patter. Even the day he proposed he had not allowed her to see his desire so boldly.

  He strode toward her. “I’ll be taking that as an invitation, Rose.”

  He grabbed her in an embrace so strong, so supportive, that her knees left the mattress. He kissed her possessively, hard, asking for nothing and everything. He put no restraints on his desire this time. He pulled her into its whirlwind of untamed power.

  The kisses claimed, commanded, and aroused her fast. She could not have stood against the way he took control of her even if she wanted to. She had asked for this, and she allowed her own savage reactions to have free rein. They overwhelmed her initial fear and surprise.

  Hot kisses. Hard and deep and biting and devouring. Arms of steel held her up to the fury scorching her neck and mouth. Shock upon wonderful shock slashed through her body like arrows of fire. He called forth her primitive self until she moaned from the glorious assault and lost all restraint.

  He set her down so she knelt again, on the edge of the bed. He caressed up her thighs beneath her nightdress. His hand smoothed over her hips and her bottom. A sly, erotic touch traced down her cleft. A stunning quiver followed that path to where his fingers teased at her.

  She moved one knee to encourage him to continue that delicious torture. He did, but broke the long kiss. With his other hand he swept her nightdress up to her shoulders and over her head. It fell down her arms, onto the floor at his feet.

  He looked down on her nakedness with an expression made severe by desire. His caress glossed over her breasts while his other hand flicked and teased below. The dual sensations left her trembling, weakened by pleasure and wobbling on her stance. She leaned into him for support until her face smoothed against his chest.

  A hand on her nape pressed her closer until her cheek rested on taut skin. “I can remove the nightdress, Rose, but the rest of the garments you will have to shed yourself.”

  She understood. His encouragement emboldened her. She placed her palms on his chest, feeling and seeing at the same time. Her mere touch raised his desire even more and made a new tightness flex through him.

  She caressed more purposefully. She watched her hands smooth over his chest, sliding down and over the hard ridges of his muscles and ribs. He looked at her just as she did him, his own caresses and touches on her body mimicking her strokes on his. Their hot breaths met and merged in increasingly frantic kisses while the sensations pushed them both further into madness.

  His hand left her thighs and began unbuttoning his breeches. A petulant moan snuck out of her before she could stop it. She pushed his hands away and worked on the buttons herself. She swooned from the feel of his touch stroking her again.

  She fumbled with his garment while he touched her more deliberately. His head bent to her neck and her ear. His finger probed carefully. “Do you want it like that, Rose?”

  She could not respond. She could not speak. It was all she could do to stay upright. She grabbed at his garments clumsily, blindly, pushing them down his hips while the light touches on her breast and between her thighs left her whimpering.

  “Or like this?” His hand slipped around her hip to touch her from the front. One long, slow, incredible stroke caused a quake of pleasure to shake through her.

  She knew that he could see how helpless he made her. She clung to his shoulders, hanging on him for support.

  He released one of her hands, kissed it, then moved it lower on his body. A small slice of rationality returned, enough for her to comprehend what he was doing, what he wanted. Too lost to care, too far gone to know embarrassment, she let him close her fingers around his phallus.

  Another devilish stroke with his other hand made it easier for her. Pleasure streaked up through her body in a rippling tide, and in response she caressed him as he did her.

  Whatever restraint he still maintained cracked then. He kissed her with new savagery. She felt the tension all through him, in his stance and his kiss and even in the way he touched her. Deliberate now. Determined to command her total surrender.

  Pride lost its meaning. She swayed on her knees, arching into his dominating kisses, moaning from the want.

  He moved her, but not the way she expected. He turned her so her back faced him and his hands caressed her breasts freely. She leaned into him, arching her back. Her nipples rose high, tight and hard, begging for more, for anything, for everything.

  He moved her again, bending her body until she knelt low on the edge of the bed with her legs bent beneath her body. A stunning erotic shiver trembled low in her loins.

  He lifted her hips. She waited, breathless, so excited that she could not bear it. Her body throbbed, waiting, expecting. She pictured what he saw, her bottom rising to him and that hidden flesh exposed. The scandalous image only excited her more.

  He did not take her at once. He let her wait, hovering on that point of madness. He caressed her bottom, firmly kneading the swells of her flesh, looking at her, she was sure. He watched her submissive surrender and her desperation.

  He touched her again and she cried out. It was different this time. She was exposed and open and she knew that he watched, knew that he saw her naked body. She dipped her back lower and raised her bottom more.

  She was begging soon. Begging and moaning and smothering her cries in the bedclothes. Finally he entered her in a long, deliberate, slow thrust. Beneath her moan of relief she thought that she heard his as well.

  She lost herself after that. She experienced only the torturous pleasure of need and the violent crescendo of fulfillment.

  “Did you come here to see Cottington before he dies?” Rose rested in Kyle’s arms beneath the bedclothes. It had been some while since he lifted her limp body and moved her here, situating her so that she lay tight against him while he sat with his body resting on the headboard. The candle still cast a glow over their mutual contentment.

  “That was one reason. I will try tomorrow.”

  “Try? Does he not receive you now?”

  “He does not know that I have called. His secretary and physician do not tell him about visitors, unless they choose to. That is how it is now with him.”

  She thought that it was probably how it had always been. An earl usually had people who made sure he was not disturbed unless he wanted to be. Now that Cottington was ill, someone else was deciding when he wanted to be, not him. That was all that had changed.

  “If he cannot see you now, perhaps in the spring, when you had planned to come, he can.”

  “I do not think that he will be alive in the spring.”

  She realized that he had heard the earl was dying. That was why he had come north right now.

  “It will be
very sad if you cannot say good-bye, after all he has done for you. Surely his secretary knows that.”

  “To his secretary I am the boy from Teeslow.” His mouth pressed her hair in a distracted kiss. “It is not only saying good-bye. I need to see if he still has his mind about him. I would like to ask one final favor, for the miners.”

  “Is it about reopening that tunnel?”

  “Yes. Some think to stop it, in ways that will only get their heads broken.”

  “It could work, if they all—”

  “It won’t be all of them. There are families who lost men in that cave-in who will want the tunnel opened again, so they can bury their dead.”

  “You said that your father died in an accident. It was that one, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “I would like to bury him too. But I know that tunnel will never be safe unless things are done differently. Its walls move.”

  “It is solid rock. Rock does not move.”

  “The earth is a living thing, Rose. Before I build I have to make sure the ground is stable. That mine is not in stable ground, and that tunnel was the worst. I knew it as a boy. I could see it.”

  She sat up and faced him. An echo of the night’s earlier trembles fluttered in her when she looked at him. A woman cannot allow a man to do such things without accepting a certain disadvantage with him in the future. She sensed that she had ceded him mastery of her in other ways too, ways that were between them now, encouraging those flutters.

  “How long did you work in the mine, Kyle?”

  “I first went down when I was eight. Children carry coal out in baskets. Usually they are nine or ten when they start, but I was big for my age. But not as big as a man. So I could see what the men never saw because it was right above their bowed heads. There were cracks above and near the top of the walls. I could see them shift over the months. I told my father. He and the others saw no danger because they had not been watching and had not seen the changes. Then one day—it all came down. Ten men were buried alive on the other side of a new wall.”

  “And they were just left there?”

  “They are never left if it can be helped. Men began digging. More rock fell and another man was gone. There was no more digging after that. A service was held. Prayers were said. And two days later the men went back into the pit. Except the families of the men lost. They waited a week. By then the men would be dead for certain. Lack of air or water would do it by then.”

  She pictured him, holding vigil with his aunt and uncle. She saw the child imagining the father behind that wall of rock, maybe still alive but beyond help.

  “I told the men we should dig from above. Bore a hole down so there would be air until we figured out how to get them out. No one listened to a child, least of all the men who supervised for the owners. I know now it could work. An engineer could do it. I could do it now, if ever such a cave-in occurs in a lateral tunnel.”

  Yes, he probably could, even if the ground would not permit it. He would do it with his bare hands, she guessed, if that was what it took. If he set his mind to it, rock and ground would not stop him.

  He had told her the story and answered her questions. She could tell that his mind had moved on to other things. He had left that candle burning for a reason.

  He took her arm and drew her toward him. He sat up and positioned her so she faced him, with her legs wrapping his hips.

  He watched his hands curve around her breasts and his thumbs brush their large dark nipples. “I saw you well enough in the dark, or my mind did at least. I like this better.”

  In other words, he did not want any more ladylike snuffing of lamps and candles at night. She did not mind. She could see him too this way. However, it would take some time before she did not experience some shyness when he looked at her body like this.

  He lifted her and moved his leg so she sat on it, bringing her higher. His tongue and teeth began arousing her breast with leisurely, devastating flicks and nips.

  Their position allowed her to caress him freely too. She stroked over his shoulders. “I think that you should take me with you when you go to Kirtonlow to try to see Cottington.”

  His fingers replaced his mouth, freeing the latter to reply. “No.”

  She wondered if he did not want her to see him turned away.

  “If I come with you, the secretary will not refuse us.”

  “Yes, he will, and I’ll not have you insulted.”

  “It is much harder to dismiss a lady, Kyle. We will let him know that he dare not do so, that the earl will be most displeased if he tries.”

  “No.”

  Her hand wandered low between their bodies in a quest to open his mind. She closed her fingers around his hard shaft and teased the tip with her thumb. “You married me for my blood, Kyle. You should let me open doors if I can.”

  His smile could not hide the sensual storm her caresses created. “Rose, are you using feminine wiles to make me pliable?”

  She glanced down at what her hand was doing. “I appear to be having the opposite effect. There is nothing pliable about you right now. Except ever so slightly, right here.” She gave a gentle squeeze at the tip.

  His hands cupped her bottom and lifted her slightly. She knew what to do without instruction because it seemed natural and necessary. She shifted and settled so that she could guide him into her.

  The first touch of penetration caused a shock of pleasure through her whole body. The sensation captivated her and stole her breath. She did not move to take him in farther but remained like that, barely joined, so that the delicious shudders would not stop.

  He allowed it even though desire tensed through him so violently that his jaw clenched and his teeth bared. She lowered a little so that she felt him a bit more.

  “You are going to kill me, Rose.” He grasped her hips. “You can torture me for hours another night, but now—” He drew her closer, lowering her until they were snugly together.

  He guided her after that, his strong hands easing her hips into a rhythm of absorption and release that she controlled. She discovered new pleasures with subtle shifts and pressures on her body. She closed her eyes and tensed around him again and again.

  Then he filled her more, and so deeply that she gasped. She opened her eyes and looked into his and could not look away again. She did not see him move, but she felt him filling her, thrusting and claiming while the depths of his gaze invited her to drown in sapphire fathoms. He held her hips firmly immobile at the end. No longer free, she surrendered to the way he ravished her body and soul.

  Her violent climax was almost painful in its intensity. She collapsed on him. Her face pressed to his chest, bound to him by his strong embrace while her body slowly relinquished the last shivers of bliss.

  “When will you leave for Kirtonlow Hall tomorrow?” she asked when their breaths and hearts had calmed.

  A stretching arm. A billowing sheet. He drew the bedclothes up and tucked them around her. “Noon, I think.”

  “I want to go with you. I will be ready at noon.”

  She waited for his “no.” It did not come. Instead, his embrace adjusted around her, wrapping her closely. His breath warmed her temple with a kiss.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  The bleakness of the hills disappeared five miles away from Kirtonlow Hall and the landscape became more lush by the minute. The house loomed tall and broad, overlooking a large pond that reflected its gray stone in silver water.

  As their carriage turned along the drive, Rose examined Kyle and herself. His cravat creased perfectly. His coat sat perfectly on his shoulders. Even the chain of his watch glowed in a perfect arc of links. A fashion plate would not be more precise in its correctness.

  She had worn the best garments she had brought, a newly commissioned lavender carriage ensemble with a mantlet lined and trimmed in gray squirrel. It had joined her wardrobe on this journey for the most practical of reasons, but its current style and discreet luxury would serve a
different purpose today. This officious secretary would never know the fur had been salvaged from one of her old garments that had gone hopelessly out of style.

  Kyle’s card was taken away. Eventually steps were heard, this time two sets. The servant clicked his way down the staircase with a short, bald man in tow.

  “Well, well. At least Conway will turn me away himself this time,” Kyle muttered. “You were correct. He dare not dismiss a lady without explanation.”

  Mr. Conway approached with an ingratiating smile. “Mr. Bradwell. Mrs. Bradwell. I regret that the earl is too ill to have visitors. His condition is far worse, it saddens me to say, than when you called the last time, Mr. Bradwell. I will, of course, bring him any message that you may have, although it is not clear that he understands all that is said to him.”

  “My message is for his ears alone, competent or not, however they be now,” Kyle said. “Since he is failing, I must insist on seeing him.”

  Mr. Conway’s smile thinned.

  “I also have a message that must be given directly,” Rose said. “Lord Easterbrook charged me quite specifically with personally communicating his exact words to Lord Cottington.”

  “Lord Easterbrook!”

  “He is my relative through marriage. I visit his London house regularly and he condescends to include my husband and myself in his circle.”

  Mr. Conway frowned unhappily at this news.

  “I fear Easterbrook’s anger if I return to London and report that I failed him. You appear a faithful servant, Mr. Conway, and I know that you seek only to ensure your master’s comfort, but I doubt that I will be able to keep your name out of my sad story. As you may have heard, Easterbrook is somewhat eccentric. One never knows what he will do if he favors or disfavors someone.”

  Conway’s eyes blinked hard at the implied threat. Rose smiled as sweetly as she could. Kyle remained passive, but she detected deep sparks in his eyes that said he found her speech stunning.