The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” he barked.

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Is it not?”

  He stared down at her for a long time before he could summon a reply. He wanted to call his armor back. Could he not be made of steel and stone instead of this flesh-and-blood man who hungered for her so vehemently?

  “Very well,” he finally acquiesced. Did he ever have a choice? Could he deny her anything? “Now that I know who I am … I also know who I am not. I am not Dorian Blackwell. And I … no longer wish to be the monster created by a lifetime apart from you. Maybe, in time, I can be who you want me to be. You’ll … you’ll have to show me how.”

  She rushed to him, ignoring the hand he held against her. Flinging her small, warm body against his with a dangerously contagious exuberance. “We could finally start our life together, once you find your treasure.”

  He’d already found it.

  Swept away by the tide of her emotion and his need, he crushed his lips against her offered mouth and secured her lush body to his.

  Desire slammed into him with all the violence of a war hammer, lancing the breath from his chest. Years of forgotten needs roared to the surface, overwhelming his senses. Everything that made him lethal and ferocious snarled to claim her. To be tamed by her.

  But he couldn’t do that. Not to this soft creature in his arms. She was the antithesis to the endless battle of pain he’d only surmounted by the force of his will and the strength of his back. His Lorelai was lush and warm where he was unyielding and hard. Instead of seeking revenge, she survived by means of endurance. Despite her own difficult battles, she healed her little broken creatures with all the care she had left to give.

  Her lips parted beneath his. Inviting. Pliant.

  God, what he could do to her mouth.

  With a raw moan of protest, he thrust her from him. “Not now,” he gasped. “Not tonight.”

  Hurt shimmered over her features as she stood where he abandoned her. Lips swollen and slick. Eyes clouded with what he wanted to believe was desire.

  “You … don’t want me?”

  “Christ, Lorelai,” he growled, wiping the sweet taste of her from his lips. “You can’t be that naïve!”

  Her eyes went positively owlish, little reserves of tears gathering in her lashes. “Wha— I … You just said—”

  He grasped her hand and shoved it between his legs where his cock strained against his trousers, desperate to be thrusting into any part of her. Her lips, her hands, her ass, her sex. He’d claim it all before their lives were through.

  “Does this feel like a lack of fucking desire to you?” he gritted out.

  Her eyes became as dark as the sea tossed about by Calypso’s wrath. Color tinted her cheeks and lips, as blood rushed through her. “No,” she breathed, her fingers twitching against him. “But … then … why?”

  “I am not myself,” he warned. “And you still need to recover from last night. You said it earlier.”

  To his utter astonishment, she grinned. “It’s happening already,” she marveled, sidling closer.

  He squinted at her, trying to make out her meaning. His move, meant to shock her, had backfired somewhat, and he was having a devil of a time stringing thoughts together with her shy fingers now cupping his shaft through the fabric.

  “Not so long ago, you claimed my discomfort wouldn’t have mattered,” she said with a sense of triumph.

  He closed his eyes against the onslaught of guilt at the thought of terrifying her. He’d been such a barbarian with her only days ago … and that barbarian was now screaming to be let out.

  “That’s what I’m saying.” He tossed her wrist away. “It won’t in a matter of minutes. If I were you, I’d find a sturdy door, get behind it, and lock it. Now that I’ve had a taste of you, I want everything, selfish bastard that I am.”

  His nostrils flared. His chest couldn’t seem to hold enough air as he watched her throat work over a swallow.

  “You think I feel less need than you?” she challenged. “Less frenzy or wildness? That after last night, I want you any less than you want me?”

  “I know you do.” Nothing she could conceive of could match the hunger he now battled.

  She stepped to him, sliding her hand down his front until it gently, but instantly, clutched his cock. “I can take it, Ash,” she whispered in a low, needful octave he hadn’t thought her sweet voice capable of attaining. “I can take you. All of you.”

  “Lorelai.” His last warning was underscored with a plea. Who was this woman before him? This temptress?

  This goddess.

  “You don’t know what hurting you would do to me,” he rasped, held prisoner by her lithe little fingers.

  Her other hand reached around his neck, tugging his head down to hers for a scorching kiss. A feral beauty licked her innocence away, leaving him utterly speechless. “Veronica told me of a way to pleasure you that would cause me no pain.”

  When she lowered to her knees, he lost his ability to move.

  * * *

  There was power in this, Lorelai realized. Veronica had neglected to mention that.

  This beast in a black suit. This primal, ferocious male was hers to command. It was her hand that absorbed him. Her lips that would claim him.

  He mouthed her name, but no sound escaped. His nostrils flared, but he remained motionless, his eyes swirling with unmitigated lust and something else that broke her heart.

  The gasp that fled his throat as she freed him from his trousers was laced with pain.

  She’d almost forgotten how intimidating his sex could seem, every bit as immense as the rest of him.

  His body went splendidly rigid as she wrapped her hand around the thick base of him. Moisture suffused her mouth as she breathed over the length of him.

  “Lorelai,” he groaned. “You don’t—”

  The words were ripped from his throat by a harsh cry as her lips closed over the blunt tip in a vulgar parody of an openmouthed kiss.

  She found she enjoyed the flavor of his flesh. Salt and musk and something so intoxicating she felt a bit light-headed.

  Another desperate sound ripped through him. This one an overt plea.

  Slowly, she slid her moist lips over the plush, velvet head of him and let her tongue ease down the ridge beneath until he met the back of her throat.

  She felt his knees tremble, and was rocked by a wave of victorious feminine lust. She widened her jaw to its capacity and secured her lips over her teeth before dragging those lips as far as she could, leaving trails of moisture in her wicked wake.

  Despite his desperate growls and incoherent curses, she refused to hurry. She rhythmically explored his shaft with her fingers as she sucked him deeper. Her tongue found the absorbing ridges of veins beneath the thin skin and swirled and darted about them.

  His hand clamped behind her head. Strong, demanding fingers ruined her coiffure as they threaded through her hair and tightened to a fist.

  Something slick and succulent welled from his sex, easing the glide of her lips.

  Lorelai greedily enjoyed his broken breaths. The black inferno she found when she looked up into his eyes. He bared his teeth like a wolf, and his grip on her hair became more dominant than demanding.

  Did he want to play with power? The thought both excited and frightened her.

  She braced a hand against his hips, which had begun slight, instinctive thrusts in time to her own rhythm. So, she changed her pace, drawing back so completely, he popped out of the seal of her mouth with a lewd sound.

  “It would behoove you to behave.” She echoed his words from their wedding night against his sex, giving it a playful lick.

  He let loose a string of blistering curses, not all of them in English as he, one by one, uncurled his fingers from her hair.

  Satisfied, she latched onto him again, taking him as deep as she could, using her tongue to swirl around his engorged head as she let her hand resume its previous rhythm.

  He
said things. Lusty things. Demanding and degrading things. And they meant nothing, or everything. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t care. She’d become a glutton for this, for the illicitness of it. The transformative intimacy of it.

  This was something she could give a man from whom everything had been taken.

  He grew impossibly larger inside her mouth. Hotter. The vein at the underside of his sex began to pulse.

  “Stop,” he gasped. The involuntary jerks and twitches of his hips became more frantic. Desperate. “If you don’t stop … I…”

  She knew what he would do. He’d release the same substance he’d coated her womb with last night.

  She was ready. She wanted it. Wanted him.

  “No.” This time, when he clutched at her hair, he arched her neck back slightly, releasing his sex from her mouth once again.

  “Wait,” she panted. “It’s all right. It’s—”

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” he said darkly, as he dragged her off her knees and toward the bed. “It is my turn.”

  The force of his raw passion unleashed upon her with the unrivaled strength of a sea gale, as he tossed her on the bed and yanked her skirts above her knees.

  He growled his approval when he found her without undergarments.

  Lorelai had no compunctions about borrowing a dress from the Countess Northwalk, but she drew the line at sharing intimates.

  He spread her legs with rough hands, and she braced herself for the pleasure his fingers would surely impart.

  “You’re so fucking beautiful.” His voice had become deeper, more savage. “I need to taste you.”

  “What?” He couldn’t mean—

  Without warning a strong, wet lick split her sex, strangling all protestations along with her breath. The pleasure elicited by the wicked deed rocked her so incredibly, her knees instinctively closed.

  Ash’s strong arms anchored her thighs apart, his mouth burrowing into her core, lips exploring the pliant ridges of flesh and the throbbing apex above.

  Unlike his callused, clever fingers, his tongue was warm against her sensitive sex, smooth, and delectably wet. It slipped and slid among her increasingly slick topography, leaving trails of pulsating pleasure behind.

  Now this was something Veronica had never prepared her for. This shocking, scandalous act. Something so selfless and sacrosanct, she wasn’t certain God allowed for it.

  Because nothing so heavenly should be allowed in the human experience.

  She blinked down at the dark head playing between her thighs, her insides both quivering and aching. If the depths of physical pain and suffering could be so acute, so terrifyingly exquisite, shouldn’t moments of pleasure be, as well?

  Had they not both earned this?

  He thrummed at the sensitive bud that was the center of her need. His tongue rolled, and his lips nipped at it, playfully teasing her with apparent delight before he gently ground against it with the flat of his tongue. A thrill of bliss shot through her with such force, her fingers sought and clutched at his hair, tugging insistently in no particular direction.

  His sound of appreciation vibrated against her core, unleashing a tide of need from deep in her belly. She couldn’t call back an insistent mewl, then a hoarse cry as her need bloomed beneath his expert mouth. Her toes curled in their boots as her soul began to sing. A rhythm so ancient and primal melding with the dance of his tongue until ecstasy pulsed from her womb, to her bones, and sang through her blood.

  Her body strained against the strength of his hold, her limbs thrashed, and her hips bucked beneath him. Later she’d be mortified that she’d become this uninhibited creature of wanton, voluptuous lust. That she’d abandoned all sense of modesty or dignity in favor of craven desire and this all-consuming rapture. The pleasure melted her into a miasma of shuddering wet pulsations. She’d become weightless with it, a being both created and dismantled by its relentless, agonizing waves.

  A few helpless sobs escaped her as the sensations flowing from his mouth to her core reached a peak so indescribable, she wasn’t certain her body could contain it.

  As though he sensed he’d overwhelmed her, he lifted his head, allowing her hips to float back to the bed. She’d been unaware they’d ever thrust away from it.

  He crawled up her body, licking his glossy lips like a satisfied cat, his eyes glittering like volcanic shards of dark intent.

  Her muscles, replete and heavy, melted beneath him.

  “Did you mean it?” he asked tightly. “Can you take all of me?”

  Sighing, she wrapped her arms around his wide torso with more urgency than even she had expected, her heart contracting with a thousand different forms of love. “Every part of you.”

  He sank inside her, stretching her untried muscles in warm, luscious increments. Her still-pulsing core gave way reluctantly at first, but his second slide was faster, wetter, and he didn’t stop until he was buried to the hilt.

  “Yes,” she hissed into his ear as he buried his face into her hair. “Please.” It wasn’t the insistent plea that caused him to set a deep, stroking rhythm that quickly catapulted them both to the stars. It was what she whispered next. What she’d cried before her intimate muscles clenched around him in yet another release.

  “Ash.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Lord and Lady Southbourne.”

  Ash didn’t recognize the designation as belonging to him until Lorelai said, “What is it, Jenkins?”

  He glanced up from where he, Lorelai, Moncrieff, and Blackwell were bent over the map, listening intently to her observations on how to safely approach Tersea Island.

  “I’ve installed a Scotland Yard inspector in the parlor. He insists on speaking with you both.” His repugnant message delivered, Jenkins clicked his heels like a Hessian, and marched away.

  They’d been expecting a police inquiry of some sort, of course. Mortimer Weatherstoke, a peer of the realm, had been recently murdered rather publicly, after all. His wife and sister kidnapped by the infamous Rook, only to be returned some three days later none the worse for wear by an unknown cousin of dubious Continental origin.

  Ash Weatherstoke.

  Gods, after all the time he’d spent insisting the boy was dead, he had to resurrect him. Here. At Southbourne Grove. Yet again.

  Because of his cowl, no one had seen the Rook up close when he’d murdered Mortimer, and very few other souls over the years had borne account of his visage and lived to tell about it.

  Dorian Blackwell had accompanied them in part to assist with just such a situation. He had unprecedented influence with Scotland Yard, Parliament, in all the right social circles, and—more importantly—all the wrong ones. To have such a man call him brother was a boon in more ways than Ash could begin to define at this juncture.

  “Scotland Yard?” An apprehensive frown tilted Lorelai’s lips as she echoed his thoughts. “I assumed we’d only have to endure the local magistrate.”

  “We never should have left the ship,” Moncrieff grumbled, already doctoring his tea with spirits from a nearby decanter. “Why would someone call all the way from Scotland Yard unless they already found the holes poked into our criminally thin fiction?”

  “Is he always like this?” Blackwell nudged a thumb at the scowling first mate.

  “No.” Ash smirked. “He’s usually much more opinionated.”

  “God help you.”

  “If only she would.”

  “She?” Blackwell queried.

  “I’ve always been of the opinion that storms, ships, and God are a strictly female trifecta.”

  “It would explain a great deal—”

  “Now hardly seems like the time for jest.” Lorelai interrupted their smile of collusion, stepping in front of a red-faced Moncrieff, her own features pinched with anxious disapproval. “You could be in profound danger from the law.”

  Ash traced the line of her jaw, yearning to kiss those lips back into a smile. “Darling, men like us are perpetually in
profound danger from the law … or so the law likes to imagine.”

  “Do you think they mean to threaten us with Newgate?” Dorian casually speculated, picking at an invisible piece of dust from his cuff.

  “Perish the thought,” Ash volleyed with equal dispassion. “Maybe it’s the gallows for us this time.”

  “Or the firing squad.”

  “I suppose they could resurrect the practice of drawing and quartering.” Ash cocked an unrepentant brow at Lorelai. “I should hazard that my nether quarters are the most desirable.”

  “Our heads would look altogether sinister next to each other on the vacant pikes at London Bridge,” Blackwell suggested.

  “You make an excellent point. Do you suppose they’d leave the eyepatch on?”

  “It’ll be my final request.”

  “As it should be. It’s rather iconic, if you ask me.”

  With a startlingly animalian sound, Lorelai seized his lapels. “Do you not understand what this means?” She tugged at him frantically. “They could take you from here in chains! I could lose you again. Forever, this time. How can you act as if your execution would be nothing more than a lark?”

  Sufficiently chastised by the threat of hysterics, Ash sobered immediately. “I jest because the idea of anyone taking me from your side is laughable.” He covered her hands with his own, touched and feeling guilt because of the tremors of panic he sensed in her elegant fingers.

  “An entire contingent of Scotland Yard bruisers couldn’t overwhelm us,” Dorian soothed from over his shoulder. “They’d have to bring an army.”

  “And we’d see the army coming and make our getaway,” Ash amended, pressing a kiss to the wrinkles of worry on her forehead. “Come now, all is well. Let us rid ourselves of this nuisance and be about our day, shall we? We’ve treasure to hunt.”

  “Count me out,” Moncrieff growled, swiping the entire decanter from the sideboard. “I’d rather lick bog mud from the devil’s twat than share a room with a member of the London Metropolitan Police.”

  “Can’t say as I blame you,” Blackwell told his retreating back before turning to Ash. “I don’t think he’s overfond of me.”