How the Marquess Was Won

by Julie Anne Long

  He took his marble stairs two at a time and flung open the door.

  Relief, disbelief made him light-headed.

  It unmistakably was her. She looked smaller, but it could have something to do with the pelisse she was wearing, which obviously wasn’t hers. It was too large, and it was fur lined, with a collar that swallowed up her slim neck. She’d buttoned it all the way up to her chin.

  A meowing basket was at her feet.

  She stared at him, her pale eyes glowing. And even in the dark it was apparent she was furious. She fair crackled with it. He could taste it in the air, like an approaching storm.

  She turned and called down to the driver very coolly, “If you would bring up my trunk?”

  Phoebe walked past Jules without looking at him, without waiting for permission. She aimed straight for the staircase, scaled the stairs as quickly as she did nearly everything. He followed her, as if in a dream. He was unable to speak.

  He heard the thunk of the trunk dropped in his foyer, and the door closing. The Silverton driver; bless him for remembering to close the door.

  She reached his bedroom and settled the basket down and flipped open the lid. Charybdis leaped out, spotted the chair before the fire, and settled in and began nibbling on his hind leg.

  Jules found his voice.

  “Phoebe . . . I . . . Why are you here? I’m glad that you are, love, but . . .”

  She peeled off one glove. Flung it to the floor. She peeled off the other and did the same. She gave it a kick. Beautiful kid gloves went tumbling across the room.

  She slipped her feet out of her slippers. She kicked each of them aside and her bare feet curled into his thick rug.

  Dear God. He noticed she was trembling. He reached out, tried to touch her. “Phoebe . . . sweetheart . . . You’re shaking. You’ve had a shock. I’ll pour a brandy—”

  It was as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “You’ve wanted me, Dryden. Take me.”

  He froze. Dumbstruck.

  In the silence that followed, the fire spat and popped in sympathy with the temper radiating from her.

  His voice was cracked. “Phoebe, I don’t . . .”

  “Don’t what? Want me, now that the game is up? Do you even know what you really think or really want, or is it all covered over in a carapace of “shoulds”? Don’t you dare repeat that to me. I know how ridiculous that sounded. And yes I know very large words like carapace and out they come. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  His head was spinning. He didn’t know where to begin. “I—”

  “I don’t care whether you want me anymore. Because you were right all along. I. Want. You. The way a woman wants a man. And I will have you tonight.”

  “Do you even know what you’re . . . are you drunk . . . are you . . . please, can we discuss this?”

  She was unbuttoning the pelisse.

  “Are you a coward, Dryden? Are you all talk? It isn’t funny anymore, is it? You knew all along. You knew. And yet you allowed it to go on. You allowed me to be a mockery. It was in the bloody betting books.”

  She took great relish in spitting out all those B’s sequentially.

  “Hold. I know that you’re angry and hurt, but won’t have you falsely condemning me. I didn’t know. Not at first. I discovered only later. I never go near the damned books. And when I did, how could I tell you, Phoebe? I’ll admit to selfishness only: the greatest pleasure in my life in seeing you happy, even as it killed me to see you with other men. Breaking your heart would be the same as . . . the same as . . . breaking my own. And you were leaving. You said you were leaving. You might never have known.”

  Well. That stopped her in her tracks. And for an instant he saw wonder, a thrilling yearning flash over her face, a raw hope that stole his breath.

  And then she shook her head roughly. Her fury had momentum and she needed to spend it, and she didn’t want love or peace. She didn’t trust it.

  The pelisse was unbuttoned. She shook her arms out of it and let it drop to her feet.

  Holy mother of . . .

  She was entirely nude.

  Chapter 28

  His senses took her like a lightning strike. He reeled. Her entire pale white loveliness, long slim legs, the nipped in waist and heavy round breasts.

  His breath stopped in his lungs.

  A sound at last escaped him. It sounded like “Guh.”

  She reached up and yanked pins from her hair, one by one, clutched them in her fist, dropped them to the deep carpet, and down her hair tumbled. A pale gleaming waterfall. She gave it a shake.

  “Tell me you don’t want me.” She knew what she saw in his eyes.

  He couldn’t speak. He stared, unabashedly. Feasted his eyes on her loveliness.

  “Not like this.” He was vehement.

  God, he was also tremendously aroused.

  “Like what? You don’t want me too willing? Or are you too cold, Dryden? Do I need to be angrier to offset that glacier you have for a heart? Do I need to start throwing things to really excite you? Or do you need to buy things for me first, to feel like you’ve earned the right to my body? Am I worthless now to you, who likes only the precious and worthy?”

  Her stratagem was primitive, but it was working. It slipped in through his unguarded places, because only she knew them, and lit a touch paper to his temper.

  “Have a care, Phoebe.”

  “You’re a coward, Dryden.” She stepped toward him. Gave him a little push with one hand, though she of course couldn’t budge him. “You didn’t tell me about the betting books because you’re a coward. You couldn’t endure my disappointment so you let the charade go on and on. What of my pride? Am I really so pathetic?”

  She’d wanted him angry. And now he was sizzling with it.

  “You believed them, Phoebe. I’m the only one—the only one—who was truthful with you from the very beginning. I have never deceived you or misled about what I want or who I am. And dear God . . . you are never pathetic. Do not ever suggest that to me again. We will talk in the morn—”

  “Everything has to be the way you want it, doesn’t it? Well, this is the way I want it. Are you man enough for this?”

  She dodged away when he lunged toward her, stalked toward her, backing her against the end of the bed.

  He put his hand on her breastbone and pushed. She toppled backward onto the bed and leaned back on her elbows.

  He followed her there, falling forward, bridging her body, propping himself up over her on his hands. He was close enough to taste her breath, which came in furious gusts. Her pupils were large and black.

  Christ. His cock was so hard; his body almost vibrated with need. The body he’d dreamed of was now beneath him, nude and gloriously soft and his for the taking.

  “Enough, Phoebe.” His tone would have given a brave man pause. “You’re upset. We can talk in the morning about arrangements . . .”

  She twisted and tried for a kick and he dodged in time.

  “Don’t tell me how I am or how I should be! You and your bloody arrangements.” She swung wildly for his face. “It’s now or never.”

  In a lightning-swift move he shifted and pinned her wrists to the bed.

  Her muscles tensed beneath his grip. She tried to move. He saw her eyes widen in surprise when she found she couldn’t. At all.

  Still, it was an effort to keep her pinned. She was little but surprisingly strong and lithe, like her damned cat. He would bruise her wrists if he didn’t loosen his grip, but he wasn’t eager to be slapped. Or bitten, for that matter, and it looked like she wasn’t above it.

  They’d built her up and torn her down and she was a feral creature again, the creature she must have been when she was plucked out the ghetto, a creature like her cat. Hurt and frightened and fighting.

  His cock strained at his trousers now, aching. Sweat beaded his forehead, his shoulders. Traced his spine. His control frayed.

  She knew.

  She arched upward and kissed hi
m, taking his lips hard. Her mouth was supple, angry, demanding. She licked the corners of his lips, and bit the bottom one lightly. Her breasts brushed against his open shirt, and her nipples, bead-hard, grazed against his bare chest.

  She opened her legs, wrapped them around his back, pulled him toward her, slid them down along his thighs.

  “Go on, Dryden,” she murmured against his lips. “Pleasure me. It’s what I want.”

  His lips were over hers, and he tried to take control, but her tongue stabbed into his mouth, an entirely carnal invasion. They fought for supremacy, the kiss erotic and nearly violent, and he seized her plush bottom lip lightly between his teeth. She gasped, and when she did he used the momentary advantage and plundered again, taking the kiss savage and deep, a clash of teeth, a duel of tongue, slow, lewd, thorough, and graceless. And as they kissed she brought one leg up beneath him, and dragged her knee slowly once, twice, hard, back and forth, back and forth over his swollen aching cock until he moaned low and savage in his throat, and swore softly, desperately.

  He freed her wrists and scooped his hands beneath her back, and her head tipped back. He pressed hot, hard, nearly brutal kisses along her throat, sucking to brand her, and she clung to his shoulders, her fingernails digging in through the linen. He dragged his mouth down to her breasts and licked, then lightly bit one nipple.

  Her body writhed beneath him and she reached for the button on his trousers, her hands shaking but nevertheless swift and deft.

  He released her again and she fell back against the bed, and he dragged his palms over her body, hungry for the cool smooth feel of her skin, marveling at it. He filled his hands with her breasts, round and taut, and he lowered his head to suck one of them, hard, mercilessly. She gasped the pleasure of it and her body whipped backward, her head thrashed over the pillow, and she swore words no well-bred girl from the ton would ever know, words that would forever be part of her. Begging him, insulting him, inflaming him, urging him on.

  He dragged his tongue down the seam of her narrow ribs; he delved it into her navel.

  She locked her legs around him, arcing up against him.

  And he positioned his body over her, taking his cock in hand, and she wrapped her legs around him, dragging her feet along his thighs.

  He hesitated.

  “Go on, Dryden.” She bowed her body up to him.

  His breathing was like bellows, his vision hazed with lust and fury.

  “No,” he choked.

  “I said yes.” She tried to pull him down.

  “No. Not like this.”

  “It’s like this or not at all.”

  And then suddenly he rolled away from her, seized her in his arms and pulled her over his body so that she covered him. He wrapped his arms around her. Held her fast. Allowed her to realize that she was at his mercy, no matter how much he wanted her. That he was in control here.

  “I want to make love to you.”

  She shook her head roughly, her breathing tattered now. “No.”

  “And I want you to make love to me.”

  The sound of rough breathing. A sawing in-out of breath. “No,” she whispered, fighting tears now.

  “Ah, but I fear you’ve no choice,” he murmured, almost regretfully, and as though he was talking to himself as well. “No . . . choice . . . at . . . all.”

  He whispered this last in her ear, soft as a lullaby, as he smoothed his fingers through her hair, again and again. Untangling the fine length of it, as if it was the very source of her wildness. He combed his fingers along the hot silky skin of her back, again and again, as if she were a harp, murmuring to her. As if she was a wild thing to be tamed. She was vibrating with tension, but he was relentlessly tender, relentlessly seductive.

  He traced the pearls of her spine with the tips of his fingers, one at a time, savoring, while his lips glided softly to her temple, along her hairline, down to her throat. He kissed her eyebrows, one a time. As if pointing out to her, little by little, the parts of her that had enchanted and enthralled him, showing her the little pleasures that could be had from every part of her, how the entirety of her body was made for pleasure, and he intended to call forth every feeling her body could yield her. Lulling and arousing and memorizing her.

  When he kissed her eyelid, he tasted salt. Because that’s what happened to fury when tenderness was applied. It dissolved.

  And at last she sighed, a sound of frustration, and surrender. She closed her eyes, and he saw tears trembling on her lashes, so he kissed those away. Her breathing was still ragged and swift, but the frantic fury had eased from her, and in place of it a yielding desire.

  It excited him extraordinarily, because now he knew that he would at last, at last have her.

  He touched his tongue to her ear, and dragged his hands wonderingly down the curves of her again, opening his palms flat, pushing her against his body. God, how he wanted her.

  And then she found his lips with hers. A gentle, tentative kiss. Testing. An apology, a prelude. A bump, a slide, a cling. One might have thought it was their very first.

  And then it deepened, slowed. Became less a kiss than one more way they could be joined, a rejoicing; he thought he sensed in it elegy, too.

  She ended it, and ducked her head briefly, resting it against his chin.

  “I am afraid.” She whispered it. He expected she surprised herself by saying it aloud.

  He knew what it cost her to admit it. And he knew what she meant. She wasn’t afraid of sex. She was afraid of losing herself, of surrendering to someone, to anyone, of caring enough to open herself up to that kind of pain.

  He was afraid, too. She was the only one who had the courage to admit it.

  “You’re safe with me.” It was simply the truth.

  She shifted then, slid her body down along his a little so she could kiss his throat, with a searching open mouth. She slid down farther so she could lick a bead of sweat from between the bones at the base of his neck. She slid down to straddle his waist, his cock bumping up against her lush buttocks, and she sat up to push his shirt away from his shoulders. He helped her by lifting his torso and shrugging out of it, flinging it with abandon across the room, startling Charybdis, and she gave a laugh.

  And she lowered herself against him, and dragged her cheek along his skin, then gently, one by one, kissed those absurd and precious marks of love, the bruise on his forehead, the scratches dotting his chest. She kissed the mark of war, the thin white scar left by the bayonet. She dragged her tongue down the seam between his ribs while his hands played in her hair, and she could feel in the way his body arched, in the way his breath swayed his chest, in the hard, swift drumming of his heart beneath her body, how much he wanted her. And she slid farther still, raising herself up, sliding down to straddle his thighs, then tugged at his trousers. Another tug freed his cock, and it sprang up almost cheerfully, thick and swollen and curving up toward his belly. She dragged the trousers down, down over his hips, which were slim and white. She skimmed her fingers over the sharp bones while he raised his hips up to help her, but it took some serious tugging before she finally got them all the way off with an awkward yank that made both of them laugh. His thighs were hard as tree trunks and covered with fascinating curling dark hair; the very insides, she could see, were heartbreakingly tender and white, where riding horseback had likely scraped his hair away.

  And that’s where she bent to kiss him. And she gently pushed his knees apart, and laid her lips, and then her tongue there.

  “Good God,” he gasped approvingly.

  She did it again, dragging her nails lightly in the wake of her mouth, her tongue, until he was hissing in air through his teeth, and shifting restlessly. And she could see his cock leaping friskily.

  “Please . . . your mouth . . . take me in your mouth . . .” he begged.

  She licked the length of his cock and he groaned, long and guttural and primal, as though he was being freshly bayoneted. And then she closed her mouth over the dome o
f it and slid her lips down.

  He hissed in a breath, and swore beneath his breath the filthiest, most appreciative words, and a few suggestions, including “do it again,” and curled his fingers into the counterpane. He shifted his hips, rocking them, arching them upward. The cords of his neck were taut and his head tipped back.

  She did it again, fascinated by the hot, velvety strength of him, the power she had over him, the ability to give this careful, contained man so much pleasure he was losing his mind. He was so thick she could barely close her mouth around him.

  She did it again.

  “Incred . . . Phoebe . . . Christ . . .” He muttered hoarse syllables as his breath came in harsh gusts. He threw one arm over his forehead. His breath sawed in and out. He swallowed audibly, hard.

  And then he sat up, propping himself on his elbows, and stared at her.

  Seconds later, and she wasn’t certain how it had happened, he had her on her back and he was propped on his arms over her, bridging her body.

  She dragged her toes along the diamond-hard planes of his calves, and traced, with one finger, the line of those lips.

  He ducked to touch his lips to hers, but as he did he deliberately dragged his cock along her cleft. Her body bowed toward him, and she whimpered.

  “Wrap your legs around me, Phoebe.”

  She locked her feet around his back, and he thrust in.

  She gasped at the pain of it, and then moaned softly, as the hard length of him filled her.

  “Hold on to me, love.”

  She hardly needed to be told. He moved, and she could tell he was struggling for some kind of finesse, for a prolonging of the pleasure. To be careful with her. But his eyes burned down into her with the ferocity of a conqueror, with a selfish and thrilling and unnerving need. He needed her. Pleasure owned him now, and he surrendered, giving his head a little shake, an apology, admitting it was beyond his control now. And all the frustration and longing and desire they’d harbored for a lifetime it seemed spurred him on. He drove his cock deep into her again and again and again, and she moved with him, arching upward to take him deeper, as deeply as she could. She clung to him, fingers digging into his arms. And the tempo accelerated, his white hips drumming, their bodies colliding hard.