Celeste Bradley - [Heiress Brides 02]

by The Duke Next Door

  His expression did not change, but she felt his body harden against her belly. His gaze dropped to where her bosom pressed to his chest, swelling high and creamy and full. She drew in a deep breath, just for his benefit.

  His gaze locked once more with hers and his jaw worked slowly. “Then should I lock you in a tower to keep you?”

  Oh, yes. She melted into him, letting her gaze fall to his lips. “Would you promise to visit me every night?”

  He swallowed, hard. She ignored that small triumph, for arousal was easy. What she wanted from him was much more difficult. Oh, to be loved, truly loved, by a man like this one—could mortal woman survive a night in his arms? What about a lifetime?

  She was dying to find out.

  “You dare to toy with me,” he growled.

  She raised her gaze to his, allowing the heat and longing within her to flare into her eyes. “I do not make promises I will not keep.”

  His dark eyes turned black. With one movement, he turned them both until the banister pressed against the small of her back and his hard body pressed into her lower belly. She was trapped there, pinned tightly against his arousal. She realized that his abrupt motion had caused her to slide her free hand into his coat to grip at his waistcoat. She left her hand there, spreading her fingers over the muscles of his chest, feeling his great heart beat against her palm.

  This was progress, certainly … but that heart was still not hers.

  Would it ever be? Was she woman enough to win it?

  She scarcely knew what that meant, much less how to prove it to herself. Her character had not yet been tested … or had it? Had all her years under Tessa’s influence done more harm than she knew? Would she even recognize a character-defining moment of choice, or had she faced them again and again … and already failed?

  “I want to be a good woman, a good wife to you,” she whispered to him uncertainly.

  His hot gaze did not alter. He did not hear her. He was already lost in lust, when she’d wanted him lost in love.

  His gaze dropped to her bosom and one large hand came up to cup her breast. “You are so lovely.” His voice was husky and strained. Tessa had once commented that when a man’s blood engorged his member, his brain suffered the loss. Yet his touch was something else she wanted—had longed for, in fact. A man dizzy with lust was not such a bad thing, when her own body throbbed in response!

  So she went supple in his hands, shutting off that part of her heart that cried “Too soon!” and allowing her own longing and need to boil into her blood. She closed her eyes and gave her body over to him, for it was something, was it not? Something better than a long, cold life alone?

  His hand was hot on her breast as he hefted it. He slid his thumb across the bare upper portion in a forceful caress that made her knees weak. The neckline of her gown slid aside as he pushed her breast high, freeing her hardened nipple to the chill air.

  They were in full view of the factory, though it was very dim up so high and those below them were concentrating on their work. She shivered into him, too vulnerable and too achingly eager to care who might see. Let him strip her naked on the stair if he wished, so long as he did not stop touching her!

  He released her arm at last in order to wrap his about her waist, supporting her as he lowered his mouth to her breast. Her own hands freed at last, she buried them in his thick dark hair as he drew hard on her nipple with his hot mouth.

  Such sweet pain! It shot through her body—oh, heaven, she’d never known—how could she have known? A burst of answering heat came between her thighs, wetting her there, making her press her knees together in pleasure. She fisted her hands in his hair and moaned.

  He growled in response and yanked her sleeve down over her shoulder to free her other breast to his burning mouth. The first nipple, hardened and inflamed by his suckling, then fell prey to his seeking fingertips. Deirdre arched back over empty space, her breasts bare, rising and falling with each gasping breath, as her husband ravaged them. His hard fingers pinched and slowly twisted, just to make her mew in pleasure and pain, while his lips and tongue and teeth sucked and nibbled and rolled her other nipple in counterpoint.

  His hand dropped then, leaving her poor nipple alone, to slide down her body and dip between her thighs. He pressed her there, his hand outside her gown and petticoats, rubbing the flat of his fingertips in a circular motion over the hottest and wettest part of her. The first layer of fabric dampened instantly and she knew he must be able to feel the soaked heat of her there.

  He moved his mouth to her neck. “You’re wet for me?” he rasped into her skin.

  She nodded frantically as she wrapped her arms about his neck and held on to him tightly against the pleasure roiling through her. “Yes—oh, yes—I want you so!”

  His hands fell away, leaving her to grab at the banister in sudden fear of falling. He backed off a step and gazed down at her as she clung there, shaking and gasping in her arousal and confusion.

  “What—?” She tugged hastily at her gown.

  Calder was shaking with lust, dizzy with it, his vision gone nearly gray with the throbbing ache in his loins. Oh, dear heaven! So sweet, so soft, so fervent—

  You’re a fool. A real man would have carried that eager, exquisite creature off to that great cold empty bed and rogered her unto mutual death!

  He forced his breathing to steady.

  Her passion for him was stunning, outrageous, and perhaps a bit … unbelievable? He’d made a grievous mistake in marrying a treacherous beauty once. Had he been the classic fool and allowed his judgment to be overruled by his cock?

  Fine. Your cock won. Now award it accordingly! She’s still quivering for you. Beg her forgiveness and then bend her over that damned banister!

  He passed a shaking hand over his face—and caught the scent of her that still lingered on his fingers. Instantly, time spun back to when his arms were full of wet, hot, willing woman. She’d given over so easily, yet he couldn’t bring himself to believe that she was so bad.

  Yet, to behave as though his merest touch drove her senseless with desire—as though she’d been waiting her entire life for his slightest caress? That was so unlikely as to be laughable.

  His cock throbbed in favor of the idea and suggested that it bore further testing. Immediately. At length. Exhaustively, even.

  Sternly and mercilessly, Calder choked the life out of that voice and stuffed it deep, deep inside until he couldn’t hear it anymore. Finally, only cold, logical silence ruled his thoughts.

  Excellent. Now he could think clearly.

  Then she raised her eyes to his, her blue eyes swimming in tears and anger and … love? His throat released a low, fervent sound he didn’t recognize and his hand reached out to her without thought—

  At that moment the factory below them exploded into chaos.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Meggie gazed at the giant, shuddering loom in dismay. She hadn’t meant to kill it. She’d only wanted to see what made the wheels turn within—and if when sticking a long wooden weaver’s shuttle into the spinning, meshing gears, if they would chop the wood. The gears had sucked the shuttle from her hand as if she’d no grip at all and pulled it deep within. She’d had to jump back as the shuttle had nearly smacked her in the skull as it vibrated wildly back and forth.

  Now it quivered like a spear in the guts of a dying beast.

  The man operating the loom stared at it in disbelief, at least until he spotted her. With a wild howl of consternation he lunged at her. She turned in a panic and ran for her life. Ducking behind a machine that wound thread, she peeked behind her. The man wasn’t following, he was desperately trying to pull the shuttle from the gears. His cries brought others who gathered to help him. Some then scattered, racing back to the other machines while gazing upward in apprehension.

  What were they looking at? Meggie leaned forward to see past the thread-winder’s bulk. She saw her father and Dee up high on the stairs, coming down, the marquis
shouting something. Had she ever seen him run so fast? She almost pulled back into her hiding place, but something was creating the most horrendous whine, like an injured hound—no, more like a nest of angry wasps, rising in rage. The noise was coming from above the dead loom, which had apparently breathed its last. The long shaft that came down from the ceiling to power the gears had stopped rotating—but the belt that turned it had not. Now smoke was wisping up from where the band stretched over the rod … and then the wisp became a cloud … and then the band snapped with a sound like a Chinese rocket.

  Shouts and screams came from the dismayed workers as the belt’s smoking charred ends floated to the floor—and the wasp nests multiplied. Meggie crawled out farther, appalled fascination overcoming fear. Sitting on her heels, head tilted back to gaze upward, she watched one belt after another smoking and snapping as the rods froze—or worse, bent under the uneven pressure of several snapped belts. Like ripples in a pond, the destruction spread out from the loom she’d killed, as contagious as disease. The workers clung to each other in a frightened clump, cowering beneath a maddened sky, as sparks fell from the flaming belts and tilting rods loomed threateningly. Groans and clanks crescendoed with the rising anger of the wasps until Meggie clapped her hands over her ears.

  Then a single mighty groan rose to outdo them all. There was a painful rending of steel that shouldn’t bend as the central steam engine’s mighty rod gave beneath the torque, the final aching death rattle as an entire model of a modern factory died—murdered in a matter of moments by the curiosity of a child.

  Awed, Meggie rose to her feet and gazed at what she had wrought. “Bloody hell,” she whispered.

  “It were her!”

  Meggie whirled to see a crowd of angry faces—first and foremost her father’s!—glaring at her. She wet her lips nervously. “Ah … I think it was an accident, Papa.”

  The loom’s operator pushed forward in the crowd. “She did it apurpose, my lord!”

  Papa’s face froze in that look she hated so much—the one that made her feel like he wished she didn’t exist. “Papa, I didn’t mean it.” Her voice sounded so small against the cloud of blame.

  Dee pushed through the crowd then. Meggie saw her stepmother pale as she looked into Papa’s stony face.

  “Calder, don’t,” Dee said. Then she looked at Meggie in despair. “It was an accident.” But even she didn’t sound as though she believed it.

  “Lady Margaret, what did you do?” Papa’s voice was as cold as the frozen lake in Brookhaven’s winter.

  She swallowed. “Papa, you can buy more machines. I can sell my pony.”

  “What. Did. You. Do?”

  “I … I opened a little door in the side of the machine.”

  “And?”

  She squirmed. “And I looked inside.”

  “And?”

  Meggie felt as though she might need a sick basin. “And it was grinding and grinding … little metal teeth, like my pony’s teeth on a carrot.”

  And? He didn’t need to speak. His eyes said it plainly enough.

  She bit her lip. “So I fed it something.” Papa’s gaze was so frozen. It made her feet feel numb.

  He waited.

  She didn’t want to say it. All she wanted in the world was to go home to her kitten and make toffee with Dee. She glanced up quickly. Papa’s eyes were as black as coal.

  He was a big lump of coal! Alas, just like a rock, he could wait forever, she knew. Finally, she lifted her hand and pointed at the long smooth stick-thing the loom man was still holding.

  “I fed it that.”

  “Aye, my lord!” The loom man shook the gnawed and splintered shuttle at Meggie like a man brandishing a torch at a nocturnal predator. “Stabbed it with the shuttle, she did, right in the gearbox!”

  Calder’s heart sank. He’d so hoped it had been some sort of accident. What could he do now but punish the child?

  Why? Why had she done such a thing? He would never have committed such a clearly wrong act when he was a child! He’d been a calm, studious boy—a child who knew precisely what was expected of him at all times. Rafe had been the wild one. Rafe had been the one to do bold, mad things—

  Interesting things.

  Things you never dared do.

  Unfortunately, just as he’d once lacked the necessary scope of imagination to commit such misdeeds, he also lacked the wherewithal to conceive of an appropriate consequence for this vast and hideous crime. How could the child even grasp the damage she had done? His own mind whirled!

  There was the equipment wreckage, the orders that would not now be met, the well-trained and valuable people who quite rightfully deserved to be paid, who would leave him for more immediate work—people he might not be able to tempt back!

  His mounting frustration must have become obvious in his face, for Deirdre leapt between them with her hands held out in placation. She abandoned subtlety, instead physically placing herself in the path of his fury.

  “My lord, this is all my fault. I brought Meggie here. I ought to have kept a closer eye on her.”

  Fine. Deirdre made a much less disturbing target anyway. “Indeed,” he said coldly.

  She exhaled in relief. “Yes. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she continued in a soothing tone that made his own teeth grind like a gearbox. “I’m sure you’re furious with me.”

  Over her shoulder, Calder watched Trenton scoop Meggie up and swiftly remove her from the building, presumably back to the carriage she’d arrived in.

  Did they all think him a monster? He focused on Deirdre’s beautiful face. Even his wife?

  He gazed at her for a long moment, reading the tension in her shoulders, the way her eyes slid sideways to follow Meggie’s exit, the way she then watched him, as if he was an animal prone to striking tiny children and women alike.

  Yes, she did.

  Why shouldn’t she? Everyone else in London does.

  She ought to know him better than that. She ought to have looked deeper than the rumors and the gossip. He raised a hand toward her, reaching without realizing it. He’d thought—

  She flinched, ever so slightly.

  So.

  Icy inside, he drew himself up. “You should not blame yourself,” Calder said slowly. “It is my own fault that I find myself disappointed in marriage once again.”

  Deirdre’s head snapped back at his words. It was as if he had slapped her. No, worse, for it left no mark that the world could hold against him, but only bled agonizingly within. She swallowed down the cry of pain that longed to fly from her throat. Instead, she lifted her chin and sneered. “Likewise,” she snarled.

  That surprised him. “You claim yourself to be disappointed? In me?” Absently, he took a clean cloth from one of the workers and wiped his hands.

  She folded her arms against the hurt and the lingering wash of heat from their earlier episode on the stair and raised her chin. “I’m not going to deliver Meggie back to Brook House until I know what your intentions are.”

  His jaw tightened. “My intentions are to send her packing. She’ll be off to Brookhaven in the morning and there she’ll stay.” He looked away then, down at his hands that were already as clean as they were going to get without soap and water. He rubbed the cloth over them, over and over. “I think you ought to accompany her,” he said slowly.

  That sent a spear of agony through her, but she forced aside concern for herself. “You realize that if you banish Meggie now, she’ll spend the rest of her life convinced that you love your factories more than you love her.”

  He raised his gaze to meet hers. “Don’t be ridiculous. My factories keep Brookhaven prosperous, nothing more.”

  She raised her chin. “Your factories are your life. You adore them. They are your friends, your family, your very self. Meggie knows this, but until today I think she harbored some hope that she mattered to you as well.” As did I …

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I am a gentleman. I would never neglect my depend
ents!”

  “You think being a gentleman means adhering to dry, lifeless absolutes.”

  “I believe in a strict code of ethics. If that is what you mean, then yes.”

  “What of compassion? What of understanding—sympathy—even pity? Can you not concede that sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reason?”

  “That is ridiculous. If a thing is wrong, then it is wrong. The reason does not excuse a single thing.”

  “Let me ask you this then. Today Meggie was fascinated by the moving parts of a machine—even to the point where her curiosity was provoked to dangerous experimentation! That’s nothing like Melinda, at least not that I’ve heard. It doesn’t even seem particularly like Rafe. Who do you think that resembles?”

  He scowled. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean.”

  “You’re the clever one.” She glared at him. “You figure it out.”

  He wasn’t stupid. It was obvious what she was getting at. Calder simply didn’t see it. He was an orderly, unemotional, self-possessed man. He was a calm man, damn it! Meggie was a mess, a wild, uncontrollable criminal riot in a grimy pinafore and unraveling braids. “My child is nothing like me, not in the slightest!”

  Her jaw dropped slightly. She stared at him in amazement for a long moment, then threw up her hands and left the factory, muttering to herself.

  Calder watched her go, his entire body atwitch with a combination of leftover lust and indignant fury. She was entirely mad and was apparently determined to take him to Bedlam with her!

  Yet, wasn’t she lovely when nonplussed, when the usual glint of calculation faded from her stunning eyes and her lips softened from their firm determination? He would have liked to have kissed those lips just now.

  Her hands and face still bore traces of factory soot. She was probably going to bathe once she reached the house …

  Wet, bare, slippery skin. Damp tendrils of golden hair trailing between full creamy breasts. Rosy nipples crinkled in the chill …