What I Did For a Duke

by Julie Anne Long

She sighed. She felt a certain kinship with that swan. Everyone thought Genevieve Eversea was serenity and purity itself. When she really was capable of . . . alarmingly original behavior.

  And something else, something slightly traitorous, crept into her thoughts. What kept Harry from just saying what he thought? When the duke never seemed afraid to do it?

  It was an unfair comparison. The duke was an older, wiser, more confident man.

  And the duke couldn’t possibly break her heart if he said precisely what he thought.

  He could, however, keep her body restless.

  The duke hadn’t returned to Pennyroyal Green by dinner.

  There was a moment of indefinable terror when Genevieve knew, knew he was gone for good. That he’d been toying with her. That he’d remained behind at Rosemont and from there had decided to return to London in pursuit of horses. This was followed by a great swoop of relief she wouldn’t have to make a decision about kissing him again, then furious indignation that she wouldn’t have to make a decision, all of which was very ironic considering the women had devoted the evening to the quietest of pastimes, reading and embroidery and mercifully benign gossip about the neighbors. Not the barbed sort that permeated London ballrooms. The soothing sort about who had a new horse or baby niece.

  Harry and Ian had taken themselves off to the Pig & Thistle for darts, which meant for the duration no proposals were being issued to anyone.

  “Is aught amiss, Genevieve?” Her mother had asked her once, peering at her as she stabbed with an excess of vigor into her embroidery.

  The flowers on her sampler were growing ever-lusher, crowding the vase as though clamoring for escape. Tonight, with uncharacteristic whimsicality, she impulsively decided to stitch a flower outside the vase, as though heretically, it had escaped the bouquet altogether. There was a pleasing asymmetry and messiness to it.

  “Aught, Mama,” Genevieve lied a little too easily.

  She looked up with innocently widened eyes when her mother said nothing for a long time. Merely fixed her with an unreadable look.

  But she went motionless with an unseemly relief and an uncertainty that made her nearly nauseous when carriages began rolling up to the drive. Neighbor gentlemen spilled out. Much laughter echoed in the foyer, the footmen took coat after coat, and then the men disappeared into the room behind the ballroom.

  The game of five-card loo would get under way.

  Which obviously meant the duke had returned.

  Long, long after the ladies had abandoned their embroidery and repaired to their bedchambers, Genevieve remained awake. She didn’t undress for her bed. She kicked off her slippers and curled up in a chair and attempted to give her attention to the orphan in the Horrid Novel, but when the orphan met a mysterious handsome stranger she stared at the book incredulously, then frowned at it punitively and laid it down with a sigh. She listened instead to carriages departing now, carrying away men whose pockets were doubtless lighter now than when they’d arrived this evening.

  The roses in the corner looked as fresh as the day they’d arrived. They seemed everywhere in her peripheral vision, and they drove her to the curtain.

  She parted the curtains of her bedroom window and looked out onto the back garden. The sky was blue-black and glass-smooth; stars had been flung in reckless handfuls over it. Between two trees was the dull gray outline of a stone bench.

  And moonlight glanced from the polished toes of a pair of Hessians.

  The duke was lounging upon the bench, looking as much a part of it as any gargoyle carved into a medieval edifice. He casually stretched. He looked up to the window.

  And raised one hand. She thought she saw a flash of teeth. A grin.

  Bloody man.

  She dropped the curtain, but stood staring at it as if she could stare right through it. Her heart had started up a thudding that sent blood ringing through her ears, but she moved as quickly as if she were fleeing war drums.

  She slid her arms through the deep brown, fur-lined pelisse and turned to stare. This time her eyes were on the clock.

  And it was after midnight.

  She flew down the back stairs, slippers in her hands until she reached the back door.

  Her breath announced her approach with little white puffs, but the cold was certainly bearable. She stopped right before him, suddenly at a loss as to what to do next.

  “Good evening, Miss Eversea. Why don’t you sit beside me? The stars are particularly spectacular tonight, don’t you think? Dazzling. As if they’ve all had a good rinsing from the storm.”

  His voice was appropriately low for someone lurking in a garden at midnight. But there wasn’t a shred of triumph in it.

  She hesitated.

  He gave the bench an encouraging pat.

  She settled down next to him. The cement chilled right through to her bum, even through her pelisse. She pulled her fists into the belled sleeves of her pelisse to warm her hands. She ducked her chin, and looked down at their feet in disobedience of when the invitation had been to look at the stars.

  She looked up suddenly, as though she’d heard a sharp sound.

  As it turned out, it was the force of his gaze that had brought her head up. He was staring at her fixedly. He didn’t flinch or pretend he was doing anything other than baldly admiring her. One might even say devouring her. Imagining what he would like to do to her.

  Finally one corner his mouth tilted with a sort of lazy satisfaction.

  Devil. She thought she could see the constellations reflected in his eyes. A girl could forget her precise location in the universe when a man looked at her with eyes like those. She could forget where he began and she ended.

  “Aren’t you going to gloat?” she whispered peevishly.

  He blinked. “Gloat? About what? I thought you came out to admire the stars,” he reproved gravely. “I welcomed the company. For we’re here in your garden, in your father’s house, beneath a window where anyone craning their head properly could see.”

  Was he really toying with her?

  She was speechless with disappointment and embarrassment.

  He laughed softly, ruefully shaking his head. “You should see how disappointed you look. Honestly, Miss Eversea.”

  Bastard! Very well, then, she’d look at the bloody stars.

  “Ha-ha!” she laughed unconvincingly, tilting her head up. “Don’t be silly. You’re quite right, of course. I thought it a beautiful night. Who could be disappointed in these stars—”

  At some point as she spoke, in a motion as natural as an exhale or a stretch, he’d begun sliding his hands up her thighs.

  She stopped talking.

  And thinking.

  And breathing.

  She resumed breathing on a shuddery exhale.

  And as her thighs were bare apart from the garters holding up her stockings; his hands heated all the way through the fine silk of her dress to her skin. Every tiny hair on her body stood erect, as if craving his attention. She felt spangled with heat, cinders everywhere on her body. “Molten” rather described how she felt between her legs.

  He strummed his thumbs softly, softly, back and forth, back and forth, against her thighs.

  Oh God. She opened her mouth to reiterate: Only kissing.

  “Guh,” surprisingly, was what emerged instead. A sort of hybrid gasp-sigh.

  “ ‘Guh,’ indeed,” he agreed, softly.

  She would have laughed. But the sensation was too new and too total, and desire gathered with a distracting, heavy intensity beneath the weight of his hands, coaxed by those feathery stroking thumbs, and her entire body, brain included, was invested in enjoying that, not in making coherent sounds. She fought to keep her thighs from falling open like a trap door, inviting him deeper in. Was it cold? Were they outdoors? She knew only his touch.

  “I would never dream of disappointing you, Genevieve,” he reassured her on a rough-silk whisper that dragged against her imagination the way his fingers dragged along her thighs,
stirring possibilities into life.

  But he proceeded to do exactly that when his hands arrived at the top of her thighs and stopped. The sweet spot at the juncture of her legs gave a great breath-stealing throb of protest.

  He was closer now, so close she could feel the heat of his body, wear it like a second pelisse. And now that her very bones were molten—she had the presence of mind to consider that this had certainly been almost too easily accomplished—she had no choice but to flow right toward him.

  She tipped up her head as his mouth was coming down.

  You would have thought they’d done this dozens of times, rather than just once before, that it was more natural to her than breathing, judging from her sigh of relief. But he of course dictated how she would be kissed. And the kiss, too, was devastating, his mouth landing soft as moth wings, then sliding gently enough to show her how a universe of sensation and want could be coaxed from her lips. How the slide of his lips over hers could create craving everywhere in her body.

  “Fur,” he approved on a murmur against her mouth, because the backs of his hands encountered the lining of the pelisse as his hands journeyed up her thighs, along her hips, her waist, taking such savoring pleasure in her womanly curves it was like he was pointing them out to her deliberately, persuasively: You’re a woman. Don’t you see? You’re made for this.

  It was a decidedly dangerous way to think.

  She knew what to do. Or rather her body did. She wrapped her hands around his head, threaded her fingers into his hair, which was soft and cold, and slid down around his ears, which were chilled, and which she strangely wanted to warm for him.

  He sighed as her fingers dragged along his throat. She loved the sound savagely.

  His body was so hard. And so large. He was clearly so much stronger than she was, and she liked the fear of him and the sense of being enclosed and protected.

  It should have been awkward, the two of them twisting toward each other on the bench, but it felt effortless; she’d gone pliant with desire and heat. She loved the feel of his large, warm hands spread over the blades of her shoulders, and then the shivery light strokes of his fingers against the rectangle of bare skin above where her dress laced, dancing there, tantalizing her with the possibility that he might open the laces. The contrasts drugged her: his hard male body and his delicate touch; the scrape of whiskers against her own smooth cheek; his chilled skin and his hot, hot, velvety, savagely demanding mouth.

  He growled low in his throat.

  “Bit like a badger,” she murmured aloud, without intending to.

  “Pet names, my squirrel?” he murmured.

  She laughed.

  “Shhh,” he admonished. “No man enjoys being laughed at while he’s kissing.”

  His mouth abandoned hers but was traveling from her lips to her ear, down, down to the silky hidden place beneath her jaw. Every place his lips touched fired quicksilver communications to the far reaches of her body, until she was alight, shivering like a flame.

  And suddenly nothing was funny, and everything was urgent.

  She heard herself utter a word: please.

  And here, she knew, is when he began to lose his grip on control. Tension vibrating in his big body, desire tightly reined, his hands tightening on her, becoming less careful and purposeful and strategic, more demanding, which told her more about what he truly wanted. She sensed they were on the precipice of something dangerous.

  Good.

  His head dipped; his tongue drew a leisurely path to the base of her throat and his lips opened hotly there.

  It was her turn to make an animal sound: a low moan she hadn’t known she was capable of, the very sound of want. And his mouth opened on a slow, hot caress over the thump of her heart, beneath the soft swell of her breast.

  “Sweet,” he whispered.

  With a certain amount of effort he swept her onto his lap. She looped her arms around his neck. And he eased her around until, shockingly, she straddled him. His hands slid up her thighs again, beyond the tops of her silk stockings this time, to cup her buttocks, and to slide her closer.

  The bulge of his cock was seated hard beneath at the join of her legs.

  “God, Genevieve,” he swore.

  The contact sent a bolt of pleasure through her that made her gasp. She was suddenly afraid, and suddenly greatly in need. She might have said something, but his mouth was on hers again, drinking, capturing her tongue with his. His hands tense and trembling with want, fumbled at the laces at the back of her dress.

  And God help her, she helped him. She nearly dislocated an arm to reach back there. He spread them wide, and he tugged until he’d freed her breasts.

  Wait. They’d said they’d kiss again. This was something entirely different.

  The cold air was a shock against her skin, but he immediately cupped her breasts in his hands, which were miraculously warm. She closed her eyes. The pleasure was astonishing, unexpected, and she closed her eyes against the wondering expression in his as much as against the force of the pleasure.

  His thumbs stroked her peaked nipples, and each stroke was a sweet bolt of lightning through her body.

  She threw her head back at the exquisite shock of sensation and knew, somewhere in the distant reaches of her senses, that she’d gone mad.

  And also that she didn’t care.

  “Alex.” Her voice was threaded from her rushed breath.

  His arms slid behind her and he tipped her backward and closed his lips over her nipple.

  She jerked from the exquisite pleasure of it.

  He traced a hard filigree shape with his tongue, and her hands clutched his shoulders as the pleasure fired through her.

  And he slid his hands beneath her buttocks and pulled her abruptly tightly against him. His cock was so hard it hurt as she ground down against it.

  But she loved it. She trembled from whatever it was she wanted.

  He was so bold. He explained nothing, offered no clues, made no assumptions about her delicate senses. Her mind sought to keep up but her senses were overwhelmed and then in command and they managed to convince her mind it could sit this session out. A faint, faint echo of panic sounded within her, knowing this could be out of her control rather quickly.

  But he’d said she could trust him.

  He was arching up against her, and again she felt the desire pooling.

  “Alex . . .”

  She could feel his body quaking beneath her hands. And then his hand was gone and he was fumbling with the buttons of his trousers and suddenly his cock was against her, hot, velvety, thick against the vulnerable skin left bare above the tops of her stocking.

  She was afraid. But her skin felt as though cinders were falling everywhere on it, lightly, lightly, and a pressure welled, an exquisite need drove her.

  “I can’t . . .”

  “Christ, Genevieve . . .” He gasped it. He sounded astonished.

  “I want . . . need . . .”

  But she couldn’t speak anymore in complete sentences. Her breath was hot against his throat, and she could taste the salt and musk of him when she licked the cord of his neck.

  He stopped suddenly. Held her fast. Motionless. With arms like iron bands.

  His breathing was bellows; she could feel the sway of it against her torso.

  Why? What?

  And then cruelly he scooped her from his lap and stood her upright as surely as if she was a ragdoll.

  “No,” he said.

  She stared at him, abashed, and sick with disappointment. The air was icy now that she was away from his body; she felt it drying the sweat on her skin.

  “Control is rated too highly, Miss Eversea. I will not grind against you like a boy grinding a parlor maid. I will not spill in my trousers. And I was very close to doing exactly that.”

  Oh dear God. She was scarlet with embarrassment.

  “But I . . . we can’t . . . I won’t . . . I’m sorry . . .”

  He held up a hand.

&nb
sp; “I said that we ought to kiss again, and we have. Do not be sorry. Because I am not.”

  The words were rushed. Surely he hadn’t had a fit of conscience?

  And why should she feel affronted or abandoned if he wanted to preserve her virtue?

  She brought her hands up to her face, about to cover them with shame.

  And impatiently he swept them down again. He held them fast in his own for a moment.

  As it turned out, he hadn’t had a fit of conscience. Quite the opposite.

  His voice was still low, his breathing still ragged and short. He sounded peculiarly angry as he held her hands in his.

  “I want you badly. You want me badly. I want to make love to you. No more . . . juvenile fumblings. I want you naked beneath me. The decision is entirely in your hands.”

  And almost symbolically, he released her hands then. Gave them back to her.

  And to think she’d once enjoyed his honesty.

  As her body adjusted to its usual temperature, she pulled her pelisse more tightly around her. Shivering now from thwarted arousal and the loss of his heat. Shivering in fact a little from fear. She’d been on the verge of something remarkable. Of something irrevocable. Her ability to think was returning to her only in fragments.

  “And Genevieve . . . if you think this was good . . . if you sensed it could be incredible . . . you know only a fraction of what I can give to you. Think Boticelli. Think Veronese. Allow your imagination to run free. And you still won’t come close to the pleasure available to your body. It’s yours to take.”

  Bastard to leave her with kindling for her imagination.

  “Find me at midnight again if you want to know more, Genevieve. But those are the rules.”

  They stared a moment at each other in the dark.

  The stars stared down at them.

  “Why are you allowed to make the rules?” she whispered crossly after a moment. When really she ought to have been scandalized by the “naked and underneath me” portion of the conversation.

  He grinned at her. “Now, tell me. Is that something you would have dared say to anyone before you met me?”

  And as right as he was, it didn’t mean she should simply take what she wanted.

  He brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. His hand lingered there. She turned her face into it, almost involuntarily. Then he took his hand away quickly, as if he was afraid it would be the last time he touched her and he’d enjoyed it too much.