Pride & Passion

by Charlotte Featherstone

  She wanted to whisper his name, wanted to relieve the pressure that pooled within her, but she couldn’t. She was held hostage by his words, the look in his eye—the deep-rooted passion in his gaze.

  “Our first night together is too important. It can’t be anything less than what I’ve described. And for that reason, I’ll wait, and I might even pray, that one day—soon—you’ll see this marriage as something more than a duty forced upon you. And me, you’ll see me as a husband who could give you everything you need, a man who only wants to give to you, not take. Who wants to share everything he is with you, and have you do the same.”

  HE WAS DREAMING—a nightmare. Lucy heard the cry, followed by another. Creeping from the bed, she padded across the cold chamber floor and to the connecting door. Peeking in she saw him tossing and turning and she went to him, touched his shoulder.

  “Adrian?”

  He jolted and turned over, his eyes wild. He was frightening like this, and she took a step back, but he reached for her and grasped her, tugging her into bed so that she was sprawled out on top of him.

  “Adrian, you’re dreaming.”

  “I must be,” he said, his voice dark and sleepy, “because you’re saying my name, not ‘Sussex’ or ‘your grace.’”

  His lips pressed into her, and he pulled the ribbon free that held her hair in its long plait. His fingers threaded through the strands before he pulled her head down and kissed her hard. Melting into him she kissed him; let him explore her mouth with his tongue, her body with his hands.

  “Dark, cherry nipples,” he whispered. “I’ve been fantasizing about them since I first saw them.” Tugging the night rail over her head, he exposed her. Her naked flesh pressed against his, and before she could revel in it, he hooked his hands beneath her arms and lifted her up so that her small breasts dangled above his mouth. His eyes were dark, and she could feel the insistent pulse of his phallus against her core.

  “Perfect,” he whispered, then tongued them.

  She moaned, fisted her hands on his shoulders and allowed him to fondle her with his mouth and tongue. She was obscenely wet, aching, and she would have sat astride him if he would have allowed it, but guessing her plan, he lifted her off him and placed her on her stomach. His chest came down to her back, his lips nipping, searching, caressing, his fingers stealing around to her front, lifting her up so he could pluck at her nipples, pulling and tugging.

  “I’ve wanted you forever,” he breathed hard against her. Her nipples were scraping against the pillow, making them harder as he rolled and played with them. “I wanted you before I even knew what sex was.”

  “Adrian,” she moaned as he nipped at her neck and sucked.

  “You thought me passionless,” he growled, “but you’re wrong. I’m full of it. Bursting with it. My gut has ached with it, and it’s all for you. The first time I saw you I knew I would have you.”

  His hands left her, and she protested, but then he plumped up the pillow and lowered her until just the tips of her breasts grazed the cotton. He was rubbing his phallus against her bottom, and his hands were squeezing and pulling, letting him slip against her wet core.

  “He didn’t even make you come,” he growled as he lowered his mouth and kissed her hip. “Didn’t even take the time to taste, when I would have died for just a lick of you.”

  And then he was on his back, his shoulders between her thighs, and his hands parting her, smoothing and spreading. His breath was hot against her and she was shaking with desire and mortification.

  “Lower,” he ordered, and she couldn’t, just could not do as he asked. But he growled the order again, and as she obeyed, his tongue came up to meet her, pushing deeply into her flesh.

  She moaned, allowed his hands to curve her hips, his fingers to direct her movements, the rolling movements, the slow back-to-forward motions as he pleasured her.

  “My God, I love the way you respond to me.”

  She cried out when she felt him insert one, then another finger. “Please,” she gasped and begged, not knowing what she needed. It had never been like this with Thomas. It was all new, this frightening need to feel him moving inside her.

  “Adrian, please, please,” she moaned.

  “One night,” he teased, “you promised one night, and I promised to make it worth it.”

  Oh, that silly taunt, she thought, then shivered as his mouth and fingers found the perfect rhythm. What a fool she had been to deny this, to ever think him incapable of this.

  “I am dying,” she begged, increasing her rhythm, wanting more. “I need you inside me.”

  Never had a woman made him so aware of his virility. Everything about Lucy pulled and tugged at the primitive urges buried deep inside him. The desire to take and plunder was strong, almost impossible to resist. All his senses cried out to take her, to sink himself inside her tight welcoming body and claim her for himself.

  But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He wanted Lucy at his mercy, begging him to fill her, to take her as no other man ever had, or ever would. He wanted to hear his name uttered in her husky voice when it was full of passion.

  She rocked against his hand, his mouth, and he felt her reach behind her, touch him, try to grasp him, and he moved away, knowing he would never last.

  He watched as she learned and responded to the rhythm of his touch, her hips moving seductively in time to his fingers. It would be even more erotic to watch her move when he was inside her, encouraging her to take all of him, watching her lush thighs encase his waist as he stroked her deeper with each thrust.

  “Come then,” he whispered, pulling her down. Turning over, he said, “Open to me.”

  Her tongue came out to wet her lips and he captured it with his mouth, imitating what his body would soon be doing inside her. She mewled and struggled and slowly he entered her. His stroke was light, slow, purposefully not enough to give her release, but enough to make her plead for what she wanted.

  “Is this what you desire?”

  “Yes— No!” She twisted beneath him.

  “No?” He removed her legs from his waist and rested them against his shoulders. “What about this?”

  The minute Adrian set his mouth to that part of her, Lucy wished to scream. It was decidedly indecent and wicked, and decadent, and oh, she couldn’t think anymore, she didn’t want to concentrate on anything but the pleasure his mouth was giving her.

  “Ah, this is it,” he said between flicks of his tongue. “Yes, this is definitely what you want.”

  His words were arrogant, assured and laced with a lethal sensuality that Lucy was unable to resist. He was very male, and he made her feel very much like a desirable female.

  Her body began to shake, splintering her thoughts. And then he was inside her, filling her as she continued to tremble, his strong hands fitting her thighs against his waist as he pushed farther and farther into her body. Lucy moaned his name, unable to help or disguise the desire in her voice.

  “Come for me, Lucy,” he begged, and she clutched his hair, his hips pumping wildly into her. “I want to be the last thing you see, the last thing you feel.”

  She was close, so close, and he was whispering in her ear, dark erotic words, his accent looser and more guttural—gone was the politeness. The indifference. The respectability.

  “Yes. I can feel you clamping around me, squeezing me, milking me. Take me in you…let me come inside you, Lucy, hot and deep.”

  Feminine power infused her, and she reached down to snake her hands down his chest. They were staring into each other’s eyes, her hands clasping his cheeks, the ghosts gone, the gray warm and vibrant.

  “What do you see?” he gasped.

  Shaking her head, she couldn’t say, couldn’t form thought or words. She saw a past, a young girl staring across the kitchen at a feral, frightening male who would not stop watching her with his cold, emotionless eyes.

  “Adrian, stay with me!” she cried as she clutched at him, and brought her mouth to his s
houlder, which she made horribly indecent noises into.

  “I will, love. It’s all I’ve ever wanted—to be at your side, protecting you, making your dreams a reality.”

  The little death wasn’t little this time—it was impossibly long and beautiful, their skin slippery with slick heat, the musk of their bodies rising up, their lips and tongues and hands devouring, clutching, never letting the other go. Holding on to him, she fell off the cliff, holding him tight, listening to his primal sounds as they filled the room, and her soul.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE BED HAD grown cold and Lucy shivered, wanting her husband’s arms around her once more.

  “Adrian?” She had been awake for a while, watching him standing at the window, holding the carved bed in his hand as he stared out into the night. The snow had subsided; now only sporadic light flakes floated in the night, a brilliant white on a canvas of black.

  He stiffened when she spoke and, reluctantly, he met her gaze. “Rosie has begun to pace. I’ll get dressed and let her out.”

  This was not the man she had come to know. This was someone else, someone much darker, and it scared her.

  “What is it?” she whispered. Had she been too brazen, too eager for the marriage bed? Had she disappointed him? She felt like cowering in the bed, the bed where they had just made love, where they had become man and wife in the true sense of the word.

  “You’re frightening me,” she found the courage to say. “I want you to talk to me, tell me what you’re thinking, because your eyes shield your every thought, and I am left with only my own conclusions, none of which, I may assure you, are at all comforting at the moment.”

  Wiping his hand over his face, he sighed deeply. “Go to sleep, Lucy, it’s late.”

  “Don’t shut me out,” she demanded, but it sounded more like a pathetic plea. “Please don’t. I…I know I’ve been difficult, but I’m trying. I’m trying to make this work.”

  His gaze flickered to hers. “That’s the problem, you shouldn’t have to try. It should just be.”

  She was starting to feel panicked now. “I don’t understand what happened between then and now. I thought, well… I thought you enjoyed yourself.”

  He half turned, his gray eyes studying her. “I did enjoy it. I lost myself in you.”

  Heart skipping a beat, she wiped her hair out of her face and studied him from the bed. “Then what is wrong, Adrian?”

  “It’s Gabriel.” He gazed back at her, his eyes remote, full of ghosts. The only reminder of what they had shared was the dampness of his hair and the slick sheen on his chest. He had wrapped his lower half in a sheet, leaving her with the blanket. He was big and muscular and beautiful, and she had utterly lost her heart and soul to him. It was so confusing that it had happened—how it happened, but now seeing him standing there, pulling away from her, well, she wanted to cling to him and hold on for dear life.

  “Luce,” he whispered. “Did you hear me?”

  Shaking her head, she struggled through the images of what they had done, and tried to focus on him—his needs, which by all accounts were rather large at the moment.

  “I’m not who you think I am.”

  Alarmed, she sat up and rested back against the headboard, making certain she was covered with the blanket.

  “I’m quite certain that you’re my husband. I don’t think there are any loopholes left.” She grinned, but he didn’t return it, instead stared down at his hand, and the bed he carefully cradled.

  “I thought you might have reasoned it out—seen it—seen me when you clasped my face in your hands and looked into my soul.”

  Time seemed to stand still as she thought back to that searing moment of intimacy, when she had felt at one with him, when he had stolen her heart and soul. When their gazes locked, held on—she had seen something, and felt it, too. A searing connection that was profound and beautiful, and soul-shattering.

  And then the memory changed into something less sexual, but just as visceral—a connection in another lifetime, with another soul, with someone who knew her, her deeply held secrets, her girlish dreams and insecurities.

  “My God,” she whispered while she watched him, his eyes as haunted as she had ever seen them before. Her hand flew to her mouth and trembled against her lips as she looked him over, her gaze lingering on the scar that marred his eyebrow. “You are…you are…”

  “That arrogant little gutter rat who thinks himself equal to you.”

  That was what her father had called him—the butcher’s boy. Gabriel. Adrian had whispered it so softly, so painfully. She saw him as a boy, standing in the kitchen, his clothes tattered and torn, his dark hair in need of a cut and taming. In his dirty hands he held out the bed to her, his only words, “For you.”

  “I’m a bastard, Luce. Born in the stews, raised in the alleys of St. Giles amongst rubbish and animal offal. I am that gutter rat who came to your house and watched you. Who accepted your friendship because it was the greatest gift ever given to me.”

  “Adrian— Gabriel—” She paused, unsure of how to go on. “Dear God, I don’t understand. How this can be?”

  “Don’t you? It’s my deepest, darkest secret and I cannot go on lying to you. Not after tonight—after that.” He motioned to the bed, to her, and he closed his eyes. “I thought never to tell you, but it seemed a sacrilege to me to make you think I’m something I’m not. I’m a fraud. An impostor—well and truly beneath you. I never wanted you to know, not because I feared you would not keep my confidence, or that I might lose my title, but because I didn’t want you to look at me the way your father looked at me when he cut me from your life. What we shared tonight…it was beautiful, and all I could think of was that I would never lose you, never give you cause to leave me.

  “My God, I’ve never felt anything like it, and all the time I was watching you—taking me deep inside you, thinking how damn arousing and humbling it was the way you were giving yourself to me—a filthy by-blow. And then I began to think of how many years it had been that I’ve wanted you. How I never forgot you and swore when your father turned me away that one day I would come back, and you would look at me, and think me worthy of you—that I would know I was worthy of you. I was branding you, making you mine, making you forget everyone but me, every place but our bed, and finally I realized you were mine and I was worthy of you. But then…” He glanced away. “A bead of my sweat fell on you.”

  She recalled that moment, still tasted the salt of it as it dripped from his brow and landed on her lips. It had been him, his essence, and it had not repulsed her, but aroused her, made her feel feminine in his masculine arms.

  “It reminded me of the first day we met. I was filthy, and you took me to the water pump and washed my hands and face so that I could eat a tart with you. I was conscious then, as I was in that moment tonight, that I was so far beneath you. Rutting on top of you like a wild animal—like the gutter rat I was born to be.”

  “Adrian, Gabriel,” she cried. “What do I call you?” she pleaded as she tried to get her limbs out from beneath the weight of the blanket.

  “I have no identity.”

  “You must explain,” she whispered as she came to him, pressing up against him, trying to hug him. She was naked and vulnerable and cold, but she would weather it all; this moment was the crossroads—his crossroads.

  “Don’t walk away—not again. Please not again.” Taking his face in her palms she forced him to look at her. “I never forgot you, whenever you would look at me these past few weeks, I would think of him—my friend—and how your stare reminded me of his—intense and determined, silent, but knowing and seeing. I should have known it was you, so often you made me think of him—that boy I fancied…the one who listened to my dreams.”

  She was crying and he was brushing her tears away with his lips.

  “I just wanted to be yours—for you to be mine.” He sighed, caught her lips in his and kissed her, robbing her of breath as he held her close.
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br />   “Tell me all of it, everything,” she murmured between kisses.

  “I can’t,” he choked, pressing his face into her hair. “I can’t confide in you because the secret is so dangerous, so…I simply cannot.”

  He pulled away, and reached for his trousers. “I’ll be back. I need to clear my head.”

  She understood the need to run, but she was still afraid. He had turned away from her once, and disappeared amongst the humanity of the city. She had lost him once, and she wouldn’t do so again.

  Reaching up, she cupped his face and kissed him.

  “It’s fear that makes you run, but I understand it. I have done my fair share of running, too. But don’t run because you think I cannot look upon you with anything other than acceptance. I don’t see what my father saw. I don’t see that young boy. I see a man, Adrian. A man who is strong and passionate and honorable. A man I want to be married to—I want it,” she said, kissing him. “I want you. Please come back to me soon,” she whispered, and stepped back. It was the only thing she could do—for now.

  Watching him nod and walk out of the chamber was like a blow to her middle. She felt sick and frightened. Memories of the last time he had walked away made her run to the window, to stand watch as he emerged from the inn, Rosie slowly walking behind him.

  Gazing up, he saw her in the window, and stood there watching her. What a sight she must be, with her red hair wild from his lovemaking and her nude body covered with nothing but a sheet. She pressed a hand to the frozen glass, and he smiled: a slow, sad smile that broke her heart. How had she not realized she saw her friend’s eyes in the duke’s beautiful face?

  I love you. She wanted to say the words, but he turned away before she could. She stood there for a long while, searching into the black night for any sign of him and the liver-and-white spaniel that walked at his heels. But he did not return, and she collapsed onto the bed, exhausted from worry and crying, and fell into a deep sleep.

  “LUCY, I NEED YOU!”