A Duke in Disguise

by Cat Sebastian

  Then she bent her head and licked the head of his cock, her tongue warm and wet and different from anything he had imagined.

  “Verity,” he groaned. “Oh God.” Her hand was wrapped around his shaft, and she was regarding him with the intent curiosity she would devote to a new book or an interesting argument. Then she sucked lightly on the head and he cursed. There was nothing for it but to swear himself blue. He couldn’t touch the soft strands of hair that fell onto his thighs, he didn’t dare move his hips to bring himself further into the sweet warmth of her mouth. He held himself impossibly still and gritted his teeth as her lips closed around his length.

  “You like this?” she asked innocently, raising her head to face him. Her eyes were bright with amusement.

  “It’s tolerable,” he said, because that was the game. “I’ll endure.” He let loose another volley of profanity as she drew him into her mouth again, because he could take the game only so far. He gave himself up to her, let his mind be consumed by pleasure, by sensation, by Verity.

  When his muscles started to hurt with the effort of not thrusting into the slick warmth of her mouth and his wrists chafed against the crisp linen, she pulled off him and came to straddle his thighs. Her lips swollen and her hair a mess, she looked at him carefully, as if to assess whether he wanted this as much as she did.

  “Be my guest,” he offered, gesturing with his chin in the direction of his cock and speaking with as much sangfroid as a man could while bound to a bed and tortured to within an inch of his life by the woman he loved. “Have at it.”

  She teased the head of his cock against her soft, wet center and he let out a strangled groan. Finally she had mercy on him and sank onto his length, enveloping him in that velvety heat. He watched where their bodies joined, watched his cock disappear inside her, watched the sway of her breasts as she sighed when he was fully seated. She moved her hips and moaned and that was the end of his self-control. He bucked his hips up into her, because even with his hands tied and the unspoken rules of this game between them, he could not hold back any longer. He needed relief, he needed more.

  She responded by leaning forward, her hand braced on his shoulder, her breasts tantalizingly close to his mouth. He reached up and captured a nipple between his lips, and was rewarded when she made a sound of undiluted pleasure. He kept going, kissing and thrusting and doing everything in his power to wait, just another minute, just a little more.

  “Ash,” she breathed. “Ash, I can’t. I need more,” she said.

  “Touch yourself,” he said, and then she was clenching around him. The force of her climax nearly brought on his own. “Now, Verity,” he said, urgent. She lifted off him and he watched himself spill in her hand.

  “Plum,” he groaned when his breathing returned to normal. “You are going to kill me. I think you might already have done.”

  “Pity,” she said, leaning over him to untie his wrists. His hands, once free, felt light and strange, as if they didn’t belong to him. She wiped her hands on the cravat and threw it aside. “I think I could go again.”

  “Come here.” When she didn’t move, he tapped his chest. She got the message then, and crawled up his body, kneeling over his chest. He pressed his mouth to the apex of her legs, swirling his tongue around the place where she had touched herself. Her taste, her scent, her wetness against his lips, the soft whimpering sounds she made as she tangled her hands in his hair—he felt unspeakably grateful to be this close to her, to be able to show her with his body some fraction of what she meant to him. At that moment, he knew he’d never choose to be apart from her, he’d do whatever it took, whatever she needed. He stroked inside her, slow and deep, and something he did must have been right because she swore.

  “Do that again,” she breathed. “Please, please.” She was begging him. And the idea of Verity Plum begging for anything was enough of a novelty to make him smile against her skin as he moved his fingers inside her, drawing another litany of oaths from her.

  Afterward, she collapsed beside him, her head pillowed on his shoulder and one leg flung across his hips. She had pulled the bed quilt over them, and they were cocooned together, warm and close in a single drafty room within a house that maybe, once upon a time, had been their home.

  Later, after they had dressed, and were standing by the door of the cold, darkened shop, making lazy conversation to avoid saying good-night, she reached into her pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper. “I’ve been meaning to give you this. Nate left it on my desk before he left, along with a note saying I could print it if I wanted. You’ll see straight away that I couldn’t do anything of the sort. But it’s Nate at his most Nate-like. It felt good to hear his voice. It’ll be a while before we can expect a letter, and I thought you might like to be reminded that you have friends.”

  It was too dark in the shop to read, so he tucked the paper into his coat pocket. “Thank you.” He brushed his lips across her forehead. She knew him well enough to understand that he had, despite his attempts to be reasonable, experienced Nate’s leaving as an abandonment, and she was doing what she could to mitigate that.

  “When will I see you next? Will you keep coming back to me?” she asked.

  His first instinct was to tell her that of course he would, that he wanted nothing more. But this wasn’t only about his desires; he needed to know that she wanted this as much as he did. “Are you asking me to?”

  “Yes,” she said, after only the smallest hesitation. “I . . . hell, Ash, I think I need you.” Her gaze was fixed at some point over his shoulder, as if the words had cost her a lot. And, knowing her, they probably had.

  He drew her closer to him. “I love you, Plum. I don’t know how to stop coming back to you and even if I did I wouldn’t want to. Marry me.”

  “You’re deluded.” She pulled away to arm’s length, her face pale and outraged in the moonlight. “You and Portia both. And your aunt. One, you’d be a pariah.” She ticked it off on her fingers. “Two, my skin crawls at the idea of having a title. Three, I would rather eat worms than live in that house.”

  He tugged her back to him. “One, if Portia Allenby and my aunt are already contemplating our marriage, then I don’t think we’d be utterly friendless. Two, so does mine but I’m bearing up. Three, we could live elsewhere.”

  “We could carry on like this,” she countered, gesturing between them.

  He wanted to argue the point, but knew that the outcome of this discussion didn’t matter. “Look, I want to marry you, Verity. It’s the thing I want most in this life. But if you don’t want to marry, then we won’t. I’ll take you on any terms you offer. Weekly visits. Monthly visits. I just need to know that you’re a part of my life.”

  “Really?” She sounded surprised, but happy. “Even if I fell pregnant?”

  The prospect of having an illegitimate child filled him with something twisted and shameful. But he knew that it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. “We would care for any child we had under any circumstances,” he said. “I trust you, and you trust me. We’d make it right.” Because that was the truth. No matter what, marriage or no marriage, children or no children, negotiating a life together required a lot of blind faith in the goodwill of the person beside you.

  Her only answer was to kiss him in return.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Anything you do will reflect on him,” Portia said, dropping an armful of dresses onto Verity’s sofa. “If your names aren’t already connected, they will be after this. You must dress the part.”

  “What part?” Verity asked.

  “Don’t be obtuse.” Portia said, frustrated. “People will be assessing you as a potential duchess. If you’re suitable, they’ll say little. If you’re unsuitable, they’ll have a lot to say. Even if you only intend to be his lover, I can tell you that a mistress of a well-known man comes under similar scrutiny. I’m not suggesting you array yourself in peacock feathers and a sable coat. You could wear Amelia’s brown velvet pelis
se and promenade gown, or we could take in my dove gray sarsnet round dress with the black pelisse. Both are discreet but visibly costly. In fact, you ought to take both ensembles, and keep them, because you’ll need to look above reproach every time you leave your house.”

  Verity clenched her teeth. There would be other places where she had to give way, bits of herself that would be eroded by the force of this thing Ash had brought upon them. But for Ash, she’d do it. She’d do that and more and somehow she’d be glad for the chance to help him. “Fine,” she said. “I can do that.”

  “Another thing, Verity dear,” Portia said, her words careful and measured. “If I could have married Ned, I would have.” Verity was startled to hear Portia refer to her late lover as anything other than Lord Pembroke. “In a heartbeat. You’ll make your own choice, but if I had had the chance to marry Ned, I wouldn’t have whistled it down the wind, not for the world.”

  Verity tried on the brown velvet gown and let Portia tame her hair with a pair of tortoiseshell combs. She drew the line only at a pair of pearl earbobs that pinched dreadfully.

  “Brave girl,” Portia said, surveying her one last time before leaving. “It’s hard to let a little bit of yourself go.”

  Equipped with a wedge of cheese and a brand-new copy of the latest volume from the author of Waverley, Verity curled up on the sofa. But the novel failed to hold her interest. She didn’t want to read about doomed highlanders or failed rebellions. She rooted around in her pocket for a much folded and creased issue of the Examiner; she had been carrying it around for days on the theory that she might finally get around to reading in it a poem that everyone from Portia’s girls to the lads in the shop had been talking about. But when she thumbed through the pages, she found that she could read the words, see that they assembled into something beautiful, but they meant nothing for her. What use did she have for the sculptors of crumbling statues, dead kings, or travelers—all of them men, all of them gone, all of them with their heads lodged firmly up their backsides. The poem seemed to rebuke the hubris of leaders without realizing that it, too, fed into that cycle of pride in which men celebrated the deeds of other men, generation after generation. When Verity thought of a toppled monarchy, the statue of a tyrant half-buried in sand, she felt none of the melancholy that the poet seemed to want his reader to feel; instead she was filled with hope that maybe this tyranny, too, would pass, that maybe she would live to see a world in which the deeds of men were not the only measure of accomplishment.

  She took off her spectacles and abandoned her reading. She thought of her mother and Lady Caroline, both of their existences shaped by the whims and demands of the men they depended on. She thought of Portia, who had fought hard for a degree of independence, only to wager the lion’s share of her savings on finding men to provide for her daughters. She thought of nearly every letter written to the Ladies’ Register, all asking variations of the same question: how was a woman to live her own life when she was dependent on the men nearest to her. Verity herself had jealously guarded her independence, refusing help lest it spill over into control.

  She thought of Ash, and the way they felt for one another. It was the height of madness to love someone and be loved in return, and to throw that away as if it didn’t matter. But they had both done it—he by leaving her, her by going to him with what must have seemed a tepid offer of friendship. They were now cobbling together some sort of understanding, but she still didn’t know if the final result would be anything either of them could live with. And yet, for Ash, she thought she could live with almost anything that let them be together.

  She dropped the Examiner and reached for the small hand mirror that Portia had left beside the sofa. Inspecting her appearance at arm’s length, she expected to be alienated by what she saw, she expected to feel like she was participating in some kind of mummery. But all she saw was herself, rendered acceptable for Ash’s world. She could do that. She would do that.

  It was a dangerous thing, this being in love.

  “You look pretty,” said a voice in the doorway. “Is that my dress? It suits you better.”

  “Amelia!” Verity nearly dropped the mirror. “How did you get in here?”

  “I sort of sailed past your shopman and he didn’t know what to do. He was hardly going to tackle me. I’ll apologize on my way out.”

  “If you’re looking for your mother, she left an hour ago.”

  “If I were looking for my mother, I could have remained at home. I waited until she was closeted with the cook before slipping out. It’s you I wanted to see.” The girl twisted her hands in her fur muff and Verity raised an eyebrow. “It’s about the book. I need to know—have you printed it?”

  “You’ll need to be more specific,” Verity said, narrowing her eyes.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to make me admit this.” Amelia sank into the chair that Verity thought of as Ash’s. “The Princely Pretense, which I wrote with your brother. Have you printed it? I thought I could just take the money and be done with it, but a third of the fee you paid me was meant for Nate and now I don’t know what to do with it. Also if the book is actually”—she sketched out a vague rectangle with her hands—“a book then I want to see it.”

  “Well.” Verity stared at the girl. “I suspected as much—”

  “Of course you did.” Amelia rolled her eyes. “How many people do you know who would write a book about Perkin Warbeck?”

  “What possessed you?”

  “I have to do something to earn a bit of money. Otherwise I stay up all night thinking of penury and Mama says that’s bad for the complexion. Sleeplessness, that is. Not penury. Although, that too, I expect. So I wrote the book and was thinking of sending it off to a publishing house. But when you mentioned the possibility of printing . . . that sort of book. I talked to Nate and we, ah, collaborated. No, that isn’t a euphemism.”

  “It doesn’t need to be! My brother wrote an obscene book with a child of seventeen—”

  “Eighteen, now,” Amelia said grandly.

  “Collaboration, indeed! I assume he wrote the, er, bedroom scenes? I knew I recognized his penmanship, or lack thereof.”

  “Well, it’s done, so are you going to let me see it?”

  “I suppose the illustrations aren’t that explicit,” Verity mused.

  “Illustrations!” Amelia all but shrieked, clapping her hands together. Verity gave up any semblance of protest and went downstairs, returning with the first volume and the proofs of the second and third.

  “Are people actually buying it?” she asked as she paged through the first volume.

  “Yes,” Verity assured her. “We’re doing the next two volumes at the same time. It’s a very engaging story, Amelia. You could do it again, even without Nate’s contributions. If you’re looking for a way to support yourself, that is.”

  Amelia went pink, more from happiness than embarrassment, Verity thought. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve already started a novel about Isabella of France.”

  “Or you could write a book about somebody who isn’t . . . dreadful.”

  “Why on earth would I want to do that?” Amelia asked, scrunching her nose in distaste.

  Only after Amelia left did Verity realize she had conducted the entire conversation in a velvet gown and with tortoiseshell combs in her hair. It was a reminder that fine gowns or tatty frocks, she was still herself. Maybe this was a chance for her to decide what parts of her life she wanted to keep and which she wanted to leave behind. She was so used to digging in her heels and fighting to keep things that were hers, that she hadn’t thought of letting go as an option, let alone an opportunity. But whether she wanted to or not, things were going to change for her, and she could take advantage of that, but only if she trusted Ash enough to ask him for help.

  It took three footmen to clear the way for Ash and his aunt to enter Westminster, and once they reached the courtroom themselves they found it packed nearly to the rafters with noisy spectators
. Only when the judge pounded his gavel and the barristers began making their speeches did the cacophony settle into a restless whisper.

  Ash felt hundreds of eyes on his back as his uncle’s barrister described him as a grifter and a cheat, an impostor and a liar. He kept his face impassive, only reaching out to hold his aunt’s hand when the lawyer’s invective turned to describing Lady Caroline’s betrayal and hinting at a hereditary insanity. They had expected as much, but hearing it said in a packed court, in front of people who knew them, made Ash feel exposed and ashamed. It was a reminder that there would always be those who believed he was every inch as bad as his uncle’s lawyer insisted. Ash’s mind turned to what his uncle would do when the trial was over. Regardless of the outcome, Ash didn’t doubt that his uncle would retaliate against Ash, Caroline, and even the duke. He was a violent man, accustomed to getting his way.

  When the court recessed, he took a surreptitious glance at the crowd on the way to an antechamber with his aunt. On the balcony he saw Verity sitting next to Portia Allenby. She shot him a small smile and waved discreetly. She was wearing a hat, which was so singular a circumstance he could only stare. He mouthed hat and gestured at his own head, and he would swear on his life that she actually blushed.

  Later, his aunt took the witness stand, telling of how, after witnessing her brother push her orphaned nephew down a set of stairs, she had sent the injured child away with her lady’s maid and a purse filled with coins. His uncle’s lawyer asked all the questions Ash’s solicitor had told them to expect: if she knew for a certainty that her brother had attempted to take the life of an innocent child, why not inform her father? Her answer—that she expected her father to support her brother’s murderous efforts—made the courtroom explode into a buzz of conversation.