In the hands of this man?
“No.” He held her eyes, watching her carefully. “No, Grace. He didn’t steal her. He begged her. The son of Zeus, the great deity of the Trojan War, he lowered himself to his knees and begged her to join him. He offered her wealth, jewels, immortality . . . if she just let him love her.”
She shook her head. “She refused again.”
“Why?” The story was fading, and there, at the edge of that single question, she heard reality. “He wanted nothing more than to give her the world. To love her and keep her safe, and give her everything she wished.”
“But not everything she needed,” she replied. “He couldn’t know what she needed—with him a god, and her a mere mortal.”
With him a duke, and her, nothing at all.
“She didn’t want the world,” she said softly. “Not from him.”
He nodded, urging her to continue.
“He wanted to gift her the future,” she said softly, “but she wanted to claim it.”
He paused for a long moment, until she wondered if he was going to speak again, one finger tracing the line of her jaw, over the soft swell of her lips. “What do you need?”
The question brought her such comfort. Such joy.
And hope beyond anything she’d ever experienced.
“I need you—” she said.
He waited. Ever patient.
And finally, she continued. “I need you.”
His eyes darkened at the words.
“Now,” she whispered. “Tonight.”
She didn’t say the rest—the bit that would change everything.
She didn’t say forever.
He might have heard it anyway, for how he kissed her, deep and thorough, rolling her to her back and coming over her to kiss her jaw, her neck, the slope of one shoulder, her breast, easing closer and closer to one straining tip. His lips softened over her and she sighed at the way he worshipped her, her fingers sliding into his hair, her back arching toward him, pressing closer to him.
Aching for him.
Not just for his touch, but for all of it, the intimacy of the caress, the care, the pleasure.
So much pleasure.
He followed her touch, his lips closing tightly around her, and he sucked gently, working at her until she was fisting his hair and whispering his name, holding him at her breast, full of heat and want, and slowly unraveling beneath his long, rhythmic sucks.
His hand was sliding over her hip, down the skin of her thigh, teasing her legs apart until she was open for him, lifting her hips to meet his touch, rocking against him. She ached with need, not just for the caress he promised, but also for the rest, for his eyes on her. For his lips on her. For his words around her. For him.
And then he parted her folds and stroked, finding her wet and wanting, only made wetter by his growl of satisfaction. He lifted his head from her breast and met her gaze. “You like this.”
She nodded, moving her hips in time with his strokes. “I like you.”
He stilled at that, and for a mad, fleeting moment, she wondered if she’d said too much. But if that was too much, what would happen if she told him the rest?
He stroked again, and her eyes began to slide closed. He stopped. “No, love,” he said, the word warming her as much as his touch. “I want you to watch.”
His fingers moved in lazy circles, there right at the heart of her.
She spread her legs wide. “Go on, then.”
They both looked down her body, at his hand, working her, and she slid her own over his, their fingers tangling, their breath coming heavier. Neither of them looked away when he said, “Take it.” He leaned down and took her nipple again, in long, lovely sucks that made her pant, his touch steady and strong, then faster, and she was arching up to him.
“Ewan,” she whispered. “Please.”
And then it was there, cresting, and she was rocking against him as he guided her through the pleasure, lifting his head to watch her claim it for her own. “There,” he growled. “Take it. Everything you need.”
She did, his watchful gaze a gift, a promise that he would always be there to hold her pleasure. To provide it. To revel in it. To guide her through it, as it threatened to unravel her.
When she was sated, he lifted his head, his hand now cupping her tightly, ensuring she received every last moment of pleasure.
Finally, she looked to him and raised her hand to the side of his face. “This was supposed to be yours,” she whispered. “I was to give it to you.”
“And you think you haven’t?” he said at her lips, stealing kisses between whispered words. “I feel nothing but the kind of pleasure that steals one’s sanity.”
She shouldn’t like that, but she did. “That good?”
“Impossibly good,” he said. “Christ, Grace. Pleasure with you—it puts pale to every other pleasurable thing I’ve experienced.”
“Have you experienced much pleasure?”
She didn’t know why she asked it. It shouldn’t matter what had happened in the twenty years that had passed. It didn’t matter if he had had lovers. It didn’t matter who they’d been.
She shouldn’t have asked.
He did not seem to mind. “No.”
She ached at the reply. At the truth in it. He’d been alone for as long as she had. Longing for something, just as she had.
Longing for her.
“I missed you too much,” he whispered, the words so soft that if they hadn’t been entwined, she wouldn’t have heard them. But she did, along with the truth in his voice. “Every day, every hour. I missed you.” A pause, and then, “To say I have missed you—it’s not enough. The word . . . it implies a natural occurrence. It suggests that if only I’d been home the day you called . . . if only you’d been on St. James’s the last time I bought cravats . . . then I’d have had a chance not to miss you. But what do we call the aching emptiness that I feel for you? All the time? Every day?”
Tears stung at the words, at the way he put voice to the emptiness that lived inside her, as well. An aching sadness, like a part of her was gone.
He kissed her again, urgent and full of that ache. “What do we call the loneliness, as though my other half has gone, never to return?” he asked. “What do we call that?”
Love.
“Ewan,” she whispered. Not knowing what to say. Not knowing what to think. Knowing only that she wanted to give him something to ease the ache.
To ease her own.
And then he froze, his breath stopping in his throat. Her eyes flew to his, but he wasn’t looking at her face.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She had a tattoo on her left shoulder.
He hadn’t noticed it before then—it had always been covered by straps and bodices and sleeves and, when he’d stripped her naked earlier, by her riot of red curls. And then, he’d been so riveted by her eyes and her face and the way she gave herself up to desire that he hadn’t noticed.
But now he did, on her left shoulder three inches down and six in from the outer edge of her arm, a tattoo, in black. One he recognized because it was the foil of the mark he carried in the same spot on his own body. His, a white scar—one she’d tended mere nights ago—twenty years old and still raised and puckered, the punishment he’d been given for loving her.
The punishment he would have taken again and again, if it meant keeping her safe. And it had.
She had run, and she had built herself a kingdom and a palace alongside his brothers, whom she now claimed as her own. And he’d imagined that she had done everything she could to forget him, from the moment she fled, believing him the monster he had made himself to be.
But she hadn’t forgotten him.
She’d carried him with her.
Because there, on her shoulder, three inches down and six in, was his mark, the M his father had carved into his own flesh, turned ninety degrees.
No longer an M for Marwick.
Now an E.
F
or Ewan.
His breath caught in his chest, heart pounding, and he couldn’t find the words to speak—the heavy weight of that mark suddenly proving that everything he had done, everything he had been, everything he had sacrificed, had been worth it, because she hadn’t forgotten him. She had carried him with her.
He reached for the mark, and she turned her head, to watch as he stroked his fingers over it, smooth on her perfect, soft skin. He covered it with his palm. “Did it hurt?” His words came out ragged, like his thoughts.
“Yes.”
He looked to her. “You don’t mean the tattoo.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“No masks,” he whispered.
“It hurt,” she said. “Everything hurt. For days and weeks.” He closed his eyes, his chest tightening at the words as she went on. “I missed you like air. I would wake up, in the dark, in the dank, in the rain, in the cold. And I missed you. And I climbed those fucking buildings in Mayfair, and counted the fucking chimneys, and imagined that one day you would leave him. And leave that place. And leave your title, and come back to us.”
Her eyes were full of tears, glistening in the candlelight. “No. Not us. Me. I imagined you would come back to me.” One tear spilled over, dropping on the hand he held over her tattoo. Searing him. “And you didn’t.”
I wanted to.
Every fucking night. He’d lain in his bed in that godforsaken house in the middle of nowhere and he calculated the exact path he would take to get to them.
“I hoped the tattoo would ease the pain. Like drawing out the poison.”
Christ, he hated being poison to her. “Did it?”
She met his eyes then, holding his gaze for a long moment, so he could see the truth when she said, softly, “No.”
The word was a weapon. A needle, inking his heart. “Grace.”
“God, I hated that name,” she said, the words coming more freely now. “I hated the way it invoked you every time Devil or Whit used it.”
“I have had the same curse—to be haunted by you every time a bowing servant or mincing dandy or matchmaking mama addressed me as Your Grace, I ached with fury. It was a constant reminder that my Grace was nowhere to be found.”
She looked to him. “And is that what I was? Your Grace?”
“It is all I have ever wanted.”
“Tonight?” she said.
“Always,” he replied. “Forever.”
He lifted his palm from where her skin seared him, leaning down to brush a kiss over the mark there, before finding her eyes again. Reaching up, he covered her hand, on his own shoulder, with his, and he said, “You told me that my mark made me his forever.”
She went soft at the words, as though she wished to take them back.
“No.” He didn’t want her regret. There was enough of it between them for both their lifetimes. He shook his head. “If that is true,” he said, “does your mark make you mine?”
She slid her hands into his hair then, pulling him down to her. And in the heartbeat before she set her lips to his, she whispered, “Yes.”
And with that single word, she set him free. He levered himself up, over her, letting her command the kiss, letting her explore him thoroughly. And then he was exploring her, sliding his bare leg between her own as she wrapped her arms around his neck and lifted herself to meet him, and gave herself up to him.
He growled at the feel of her against him, so warm and soft, the strong muscles of her thighs coming around his waist as the kiss turned rough and carnal, as though she had been waiting for it for as long as he had. Grace matched his desire; lifting against him, pulling him closer, opening for him, giving him everything he asked for. And then, as if that weren’t enough, she broke the kiss with a little sigh, and said, “Make me yours.”
On more than one occasion over the last years, Ewan had thought it possible that he was going mad. But that moment, when she whispered those words, delivering herself to him, he was the closest he’d ever been to it. Mad with desire. Mad with hope. Mad with need.
He tore his lips from her, giving her scant space to breathe. “If I do that . . . if you allow it . . . it’s not just tonight.”
She stilled, her beautiful brown eyes on his. “I know.”
Did she? He didn’t dare hope.
“It’s not just this week, or this year, Grace.” He took her face in his hands. She had to understand that. Had to make her own decision. “I want to start again.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“I want to be everything you desire.”
She smiled, and he nearly stopped breathing at her beauty. “I thought you wished to be everything I needed.”
“That, too,” he said, kissing her. “That, too.”
“In that case,” she said, her gaze going dark and languid as she lifted her hips against him, pushing the hard length of him against her softness once, twice, until they both groaned. “Make me yours.”
Mine.
His control snapped with the single word and they were both moving, hands and mouths exploring, his hands on her skin, her fingers raking through his hair as he made his way down her body from her lips, down the column of her neck, worshipping again at the tattoo on her shoulder, and then over her breasts, giving each pretty brown tip a lingering suck until she was arching up to him.
He continued his exploration, painting kisses across her torso, reveling in the strength of her, the ridges of her muscles—honed over the years with fighting and scaling the rooftops of London. He paused on the soft, barely-there swell of her belly, and she giggled as he ran his cheek, rough with an evening’s growth, over the skin there.
Ewan lifted his head at the magnificent sound, simultaneously familiar and foreign. “Covent Garden’s queen is ticklish,” he teased.
She smiled to the ceiling. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Never,” he vowed, repeating the movement and reveling in her laugh—and the way it quickly turned breathless—and she placed her hands at his head and lifted him to stare up at her, across the beautiful planes of her body. “It’s my secret.”
She smiled. “Keep it well.”
He would—and he realized in that fleeting, magnificent moment that he would spend the rest of his life keeping her secrets.
Just as she had spent so much of her life keeping his.
He pressed another kiss on her sensitive skin and moved again, in a slow slide, until her legs parted and he was between them.
“Tell me another secret.”
She sucked in a breath at the words, spoken to the core of her. Satisfaction thrummed through Ewan at that, and he leaned forward, parting her gently with his thumbs, to look at her.
“Christ,” he whispered, the sensation of words on her hot, wet flesh clearly enough to make her wild. “I’ve never seen anything so pretty as this.”
“Ewan,” she gasped. “Please.”
He let out a long stream of cool air, straight to the core of her, and she shouted her frustrated pleasure at the sensation. “Tell me another secret,” he said.
“I want you,” she whispered, and the words came out so graveled and distant that it felt as though she’d given him a gift.
“Good girl,” he said, pressing a kiss to her thigh, high up, where she was all sensation. She lifted her hips, rocking into the air, searching for purchase, and he thought he might die from the stunning look of her, pink and wet and hot as flame. He moved, setting one finger to the top of her folds, and she sighed, the sound so remarkable, it took all his energy not to spend then and there. “Yes, there,” she said, frustrated. “Do it.”
She was so ready for him. Slick and wet and perfect.
He moved that single finger down the center of her, loving the hitch of her breath, the little cry she bit back as he circled the straining nub at the very top of her folds. He rubbed gently, up one side and down the other, and she finally released the cry. “You like that,” he said, softly, more to himself than to her.
&nb
sp; She swore again, the language coarse and powerful and perfect proof that she was coming unraveled. He lingered there, at that spot, stroking and rolling, exploring her until she was doing the work, using his touch to find her pleasure. “That’s it, love,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to the soft skin of her thigh. “Show me what you like. Show me what will make you scream.”
The words set her aflame, and he slid another finger into the hot, wet center of her, up to the first knuckle, just far enough to feel her pulsing around him. She widened her legs and thrust up. “More,” she gasped. “Please.”
“You ache here, don’t you?” he asked. “Poor love. Does it hurt?”
“God, yes. I want . . .”
“Tell me what,” he said. “Tell me what you want.”
I shall give you everything.
“I want . . .”
My mouth, he willed her.
He was going to die if he didn’t have his mouth on her soon.
She didn’t say it. She did one better, threading her fingers into his hair, fisting tight, and putting him precisely where she wanted him. “That,” she panted, as he settled his lips to her, holding her wide and licking her in long, thick strokes. “Oh, yes.” She sighed. “This.”
She tasted like sweet and sin, and he feasted on her, reveling in the taste of her, in the way she rocked against him, taking her pleasure, unashamed of it, her hands in his hair, holding him tight to her as she moved. And all the while, she spoke, his filthy love, telling him all the ways he was doing right. “Yes,” she gasped. “Right there.” She gave direction and he took it, eager for it, for all the ways he could drive her wild.
Slow circles became gradually faster, his tongue working in time to the rhythm of her hips, and then she called out his name, and he could hear she was nearly there. He continued on his course, reveling in the taste of her as he gave them both pleasure beyond anything he’d ever experienced.
And then, just as she reached the point of frenzy, she looked down at him like a fucking goddess and said, “Shall I tell you another secret?” His eyes met hers across the length of her body, and he nodded, not wanting to leave her for a moment.
Daring and the Duke EPB Page 27