Duchess of Seduction (Hearts in Hiding Book 3)

by Beverley Oakley

  Later she would accept him back into her bed with her former enthusiasm, now that all restraint had been banished between them and each knew, secretly, the desires of the other.

  Her climax was cataclysmic. She bucked and moaned, twisting her hands in his hair as she fought against it, finally crumpling to the floor beside him, her breath coming in short bursts.

  Kneeling, he stared at her, a slow grin spreading across his face. Clearly she was determined not to show herself, for the mask remained firmly in place, but she’d know that he’d know her body, her responses, the scent of her desire, anywhere. Justin had never believed in keeping secrets, but tonight was an exception. If secrecy for the meantime gave Cressida the confidence to realize her potential in the marital chamber, she could have as much of it as she wanted.

  In a minute, he would retire to regain his composure now that he’d taken her to the zenith of her pleasure. Then he’d meet her back at home, where she would dictate how to proceed.

  After that, there’d be no looking back. He would coax her into confessing her fears, and he would reassure her that there were ways other than complete abstinence to achieve her desires.

  Their desires.

  Soon they would be as one again.

  He was caught by surprise by her low, wicked laugh as she rolled onto her stomach and clawed her way on top of him, her little fingers clumsy in their haste as she grappled with the buttons of his breeches.

  He could hardly believe it. Now she was straddling him, her skirt hiked up to her waist, her soft lily-white body pulsing to receive him. He tried to raise himself to cast a seeking hand for the receptacle which contained the French letter, but Cressida was now nuzzling his neck, kissing his throat. It was thrilling to be the object of her desire like this, but it was certainly no way to ensure they did not to add a sixth little angel to the nursery .

  No, tonight he’d imagined a far more cautious return to sexual intimacy. With perhaps a great deal of talking and a revealing of identities to precede a gentle, pleasurable exploration of each other’s bodies.

  Cressida had chosen to retain the secrecy. He could not reveal that he knew her, call her by name. Yet what should he do when she was hell-bent on satisfying her extraordinary desire? She must have forgotten herself. And her fears—though if Justin wanted to reclaim such exquisite carnal pastimes on a regular basis, he could not forget himself under the onslaught of her unbridled enthusiasm.

  “Wait,” he ground out as he gently but firmly pushed her hand away and rose to his feet, his eyes scanning the mantelpiece. To his horror, the book in which he’d secreted the French letter he’d initially doubted he’d need tonight wasn’t there. He cast around the gloom, but could not see where it had fallen. It must have happened when Cressida had been gripping the mantelpiece just seconds before.

  Cressida froze, her fingers still beneath his hand as his protest reverberated round her fevered brain.

  Uncertainty replaced desire like an arctic wind through an open doorway .

  She’d come here in disguise, fully believing Justin knew exactly who she was. She had the Queen Anne’s Lace seeds and had douched herself with vinegar to afford her some protection against conception. It was by no means as effective in preventing conception as a French letter, but she was prepared to take the chance, intending this moment to be the greatest gift she could give her darling husband after ten months of silent resistance to his loving overtures.

  Now his words tore asunder her confident assumptions.

  Justin’s reluctance to consummate their sexual congress suggested he really did not recognize her or that he was in the habit of receiving strange women in Mrs. Plumb’s private sitting room.

  She shrank back from him. He did not want her? No, it could not be that. In which case, it could only mean that he did not know it was her. But Justin would never involve himself so wantonly with a stranger. She was too confused and uncertain to know what to say. Could he really kiss and fondle and suckle a desirable, unknown woman as long as he virtuously refrained from penetrating her so he could still guiltlessly smile at his wife over breakfast the next morning?

  She could not see his face beneath his mask in the dim light, but she sensed he knew something was amiss.

  “Please! Just wait a moment. I...I’m looking for something. We mustn’t get carried away .”

  Carried away? Not wanting her reaction to strike a discordant note, she smoothed her skirts and rose with dignity while she re- buttoned the front of her dress, saying in a strained attempt at sounding jaunty, “We did get carried away but...it’s late and time I left.”

  “Don’t leave. Wait. I must find something and then we can—”

  But Cressida wasn’t waiting to hear more. The roar in her ears drowned out his protests as she hurried to the door, fumbling with the key in an attempt to put this, her greatest humiliation, behind her.

  It was a humiliation, wasn’t it? She wasn’t overreacting? Overreacting at the fact her husband baulked at the final moment of consummation suggesting that tonight’s frenzied prelude to sex was just that?

  “Please, stop... We need to talk about this.”

  She ignored him, still too confused to know what to say. She’d exposed herself in a way she’d never believed possible, and he’d egged her on all the way, only to reject her at the end. Revenge? Tit for tat? He really didn’t know it was her?

  Oh God, she should remove her mask this minute. Reveal her identity and uncover the truth, except that Justin’s reaction had been so unexpected she couldn’t help but think she’d missed something gravely important and had just made herself the biggest fool ever.

  “Please wait!”

  Still she ignored him, blinded by hot, mortified tears as she finally turned the key .

  His hand grazed her arm but she knocked it aside as he cried out, “Why come here if not to torment me? I have precautions, but we cannot proceed without them.”

  Dear God, so he was prepared to make love to a stranger, she thought wildly, pulling open the door then slamming it upon his hand so that the last sound she heard was his cry of pain.

  At least that might act as a dampener in case the next available widow was only five minutes away, she thought bitterly, as she ran down the passage.

  “Cressida!”

  The sound of her name stopped her mid-flight, and she sagged against the wall. Squeezing shut her eyes, she dragged in a deep breath and forced reason to the fore. She looked down at her hands, balled fists, and tried to control her trembling. Justin had just called her by name. What a fool she was. Her brain had been trying to assimilate the worst-case scenario, when of course she should have known that Justin had everything under control.

  He knew exactly who she was and why she was here. Somehow he’d cleverly guessed, without her telling him, that her greatest fear of intimacy was conceiving again. He’d merely wanted to halt proceedings to protect her.

  Joy surged through her. She nearly wept with relief.

  Of course Justin knew who she was, just as he’d known last Wednesday. He’d allowed her to proceed with her outrageous seduction at her own pace, hinting though never alluding directly to it in his loving letters of this past week to her in Bath.

  Still mortified but quickly filling with hope and excitement, she waited for him to come to her, reflecting with shame upon her cool response to her darling husband’s flood of correspondence while she’d been tending impossible Great-Aunt Jane. She’d been too blinded by her own fears and lack of self-confidence to read between the lines and properly interpret his letters as an attempt to reason out her confusion.

  Raising her head, she smiled at him, happiness radiating through her like treacle through her veins.

  “Oh, Justin, I’m so sorry—” she began as her wonderful, beloved husband strode up the passage toward her, his masquerade mask now discarded, raking his hands through his disheveled brown hair.

  She put her hands up to untie her own mask, excitement mounting at
the thought that in seconds, their stupid charade would be at an end and she’d be where she should have been for the past ten months—in her husband’s arms. They’d waited far too long. Now, within minutes, they could be right back in that room, or, better still, in their own bed, finishing off the wonderful business that had brought them here.

  As she clutched at her wildly beating heart, Cressida saw her own hopes mirrored in the expression on his face, and her heart surged with love and longing.

  “Justin!”

  They both turned at the cry, checked by its note of desperation, and Cressida felt her joy turn to confusion as the figure at the end of the passage ran toward her husband and Miss Mariah threw herself into Justin’s arms.

  “Oh, Justin!” Just two simple words but uttered in such heart- felt tones that Cressida needed to be a fool not to understand that some deep emotion bonded the two of them.

  Justin did not push the woman away. He did not unclasp her fingers, which gripped him behind his neck. He did not step politely away. No, his expression changed from passion to some- thing curiously deeper in a response that quite clearly conveyed to Cressida how much this woman meant to him. Miss Mariah?

  “Madame Zirelli!”

  She heard the name from the lips of a nearby patron who stopped in the passage and stared, confused a moment, before moving on.

  Miss Mariah was Madame Zire!i? The woman who had been Justin’s mistress before he’d married Cressida.

  In the moment that the truth revealed itself, Cressida traded hope and happiness for the sorrow of all the world’s betrayed women. She would have preferred anger to the heartbreak that consumed every hope for their shared future she’d ever allowed herself. What a fool she’d been to have missed what had been staring her in the face. The woman to whom Justin had turned during these long months when Cressida had not wanted him had indeed been his old mistress, as Catherine had insisted at the ball.

  “Justin, I always knew I could rely on you!” Miss Mariah wept. Cressida’s stomach roiled and she felt the bile, excoriating and bitter, burn her throat.

  Apparently unaware of Cressida standing a few yards farther up the passage, Miss Mariah’s limpid gaze encompassed only Justin as she clasped his shoulder, pulling him down for her kiss, her greeting revealing a depth of feeling between them that went beyond friendship.

  Or anything a wife would condone.

  Heaving in a wrenching breath, Cressida brushed the tears from her eyes and picked up her skirts, ignoring her husband’s imploring call as she gathered speed, all but running along the corridor and out into the street where her carriage was waiting.

  As she pulled in her trailing skirt, she heard his desperate cry from the top step of the portico.

  “Cressida, come back!”

  She rapped on the roof, signaling impatiently for the coachman to go.

  “Cressida, it’s not what you think. Talk to me—!”

  He was at the carriage door, grasping the handle, while she gasped her anger and outrage to John the coachman in one imperative command that he obey her and whip up the horses. Hunched up in the carriage, numb and trembling with shock, she dared not look out through the window in case the sight of Justin, pleading and confused, staring after her in the street, caused her to weaken her resolve and turn back.

  She’d accepted that Justin had a very good reason for being at Mrs. Plumb’s. No, she hadn’t questioned that at all. At every turn, she’d given him the benefit of the doubt before challenging her greatest fears in order to give herself once more to him.

  What a fool she was.

  Justin would follow her and try to make her believe some concocted story, but right now she needed to talk matters over with someone who knew all about straying husbands.

  For hadn’t Justin been just like James only worse. At least James no longer pretended he cared for Catherine.

  Chapter 11

  The moment Catherine received her, Cressida realized her error.

  For a start, the house was in darkness. She’d hoped to find her cousin up and playing cards or recently returned from an evening out and full of post-revelry cheer.

  Instead, a glowering Catherine appeared at the top of the stairs, an enormous muslin cap covering her elaborately dressed hair and a shawl thrown hastily over her nightgown.

  “Good Lord, Cressy, do you know what time it is?” she demanded. “Unless Justin has thrown you out, I’ve not the patience to listen to tales of Thomas’ teething woes.”

  Cressida swayed at the bottom of the stairs, her anguish over recent events turning to indecision. She’d not come for a sympathetic hearing, for there was scant kindness in Catherine at the best of times, but she’d not expected such a vituperative greeting.

  Oh Lord, what had possessed her to seek out Catherine? It was Justin she should be speaking to, not her viperish cousin. She was bound to Justin for life and, if he could explain his way out of this or persuade her out of her misery enough to enable her to forge ahead, a happiness only temporarily wounded was more than most wives could hope for under such circumstances.

  With a brittle smile, she dropped her hand from the newel post and turned back to the front door, saying over her shoulder, “I beg your pardon, Catherine, and apologies for disturbing you. I’ve decided to return home after all.”

  Gathering up her skirts, she prepared to make her exit, unable to shake the image of the woman she’d considered her friend, cozily making up to her husband at Mrs. Plumb’s.

  She could forgive Justin. She must...

  For a moment, she thought she was going to be sick and doubled over.

  “Cressy, stop!” Catherine seemed only then to take in the extraordinarily daring cut of Cressida’s gown, for her eyes widened then gleamed as Cressida turned. Then gasped at the sound of a vehicle drawing up in apparent haste by the front door before heavy footsteps sounded.

  “My, my, Cressy, love...marital dramas!” Her cousin hastened down the stairs and took her arm, leading her back from the door. “You’ve come to the right place. I apologize for my rude welcome, but I’m never at my best when my slumber is disturbed.”

  “Then I shan’t continue to disturb you,” Cressida said, dignified while she prepared for Justin’s entrance. At least he’d valued her sufficiently to make coming after his wife his priority .

  Even if Cressida’s recollections of the familiarity between her husband and Madame Zirelli—who had known each other intimately before Cressida had even met her husband—continued to make her feel ill.

  She clenched her teeth. Not only had she been deceived, but she’d been made a laughing stock, and by a woman she’d trusted. It only proved how naïve and credulous she was.

  When she opened her eyes again, Catherine was hustling her into the drawing room, leaving the butler to attend to the pounding on the door.

  “I made a mistake. I must go to Justin.” Cressida tried to pull away, but her cousin held her firmly, pushing her down onto the Egyptian sofa and adopting an attitude of the greatest solidarity as she positioned herself close, her arm about Cressida’s shoulders.

  “So I was right?” The edge of prurient interest was greater than the sympathy for which Catherine obviously strove as she pursed her mouth and patted Cressida’s knee, saying, “My poor love, I thought you were the lucky one, and that nothing could touch the magic that seemed all too apparent between you and Justin. Now you see he’s like all the rest, and you have to learn that sorrow is a woman’s lifelong companion.”

  Her words were cut short by the drawing room door being thrown open over the whispered admonitions of Catherine’s butler that Justin wait to be announced.

  “Evening, Catherine. I’d like to see my wife, alone.” His glance did not even encompass his wife’s cousin. The tightness around his mouth and the flare in his eye as he rested his gaze upon Cressida indicated the storm raging within. These were not signs with which Cressida was familiar. Her husband was the mildest of men in the most trying of circumstance
s. Never had Cressida seen Justin so discomposed.

  Despite the raw hurt that scored deep into her heart, there was no denying Cressida’s pride at being allied to such a handsome man, or her admiration as she raked her gaze over his tall, determined form. Certainly these were cosmetic, but it had always given her a thrill to know that Catherine—and others like her—envied Cressida her husband for his outward charm, good looks and obvious intelligence, in addition to his pocketbook. Catherine must indeed be curious as to the extent of Justin’s manly attributes, which only Cressida—well, she’d thought this until only recently—was in a position to know .

  As Cressida’s eyes met Justin’s, the intensity of his look sent her stomach lurching. In an agony of anticipation, she watched him rake back his hair and draw in a breath...to apologize? Beg her forgiveness?

  Catherine’s grip on her arm dug in harder but Cressida ignored her cousin as she shifted away, staring at Justin as if seeing him for the first time. Relief had made her weak and she nearly succumbed to tears on the spot, despite the suspicion of his infidelity and the guilty knowledge of her own part in pushing him away.

  But Justin wanted her. At least, he wanted her more than he wanted his old mistress, and if Cressida valued her happiness, she must show the good sense to sweep everything under the carpet and simply forgive and forget. They were bound to one another for life and, if he’d strayed, it was only because she’d denied him his marital rights for longer than any red-blooded male could reasonably be expected to survive.

  She rose to go to him. Justin was her world. She belonged with him. The warmth of his gaze, his kindling look, made this clear.