A Heart of a Duke Collection: Volume 1-A Regency Bundle

by Christi Caldwell

  An animalistic groan worked up his throat and she reveled in the helplessness of that sound. Emboldened she continued to tentatively stroke him when he suddenly caught her hand once more.

  She shot a questioning look at him. For the first time, the insecurity of being with a man who knew all in the art of lovemaking, a man accustomed to equally knowledgeable partners slammed into her. “Did I do something—?”

  Edmund kissed the question from her lips and in one effortless movement, swept her into his arms. He stalked through the length of the floral haven. The sweet scent of peonies and roses filled her senses. So this fragrant, floral heaven was Eden. He paused momentarily at the back of the conservatory and then pulled a door open. The crisp night air enveloped them in its fold as he stepped outside to the walled-in garden. Edmund adjusted her bodice and then set Phoebe on her feet.

  She blinked, as though dazed at the abrupt cessation of his caress. “Why did you stop?”

  Why had he stopped?

  Somewhere between the short walk into the gardens and this moment, the small, honorable sliver of a man who still existed hoped Phoebe Barrett would come to her senses. Hope that she’d realize he was a cad undeserving of the gift she offered with her eyes, kisses, and breathless moans.

  But that sliver of a man was just a fragment of who he was. The dark, selfish, hungry bastard that he was only knew he wanted her. Wanted her and planned to take what she offered.

  He shrugged out of his jacket, snapped the fabric once, and then deliberately set it down beside him. A wide-eyed Phoebe followed the garment as it sailed to the ground at the side of a rose brush, taking down with it several silken petals in its fall. “You will not leave?”

  She hesitated and then slowly shook her head. “I would have you take me on this journey.”

  Oh, God. He focused on his ragged breathing to keep from the innocent allure of that misplaced trust. Edmund stared at Phoebe through his lashes. “I am not so honorable that I will urge you to run. I have warned you, but your decision is yours.”

  Phoebe wet her lips. “I know that, Edmund.”

  That intimate use of his name on her lips drove him mad with desire and he closed the distance between them with a speed that brought a shocked gasp to those same lips. He settled his hands on her rounded hips and pulled her close. What hold did she have over him? As he took her lips in a demanding kiss, she met his desire with her own heated ardor. Edmund guided her gently to the ground and brought her down upon the fabric of his jacket. He came over her, taking in the rapid rise and fall of her chest. “Then come with me,” he whispered. “I will give you your journey.”

  In one fluid movement, he shifted her gown and chemise down to expose her breasts once more to the moon’s glow. The pink tips of her nipples puckered in the cool of the night. On a groan, he closed his mouth around the pebbled flesh and worshiped the bud. A shuddery gasp exploded from her lips and then she fisted her hands in his hair and held him close.

  Encouraged and afire with a hungering need for her, Edmund continued to lave the swollen tip. He blew faint puffs of air onto her nipple and then claimed it under his lips. Over and over he repeated the patterned movement until Phoebe splayed her legs open. “Please,” she begged.

  Every other woman to come before Phoebe had merely been an object with which to slake his lust. There had been no bond. No connection. But rather a cold, emotionless meeting of two like beasts. He’d given pleasure and gained pleasure, but there had been none of this fiery ache inside and out to possess a woman in any way and every way she could be possessed.

  Now, as he rucked up her wrinkled skirts and slid his hand between her legs to find her hot, wet center, he confronted the truth that she was different. Like a siren, she’d shaken down his defenses and tossed him onto the rocks, dazed, enraptured by her. With his hand between them, he teased the damp, auburn curls that shielded her womanhood.

  Her hips shot off the ground. “Wh-what are you doing?” she gasped, but her legs fell open in an unwitting invitation.

  With a slow grin, Edmund slid one fingertip into her honeyed warmth, relishing her broken cry. “I am exploring you, Phoebe. Learning what makes you cry with desire, tasting you so I never forget the taste and texture of you.” He toyed with the slick, wet nub of her center and she shot a hand out, covering his with her own, holding him in place.

  “D-don’t stop,” she pleaded, her words a breathless entreaty.

  “I do not intend to, love.” Fueled by the gripping need and an equal panic, he slid a finger into her dripping folds.

  “Oh, my,” she cried out. “Edmund.”

  He continued to work her, readying her for his entry and with each deliberate touch her cries took on a keening desperation that drove him to a frenzy.

  The unrestrained sounds of her desire, headier than any other moment that had come before this, made every woman of his past melt away. Phoebe’s innocence was an aphrodisiac; a drug he’d consumed and now it possessed him. Once he had her, he could, at last, be free of her maddening, witches hold.

  He parted her thighs with his knee and palmed her center with the heel of his hand, knowing just the pressure to drive her to madness. Phoebe screamed to the skies and he swallowed that unrestrained sound with his mouth. Sweat beaded the top of his head as he warred with the unholy need to thrust himself deep and pump into her over and over until he found release. His eyes slid involuntarily closed as she raised trembling fingertips and brushed back the sweat from his brow.

  Edmund reached between them and released his erect shaft from the confines of his breeches. He forced his eyes open and held her passion-glazed stare. “This is going to hurt,” he said gruffly as he laid himself between the sweet envelope of her silken thighs.

  “I trust you,” she whispered and splayed her legs open wider. A wall of emotion slammed into him, humbling him with her unwarranted faith and trust, in light of his betrayal. Her arms came up and she wrapped them about him, holding tight.

  Then with a groan he slid his length slowly inside her welcoming, hot heat. The tight walls of her virginal sheath closed about him, drawing him to the edge of ecstasy; an edge if he tumbled over, he’d never recover from.

  Phoebe moaned and shifted her hips.

  I am going to lose myself. I am going to spill myself like an untried youth all because of her innocence. Fighting the black thread of orgasmic ecstasy pulling at him, he moved himself deeper inside her core. With each drag of his shaft, her keening moans grew louder in volume. Edmund paused when he reached the threshold of her innocence. Take her. Take her now.

  Warring with himself, he slid a hand to her center and stroked her until those eager moans became hungry cries. “Forgive me,” he rasped and then plunged deep into the heaven of her body.

  Her cry ended on a shattered scream that he silenced with his kiss. Phoebe went taut in his arms and squeezed her eyes so tight a single drop slid down her cheek, ravaging him so that the desire to drive back her tears was even greater than the need to continue pumping himself within her until he spilled his seed.

  “I am so sorry,” he rasped. “If I could have spared you this hurt, I would have.”

  She gave a jerky nod and then forced her eyes open. Pain bled through her eyes but she mustered a small smile and something shifted inside him. And because the panic pounding away inside his chest threatened to overtake him, he began to move slowly, withdrawing, and moving forward. Until the pain receded from the blues of her eyes, replaced with the haze of desire. Then she flexed her hips, almost tentatively, and he increased his pace. Phoebe folded her arms about him and matched his rhythm. Their bodies rose and fell with the sheen of sweat slicking her skin, giving her an other-worldly beauty that shattered his logic so all he wanted was to lose himself within her.

  “I-I never kn-knew I could feel like this,” she rasped, echoing the very thought thundering through his mind. She raked her nails lightly down his back and he squeezed his eyes shut at the pleasure-pain of both that
seductive gesture and her words.

  Neither did I. Agony kept those words silent. One wrong word and he would be lost—in every way.

  Their thrusting took on a desperate, primitive beat and he slid his shaft in and out of her tight cavern. White light flecked behind his eyes. “Come,” he urged on a hoarse command.

  She arched her hips up, meeting his pounding rhythm. “Yes, take me with you,” she pleaded and then her slender body went stiff in his arms. Urging her on, he reached between them again and played with her nub. With a loud, desperate cry, the folds of her sheath tightened about him and she screamed her release to the heavens. Propelled onward by her surrender, Edmund pumped harder and faster, and then with a triumphant groan, poured himself deep inside her until every last logical thought, word, or feeling was drained from him. He collapsed atop her, sated. Edmund rolled to his side and pulled her against him.

  They lay there with time melting away, and instead of the sated sense of at last knowing her so he could move on from her, there was…guilt. He’d taken her as he would any other woman, when she’d been deserving of a bed and vows and all things good. Never before had any person’s interests mattered to him more than his own—until now.

  “What is it?” she whispered, as she plucked at the fabric of his shirtsleeves. She angled back and looked up at him with concern in her eyes. “Did I do something wrong?”

  She’d ask that when he was the sole, vile blackguard between them? He shoved aside the stirrings of guilt at having taken her in Lord Essex’s gardens and dropped a kiss atop her brow. “You did everything right.” His praise elicited a pale pink blush on her cheeks. Masculine pride at being the first to know Phoebe’s body filled him. Never before had he cared whether a woman had lain with another or how many lovers she’d known. This woman was different…for the idea of her sharing this with another filled him with bloodlust as a rapidly growing, insidious sentiment that felt a good deal like jealousy spiraled out of control. On the heel of that, a slow building panic spread through him. He abruptly sat up.

  “Edmund?” She looked at him through confused eyes.

  “Come,” he commanded gruffly. “You must return or your,” our, “absence will be noted.”

  Edmund retrieved his jacket and fished out a handkerchief. The intimacy of brushing the evidence of their loving and the traces of her innocence from her soft, inner thighs momentarily froze him. Through the years, he’d taken care to never spend himself inside a woman. In addition to not wanting to propagate the world with his bastards, he’d loathed the idea of that intimacy for the loss of control it signaled. Yet, in the moment when climax had been near, he’d wanted to brand her, Phoebe Barrett, as his. Terror ran roughshod over his muddied thoughts.

  “What is it?” she pressed, concern lacing her question.

  Edmund gave his head a curt shake, incapable of words. He’d thought once he’d taken Phoebe Barrett, he could purge her from his life. Loathing gripped him. In the end, she’d given a worthless bounder such as him the gift of her virtue and only fueled a growing hunger for her. He put her hair and wrinkled gown to rights, aware the whole time of her probing stare.

  Not another word was uttered however as they made their way from the gardens and into the conservatory. As he pulled open the door of Essex’s prized room, Phoebe hurried out of the room and back to the festivities. He stared after her.

  Would he ever have his fill of Phoebe Barrett?

  Chapter 11

  He didn’t come around. In fact, he hadn’t come ’round in more than four days. Phoebe stared into the contents of her cup of chocolate, while her mother and sister prattled on about fabrics and shopping excursions and all manner of things that didn’t matter.

  Despite his request to court her, his absence these days indicated that whatever sentiments she’d imagined between them were, in fact, imagined. It was as her friends had said of Edmund—men with his notorious reputation didn’t dabble in the respectable and they assuredly did not court ladies. Likely, he’d taken his leave of her and her stern-staring friends and remembered why he craved a rake’s life.

  Panic slapped at the edge of her mind. In a decision that had belonged entirely to her, she’d given her virginity to him. Even now, she could be carrying his child.

  Nausea churned in her belly and she tightened her shaking fingers upon the cup, just as her brother sailed through the open breakfast room doors.

  How could he be so carefree when her world had been so shaken by her actions at Lady Essex’s?

  “Mother, Phoebe, Justina,” he greeted, moving with the swagger of a youth just out of university. He stopped at the sideboard and heaped a plate full of eggs, bacon, cold ham, and warm, just made bread.

  Phoebe managed a lukewarm greeting and then returned her attention to her drink.

  “What is the matter with her?” Andrew called across the table as he slid into a seat.

  “She’s sulking.” Justina spoke with a maturity that brought Phoebe’s head up.

  “I am not sulking.” Her family studied her with matching stares and she shifted in her seat. “I’m not,” she said defensively. She wasn’t sulking. She’d merely been reflecting on her own regrets over Edmund and what might have been and why it might not have been and… She groaned and set her cup down. When she picked her gaze up once more, she found her mother and siblings still studying her. This time, regret and pity lined their faces.

  “It is about the marquess,” Justina said noisily, the overly loud whisper a secret to no one.

  “It is not—” They stared pointedly at her and she sighed again. It was the marquess.

  “What about the marquess?” Andrew asked. With no forthcoming response from Phoebe, he turned to first his mother and then his sister. Mother nibbled at her toast while Justina made a show of buttering her bread. They were loyal, the Barrett ladies. When he looked to her again, Phoebe picked up her fork and knife and made a show of slicing her already very sliced ham. With a frown, he waved over a liveried footman. “I, for one, like the gentleman.”

  Phoebe’s silverware clattered to the porcelain plate. “You know the marquess?” Her heart hammered wildly with this foolish desire for some additional glimpse of Edmund; the suitor who’d come and gone. But it was madness to believe he knew—

  “Oh, yes, know him quite well.” Suddenly, he glanced about, registering the intent stares trained on him and stretched the interminable moment out by taking a long sip of his coffee…and promptly choked.

  Despite the nightmare facing her as a fallen woman, a wistful smile pulled at Phoebe’s lips. For all his show, Andrew was really nothing more than a boy. That smile dipped. A boy who professed to know Edmund.

  “You know the marquess?” Phoebe was grateful when her mother spoke the question, sparing her from asking that very question a second time.

  “I know him, a bit,” he amended.

  “You merely read about him in the papers,” Justina said with a bluntness that raised the color in his cheeks.

  “I know him,” he persisted, sounding more like an insolent child in debate about his lessons with a nursemaid. “I told him all about Phoebe.”

  She choked on her swallow. “You what?” Her voice emerged garbled and her mind frantically raced to put to right Andrew’s words. “What did you say?” What had he said?

  Suddenly registering the severity of his interference, he shifted back and forth in his seat. “I merely told him you detested needlepoint.” Which didn’t seem a detail Edmund would much care about.

  “What else did you say?” she bit out.

  He furrowed his brow. “Well…”

  “Andrew,” his mother snapped, with more seriousness than she’d exhibited in the course of Phoebe’s twenty-one years.

  “I merely sought to gauge the seriousness of his…” She groaned over her brother’s words. “…intentions.”

  Phoebe dropped her head into her hands and shook it back and forth. No. No. No. But blast and double blast. Yes. Yes
. Yes. Andrew had no doubt gone and discussed that very intimate part of her and Edmund’s relationship, which likely accounted for why a notorious rake would suddenly cease to visit. Oh, God. Did he even now believe she’d sought to trap him into marriage? “What have you done?”

  “He seemed very interested,” Andrew said.

  She whipped her head up. “He did?” And then her heart promptly sank. If he’d been interested, as her brother said, he would have come by, but instead he’d disappeared. The one gentleman she’d ever truly felt a connection to—a man who knew the struggle of being labeled one thing by gossips, when he was, in actuality, a very different person. A person who dreamed and hoped. And a man who, in a stolen moment of magic, she’d given her virginity to. Fear curled her toes. For she’d now given the gift expected of any gentleman’s respective bride.

  “Oh, yes,” Andrew said after he’d taken several sips of his coffee. His lips pulled in a grimace, likely at the bitter, black brew. “He claimed he was uninterested in polite ladies.”

  Their mother gasped into her fingers.

  “He said that?” Phoebe dropped back in her seat, her heart dipping all the further. Her friends had been correct in their suppositions of the marquess, then. She struggled to breathe through the fear and panic weighting her chest.

  A twinkle glinted in Andrew’s eyes. “He did, however, profess to be interested in you.”

  She scrambled forward, a question on her lips, as with her brother’s flippant comment, hope was restored.

  The words however remained unspoken, as their father chose that inopportune moment to enter the breakfast room. They stared at him in mute silence as he scratched his enormous belly. He stared at them all with a frown on his florid cheeks. “Who is interested in whom?”

  Phoebe bit the inside of her cheek. She loathed the idea of her drunken, reprobate father knowing anything that mattered to her. If experience had taught her one thing about her useless sire, beyond how a marital connection could fill his rapidly depleting coffers, he had no interest in his children.