Desiring … her.
“Sarah. Now she was the epitome of a lady.” He quite literally looked down his nose as he said this.
“As opposed to me, you mean?” She arched a brow up at him, but it accompanied a dry smirk.
“Take it how you like, but try not to be too offended. I am a man of diverse faults and deficient merits. A right proper ass, really, and most of the people I ever held in high esteem are either dead or … missing. Conversely, Lord and Lady Anstruther were kind people. I ardently regret their passing.”
Her gaze was soft the next time she looked up at him, and a pleased little smile toyed at the corner of her lips. He had the oddest notion that she resembled a woman who’d found something she thought lost to her.
“I miss Edward every day.” Her confession stunned him, and for a moment, he almost believed her. With a delicate sound of victory, she freed the buckle and was able to pull the prosthesis away. While she set it aside, Cole covered the abrupt end to his forearm with his shirt, the empty cuff a stark reminder of what wasn’t there. He couldn’t, however, hide his utterly relieved sigh.
If she noticed, she didn’t convey it. “He seemed to recover a little toward the end.” She went on as he rubbed at the tender places made raw by the tight straps. “He would sit here in the garden with me and watch me paint when he was up to it. And once I was able to take him to the museum in his wheelchair and show him some sculptures he was so keen to see … It was the loveliest day I can remember.”
His gut twisted again with that odd and discomfiting sensation. Cole slammed a door on it, summoning all the cool disdain he possibly could. There was simply no possible way he was jealous of a dead man. The ache he felt had to be something else. His face contorted into a grimace of distaste. “You’re not asking me to believe that you … loved the old codger, are you?”
“And why not?” she asked hotly. “Of course I loved him. Not as a proper wife to her husband, granted, but like … like a dear friend. Perhaps a daughter to her father.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Don’t you dare,” she admonished him, the almost imperceptible register of her words lending them a great deal of gravitas. “Don’t you dare contaminate the companionship my husband and I had, or turn it into anything perverse. It was innocent.”
“Innocent?” Cole echoed. “Are you saying the marriage was never … consummated?”
“I don’t see what business that is of yours.” Though her voice conveyed indignation, her eyes darted away.
He had her. Perhaps if he frightened her enough, she would cease her dreadful schemes. “You are aware that if you’re a virgin, your marriage could very well be annulled.”
Her eyes widened. “Certainly not posthumously.”
Sensing her fear, he struck. “I might look into it. I wield a great deal of influence, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Why—why would you do such a thing?” she whispered, as though he’d wounded her.
“Because it’d be what you deserve. Shame on you, beguiling a decent old man on his deathbed, turning his ancestral home into little better than a brothel, and not even a useful one at that.”
Her features hardened, lips drawing into a tight line. “It should be beneath you to bully me thus.” She stood, obliging him to do the same. “I’ll have you know that I’m not a virgin, so you’ll not be able to carry through with your threats.”
Not a virgin? Some foreign, dark emotion drew the corners of his lips down. “Why does that not surprise me?”
The look she gave him brimmed with an irony he didn’t comprehend, but now he was too irritated to consider it. She made a caustic, brittle sound, wrapping her arms around herself as she did so, hunching against the evening breeze as though the world had become too cold.
“I’m not going to let you stop me, you know,” she said archly. “This charity is my purpose, my passion. I may not be able to save every unfortunate, but it won’t stop me from doing what I can.”
She had spirit, he’d give her that. But perhaps if logic and adversity wouldn’t dissuade her, dread might.
Cole stepped toward her, using his height to crowd her, forcing her to take a step back toward the doors. “You are such a little thing in a big, cruel world,” he murmured menacingly. “How will you manage all this, alone and defenseless?”
She took another step backward as he stalked her, but thrust her chin to a haughty angle. “I’ll manage quite well,” she said tartly. “We all have our impediments, don’t we?” Her eyes flicked to his empty cuff, and Cole felt the beast stir within him.
It wanted at her with a violence he’d never before felt.
His hand found its way to her throat. Her startled gasp both shamed and inflamed him. It was the only way he could make her see, the only possible way for him to force her to comprehend the mortal danger she was putting herself in.
“I will spoil you at every turn,” he snarled.
“I would expect no less from you.” By now, she had to tilt her head back rather far to look up at him, pressing the column of her throat against his hand.
“It would take nothing to destroy you.” He tightened his fingers ever so slightly, and the telltale jump of her pulse belied her unwavering audacity.
“Better men than you have tried,” she remonstrated, her eyes blazing green with a maelstrom of her own primitive emotions. “Yet here I stand.”
“You are a fool if you think any of those people in there are going to help you save every gutter whore from here to the East End once they realize you’re planning on bringing them here.”
She gave him a level look. “You surprise me, Your Grace, I rather expected you to have higher opinions of whores, as you are reported to spend an inordinate amount of time in their company.”
He leered at her. “I appreciate whores very much and like them to be what they are instead of striving for a title.”
Her eyes narrowed to glittering slits of wrath. “You should hear what they have to say about titled men. Apparently blue blood has a difficult time finding its way to the correct appendage. And even if it does, the experience rarely lasts long enough to be worth the trouble.”
She gasped a bit when her back found the panes of the door, but to her credit, her eyes never ceased burning up into his.
“The whores I’ve known have never left my company unsatisfied,” he purred, his finger drifting south, to curve over the delectable flesh at her nape, the sharp arrow of her clavicle, pointing down. Down toward the breasts now surging toward him with each troubled breath.
“How wonderful for you.” She mocked an impressed expression, but not before something else flickered over her features. Fear. Sadness. And something else … something that disappeared as quickly as it had materialized. “I suppose they’re paid not to complain. And I happen to know the ones who feign pleasure are better compensated.”
He made a droll sound. “I rather think I’m not too dense to decipher real pleasure from false.”
She lifted a lovely bare shoulder and rolled her eyes heavenward. “Every man assumes thusly.”
How was it that such a lovely, soft woman had such a sharp tongue? It was like being bitten by a butterfly. Most women would have been shocked into catatonia by this conversation, or at the very least reduced to tears. His hand was around her neck, for the love of Christ … or it had been. Now it was decidedly not. It had drifted and explored … which should have distressed her more than it did him.
But the countess Anstruther met his dark look with a mulish one of her own. God, it had been a long time since he’d felt so frustrated, so infuriated.
It was … rather glorious.
The scant air between them shifted, becoming heavy with promise, insinuation, and more than a little danger. “How is it, Lady Anstruther, that you know so much of my intimate exploits? Interested?” He punctuated the word intimate by leaning forward and catching his weight on his elbow, hovering above her. A moth’s wing wouldn’t have s
urvived between them.
“It’s only the worst-kept secret in the realm.” She rolled her eyes again, but her voice was certainly breathier than before, contradicting her pretense of remaining unaffected. “Everyone knows who you are and the manner in which you conduct yourself. The prodigal duke. The tragic hero. Gossip columns report what kind of powder you prefer to clean your teeth with, let alone the more salacious aspects of your life. Everyone knows how you’ve taken your second chance and done your best to ruin it in the most reckless, ridiculous ways possible. It’s an insult to those of us who toiled so hard to save you.”
“They bloody well know nothing,” he growled. “And I credit you with even less intellect than I first did if you believe what you read in the papers.”
“If not for a reporter, you’d never have been rescued,” she argued.
“I’m certain you’re feeling that your life would be a great deal easier had I not been found.” He meant to push away from her, to stalk out of her home and her life, but something about her expression froze him in place. Between the blood-soaked battlefields and messy assassinations, the numerous hospitals and even the Turkish prison, he couldn’t remember ever seeing such a deeply, truly wounded expression.
“You can’t even hope to imagine how I feel about it.” Her faint words carried a thread of steel, and so much pain he could no longer stand to look her in the eye.
Glancing down, his gaze snagged on her now-exposed throat as it struggled to swallow some incomprehensibly powerful emotion. Such a graceful neck. Soft and lovely with fragile, thin skin. The most delicate place. Well … among them. There were others.
Like the insides of her wrists. Or her thighs.
Her lips. Lips that might welcome him, that might part for him if he took them.
His head dipped low, his body curled around her. So small. So slight. And yet so warm.
Her tremulous breath brushed at his face, her features frozen. Paralyzed. Though her small, pink tongue slipped over her lower lip, leaving a delicious gleam of moisture there.
Fuck, suddenly he wanted to—
Surging up to her toes, she slammed her lips against his with such force their teeth almost clattered together.
Cole couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d taken a knife and stabbed him in the heart. Either way, that traitorous heart ceased beating. She not only stole his wits, she took his breath for good measure.
This was no searching, probing kiss from an aroused woman seeking stimulation or validation of his feelings. No exploration of sensual attraction nor the expression of tender affection. This was something hard. Something angry and wild. The explosive moment held them suspended in time, the frustrated heat of it searing its way from his lips to his cock. With this kiss, she seized control of the moment. Exerting her wishes upon him. She demonstrated to him with a definitive, unmitigated action that she was a creature in command of her own will.
He’d been so wrong about her. At first he’d thought her devious and scheming. Then perhaps sweet and simple, unaware and out of her depth.
But no.
This was no bright-eyed do-gooder latched to his mouth with all the craven audacity she could muster. She was a woman of desire, of spirit and determination. She was like a wild American mustang yet to be broken to a master’s hand.
Sweet Christ, did he ever want to ride her until they were both slick with sweat and pleasure. Until she was slack-limbed and docile.
The moment he decided to deepen the kiss, she ended it.
A new pallor flushed her skin as she held a hand to her lips. He realized with a hot stab in the pit of his stomach that she was as shocked as he by the electric current of arousal between them.
She recovered astonishingly well, her multicolored eyes glittering with triumph as they narrowed at him. “Don’t get any mistaken ideas of my intentions, Your Grace,” she said. “I merely wanted to see if your taste was as bitter as your conversation.” She gathered her skirts and made to push past him, her voice hitched with telltale breathlessness. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I—”
“Shut up,” Cole commanded, as he crowded her back against the door and captured her mouth again.
He wasn’t finished with her.
Cole made his kiss everything hers hadn’t been. Wet, probing, and utterly wicked. Though he had to brace himself against the door so his weakened knees wouldn’t have to support them both, he summoned all the skill and expertise she’d accused him of having and wielded it against her lips.
He licked at the seam of her mouth, more of a warning than an inquiry, before he claimed it with his tongue. In truth, he half expected her to bite him.
But she didn’t.
The moment a dark groan manifested in his throat, she came alive in his arms, clinging to his shoulders for stability. As he drank deeply from the well of shocking pleasure in her kiss, he found with sinister delight that her tongue tangled with his instead of retreating. Her mouth was hot and her lips so infinitely soft, he almost couldn’t believe they were real.
A part of him realized he’d conjured a firestorm in that moment. That everything that had been shattered and cold within him melted in an instant inferno, becoming liquid and incomprehensively hot. Ready to be molded into a weapon. Made to thrust. To penetrate.
And here was an opponent worth the battle.
With a ragged sound, she broke the kiss, ripping her mouth from his and surging to the side, out of his grasp. With clumsy, shaking hands she wiped at her mouth as though to erase any trace of him.
She stared at him in open accusation, her features twisted with dire anguish. “Why did you come here tonight?” she demanded with a half-sob. Her eyes, though suspiciously bright, remained empty of tears and full of antipathy. “Do you enjoy tormenting me so, that you would dedicate an entire evening to my humiliation?”
Cole pushed away from the door, turning from her and taking the time it took retrieving his prosthetic from the bench to collect himself. Why had he come? Why was he acting like this? Why, when his mind recoiled from her, did his flesh seem to crave her? It was as though his body betrayed him in her presence. He’d never had such a strong physical reaction to a woman he hardly knew. At least not since …
“Ravencroft wanted me to attend, and since I owe the man my life, I find it hard to deny him anything.” He answered her question with as much nonchalance as he could muster.
“Need I remind you that I also saved your life,” she railed. “And yet you have no compunctions about degrading me and threatening to take everything I have.”
Was that how she regarded his kiss? As a degradation?
“What have I done to you?” she cried. “Why must you be so beastly?”
We must be what we are, he thought. Beasts.
“I don’t like what you are doing here.” He turned on her, summoning his reserves of malice to coat the nerves that had become raw and exposed by their interaction. “I don’t like the noise of your renovations. I don’t want to live next door to whores, vagrants, and pickpockets. I don’t want to deal with the risks their associations bring into this neighborhood. I want peace, woman. Why can’t you understand that?”
“Is your peace and quiet worth a beaten woman’s life? Or a frightened child’s safety?” she asked, once again impassioned.
“Whatever it’s worth, I’ve paid twice the price. I’ve earned it.” He brandished his prosthetic at her. “You want to save all the whores in London, fine, just do it elsewhere.”
“These women, they’re not just whores, not merely a collection of orifices for your amusement. Some of them are mothers. Or daughters turned out by the very family who was supposed to protect them. They’re human beings.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he bit out.
“Do you? If you truly believed in their worth as women, you’d treat them with compassion instead of contempt. With affection rather than acrimony.”
“You know some big words for such a small woman.”
“And you have a small mind for such a big man,” she volleyed back, raking him with a disgusted glare. “I can’t believe I ever—” She pressed her lips closed, her little fists balled with fury.
“You ever … what?” he finally asked when the silence stretched longer than he was willing to bear.
“Nothing,” she breathed, turning against the door to open it. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to return to my guests.”
Like hell would she escape him with this left unfinished. “You can’t believe you ever what? Kissed me? Saved my life?” he demanded, seizing her arm.
She looked at his hand with sufficient contempt. “I can’t believe I ever welcomed you into my home. In the future I’ll make certain the door is barred to you.”
He released her immediately. “No great loss.”
“To either of us,” she agreed, and escaped into the house.
It took Cole a full minute to find his breath again, and another to gather the strength in his legs. He shook with so many fragmented emotions he couldn’t even begin to identify them.
Imogen Millburn, Lady Anstruther, was more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. For she brought out something in him he’d promised he’d left in that prison cell along with his hand.
That wild, primitive beast. A starving, wolfish creature who wanted to do nothing more than stalk and prowl. To leap and snare. To feast and fuck.
This beast was no duke. He was no man raised with genteel civility, with a care for the expense of things or the consequence of his actions. This beast was no longer dormant within him, but prowling beneath the surface of his skin, wanting to mark his territory.
And he’d found a delectable morsel just now, one he was in danger of acquiring a taste for.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It wasn’t a long walk from Mayfair to Belgravia, but Chief Inspector Carlton Morley went on horseback, his haste due to the brutal murder at the Anstruther manse. The fact that the Anstruther residence abutted the Grecian-style monolithic dwelling that belonged to Britain’s former most prolific assassin, Christopher Argent, didn’t at all set his mind at ease.
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