The Duke
Page 32
Imogen glanced at his prosthetic, the whole of it visible as his shirtsleeves had been rolled up at some point during his vigil over her. He couldn’t mean that.
Although … Could it be she’d not dreamt of him lying next to her? That he’d really been there?
“I mean it.” His voice allowed no question.
Her breath left her in a rush, half gasp, half sob, as Imogen lifted her arms to beckon him to her.
Suddenly he was there. Her covers were gone and he replaced them, clutching her to him as he took her offered mouth with ferocious gentility. Clinging to him, she relished the heat building inside of her, answering the scorching flames he licked into her mouth with a demanding tongue. She tasted love on him, love and fear and earnest need.
Desire fanned through her, at once tensing and releasing her muscles. She turned into a puddle beneath him, her legs falling open, her body making way for his weight.
“Good sweet God,” he groaned. “I’m going to taste you everywhere.”
He cradled each side of her face like a monk at prayer, one hand warm flesh, and the other cold steel. So much like the dichotomy of this man.
His lips fanned over hers with skillful, drugging pulls. His tongue made wicked swirls inside of her mouth, exploring with unapologetic languor. The groan was that of a damned soul finding sanctuary. His tongue, a sword of silk, penetrated and retreated in a rhythm that flooded Imogen’s loins with passion.
Abruptly, she pulled away. “Where is everyone?”
His brow furrowed with confounded indignation, lips wet and hard above her as he processed her words between panting breaths of mounting lust. “You interrupted what was possibly the best kiss in the history of the empire to ask such a question,” he said tightly.
She loved this arrogant, grumpy beast with all her heart. “I’m about to make love to you, Your Grace, and I don’t want to be interrupted.”
The temperature in his eyes flared from molten to volatile. “Your mother forced everyone to go to church to pray for you.” He touched his nose to hers with sweet affection that caused her heart to double in size, simultaneously slipping a hand to wander perilously close to her breasts. “Lovely woman, your mother.”
“Bless her pious heart,” Imogen agreed, then arched her body against his, silently pleading for him to resume her ravishment.
He lit her blood on fire with his next kiss, then knelt up and over her to grapple with his shirt, his frantic hand less dexterous than it had been before.
“Here, let me.” Imogen batted his hand away, unfastening his shirt and pulling it down wide, breathtaking shoulders. “I suppose dressing and undressing you will be one of my many wifely duties,” she said, discarding the garment to the floor before spanning her hands over the familiar width of his chest.
“I have a valet,” he argued haughtily, then stilled, ceasing to even breathe, though his heart thundered beneath her palm. “Did you say wife?” His voice was laced with a hesitancy she’d never before heard from him.
She nodded, her throat full of emotion. “I love you too,” she managed.
Struck similarly mute, his eyes shone with something more powerful than heat, more eternal than lust. More selfless than need.
Gently, slowly, he slid the bodice of her nightgown off her shoulders, and she helped him ease it away from her.
His hot gaze roamed her like an impatient surveyor would an uncharted land, as though he couldn’t decide where to explore first. He settled for the arch of her throat, barraging her with an assault of kisses as they both worked to free him of the rest of his garments.
Ripples of warmth sang along her skin when his lips reached her breasts, taking her nipples into his mouth and stroking them into taut and tender peaks. She made a soft sound underscored with desire, her fingers digging into the hard power of his shoulders. She’d not known she’d been pushing him lower until he complied, the tense muscles rippling as he descended her body, marking the journey with his tongue.
Oh Lord, perhaps she wasn’t ready for this just yet. To say “I love you” was one thing, to … to let him do what he … well, that was quite another.
“Oh…” She lost her breath as he imprisoned her thighs open, not preparing her at all before the flat of his tongue spread her sex apart.
Imogen gasped, and bucked, knowing the moisture he trailed against her intimate flesh wasn’t only from his mouth, but from her body.
An appreciative moan vibrated against her, sending echoes of pleasure to her every extremity. Another unhurried lick cleaved her world in two, though he stopped the moment before he reached the quivering pearl of her clitoris. He circled it instead, stopping to nibble here, to tease there, tormenting her with skillful evasion.
“Cole,” she begged, desperately grasping for his hair. “Please.”
Another pleased groan caused her feminine muscles to clench against the sensual promise in the sound, and she surged against his mouth. He latched on to her then, his clever tongue flicking and laving, creating sensations of overwhelming delight.
She cried hoarse relief to the canopy as wave after wave of crippling ecstasy crashed over her. Her breath came in sobs and inarticulate words. It felt like bliss flowed from his tongue into her body, bowing it with paralyzing spasms until the fingers she’d used to hold him to her now clutched at him to pull away before she expired from ecstasy.
His glossy lips lifted with wicked masculine delight as he prowled up her body. He wiped his mouth before hunkering over her, his movements impeded slightly as he carefully situated his left arm.
Imogen reached for it, and didn’t miss the hesitation that overtook his posture.
“You don’t need this,” she soothed. “Not with me.” He didn’t look at her as she unbuckled it and set it aside, though a nearly inaudible gasp escaped him as she smoothed soft fingers over the rounded skin left with similar marks her thighs suffered after she removed her garters at the end of the day.
Then he was pulling her beneath him, his strength absolute, and his alacrity remarkable.
The blunt head of his cock prodded her, finding where desire and release made her wet and open. Locking his eyes with hers, a tenderness there she’d not read before, he rolled his hips forward, feeding her inch by agonizing inch until he filled her completely.
Her body. Her heart.
Retreating, he glided inside once again, aided by her slick desire, sinking a little deeper with each gentle thrust. At last he rested, fully seated, inside of her. Heated steel sheathed by silk and velvet.
The way he looked down at her broke Imogen’s heart. It was the astounded, incredulous expression she imagined the family of Lazarus felt once he awoke from the dead. An interruption of pure grief. A revelation of something eternally lost.
A little bit worship, a little bit disbelief. A vulnerable incomprehension of happiness.
“How could I not have known?” he moaned, dropping his head from his powerful shoulders to shower her with light, reverent kisses. “How could I not have recognized you by how badly I wanted you?”
Slowly, he withdrew and pressed forward once more, their breaths mirroring one another’s in perfect synchronization. “Wanted this.” He lifted and sank with dewy, pulsing friction. “Only you. No one else ever…” He trailed away, losing the ability to form words as he became intent upon the growing ferocity of his rhythm.
Imogen relished the sensation of his hard, male body moving against her. The strength in his corded arms. The weight of his chest against her breasts. The defined curl of his abdomen with each thrust. Even the way the coarse hair of his muscled legs tickled the inside of her thighs.
He thrust deeper, ever deeper, and she lifted to meet him, chasing a thrum of sensation coiled around her spine, the promise that if she could angle just …
There. In one, long, smooth stroke he stretched her wider than she thought possible, filled her to glorious effect, and she lost herself over a precipice from which there was no return. She distantly
heard him growl her name, and she tried to answer him through pleasure that shattered her into a thousand pieces.
It wasn’t until they both melted into an entwined knot of contentment that Imogen returned to herself. Overcome with emotion, she held him to her, one hand stroking over the straining muscles of his back, the other threading through the silk of his hair.
He breathed out in a sigh so long and hollow she wondered if he expelled tension and emotion kept there for three long years.
They remained joined, clinging together, no longer separated by secrets or walls. They let their hearts beat next to one another as rare sunlight broke over the city.
Finally, he stirred, pulling away, his face a mask of sorrow and shame when he gazed down at her.
“Last night…”
She pressed soft fingers against his hard lips. “We don’t have to speak of the past.”
He kissed her hand, and then covered it with his own, moving it from his lips to enlace their fingers. “I was hurt,” he conceded. “Wounded that you weren’t searching for me. That I was right in front of you for so long, alone and lost in absolute darkness, and you didn’t reach for me … I don’t blame you, understand that, I just…”
“I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to reach for you,” she said. “But I was afraid. I didn’t know how to find you. If you were still there. If you’d even want me anymore.”
He tucked a tendril of her hair away from her face, true veneration smoothing the regret she read in him. “How could anyone not want the warmth of the sun on their face after so long in the shadows?” He became serious. “You are the only light I’ve known. And I must warn you, the sun cannot shine so bright for me now that I’ve lived in darkness. You were right about so many things, but especially that.” He held his empty wrist aloft, and she covered it with her hand. “That year changed me. Carved me away from myself, until I barely even recognize the face in the mirror. I have clawed my way back to some semblance of humanity, but I fear—I know—I cannot be the man I was when we met.”
Imogen lifted her head and nuzzled at him, melting at the sibilant sound he made deep in his throat. “Then I will love the man you have become. And if you live in the shadows, I’ll find you patches of sunlight, and we’ll venture into them together when you are able.”
He clutched her to him with a desperate strength that almost hurt. “I will love you for your light, if you can love me through the dark times. And that love will be like the clear night sky when the moon is full. Not like the sun … but beautiful and bright enough to find our way.”
A tear escaped Imogen’s eye and slid between them, though this one carried happiness instead of sorrow.
She realized with a little alarm that he hadn’t yet released her, that his body remained tense with an emotion other than pleasure.
“What’s wrong?” she inquired, soothing a hand over his bunched muscles.
“When I think of the things I said, of how I took you last night…” He buried his shame in her hair. “God, I was such a beast.”
“You are such a beast,” she teased, rolling her hips beneath him and smiling when he twitched within her. “To me, you have always been a wolf.” She blew across his neck, watching the skin burst into gooseflesh and a ripple chase down the muscles of his spine, making his cock gloriously full once more. “You know the one—from all the cautionary fairy tales—who devours the hapless innocent should she venture into his lair.” She wriggled beneath him feeling naughty and happy and ready to play after so much work and fear.
“That I am, my love,” he growled, using his teeth to nibble at her ear, her neck, and then closing his lips around the bite to soothe it with his tongue. Heat rushed between her legs, carrying moisture with it.
“I could sup on you for a lifetime and never get enough,” he growled.
“Then—” She struggled between hitched breaths as he began to move. “You must devour me one bite at a time.”
“Gladly,” he breathed. “Every. Delicious. Morsel.”
It didn’t take a lifetime. Only the span of a few enchanted hours.
Coming soon…
Don’t miss the next novel in the Victorian Rebels series by
KERRIGAN BYRNE
The SCOT BEDS HIS WIFE
Available in October 2017 from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
Also by
Kerrigan Byrne
The Highwayman
The Hunter
The Highlander
Praise for Kerrigan Byrne and her captivating novels
“The dark, violent side of the Victorian era blazes to life as a caring, competent heroine living under the radar is abducted by a notorious crime lord with wonderfully gratifying results in this exceptional and compelling vengeance-driven romantic adventure.”
—Library Journal (starred review) on The Highwayman
“The romance is raw, edgy, and explosive … the path they take through adversity makes the triumph of love deeply satisfying.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Highwayman
“A truly mesmerizing series that highlights dangerous heroes who flout the law and the women who love them.”
—Library Journal (starred review) on The Hunter
“Dramatic, romantic, and utterly lovely.”
—BookPage
“Byrne is a force in the genre.”
—RT Book Reviews (Top Pick!) on The Highwayman
“Romantic, lush, and suspenseful.”
—Suzanne Enoch, New York Times bestselling author
“A passionate, lyrical romance that takes your breath away.”
—Elizabeth Boyle, New York Times bestselling author
“Beautifully written, intensely suspenseful, and deliciously sensual.”
—Amelia Grey, New York Times bestselling author
Whether she’s writing about Celtic Druids, Victorian bad boys, or brash Irish FBI agents, Kerrigan Byrne uses her borderline-obsessive passion for history, her extensive Celtic ancestry, and her love of Shakespeare in every book. She lives at the base of the Rocky Mountains with her handsome husband and three lovely teenage girls, but dreams of settling on the Pacific Coast. Kerrigan loves to hear from readers. You can contact her at www.kerriganbyrne.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Also by Kerrigan Byrne
Praise for Kerrigan Byrne and her captivating novels
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE DUKE
Copyright © 2017 by Kerrigan Byrne.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN: 9781250118257
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St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / February 2017
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.