Page 73 of The Duke
“Yes, of course.”
The duke released Celine’s shoulders and brushed her cheeks with anxious tenderness. “I didn’t send it? Are you sure? Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God.” The duke let go of her and fell back. She seemed to fall not only onto the mattress but back and back and back into some internal place where Celine couldn’t follow.
Celine turned carefully onto her side and lay for some time, watching the duke in her deep, almost unnatural sleep. Then the duke started up, awake all at once, with a gasp. “But if I didn’t send the letter,” the duke cried out, “why is everything still on fire?”
For hours it was thus.
The duke moved between tension and inertness almost like breathing, in and out. Sometimes it was the screaming, racked agony Celine had witnessed when she first entered, but more often it was that delirious fixation on the letter the duke had written Bastien, or on the unknown Eleanor.
Once, the duke begged her, “Don’t tell Royce. Royce doesn’t know anything, please, you mustn’t tell her. She’s just a child.”
Celine thought of what the duke allowed her to see—or anyone to see—when conscious, and the hoarse, naked begging was almost more than she could take.
She tried, numerous times, to wake the duke from her nightmare state. She shook her. After the duke began begging, she even slapped her. But it didn’t make any difference.
She found herself thinking of what Royce had said the night they met:I don’t know how she lives here. Just spending a single day makes me feel like I’m dying. If I had to live here, day in day out, I would go stark raving mad. More proof she has no heart to speak of.
Royce had got everything so wrong! The duke had a heart, and it was mad with grief. But just as the duke chose to let no one in and confide in no one, so no outside influence might be felt when these agonies had her in their grip.
It was the very nature of her powerful control over herself that had her now.
Celine forced the duke’s hand open. Before it could close, she put her own hand inside it, their fingers entwined. The duke’s hand twitched, and then her whole arm moved as though Celine had put an electric volt into her. The duke gasped, coming into consciousness. She breathed in, and in, and in.
“But Bastien had the letter,” she cried out. “I sent it. I sent it.”
“Kate,” Celine said. “Kate, stop. You’re going to break my fucking heart.”
It was sometime during the night, she couldn’t have said when, that Celine realised she couldn’t marry Lord Burnley. If the duke wouldn’t have her, she would have to start again, with nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Gentle fingers brushing the hair from her face woke Celine. The curtains had been opened, and late morning sunshine poured through the windows. Last night’s darkness had been banished. The world was restored.
She was in the duke’s bed. The duke leaned over her, hair falling across her forehead, those startling eyes melting-bright.
She wanted to fold her limbs around the duke’s, the way sleep-warm bodies yearn towards each other, towards a languorous coupling. The duke’s nightshirt sheared off to one side, displaying a powerful shoulder. She wanted to sink her teeth into it. She thought of the duke’s torso against hers last night, the duke’s thighs holding her. She wanted to put her hand under the duke’s nightshirt.
But she knew the duke too well: She had been right that such intimacies wouldn’t be invited when the duke was awake. As soon as Celine opened her eyes, the duke put some distance between them and leaned her elbow on her own pillow.
“You stayed the night with me,” the duke said, her tone ambivalent. “You seem unharmed, but you will tell me if I injured you in any way.”
“Kate,” Celine said, a reprimand.
The duke’s eyes dilated sharply, and she looked down, hiding them.
Celine said, “Who’s Eleanor?”
The duke’s face drained of colour. “Did I talk about her in my sleep?”
“Mm.”
“What did I say?”
“It was difficult to make out, but you sounded very distressed. You asked about the letter, a number of times.” Asleep, there had been no hiding how deeply the letter hurt the duke, how her whole life turned on that hurt. How she would never be able to take it back and make it right.
The duke sighed. “I can imagine some of what I said. Who’s Eleanor?Who’s Eleanor?God, what a question.” Her elbow dropped out from under her, and she flopped down onto her back then laughed, a deeply unhappy sound. “She was my cousin. She was the daughter and heir to the Duke of Howard. She’s the person whose life I live.”
It went clean through Celine. She had known last night she was glimpsing the reason the duke held back from her, and also that she didn’t understand it yet. She had been prepared to put them both through hell in order to see the full picture, but the duke was gifting her an answer.
