Page 91 of The Duke
She slipped her hand into the place where Celine’s skirts crossed at the front and folded the uppermost layer back so that yards of Celine’s stunning dress pooled on the floor of the moving carriage. A ruffled petticoat draped around Celine’s bent leg, its shape at once far more obvious and more erotically obscured. She lost another breath.
She ran her hand up Celine’s leg, underneath the petticoat. Celine’s knee fell subtly outwards, a gesture of invitation. Celine lay within her arm and looked up into her eyes, inviting a still more potent togetherness. Kate recognised the feeling that had scared her so badly in Paris. It didn’t scare her any longer.
Celine said, “I don’t think you can have any notion how much I love you. I would do anything for you.” She shook her head, her eyes dark with feeling. “Anything.”
Kate felt the responsibility that love placed on her, and she welcomed it. Celine had no one else. Her family lost in time, her friends scattered to the winds. Kate would be equal to the love Celine had for her. She would return it tenfold.
Her palm encountered the ridge of Celine’s tied garter and then—Christ—the obliterating softness of Celine’s bare inner thigh. Celine took a sharp breath in and Kate was lost.
She grasped Celine’s whole thigh in her hand and Celine arched up to kiss her. It was the beginning. Where a moment ago Celine had still been coherently speaking, she was now wholly of the body, responding to Kate’s rough hold on her.
Kate’s hand sought—and found—the wet heat that echoed what her mouth was feeling. Celine cried out. The sensation intensifiedas everything became hotter and wetter and Kate was gloriously animal, her powerful body working towards consummation. She wasn’t aware, individually, of the enveloping way she held Celine, or that she was rubbing herself on her, using Celine’s body as an object, a means of release. She wasn’t aware of Celine’s fingers tangled painfully in her hair, or the restless swaying of Celine’s knee, or the desperate noises; she wasn’t aware of the prodigious, randy thrust of her fingers or the passionate coupling of her mouth with that other mouth, the vulgar mouth, the clever tongue, the upper lip that would make angels weep. It was all of a piece. It was heaven. Celine came apart and the warm chamber clutched Kate’s fingers. She swallowed Celine’s cries, then went into orgasm, as though she’d swallowed that as well.
Afterwards, Celine threw her head back and lay across Kate’s lap, boneless and spent, her eyes in a daze. Kate wasn’t done. She let Celine lie where she was, head tipped at a downward angle, hair beginning to unwind long skeins onto the carriage floor, and released Celine’s shoulder from its capped sleeve.
She pressed a kiss into the warm muscle, closing her eyes and staying there a moment. Then she applied her teeth. As Celine gasped, rousing, Kate tugged the sleeve roughly down and released one heaving breast from the outermost layer of the dress. She pulled back and stared at it, her mind gone blank. The gauzy chemise strained against round flesh, and through it, she could see the broad, dark areola she remembered and the thick teat of Celine’s nipple.
Celine wasn’t wearing stays.
The whole night, while Celine had charmed and danced and made her maidenly debut, she hadn’t been wearing stays. The perfect structure of her dress had been held up by her natural form only. Kate…
Kate lost her goddamn mind.
When, sometime later, the carriage stopped, there were some fastenings to tie and button, some humid limbs to untangle, a stocking to find. They couldn’t find it. She carried Celine into Howard House, pausing for a moment on the threshold.
Even through her raging lust, she was aware of the significance: From this moment, she wouldn’t be alone in the inner sanctum anymore. She stepped inside with Celine in her arms.
The lady of the house was home.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
For only the second time, Celine entered the duke’s private rooms. This time, the urgency was of a different sort. This time the duke carried her, and she thought of it as her wedding night. It was the only one she would get.
The duke deposited her on the edge of the bed with a kiss and said, walking to the sideboard, “Would you like something to drink? Brandy? Wine?”
“No, thank you.”
The duke pulled the end of her cravat and it slithered loose. She threw it over the back of a chair and slipped her cufflinks from a pocket, restoring them to their place in a drawer. “I couldn’t eat a thing tonight, my God, you scared me, Celine. I scared myself.” She took out her pocket watch and glanced down before unclipping it and throwing it onto the dressing table. “Breakfast’s in three hours. I can most certainly wait.”
She turned a wicked smile on Celine, which a moment later slackened into awe. “Christ,” she said. “You look like you got in the way of an ocean.”
Celine glanced down, seeing what the duke saw. The shoulders of her dress had been returned to their proper place, but as neither she nor the duke had bothered to tie it properly, the sides of the dress had slid apart, following gravity. The material frothed around her body like sea spume. And clear beneath her chemise, the red marks of the duke’s kisses on her breasts. Her hair down in messy, inky coils.
Breakfast in three hours. And it would be light before then.
In a different voice the duke said, “You’ve gone somewhere else. I don’t like it.”
She looked up, laughing. Three hours was all she was going to get. “And to think I used to have to chase you about the house just to get you to talk to me.”
“A not entirely irrational response, given the manner of your arrival in my home. Very well, I took you in small doses, knowing I would become addicted if I took more.” The teasing smile disappeared into something darker and more intent. “Well, I have glutted myself now.”
“Poor darling,” Celine said condescendingly. The duke needed to be teased and laughed at occasionally. She wondered who on earth would do it when she was gone.
The duke smirked and, lit from behind by the fire, began to undo her shirt ties and waistcoat. Celine felt herself come to quivering attention. The waistcoat ended up on the floor, the shirt on an armchair. The duke pushed down her breeches slowly, aware her audience was captive, making an obscene peep show of the pale thatch between her long, muscled thighs. Stockings last. Then the duke straightened to her full height, showing off powerful legs, the hard planes of her stomach, her breasts with their pink tips. She shook her hair back and trained her vast gaze on Celine. She looked like a young god, naked and strong, ready to run out into the morning forest and match the stag heartbeat for heartbeat, stride for stride. She looked like an idol, golden and still.
Then she came to Celine, a flesh-and-blood woman.
She touched a fingertip to the inner curve of each of Celine’s knees and, exerting almost no pressure, pushed them apart. Celine gladly took instruction. The duke’s hot eyes dropped to her fingers, and she ran them up Celine’s thighs, raising the petticoat with them.
