Page 93 of The Duke
She took a deep, steadying breath and considered the question. “I was happy in Paris.”
“With Bastien?”
“Before Bastien. I was… bored with him. Stupid of me, but it’s true. He was incredibly boring in bed, and only wanted me a couple of times a week, less as time went on. He wanted someone to love, but not—”Not the way you do.“Not the way you do.” Her voice went lower, speaking truth. “You want love like you’re going to die without it. He wanted a pretty wife. Someone he could pamper and get a child on.”
“Like I’m going to die without it?”
“You’re…” How to explain? “Love has an uncommon hold on you. You fear it and crave it. You’re like a shipwrecked sailor drinkingdown the ocean.” And yet the ocean had nothing on Celine. She could have sated the duke for a lifetime.
“Celine, you’re—”
“In love.”
A silence. Then: “Christ.”
When the duke spoke again her voice was unsteady, like she was looking for a reason not to reach out and get wine all over the settee, consideration be damned. “Tell me about the time before Bastien. When you were happy.”
“When I was nineteen, the man I had belonged to died, leaving me nothing. I didn’t want to go out for work as a maid or a shop girl, but I wasn’t respectable enough for anything else. He had been the most sought-after clockmaker among a certain class in Paris; he wound clocks in the grand houses. Everyone knew he kept me, and they knew there was something wrong about it.”
“How did you come to be in his possession?”
“He adopted me.”
“Was he a relation of some sort?”
“No, nothing like that, he…” It was not something she spoke about, but she wanted the duke to know. She wanted to be bare. The duke was fascinated by her, as she was by the duke, and speaking together like this was a heady, romantic pleasure. She wanted this no less than she wanted to kiss. “By chance—by accident, I want to say—he travelled through our village and sat on the steps of the hostel peeling oranges and eating them while his horse was watered and fed. I was doing something nearby, hanging laundry, and I felt more astonished the larger the pile of orange peels beside his boot grew. Thinking back, he ate perhaps three of them, but it seemed like he did nothing but eat oranges for an hour. He eventually offered me a segment and it was like eating sunshine. He offered my mother a large sum for me. My mother loved me, I think, but she had two very small children who had begun to starve, so when his horse was saddled again, he took me up before him.”
There was silence for a moment before the duke said, “It must have been a terrible shock, your life changing like that.”
“I wanted to taste the orange. I didn’t want to be taken away.” She tipped her head back, curiously happy. The first sounds of the house waking could be distantly heard. “You’ll be making certain assumptions about what he wanted with me, and it was both better and worse than you’re thinking. What he liked was having me under his thumb. He wanted a daughter, not a lover, but a daughter who lived at his pleasure. He told me what to eat, what to wear, where to go, who to talk to, who not to talk to. I would hide from him sometimes, and he would punish me for it. My mother couldn’t read or write any more than I could, then. I don’t know if she would have written to me, if she could have, or if he would have allowed it.”
For the first time, it occurred to her it might be possible to find her mother and her sisters, who must be sixteen now if they lived. She didn’t know if it was even something she wanted. Maybe she’d had to find Louise before she could consider older wounds and begin to look further back. Dealing with Louise, who was sick, peevish, and clingy, was enough for now.
“But when you were nineteen, the old bastard died,” the duke said with feeling.
She laughed, surprised. “The old bastard died. And I found the most exclusive pleasure house in Paris and asked Madame Versailles—”
“A pseudonym, I hope.”
“—an outrageous sum of money to be one of her girls. A pseudonym, of course. It was the grandest life. Parties every night—truly marvellous parties. I didn’t mind the fucking, and Ilovedbeing the cleverest person in the room. The centre of attention. I had educated myself. I craved the wider world, and the attention of everyone in it. It was all very wicked, but I suppose I decided to enjoy damnation.”
In a darker, lower register, the duke said, “Tell me about the fucking.”
Celine’s body responded. The consciousness that this would be the last coupling made her pause and consider how to answer. To her native intuition she had now added weeks of observation, andher knowledge of the duke was of a different calibre to what it had been the day they rode out on the phaeton.
She said, “There was a naval captain who visited the house once. He’d been at sea for six months, and you could see it in his eyes: starved of luxuries, beauty, comfort. He and I marked each other almost immediately, but he didn’t take me upstairs for hours. Starving himself further, God knows why.”
“You know why.”
“I know why. He slaked himself on me, and it was glorious. He stood across the room from me, watching, and freed his huge prick. Nothing else. Just that part of him. It was so needy, and ugly. He pulled himself off just watching me.”
“What were you doing?” The duke’s voice was hoarse.
She was aware of what had set the duke off in the carriage. “Touching my nipples through the sheer gown I wore.”
The duke swore. “How long until he was hard again?”
“Minutes. He fucked me fully clothed, and then stripped us both and fucked me again.”
