Page 6 of The Duke
The duke stroked from her knee up to her inner thigh, through the wetness on her upper thigh, and held her drenched sex. She felt her heart beat in the duke’s palm. Then the duke penetrated her, a slow, slick pressure with all the weight of the duke’s body behind it.
Flush with her, not a breath between them, their faces pressed humidly together.
“Breathe,” the duke murmured into her ear. “You’re all right. Just breathe.”
As though she were a virgin, overcome, and not a prostitute of some renown. And the mortifying truth was that she couldn’t catch her breath. That within her trembling, alert, compromised body, she yearned to take the comfort offered.
“Breathe,” the duke said again. The quality of her voice—roughened, fraying—was the first admission of something beyond her control. That beyond lust, this encounter moved her as it moved Celine. Celine breathed, and started to come around the duke’s fingers. The usual hot bloom, and then a wrench into something bigger.
She let the knife cut her, and she let the duke hear it so it would cut the duke as well.
She would use this. Even this.
The world restored itself gradually. A draft made the candles over the fireplace flap and then stand straight again. The wall clock idly ticked. Muffled laughter and music intruded from downstairs.
She held the duke tightly and couldn’t make herself let go yet. The duke spoke into her ear, insistent, warm words of endearment, and stroked long strands of her hair between trembling fingers.
Deep in the duke’s voice was something loose and aching, something slipping its leash.
With the sense of the room returning came the renewed knowledge that this was a woman who held her.Thewoman. Her heart felt tender to the point of pain. She wanted to live.
“Take me,” she whispered, and with a sound of animal anticipation, the duke unleashed herself.
WHEN SHE WAStwelve years old, Kate Elizabeth Justinian Parsival Howard, the Duke of Howard, killed her whole family, save one.
In her bold, childish hand she had written a letter to her Frenchfriend Bastien du Ponte, instructing him with great attention to detail how to plant evidence of treason against her aunt, Anne Howard, who was the Duke of Howard at the time. She had wanted to prove how clever she was. She had wanted her aunt’s attention.
Giddy, terrified, elated by what she had done, she hadn’t understood there would truly be consequences until the consequences had overtaken her with a sober, adult speed she couldn’t stop.
In memory, her aunt was a golden-haired titan. When Kate thought of her, it was in the old, wood-panelled study where the floorboards had been half-eaten and never replaced, and red curtains filtered light like the walls of a heart. The study was where Kate and her cousins would go to be praised for their boldness and lashed for their mistakes. Eleanor, Anne Howard’s own child, had always stepped forward for the lash first.
It was gone now. Burned to the ground and swept out like an old fireplace. The study, the lessons, the golden hair. What a monstrous child she had been, breaking the world to get what she wanted.
Eleanor would have become the Duke of Howard someday, had she lived. Eleanor, who had feared what Kate might do. Eleanor—
Kate took a careful breath. She was sitting in a chair by the window and had been watching the colours change in Bastien’s study from deep night to the leached, flat palette of dawn.
She thought she had maybe ten more minutes before Celine roused from her post-coital stupor and realised it was morning. The French beauty lay before the fireplace on a pile of heavy velvet drapes, which Kate had, at some point during the night, ripped down from their runners. She barely remembered doing it.
She had come to Paris to find the letter she’d written Bastien and burn it. She could overcome every other threat—the driving motivation of her life had been to ensure it. But against the letter she had no defence.
She had come already hurt by it, by the curious proximity of that violent, defining childhood event. And, hurt, she had met Celine.
Celine.She couldn’t account for how far she had pushed Bastien’s mistress last night. She couldn’t account for the frenzy that had come over her when she realised there was no limit to what Celine would let her do. She didn’t understand why—or how—it had cut her.
She told herself it was a stupid indulgence of the flesh, a one-time thing. She told herself the unusual loss of control was nothing to worry about. Paris was a long way from home, and once home, she would never think of Celine again.
It didn’t matter how carefully she breathed. Her throat felt sliced open.
She couldn’t wait any longer. What she had taken from Celine, what she had shown Celine, what Celine had made her feel—none of it could be taken back. The only comfort was in knowing she would never do it to herself again.
She went to Celine and squatted, her boots squeaking. She was fully dressed, her wilted cravat tied in a plain knot, the diamond pin in her coat pocket. She wanted to touch Celine again, even now. As though they hadn’t spent four hedonistic hours slaking themselves on each other. (Celine, reaching out a trembling finger to touch Kate’s mouth, wonder on her face; Celine, looking up at Kate that final time, tears sliding unnoticed into her hair, her eyes entirely, painfully sincere.) Swiftly, she squashed the thought. The only possible conclusion to the night was this.
She took the ring off her left hand and slid it onto Celine’s unresisting index finger. It was a gold band topped with a square sapphire. Celine’s eyes traced the movement from beneath her lowered lashes, but she said nothing.
“To remember me by,” Kate said, and didn’t let herself think about why it felt necessary.
One of the ring’s broad sides was flawed, pockmarked where Celine had bitten down on Kate’s fingers in their final, impossible embrace. Celine regarded it, and Kate could see her struggling up to the surface, trying to gather her wits, perturbed by the heavy jewellery on her finger.
