Page 92 of The Duke
The duke was breathing heavily, and high on her cheeks were slashes of pink. She dropped to her knees and looked at what she’d exposed between Celine’s legs. The colour in the duke’s cheeks deepened. She continued to do nothing but look.
Celine had understood from early on that her mind was more interesting to the duke than her body, and yet her body enthralled the duke, this one piece of her in particular. It enthralled the duke not because of what it was, uniquely, but because it washersuniquely. She felt it fill with blood. She felt all the sensitivities from the carriage return.
As though waking suddenly from a reverie, the duke got her shoulders between Celine’s thighs, bullying them wider. “My pretty little pussy,” the duke said in French, “I am going to eat you.” And did.
At first Celine was able to remain relaxed, amused, and wanting somehow to be the objective observer even as she was experiencing the warm mouth where mouths oughtn’t go. She pulled her petticoat higher and held it in a fist at her waist so that she could watch. The duke pressed her face in deeper, a purring, animal sound coming from her throat. Amusement dissolved slowly into pleasure.
The duke took the time to make her thoroughly wet. Heat poured through her and pooled low in her abdomen until she couldn’t feel her body where the duke kissed her, just heat. She realised she had closed her eyes. She opened them and found the duke looking up at her. That brutal, aristocratic face looking up at her from between her legs. The duke made another humming, claiming sound and penetrated Celine with her tongue.
The objective self was subsumed. Celine threw her head back.
“Oh—God,” she said. “I can’t—” Again the duke penetrated her, and again. Mounting warmth rolled through her limbs, not an orgasm yet, but the promise of something she couldn’t avoid. She began to lose the edges of her body; she became a vast, lush, expanded self.
Time stopped functioning as a matter of minutes and skipped from sensation to sensation. Hot, satiny skin and the hard erection of a nipple in the centre of her palm. Fingers taking a thorough grasp of her wrist and her hand wrenched away and pushed into the mattress, closing convulsively on air as a gasp juddered intoher lungs. A powerful thigh shoving her. A curse. A rending. The ticklish, maddening caress of the duke’s hair across her stomach, her thighs, a hot, enveloping hand around the arch of her foot as her toes tried to free themselves from gravity.
She had lost count of the number of times she’d come. She had entered that powerful, dreamlike state where the sensations and images that came from the body were more real to her than any external reality.
The duke’s head lay on her thigh, almost sweetly at rest. The duke’s hair was sweat-darkened, her bright eyes fixed on Celine’s face. Her whole hand was seated within Celine’s body so that the smallest movements of her knuckles sent full-body shocks through Celine.
Celine breathed, and closed her eyes, and drifted.
“Look at me,” the duke said. “Come on, open your eyes. I know it’s hard, darling, but I need you to do it.”
She couldn’t have guessed that a word as innocuous asdarlingcould be used so cruelly, could make tears slide from the corners of her eyes as she forced them open, and forced herself into the duke’s regard.
“Yes,” the duke said, her voice blown wide, “yes,” and Celine clenched around the duke’s hand deep inside her and felt the whole world come apart, patiently, piece from piece, atom from atom, body, breath, nothing.
Celine drifted.
She’d thought she had known how it would be between them. She had known, from Paris, that the duke’s appetites were significant. What she hadn’t accounted for was that, though she might have already loved the duke in Paris, she hadn’tknownher. A distinction that made all the difference in the world, as it turned out.
She became aware the duke was pressing soft kisses into her inner thigh, stroking the cap of her knee. Her legs trembled, and her lungs worked hard to get air into her body. She looked away from the duke, which helped a little.
Her eye caught on the heroic circle of ruffles that was the onlything holding her petticoat together. She said hoarsely, “You’ve murdered my dress.”
The duke’s shoulders began to shake, and she came slowly up Celine’s body, squeezing her waist, kissing her nipple, her upper breast, burying her face and her laughter into Celine’s neck. “I will buy you a thousand dresses,” she said, and brushed her fingertips over Celine’s drenched mound. “Come for me again.”
“I cannot.”
She threw her trembling arms around the duke’s neck and the duke willingly came into her embrace. For a long time, they did nothing but kiss. Kisses so slow and thorough there was barely movement, just one sighing, perfect fit sliding into another. The duke’s fingers moved in leisurely exploration. After some time, Celine’s hands began almost compulsively to move, encompassing as much of the duke’s skin as she could, feeling wild inside at the sensation of the tense muscles held in check above her.
What it revealed about the duke’s self-control was staggering. The duke did not indulge in physical expressions of affection with anyone, much less regular, daily sex. And yet every minute of every day, this enormous hunger lived inside her.
Celine pressed her head back into the mattress, wanting to meet the duke’s eyes—but the duke’s eyes were closed, as though privately she had given herself over to Celine touching her.
A feeling went through Celine. Searing. Catastrophic. A first real taste of the pain that was to come. She would have to contend with it, eventually. But not now. Please, not now.
The duke made a small sound of discontent, and her eyes fluttered open. For a moment, her body stilled. She met Celine’s eyes, and then where her idle fingers had been, she fitted herself between Celine’s legs and began rutting, her breaths coming harder, her eyes turning molten. Celine gripped the duke’s shoulders and gritted her teeth around a broken cry. “Ah,” she called out, her heart in the utterance. “Ah, love.” Desperately, she cupped the back of the duke’s head and drew their mouths together, her eyes searching the duke’s. By now, neither of them needed to look away, or indeed could.
IN THE END,the duke fetched them both a glass of wine, which they drank on the settee. The duke had pulled on a silk banyan, and Celine was somewhat wrapped in a bedsheet. She knew the wine was out of consideration for her own limp, spent state; the duke had put her boundless carnal energy in check, temporarily.
Celine turned and saw the line of the curtains had begun to lighten. Louise would be making her way over to Wroth House soon with the letter. It was all out of her hands now.
“Tell me something good,” the duke said, stroking hair away from Celine’s face and recalling her attention. “Tell me about a time you were happy.”
These past weeks I have been so happy.It was a strange thought when at the time she had felt gripped by urgency, anxious that her plans bear fruit, terrified it would all end with her dead.
It was strange to know the past six weeks had come to this, her last hour with the duke, and that all she could do was live it. In another way, it wasn’t strange at all. It was the premise of a person’s whole life, after all: make the most of it, because it’s going to end. She would always want another hour, no matter how many she was granted.
