Page 127 of The Duke Undone

She’d lain on her back, insensible, while the sun crossed from east to west, and the world turned and turned again. And the deadline had come and gone.

His lips moved from her knuckles to her wrists. She twined her arms around his neck, bending his head toward hers with brutal force. She was kissing him like a strangler. She couldn’t tell if the salt on her lips came from her tears or their blood as their teeth clashed. The hunger was savage. She tore at the buttons of his shirt, then pushed it up, raking her hands down his ridged torso, the rib and muscle. She didn’t need to unclothe him. She was done with revelation, with awe. She wanted the darker sublime, terrifying and destroying. The tears clung thick to her eyes, wetting his ear as she bit the lobe, hard, making him growl with a sound near to anger. Good. She slapped away his hands as they moved to unfasten her dress.

“No,” she grated. “Now.” He understood, surged with the same obliterative urgency. He seized her buttocks and jerked her onto his hips, bending her legs sharply, pushing up her skirts. She needed this, this violence and immediacy. It could draw blood. It could break bones.

The coach rattled over broken cobbles, the axles tipping, and she jammed her right knee into the bench, her thighs sliding up his, the flesh between grinding against the bulge of his erection. He twisted his arm up under her skirt, fingers plucking at the slit in her drawers, and then rolling over the swelling knot that made her release a sob, of pleasure, of pain, she no longer knew. She scrabbled at his trousers, pulling him free, that thick muscle springing into her hand, and then he was lifting her, seating himself inside. She bore down and he cried out, groping her breast crudely, the fabric of her dress harassing the nipple, his other hand gripping her hip. The vibration of the coach moved through them, making her teeth chatter until he forced her jaws apart, his tongue filling her mouth as he torqued his hips. The angle he struck made her buck against him and scream the scream that she had tried to force out for days, guttural and desperate. It startled him. He stilled his hips and ripped his mouth away. She saw his hooded eyes, the tight intensity of his expression. Even in the throes of this brutalizing passion, he could halt, could hold himself back—quaking—to safeguard her pleasure. He would hurt her, dominate her body, but only if and as she wished.

“Do you want me to stop?” he panted, mouth twisting, hard thighs leaping beneath her.

Slowly, she rolled her hips against him in answer, the expulsed scream opening into a sigh that became quick, panting breaths. She could set the rhythm, direct this torture for both of them. She wiggled, adjusting herself, driving him deeper, until there was no room for anything else, and she began to move quicker.

The coach tilted precariously in a pothole and the lamp winked out. They coupled in total darkness now, mouths fused. He strained up to meet her, hips pumping, and what she felt was better than light, more jagged and more grasping, and then the feeling tightened, curled her into a molten spring.

She exploded with the force of her climax, heaving and shuddering against him, and he stroked inside her in time with the contractions until his whole body went rigid and he lifted her away, muffling his cry against her dress.

Their breathing normalized slowly. Clothing was tugged and straightened. Their bodies, detached, solidified within their individual membranes, bounded and separate. The coach rolled on through the city. After a moment, he took her hand.

“We’ll fix all of this,” he said. “Count on me.”

She wiped condensation from the window. There was Shoreditch, laid out in crooked misery.

“I believe I proposed somewhere along the way,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t phrase it as a question. You didn’t answer. Look at me. Lucy. Miss Coover, will . . .”

She turned and put her damp fingers to his lips. Suddenly, it all felt too raw, too fast. Everything in her life had been upended and upended. She’d lost an entire day, the most important day of her artistic career to date. He’d still to break his engagement. To confront Mr. Yardley. Would he still want her to count on him after that?

“One thing at a time,” she said. And after, when he tried to speak, eyes burning: “Shhhh.”

Her head was filling again with vapor. As she stepped out of the coach, the future seemed as murky as the night.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Anthony! Was it you making that racket?”

Lavinia poked her head out of the morning room.

“How romantic,” she said testily, hurrying down the hall to intercept him as he stalked toward her, the Yardleys’ butler, whose slow arrival at the front door had precipitated Anthony’s wild pounding, trotting a few timorous paces behind.

“I believe you’re meant to compare me to the sun at dawn, not storm into the house at dawn looking like . . .”

She searched his face, her own face draining of color.

“Anthony. Is something wrong?”

He’d rarely heard that anxious note sound in her voice. What did she see etched on his features? Bottomless sorrow? Ravening fury? He’d barely slept, had woken with the sky ink black and paced his room like an animal, dressing when the clock struck seven without ringing for Humphreys or checking his appearance in the mirror.

He stared at her, at her round eyes as blue as bells of heather. It wasn’t in his power to assuage her concern.

“Where is your father?”

Her reply lagged too long. Everything lagged today. And to think, he’d prided himself on newfound patience. He strode past her into the morning room.

It was a pleasant scene. The curtains were pulled back; the east-facing windows shone with morning light. Yardley sat reading the newspaper in a wingback chair, a rolled blueprint propped against the arm. Enjoying half an hour of domestic tranquility before departing for the hustle and bustle of the office, where his attention would be divided among dozens of tasks. Overseeing clerks, advising district surveyors, consulting on walls and roads, drafting plans.

Covering up crimes.

His wife, Moira, sat nearer the windows, bent over her needlepoint. A copy of the Queen lay on the chair Lavinia had lately abandoned, open to a colorful fashion plate. Breakfast was still spread out on the sideboard.

Moira looked up, flustered by Anthony’s abrupt entrance.