Chapter 18
CHAPTER 18
H elen walked away from the wedding breakfast with measured steps. She would have imagined them as the kind of steps a proper duchess would make, except that thought almost drove her into hysterics, so she pushed it aside.
She thought about nothing except the pattern of her footfalls as she walked toward the library. One step, two steps, three steps.
Open the library door.
Step inside.
Close it behind you .
The door clicked shut, and she collapsed onto the nearest chair, entirely out of energy.
She dropped her head into her hands, her breaths coming quickly, threatening to heave into sobs.
“Oh God,” she murmured. “Oh my God. What on earth have I gotten myself into?”
Even trying to answer that question made her panic ratchet higher. She could scarcely breathe. She wanted to tear at her laces, to loosen her bodice, to get some blessed air in her lungs. But of course, this fancy gown laced up the back and had about a thousand tiny buttons atop it.
Oh, grand. She was going to die, strangled by her dress.
Wasn’t that just the thing?
She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe. She was gasping for breaths, but each one was shallower than the one before, and the lack of air was constricting her chest, her throat?—
“Helen. Helen!”
Hands were on her, guiding her upright, pulling her around to look at him.
Xander.
She’d known it before looking, had known it from the moment he touched her, the feel of it so different than the cold dance they’d shared only minutes before.
“Breathe,” he commanded, and for one flickering, delirious moment, he was both Xander and the duke, authoritative but warm.
Or maybe this was just a product of her hysterical mind. She couldn’t be certain which.
He put one hand to her cheek, the other resting along the nape of her neck, so his thumb just glanced where her pulse thrummed too quickly.
“Breathe,” he said again before modeling the action for her, as if he feared she’d forgotten how.
It was, alas, entirely possible.
When she’d calmed enough that she was getting air in her lungs—albeit with the occasional punctuating gasp that came just shy of tipping over into a sob—he started moving his thumb in small, reassuring circles.
“Good,” he said, and she hated how warm that small bit of praise made her feel. “Now. Tell me what’s wrong.”
It was a command again, the kind given by a man who had no question that he would be obeyed.
“This was a mistake,” she gasped out. “This marriage. You were right. I’m not cut out for it. You should have left me to my fate. Because now I’ve ruined you, too, because I’ll never be like them, never be enough. I’ll never be a proper duchess.”
The confession spilled out of her. The only thing keeping her from once more dissolving was that steady back and forth of his thumb against her pulse.
He frowned. “What did my mother say to you?”
She shook her head. “It’s not just that, it’s all of it. All of these proper, fine people, and then there’s me?—”
“Helen,” he interrupted. God help her, it felt so good to hear him speak her name after this past week of stiff Miss Fletcher s. Though, she realized with a start, that wasn’t her name anymore, was it? And he wasn’t about to start calling her Your Grace . It was too absurd.
“Helen,” he repeated as though sensing her mind drifting. “We’ll handle all that later. But first, what did my mother say to you?”
Helen feared she was about to look very foolish.
“It really wasn’t anything,” she admitted. “She merely asked where the silk in my gown had come from, and then when I said I didn’t know, she said she supposed it was Italian silk, which was clearly inferior to French silk. But French silk is so hard to come by, with the war, that she supposed I didn’t have the right connections and?—”
She shook her head, cutting herself off.
“I don’t think she meant it to be unkind,” she said, mostly out of her own impulse to be kind rather than an inclination toward honesty. This was Xander’s mother, after all. Helen had only about ninety minutes’ experience in being a wife, but she suspected that insulting one’s husband’s mother was not the way to go.
“No, she did,” Xander said with a little sigh of his own. “My mother can be rather…snobbish.” He sounded like he was seeking a gentler word but failed to find one. “She thinks she knows the best of everything and is not kind to those who dare disagree—or even have other preoccupations.”
He moved his hands so that they were both cupping her cheeks, then moved her head until she was forced to look at him. One thumb swept away a tear. She hadn’t realized she’d let it escape.
“Listen to me,” he said, and at that moment, they might have been playing scandalous card games in his study or even in that secret bedroom while a ball carried on below their feet. “Snobbishness is not a good trait to have. And the rest? You can learn the rest. You will learn to navigate the image and the politics and all that. And you might even learn that there are some perks to being a duchess, too.”
He gave her the tiniest hint of a smile, then, and there was a smidgen of boyishness in it. He was, Helen knew, probably talking about things like influence and wealth. But, gazing up at him, the only benefit to being a duchess she could imagine was that this man was her duke.
She let herself sag into his arms. He welcomed her openly.
It was as perfect a moment as Helen could hope for. She heard the steady, rhythmic thumping of his heart. That steadiness was Xander’s. It was the duke’s. If he could hold both those sides inside him, maybe she, too, could learn this. Maybe she could figure out how to be the duchess he needed.
She turned her face up to look at him—to say…something. To thank him, to promise she would try—something.
But she was arrested by the intensity in his blue eyes as he looked back down at her.
They stayed like that, just looking at one another for an eternity.
And then, as if a spell had broken—or a new spell had begun—he bent those last few inches to press his mouth to hers.
The kiss began tenderly, almost chastely. That lasted for mere moments, however, as Helen, starved for more, let her lips part in clear invitation. Her husband took her offer, sweeping, plundering, his tongue tangling with hers. She pulled at his shoulders, needing more of him, more of his weight, and he guided her down until she was lying down on the back of the settee she’d chosen for her panicked collapse.
It was perfect, feeling him lying along every part of her—except for the part where she’d married a tall man who was in no way suited to fit on a cramped little settee.
The disgruntled look on Xander’s face—as though he wondered how this blasted piece of furniture had the sheer audacity not to fit him properly—was enough to make Helen press her face against the fine wool of his jacket to stifle her laugh.
When he looked down at her, a smile split across his face, and it threatened her heart.
“Perhaps this isn’t the best location for what I had in mind,” he observed.
“You don’t prefer to have assignations on miniscule sofas?” she inquired pertly, and God, how good it felt to tease him again.
Xander, however, grew serious.
“This isn’t an assignation, Helen,” he said, though he sounded as though he was speaking to himself, too. “You are my wife.”
And so she was, unbelievable as it sounded.
They paused as if marveling over this fact.
But their bodies were still pressed together, ready to remind them of their interrupted activity. The shock and marvel faded, and their desires sparked anew.
“Come,” he said. “Would you like to see your new bedchamber?”
To her surprise, Helen found that she would, and not just because it would provide a more expansive place for her husband to sprawl at his leisure.
He led her down the lushly decorated corridor, which seemed somehow even more luxurious now that Helen planned to actually live here. She’d thought the rented townhouse where she’d lived with George and Patricia had been rather nice (except for the fact that George had lived there, too, of course). It had felt a tad small after a lifetime in a sprawling country estate, but that was city living for you.
The Lightholders’ townhouse did not feel small. And it made the supposed luxuries of the other house to shame.
The duchess’ chambers— her chambers—were similarly opulent, with an enormous oak bed that had doubtlessly been built inside the room, a matching armoire, and gauzy curtains letting in plenty of light. It was gorgeous in the kind of way that threatened to send Helen to panicking again, except she lacked the opportunity because her husband grabbed her face again and pressed their mouths together once more.
This kiss did not start chaste. It was all hunger from the start. They grappled at one another for a few moments with feverish intensity and little in the way of nuance until Xander pulled up just enough that Helen could not reach his mouth, not even on her tiptoes.
He smiled playfully when she made an impatient sound.
“Tell me what it is that you want, little rabbit,” he said, and she wanted to stamp on his foot or shout at him or kiss him senseless for that stupid nickname. “Tell me, and I shall give it to you.”
She tugged at his collar. It had no effect.
“I despise this game,” she sulked.
He laughed, low and rumbling.
“No, you don’t.”
She didn’t.
Her protests had some moderate effect, at least, because he began backing them toward the bed, which was covered in an ivory counterpane and pure white sheets, the color a sign of opulence in itself, given the dreadful burden of keeping such a thing pristine. These were the kind of details that suggested a full and well-trained staff, even if that staff was well-educated in the art of remaining unseen.
He laid her back on the softest mattress she’d ever touched, and it was a testament to the utter temptation her husband posed that she did not desire to curl up upon it and sleep for a year.
And then, because he was terrible, he pulled back.
“Don’t think you can trick me with your drugging kisses, little wife,” he said. God help her; that was worse than little rabbit . The words made her want to squirm. “You will tell me what you desire.”
He waited with absolutely wretched patience while she fumbled for an answer.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want . She wanted him with a desperation that lit her up. Now, bound by the ties of holy matrimony, she could admit it to herself. She’d wanted him from the first; that desire had been all tangled up in her annoyance at him, the awful man. Because he wasn’t just awful, he was wonderful, too, awfully wonderful, and so, so gut-wrenchingly handsome and masculine and strong that she’d be mad not to want him.
But she didn’t have the words to explain it. And searching for them mad that hot, restless feeling even worse.
“I—” she said while he waited, looking down at her. She tried to make a grab for him, but he was too quick. He snatched her hands out of the air and pressed them down hard into the bed.
Her eyes went wide.
“No tricks from you,” he scolded. Why did that chastising tone make her hunger for him all the more? “You are terrible at doing what you’re told, do you know that, little rabbit? Your governess must have despaired every day.”
“I didn’t have a governess,” she panted. “Or, we had a few, briefly, but my father kept forgetting to pay them on time. I taught Patricia myself.”
He frowned at this briefly, then shook his head as if trying to frighten away a buzzing insect.
“Don’t try to distract me, Helen,” he warned. “I will have what I want from you.”
The gravelly threat in his voice tore a whine from her throat. It would have mortified her, except for how it made him press his weight more heavily against her, just for a moment. She could feel the hardness of him through her skirts and his trousers.
That. She wanted that.
“I want—” She began, panting and fighting for the words, though she knew she was blushing straight up to her hair. For all that his breathing, too, was growing labored, he showed no signs of relenting until she gave him the words he’d demanded.
“I want to see what a true rake is capable of,” she said, recalling the words she’d spoken that night, the night that had set all of this into motion. “I want the parts you withheld before. I want you to make me truly yours.”
As she spoke, his eyes darkened with desire. She’d not been as explicit as perhaps she might have been, she supposed, but it had done its job. She felt as though she were Monsieur Perrault’s Chaperone Rouge , staring down the maw of the wolf and waiting to be devoured.
This was no fairy story, however, and Helen would seek no aid against the wolf. She wanted to be devoured.
And so she was.
He fell upon her as she reached up for him, lunging at him the instant he released her wrists. Their mouths clashed together; she wove her fingers tightly through his hair lest he try to separate them again to play more games. She knew she was tugging on the strands, but with each small pull punctuated by an extra press of Xander’s hips against hers, she suspected he didn’t mind.
“Dress,” he murmured against her mouth. “Helen, your dress.”
“What?” she asked, struggling to connect her mind and her mouth. Who gave a flying fig about her dress?
“I want it off ,” he said, the words ending on a savage bite.
Oh . Helen revised her opinion immediately. She cared enormously about her dress, in that case.
“Buttons,” she said as he kissed his way down her throat, leaving a burning trail in his wake. “They’re at the back.”
He let out a growl, with which Helen wholeheartedly agreed; it really was too great a burden to bear at the moment. Except then he pulled back, grasped her by the hips, and flipped her to her belly as if she weighed no more than a bundle of fluff.
Again, she changed her mind. She loved the buttons on the back if they meant he would do that sort of thing.
The skills of a rake proved once again in her favor as Xander made quick work of the dozens of tiny seed pearls, freeing them quickly from loops and only breaking a few in the process. Helen didn’t care a whit. He could have sliced the garment off her with a sword, if it had gotten the job done more quickly.
He made similarly easy work of her corset, tugging the strings free, each making a little anticipatory hiss as it was freed from its eyelet.
“Come here,” he murmured when he was done. He guided her again, giving her no option but to follow, as he pulled her up to a seated position, letting her bodice, stays, and chemise pool around her waist as he did so. “Look,” he ordered her.
Helen gasped. The bed was set directly across from the large vanity, atop which stood a looking glass that was smooth as water and clear as crystal. It showed the two of them: Helen half-debauched with her dress around her waist, her husband behind her, hair wild from her roaming fingers, and eyes just as intense.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he breathed.
She started to shake her head, the instinctive reaction of a young lady who had been trained to be humble, but he bit hard where her neck met her shoulder, making her gasp and arch.
“Don’t contradict me, little wife,” he said. She watched in the mirror as his hand snaked up her ribcage to cup her breast before tweaking her nipple sharply, which made her gasp again. “We are wed. You vowed, before man and God, to obey me in all things. If I declare you are beautiful, it is so.”
She urged herself to find this bit of imperiousness maddening, but she could not manage it, not when his finger was circling her un-pinched nipple until it hardened into a point that matched the other.
Her lack of answer seemed to satisfy him, for he bit her again along the shoulder, further down this time, and it seemed like praise.
“Stay where you are,” he cautioned, lips making her shiver where they brushed the shell of her ear.
She nodded, obeying.
The looking glass revealed him undressing behind her, each layer revealing more and more of his body as it was discarded. It seemed impossible that she hadn’t seen him unclothed before now and yet, in another way, perfect. He was built like a god, so surely it was right that they had entered a holy union before she was permitted to see him in all his glory.
Coat. Cravat. Waistcoat. Shirt.
When his bare chest was revealed to her, she could not help herself any longer. She tried to turn, to look more closely, to touch, but Xander was too quick.
He pressed a hand between her shoulder blades, overbalancing her and tipping her forward until she had to catch herself with her hands. She could still see, though not as clearly. A punishment for her disobedience.
The second punishment came when he stopped taking off his clothes, instead pausing to remove the rest of her gown, sliding the puddled layers over her hips, down past the end of her feet. He chucked them carelessly aside, then, with exacting slowness, peeled each of her stockings down along the same path.
When she was fully nude, he glanced down to look at her. From the mirror, she could see the appreciative gleam in his eyes.
“Perfect,” he declared, and Helen could not help but feel so, not when he looked at her like that. He drew her back up to sitting, her back pressed against his chest, and the feeling of so much skin on skin made her dizzy with desire. Again, he took his time lazily tracing his fingers over her ribs, her breasts, her stomach, her hips. He ventured down to her thighs, guiding her knees open slightly until absolutely every inch of her was revealed to his gaze.
It was an unbearably exposed position, and Helen could see all of herself as clearly as could her husband. When it made her blush, she saw that the redness continued all the way down her breasts.
Xander hummed his appreciation, tracing his fingers along the flushed skin.
“Perfect,” he repeated.
“Xander,” she breathed. His grip clamped on the pillowy softness of her thigh, the skin going briefly white around the pressure before he released her. “Please. I need all of you.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He tilted her chin up and back so he could kiss her even from behind, then released her just long enough to unfasten the front of his trousers, shove them down, and kick them aside.
With her husband standing behind her, Helen could not see enough of him. There was only the tantalizing glimpse of a hip here—straighter and far leaner than her own—a flash of muscular thigh there, particularly as he came up behind her on the bed. He pulled her back into the cradle of his thighs until she could feel the hot, hard line of his erection against her lower back.
When she tried to turn to get a better look, he swatted her thigh, startling her more with the sound than the pain.
“I told you not to move,” he said. “I told you to watch.”
She did as she was told, despite the temptation to look back anyway—and earn herself another one of those all too appealing little slaps. She watched as he caressed and examined her at his leisure, each movement of his hands making her go hot and molten inside, each inch toward her center making her feel mortifyingly wet .
Any fears about this strange reaction of her body faded when Xander slipped a finger, then two, between her legs and gave her a conqueror’s triumphant smile.
“Oh, little rabbit, I am affecting you quite badly, aren’t I?” he crooned into her hair, looking entirely too satisfied with himself. “Have I left you needy and wanting?”
Lord, those were exactly the words.
“Yes,” she panted. “Xander, please. I need you.”
She was far past the point where she felt mortified by her begging. She would do whatever it took to get him to give her what she wanted, what she needed .
And finally— finally —he didn’t make her plead or beg or spell what she wanted or say it in Latin or whatever nonsense he’d been up to that had turned her into this panting pile.
Instead, he stroked her harder, pushed her higher, caressed her just so?—
And stopped.
“Xander!”
It was nearly a screech, half feral.
And he chuckled at her, the miserable lout. She was dying, and he was laughing .
“Hush, it’s all right,” he soothed as he leaned her back and laid her down. She went, despite her fury, because her body responded to his commands now, not her own. “It will be better this way.”
He moved atop her. And then there was a blunt pressure, an aching stretch, and— oh .
At first, she was certain that surely, surely, this could be all there was. There was simply so much of him, and she could feel him everywhere.
And then he surged a little deeper, and though she’d been certain that she’d been filled entirely to the brim before, it turned out that he had more to give. And she yielded to take it.
He pressed a little more, inexorable—not that she had any intention of denying him. She sucked in a tight breath when the feeling brushed right up against the edge of pain, and he paused at once.
“You’re all right,” he said.
It was an absurdly high-handed of him to say, of course, but she couldn’t argue, for he said it not as a command but as a promise. She would be all right because he would make it so.
And, indeed, he did.
When he was fully seated inside her, his body stretched out, long and strong on top of her softer, lusher form, he paused. Xander was a tall man, and Helen, though no diminutive pixie, could not match his height by a significant margin. Yet he bent just so and tipped her neck until he could plunder her mouth with a deep, probing kiss that left her breathless.
He pulled back, his own breaths heaving.
And then he kissed her some more.
When he had first stilled the movements of his body, Helen had been grateful for the moment to adjust. The fullness in her body was foreign, intriguingly novel and still strange, all at once.
But now, as he kept kissing, kept stretching out that moment of anticipation, she began to squirm against him.
“Patience,” he urged.
She was gratified to hear that his voice sounded a bit strained, at least.
“Xander,” she pleaded, vowing to be embarrassed about the whining note to her voice later. For now, she would do whatever it took to make him fix this terrible tension within her. “Please.”
“The waiting makes it all the sweeter,” he said, a devilish smile on his lips. Even as he spoke, though, his hips were starting to move again, small, jolting movements that sent sparks of pleasure through Helen with every minute thrust.
She felt. It was all she did—she was a creature of feeling, of wanting, of longing. She scrabbled at his shoulders; he let out a little growl that did not sound at all displeased when she pressed her fingers into the muscle, leaving little divots from her nails.
“I can’t wait,” she panted. She was doing everything she could to spread herself wider for him, using all of her scant leverage to push up into him. “Please. Please, please. Please.”
She was begging, and she did not care a whit.
Xander, however, seemed to care enormously. A satisfied look undergirded the strain in his expression that suggested that he, too, was struggling with his patience.
“See?” he said, and damn her, for that sly note in his voice only made her feel all the wilder. “I told you it would be better this way.”
And then, finally— finally —he began to move.
For it was better this way, like his fingers, but more, deeper, faster. She’d already been so wound tight when he’d pulled away from her before that it didn’t take her long at all to get back to that point, despite the novel sensations that assailed her.
His movement kept bringing him flush against her, the hard planes of his lower stomach brushing against that sensitive part on the outside, even as he caressed the tender places deep in her core.
“Xander,” she said. “I?—”
“Yes,” he urged, panting breaths breaking up his words. “Fall apart for me. Show me how beautiful you look when I make you come.”
She could feel him, feel him inside her, and she found that there was something marvelous about being so close to another person that the two of you became one. She watched in delirious, pleasured awe as he moved, watching the muscles bunch and lengthen under his skin, as his face grew lax with pleasure, then taut as if fighting off an onslaught.
He moved a hand between them and touched her in that nearly too-sensitive spot.
It was like a bonfire, like an explosion. She became heat and light.
Her eyes slammed shut, her back arched, and she cried out as her pleasure overtook her. Xander, too, reached his crisis, his movements becoming erratic until he crushed himself close to her, his face pressed into the crook of her neck, his breath hot but not unpleasant against her skin.
They lay still for a moment, hearts racing, limbs entwined.
“Goodness,” Helen said when she was capable of speech again.
Xander didn’t move from her for a moment, and she began to feel that this had been an unspeakably foolish thing to say.
Then he pressed a soft kiss to the underside of her jaw.
“And that, my darling girl,” he said, sounding quite breathless himself, “is what a true rake can do.”