The Duke of Hearts (The Highwaymen #2)

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

“WHAT?” SHE WAS saying.

Arthford lifted his head from the bed. “I said I was very sorry. I completely lost all sense of control. I wanted you to like that more than you did.”

“I liked it,” she said.

He rolled onto his side, propping himself up with one arm and looked her over. Oh, he liked the way she looked with his spend all over her. His cock gave a little twitch at the sight of it. But no, he shouldn’t be thinking that, not after he’d just taken advantage of her like that. “If it were different between us, I’d say that I’d make it up to you next time, that I wouldn’t be so bewitched by that tight little cunny of yours if I had it again. It is divine, you know, Miss Adams.”

“I thought I was Marjorie.”

He chuckled. “Marjorie. Right. I think… you’ll want me to go, I imagine.”

“Right this moment?” she said, sounding a little bereft.

“I don’t wish to go at all,” he said, because it sounded like she might not mind having him around for a bit. “I think I’m falling for you. I think I could have quite the affair with you. I think I could buy you some convenient house and install you there and spend every night in your bed for months. A year. I don’t know. Just now it seems that it would be impossible to tire of you.”

“I’m not that sort of woman, Your Grace,” she said. “I know my father—But I’m not a courtesan, not a kept woman.”

“No, of course you’re not.” He sighed. He rolled onto his back.

“I…” She probed the mess he’d left on her skin. “I need something—”

“Yes, one moment.” He jumped out of the bed and went to find the towel next to her water basin. He brought it to her and mopped her skin clean.

She watched, biting down on her bottom lip, eyes wide.

“I could marry you,” he said, wiping his semen off the bottom of her breasts.

“No, you couldn’t. You’re a duke, and I’m not the right sort of woman for a duke. I’m far too poorly connected for that.”

“Hmm, is that your only objection?”

“You’re not serious.”

He tossed the soiled towel over his shoulder. It landed on the floor with a splat.

Her gaze fell on it.

“What if I was?”

Her gaze came back to his. “But you’re not .”

“You did say you didn’t wish to get married,” he said.

“I don’t,” she said. “B-but you can’t marry someone like me anyway.”

“The thing about being a duke is that you can really marry whoever you’d like,” he said. “True, my mother would be horrified.” He lay back down on the bed next to her. “I’ll stop going on about that. You’re only the second woman I’ve ever taken to bed, and I seem to be reliably, erm, lovestruck once I’ve…” He groaned. “It’s embarrassing. It’s a fault. I’ll go. We had a deal, and you’ve quite lived up to your part of it.”

“Only me and the marchioness, then,” she whispered, looking at him. “Truly?”

“Truly,” he said. “I thought I told you this already.”

She considered that. “I don’t think I registered it in the same way for some reason. I was reeling from the idea of you with a man.” She blushed and looked away.

“Oh, Lord, the things I have said to you, the things I have admitted…” He was embarrassed.

She raised her gaze to his again. “So, it was never about her, then, just you. You fall in love easily, you think?”

“Easily and hard,” he said, looking into her face. She was beautiful, really, so very beautiful.

“And you want me again?” she whispered.

He sighed. “I should go, I think. Not because I want to, but because it’s better for both of us that way.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I might be convinced, perhaps, convinced to be your kept woman.”

“No, that would degrade you,” he said. “This, what we’ve done, it already degraded you. I don’t wish to participate any more in that. You’re too lovely for that.”

“But am I?” she whispered. “Lovely, I mean? If you fall in love easily, if you’d fall in love with anyone, even that dreadful marchioness, then… well, am I lovely or just… here?”

“Oh, count upon it, you’re lovely,” he said. He scratched his stomach, shutting his eyes. “She isn’t dreadful either. No one understands, I suppose, why I could have been with her the way I was, over a decade, even as she was never faithful to me. No one understands that. But then, they don’t know her the way I do.”

“And you’re still in love with her,” she said in a tiny voice.

He didn’t say anything. He was in love with Seraphine, but he would always be in love with Seraphine. She could be done with him, and it wouldn’t change that.

“So, what does that say about me? What sort of woman does this, trades her maidenhead for a house? And I don’t think I was supposed to like it. I think it’s supposed to be painful and awful a woman’s first time—”

“You really did like it?”

“And that must mean something’s wrong with me, too,” she said. “I should have demanded more of a man, more than just his desire for me. I well know how easily a man desires a woman, after all. It means nothing.”

“Not nothing,” he said, opening his eyes. “It means something, Marjorie.”

“But this? With us? What does it mean?”

He hesitated. “What do you want it to mean? I’ve already proposed and you refused me.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said.

“I can do it again,” he said. “But if you are going to refuse me, why should I bother with that? It’ll only be awful for us both.” He sat up. “I’ll get dressed. I should get back to Dunrose, anyway.”

“You don’t actually wish to marry me,” she said softly.

“And you don’t actually wish to marry me,” he said, climbing over her, stopping to plant little kisses on her nipples.

She gasped prettily, gazing up at him with half-lidded eyes. “Don’t go.”

He paused.

She put her hand right in the middle of his chest. “Can you do it again?”

His lips parted. “I mean…” Yes, the answer was yes, and he was already half-hard even though he shouldn’t be able to recover that fast. “You want me to?”

“Not if you don’t want to,” she said.

He moved her hand, showing her his erection. “I want to,” he said with a grin.

She wrapped her hand around him, giving him an encouraging squeeze. “I want to, also,” she breathed.

SERAPHINE MERTUELLE, THE Marchioness de Fateux, appeared at Bluebelle Grange in time for dinner, but there was no dinner to be had.

For one thing, the man she’d come to see wasn’t there. She was quite comfortable at the estate, having stayed there on a number of occasions, and the servants knew to make her comfortable when she arrived, familiar with all of her specific requirements. They put her in the bedchamber she favored and they brought her the herbal tea she liked in the evenings and they promised that whenever Simon Green, the Duke of Arthford, got back home, they would tell her.

Then there was some noise from the depths of another wing in the house, and she realized she was not alone here, even though Simon was absent.

She got the information out of them easily enough.

It was Dunrose, and he was apparently trying to get off the laudanum. He was past the phase where he was sickly and violently ill, but still enough in the clutches of it that he wanted it. Truthfully, near as Seraphine herself knew, that phase never ended. Once a man was dependent on opium, he was never quite free of it.

Dunrose did not strike her as the sort of man with the constitution for getting free of it.

But she was bored.

She went to see him.

“I brought brandy, that’s all,” she said through the door. “You can still drink brandy, can’t you?”

“I’ve been trying not to.” Dunrose sounded particularly sulky. “It makes me want the laudanum more. It makes it harder to talk myself out of it. And you won’t even try if I ask for it.”

“Well, there can’t be laudanum in this house,” she said.

“True,” he said.

“You don’t have to drink any of the brandy with me,” she said. “But I have nothing else to do and no one to do it with. Come now, Dunrose, you must be bored, also.”

He let her in.

He didn’t take much before he was asking for a glass of brandy, which she supplied. He barely took any prompting before he was telling her all about where Simon was.

“I think he has a bit of a fascination with her,” said Dunrose. “Me too, I suppose, if it comes to that. Since I’ve been off the laudanum, my prick is deciding to stand up again, which is frightfully annoying since I’m here .” He gestured around. “Simon would run me through if I started dallying with his servants, you know, so I’ve nothing to do with myself, nothing at all.”

Seraphine actually remembered this woman. She remembered that wretched place. Briar Abbey, an old estate, not that big, decrepit in its way, the stink of sour ale hanging in the air.

She was used to being places where she was the only woman (or the only woman of her class, anyway) and where men behaved the way men did when there weren’t any women around. She was used to being hauled around to places that men visited when there weren’t any women around, like brothels and the like.

She often studied those women, thinking that nothing much separated the likes of them from the likes of her, only flimsy things like titles and such.

The truth was, it was the way of things for women, all women, no matter their status. What all women did was sell their bodies to men for various things. And sometimes, after a woman had been very thoroughly sold to a man, he decided he owned her and that he could sell her to other men.

This had been happening to Seraphine her entire life, in various ways.

She was soured in some way, and she knew it. When she’d met Simon, and he’d been so innocent and good and sweet, a man who’d loved her in some pure way, unlike her husband ever had and definitely not the way Champeraigne ever had, she had wanted him, and wanted to be loved by him. Simon made her feel less sour, made her feel almost sweet.

But it was wrong, and she knew that.

Wrong to use him. Wrong to keep him like a loyal puppy, tongue hanging out, ready to do her bidding, ready to be practically her slave.

She was awful to him, and she knew it.

Sometimes, she told herself that she was being awful in an attempt to chase him away. She did things like make him watch her fuck other men, make him share her with other men, even. (But that seemed to have backfired, because she rather thought he might have been a little attracted to men, too.) She did other awful things to him. She would run away without telling him where she was going or lie to him about whether she’d be at some ball and get word he’d gone and waited for her, waited for hours.

Did he ever get angry with her, though?

No.

He seemed to take it all in stride, as his due, and she hated that about him.

If he’d been different in some way, if he’d been angry, if he’d demanded that she be faithful to him…

Well, she wasn’t sure what would have happened.

She liked to indulge in a little fantasy about it all, wherein she chose him and was faithful to him. She was married, of course, but her marriage had never been about love or attraction or even mutual respect. They tolerated each other, and her husband liked the money and the benefits when he sold her body to other men, of course. He liked owning her. She supposed it hadn’t been his idea, not exactly, the selling. Perhaps it had been Champeraigne’s. And, of course, she’d taken to it, hadn’t she? She did it voluntarily. She sold herself. At any rate, her husband wouldn’t have minded, if she refused to let him touch her body. He hadn’t fucked her in over seven years.

If they’d still been in France, perhaps he might have cared about an heir, but his lands were gone and his legacy was trampled by the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and there was simply nothing left to give an heir. He didn’t want one.

Sometimes she liked to fantasize about having a child with Simon. She thought he’d be such a doting and wonderful father.

She was really too old for such things, though.

Truly, she was too old for Simon. She was two and forty, and she was not going to have any children. Simon himself, he should have children, though. He should get married and sire a passel of brats on his wife. He was over a decade younger than her. He was just at the right age to think about it.

But he was never going to do it, and she knew that.

He told her he didn’t want anyone except her, and he was slavishly devoted to her. She liked it, but she felt guilty about it. She felt guilty about it all the time.

This was the reason she’d broken it off this time.

Well, she’d broken it off—for the same reason—at least ten times. Usually, she couldn’t bear it for very long and she came back to him, pathetic, lonely, missing his touch and his smile and the way he looked at her. No other man had ever looked at her that way.

And he was hers, too.

He’d never known the touch of another woman besides her.

It was a heady, heady thing, that.

She hadn’t thought she cared about a man being faithful to her—she was never faithful to anyone else, after all—until she had Simon there, faithful, hers and hers alone, and she felt what that was, how intoxicating it was.

“He did not have a fascination with her,” said Seraphine to Dunrose now, sipping at her brandy. “He barely looked at her.”

“Well, he did kill her father, if you remember,” said Dunrose.

Seraphine blinked, thinking that through.

“Just in the nick of time, really,” said Dunrose. “I was trying to convince her father to let me have her, you know, really and truly. I remember there had been a bidding war for being the first man to look at her quim, and Champeraigne won it. He paid some ridiculous amount of money for a look between her spread thighs. And it couldn’t have been anything exciting. I’m sure she has a cunt like everyone else’s cunt. Probably a lot like yours.”

She glowered at him.

“That was odd, wasn’t it, that Champeraigne even arrived there?” said Dunrose. “Because you were there with Arthford, and I remember Simon wasn’t the least bit pleased at the thought of sharing you, which always confused me, because he knew he was sharing you.”

“It’s one thing to know. It’s another to watch,” said Seraphine. “But anyway, as you say, Champeraigne wasn’t there for me. He was bidding on that girl.”

“Yes, indeed, and the fact that we were bidding, that made it exciting, if you know what I mean,” said Dunrose. “It was simply so forbidden to be looking at this pretty gentleman’s daughter’s body and I remember I had such a damned cockstand.”

“Spare me, Dunrose.”

“Oh, am I violating your delicate sensibilities, marchioness?” said Dunrose, snorting. “May I have more brandy?”

She handed him the bottle. “I’m not interested in hearing about your cock, Dunrose.”

“No?” he said. “And here I thought you were quite the connoisseur.” He smirked at her.

She smirked right back. “Oh, that’s just like a man, really, thinking it’s that way for women. It’s not that way. We don’t like your cocks the way you like our cunnies.”

“Well, not all women, I suppose, but you seem to.”

“I like power,” she countered. “Men are mastered through their pricks. Pricks are a means to an end.”

He blinked at her, thinking that over. “I see.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Maybe Arthford is,” said Dunrose. “He’s mastered in that way. I’m not.”

“I’m not going to fuck you, Dunrose,” she said, throwing up her hands.

“No?” he said, sounding even more sulky. “Why not?”

“Oh, God,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I mean, you know, he’s quite brokenhearted and did not come home, so I think he’s in her bed.”

“He is not ,” she said, sighing.

“I think he is,” said Dunrose.

“No, he never strays, not even when I end things,” she said. “I try to convince him to, even just with a strumpet or something. I have told him, he should not be so devoted to something like me, that I don’t deserve his devotion. But he—”

“Well, this time, he’s listened,” said Dunrose.

“You’re just saying this because you think it’s going to make me take you to bed,” she said. “But I’m not. He wouldn’t like that, you know. It’s one thing if it’s men, it’s another if it’s you lot, his fellow highwaymen.”

“Oh, don’t call us that,” said Dunrose. “We’re not even doing the Lords of the Crossroads bit these days. I think Rutchester and Nothshire went all the way to the north, near his country estate, and they’re picking off carriages here and there.”

“Well, it is partly why I’m here,” she said. “It’s for Champeraigne. It’s very complicated, and I can’t remember all the ins and outs, but he has a job for the lot of you and it requires robbing carriages.” She poured herself more brandy. “Stand and deliver,” she said in a sing-song-y voice.

“So, you’d never bed one of the four of us?” said Dunrose. “Admittedly, Nothshire and Rutchester were never in the running. I think Rutchester is broken—either physically or mentally or something. I don’t think he can fuck. I think he can just slash and stab.”

She winced at that description. “What happened with his father, anyway?”

“Oh, you can guess that, I think,” said Dunrose.

“When he was small?”

Dunrose nodded.

“God, that’s appalling,” she whispered.

“Anyway, he’d never touch you and Nothshire wouldn’t have either, even before he was married and boringly obsessed with his wife—”

“They’re newlyweds,” she interrupted. “It fades. Rarely lasts past once a woman’s belly swells too large. Men see women differently once they’re increasing.”

“I don’t know,” said Dunrose, sighing a little. “I think it’d be rather affecting, knowing you’d sired a child on a woman like that. Seeing it there, growing in her body, knowing it was because you put your prick in her and spent there? I’m getting a cockstand just thinking about it.”

“Stop telling me about your erections,” she said tightly.

He snorted. “All I’m saying is that it was only ever me, right? And he won’t care. He lets you fuck everyone. How many other lovers have you had over the years you’ve been with him? Got to be thirty or something, right? He won’t care.”

“I am not going to bed with you,” she said to him. “There’s nothing remotely appealing about you.”

Dunrose looked down at himself. “Oh, that’s not very nice, is it?” He was only wearing an undershirt and a pair of trousers. He examined himself. “I suppose I’m sort of skinnier than Arthford, and I suppose I lack the skill with a sword or a gun that the others have, and I suppose they think I’m stupid. But, really, I’m the most fun. I guarantee I’m the best in bed, also. I have the most varied experience. If you were going to pick a favorite, it would be me. I’m the Duke of Dunrose.”

“I’m telling you, he would care,” she said. Maybe it was the brandy, but he was starting to look a little bit appealing.

She’d lied to him, of course. She did not go to bed with so many men simply because she thought pricks were the path to power. It might have been true in a way, but the path to power was to pretend as if you liked one prick more than another, not to have an array of them at your disposal.

She really did just like sex.

Maybe what she liked was being liked. Being wanted.

She didn’t know, but she wasn’t ever going to give it up, and—despite her little fantasies about Simon—she didn’t think she could manage to be faithful to one man.

Dunrose shook his head. “He wouldn’t care. Besides, he wouldn’t even find out, would he? We could be quick.” He gave her a mischievous smile.

“Oh, this is sounding ever so appealing,” she muttered.

“I mean, I don’t have to be quick,” he said, his voice dipping suggestively. “He really probably won’t be home tonight. I’m sure he’s in that girl’s bed.”

“He has never been in any woman’s bed except mine, so he is not,” she said with a sigh. She blinked at Dunrose. “But you know, I almost didn’t come here when Champeraigne asked me to.”

“No?” said Dunrose. “Why not?”

“I mean to stop,” she said. “I mean to end it with him. For his own good. He is very young, and I am not good for him.”

“Well…” Dunrose shrugged. “I suppose everyone knows that, then. Except him.”

“Exactly,” she said. “I don’t want to give him up, that’s the thing. I know I should. I am selfish, frightfully selfish. I never…” She shook her head, and she was embarrassed when tears pricked her eyes. “No one ever loved me like he does, you know.”

“You don’t deserve to be loved that way, my lady,” he said.

“Careful. You were trying to seduce me, remember. You’d best not start attempting to insult me now.”

“No, no, I don’t mean anything by it,” he said. “I don’t deserve to be loved that way either. Maybe none of us do, we highwaymen. Nothshire, he shouldn’t have that wife of his and Arthford, he’s not got clean hands, no matter how he seems to you, you know?”

“I know about your fathers,” she said softly.

“Oh, so he just told you that?” said Dunrose.

“No, he doesn’t talk about it at all,” she said. “I know from Champeraigne, I suppose. But I don’t see why you think it’s so very bad, in the end. Your fathers seemed to have deserved it.”

Dunrose was quiet.

She sighed. “All right, this is all becoming quite depressing. I’m going to bed.”

“No,” said Dunrose. “Or… let me come with you. My bed is awful, because I’ve been sweating out my dependency on it for too long.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“But you say you want to set him free, and he’ll be hurt if you fuck me. Hurt him for his own good if you really and truly care about him, marchioness.” Dunrose gave her a careless shrug. “Besides, I’m as hard as stone. Do you want to feel?”

Her gaze went to his crotch, damn him.

He noticed. He grinned, satisfied as a cat. He sauntered closer to her.

“You’re disgusting,” she told him.

“Perhaps,” he said, finding her hand and tugging it against him. “You like things a little disgusting, don’t you, marchioness?” His cock jumped against her as he forced her to feel it.

She could have pulled her hand away. She didn’t, exploring the size of him. “You think this tempts me, Dunrose?”

He let out a little laugh. “You know, you should know that I don’t mind a little well-placed humiliation as foreplay. You want to taunt me and say it’s small or something? Go right ahead.”

She snorted. She stroked him through his trousers. “You’re disgusting.”

“Very disgusting,” he agreed. “Call me names if you like, just keep doing that .”

She let go of him.

“Fuck,” he said, but he stretched the word out so it had several syllables. “Please?”

“On your knees,” she said, looking him over. “Beg to be taken to my bed, on your knees.”

He dropped to his knees immediately. “Please let me pleasure you with my very clever fingers and very swollen cock, marchioness.”

“You call that humiliation?” she said. He was sort of charming in his way, though, wasn’t he?

“I’m a worm,” he said, raising his eyebrows. He didn’t sound at all as if he thought himself a worm. “I’m the bottom of your shoe. I’m so debased that I’m less than nothing.” He was grinning, looking rather pleased with himself.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, get up, then.”

“Yes?” he said. “I can come with you? You’ll let me have you?”

She rolled her eyes and walked out of the room, taking the brandy with her.

He kept pace. “If you don’t say no, I’m just going to assume it’s yes.”

“Sounds like you,” she said to him.