Twenty-Seven
“You don’t need to admit I was right. I don’t want you to embarrass yourself.” She did not give Apollo the pleasure of turning around to look at his self-satisfied countenance.
“I knew I’d regret not bringing my blade gloves with me,” she tossed back.
He barked out a laugh as he pulled her by the waist. She went to him, done with resisting the closeness she wanted. The more she learned about this man, the more confused she became about how she’d give him up.
“I love it when you threaten me with bodily harm.” He had her plastered to his front, and she leaned into him, struggling again to recall what she was mad with him about. “It’s very arousing.” His voice was very low now and it seemed to slither through her, weakening her inch by inch. “I liked when you clawed my back, mi gatita.” He pressed his lips to her neck, parted them just enough to lap her heated skin.
“I’m not a kitten,” she protested, her voice embarrassingly breathless. He’d been careful with her since the attack, treating her like spun glass. Even when she knew it was wrong, she could not deny she’d missed this.
He made a sound of agreement. Scraping the edge of his teeth on the spot below her ear that coaxed a sound from her very close to a purr. “You’re a leona,” he whispered, indulgently. “Fierce and wild, and deliciously prickly.” He’d called her those things before. But this time she didn’t feel mocked. She felt worshipped, appreciated, praised. Then she remembered she was supposed to be annoyed at him.
“It would’ve helped to know about those loans when we first met, you know,” she reproached him, pulling away from his attempt to incapacitate her with kisses.
When she turned to face him, he was looking at her with that curious expression he sometimes affected. Like she was the most fascinating riddle.
“You’re claiming that my boasting about all the things I do for women would’ve made for a more positive impression of me.” She’d have thought he was a self-important comemierda who was probably lying to paint himself as a hero.
“It might have,” she hedged, making him laugh again.
“You hated me instantly.”
“I didn’t hate you.”
“You detested me,” he volleyed back, greatly entertained by her fib. Dios, that laugh burrowed right into her bones. It was her favorite one, the one that made his eyes twinkle. How was it fair that a man this handsome, this powerful, had dimples and sparkling eyes?
“I can’t reason with you when you’re like this,” she huffed and took off down the path.
“What am I doing?” He chased after but kept pretending like he couldn’t catch her. Extending his arms until he could almost reach her, and then letting her escape his grasp. When had she ever played like this? She could not remember.
“You’re being charming again and it is very unsettling!” she yelled over her shoulder, before she picked up her skirts and raced up the field.
“Ven aca, Fiera,” he called. “I thought we were friends.” When she looked back again, he crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue, making a laugh burst out of her. This was perhaps the most concerning effect this afternoon had on her. She seemed unable to hold on to the irritation that before Apollo seemed to always be simmering under her skin.
It could be knowing that women owned the land she stood on. That they owned everything she could see. That despite all the work yet to be done and the horrors happening even in that very moment, she could hold on to the knowledge that she was one of many working to right some of the wrongs in the world. It could be that Apollo made her common sense evaporate.
She kept running, her face up to the sun, until a stitch in her side made her stop to catch her breath. Her chest heaving up and down as her heart pumped blood to her limbs.
“Caught you,” he said, low and husky in her ear as he wrapped his strong arms around her. She turned so that they were face-to-face.
“You have to give me back,” she told him, trying very hard to make light of the storm of feelings roaring inside.
She loved him and she could never, ever tell him.
He pushed back an errant curl as she worked to get her heart to slow down. “What if I want to keep you, Fiera? What then?”
She wanted to latch on to the promise in his eyes, but she knew what this was about. Apollo’s need to protect the women in his life. That didn’t stop her from yearning for what he offered her. Didn’t stop her from foolishly wishing she could accept it.
“You’ll have to learn to live with disappointment, Your Grace.” She expected one of his acerbic remarks. Hoped for something that would put them back on familiar ground, where she flung insults that he punctured with his sharp tongue. But all he did was bring her closer. His own chest rising and falling as he looked down at her. He opened his mouth, but she stopped him. Pushed up on her tiptoes and circled her arms around his neck.
“I’m not done with this conversation, Doctora,” he said against her mouth. “But I will let you win for now.” She should fight, remind him that not even the South American families vying to befriend the new duke would tolerate a duchess with such a history as hers. He could not be tied to scandal, and even he could not ignore the ones in her past.
“Kiss me, I’m out of breath,” she gasped, and the side of his mouth tipped up. He shook his head, brushing their lips together.
“You need my air in your lungs, Fiera?”
“Yes.” He held her too tight, his body a harbor against anything that could harm her.
“Dame tu boca,” he demanded roughly as he took her mouth. Any man would’ve soothed her with soft kisses, but what she needed was exactly this. To know the ferocity of his desire for her. He sucked on her tongue as his hands gripped her tight. Her waist, her rump. He touched her like he could never have enough of her.
She gave as good as she got. Her own teeth scoring his neck, marking, like he belonged to her.
“Deja tu huella, Fiera,” he encouraged as she dug her nails into his skin. She wanted to leave traces of her on him. So that when she was gone, he’d remember. He searched for her mouth and took it again, his tongue sparring with hers. She could feel herself sinking, but he held her up. “I’m not going to make love to you on this field,” he groused, when her hand slid over his hardness.
“Why not?” she asked, coming up for breath. Who was she? This reckless creature ready to make love in the open air?
“Because these bushes are full of bees,” he said, pointedly looking at one buzzing only inches from them. She yipped and burrowed closer into him.
“I don’t like bees.” He made one of those low-in-his-throat noises that made her think all manner of sinful thoughts and kissed her head.
“And I don’t want you plagued with stings when I undress you tonight.” Her nipples puckered at the promise in his voice.
“I don’t want to be disreputable in Madame Phuong’s home,” she demurred, knowing it would only make his next remark more incendiary. One of his hands slid up her bodice until his thumb was flicking one of those puckered nipples.
“You love when I do disreputable things to you,” he told her, with the air of a man who knew he was standing on solid ground, before biting her earlobe and sucking on it. “First we’ll have dinner,” he said, pressing soft kisses to her forehead while his fingers took turns pinching her nipples. The contrast between the gentle caress of his lips and the harsh work of his fingers had her caught in this exquisite space between pleasure and pain.
“After dinner, we’ll go to sleep, separately,” she taunted him.
“After dinner, Fiera,” he began, sliding a hand down her front until he was cupping her sex, “I’m going to take every inch of clothes off your delicious form.” His touch was too clever, too good. “Then I’m going to lick you from head to toe.”
“Apollo,” she whined, and began to wonder how painful it would be to acquire a few bee stings.
She knew she was on borrowed time. That every moment she spent with him, she was exposing him to wagging tongues and scandal.
“You’re thinking again,” he complained, gently tapping her right temple. “You’re much more amenable when you don’t think so damned hard.”
“If what you want is an empty-headed trollop, you should’ve left me here and gone to Nice.” The moment she said the words, she regretted them. She didn’t want to think about Nice or what—and who—was waiting for him there. She stared up at him, attempting to pierce him with an unfriendly glare, but she knew she was much too besotted to manage anything of the like.
“Encabronada.” With the way he uttered the word, sultry and slow, one would not think he was calling her bad-tempered. But those eyes simmered with heat as he looked down at her. “There is nothing in Nice that I want more than what I have right here,” he told her, making her heart thump painfully against her chest. “And you know damned well, I’m obsessed with your mind.” This was how she’d lose this war, the praise, the delight he took in her ugly moods and her penchant for overthinking. “I just don’t want you to be in here all the time.” He rubbed a circle on her temple, then bent down to tear a piece of lavender from one of the bushes and slid it right over the errant curl he’d tucked back earlier. Then kissed her again.
She could try to argue more, remind him that they’d agreed she would be a terrible duchess. Ask what he meant with that comment about Nice. Tell him that he was making things more difficult. That he knew as well as she did there was no future for them. Not if he wanted respect from his peers, or from the elite from the Americas and Africa he was courting.
But she didn’t. Instead, she exhaled a long breath and let her head fall on his chest. She let him brush his lips on the top of her head. She let him take her by the hand and lead her down the rows of lavender and pretended this stolen afternoon could be her life.
* * *
“I know the way back to the room, Apollo,” she told him that evening, as she swayed those hips down the long hallway leading to the bedchambers.
“I’m merely escorting you, to make sure there are no monsters under your bed,” he shot back, attempting and failing to lightly pinch that gorgeous backside.
“The only monster I’ve seen so far is the one in your trousers.” A sly grin over a bare shoulder. Dios, but he wanted her. All through dinner, he’d barely been able to keep his hands off her.
When they reached the door, stood at the threshold, her arms splayed to the side, blocking him from the room. “Respectable houseguests don’t let rogues ravish them in their rooms.”
“And here I was thinking that time I had you in my parlor had disabused you of that penchant for respectability.” She made a lusty sound when his palms connected with the door’s surface above her head.
“It’s not a penchant,” she protested, even as she turned her face up to him. He pressed forward, wanting to feel her. “Contrary to what my behavior as of late indicates, Your Grace, I have managed some semblance of restraint for most of my adult life.” That pretty pink flush colored her cheeks, and there was a brightness in her eyes that pierced the very heart of him.
She was open to him. Soft and wanton, his, if only for this moment.
“It’s because you find me irresistible, Fiera.”
He took her mouth, a little roughly, letting her feel his hunger. Their tongues warred as her nails raked over his back. He loved how she unleashed on him. He would never get enough of that fury.
“I want to be inside you,” he whispered hotly, as he lowered one hand to touch her. They hadn’t done this since before her attack. He’d been cautious, not wanting to pressure her when she seemed so vulnerable. But now with enough distance from Ackworth and the rest of the fires still to be put out, he needed her. Badly enough to beg if necessary.
He pressed the heel of his hand to her sex, making her moan for him. The other hand pinched the hard bud of one nipple and she fed him all her needy sounds. He felt her scramble for something, heard the sound of her fingernails scraping on wood, and before he knew it, they were tumbling inside her room.
He’d forgotten they were in the damned hallway.
“I’m not letting you tear this,” she warned, already busy unfastening the row of buttons down the front of her blouse. It was a gauzy pale blue garment, with a matching skirt that Phuong had procured for her. She looked lovely in it, serene, and he wanted more than anything to ensure she could always be like this.
“Then you better hurry,” he warned, taking a step forward. She backed away with a grin, walked to the large open window and flicked the drapes closed. Her bottom pertly lifted as she leaned over a small desk to reach them. The image of her over the surface of it, those strong hands gripping the edge while he surged into her took hold of him like a fever.
He’d told himself the craving would subside. That, like it always had before, the urge would wane. But his need for Aurora Montalban seemed to feed on itself. The more he had her, the more he wanted. Not just her body. He wanted to possess the very essence of her. Hoard those smiles she rarely offered him. Squirrel away every moan, every lusty glance. The world could have Doctora Montalban, but Aurora the Fiera was his.
“I’ll help with the skirt,” he offered, making quick work of the hook at her waist and pulling it down, before she could deny him. “I’d very much like to fuck you right against this desk.” She made an eager little sound as he worked to undress her. There was no bustle, no petticoat, just a bit of linen cov ering the swell of her backside. Beneath it, skin the color of the most luscious milk chocolate. He slid a hand up her back, gripped her nape possessively, his fingers digging into her flesh as she arched into the touch.
“Apollo.” The way she said his name in these moments tore at the very foundation of his control. He was obsessed with the raspy way she called to him. Asking him without more than a sound for everything. His body, his mind, his damn soul.
He’d tried to convince himself he could let go of this. That eventually he would have to come to terms with his title, with the path it set him on. That he had an obligation to show these aristocrats he was better than all of them. But the moment he’d seen her on the ground, bruised and bleeding, everything else ceased to matter. Her safety, her happiness was all he wanted.
He didn’t care about higher causes. He would honor his mother’s memory and he’d try to do some good, but his purpose was this woman. Making way for her to do the healing and repairing she so desperately wanted to do.
Otherwise, it would be destroying Forsyth and Ackworth and every other man like them. Without her, he’d be lost to the darkness that had always lived in him, because he might be his mother’s son, but he was very much his father’s spawn.
“Eres mia, Aurora Beatriz,” he whispered against her skin. He skated his hands up the dip of her waist, up her spine. “This is mine.” He sank his teeth into flesh, making her whimper. “Mia. Mi Fiera.” She stiffened at the possessive declaration, then a humming thrummed through her.
“I belong to me, Your Grace,” she countered, even as she parted her legs to his touch. He countered her statement by cupping one breast with a hand while he speared her heat with the other.
“I own this,” he insisted, struggling to free his hard shaft from his trousers. The sound of tearing fabric elicited a sur prised laugh from his lover, who was circling her hips like a demon on his aching length. “Cono,” he moaned when he finally wrenched it free. “Let me in, amor,” he coaxed as he kissed the tip of his hardness to her entrance, then slid it over her drenched folds.
Always so good. So perfect.
They both cried out at their joining. It was always like this. Consuming, unbearably perfect.
“Move, Duke,” she demanded, making him laugh.
“My blushing maiden,” he teased, nipping at her skin, then she was the one laughing. The sound of it, so bright, so light, even when he knew there were so many shadows in her heart. But for him, in these moments she sparkled. He lifted her up until she was on her knees on the desk.
She cried out as he sank further. “It’s so deep,” she moaned when he pushed inside again and again. He ran his hands over her, leaned down to kiss the nape of her neck, her shoulders.
“You’re perfect,” he moaned, as he reached under her and rubbed that tight nub of nerves. She jolted at the touch, her sex gripping him so tightly his eyes rolled in his head. “So good, mi Fiera.” He wanted to say it then. That he loved her. That he could not let her go.
“Ah, Apollo,” she cried when he increased his thrusts. He felt her flutter around him. Her slickness warning him of her nearing climax.
“Come for me, amor,” he coaxed, leaving open-mouthed kisses on her hot skin as he entered her in rough, short strokes. “Your cunt is the sweetest thing,” he growled in her ear, making her buck into him.
“You have a dirty mouth,” she rebuked, even as she turned her face for a kiss. She puffed a breathless little moan into his mouth, then cried out.
He found his own orgasm in the next instant, his forehead pressed to her shoulder and words he knew he was afraid to utter biting his tongue.
“I will have to live in this room now,” she grumbled moments later, her voice muffled with her mouth pressed to the desk. “There’s not a soul in Marseille that didn’t hear us.” He laughed tiredly, still catching his breath, while he caressed her heated skin.
“I assure you Gilberto and Mihn are too busy with their own evening endeavors,” he told her, carefully sliding out of her. They both groaned at the loss, but he did manage to resist the urge to paint her with his seed like a Neanderthal. “Let’s get you to bed.” He scooped her up and she let him carry her there. Her face buried in his neck.
He laid her down gently, his heart beating so aggressively in his chest he could hear the pulsing. She was so lovely in the moonlight, her skin glorious against the pale sheets. This woman had carved a hole in his heart and nothing else could fit but her.
“I need to stop letting you debauch me whenever you like,” she said with feigned peevishness as she modestly brought the sheets up to her neck.
“But you always look so refreshed after a debauching,” he told her from the foot of the bed. She scoffed, but her eyes didn’t leave his naked body. She might not ever vocally stake a claim to him, but those brown eyes roamed over him like a queen surveying her territory.
“You might as well sleep here,” she said, reaching for him. “You’re so damned loud you’ll wake up the entire house getting back to your room.”
“You can just say you want me in your bed, Fiera.” She rolled her eyes and tugged on his hand until he relented and toppled over her. He cradled her face and kissed her, and she kissed him back. He did so with his eyes open, tasting, look ing, inhaling her. Wondering how to say it as he watched her lashes flutter from his kiss. He’d asked her this before but pretended to do so in jest. But nothing about keeping her was a joke, not anymore. He didn’t think it ever had been.
When he pulled back, her eyes slid open and he thought he could see every minute, every second of the rest of his life in their depths. His future right under him, cradling him, holding him.
“Marry me, Aurora.” He let her go, expected her to fight him. She did.
“Apollo,” she cried out, as if the words terrified her. “You know I can’t. Philip is still out there.”
He dearly wished he could erase Forsyth’s filthy existence from the face of the earth. How much damage could one man do?
“Forsyth doesn’t matter, you and I do.” It made him sick to his stomach, it made him homicidal to see her like this. The bravest, best woman he’d known huddled under the weight of other people’s judgments. People who were not worthy of kissing her damned feet.
“It’s not just Philip and you know it,” she finally said, blinking madly as if she was holding back tears. When he reached for her, she pulled away. Right before his eyes, she retreated into herself, that hair shirt she loved so well tightly wound around her. She wouldn’t look at him, her gaze fixed upward. “Not even a duke can make a bastard acceptable to the aristocracy.”
The word hit him across the face. The violence of it, the way it made her sound so small. Instantly the warm glow of their lovemaking was replaced with a glacial aloofness. He could almost see her shields going up. The defenses he’d so painstakingly tried to demolish back in full force. They were so close he had but to slide his hand an inch and he’d touch her, like she was sitting on her own little island, with an ocean of fury around her.
“That doesn’t matter to me, Aurora—”
“You say that now, but you will change your mind.” There were a thousand things he wanted to say, but he knew this woman by now and she needed to say her piece. “I’m the child of my father’s indiscretion with his wife’s younger sister.” Her lip quivered, and he could see her struggling not to cry. “Do you truly think the aristocracy will abide that?” He wanted to take her in his arms, but he also knew that would not be welcome. She wasn’t wrong. If he was someone different, they might tolerate it. But he had to be above all reproach and even then, they’d make him feel like he didn’t belong. “You have a chance to show them who you are, who we are. And my presence would be a stain on that.”
Not for the first time he repudiated the burden of being the first, the only.
“Don’t say things like that about yourself, Aurora.” It was an effort to keep from shouting. He hated the way she looked right now. He could practically feel the self-loathing rolling off her in waves. “You’re already better than all of them, than I am. Just as you are.”
She looked brittle, like the lightest wind could knock her over. “What about all the women in Nice right now waiting for you to make your selection?”
“I’ve already made it.” That was the only thing he was certain of. “You’re my duchess.”
“Don’t say that, Apollo.” She sounded scared, like every word out of his mouth terrified her.
“It’s true, you’re who I want and none of this other mierda matters,” he began, but she cut him off with a swift shake of her head.
“No, don’t tell me it doesn’t matter to you.”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” he insisted. There was no gently bred, aristocratic lady who could ever compare to this woman.
“It will matter.” She was pure defiance now. It cut him to the bone to see the fear in her eyes, refusing his words. “It will matter when the whispers start, when you can’t find a single ally. You’ll hate me or you’ll hide me.” Like her father hid her. Like that whore’s son Ackworth hid his wife.
She was up from the bed now, wedged into a corner of the room with that sheet wrapped around her. She looked hunted, her eyes traveling over his face as if looking for a diagnosis. Excavating for some feeling she expected to see but was yet to locate.
“I would never hide my duchess.”
She laughed, a broken sound, and turned away from him. He tried to stand, to go to her, but she held her hand up.
“No, stay there.” She squeezed her eyes shut, her mouth in a flat, miserable line. “Or I won’t say the things I need to say.” He wondered if this was the true reason she’d given up her family fortune. If she was imposing some kind of penance on herself. “Remember when you’d tease me about my sanctimoniousness?” God, he could be such a pendejo. “Why do you think I’m like this?” she asked, through tears.
“I don’t know, Aurora,” he answered helplessly, as he watched her rip herself apart.
“Because I need to make up for my birth. Because no matter how good I am, how well I behave, any mistake, any misstep comes down to that. The bastard who can’t rise above her nature.”
The words were not easy to hear, and it took everything in him to not go to her. But it all made sense now. The way she held herself. The distrust, the walls she built up around herself. Her certainty that she wasn’t enough. In the beginning, he’d thought they were similar in their stubbornness. That, like him, she forced herself into places because she had to show people she was just as good as they were. But now he saw it was about earning her place.
She killed herself with the clinics, with the work, because she didn’t think they would allow her to stay. She kept secrets even from her friends because she believed their love, like her father’s and even her mother’s, would only be there as long as she didn’t cause them trouble. His heart shattered for that little girl who was neglected and ignored, never knowing why she wasn’t wanted.
He had seldom felt this powerless. Fury churned in him at what the world did to women. The cycle of misery and shame inflicted on them.
“Mi cielo.”
She scoffed at the endearment. “I’m no one’s idea of heaven.” But when he stood and went to wrap his arms around her, she came to him. She pressed her forehead to his chest. “I don’t want to ruin things for you, Apollo, and I will. Promise me you won’t risk what you’ve fought so hard for, for me.”
He was tired. Weary of having to take on the world, simply to be allowed into a room he had every right to be in. He didn’t want to battle anymore, he just wanted to love her.
“But what if all I want is you?” He tried to pull her chin up to look at him, but she wouldn’t let him.
“I won’t marry you, Apollo. I won’t do that to you.”
He wanted to fight her, bully her into seeing that she was the only thing he wanted. But he knew that with Aurora, words only went so far. He’d have to show her.