Chapter 13
CHAPTER 13
“ O h, Your Grace, I’m so flattered,” Helen said, giving the duke a look that said, What are you doing, you great idiot? Go away .
He kept giving her that very genteel smile.
“Wonderful,” he said, extending a hand. “Then we are in agreement.”
She looked at the hand the way she might look at a snake that was already baring its fangs.
“I’m sure I couldn’t,” she said, looking—foolishly—at her previous partner, Lord Ryder, for aid.
Lord Ryder, she’d learned, was not more highly ranked than George, but he was apparently richer than God, so she’d targeted him this evening with the hopes that he would…purchase Patricia from her cousin? No, that didn’t make sense.
Helen’s planning was, alas, still in the nascent stages.
She would allow, however, that as far as loveless, forced marriages went, she could do worse than Lord Ryder, who seemed vaguely dim in a sweet, biddable sort of way.
This was, unfortunately, not the kind of quality that she needed at the moment.
“Oh, we’ve finished our dance, miss,” Lord Ryder supplied helpfully, as if she might not have noticed this despite the absence of music. “Unless you’ve someone next on your dance card, you’re free to dance with someone else.”
“Thank you for that clarification,” she said through gritted teeth.
Ryder, entirely ignorant of the pulse of tension, bowed and smiled.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Good evening, miss, Your Grace.”
This left Helen standing with the duke, his hand still extended. He looked like he would be perfectly happy to leave it hanging there all night.
She darted an eye at her dance card. He arched an eyebrow that indicated that he would also be perfectly happy to check the veracity of any claim she made regarding its contents.
People were starting to glance in their direction. She could not refuse him now, not without starting a scandal, one that would doubtless reach her cousin’s ears in a trice.
Her smile was less than gracious.
“Lead the way, Your Grace,” she said, putting her hand in his.
He looked very pleased with himself, which made sense, as he was an annoying man who did annoying things.
The next dance was a waltz, which also made sense because Helen seemed to have brought some sort of curse of bad luck upon herself. This was, she thought resignedly, just the latest in a cascade of misfortunes that had afflicted her since her father had died. George had shown up, George had been George , and then, when she’d finally secured an ally, it had been the dratted Duke of dratted Godwin, who was the worst dratted man in the whole of the dratted world.
Helen made a mental note to learn better swears—or get more comfortable even thinking about the ones she did know.
Then the music started up, and the duke swept into effortless steps (because, of course, he was an elegant dancer), and she was swept along with him.
And then she could think of nothing but his hands upon her.
His position was not a millimeter out of place, the touch entirely proper, but when he held her like this, moved her through the steps, she could understand why people had clutched their throats and gasped over the impropriety of the waltz.
The dance felt like a prelude to a kiss.
“What are you doing?” she asked quietly when she’d gathered enough of her wits to string together a sentence. It had taken more effort than she might have liked.
“Dancing,” he answered—simply, infuriatingly. “Hush, Helen. Just dance.”
She obviously should have argued, protested his use of her given name in public, done…something. Anything.
But it was so easy to just do as he said. And it had been simply ages since Helen’s life had been the least bit easy.
So she just danced. And as she danced, her eyes gravitated naturally toward his, then held. They were so blue, those eyes. Pale, pale blue. And perhaps on a lesser man, the color would have looked watery or washed out, but on the duke…
She had the terrible feeling that he could see directly through her.
And the way he saw through her helped her see through herself, helped her admit all the things she’d been trying so very hard not to admit.
Under his gaze, she could admit that, despite her protests, she’d been quite intrigued by the idea of satisfying this man, that the bargain between them had made her feel not cheap but powerful, as though she were someone to be desired.
As he watched her, she could admit that she was disappointed that their deal had ended before such a thing had come to pass.
With his eyes boring into her, she could admit the thing that she had shoved down to the darkest corners of her heart: that she was scared that she would fail Patricia, fail herself and that everything would be terrible forever.
“Helen,” he murmured, and there it was again, that unbelievable audacity, that unforgivable familiarity, and it made Helen feel warm and safe and good . “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
God, of all the dangerous questions he could have asked!
She could not lie; all she could do was offer the least revealing answer.
“I find,” she said, her voice low and throaty and not at all her own, “that I am sorry that I never got to…reciprocate. In our arrangement, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “For my own sake, as well as yours.”
It was a remarkable thing, watching his eyes darken. The color didn’t truly change, of course. There was that same piercing blue. But something behind them palpably shifted until Helen was no longer looking at the duke but at the man.
She’d only caught glimpses of him before, but she was intrigued.
The notes of the waltz started to slow, and thank God the duke was paying attention because Helen mightn’t have noticed if a cannon blast went off in the middle of the ballroom.
“Here is what is going to happen,” he said in the last moments the music provided cover for their conversation. “You are going to curtsey, thank me, and depart. And then, in three minutes, you are going to leave this room, go upstairs, and meet me in the second room on the right. Do you understand?”
There was no time to argue. She could only give her answer.
“Yes,” she breathed.
And then he had let her go, and he was every inch the duke again as he bowed with exacting propriety.
“Thank you for the dance, Miss Fletcher.”
“The pleasure was all mine, Your Grace,” she returned.
In the end, it was easy—on the outside, that was. Internally, Helen was at war with herself. There was stupid, she lectured herself, and then there was stupid . If sneaking out of her house at night to liaise with the duke had been the former, sneaking out of a ballroom with half the ton in attendance was decidedly the latter.
Not that it mattered. She knew this even as she tried to convince herself that it did matter, that she was a sensible girl, that she needed to show a single ounce of wisdom here.
Nobody so much as glanced in her direction as her feet carried her out of the ballroom. Nobody was even present to glance at her when, instead of heading toward the ladies’ retiring room, she slipped toward the back stairs.
She paused at the doorway of the second room on the right, mentally pleading with herself to turn around.
But , a much louder voice argued, you are to enter a loveless marriage. It will be a duty, not a pleasure. Don’t you deserve this one adventure to remember, to carry you through those cold and joyless years?
She opened the door.
Jesus Christ and all the martyrs, this was a bedroom. She’d thought she was headed for a study or a library or a…
But it didn’t matter. She went in anyway.
In the instant she closed the door behind her, the duke’s hands were on her face, warm and firm but gentle still. He pressed her back against the door she’d just come through, then inserted one of his legs between her own, pinning her in place with her skirts.
She gasped and he devoured it as his mouth touched hers.
Helen’s father had once come home with a wondrous tale of a chemist called Sir Humphry Davy, who had invented something he called an arc lamp. Her father had breathlessly described the flash of light that Davy’s lamp had produced—a thousand times brighter than fire, so bright that it blazed behind your eyelids for long minutes after it had burned out.
Helen had listened more out of daughterly loyalty than anything else. Privately, she’d wondered why anyone would bother inventing such a thing. Who cared about a lamp that was too bright and too brief to use? Where did one even get such an idea?
She suspected now that Sir Humphry had, at least once in his life, had a truly incendiary kiss.
For she could think of no greater analogy for how she felt now, with the duke’s kiss burning her up inside. It would be imprinted upon her forever.
“I—” she gasped against his mouth because surely, surely, if she didn’t rationalize or explain this somehow, it would burn her fully to ash.
“Shh,” he—urged? Scolded? Soothed? She couldn’t tell, as his mouth had returned to hers, and she was, again, lost.
Their mouths moved together, and she’d never felt hungrier in all her life. Her body urged her to act. She felt as though she were drawing upon some long-dormant instinct as she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself up and closer to him—not that they could get much closer, given that he still had her pinioned against the door.
“Fuck, Helen,” he gritted out, pushing himself ever closer to her. “You feel so good.”
“Yes,” she agreed. It wasn’t pride; it was the only word she still knew how to say.
She felt the mad impulse to reach out her tongue to touch his mouth and did so. She had the barest second to wonder what on earth had gotten into her, to half recoil with embarrassment, and then his tongue invaded her mouth with such confidence and heat that she melted before it.
Never mind , she thought giddily, dizzily. I’m doing marvelously .
The duke seemed to agree if the exuberance with which he was kissing her, pressing her back, and winding his fingers through her hair was any indication.
She followed her next impulse, which was to press herself down against the knee that was still lodged between her legs. A jolt of pleasure shot through her, and the duke cursed.
“Fuck, Helen,” he growled, and hearing such coarse language from his refined lips sent another similar thrill coursing through her. His panting made her feel as powerful as a queen. “I’m not going to—Not against the fucking wall. Come here.”
He manhandled her over toward the bed. Helen found it delightful and told herself to never, ever admit as much. Lord only knew the man already suffered from a distinct overabundance of self-confidence.
He proved this in the following moments by toppling her over onto the soft mattress, pinning her down with his body, and then…not kissing her.
Helen opened her eyes to find the duke’s gaze mere inches from hers, his nose so close to her own that she could practically feel the energy leaping between their skin.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice a hoarse whisper.
He gave her a wicked, wicked look.
That look promised trouble. Helen’s foolish body reacted by coiling tight in anticipation.
“Ask me,” he ordered.
For a second, she didn’t understand his meaning. And then she did , and only the need for secrecy stifled her squawk of outrage.
“You!” she exclaimed. “Was all this a—a ploy to get me to give in your stupid game?”
He grazed the tip of his nose down her cheek, the gesture oddly reassuring.
“Certainly not,” he told her. “This was all a ploy to get to kiss you until you look as flushed and undone as you currently do. And I daresay you enjoyed it as much as I did. No.” He shook his head, and a flop of dark hair fell over his brow. “This part here—the part where you ask me for what you want—is because I don’t go back on my bargains, Helen, and you really ought to know that.”
He paused, almost as though a new thought was crossing his mind.
“And because I very much want to hear you tell me what you want,” he added. “I want to hear you say it, and I want you to know, when I am giving you what you asked for, that this is how pleasure should be.”
Lord, how those words struck her. She wasn’t certain whether she wanted to laugh or cry or scream, but she did know that she wanted his hands on her, wanted to feel that pleasure he promised, and she wanted to feel it now .
“Touch me,” she said.
Pointedly, he lifted a single finger and laid it gently on the tip of her nose.
She scowled. He grinned, and he was horribly beautiful.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” he said, all lightness and air.
She growled, low in her throat. She felt his laugh more than she heard it.
She didn’t know how to ask him, that was the thing. She wanted to feel him, to know him, to have that light back under her skin. But the specifics, the language of the act…that she did not know. She might not be as sheltered as most London-raised misses, but she was still a young lady. She didn’t have the education of a rake…
Oh, well, that was an idea.
“I want,” she said, holding his eyes with hers, “to know what a true rake is capable of.”
His expression flickered with delightful, promising danger.
“I don’t know, little rabbit,” he said, and it was astonishing how much less she minded that nickname when she was pinned between his hard body and the soft bed. “I think that might be a bit too much for you yet.”
She had one last card, and she played it.
“Xander,” she said. “Please.”
This was the first time she’d used his name, and it was, she knew, a gamble. There was a line in him between the duke and something softer—the face she’d noticed he showed his family, the one she’d caught only in glimpses. He very well could have pushed her away for stepping over that line.
But he didn’t. He fell on her, instead, pressing kisses over her mouth, her cheeks, her jaw, her throat. It was an onslaught of pleasurable touching, and Helen was unable to do anything but ride along the waves, a boat bobbing in a maelstrom.
“A taste,” he said, tongue flickering out to lick her throat along with his words. She gasped and arched, seeing…more? Relief? She had the terrible feeling that they might be one and the same.
“I will give you a taste,” he went on, punctuating his words with little nipping bites along her collarbone. “Say yes, Helen.”
“Yes,” she said. It was the easiest answer she’d given in an age.
She expected him to grow quiet, then, to get along with the business of…whatever it was that he planned to do.
But the duke— Xander —kept right on talking.
“My grandfather was properly obsessed with classical antiquity, you know,” he said, and she might have scolded him for talking about his grandfather of all people if he hadn’t followed this sentence with a hot, open-mouthed kiss on the upper curve of her breast where it surged above the line of her bodice. “Which means I know the provenance of your name. Tell me, Helen, do you know the history, too?”
“I—what?” Was he giving her a bleeding history examination while cupping his hands over her breasts, his thumbs somehow unerringly pressing against her nipples even through layers of silk, corset, and chemise?
“Helen of Troy,” he explained with excruciating patience. “The most beautiful woman in the world. It’s fitting, I think.”
And then he pulled back his head from where he’d pressed it against her throat and gave her a look of such pure, uncontrolled lust that it made her feel hot and liquid inside.
When he broke their gazes, it was to look down her body. His hands began deftly pulling her voluminous skirts up and up.
“Men fought wars to possess Helen in the way I’m about to possess you,” he said. “And look at me, the lucky man who has you laid out like a gift in front of me, with nary a need to raise so much as a single sword.”
He paused. “Oh, well, perhaps a single sword,” he added with a wry note. She again didn’t catch his meaning until he ground his hips against her thigh. Then, the burning length of him left her without question. He’d meant his…
She couldn’t even think of it without feeling as though she might faint from blushing so hard.
“My name, meanwhile,” he said, tracing lazy patterns over her silk stockings, “is that of a conqueror. Alexander the Great. A bit self-important, as far as names go, but that’s hardly the point.”
Her skirts were now rucked up, and Helen might have thought it a horribly inelegant position, except for how Xander was looking at her as though he intended to swallow her whole. It was hard to worry about anything else when a man looked at her like that.
“Will you let me play conqueror, Helen?” he asked, punctuating the purring question with another nip at the base of her throat. “Come on now, darling. Show me you want it. Spread your legs for me.”
Xander had evidently been weaving some spell over her with his words, with his talk of ancient kings and deadly beauties, because when he made this crude request, Helen didn’t feel as though it was actually crude at all.
She felt like a queen.
She spread her legs.
The way he looked at her, bared to him, clad only in shadows and the dim light of a banked fire, made her feel like an empress. No, a goddess.
“Fuck,” he said, almost to himself. “I must taste you.”
Up until the moment when he bent his head toward her center, Helen had thought taste was more a metaphor than anything else. Thus, when he bent toward her exposed flesh, she squeaked in surprise and tried to sit up.
Xander was faster, however. His hand came to the center of her chest and pressed her back.
“Do you wish to stop?” he asked.
She shook her head violently. “No,” she said in a rush. “No, no.”
His smile was dangerous. “Good. Then you will let me do as I please. Lie back, Helen. Let me do as you asked. Let me show you how a rake pleases his lovers.”
She sucked in a gasp at the word lover . But, God, that’s what she was? She was, in this very moment, becoming one of the Duke of Godwin’s lovers. It would be a short-lived role, she knew, but the memory could never be taken from her.
She let herself go boneless, sinking back into the mattress.
“Good girl,” he praised. It made her whimper, which would have embarrassed her if he didn’t look so very satisfied by it. “Perhaps I ought to have warned you a bit more clearly. You’re just a sweet little rabbit, after all, aren’t you?”
She didn’t know if she should argue, didn’t know if she wanted to argue. It was too hard to think of anything, argument or otherwise, when he was tracing aimless little patterns on the soft, sensitive flesh of her upper thigh.
He seemed to take her lack of answer as an answer of its own type. He proceeded to warn her…if that was what one could call this torturous kind of talk that stoked the heat in her ever higher.
“I’m going to taste every inch of you, little rabbit, inside and out. I’m going to use my mouth to make you twist and writhe and ache. I am going to push you to feel things you’ve never felt before and then, when you cannot take it a moment longer, when you cannot bear the tension lest you shatter…”
He smiled, and even in the dim light, she could see that it was beautiful and wicked.
“Then I shall fill you with my fingers. There’s this spot, you see, deep inside. And when I press it for you—” His own breath was getting labored now as if he was as affected by his own words as she was. “You shall fall apart for me, Helen. And it will be so very beautiful. Just wait and see. I’ll show you.”
She was letting out little whimpering sounds with each breath now, and she should have felt bothered by it, but she was too consumed by the spell that Xander was weaving.
“Do you want me to do that, sweet Helen?”
“Yes.” He’d barely finished his question before her answer was bursting from her lips, but, if anything, her eagerness seemed to please him.
“Marvelous,” he purred, every inch the cat who had gotten the canary. “Let’s begin.”
And then he proceeded to do precisely as he’d told her he was going to…and yet, Helen discovered almost instantly, the warning was no warning at all.
He’d told her he was going to taste her, but it was more like a devouring, a starving man before a feast, a condemned man before his last meal. The touch of his tongue made her feel feral; it was hot and wet and everything, consuming her attention down to the point of his ministrations. He licked her everywhere, and it all felt so wonderfully good, and then there was this one spot?—
Her back arched, her hips canted up. She gasped.
He pulled back from her for just a moment, but it was ages too long.
“Settle, my sweet girl. There’s more to be had.”
And then, to confirm her compliance, he pressed a strong, steadying hand on her lower belly, and that, too, made her wilder and hotter and practically mad with the need for—for?—
Something. There was something missing. A distant part of her mind remembered something about not bearing the tension any longer, and truly, she thought she might die if he didn’t fix this, fix this thing he had done to her, this spell he had wrought.
Then, true to his word, he slid his fingers inside her. It hurt just a bit, but it wasn’t a bad hurt. Instead, the stretch made her want even more, more. He didn’t let up with his mouth, keeping his attention on that particularly sensitive little nub, one hand holding her down, the other working between her legs, feeling for something.
She knew the moment he found it, for it made the pleasant fullness of his fingers expand, erupt, explode into more. She bit back a whimper, pressing both hands over her mouth to keep herself from calling out, using her very last shred of rationality to do so.
It took only a few moments more, his clever fingers on that spot, his tongue working her, and then he, in perfect synchrony, pressed and sucked .
And Helen died of the pleasure.
Xander guided her through the wracking waves, the feeling making her sob against the press of her own palms over her mouth. The explosive feeling had just started to seem like it would go on forever—not that Helen minded overmuch—when each wave ebbed and quieted, like the tide going out.
Just when the sensations threatened to tip from wonderful to overwhelming, Xander slowed his own movements and then, gently and slowly, withdrew his fingers from her body. He pressed a final kiss to her leg, this one a bit lower, closer to her knee, and then lightly draped her skirts back down, not covering her entirely but preserving a bit of her modesty.
A bit like bolting the barn doors after the horses have fled, isn’t it?
That thought made Helen giggle—she felt almost drunk, like that time she’d gotten in her father’s whisky—which made her realize that she still had her hands over her mouth.
She let her arms fall to her side, feeling boneless and spent.
Xander climbed the bed until he was lounging by her side, looking—it had to be said—extremely pleased with himself.
“Please imagine that I’ve said something clever about the prowess of rakes,” Helen said, her tone a touch slurred. “I promise to do so as soon as I have any energy at all.”
His grin broadened, which did nothing good for Helen’s wits or levels of energy, as he looked…unguarded. Unmasked.
It was just like him to take her breath away, she thought, not even bothering to deny that her mental insult was deeply tinged with fondness.
“Well, you’ve done what every rake truly desires,” he returned. “You’ve played to my ego. Thank you very much for that.”
“I think I’m meant to be thanking you?”
She had a dim sense that she’d begun this adventure with the idea that she was meant to satisfy him. And while he seemed very self-satisfied, she wasn’t sure that was quite the same thing.
But that all was too difficult to puzzle out at present. So, she went with her impulse, which was to reach up a hand, cup it over his cheek, and use it to guide his mouth to hers. He tasted slightly foreign, and she realized with a jolt of scandalized delight that it was because he’d used his mouth on her so intimately.
They kissed in a lazy, unhurried kind of way, and Helen let her hand trace down Xander’s cheek, to his jaw, to his throat. She pressed her palm against the hard expanse of his chest, exposed where he’d torn his cravat free. She could feel his heart beating beneath her fingers, a steady, sure thump.
It was a nearly perfect moment. Peaceful, uncomplicated.
And then the door opened, and there was a chorus of gasps. Helen and Xander sat up in a synchronized, startled bolt.
A crowd of people stood at the door. At their head was George.
He met Helen’s eyes and gave her a satisfied smirk.