Chapter Two
She stared at the figure before her. The same exquisite tailoring she had admired on entering the room, the same palpable air of authority, the dexterous hands, the angular face, the cruel, emphatic mouth.
The hair just long enough to hang over one eye before it was shaken impatiently back.
All these things were the same and yet utterly different.
This was a woman.
The duke was tall, her shoulders powerful, her whole body held with the still, leashed focus of a predator. She was the most intimidating woman Celine had ever met.
The woman Bastien planned to gift her to; the woman Bastien would let fuck her. She heard Bastien’s voice saying, She prefers women.
The first time Celine had encountered the duke’s name, she’d been hiding in the airing cupboard in Monsieur Genet’s laundry.
He was a clockmaker whose household she lived in.
At thirteen, she had to bend her knees almost to her nose to fit in the cupboard, feet flat against the opposite wall and bum uncomfortably warm where it was wedged close to the boiler.
She was reading a newspaper by the slatted light that came through the cupboard door, scouring it for useful on-dits.
M. Genet didn’t like to take her with him to the wealthy houses whose clocks he maintained, but his patrons had lately been asking for her.
She’d caught their attention as a matter of survival, through personal charm and an astonishing grasp of current gossip.
And so, he would take her sometimes, armed with her tiny, necessary advantages.
And so, she scoured the paper, filling her arsenal.
She had skimmed three paragraphs about the Duke of Howard before she realised the duke in question was a woman: a singularly British affectation. Her foot slipped and she nearly burned the full length of her thigh in her surprise. She steadied herself and read the article again, slowly this time.
The Duke of Howard had turned twenty-one and made her long-awaited maiden speech in the English House of Lords.
The Duke of Howard, the newspaper reported, had once razed two villages to the ground, throwing out elderly tenants whose families had lived on Howard land for generations, throwing out war veterans on their odd-numbered limbs, throwing out widows with eleven mouths to feed; and built foundries in their place, monstrosities that grumbled and groaned and spewed filth into the air and water.
What had once been a pastoral idyll had now become hell, and God save anyone who stood in the way of the Duke of Howard getting what she wanted.
The paper had trembled lightly. Bent at an angle by the shelves, by the need for light, heart held uncomfortably in the ravenous-tender confines of her mouth, Celine had read the piece a third time.
It was the summer of the Duke of Howard. She had taken Paris by storm. She had taken over the print shops, which couldn’t print her likeness fast enough for the feverish young ladies.
She had taken hold of Celine.
And now, almost nine years later, in the house of her condemned lover, Celine found herself face-to-face with the Duke of Howard in the flesh. No longer the untried youth Celine had first read about, but an adult come into her full authority.
No longer fantasy, but real.
The duke straightened and came around the desk.
Slowly, as though she had realised how easily Celine would take fright.
“You were promised to me?” Her voice was low and intimate.
Impossibly affecting. It took a moment for Celine to realise the effect was in part because the duke had switched to the informal.
“Not”—she sucked in a breath—“till next week.” Stupid.
“I came sooner than expected.” The duke had cleared the desk, and finally Celine could take the rest of her in: her tall black boots and her long, muscled thighs in buckskin breeches that made no pouched allowance for a prick.
Just legs, all the way up to the junction between them.
“News reached me that Bastien wasn’t long for this world, but due to the vagaries of the Channel, I arrived before my message.
I leave again at first light.” The duke was taking Celine in as greedily as Celine did her, and the light in her eyes intensified to an almost painful degree.
“Christ, Bastien must have wanted to please me.”
Celine couldn’t catch her breath. The duke’s words and voice had evoked a vivid fantasy. Painful-bright eyes looking down at her through a fall of hair, a firm, hot hand round the back of her head—
She took a sharp step back, and the duke immediately stopped, with no more than three swift strides between them.
She felt young in a way she usually didn’t, uncertain of herself and blushing. She couldn’t quite believe this was the Duke of Howard; she couldn’t quite believe what she felt.
The duke considered her, and she could almost see the duke reassessing what the situation needed.
Instead of advancing and grasping her, the duke leaned back against Bastien’s desk and looked.
Without a hint of shame, or any attempt to hide her interest, the duke looked at Celine’s breasts, her waist, her very fine ankle.
I can make her change her mind, Celine realised, amazed, as the hot eyes returned to her face. Hope surged through her. She wanted to live. I can make her want to take me with her in the morning. If only I have the courage to try.
The duke made a humming sound Celine felt in her stomach and said, “Have you ever slept with a woman?”
“No.”
“Does the idea frighten you?”
She swallowed. “A bit.”
The duke exhaled, an amused puff of breath from her nose, and said, “We don’t have to.”
Would the duke laugh at her again if she confessed that she feared not the act but her own desire for it?
That she feared she somehow wouldn’t survive it?
Pricked, she said, “I’m well aware I’m not obliged to sleep with you.
You, on the other hand, will dream of me on those long nights you spend wondering whether terrorising the English populace was worth how lonely you feel. ”
Maybe she’d wanted it to hurt, but the duke laughed, sudden and warm. “So you do know who I am.”
“Tyrant,” Celine said. “Immoral.” Her breath scorched her throat, her mouth, her lips. “Untouchable.”
The amusement left the duke’s face, and her eyes hooded. “Come here,” she said.
Go to this intimidating woman, this English duke of whom she’d been in awe for nearly half her life? And yet the compelling voice commanded her.
She went to within arm’s reach but couldn’t make herself go closer.
Probably, before the duke touched her, she could see how Celine was shivering all over, but certainly, the duke must have felt it when her gloved fingertips landed lightly on Celine’s cheek and skimmed over her jaw, down her neck. Then the duke cupped Celine’s skull in her capable hand.
Of the impatience Celine had sensed from her earlier, there was no sign.
Every movement of the duke’s body, every breath spoke sexual intent, but she made no wild lunges at Celine, no impositions on her, nothing but this infinite, patient hold she had on her.
In the silence between them, Celine’s breaths tore up the air, painfully loud.
“Not brave enough to force yourself on me?”
“Just waiting for you,” the duke said, “Celine.”
She shivered through her whole body the way she had when she first heard the duke’s voice.
But more violent— Her name—Her name— She was unhinged from reason, within the grip of a purely sensate, animal part of herself she had been sceptical existed.
Quiet and apart was the sophisticated, clever self, observing, aghast. But that self had been shaken loose.
The duke pulled her gently closer, and Celine went, until her hands came to rest on the duke’s shoulders, warm through the woollen coat.
Here was the phantasm whose imagined fingers had touched her, whose mouth had devoured her and body covered her as, beneath the sheets of her narrow bed, she had let her heart turn towards what it wanted. Here, in the flesh.
Here, and asking to have her. And able to save her.
There was only one possible answer she could make. Her eyes slid closed. Her lips opened. The duke gave a low growl of approval and, surging up, kissed her full on the mouth.
Distantly, she was aware the party continued downstairs, that her lover Bastien, not dead yet, was innocent of what she did, and with whom. But in truth, there was only this: she, held between the duke’s two hands, and the duke, taking possession.
Such avarice she had felt, watching the duke’s mouth while they spoke earlier.
How she had wanted to make it open and express something meaningful.
And now it had opened. The cool, articulate lips moving over her mouth.
The cool lips becoming warm, softening, wetting themselves on her mouth.
And then the sudden, hot advance of the duke’s tongue as she moved Celine’s head just so to receive it.
Her heart pounded. Her skin flushed. Her body gave itself over to pleasure with a vivid interest.
She opened her eyes, ready this time for the impact of meeting the duke’s eyes. But the duke, kissing her, had closed them. There was a line of concentration between the duke’s brows, a warm flush on her cheeks, a tremble in her lashes.
Celine’s heart skipped a beat.
She realised she was gripping the duke’s lapels, and that at some point, the duke had leaned back against the desk again; she was cradled between the duke’s spread thighs, which excited her unbearably.
They were rubbing themselves slowly on each other.
She broke off the kiss and looked down to watch.
The duke made a sound of complaint, then followed her gaze and continued the muscular movement.