Chapter Two #2
The duke held her upper body away. Their heads bowed together, and their breaths grew heavy in the space between them. Then the duke pulled her close, a full-body grind. “You think you know how gorgeous you are,” the duke growled into her neck, “but you’re wrong.”
The words of an aroused lover, not to be taken to heart. And yet she felt them meet their target with force.
The duke gripped her arse and effortlessly lifted her, then turned to set her roughly on the desk, closing a hot mouth over her neck.
She felt it all the way through her body.
Hot kisses down to the swell of her breasts.
A growl of frustrated desire. Then an obscene rending as the duke ripped her dress once down to the waist and again down to her lap.
She wasn’t wearing a chemise, and the sudden exposure of her naked skin made her feel touched all over.
Her stays were brief and held her breasts high and bare from below the nipple, like hands offering her up lovingly. She heaved in a breath.
The duke looked down, hot disbelief on her face, and said, laughing, “God bless French stays.” She drew off her gloves and dropped them to the floor, then came back, crowding Celine.
Perhaps her hands wouldn’t quite span Celine’s waist, but they took a comprehensive hold of her ribs, lifting Celine into her mouth.
Celine took a scorching breath. The duke released her nipple with a wet sound and started sucking on the other. The duke’s thumb smeared through the spit on the first, over and over the engorged teat.
She tried to keep watching the duke—the way her lips opened and worked, the swipe of her tongue, the deepening flush across her face, deepest over her sharp cheeks, but Celine’s eyes were rolling back, her head tipping as she arched.
The sound of her own breath made her feel frantic and hot.
It was lewd, as though she’d heard a stranger’s uninhibited pleasure on the night air from an open window.
Fear and desire wrestled each other hard and fast, pulling in every sense, every nerve, every thudding heartbeat. Her arms were going to collapse where they held her upright. She couldn’t bear it. She had to—
She had to—
She reared forward, the duke going with her, and then her hands were in—an aching longing at last met—the duke’s pale hair, holding her, making a mess of her. Curled over and holding the duke to her breast, gasping into her hair.
“Yes,” the duke said darkly and took Celine fully into her embrace. “That’s it.”
Celine had dreamed of this. She had wanted— She gasped, rubbing her entire face against— She had wanted the duke. She wanted her.
The duke brought her forehead to Celine’s, pushing the two of them upright so Celine’s tender nipples rubbed down the woollen coat.
“Celine,” the duke murmured. “Celine.”
Her very veins seemed to answer, dilating with blood. She felt huge and wonderful. She returned the duke’s dark gaze, craving this wholly unexpected congress.
And even as she craved it, she would use it, a dangerous knife that cut two ways. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to survive.
The mood shifted suddenly, and the duke took hold of her with singular intent, one hand around her nape, the other around her knee.
On instinct, Celine made to close her legs, but the duke’s hard body was wedged firmly between them, stopping her.
There was nowhere for her to move; she was held and mastered.
She began to pant with fear, with anticipation, with a feeling she couldn’t name.
The duke stroked from her knee up to her inner thigh, through the wetness on her upper thigh, and held her drenched sex. She felt her heart beat in the duke’s palm. Then the duke penetrated her, a slow, slick pressure with all the weight of the duke’s body behind it.
Flush with her, not a breath between them, their faces pressed humidly together.
“Breathe,” the duke murmured into her ear. “You’re all right. Just breathe.”
As though she were a virgin, overcome, and not a prostitute of some renown. And the mortifying truth was that she couldn’t catch her breath. That within her trembling, alert, compromised body, she yearned to take the comfort offered.
“Breathe,” the duke said again. The quality of her voice—roughened, fraying—was the first admission of something beyond her control.
That beyond lust, this encounter moved her as it moved Celine.
Celine breathed, and started to come around the duke’s fingers.
The usual hot bloom, and then a wrench into something bigger.
She let the knife cut her, and she let the duke hear it so it would cut the duke as well.
She would use this. Even this.
The world restored itself gradually. A draft made the candles over the fireplace flap and then stand straight again. The wall clock idly ticked. Muffled laughter and music intruded from downstairs.
She held the duke tightly and couldn’t make herself let go yet. The duke spoke into her ear, insistent, warm words of endearment, and stroked long strands of her hair between trembling fingers.
Deep in the duke’s voice was something loose and aching, something slipping its leash.
With the sense of the room returning came the renewed knowledge that this was a woman who held her. The woman. Her heart felt tender to the point of pain. She wanted to live.
“Take me,” she whispered, and with a sound of animal anticipation, the duke unleashed herself.
WHEN SHE WAS twelve years old, Kate Elizabeth Justinian Parsival Howard, the Duke of Howard, killed her whole family, save one.
In her bold, childish hand she had written a letter to her French friend Bastien du Ponte, instructing him with great attention to detail how to plant evidence of treason against her aunt, Anne Howard, who was the Duke of Howard at the time.
She had wanted to prove how clever she was. She had wanted her aunt’s attention.
Giddy, terrified, elated by what she had done, she hadn’t understood there would truly be consequences until the consequences had overtaken her with a sober, adult speed she couldn’t stop.
In memory, her aunt was a golden-haired titan.
When Kate thought of her, it was in the old, wood-panelled study where the floorboards had been half-eaten and never replaced, and red curtains filtered light like the walls of a heart.
The study was where Kate and her cousins would go to be praised for their boldness and lashed for their mistakes.
Eleanor, Anne Howard’s own child, had always stepped forward for the lash first.
It was gone now. Burned to the ground and swept out like an old fireplace. The study, the lessons, the golden hair. What a monstrous child she had been, breaking the world to get what she wanted.
Eleanor would have become the Duke of Howard someday, had she lived. Eleanor, who had feared what Kate might do. Eleanor—
Kate took a careful breath. She was sitting in a chair by the window and had been watching the colours change in Bastien’s study from deep night to the leached, flat palette of dawn.
She thought she had maybe ten more minutes before Celine roused from her post-coital stupor and realised it was morning.
The French beauty lay before the fireplace on a pile of heavy velvet drapes, which Kate had, at some point during the night, ripped down from their runners. She barely remembered doing it.
She had come to Paris to find the letter she’d written Bastien and burn it. She could overcome every other threat—the driving motivation of her life had been to ensure it. But against the letter she had no defence.
She had come already hurt by it, by the curious proximity of that violent, defining childhood event. And, hurt, she had met Celine.
Celine. She couldn’t account for how far she had pushed Bastien’s mistress last night. She couldn’t account for the frenzy that had come over her when she realised there was no limit to what Celine would let her do. She didn’t understand why—or how—it had cut her.
She told herself it was a stupid indulgence of the flesh, a one-time thing. She told herself the unusual loss of control was nothing to worry about. Paris was a long way from home, and once home, she would never think of Celine again.
It didn’t matter how carefully she breathed. Her throat felt sliced open.
She couldn’t wait any longer. What she had taken from Celine, what she had shown Celine, what Celine had made her feel—none of it could be taken back. The only comfort was in knowing she would never do it to herself again.
She went to Celine and squatted, her boots squeaking.
She was fully dressed, her wilted cravat tied in a plain knot, the diamond pin in her coat pocket.
She wanted to touch Celine again, even now.
As though they hadn’t spent four hedonistic hours slaking themselves on each other.
(Celine, reaching out a trembling finger to touch Kate’s mouth, wonder on her face; Celine, looking up at Kate that final time, tears sliding unnoticed into her hair, her eyes entirely, painfully sincere.) Swiftly, she squashed the thought.
The only possible conclusion to the night was this.
She took the ring off her left hand and slid it onto Celine’s unresisting index finger. It was a gold band topped with a square sapphire. Celine’s eyes traced the movement from beneath her lowered lashes, but she said nothing.
“To remember me by,” Kate said, and didn’t let herself think about why it felt necessary.
One of the ring’s broad sides was flawed, pockmarked where Celine had bitten down on Kate’s fingers in their final, impossible embrace. Celine regarded it, and Kate could see her struggling up to the surface, trying to gather her wits, perturbed by the heavy jewellery on her finger.
She must leave if she was to reach the coast at the appointed hour. She had searched every inch of Bastien’s house, his bank vaults, and his mother’s house, and found no trace of the letter. He must have destroyed it as she’d instructed him to do. Only his knowledge of its contents remained.
She stood. An ending, at last.
As she closed the door behind herself, she felt her path and Celine’s diverge, as they must. Celine, drowsing in her dead lover’s house, in a city bitterly grinding through its revolution.
Kate, on her way to the coast to meet her ship, sure the only threat she truly feared would be extinguished forever when Bastien went to the guillotine at week’s end.