Chapter Thirty-Five
That night Celine couldn’t sleep, so when the duke started yelling, she heard it.
It was the same pained screaming she’d heard what felt like a lifetime ago, soon after she first arrived in London.
That time, Margot had stopped her from going to the duke and had instead taken her down to the kitchen to share chocolate and stories.
The valet, for reasons Celine still didn’t fully understand, had filled in some of the duke’s history for her.
Margot had been right to stop her, then. What business had it been of hers?
Silence fell for some minutes, and she sank back into bed gingerly, all her senses alert. She closed her eyes and made a halfhearted pretence at going to sleep. The yelling started again, and again she was sure it was a name the duke yelled, indistinct at this distance.
She slipped out of bed, stopping to wrap a shawl about her shoulders and light a hand candle, then made her way down the long hallway. The door to the duke’s bedroom—into which she had never been admitted—drew her forward. Behind that door, the duke was in pain.
Behind that door, it sounded like the duke was in hell.
Like last time, Margot’s door opened into the hallway, interrupting Celine’s progress.
Reluctantly, she stopped. But when she met the valet’s tired gaze, she saw the same understanding she herself had: She must go to the duke.
The duke had not left her side through the darkest hours of her illness, and now it was her turn to be the hearth and flame, the reason to return. Margot nodded and closed her door.
Celine continued on.
When she reached the heavy mahogany door, she stopped and laid her hand on it, as though on the warm hide of a bear in a trap. She took a deep, steadying breath, snicked the latch, and entered.
Her first impression was of colour. Rich, saturated colour, most vibrant in the circle of her candle’s light.
The walls were papered in deep blue, over which branches and leaves, birds and forest animals ran.
The furniture was sparser than in her own rooms, and dark.
She wanted to linger, to take in every detail and find out what these private spaces could tell her about the duke.
But the duke’s voice pulled at her from a room deeper within, and Celine followed. The next room she passed through was papered in yellow, and the next in green.
The green room was the duke’s dressing room, and there, the smell that pervaded was clearest. Sharp and crisp, with a warm, carnal depth. It was the duke’s smell, she realised, intensifying as she came closer to the inner sanctum.
She could make out the name, now.
“Eleanor! Eleanor!”
It wasn’t a name she knew. It was strange to hear it filled with such heartfelt, pleading emotion when it meant nothing to her, who listened.
“Eleanor!”
She came into the bedroom, which was very dark. Only a few coals still burned in the grate, casting almost no light. Her own candle seemed to make barely any difference, as though the room resisted illumination.
A four-poster bed stood in the centre of the room, its curtains open, and within its sheets was the bowed, straining body of the duke.
Celine had expected to see some physical agitation, but it was a shock to see the duke—normally so icily contained, so totally in control—stretched as though on the devil’s rack.
Tendons stood out on her pale neck, her hands convulsively clenched then flexed, and endlessly that name emerged from her throat: Eleanor, Eleanor.
Celine placed her candle on the floor, then approached the bed. She climbed up beside the duke and hesitated, not knowing where she might safely touch. Of a certainty over the nightshirt, avoiding sensitive skin. She touched the duke’s shoulder.
Her fingertips barely made contact, but that featherlight touch was enough. The duke snapped, as though her body had been at its outer limit of tension.
Before Celine could speak or cry out, the duke surged over her, the powerful body thrumming, blotting out the room so she could only see the duke’s eyes and bared teeth, which reflected the glow of fire and candle.
Fighting every instinct, Celine went limp, her head pushed back, chin up, the duke’s hand wrapped hard around her throat.
She felt the plane of the duke’s stomach against hers through warm layers of linen. The muscled legs that had mastered Bold Titus trapped hers beneath them, and her pelvis was enclosed by the duke’s thighs.
“Eleanor,” the duke said in anguish, touching her forehead to Celine’s.
“I can feel you, as though you weren’t dead, but living somewhere I cannot find you.
Oh, how you torment me!” The hand around Celine’s throat tightened, as though the duke might try to squeeze the life out of the ghostly Eleanor.
Celine took a difficult breath through her nose, then formed the words, “It’s me, Kate. Just me.”
The effect was immediate. The hand at her throat gentled, and the duke lifted her head to look at Celine more clearly. The room returned around them even as the duke seemed to return to herself.
“Celine?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, thank God.”
The tension went out of the duke all at once, and she collapsed onto the bed. “It wasn’t real,” the duke said in a voice that shook with the force of her relief. “None of it was real.”
Then the duke pulled Celine into her arms, wrapped her leg over Celine’s, and pressed her face into Celine’s neck.
With small, rocking adjustments, she manoeuvred Celine closer until they were as bound together as two bodies could be.
Heat drenched Celine. The air was perfumed with the smell that pervaded the duke’s rooms but in its most potent form, warmed by the duke’s own body.
The duke seemed to fall into something of a doze, her limbs gradually growing heavy.
Celine lay awake within her embrace, feeling so much that she didn’t know how her heart was still beating.
Heartache for the duke’s torment. A humming, purring pleasure at being surrounded, held, here where no one would intrude.
Shock at how suddenly it had happened. A guilty recognition that she was stealing what the duke would never give her if the duke were in her right mind.
Slowly, she began to relax as well, her head settling into the warm muscle of the duke’s shoulder. A deep conviction that this was where she belonged came over her. She would find a way to permanently belong. She must. She released a long breath and closed her eyes.
In the next moment, however, the duke became tense again, her head lifting to regard Celine.
“Do you still have the letter?” the duke asked, her voice agitated. “Quickly, tell me.”
When Celine didn’t immediately answer, the duke became even more agitated, gripping Celine’s shoulders. Her eyes bored into Celine’s. “The letter for Bastien, do you still have it?”
“Yes, of course.”
The duke released Celine’s shoulders and brushed her cheeks with anxious tenderness.
“I didn’t send it? Are you sure? Oh, thank God.
Oh, thank God.” The duke let go of her and fell back.
She seemed to fall not only onto the mattress but back and back and back into some internal place where Celine couldn’t follow.
Celine turned carefully onto her side and lay for some time, watching the duke in her deep, almost unnatural sleep. Then the duke started up, awake all at once, with a gasp. “But if I didn’t send the letter,” the duke cried out, “why is everything still on fire?”
For hours it was thus.
The duke moved between tension and inertness almost like breathing, in and out. Sometimes it was the screaming, racked agony Celine had witnessed when she first entered, but more often it was that delirious fixation on the letter the duke had written Bastien, or on the unknown Eleanor.
Once, the duke begged her, “Don’t tell Royce. Royce doesn’t know anything, please, you mustn’t tell her. She’s just a child.”
Celine thought of what the duke allowed her to see—or anyone to see—when conscious, and the hoarse, naked begging was almost more than she could take.
She tried, numerous times, to wake the duke from her nightmare state. She shook her. After the duke began begging, she even slapped her. But it didn’t make any difference.
She found herself thinking of what Royce had said the night they met: I don’t know how she lives here. Just spending a single day makes me feel like I’m dying. If I had to live here, day in day out, I would go stark raving mad. More proof she has no heart to speak of.
Royce had got everything so wrong! The duke had a heart, and it was mad with grief. But just as the duke chose to let no one in and confide in no one, so no outside influence might be felt when these agonies had her in their grip.
It was the very nature of her powerful control over herself that had her now.
Celine forced the duke’s hand open. Before it could close, she put her own hand inside it, their fingers entwined. The duke’s hand twitched, and then her whole arm moved as though Celine had put an electric volt into her. The duke gasped, coming into consciousness. She breathed in, and in, and in.
“But Bastien had the letter,” she cried out. “I sent it. I sent it.”
“Kate,” Celine said. “Kate, stop. You’re going to break my fucking heart.”
It was sometime during the night, she couldn’t have said when, that Celine realised she couldn’t marry Lord Burnley. If the duke wouldn’t have her, she would have to start again, with nothing.