Chapter Forty-Five
For only the second time, Celine entered the duke’s private rooms. This time, the urgency was of a different sort. This time the duke carried her, and she thought of it as her wedding night. It was the only one she would get.
The duke deposited her on the edge of the bed with a kiss and said, walking to the sideboard, “Would you like something to drink? Brandy? Wine?”
“No, thank you.”
The duke pulled the end of her cravat and it slithered loose.
She threw it over the back of a chair and slipped her cufflinks from a pocket, restoring them to their place in a drawer.
“I couldn’t eat a thing tonight, my God, you scared me, Celine.
I scared myself.” She took out her pocket watch and glanced down before unclipping it and throwing it onto the dressing table.
“Breakfast’s in three hours. I can most certainly wait. ”
She turned a wicked smile on Celine, which a moment later slackened into awe. “Christ,” she said. “You look like you got in the way of an ocean.”
Celine glanced down, seeing what the duke saw.
The shoulders of her dress had been returned to their proper place, but as neither she nor the duke had bothered to tie it properly, the sides of the dress had slid apart, following gravity.
The material frothed around her body like sea spume.
And clear beneath her chemise, the red marks of the duke’s kisses on her breasts. Her hair down in messy, inky coils.
Breakfast in three hours. And it would be light before then.
In a different voice the duke said, “You’ve gone somewhere else. I don’t like it.”
She looked up, laughing. Three hours was all she was going to get. “And to think I used to have to chase you about the house just to get you to talk to me.”
“A not entirely irrational response, given the manner of your arrival in my home. Very well, I took you in small doses, knowing I would become addicted if I took more.” The teasing smile disappeared into something darker and more intent. “Well, I have glutted myself now.”
“Poor darling,” Celine said condescendingly. The duke needed to be teased and laughed at occasionally. She wondered who on earth would do it when she was gone.
The duke smirked and, lit from behind by the fire, began to undo her shirt ties and waistcoat.
Celine felt herself come to quivering attention.
The waistcoat ended up on the floor, the shirt on an armchair.
The duke pushed down her breeches slowly, aware her audience was captive, making an obscene peep show of the pale thatch between her long, muscled thighs.
Stockings last. Then the duke straightened to her full height, showing off powerful legs, the hard planes of her stomach, her breasts with their pink tips.
She shook her hair back and trained her vast gaze on Celine.
She looked like a young god, naked and strong, ready to run out into the morning forest and match the stag heartbeat for heartbeat, stride for stride.
She looked like an idol, golden and still.
Then she came to Celine, a flesh-and-blood woman.
She touched a fingertip to the inner curve of each of Celine’s knees and, exerting almost no pressure, pushed them apart. Celine gladly took instruction. The duke’s hot eyes dropped to her fingers, and she ran them up Celine’s thighs, raising the petticoat with them.
The duke was breathing heavily, and high on her cheeks were slashes of pink. She dropped to her knees and looked at what she’d exposed between Celine’s legs. The colour in the duke’s cheeks deepened. She continued to do nothing but look.
Celine had understood from early on that her mind was more interesting to the duke than her body, and yet her body enthralled the duke, this one piece of her in particular.
It enthralled the duke not because of what it was, uniquely, but because it was hers uniquely.
She felt it fill with blood. She felt all the sensitivities from the carriage return.
As though waking suddenly from a reverie, the duke got her shoulders between Celine’s thighs, bullying them wider. “My pretty little pussy,” the duke said in French, “I am going to eat you.” And did.
At first Celine was able to remain relaxed, amused, and wanting somehow to be the objective observer even as she was experiencing the warm mouth where mouths oughtn’t go.
She pulled her petticoat higher and held it in a fist at her waist so that she could watch.
The duke pressed her face in deeper, a purring, animal sound coming from her throat.
Amusement dissolved slowly into pleasure.
The duke took the time to make her thoroughly wet.
Heat poured through her and pooled low in her abdomen until she couldn’t feel her body where the duke kissed her, just heat.
She realised she had closed her eyes. She opened them and found the duke looking up at her.
That brutal, aristocratic face looking up at her from between her legs.
The duke made another humming, claiming sound and penetrated Celine with her tongue.
The objective self was subsumed. Celine threw her head back.
“Oh—God,” she said. “I can’t—” Again the duke penetrated her, and again. Mounting warmth rolled through her limbs, not an orgasm yet, but the promise of something she couldn’t avoid. She began to lose the edges of her body; she became a vast, lush, expanded self.
Time stopped functioning as a matter of minutes and skipped from sensation to sensation.
Hot, satiny skin and the hard erection of a nipple in the centre of her palm.
Fingers taking a thorough grasp of her wrist and her hand wrenched away and pushed into the mattress, closing convulsively on air as a gasp juddered into her lungs.
A powerful thigh shoving her. A curse. A rending.
The ticklish, maddening caress of the duke’s hair across her stomach, her thighs, a hot, enveloping hand around the arch of her foot as her toes tried to free themselves from gravity.
She had lost count of the number of times she’d come. She had entered that powerful, dreamlike state where the sensations and images that came from the body were more real to her than any external reality.
The duke’s head lay on her thigh, almost sweetly at rest. The duke’s hair was sweat-darkened, her bright eyes fixed on Celine’s face. Her whole hand was seated within Celine’s body so that the smallest movements of her knuckles sent full-body shocks through Celine.
Celine breathed, and closed her eyes, and drifted.
“Look at me,” the duke said. “Come on, open your eyes. I know it’s hard, darling, but I need you to do it.”
She couldn’t have guessed that a word as innocuous as darling could be used so cruelly, could make tears slide from the corners of her eyes as she forced them open, and forced herself into the duke’s regard.
“Yes,” the duke said, her voice blown wide, “yes,” and Celine clenched around the duke’s hand deep inside her and felt the whole world come apart, patiently, piece from piece, atom from atom, body, breath, nothing.
Celine drifted.
She’d thought she had known how it would be between them.
She had known, from Paris, that the duke’s appetites were significant.
What she hadn’t accounted for was that, though she might have already loved the duke in Paris, she hadn’t known her.
A distinction that made all the difference in the world, as it turned out.
She became aware the duke was pressing soft kisses into her inner thigh, stroking the cap of her knee. Her legs trembled, and her lungs worked hard to get air into her body. She looked away from the duke, which helped a little.
Her eye caught on the heroic circle of ruffles that was the only thing holding her petticoat together. She said hoarsely, “You’ve murdered my dress.”
The duke’s shoulders began to shake, and she came slowly up Celine’s body, squeezing her waist, kissing her nipple, her upper breast, burying her face and her laughter into Celine’s neck.
“I will buy you a thousand dresses,” she said, and brushed her fingertips over Celine’s drenched mound. “Come for me again.”
“I cannot.”
She threw her trembling arms around the duke’s neck and the duke willingly came into her embrace.
For a long time, they did nothing but kiss.
Kisses so slow and thorough there was barely movement, just one sighing, perfect fit sliding into another.
The duke’s fingers moved in leisurely exploration.
After some time, Celine’s hands began almost compulsively to move, encompassing as much of the duke’s skin as she could, feeling wild inside at the sensation of the tense muscles held in check above her.
What it revealed about the duke’s self-control was staggering. The duke did not indulge in physical expressions of affection with anyone, much less regular, daily sex. And yet every minute of every day, this enormous hunger lived inside her.
Celine pressed her head back into the mattress, wanting to meet the duke’s eyes—but the duke’s eyes were closed, as though privately she had given herself over to Celine touching her.
A feeling went through Celine. Searing. Catastrophic. A first real taste of the pain that was to come. She would have to contend with it, eventually. But not now. Please, not now.
The duke made a small sound of discontent, and her eyes fluttered open.
For a moment, her body stilled. She met Celine’s eyes, and then where her idle fingers had been, she fitted herself between Celine’s legs and began rutting, her breaths coming harder, her eyes turning molten.
Celine gripped the duke’s shoulders and gritted her teeth around a broken cry.
“Ah,” she called out, her heart in the utterance.
“Ah, love.” Desperately, she cupped the back of the duke’s head and drew their mouths together, her eyes searching the duke’s.
By now, neither of them needed to look away, or indeed could.