Chapter Forty-Five #2
IN THE END, the duke fetched them both a glass of wine, which they drank on the settee.
The duke had pulled on a silk banyan, and Celine was somewhat wrapped in a bedsheet.
She knew the wine was out of consideration for her own limp, spent state; the duke had put her boundless carnal energy in check, temporarily.
Celine turned and saw the line of the curtains had begun to lighten. Louise would be making her way over to Wroth House soon with the letter. It was all out of her hands now.
“Tell me something good,” the duke said, stroking hair away from Celine’s face and recalling her attention. “Tell me about a time you were happy.”
These past weeks I have been so happy. It was a strange thought when at the time she had felt gripped by urgency, anxious that her plans bear fruit, terrified it would all end with her dead.
It was strange to know the past six weeks had come to this, her last hour with the duke, and that all she could do was live it.
In another way, it wasn’t strange at all.
It was the premise of a person’s whole life, after all: make the most of it, because it’s going to end.
She would always want another hour, no matter how many she was granted.
She took a deep, steadying breath and considered the question. “I was happy in Paris.”
“With Bastien?”
“Before Bastien. I was … bored with him. Stupid of me, but it’s true.
He was incredibly boring in bed, and only wanted me a couple of times a week, less as time went on.
He wanted someone to love, but not—” Not the way you do.
“Not the way you do.” Her voice went lower, speaking truth.
“You want love like you’re going to die without it.
He wanted a pretty wife. Someone he could pamper and get a child on. ”
“Like I’m going to die without it?”
“You’re…” How to explain? “Love has an uncommon hold on you. You fear it and crave it. You’re like a shipwrecked sailor drinking down the ocean.” And yet the ocean had nothing on Celine. She could have sated the duke for a lifetime.
“Celine, you’re—”
“In love.”
A silence. Then: “Christ.”
When the duke spoke again her voice was unsteady, like she was looking for a reason not to reach out and get wine all over the settee, consideration be damned. “Tell me about the time before Bastien. When you were happy.”
“When I was nineteen, the man I had belonged to died, leaving me nothing. I didn’t want to go out for work as a maid or a shop girl, but I wasn’t respectable enough for anything else.
He had been the most sought-after clockmaker among a certain class in Paris; he wound clocks in the grand houses.
Everyone knew he kept me, and they knew there was something wrong about it. ”
“How did you come to be in his possession?”
“He adopted me.”
“Was he a relation of some sort?”
“No, nothing like that, he…” It was not something she spoke about, but she wanted the duke to know.
She wanted to be bare. The duke was fascinated by her, as she was by the duke, and speaking together like this was a heady, romantic pleasure.
She wanted this no less than she wanted to kiss.
“By chance—by accident, I want to say—he travelled through our village and sat on the steps of the hostel peeling oranges and eating them while his horse was watered and fed. I was doing something nearby, hanging laundry, and I felt more astonished the larger the pile of orange peels beside his boot grew. Thinking back, he ate perhaps three of them, but it seemed like he did nothing but eat oranges for an hour. He eventually offered me a segment and it was like eating sunshine. He offered my mother a large sum for me. My mother loved me, I think, but she had two very small children who had begun to starve, so when his horse was saddled again, he took me up before him.”
There was silence for a moment before the duke said, “It must have been a terrible shock, your life changing like that.”
“I wanted to taste the orange. I didn’t want to be taken away.
” She tipped her head back, curiously happy.
The first sounds of the house waking could be distantly heard.
“You’ll be making certain assumptions about what he wanted with me, and it was both better and worse than you’re thinking.
What he liked was having me under his thumb.
He wanted a daughter, not a lover, but a daughter who lived at his pleasure.
He told me what to eat, what to wear, where to go, who to talk to, who not to talk to.
I would hide from him sometimes, and he would punish me for it.
My mother couldn’t read or write any more than I could, then.
I don’t know if she would have written to me, if she could have, or if he would have allowed it. ”
For the first time, it occurred to her it might be possible to find her mother and her sisters, who must be sixteen now if they lived.
She didn’t know if it was even something she wanted.
Maybe she’d had to find Louise before she could consider older wounds and begin to look further back.
Dealing with Louise, who was sick, peevish, and clingy, was enough for now.
“But when you were nineteen, the old bastard died,” the duke said with feeling.
She laughed, surprised. “The old bastard died. And I found the most exclusive pleasure house in Paris and asked Madame Versailles—”
“A pseudonym, I hope.”
“—an outrageous sum of money to be one of her girls. A pseudonym, of course. It was the grandest life. Parties every night—truly marvellous parties. I didn’t mind the fucking, and I loved being the cleverest person in the room.
The centre of attention. I had educated myself.
I craved the wider world, and the attention of everyone in it.
It was all very wicked, but I suppose I decided to enjoy damnation. ”
In a darker, lower register, the duke said, “Tell me about the fucking.”
Celine’s body responded. The consciousness that this would be the last coupling made her pause and consider how to answer.
To her native intuition she had now added weeks of observation, and her knowledge of the duke was of a different calibre to what it had been the day they rode out on the phaeton.
She said, “There was a naval captain who visited the house once. He’d been at sea for six months, and you could see it in his eyes: starved of luxuries, beauty, comfort.
He and I marked each other almost immediately, but he didn’t take me upstairs for hours.
Starving himself further, God knows why. ”
“You know why.”
“I know why. He slaked himself on me, and it was glorious. He stood across the room from me, watching, and freed his huge prick. Nothing else. Just that part of him. It was so needy, and ugly. He pulled himself off just watching me.”
“What were you doing?” The duke’s voice was hoarse.
She was aware of what had set the duke off in the carriage. “Touching my nipples through the sheer gown I wore.”
The duke swore. “How long until he was hard again?”
“Minutes. He fucked me fully clothed, and then stripped us both and fucked me again.”
“How?”
“On my stomach, with his hand over my face.” She placed her glass delicately on the floor.
“Like this,” she said, turning onto her knees.
She lowered herself until her chest was on the settee and her arse in the air.
The sheet slid away from her body, slowly at first, then all at once.
Nothing about the pose was artificial: the fulcrum of her breastbone against the seat took most of her body’s weight.
The position spread her wide, making her slick, heavy vulva hang in the cool air, and exposed the knot above that could only deliberately be exposed.
Her arm hung over the side of the settee, the hand lying in repose on the carpet, fingers curled inward.
The duke took a harsh, painful-sounding breath.
And then her body came over Celine’s, in all its heat and power, and her hand swallowed the side of Celine’s face. The hand on her was a caress, a mastery, a warning not to move, and nothing about that was artificial, either. She could feel the duke shaking with excitement.
She felt no less as the duke mounted her.
It was a powerful intimacy that came from crossing lines that usually meant danger or revulsion or pain with a person she trusted completely.
It brought her and the duke together with no protection, so vulnerable to each other even the most accidental slight or defensiveness could do irreparable damage.
And yet in her sweet, utter submission was the knowledge that her lover would protect her from all harm and the acceptance that harm might still be done. Such was the heart that loved.
IT WAS FULL morning outside when the edge had finally been taken off, and Kate was ready to concede that her body needed sleep. And later, she would have to make an appearance in Lords to see Lord Wroth’s Inheritance Bill defeated.
She wound her body around Celine, who was silently crying, and had been for some time. She thought she understood. What had happened between them this night was momentous—almost too much to take.
She kissed the tears from Celine’s cheek; Celine kissed her back with wrung-out, desperate fervour.
“Quiet now, love,” she murmured, her eyes closing heavily, “and sleep.”
In an hour the servants would come in, and she and Celine would drink a good cup of tea, and the ordinary world would steady them into something they could stand.