Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The moment Amelia’s fingers tightened around his arm, he knew what she had seen. She tried to smile when the gentleman she had collided with apologized, but Nicholas could not hide his disgust for anything in the world.
He stared at Paul de Rees across the drawing room and felt his blood chill in his veins. The man stood by the fireplace, laughing with another young gentleman, as though he had any right to walk among polite society after what he had done.
The Last Rose of Summer was a distant hum beneath the roar of Nicholas’s anger—beneath the memory of Amelia, convulsing after her assault.
“Stay here,” he ordered his wife, his voice low and edged with something sharp. “He must be told to leave. I will not stand to see him here breathing the same air as you.”
She caught his sleeve again. “Nicholas, do not make this worse by causing a scene. We should not… I should not… Oh, please, do nothing,” she urged him, her voice breaking with a sob.
The sound devastated him worse than the presence of Paul de Rees. He turned, worried Amelia would collapse again. But she merely stood staring at the floor, a tear rolling down her cheek.
She was right.
He could not confront De Rees here, though his body burned with a desire to strike him where he stood.
Amelia’s implorations alone stopped him.
Placing his hand over hers where it rested on his arm, calming himself, he laced his fingers through hers, bidding her to look up at him.
“Then it is we who should leave,” he muttered, though his body pulsed with the urge to cut through the room and knock the smile from De Rees’s face. “I will inform your uncle of our departure immediately.”
Baron Spencer, interrupted in the middle of another story, leaned in close as Nicholas whispered that they were leaving.
“Is it Amelia? Her health?” the uncle asked, shooting a nervous look at his niece. “Why then, yes, of course, Your Grace. We will miss you both, but of course, you should go. I will have my driver take you to Riverside Court at once.”
Leading Amelia out of the drawing room with Baron Spencer, Nicholas thanked the man as they parted ways. Once their coats were secured, nearby staff were ordered to inform their valet and maid that they were leaving, and their trunks were prepared silently upstairs.
Outside on the portico, Nicholas guided Amelia down the steps. The sky was the color of an old bruise overhead, the first stars breaking through the dark. He could not bring himself to speak to her, worried that anything he might say would cause another fit.
Suddenly, the grunt of footsteps crunching against the gravel sounded from beside them.
A darkly clad figure approached from the side of the house, pausing a few yards from them to sit beneath a window. The tip of a cheroot burned bright orange in the gloom, the smell strong and intoxicating as it carried on the air toward them.
“Who…?” Nicholas murmured to himself, squinting toward the figure. A sense of familiarity washed over him. The height. The length of his limbs. A shock of thick hair. “No…”
Before he could act, Amelia pointed out the carriage driving toward them from the opposite side of the house. A lantern lit the driver’s way forward, the Spencer family crest emblazoned on the side of the vehicle.
It parked before Amelia, and the driver descended to escort her inside. Then came the servants. His valet, her maid. But Nicholas’s gaze remained fixed on that spot of fire in the darkness.
“Nicholas,” Amelia pressed from inside the waiting carriage, having not seen what he had. “Nicholas, we must leave.”
The ember flared again, smoke curling into the night air. Nicholas marched forward automatically, boots grinding against the gravel. Paul turned, startled, but did not straighten.
“What—” he faltered, ash falling to the ground.
Nicholas said nothing. Did not slow.
His fist connected with Paul’s jaw hard in a single, brutal arc.
The man crumpled before him and clutched his face, blood trickling from his mouth.
Amelia’s gasp cut through the otherwise silent night.
De Rees’s cheroot clattered to the stones.
“You… You madman!” De Rees protested, cowering in fear.
Nicholas ground the cheroot under his boot and returned to the carriage, where Amelia awaited, afraid, his hand on fire with pain.
“What on earth were you thinking?” Amelia cried, grabbing Nicholas’s hand where it rested limply in his lap. “What if he had struck you back? I begged you not to confront him, Nicholas. I begged you!”
The carriage rolled out of the gates, proceeding down the thoroughfare connecting the Spencer lands to Oxford.
She blinked away the tears in her eyes, inspecting his hand. They had left so quickly, he had not had time to put his gloves on, and his knuckles had split open with the force of the blow. Two angry red seams glistened at the base of his trembling fingers.
“Why did you do it?” she asked. The carriage shook, and Amelia gasped, falling closer toward him. She growled, furious with him. “He will have gone back to the party by now and told everyone how you hit him!”
“As he should.” Nicholas refused to look at her, his face contorted in anger. “All the world should know what sort of man he is. This was the least he deserved.”
“And what of me?” she sobbed. “What if he tells them that he was the one who followed me at the Bodleian ball, not you, and that was why you attacked him tonight?”
“It does not matter. We are married.”
“For now.” She laughed despondently and threw his injured hand back into his lap. She clutched her arms around herself and cried. “And the moment this marriage is annulled, everyone will think I was ruined twice, when no man has even touched me once.”
She hated how pathetic she sounded, knew he would never understand the shame and rejection she felt.
“Do not ask me to apologize,” he said quietly, coldly.
“What good would that do?” she shouted. “Paul de Rees would not accept—”
“I did not mean that I would apologize to De Rees!” Nicholas turned suddenly, fixing her with a white-hot stare.
He took her by the arms and shook her. “I meant you! Do you believe I attacked him to satisfy myself? It is you, Amelia. It has always been because of you. To know that he saw you that night, and… To think that he could have…”
He grit his teeth, hands tightening around her arms. She knew there would be bruises in the morning, but she did not care.
“I would kill him if you ordered me to,” he growled. “And never would I apologize for it…”
A soft, surprised gasp left her in the quiet of the carriage.
It made no sense. Nicholas had refused to duel the husband of his lover in London—but for her, he would commit murder? It was an insane thought—terrifying. She trembled in his hold.
But beyond her fear, there was that same maddening yearning for him, present even now when she hated part of him for what he had done.
The air between them stilled. A tear ran into her mouth, and she watched his eyes follow the path of it over her lips.
She could not say who inched forward first. Him or her. Their mouths crashed into each other so fast it was impossible to tell.
She moaned into the kiss, her body arcing toward him like a flame bending in wind. Heat flooded her from scalp to sole. Satisfaction, at last, after weeks of denial, of almost, of not yet.
His kiss, the taste of him, the feeling of him pressing into her.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and dragged him closer, a cry of pleasure escaping her that the rain outside could not drown.
One of his hands found her leg beneath the layers of her gown, gripping her behind the knee, hauling her thigh against his hip.
The carriage swayed with their shifting weight, and neither of them cared.
“Devil, I have wanted this so bad,” he whispered, angling their bodies on the bench so she lay beneath him. He licked and kissed her neck, driving her mad.
She nodded against his face. She did not know what she was agreeing to. She knew only that she wanted his hands on her, his mouth on her, wanted him to do whatever he pleased and never stop.
He shrugged off his coat and flung it into the footwell.
Braced above her on one arm, he paused. Looked down at her.
His eyes were blown dark with desire, his chest heaving, his hair falling across his forehead in a way that made him look younger.
Wilder. Less like a duke and more like a man on the edge of something he could not take back.
He had never looked so gorgeous to her as in that moment.
His fingers found the hem of her skirts.
He pushed the fabric up slowly, his knuckles dragging against the bare skin of her calf, her knee, the inside of her thigh.
Each inch of contact left a trail of fire in its wake, and by the time the cool air of the carriage met the heated skin between her legs, she was trembling.
“Do you have any idea what you have done to me?” he growled, digging his thumb into the hollow of her hip. “This hunger for you… I have known nothing like it in all my life.”
“I know,” she murmured, and before her courage could desert her, she took his hand and guided it between her thighs. She had no idea what had possessed her. Knew only that the ache there had become unbearable, and he was the only remedy. “How could I not know. I…”
The rest died in her throat as his palm cupped her.
The sound she made was not ladylike. It was not quiet. His hand was warm and sure against her slick heat, and when he ground the heel of his palm against her, she squeezed her eyes shut and saw white.
“Nicholas, yes...” she moaned, bucking into his hand, shameless, desperate, chasing the pressure.
He gave it to her. His thumb found the swollen bud at the crest of her sex and circled it.
Lazy. Deliberate. As though they had all the time in the world and he intended to use every second of it driving her out of her mind.
She clawed into his forearm, her nails biting through the linen of his shirt, holding his hand exactly where she needed it.
Stars flickered at the edges of her vision.
Her head knocked painfully against the carriage door behind her, and she did not feel it.
Nothing existed beyond his hand, his breath hot against her throat, the slow maddening rhythm of his thumb.
“Ask me,” he snarled against her ear. “Ask me to grant you what you need.”
“Please.” The word came out broken, begging. “Please, Nicholas. I need... Ah!”
He slid a finger inside her. Slick and foreign and so achingly good that she had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. He curled that finger, pressing against a place within her that sent a bolt of pleasure so sharp it was almost pain, and her spine arched clean off the bench.
When she dared look up through her fingers, he was watching her. Smiling. Biting his lower lip as he worked her body with a focus that bordered on devotion. The sight of him like that, controlled and intent while she fell apart beneath him, was its own form of torment.
He added a second finger, and she sobbed.
His thumb never stopped. Circling, pressing, retreating just enough to make her whimper before returning with devastating precision.
His free hand gripped her hip, holding her steady as her body writhed against the leather. She clutched the edge of the bench until her knuckles turned white, her hips rolling to meet every stroke, every thrust of his fingers, every cruel, perfect pass of his thumb.
Then, slowly, his touch withdrew, but only to reach up and tug at the neckline of her gown. He did not ask. He simply bared her to him, tugging the fabric down over her shoulders and freeing her breasts into the cool air of the carriage. His gaze burned hotter.
“Divine…” he growled, almost to himself.
He bowed his head and drew one taut peak into his mouth.
She cried out, fingers threading through his hair as his tongue flicked over her, then sucked harder, deep and possessive.
His fingers returned between her thighs, sliding back inside her with the same rhythm his mouth took at her breast—until she could not tell where one sensation ended and the next began.
She clung to him, body taut with want, the wet sounds of his mouth and her own broken gasps filling the tight carriage.
The tension coiled tighter. Her thighs began to shake.
For one terrifying instant, the sensation was so overwhelming she feared it was another fit, her body seizing beyond her control. But this was different. This was a wave gathering force, pulling everything she was toward a single, unbearable point.
“Let go,” he commanded, low and rough against her mouth. “I have you.”
She shattered.
The climax ripped through her with a violence that stole her voice. Her head fell back, her mouth open in a silent cry that finally broke into his name, ragged and raw, as her body clenched around his fingers in wave after desperate wave.
He did not stop. He worked her through every pulse and tremor, his lips pressed to her temple, until the last shudder left her body and she went limp beneath him.
His hand withdrew slowly. His fingers, still slick with the evidence of her pleasure, curled around the back of her neck and pulled her upright.
He kissed her. Hard. His tongue swept into her mouth, tasting her gasp, swallowing the soft, wrecked sounds she was still making.
She kissed him back with whatever strength remained, her arms heavy around his shoulders, her body liquid and buzzing and already, impossibly, wanting more.
“And I will not apologize for this either,” he whispered against her lips. “Not even if you begged me.”