Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
His mouth was warm.
That was the first thing, before thought, before sense, before anything at all, the sheer unlooked-for warmth of him.
His lips were softer than any part of so hard a man had a right to be, and they moved over hers, sure of their welcome, and for the space of one traitorous heartbeat Diana’s whole body went still and yielding beneath the surprise of it.
Her heart skipped clean over a beat. And then sense came flooding back, cold and appalled, and she tore her face from his and struck him across the cheek.
The slap cracked out sharp in the quiet of the room. His head turned with the force of it, to the side, and held there a moment.
Neither of them moved. The fire snapped in the grate. Diana sat frozen, her palm still stinging, her breath coming in quick shallow pulls, and then her mind caught up at last with what her hand had done, and a wholly different horror came over her, cold as a draft under a door.
He is my husband. The knowledge dropped into her like a stone into a well. I have struck the Duke of Rosewood across the face, in his own house, on the first of five nights. Merciful God, what have I done?
She had married a man the whole of London named a monster, a man who kept his threats, she did not doubt, as scrupulously as his promises, and she had just laid her hand across his face like a fishwife.
“I—” Her voice failed her entirely. She swallowed and forced it out, stammering. “Your Grace, I—forgive me. I did not—you startled me, that is all, I never meant—I did not think—”
His hand grabbed both her wrists at once, gathering them up as easily as a man gathers a length of ribbon, and drew them above her head and pinned them there against the high back of the settee.
It was done without haste and without the least apparent effort, and it left her stretched helpless against the cushions with her face turned up to his.
And oh, she felt his strength then felt how little her struggling would signify should she choose to struggle, how wholly and completely he might do with her as he pleased.
She ought to have been afraid. She waited, quite reasonably, to be afraid.
Instead a strange scalding shiver ran the whole length of her, from her pinned wrists to the soles of her feet, and pooled low in the pit of her where she had no name for it.
Her breath went thin. She could make no sense of the feeling whatever; she knew only that it was not fear, and that the not-knowing frightened her worse than any fear could have.
“Apologies are cheap, Duchess.” His voice had dropped low, close above her upturned face. “You have repaid my kindness with enmity. I rather think you deserve to be punished for it.”
She braced herself for the cruelty then, for the cold hard glint she had seen in him the night before, the thing that had made her shiver on the edge of his bed. She lifted her eyes to his, ready for it.
It was not there.
He was amused. There was laughter in the dark blue of his eyes, and the corner of his mouth had tucked upward, and he was, she understood it with a fresh hot rush of blood to her face, enjoying himself enormously.
He held her pinned and helpless and looked down at her as though she were the finest diversion London had offered him in twelve months.
Diana’s cheeks flamed scarlet.
“I will make it up to you,” she said, and dropped her gaze from that insufferable, dancing amusement.
“Will you?”
“I will.” She cast about, thick-headed with wine and mortification, for how such a debt was properly discharged.
When she quarreled with Henrietta she brought her sugared almonds, and all was mended; when Arabella sulked, a story set it right.
But neither would serve here. One did not bring a duke a paper of sweets.
Perhaps she might have something baked for him, something sent up from the kitchen.
“How—” She floundered, and tried again. “How do your friends make it up to you? When they have wronged you. What is it you would have of them?”
Something flashed across his face, startled, delighted, as though she had handed him a gift he had never thought to receive.
“Now that,” he said softly, “is a very interesting question to put to a man in my present situation.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “As it happens, Duchess, I should far rather you made it up to me with something I actually want.”
Diana swallowed. “And what,” she managed, “is that?”
“A kiss.” He said it plainly, his eyes on her lips as he spoke. “I want a kiss. Freely given, this time.” A pause, and the smile deepened. “Call it the price of your pardon.”
He released her wrists. “May I?”
Her body answered before her lips formed words.
She sat up and cupped his face. Their eyes met and she could hear her breath thicken as her body shivered.
His lips curved and met hers, forcing it apart, and when his tongue drove into her mouth, a sound tore out of his chest. She felt it move through her like a struck chord.
He caught her upper lip between his and sucked, deep and slow, no hesitation anywhere in him, tasting her as though she were already his to take apart, and her heart hammered so hard it hurt.
Diana moaned into the kiss before she knew she meant to.
Her fingers fisted in the front of his shirt, clutching, because her knees had gone and there was nothing else to hold.
His mouth was merciless. He drew her lip between his teeth and bit down, then dragged another hungry pull from her that sent fire pouring down through her body and settling, shamelessly, low.
His hand slid down the column of her throat and closed there and tilted her head back to the angle he wanted, holding her exactly where he chose to have her.
The grip should have frightened her. Instead a scalding jolt went straight through her, down and down, to that hot unfamiliar ache blooming between her thighs that she still had no name for and no way to still.
He took her deeper. His tongue claimed every part of her mouth in slow, driving strokes, and she was drowning in it, dizzy, her legs burning beneath her skirts, her whole body gone weak and molten and trembling against him, heat gathering where she had never before had cause to feel anything at all.
His other hand plunged into her hair and gripped, tightening in the dark strands until her scalp stung, dragging her face up harder to his, angling her precisely for his mouth.
His tongue swept the seam of her lips and thrust back inside, deeper still, in rhythm that woke a heavy pulsing ache low in her and would not let it rest, an ache that clenched at nothing, that wanted, that left her hips shifting helplessly where she stood.
The taste of him swallowed her whole: wine, and salt, and beneath it the heat of the man, hunger answering hunger.
Then he tore his mouth from hers.
They were both breathing hard, ragged, their chests heaving against each other.
Diana stared up at him, lips swollen and parted, unable to make sense of the storm that had just broken through her, or of her own body, still throbbing with it, still straining toward him for more.
His hand stayed locked at her throat, his thumb pressed to the frantic leap of her pulse, feeling what he had done to her.
With one firm tug on her hair, he tipped her face up again and brought his mouth back to hers.
It’s unbearably soft, a slow scatter of gentle kisses over her bitten lips, each tender brush so at odds with the savagery before it that her heart beat wild against her ribs like a bird flinging itself at the bars of its cage.
And she could feel all of it still, echoing through every inch of her, the edge of his teeth, the deep insistent stroke of his tongue, the possessive grip of his hand at her throat, and the shameless, aching, frightening want it had woken in her, throbbing now between her thighs, refusing to be quieted.
Before she had recovered herself enough to sit upright, he had risen, stooped, and gathered her up off the settee, one arm sweeping beneath her knees and the other at her back, and lifted her against his chest as lightly as though she weighed nothing whatsoever.
Diana gave a startled cry and clutched at his shoulder.
“Your Grace—!”
“You have got the legs of a newborn colt beneath you. I shall see you to your room.”
She protested. He did not heed her by so much as a flicker.
He carried her the length of the corridor and shouldered open the door of her chamber and crossed to the great curtained bed and laid her down upon it with a gentleness that sat strangely against everything else the man had shown her.
Then he looked down at her a moment, reached out and drew the pad of his thumb slowly across her swollen lower lip, wiping away the last dampness of his kiss.
“I shall see you tomorrow, Duchess,” he said.
And he turned, and was gone, and the door fell shut softly behind him.
Diana lay exactly where he had left her, staring up into the shadows gathered in the canopy.
Her heart would not slow. Her lips were sore and tender, and she could taste him upon them yet, and under the last thinning fog of the drink her whole body thrummed with a want so new and so shameless that it terrified her to the marrow.
She pressed her fingertips to her mouth.
She shut her eyes tight against the dark.
The truth of it rose all the same, and would not be hushed however she tried to hush it: that every wild and wanton inch of her wished, with a desperation she scarcely recognized as her own, that he had not stopped.
That he had not gone. That whatever had just befallen her upon that settee might befall her again, and again, and never come to an end at all.
Heaven help me, was her last clear thought before the wine pulled her down.
One night gone, and four yet to come, and I am already in a very great deal of trouble.