Chapter Nineteen
“I am asking now.”
Royce stood on the other side of the door she had left open, and the single candle gave her a face she had not seen on him before.
“You have done all the asking in this marriage. Because I made you. Because I trusted your wanting and never once my own. So here is mine, plainly, the way you taught me. I want you, Giselle. I want this night, and every night the law and luck will allow me after it, and I am asking.”
“Then come in,” she said, “close the door, and stop standing in draughts being eloquent. The question is answered. It was answered in a carriage weeks ago. You are the only man in England who required it notarised.”
“I required it notarised because I have spent my life among documents that lied. I wanted one that did not.”
“Then witness it. Dated this night, at Foxhollow, of sound mind, against all commissions to the contrary. The lady consents.” She held out her hand across the candlelight. “Entirely.”
He came in, and the latch fell, the loudest small sound she had ever heard.
“Come here.” She stood by the bed in her shift, her heart beating hard, and she let it go hard, because tonight fear and wanting were the same animal, and she meant to ride it.
“You have undressed me twice in my imagination, by the fire, and in the parlour at Westmere. I am told the work is better in person.”
“Slander. I have never once undressed you in your imagination. I undressed you in mine, which is a separate set of crimes.” His hands came to the laces at her shoulder, not quite steady, and she loved him for the unsteadiness past all sense.
“I am going to be slow about this. I warn you now. I have waited a long time, and a man does not gallop through the one door he has spent his whole life walking past.”
“How slow?”
“Archival,” he said, and drew the first lace.
He undressed her the way she catalogued, with attention, reverence and running commentary, the shift coming off her shoulders an inch at a time while his mouth followed the cloth.
“Collarbone,” he said against it. “I have been distracted by this collarbone since the second week. It has cost me whole paragraphs of legal reading.”
“It is a perfectly ordinary collarbone.”
“There is nothing ordinary in this room. Shoulder.” The cloth slid, and his mouth went with it, warm and open against the bare slope of her, and the patience of it sent a shiver down through her that the cold had nothing to do with.
He kissed the inside of her elbow, of all places, and the shiver went through her whole arm, and his laugh against her skin made it worse.
“There. The crease of the elbow. Nobody guards it. Every woman keeps her composure in some place she has forgotten to defend, and I have spent three weeks finding yours.”
“Cold, Duchess?”
“You know exactly what I am, and cold is not the word for it.” The shift went to the floor, and she stood in candlelight with nothing on at all, and made herself not cover.
The look on him was the dance-floor look multiplied past safety, the room not just empty around them now, the room gone entirely.
“Say something. You are never silent. The silence is alarming.”
“I am revising my whole estimate of what my life has been for,” he said. “Give a man a moment with the arithmetic. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever been permitted near, and I have stood in treasure rooms with the candles lit, and I would burn each one of them to keep this.”
“That is sufficiently eloquent. Your turn. Off, all of it. Fair trade is the foundation of a sound marriage. I have it on excellent authority.”
She unwrapped him with the same archival slowness he had spent on her, coat, shirt and the rest, and learned with her hands what the dark had only let her guess at.
“The jaw first,” she said, and set her mouth to the long pale line of it.
“Oldest in the collection. Then this.” The pistol-pucker at the shoulder, silver and ugly and his.
“Acquired before my time. Provenance still owed to me; I note it for the record.” Her mouth moved down to the knife-scar at the ribs.
“And the newest accession. Bound on site by an unqualified conservator with a petticoat. The join has held beautifully.”
“The conservator was the finest I have been treated by, and I have bled in three capitals.”
“Flattery will be entered in the minutes.” She kissed each scar in strict chronological order, oldest first, and he stood and let her, breathing like a man holding a great weight gently.
“You are cataloguing my ruins,” he said roughly.
“I am not raiding ruins, Your Grace. I am accessioning the collection. Ruins are abandoned. Everything here is kept.” Her hand travelled down the flat of his stomach, and lower, and closed around the hard length of him, and the sound he made was nothing like a duke.
He was heavy and hot in her hand, silk over iron, and she let herself learn the weight, the shape and the way his breath broke when her thumb crossed the crown of him, until learning turned into a kind of power and she used it, slow strokes that made his hands flex at her waist. “I have wondered about this since the library. Whether I could take the composure off you the way you take it off me.”
“The finding?”
“Conclusive.” Her thumb crossed the crown of his tip again, his breath tore again, and she smiled like a woman winning at cards. “I shall want the proper terms for all of this, by the by. The literature was evasive. Everything was a lance, a flower or a veiled allusion to Greece.”
“The literature was written by men who had never once been in this bed. We will build you a working vocabulary as we go.” He bent and put his mouth beside her ear and told her, plainly, in words no poet had troubled to veil, exactly what she was holding and exactly what he wanted to do with it, and the words went through her like brandy.
“That is a great deal more precise than the poetry.”
“Precision is the whole of my charm.”
“Then I shall be precise as well.” She sank to her knees, and his hands went straight to her hair, not to stop her but because he had nowhere else to put them that could hold what her kneeling did to the last of his composure.
“I have read enough to know the theory. You are going to hold still and let me practise it, and you are not going to be noble about it, because if you are noble at me one more time tonight, I will lose my temper.”
“Giselle.” Her name came out of him scraped raw, the way it had in the dark the night he bled on her, and she set her mouth to the broad head of his manhood before the name had finished leaving him.
The first taste of him was salt, heat and the clean musk of his skin, and the sound he made above her, low, wrecked, and urgent, told her more about the man than seventeen chapters of his careful silences ever had.
She took him deeper, her tongue pressing flat along the underside as her lips closed around the thick shaft, and his fingers tightened in her hair until the pull of it sang at her scalp.
She would have told him if it hurt, but it did not hurt.
The grip was the first wholly ungoverned thing he had done in her presence, and the honesty of it went through her the way the brandy of his words had.
“Your mouth.” He could barely get the sentence flat. “You are killing me with your mouth, and you are enjoying it, and I find I have no objection at all to dying.”
She answered by taking him deeper still, her hand circling the base of him where her lips could not reach, and the wet slide of her mouth together with the tighter grip of her fist drew his hips forward into the stroke before he could govern them.
She let him move, let him set the depth, her jaw loose and her tongue working the swollen ridge on every withdrawal, and the trust of the letting changed something in the room the way a key changes a lock, silently and all at once.
“Giselle. Look up at me.”
She did, and the sight of her on her knees with her mouth full of him and her eyes steady on his undid the last of whatever architecture a man builds to keep himself decent.
His hand cupped the side of her face and his thumb traced her stretched lower lip where it met his wet skin, and the gesture was so tender and so filthy at once that neither of them could have said which it was, but neither tried.
“If you do not stop,” he said, and the steadiness cost him the whole of his voice, “I am going to finish in your mouth, and I have waited too long for this night to spend it on my knees when I could spend it inside you.”
She drew off him slowly, her tongue tracing the full length of him as she went, while her lips were left wet, aching and shining in the candlelight.
The sound that came out of him at the loss of her was the sound of a man who had paid for patience the whole of his life and had reached the last farthing.
He reached down and took her by both arms and brought her to her feet and kissed her, hard, tasting himself on her tongue and not flinching from it, which she marked, because a man who could taste himself on a woman’s mouth and not pull away was a man who took the world as it came, and she had loved him for that since the first afternoon.
“Bed, Duchess.” His voice had dropped to the register she had heard only once before, in the carriage, the register with no title in it, no manners and no room left over. “The slow part starts now.”
“That was the slow part?”
“That was the preface.” He lifted her, one arm beneath her knees and the other at her back, and carried her the three steps to the bed and put her down on the old clean linen with the kind of control that comes only from a man who was not, at any level, in control, and who had decided to spend the last of it rather than pretend.
“And the preface has given me ideas I did not have when I walked through that door, so you have yourself to blame for the next half hour.”
“I accept the blame. I shall wear it proudly.”