he blanched at the name of her former betrothed, all the color leaching from her beautiful face. Bloody, bloody hell. It wasn’t what he wanted to see, even if he’d anticipated it. Even if he’d had the journey between London and Liverpool to reconcile himself to the fact that the woman he’d married—the woman who had forced him to spend the last three months guilt-ridden and torn between his feelings for her and his duty—was a fraud, a liar, and a conniving jade. Possibly even a conspirator and prospective murderess. And then there had been the other part of him, the part that had been desperate to come up with reasons why she could not be, or ways he could save her if she was.
Pathetic of him, really.
His jaw hardened, fingers fisting the bedclothes on either side of her lithe form, a fresh wave of rage bursting through him. Hers was not the reaction of an innocent woman, by God. It was the reaction of a woman who was guilty as sin. A woman who’d just realized the elaborate web of lies and deceit she’d spun had transformed into a trap of her own making.
“Padraig McGuire.” He spat the name out as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.
Of course, it did. The thought of any other man touching Daisy, kissing her, running his hands over her bare curves, sinking home inside her… Jesus, it made him livid enough that he wouldn’t trust himself alone in a chamber with any of them. Whoever they were. Faceless bastards. Christ knew how many. He wanted to tear them all limb from limb.
Padraig McGuire, however, was the one man above any—even above the Earl of Bolton—that infuriated him to the point of irrational, unpredictable bloodlust. McGuire was a Fenian plotter. A maestro of death and destruction. Most importantly and damning of all, he was a man that Daisy had once loved enough that she’d wished to marry him.
A man she had received in private no less than four times.
Damn it all, he was a fool. For even with the blinders removed, he still couldn’t help but want her. His cock was rigid, straining against the placket of his trousers, jutting into the soft warmth of her left thigh. She was even lovelier than he’d recalled during his months away from her. When his eyes had first lit on her tonight as she’d crossed the threshold, he’d been momentarily speechless. Perhaps it had been the trousers, which accentuated her tiny waist and the feminine flare of her hips and trim ankles to perfection. Or perhaps it had simply been her, Daisy.
Goddess. Witch. Siren. Liar.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” he growled, realizing that she had yet to answer him and his body was growing far too accustomed to his position atop her. His body, in fact, wanted to be buried deep inside her. It was a hell of a thing, how his cock and his mind could fight each other so mercilessly, but there it was. “Who the hell is Padraig McGuire to you?”
She flinched, then swallowed. The thick fringe of her lashes swept down over her eyes. “How do you know that name? He didn’t use it when he called here.”
Hearing her confirm what he’d already known, that the bastard had called upon her—at his goddamn home—as though it had been an innocent social visit, sent another onslaught of fury ricocheting through him. Slowly, the full implications of what she’d said descended.
He’d unwittingly revealed too much to her. To this woman, with her tits straining against her bodice, legs spread wide in satin trousers, with her wide eyes and full, beckoning mouth, who was a deceptive, traitorous bitch.
To this woman, who knew too much, and had always known more than she’d let on. His wife, the woman he had lusted over for three long, interminable months. The same woman who had taken lovers the moment he’d been gone from her sight. The woman he loved.
Bloody hell. The heart was nothing but a weakness. A fool incapable of knowing reason. For there was no reason on this earth—not a goddamn one—that he should still feel this heaviness in his chest, this conflagration inside him by being in her presence.
“You don’t have the right to ask anything of me,” he snapped at her, feeling an icy cold sink straight into the marrow of his bones. “I pose the questions. You answer them, or tonight won’t go well for you. Do you understand?”
She stiffened as she gauged the depth of his rage, bringing her palms between them to shove ineffectually at his chest. The fear in her expression would have made him feel shame on any other day. Regardless of what he’d been ordered to do, and regardless of the depth of her treachery, he would never physically hurt her.
But today was different. Today, he wanted her to drown in dread of what he would do to her. Today, he wanted to make her pay and in so doing, slake some of his own pain. He had believed her. And she had lied. He rose on his knees and caught her wrists in a manacle grip, lowering each to her side and pinning them to the bed. She was helpless. He rocked his body against hers, partly for the simple pleasure and partly to let her know that he was the dominant force. That she answered to him.
“Who is Padraig McGuire?” he posed the question once more, this time with his cock grinding against the part of her he wanted most.
He decided that regardless of how much he would despise himself by morning light, he was not going to stop until he took his fill of Daisy tonight. He would possess her, enjoying the sound of her shameless trousers being torn from her body. He’d rip the bodice to shreds, cut her corset off with the knife in his boot. Then, he’d sink so deep inside her, pound so hard, until she couldn’t help but cry out with wild need. Suck her nipples, sink his fingers into the soft bounty of her hair. Yes, by God, he would take her, punish her. And he would enjoy every debauched second of it.
Perhaps he would even bind her wrists. The thought made his cock jerk, and he rolled his hips against hers in instinct, half horrified at himself for being so consumed with lust at the thought of fucking a conscienceless traitor.
But she was still and ashen-faced beneath him, her lips compressed. Not compliant. Not willing as he wanted her to be. The hunger burning within him cooled. He took no pleasure in forcing a woman, regardless of how far she drove him to the edge of sanity. “Who. Is. He?” he pressed.
“Please, Sebastian.” She paused, breathless, wetting her lips. “It is not what you must think.”
That was a goddamn lie, and he knew it. The report had been forever committed to his memory. Padraig McGuire called upon Her Grace and was received upon four separate occasions. She had been alone with McGuire. In Sebastian’s own bloody house. Half an hour on the third visit. A scant fifteen minutes on the last, but he wouldn’t trouble himself with that now. Perhaps by that time, McGuire had enjoyed his fill and needed only a rushed coupling to satisfy his lust.
The thought of Padraig McGuire atop Daisy much the same as he was now sent more ice through his veins. “The truth,” he commanded her, unable to resist pressing his body deeper into hers until her breasts thrust against his chest and his abdomen crushed into the rigid girding of her corset.
Had she forgotten the way it was between them so easily? Or had her introduction to desire only made her hungry for more with the man she almost married? Had nothing they shared been real? Was her body’s reaction to him, even now, feigned?
Damn it, not even his disgust for her hampered his raging lust. His cock ground into her in a crude imitation of what he wanted to do, despite the fact that she had allowed the same privilege to others in his absence.
Never mind that she had never been meant to be his wife in truth. As far as she knew, she was his duchess forever. And even if he’d been called away on an urgent matter, she’d sworn to be faithful and obey. How quickly she’d broken her vows. Not to even mention the feelings she’d claimed to have for him. Her protestations of love returned to him now, the remembrance of her sweet, husky voice raining the words down upon him: I love you. I love you. I love you.
And he had believed her, fool that he was. Like a starving man hungering for a scrap to put into his empty belly, he had been desperate. Desperate to believe in her and her innocence. How wrong he’d been. His instincts were worthless to him now. And she had done that. She alone had slipped past his defenses, making him fall in love with her, making him want to build a true marriage with her after his mission’s completion. Making him want to give up his life’s work just to be with her.
What a sodding joke. What a lunatic he was. Perhaps he ought to retire from the League anyway, just on account of his own stupidity. He was useless. Foolish. How could he look any of his fellow League members or his superior in the eye again, knowing what he’d done in allowing this scrap of a woman to control him and lay him low?
Delilah, he thought. She was his bloody Delilah.
“The truth,” she said at last, shattering his thoughts, her voice quiet but as decadent as velvet to the senses, just as it always had been. Her lashes swept up, and her gaze met his. That vivid, vibrant, clear green seemed to see straight through him. “I’ve told you nothing but the truth already. You ought to know that, Sebastian. Just as you know that I was engaged to marry Padraig McGuire in New York City. But he came here for good reason.”
Ever perceptive. He could own that she was intelligent. Far too intelligent, for that matter—and wary and cagey—for her own good. Her skills as an actress, however, outshined any other gift she had, even her undeniable beauty. Her protest that McGuire had visited her for good reason almost seemed genuine.
He didn’t deny that he was aware of her relationship with McGuire. Why pretend? “Did you not think that word would reach me? That I wouldn’t hear of your frequent, private visits with a particular gentleman? That I wouldn’t then take it upon myself to gather information about who it was that my wife felt the need to spend time with in my absence?”
Private visits with a Fenian plotter. Had they discussed plans for laying bombs and then fucked? Christ, he wouldn’t think of it now. He ought to hate her for what she’d done. And yet, somehow he couldn’t.
Daisy’s gaze didn’t waver from his. Aside from the hitch in her breath and the thumping of her heart that he could feel against his chest, she appeared the perfect picture of calm and elegance. “Of course I knew word would reach you, or at least I hoped it would. What would you have done in my place? I’d been abandoned by my husband with no friends or family to speak of, and you certainly didn’t answer any of my letters or even bother to send word inquiring after me. You disappeared with just a terse note. Everything I tried failed—no one knew where you’d gone or when you would return. So I decided to attempt to lure you back here by creating so much scandal that you’d have no choice.”
There was his brazen actress once again, returning from the ashes of the broken creature she’d wanted him to believe her to be. How bold of her to suggest she’d privately received gentlemen callers in his absence in order to win him back to her side. My God, she lied so swiftly he almost wanted to believe her.
His fingers tightened on her wrists. Her gaze fastened on his, alert and searching. He allowed her nothing, keeping eyes and his expression both cold as the diamonds she wore at her throat. “You expect me to believe that you took lovers so that I would return to you?”
“Of course not.” She tugged at her wrists, attempting to free herself. “Sebastian, release me.”
He wasn’t inclined to listen to her demand. The beast inside him had been caged for too long. He didn’t ease his grip. Instead, he lowered his face closer to hers, until her scent flooded him. By some miracle of self-restraint, he refrained from burying his face in the honey-gold strands of her hair. But as he observed her now, he wished he’d taken the pins from her coif before leaping upon her.
“Am I meant to thank you for bedding a string of lovers, including your former betrothed, in my own home?” he seethed. The last words emerged as a roar.
“No!” she shouted back at him, turning her weak attempt at escaping him into a full-scale battle. She writhed and bucked beneath him, trying in vain to free her wrists. But all her efforts trapped her more snugly beneath him. “Listen to me, Sebastian.”
But he was beyond listening. And in truth, her thrashing like a feral cat only heightened his arousal. Each jerk of her body made the most pleasurable friction against his cock. Her breasts strained against him, her mouth so near to his that he could almost taste her. Her body fitted around him, her lush curves melting into his hardness and angles. A perfect fit. Even half mad with anger and lust, he could still feel the rightness of her beneath him.
Such a bloody shame that the one woman he wanted most in the world was the same woman he’d be sending off to prison along with her lover. First, however, first he would take what was his. What had always been his. And he would take her so fiercely that she would never forget in all of her days that he was the man who had claimed her, body and soul.
“Keep moving about like that, madam, and see what happens,” he warned her, his voice ragged and low, saturated by the tumult of the moment. Dichotomies plagued him. He wanted her, but hated himself for his weakness; she was beautiful, but she was a bloody criminal, an enemy of the Crown. His enemy. The woman who had betrayed and deceived him.
She went still beneath him. “You still don’t believe me.”
“Of course I don’t believe you, buttercup.” Slowly, he slid her wrists along the bed until they were both held captive above her head. He leaned back to survey his handiwork. She was like an offering before him, breasts outthrust, face flushed, succulent lower lip caught between her teeth.
He wanted to bite her there too. To nip her just enough to give her pain without drawing blood. She needed to pay for what she’d done, for the harm she intended to inflict upon innocents by aiding and abetting Padraig McGuire and her father. For what she had done to him, infiltrating his mind and body as thoroughly as opium. Fury ravaged him, mingling with lust.
Retribution was what this was. He would make her atone for her sins. He would take her one last time so that he could sleep at night when she was gone.
“I’m telling you the truth,” she insisted. “It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Sebastian, you left me. You didn’t deserve my loyalty. But I have been here waiting for your return just the same. Even now, I can’t deny you because I love you too much.”
Bitterness laced through him. “Your manipulation won’t work upon me any longer. All those clever little lies, Daisy. You’re a brilliant actress, I’ll grant you that. But now the time for deceit is at an end.”
Her fine-boned wrists were small and delicate enough that he could hold them both in one fist, he discovered, which left his right hand free to do as it wished. He skimmed down the length of her bare arm to the lace at her sleeve. Down over her breasts, and then lower, to her hip, her knee.
“It’s true,” she said, and there was a tremble in her voice that almost made him feel a trace of compunction. “I love you.”
He pressed his forehead to hers. “Liar.”
She tugged at her wrists, naively thinking she could somehow overpower him and escape. She could not. “Unlike you, I speak the truth. You still have not said where you were. Will you tell me? Please?”
He ignored her plea. Blood rushed through him, straight to his cock. He didn’t want to hear anything else she had to say. No more falsehoods or pretense. No more protestation. One last time. Just this night, he promised himself silently, this night to exorcise her from him.
He kissed her. Took her mouth with his to stop hers from moving. Or at least that’s what he told himself as lust slammed through him. She tasted sweet, sweeter than he remembered, and though he’d wanted the kiss to be punishing, the moment she responded, moaning into his mouth, fitting her lips to his, he knew it could not be.
The only one he punished was himself.
Because his body clamored for her, but so did his heart. Damn it, the weakest part of him wanted to believe her when she professed to love him. When she claimed her antics had all been an attempt to bring about his return. That the fortnight they’d spent together had been real—the laughter, the love, all of it. That she wasn’t a Fenian. Dynamite, he thought as he dragged his mouth lower, down her throat, across the silky expanse of creamy skin. She was his dynamite.
He had missed her. Dear God, how he had missed her. “Do you want this?” he asked before he tongued the hollow at the base of her throat, just above her glittering diamonds.
“Yes.” The word slid from her lips on a sigh. “I want you so much I can’t bear it.”
Thank fuck. He caught her bodice in his hand, and ripped the delicate silk cleanly from her. Or at least half of it. With a flick of his wrist, the bodice was gone. He gripped her corset and used his thumb to work the first hook-and-eye closure free. It didn’t take him long to have the red satin, black-lace-trimmed corset open. Her chemise remained, shielding her from him. He rent the fine fabric as well. She was nude from the waist up.
Her breasts were full and high, the sweet pink nipples he’d recalled countless times while secreted in Liverpool hard and inviting, pointing upward. He couldn’t resist lowering his head to take the hardened bud of her left nipple into his mouth. He sucked, relishing the way she writhed against him, arching into his body, squeezing his hips with her thighs. She moaned. He caught her between his teeth, tugged.
She begged. “Please, Sebastian.”
Need roared out of control. Thundered though his veins. Lit a fire that burned just beneath his skin. His ballocks tightened, his cock grinding against her center. Jesus. He had never wanted a woman more. His reaction to her was ludicrous. He knew what she was, what she’d done. Christ, he probably didn’t even know the half of it. And yet there would be no purging her from his blood until he had her this night.
He released her nipple with a loud, wet pop, tilted his head so that their eyes clashed again at last. Deep, intense green pierced him. Her mouth had fallen open, her breath uneven. He blew on her nipple once. Twice. Nipped it again, his gaze never leaving hers.
“What do you want, Daisy?” As he asked the question, he canted his hips, pressing the demanding ridge of his cock against her more fully. “Tell me. What do you want?”
Her breasts rose and fell, her breathing faster. She swallowed, ran her tongue over her lower lip. “I want you to believe me.”
“Make me believe you,” he dared. The challenge was a lie, bold and foolish, for he knew there was no earthly means by which she could persuade him that she wasn’t in fact the treacherous viper he had discovered her to be. All the evidence led to only one conclusion. She was her father’s daughter. She had betrayed him. She was an actress, a manipulator, a faithless liar. And he had fallen prey to her.
Now, he wanted to exact a bit of his own vengeance before she needed to face her inevitable end. Turning her over to Carlisle and League forces would not be easy when the time came, regardless of what she’d done.
But for tonight, she was his and his alone.
“I shouldn’t have to make you,” she countered, stubborn to the last. That was Daisy—bravado and courage and manipulation, a vibrant flower that was too bold and dishonest for her own good. “I’m your wife. I’ve never given you cause to doubt me.”
Everything she’d done gave him cause to doubt her. The reports from the Home Office made him doubt her. Her own actions made him doubt her. The fact that her father was the puppeteer for an ever-growing web of Fenian plotters made him doubt her. But doubt and need were two separate propulsions.
He tongued her nipple, and she arched on a breathy moan, responsive as ever. And then he nipped her again. Not hard enough to bruise, but enough that she gasped and writhed against him in obvious frustration. A liar she might be, but there was no pretense in the way her body wanted his. Nor in the way he wanted her. His desire for her was all-consuming.
“Release my hands,” she said.
He licked the puckered flesh he’d just bit. “No.”
“I want to touch you.”
Fuck. Longing slammed into him at her simple words. He wanted her to touch him. He could overpower her in an instant. What was the danger, the risk?
Only his heart.
Where the hell had that rogue thought come from? He forced it where it belonged, into the dark recesses of his mind. Good and bloody buried. He did as she asked, and then with two free hands, he took his knife from his boot and lowered it to the waistband of her trousers. One quick, careful swipe, and he’d cut straight through the silk and her drawers both. Fabric gaped. He tossed his knife to the floor where it landed with a carpet-muffled thud. And then he caught the rent fabric in his hands and tore it down her body in one, fluid motion.
Her eyes widened. “Sebastian.”
He looked down at their bodies, his poised for entrance despite the barrier of clothing he still wore. Hers… bloody, bloody hell. He took in a curved length of creamy thigh, an impossibly perfect knee, a sweetly turned calf and a trim ankle. But that wasn’t what made his mouth go dry. No. His gaze skimmed back up her body, lingering on the soft flesh at the apex of her thighs. Ah, yes. He had not forgotten the taste of her, the way she’d reacted to him. Here was his prize at last, what he’d longed for each seemingly endless day of the three months he’d spent away from her.
His fingers slid into her folds, finding her so slick that he couldn’t suppress his groan. His cock surged. Wanting. Needing. His heart pounded. “Daisy.” He circled her responsive bundle of flesh once, twice, then traced the seam to her entrance.
He was drawn as tense and still as the strings on a violin awaiting the slide of a bow. He needed to calm himself, to slow down. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, his cock so rigid he had to take a few steadying breaths just to regain his equilibrium.
One, two, three.
Counting again, blast it all. Blast her.
“Sebastian,” she said his name again on a gasp, and it bloody well killed him. “I want you so badly I ache with it. I wanted you every day that you were gone, and I want you now more than I ever did though I hate myself for it.”
Jesus. He knew the feeling. The breath he’d inhaled hissed from his lungs. When he found his voice, it was dark and low with the same suppressed anger that had been guiding him from the moment he’d first caught sight of her, resplendent in her evening finery, trousers and all. “Damn you. How is it that I want you, so badly, Daisy? It makes no bloody sense, but I want you so goddamn much that I burn with it.”
Her right palm caressed down his chest, over the taught plane of his abdomen, before traveling lower. Seeking and bold. Her fingers glanced his trousers directly over his cock. He jerked into her, and her fingers curled around his length.
His mouth descended upon hers, bruising, scalding, possessing. This kiss held no quarter. It was meant to ravish her. Take her. Remind her she was his. That he was her bloody husband, like it or not.
Not in truth.
There it was again, his sainted conscience, interrupting at the most inopportune moment. But nothing, not the fact that she’d been parading her lovers in and out of his home, nor that she was working for the Fenians, neither her duplicity nor the fact that he was meant to remove her as a threat, could cool the raging fires within him. Not even his conscience would keep him from sinking deep inside her tonight.
He thrust against her hand, caught her lip between his teeth and lightly bit. His free hand cupped one of her full, beautiful breasts, his thumb working her nipple. Everywhere he touched her, she was hot, soft as silk. Her scent, the scent that had haunted him in his absence, went to his head like fine whisky.
He kissed down her neck, licking and nipping. She tasted sweet, like vanilla with a trace of bergamot, and by God, he could lick every bit of her all night long if not for the painful state of his engorged cock.
“Open my trousers,” he commanded against her skin, before playing his tongue over the elegant hollow where her throat and shoulder met and her pulse raced.
She hesitated only a moment before her fingers found the closure of his waistband. Slowly, his trousers came undone and then the placket of his drawers.
He dragged his mouth lower in appreciation, over her breast to the nipple he wasn’t currently plucking between thumb and forefinger. His tongue teased the stiff peak, back and forth, wringing a moan from her lips. Unable to deny himself or her any longer, he gave in and drew her into his mouth. He used his teeth against her, a subtle pressure designed to heighten her arousal, before releasing her.
“Touch me,” he said, pressing a kiss alongside that pretty nipple. Pink, so pink. The sweetest pink he’d ever seen, rivaled only by her luscious lips. He kissed the tip.
She gripped him then, and the taunt of her fingers over his bare length was enough to nearly unman him. On another night, when he wasn’t quite so carried to the edge by his commingling anger and lust, he would’ve taken his time. He would’ve removed his boots and his bloody trousers. His shirt.
But this was no ordinary night, and nothing about the passion exploding between him and Daisy felt ordinary. It felt deuced incendiary, in fact. If he didn’t sheathe himself inside her in the next minute, he was going to come all over her hand like a lad who’d just seen his first cunny.
And so he swirled her nub, worked it. Ran his finger along her dewy seam, coating his fingers in the evidence that she wanted him every bit as much as he needed to have her. He slicked his digit over her again and again, teasing at her entrance, sucking her nipple, paying attention to the soft sounds of appreciation she hummed, the way she angled her hips to gain more sensation.
Daisy was near to reaching her pinnacle. Her breathing was coming in fast gasps, her body arching from the bed. Finally, he returned to the pearl he’d originally sought, exerting greater pressure, working her into a fine frenzy. And then he sank a finger deep inside her sheath, testing her, teasing her. Wet. So hot and wet and… damn it, everything in him clamored for more. He hooked his finger, pressing against the most sensitive part of her, fucking her in slow, deep thrusts.
He released her nipple, dragging himself back up her lithe body to her mouth. And he kissed her as though she was everything to him, his life source, and he couldn’t get enough.
In that stark, mad moment, she was.
Their tongues tangled, and she shuddered against him, more wetness flooding his already drenched fingers as she came. He took her cries with his mouth and swallowed them, his forever.
There was no time to shuck his shirt. Not enough patience to even pull down his trousers and smalls. He guided his cock to her slick entrance. He forced everything—her betrayal, what would come tomorrow—from his mind. In one swift thrust, he was inside her to the hilt. She was so damn tight, her body wet and hot and so bloody decadent that it took his breath away.
“Sebastian,” she cried out, drawing him deeper, her body clenching on his as though she would never let him go.
He didn’t want her to, damn it all. He surged inside her, again and again until he jerked himself from her, exploding onto the bed coverings.
Dynamite.
How the hell could he ever let her go?