Not the Dukes Darling by Hoyt, Elizabeth (13)

Freya pressed her lips to Harlowe, tasting the brandy on her tongue and his. He’d looked so sad. So tired. And she’d wanted only to give him some solace.

But her lips parted helplessly as he snatched the cap from her head and threaded his fingers through her hair, tumbling it to her shoulders.

Her heart was thumping, her breasts pressed to his hard chest, and excitement rose in her throat.

Perhaps she’d known, deep down, that this would happen if she touched him again. Despite her hesitation. Despite her philosophical doubts.

She wanted him with an instinctive pull that had nothing to do with higher thought.

The heat of his body, the prickle of his stubble against her face, the strength of his hands.

The sly, growing knowledge that she affected him just as much as he affected her.

She tore her mouth from his. “Show me.”

His eyes had gone dark, color high on his cheekbones, his mouth wet from their kiss.

She reached for the top of his shirt with one hand and began to undo it.

He stood frozen, like some classical statue in modern dress. She wanted to see what lay underneath.

She held his eyes and pulled open the first button, the fabric making a small rustling sound that was loud in the silent room.

He watched her without any movement to prevent her.

Her breath was coming much too fast. She raised both hands and slipped the second button free.

It felt as if she’d somehow leaped a great distance. As if she’d crossed a border into a strange, new country.

A country she wanted to explore.

The next button came undone and then the next, her fingers working faster and faster.

He groaned under his breath but still he didn’t move, merely letting her do as she willed.

And that—his tacit permission to play with him, to explore him—was more exciting than anything she’d ever felt.

The shirt buttoned to midchest and she was very careful to undo each button. Gradually the shirt parted, revealing his strong neck, the dip between his collarbones, and then whorls of hair.

His body was so different, so fascinating. She wanted to discover all the ways he was different from her. Wanted to map and trace and taste.

Freya breathed out, feeling her heart beat so hard she worried he could hear it. Fanny Hill’s lover had had body hair, and when she’d read that, curled in a window seat in a deserted library, she’d had to press her legs together.

She’d grown wet at the thought of a man naked.

Of a man’s body, so strange and different.

And now…

Now she had one before her to do with as she wished.

She smiled a private smile and tugged his shirttails free from his breeches.

He raised his arms without prompting, and she lifted his shirt as high as she could before he pulled it off the rest of the way.

He stood before her naked to the waist.

She stared.

Breathing in and out. Simply looking.

She thought him beautiful. That wasn’t the word one was supposed to use for men, but for him it was true.

Beautiful.

From the rolling muscles on his shoulders to the tiny red-brown nipples to the curling hairs that thickened at the middle of his body below his navel.

She smiled at him, looking in his eyes with delight, and his own eyes widened as if he was surprised by her approval.

His wife had rejected him physically. There had probably been other women, but such a basic blow would remain hidden under the skin, a bruise painful to the touch.

She could give him balm for that wound.

Her hand touched the left side of his chest. Over his nipple.

Where his heart might be under that smooth olive skin.

He had hairs on his chest, and she drew her fingers together, stroking, feeling the soft rasp, watching the curls spring back.

So foreign.

So wonderful.

Carefully she leaned forward and touched the tip of her tongue to the base of his throat. He was warm, living, and he tasted of man and faintly perhaps of salt.

She closed her mouth and kissed him there as her fingers worked on the falls of his breeches.

His great chest rose and fell beneath her lips. She felt as if she held a dangerous wild thing in her hands. An animal far stronger than she, who nevertheless permitted these liberties.

His falls opened and she worked more quickly at his smalls until she could push both down his legs. There it was, pointing at her, larger, thicker than she’d expected. His penis, cock, prick. There were so many names for it, but she remembered one from Fanny Hill: “battering ram,” which, really, sounded quite intimidating and possibly repulsive.

She wasn’t repulsed by this penis. It was ruddy and veined. Sturdy and somehow rather magnificent. She wanted to touch, but was forestalled as he stepped out of the clothes bunched around his ankles, kicking off his shoes as well.

When he bent to his stockings—his only remaining clothing—she laid a restraining hand on him.

“Let me.”

He said nothing, but his lips parted, gleaming in the candlelight.

She knelt at his feet.

Strange, that. She was in the supplicant position and indeed she played the servant, carefully rolling down his stockings.

But it was she who was fully dressed. He who was vulnerable and naked.

She wielded her power at his feet.

And when his stockings were at last pulled off, when he was fully nude, nothing to shield him from her gaze, she knelt up and took his genitals between her palms.

He hissed through his teeth.

His bollocks were heavy, the stones within rolling like eggs in a sack. She might’ve kissed him there, but hair covered the orbs.

Instead she placed her lips on his cock head. She’d been shocked and not a little disbelieving when she’d first read of this act in Fanny Hill. But the longer she thought about it—and somehow she couldn’t stop thinking about it—the more intriguing it seemed.

She felt her legs shake as she finally tasted his prick.

Oh, it was hot, as if molten lava boiled beneath the fine silky skin instead of mere blood.

He made a sound over her, but she didn’t look.

Her attention was on matters below.

His foreskin was pulled back, the purple crown nosing out, and she licked the bead of moisture there and then wrinkled her nose. It was bitter.

Not distasteful necessarily. Just…different.

Unlike anything she’d ever tasted before.

She parted her lips and kissed him again, this time prompting a rumbling groan.

At last she looked up.

He stood, his legs braced, his face flushed. Obviously aroused but not acting on it.

Permitting her the lead.

She smiled and sucked the head of his cock into her mouth, even as she kept her eyes locked with his. She could feel the wetness at her center, seeping between her thighs. It seemed terribly odd, that this act she did for him should cause her such excitement.

“Freya,” he groaned, his voice so deep it sounded like gravel. He watched her with heavy-lidded eyes. “Darling, move your hand on my prick.”

She did as he bade her, touching him at first gingerly and then with more sureness. His skin moved independent of the hard muscle beneath. She could feel his heat and the pulse of his blood and suddenly it was too much.

She rose and went to his bed, flinging herself onto it, rolling to her back and looking at him, standing stock-still. She grasped her skirts in her fists and raised them, pulling the fabric clear past her thighs, over her hips, until her mound was exposed.

She deliberately spread her legs. “Harlowe.”

He was across the room at once, climbing onto the bed, climbing onto her, his face wild, his teeth bared.

He knelt over her, his legs between her widely spread thighs, and looked down at her like a lion at a fallen gazelle.

Except she was no gazelle.

She was a lioness—fierce and brave.

She took hold of his shoulders and pulled him toward her. “Now. Please, now.”

He lowered his hips, his cock skidding across her thigh. He nudged between her legs, making her widen them still farther, and his penis caught at her entrance.

She looked at him, memorizing his features in this moment. Feeling wild with expectation and triumph.

He speared her.

There was a burning pain, but she made no sound, and he retreated and drove into her again.

Spreading her.

Filling her.

Marking her.

If she was the lioness, then he was surely the lion. A mate fit for her, strong and protective. He thrust into her again and again, moving into her in slow increments until he was fully seated.

She was breached, impaled, and should have felt weakened by defeat.

But this was her victory. She arched beneath him, urging him to move.

To complete the act.

He withdrew and thrust. Withdrew and thrust. She tried to mirror his movement, and for an awkward moment they merely clashed, bumping against one another.

But then they caught, rising in rhythm together.

She flung back her head, gasping at the sensation.

At the wonder.

Her heart was swelling, a strange affliction tied to what this man was doing to her.

She might be a lioness, but she knew now she wouldn’t leave this battle unscathed.

Her legs shook and her palms slid over his shoulders, slick with sweat, striving, striving for a summit, a common goal.

She groaned as his body drove her to feel things she’d never felt before. To doubt she could live through this.

“That’s it, darling,” he whispered, his voice strained. “Nearly there. Nearly there.”

But she wasn’t sure. Nearly where? Was this something she wanted?

And then she reached it, an impossible peak, and she shrieked, barely noticing when he covered her mouth with his.

She fell. Sparking, bursting, filled to overflowing with pleasure.

With feeling.

For this man.

For Harlowe.

She opened wide her eyes and watched him fall, too.

Christopher woke the next morning to the scent of honeysuckle.

His nose was buried in a tumble of red waves.

Carefully he sat up to lean over Freya and study her face.

She lay on her side, one hand curled beneath her chin, her plump lips slightly parted and her eyes closed. Asleep she looked sweet and young. A docile maiden waiting for a prince to wake her with a kiss.

Christopher snorted under his breath. Freya was no docile maiden, and he was certainly no prince.

Still, when he bent and brushed a kiss against her cheek it was soft and almost reverent.

She murmured, her nose scrunching.

He smiled and kissed her again, a trail of small touches over her brow and down to the tip of her nose.

She blinked, and then he was looking into gold-flecked green eyes.

Something within him turned over. What he wouldn’t give to wake every morning thus, to Freya’s sleepy moan, the light in her eyes that he wanted to believe was for him and only him.

“Good morning,” she husked.

“Good morning to you as well, my lady,” he returned.

“What time is it?”

He glanced at the clock beside the bed. “Almost seven,” he said regretfully. “My valet will be here in half an hour, and although I trust him…”

He trailed away because she was already moving, tumbling from the bed. She’d fallen asleep still clothed, so all she had to do was shake down her skirts and look for her shoes.

He wanted her to stay. Wanted this time together to go on, perhaps forever.

But even as he was thinking that, it was over.

She darted to the door, and for a moment he thought she would simply leave without further word to him. But then she turned, looking at him, her eyes curiously vulnerable. “I…Thank you for last night.”

She opened the door and left.

Christopher flopped back on the bed as Tess decided to join him. He ruffled her ears as he thought. Freya’s parting words were a rather formal dismissal save for the fact that she’d blushed as she said them. She was such a guarded woman, as if her heart were walled in by thorny vines. A man wishing to brave those thorns was sure to be bloodied in the endeavor.

Almost any other woman would be easier to woo.

And yet he didn’t want any other woman. He wanted her, Freya. If he could not persuade her to his side, he had the feeling there would be no other opportunity in his life for companionship.

For love.

It was Freya or no one.

He lay abed a moment longer with Tess before he rose and drew on a banyan. Christopher paused when he saw Sophy’s letters lying forgotten on the table by the bed.

Freya had drawn his attention away from them, first with her sympathy and then with her seduction. When she’d touched him nothing, not even the end of the world, would have distracted him from her.

But even in the midst of that sensual exploration, he’d known that she hadn’t been experienced. Or at least not very experienced—and the difference hardly mattered in any case.

And having once made love to her? He couldn’t imagine never doing so again. His chest physically hurt at the thought. He had to somehow persuade her that he could wed her without taking her freedom from her.

But first there were other matters.

Christopher stirred the embers in the fireplace, tossing coal on them until flames flared up. Then he plucked Sophy’s letters from the table and fed them, one by one, into the fire, watching as they blazed and crumbled to ashes. Perhaps he should feel something—a sense of justice, of a duty fulfilled.

But destroying the letters brought no satisfaction.

Sophy was still dead.

“This is the most exciting house party I’ve ever attended,” Lucretia said later that morning, buttering a piece of scone. She popped it into her mouth and chewed, looking around the breakfast table cheerily.

Lucretia was the only one so bubbly this morning, Messalina thought sourly. She had a sore head, possibly from overimbibing brandy the night before. Lady Holland was a bit pale and very quiet. Mr. Plimpton, of course, was absent from the table, having been almost literally thrown from the house, and the remaining party members were not talkative.

There was one exception—or rather two. Arabella Holland was sitting beside Lord Rookewoode, her face alight with obvious joy as they idly made morning conversation.

Messalina had to suppress a wince. To wear one’s emotions so openly on one’s sleeve seemed to beg fate to bring one crashing to the ground. She sipped her tea, hoping her cynicism was without merit.

“I wonder if Mr. Plimpton has found a way to return to London?” Lucretia said, still abominably cheerful. “He did look in a state last night after the duke was done. Why do you think His Grace took such a dislike to him?”

“I think it’s better we don’t ask,” Messalina said darkly.

Viscount Stanhope cleared his throat portentously. “My man informed me that Mr. Plimpton was seen riding in a wagon leaving the nearby town this morning.”

The table turned their attention to this unlikely source of gossip.

“Then he’s gone?” Mr. Aloysius Lovejoy asked, brows raised.

“It would appear so,” Lord Stanhope replied. “I myself wonder what would make Mr. Plimpton lock the duke and Miss Stewart in the well house in the first place. Perhaps he had knowledge of the duke the rest of us do not?”

“Or perhaps he’s a conniving little worm,” Lady Lovejoy said sweetly.

The viscount blushed, and Freya walked into the breakfast room, drawing everyone’s attention.

“Good morning,” Lucretia said brightly as at the same time Regina Holland said, “Oh, Miss Stewart, there you are.”

Freya blinked at the sudden assault of voices.

She said, “Good morning,” and took the empty seat beside Messalina.

Everyone was carefully not looking in her direction—everyone but Lucretia, who was munching on her second scone and staring at Freya interestedly.

“Tea?” Messalina asked because the pot was in front of her.

“Yes, please.” Freya widened her eyes in question.

Messalina shook her head slightly and murmured so only she could hear, “Jane told me James the footman is bringing the scullery maid to meet us this morning.”

Freya’s expression was politely inquiring. “When?”

“As soon as he comes back—probably directly after breakfast.”

Freya gave a small nod and attended to her tea as the table conversation turned to more benign matters.

A few minutes later a footman entered the room and bent to whisper in Jane’s ear.

Jane nodded and glanced at Messalina. “I wonder if you’d like to see those new fashion dolls my modiste sent from London?”

“Yes, of course,” Messalina said, rising.

She sent a significant glance at Freya before following Jane from the breakfast room.

They crossed the hallway and went into a small sitting room, where they found James standing next to a thin girl. The footman was dressed in a common worker’s clothes, a soft hat pulled over his face. Beside him the scullery maid was a tiny little thing, all raw bones and reddened knuckles. She couldn’t be more than fourteen or fifteen.

The door opened behind them and Freya slipped into the room. “Have I missed anything?”

“No.” Messalina shook her head. “We haven’t started yet.”

Freya glanced at Jane. “With your permission, my lady?”

Jane nodded. “Please.”

Freya squared her shoulders and turned to the footman. “James, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Who have you here?”

James came to attention at Freya’s calmly authoritative tone. “This is Lucy Cartwright, who used to be a scullery maid at Randolph House.”

Lucy, who was wrapped in a gray knit shawl, looked as if she wanted to bolt from the room.

“Now, Lucy,” James said with paternal sternness, “these ladies wish to ask you some questions. All you need to do is answer them.”

Lucy nodded timidly as the three ladies took seats around her.

Freya smiled at the girl. “Have you worked for Lord Randolph long, Lucy?”

The girl lifted one shoulder. “A year, miss.”

“Then you no doubt knew Lady Randolph.”

“Yes.”

“What was the relationship between Lady Randolph and Lord Randolph like?”

Lucy’s wide eyes darted to James. “Relationship? They was lord and lady, miss.”

“Yes,” Freya said patiently, “but how did Lord Randolph treat Lady Randolph? Was he a loving husband?”

Lucy knit her brows before her expression cleared. “He’s a shouter, if’n that’s what you mean.”

“Indeed it is,” Freya replied. “Did he often shout at Lady Randolph?”

“All the time, ma’am, and in awful nasty terms, too. My lady was right sad about it. Her lady’s maid used to tell the kitchen that Lady Randolph wept in her rooms.”

Freya raised her brows a little, as if this news were only of little interest, and asked casually, “Did he ever hit her?”

Lucy stared. “Oh no, miss. Lord Randolph isn’t one to raise his hand.”

Messalina felt her shoulders slump in disappointment.

But then Lucy continued, “He didn’t even hit Lady Randolph when she tried to run away.”

Messalina exchanged an excited look with Jane. This was real information.

Freya cleared her throat. “Can you tell us about that, Lucy?”

“Well…” Lucy scrunched up her face. “Mind, I wasn’t there when it happened, ’cause it were at night. But Bob the stable boy told me that Her Ladyship was found in the stables in just her chemise and cloak. Hastings, the head groom, would’ve turned a blind eye, but His Lordship was there as well. He took Lady Randolph’s arm and dragged her through the rain and back into the house. Bob said he could hear the shouting even from without. Awful bad, it was.”

“And after that?” Freya asked.

Lucy shrugged. “Nothing, miss. I never saw her after.”

“Blast,” Messalina muttered. She’d felt so confident when they heard about Lucy that finally she would learn something about Eleanor’s final days.

“What about when they called the doctors?” Freya persisted.

“There wasn’t any doctors called,” Lucy said, sounding puzzled. “They just put her in the cellar.”

For a moment Messalina missed the implication.

Then she sat upright. “Lady Randolph was put in the cellar?”

“Yes, miss?”

“Is that where she sickened?” Freya asked softly. “In the cellar?”

“Sickened, miss?” Lucy asked.

“The illness she died from,” Freya clarified.

Lucy’s brow cleared. “Oh, Lord love you, miss. Lady Randolph isn’t dead.”

Beside Messalina, Jane stifled an exclamation.

Messalina maintained her calm with difficulty.

Freya was leaning a little forward now. “You’re saying Lady Randolph is alive and imprisoned in Randolph House’s cellars?”

Lucy glanced at James as if verifying that aristocrats were this dim. “Yes?”

“Oh my God,” Jane said, apparently unable to hold back her emotion anymore.

Messalina was about to ask Lucy to explain exactly where the cellars were when the door to the room opened and Lucretia entered.

Messalina turned. “What is it?”

Lucretia glanced at the servants and then her. “Lord Randolph has returned to Randolph House.”