Page 18 of A Duke to Undo her (The Husband Hunt #1)

Chapter Thirteen

When an unknown hand rapped again at his study door a second time, around noon, the Duke of Ashbourne stiffened in the chair behind his desk but said nothing.

Dear God, Lady Josephine had not returned had she? He had only just begun to feel fully in control of himself again after her departure. If she came back now, it would be the undoing of both of them, likely over this very desk with her skirts around her waist…

“Cassius? Are you in there, Cassius?” called Dowager Duchess Nerissa’s uncertain voice and Cassius gave a long sigh of relief, rising now to his feet.

“Mother, is everything well?” he asked cordially as he opened the door, trying to keep his tone as neutral as he could.

As open and good-natured as Benedict’s, Nerissa’s sky-blue eyes seemed to instantly fix on her eldest son with concern. Cassius felt his face growing hot, as he recollected his likely state of dishevelment and wondered how his mother might interpret it.

The duke had not looked in a mirror since Lady Josephine left him but remembered all too well her fingers raking his hair as he mouthed those perfectly rounded breasts, her failed attempts to dislodge his shirt and reach his bare skin, her hot little mouth and teeth pressing into his neck as his fingers brought her to the peak of ecstasy across his lap…

“I must talk to you, Cassius,” his mother told him, her words and tone doing nothing to ease the disturbance of his mind.

What if he and Lady Josephine had been heard or even seen by someone and Dowager Duchess Nerissa had come to castigate him for committing such a flagrant breach of propriety against a young woman and her family?

The cries and moans Lady Josephine uttered at his touch had been music to Cassius’ ears at the time, but had they also been loud enough to carry beyond the study’s thick oaken door? He also realized now that with the curtains open, anyone passing outside might have glanced in through the window.

With some chagrin and not a little guilt, he looked away, and then opened the door fully so that his mother could enter the room.

“There are two subjects on my mind, Cassius. One quite minor and one more weighty.”

“Oh?” the duke responded noncommittally, his hands clenching involuntarily even as he managed to control his expression.

“First of all, there is Lady Josephine,” the dowager duchess said thoughtfully as he was closing the door.

The Duke of Ashbourne said nothing, keeping his eyes steadily on the grain of the door’s wood. It felt like he was waiting for an axe to fall. Then, the metaphorical blade swung past and never touched his neck.

“I am worried about that girl,” continued his mother.

“She is wild and impulsive, as we already knew, but her heart seems good, and the other young ladies have not taken to her. I do not like to see a young person so isolated. Even some of the gentlemen have been unkind, although I know you will not stand for that.”

“I won’t,” he agreed cautiously, not knowing where his parent’s words might be leading.

“So, I should like to invite some of Lady Josephine’s friends to join our party and keep her better company.

I believe she is close to Lord Hollington’s eldest girl, and the daughter of the Duke of Westvale.

Both are highly respectable and well-mannered.

Presently, Lady Josephine has only her sister and Benedict.

Increasing her circle might also allay our fears about Lady Josephine monopolizing your brother. ”

“An excellent idea, Mother. I leave it in your capable hands,” Cassius agreed at once, although hoping that Lady Josephine would not see the need to confide certain of her recent experiences to her friends. “Was that all, Mother?

“No, it is not,” Nerissa admitted with a long sigh. “I cannot stop worrying about you, Cassius. It kept me awake last night, as it has kept me awake on many nights before this.”

The great relief that this statement aroused was quickly quashed as his mother went to sit down in the deep leather chair where the duke had earlier borne Lady Josephine in his arms.

“No!” he intervened with undue sharpness that caused Nerissa to freeze in surprise. “Not that chair. Let us sit on the sofa over by the window, where it is sunnier. We can then sit together. It always feels too strange sitting at a desk across from my own mother.”

“Very well,” she said with a confused shrug, allowing herself to be guided to this seat by Cassius and then sinking down beside him. “If you haven’t guessed, I want to talk seriously to you again about marriage.”

At any other time, the duke might have closed down his mother’s address here, having heard all her entreaties and arguments on this subject a hundred times before, and being immovable in his resolve to remain a bachelor.

Today however, he allowed her to continue, being only relieved to move on from the subject of Lady Josephine Thomson.

“You’ve always been very clear with me about how you feel, Cassius, and I know I must be a trial to you in repeating myself so many times. I continue only because it is such an important subject and you are so very dear to me.”

“I know, Mother,” he acknowledged with a nod, his eyes drawn again to the leather chair and his brain replaying again that series of sharp helpless gasps that Lady Josephine had uttered as her pleasure reached its final heights.

How soft and warm those delicate and slippery folds had been to his touch, how velvet and tight the untried passage within.

Cassius longed to taste the salt and tang of Lady Josephine’s secret places and run his tongue over the swollen button he had already caressed with his hands.

More than that, he longed for the invitation to plunge himself into her depths and revel in her wet heat.

As the duke raised his hand to scratch his jaw, he could still smell the scent of Lady Josephine’s womanly fluids. How beautifully she had lost herself in his arms, entirely undone with new and erotic sensations…

“…Lady Belinda, Lady Penelope or Miss Tewkes?”

“I’m sorry?” the duke queried, taking a deep breath, having drifted too far away in his mind to catch his mother’s questioning

“I asked whether you could really summon no interest at all in the young ladies I have already gathered at Ashbourne Castle this week. They are all most interested in you, as they well should be, my handsome and well-favored son. Should they accept my invitation, I can advise you that Lady Rose is very beautiful indeed, and Lady Madeline has a very good mind.”

Cassius shook his head decisively, this being a well-worn conversation.

“Nothing has changed as regards my views on marriage, Mother. I beg you not to waste your efforts. You would be better served encouraging these ladies to interest themselves in Benedict, wouldn’t you?”

This suggestion went without any answer, his mother’s attention temporarily drawn elsewhere.

“Your neck,” said Nerissa abruptly, frowning as she squinted at him. “Have you hurt yourself?”

“Likely a shaving injury,” the duke lied, pulling up his very rumpled stock and turning his head a little. “Nothing of interest.”

He wished he did have a looking-glass to hand, to know how plausible this dissimulation was. Thankfully, the dowager duchess’s eyesight was not as strong as it had once been and whatever she had seen, she appeared to accept Cassius’ explanation.

The duke noted to himself that he must seek a looking glass and rearrange his collar as well as his hair before he saw Benedict or anyone else. If there were teeth-marks or other signs of passion at his throat, not everyone would be so easily thrown off the scent.

God, he hoped no one had seen Lady Josephine as she left his study. What kind of state might she have been in? He was sure that he had been gentle in his handling, even if she had been less so with him, and prayed that she was unmarked.

“Sometimes, I wonder if it is my fault,” broke in his mother again.

“Your fault?” echoed Cassius, without any idea what she meant.

“I wonder if you will not marry because of what happened to me after your father died.”

Finally, the dowager duchess had said something with the power to cut through the erotic distraction of Cassius’ illicit interlude with Lady Josephine.

Feeling her words like a punch in the stomach, he shook her head.

It was easy to refuse all his mother’s efforts to push him towards marriage but always far harder to explain why.

“You were so wonderful, Cassius. Everyone said so. Only sixteen, and yet you picked up the reins to the duchy better than most men twice your age could have done. Technically, I know the lawyers and your godfather were your guardians but they’ve always said that they only ever signed off your instructions, from the very first day. ”

“I always did whatever I thought Father would have done,” the duke said thickly. “For the estate, for Benedict, for you…”

“You did well, my son. I could not help what happened but I wish I could have been stronger for my children.”

Her voice was loving, wistful and full of regret, all at once.

“No, you were ill, Mother. I saw that, even at sixteen, and I made my brother understand it too. You were not capable of raising Benedict during those years. I am only glad that you came back to us in the end.”

“When Henry, your father, passed away, I lost a piece of myself, Cassius. My heart broke and my mind gave way under the strain. That is what you saw,” the dowager duchess spoke evenly and sadly.

“Yes, that is exactly what I saw,” the duke nodded.

“But you did not see, or maybe have forgotten, the love that Henry and I had between us. We were happy together, always. We knew one another for three years before we married, but I do believe we loved one another from the first moment we met, had we only known it. There was no one like Henry, for me, ever. I didn’t know that was love, at first.”

There was nothing to be said to that. What boy ever did look at his parents and appreciate their love? It was something implicit and assumed, a secure background, that was sadly sometimes whipped away without warning.

“I believe all that you tell me of your happy marriage, Mother. I am glad that you can take such comfort in the love you had with Father, even now. Still, I also know what loss looks like. I know grief. I know what it is like to see the people you love torn apart. I can’t be part of that. Ever.”

She looked at him with tears in her eyes as he gave this short speech and then reached out to smooth his rumpled hair.

“You remind me so much of your father sometimes, Cassius. It is in the way you talk, the stubbornness of your nature, the unruliness of your hair…”

The Duke of Ashbourne allowed this maternal caress for a moment but then removed her hand gently, instinctively not wanting to be touched by anyone else so soon after Lady Josephine.

“That is the problem,” he said with a small smile, getting to his feet, even as the dowager duchess regarded him with incomprehension at these words. “Now, you must excuse me, Mother. I have one more letter to write before luncheon.”

“Very well, Cassius. Still, please promise me that you will think about all that I have said? Think too about what it is that you really want, deep down in your heart.

As he closed the door and turned back to face the room, the image of Lady Josephine intruded on his imagination once more.

He pictured her now kneeling on that chair, her white dress off her shoulders and her bosom exposed, just as she had been an hour earlier.

In his head, she beckoned to him with heavy, hungry eyes and he knew he must have her…

“Damn it all,” the duke swore, turning from the chair.

Dowager Duchess Nerissa had no idea how foolish it was to encourage her eldest son to dwell on what he really wanted.

His mother could never have done so if she suspected for one minute what this might be.

She fondly imagined that Cassius would find he wanted a respectable marriage to proper young lady like Lady Belinda.

In fact, what consumed the Duke of Ashbourne was the urge to ravish the very improper Lady Josephine to the fullest extent of their shared pleasure, regardless of all social rules and conventions…