Page 7 of Don’t Let Your Dukes Grow Up To Be Scoundrels (Dukes in Disguise #1)

Chapter Seven

So much for being a man of honor.

Hal couldn’t believe he was allowing this to happen again. But then Gemma’s velvety tongue swept across his lower lip, eager and questing and sending sharp bolts of desire shooting straight down to his cock, and he couldn’t believe he’d managed to make it through fifteen minutes of conversation without kissing her senseless.

She’d just been so adorably flustered and flushed, in a way that he knew was unusual for the confident, self-possessed lady. Her deliciously impractical dress had done nothing to hide the heaving of her substantial bosom with every agitated breath; he’d been half afraid, half hopeful, that one more deep inhalation would overcome the flimsy bodice entirely.

As her sweet mouth ate hungrily at his, her slim fingers clutching at his shoulders, Hal took a moment to investigate the filmy scrap of lace that revealed more than it concealed of the upper slopes of Gemma’s creamy, round breasts.

His fingertips edged along the square neckline, calluses catching on the fine fabric, and when she gasped into Hal’s mouth he gave in to the need to shape the glorious plump roundness of her breast with his palm. She made another of those soft noises that drove him mad, and he grew half-delirious with the weight and softness of her, the exaggerated curve of her waist that he knew owed more to her natural shape than to the corset lifting her breasts up like an offering.

Gemma clutched at his back and shimmied her hips closer. Hal’s blood heated and surged, pounding in his ears and throbbing in his iron-hard prick.

The way she reacted to him, the open, uninhibited response of her sinfully tempting body, reached deep into Hal.

We London girls know what to do in the dark.

The words beat in his brain and emboldened his hands to explore the sinuous lines of her. He tore his mouth from hers to trail soft, biting kisses down the side of her neck as he delved under the muddy hem of her skirts.

His fingers skimmed her stocking-clad legs, tracing the ribbons of her garters before continuing up to the slit in her drawers with unerring precision while Gemma gasped against his shoulder and made a murmur of assent that set fire to his blood. Without hesitation, Hal honed in on her secrets as though he’d touched her like this a hundred, a thousand times before.

And yet at the same time it was as if he’d never been with a woman in his life, because nothing he’d experienced had prepared him for the soft explosion that detonated in his brain when he traced the seam of her body and found the delicate folds hot and slick with the honey of her desire.

For him.

Her thighs closed around his wrist and she squirmed. Her sharp little noises took on a desperate, pleading quality that sent Hal’s pulse thundering. His cock was so hard it ached, straining in his breeches.

For the first time, he regretted the endless physical labor that had hardened his muscles and roughened his hands. She was so unbelievably soft at the melting heart of her core, weeping prettily against his fingertips. With agonizing care, he skimmed a finger around the small, tight entrance to her body while his thumb found the hooded bud at the top of her cleft.

The pulse at the base of her throat leapt under his tongue. Hal felt a wolfish grin bare his teeth. He opened his jaws softly against her neck, holding and claiming her as his hard thumb brushed gently, delicately, against the side of that tiny knot of nerves.

Gemma jolted in his arms, a thin cry leaving her lips as her fingers tangled in Hal’s hair and held him to her while she shook.

Primal triumph surged through Hal’s blood. He’d made her come undone. The satisfaction of it took his breath, despite the desperate throbbing ache of his prick. He could ignore it, though, with all his attention consumed by the bewitching creature in his arms.

She unclenched her thighs and let her hands smooth down his neck to his shoulders. A subtle tension had built in her limbs where they were twined together, and Hal frowned. Gently withdrawing his hand from beneath her skirts, he set her away from him. “Are you all right?”

All he could see was the top of her bent head and the tight slope of her pretty shoulders. “I’m perfectly well. Perfectly perfect, in fact. Only I don’t want to look at you and see…oh bother. Should I assume the same rules apply as last time? We shall pretend this didn’t happen?”

“Until the next time it happens?” Hal clarified with a slight grimace, brushing his hands down her arms. He didn’t like to hear the hesitation in her voice, the uncharacteristic tremor of uncertainty. “Gemma, look at me. Whatever it is you fear to see, I promise, all you’ll find is a man who is ready to admit that he can’t seem to keep his hands off you.”

“Yes. Against your better judgment and your sense of honor.”

He tipped her head up with one hand under that sweetly dimpled chin. The way she bit her lip caught at his heart, but it was the shadows of remembered pain in her eyes that nearly ended him.

“Gemma—”

“You don’t need to say anything more,” she interrupted, giving him a bright smile that didn’t dispel any of those shadows. She bent to retrieve her coat from the ground and shook his briskly to rid it of dirt. “Let’s take your regrets and recriminations as read, shall we?”

Shaking her skirts into place, she started to march off, head held high, until Hal grabbed her hand and stopped her. “Stop, Gemma. No recriminations, I promise. And no regrets. This may not be the wisest course of action, for either of us, but I can’t bring myself to regret anything that feels so…”

“So good .” The fervency in her voice made Hal grin, and when she glanced up and saw it, she blushed through an answering smile.

Against all odds—against his better judgment and certainly against his sense of honor—Hal felt invincible. Like a giant. He also felt hungry enough to snap Gemma up in two big bites if he let go his tight grip on his control. With a grimace, he adjusted the front of his trousers and when Gemma caught him at it and gave him a cheeky grin, he grinned back and let her look.

Let her see what she did to him. He could give her that much, at least.

He only wished he could give her more. So when she peeked up at him from beneath her thick, dark lashes and suggested perhaps they could tour the manor house now, Hal couldn’t find it in himself to deny her.

They’d keep to the public rooms, he reasoned. There wasn’t much to see. It wouldn’t take long for Gemma to tire of the tour when all the furnishings and paintings were covered in heavy Holland cloths.

But reason was no part of the emotion that blindsided Hal as he escorted Lady Gemma Lively up the stone steps to the imposing arched door of his family’s ancestral home.

Without intending to, he realized he’d held his breath all along the walk up the overgrown pathways through the terraced gardens. He’d seen with new eyes the tangled weeds and wild shrubbery and held back a wince as he compared it to his memory of the orderly, manicured boxwood-lined lanes and regimented rows of flowers he’d hidden in as a child.

“It’s simply gorgeous,” Gemma said thoughtfully as she studied the rambling building set into the wooded hillside like a jewel in a crown.

Hal gestured up at the facade. “The main part of the house dates back to medieval times, when the first Duke of Havilocke was granted the land and the hand of the thane’s daughter as part of an attempt to sow peace between the Normans and the Saxons.”

Gemma clasped her hands. “How romantic!”

“Not really.” Hal arched a sardonic brow and leaned a shoulder against the sun-warmed stone. “The Saxon thane had held this land for twelve generations, until the male line failed and gave the king an opening to install a knight loyal to himself. That knight, Geoffrey de Montrose, started the grand family tradition of coming to marriage penniless and expecting his wife’s fortunes to restore his own. A tradition that has continued even into the present generation.”

“Gracious. You make the family sound like such scoundrels.”

Hal became aware of the intensity of his manner and attempted to tone it down a bit. “Not many around here would deny that, although they might choose a harsher word. The duke’s father was not cruel, but he was not an attentive landlord either. And the elder son, the last duke…he took and took and took from these people until there was nothing left. It’s not a family legacy to be proud of.”

But all that ends with me, he vowed silently.

Straightening, he shouldered open the heavy door and led Gemma into the cool darkness of the entryway. The gracefully soaring ceiling lent an air of cavernous space to the unused rooms.

Gemma wrinkled her pert nose as she took off her bonnet. “It’s so musty. Does no one ever come here?”

“The current duke shut the house up when he inherited from his older brother almost a year ago,” Hal said carefully. He hated lying and had never been very good at it. He figured it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible.

“So the older brother was the one who married well,” Gemma said slowly, as though trying to get the timeline clear in her mind. “But the younger brother is as yet unwed. I wonder when he plans to return.”

Warning bells clanged in Hal’s ears. “I couldn’t say for certain, but I do know that the current duke has no plans to marry anytime soon.”

Smiling faintly, Gemma wandered deeper into the house. “That is true for most men, and yet, they must marry eventually if they want to carry on their family line. Surely this duke doesn’t want to be the last of the Montroses.”

Hal barked a laugh before he could choke it back. Answering Gemma’s questioning glance, he shrugged and thrust his restless hands into his pockets. “My apologies. It’s just, that’s exactly what the previous duke liked to call himself. Once it became known that his wife could not bear children, he took great pleasure in melodramatically and publicly proclaiming himself the Last of the Montroses.”

Gemma frowned. “But…he had a younger brother.”

Forcing another laugh, Hal agreed. “To be fair to the previous duke, no one in that family ever cared overmuch what became of the younger brother. Once his mother died, he roamed the woods and fields as feral as an abandoned dog, and he wasn’t much better behaved at Oxford.”

His mother. God. What was he talking about? Why had he mentioned Mother? The memories swirled, a black pool threatening to drag him under and drown him, but he gritted his teeth and shoved them away.

“Oxford. Where you met him,” Gemma supplied, and Hal tensed.

They had strayed into dangerous territory and he was far too close to accidentally revealing his deception. He wondered how it was possible he hadn’t anticipated this as a logical result of showing Gemma around his childhood home.

“If the duke was badly behaved at school, what were you like, then?” she pursued with a teasing glint in her eyes.

“A model of moral rectitude,” he said drily.

She scoffed, pinning him with a knowing look. “Oh, certainly. Every model of moral rectitude knows how to make a woman expire of pleasure with a single touch.”

Hal felt as though he were on fire. “I’ve never met a woman like you. The things you say…”

“I’m merely describing a thing you did ,” she pointed out, a touch exasperated. “Why should I be more embarrassed to say it than you were to do it?”

“You shouldn’t, but most people would be.”

She shrugged her smooth shoulders, making that precarious bodice tighten in interesting ways that drew Hal’s gaze inexorably down.

“I’ve never understood why people allow their lives to be ruled by the fear of embarrassment. For the most part, I find that those whom we suspect of observing and judging us harshly are, in fact, concerned with the exact same thing we are: themselves. But you were telling me about your time at school.”

“I was no saint,” Hal acknowledged shortly, not eager to follow this line of questioning much further. “I nearly lost myself. But I was lucky. My friends were the making of me.”

“The Duke of Havilocke,” she supplied.

“Among others.”

Knowing his best hope lay in distracting her too-quick, too-clever mind, Hal strode into the formal receiving room and started pulling white sheets off the furniture. Clouds of dust kicked up, making Gemma cough and squint even as she said with some alarm, “Are you allowed to do that?”

“There’s no one here to care,” Hal countered, tossing a bundle of sheets into the corner and turning to face her.

A look of calculation had entered Gemma’s lovely, refined face. She tapped one finger against the kissable dent in her chin and Hal had to hold back a groan. He shifted his stance, the erection that had begun to subside while they talked around his family’s shameful history suddenly pressing at the tightness of his trousers.

“You truly don’t believe he’s coming back anytime soon,” Gemma confirmed, her assessing gaze sweeping the lines of elegant, unused chairs and settees and sofas arranged in conversational groupings around the drawing room.

Impatient with the unsated hunger still raging in his blood, Hal made a sharp gesture. “I promise you, there’s no need to worry about the duke. He couldn’t care less what happens to this old pile.”

A lie. Hal cared, but he couldn’t afford to do anything about it yet. The people who lived and worked on the estate’s lands had to come first.

Gemma’s eyes gleamed with an excited sparkle that should have given him pause. “Excellent,” she purred. “In that case, the duke won’t mind if we borrow a few of these lovely pieces. That chaise longue will do nicely, ooh, and that writing desk. Is that Thomas Sheraton?”

Hal blinked in astonishment. “Are you...furniture shopping?”

In my house?

She really was the most brazen person Hal had ever met. She didn’t even blush as she cocked her head and said, “Not for myself. Oh, I wouldn’t mind refurbishing my family’s rooms at the inn, but that can wait until we’ve established the Five Mile as the fashionable place to stop on the journey from London to Bath. And for that, we desperately need higher quality furnishings.”

Equally astonished and appalled by the force of her personality, Hal gave a helpless laugh.

Sensing her advantage, Gemma immediately pressed her case. “Only temporarily, of course! We’ll return everything to its proper place the instant I’ve secured an appropriate match.”

The laughter died in Hal’s throat, which suddenly felt constricted. “So. You still mean to go through with that brainless scheme.”

A swift expression crossed her face, too mercurial for him to read before she blinked it away. “Of course. Nothing has changed. This ‘brainless scheme’ as you call it is the only path I see back to the life I want, the only life my family has ever known. If you have another path to offer, I am ready to hear it.”

The words hung suspended in the silence between them like dust motes swirling in a shaft of sunlight. For a reckless moment, everything within Hal clamored to take her in his arms, proclaim his true identity, and offer to make her a duchess.

But duchess of what, exactly? A crumbling house and grounds gone to seed? The remains of a diminished fortune that was entirely committed to rebuilding and restoring the lives of the estate’s dependents?

An estate in the middle of nowhere, far from the lights and parties and decadence of her beloved London—the life she wanted, which sounded like hell on earth to Hal.

No. He shook himself free of the painful reverie.

It was naught but a wild fantasy, brought on by the searing intensity of their physical attraction. And no doubt exacerbated by the fact that Hal hadn’t had the time or energy at the end of his long days of working on the estate to do more at night than fall into bed, exhausted. And alone.

If he were wise, he’d make a journey to the neighboring market town and find a wench to tumble in one of the big, bustling pubs.

He studied the woman gazing up at him, and knew that he wouldn’t be making the trip to Newbury anytime soon.

“Your path is your own, your ladyship,” he said, and tried not to notice the way the lines of her extraordinary face settled into resigned acceptance. “I wouldn’t presume to try to sway you.”

“Quite right.” She tossed her head, making her artfully tumbled curls dance. “Nothing can sway me. Certainly not a bit of harmless flirtation.”

Harmless. Nothing about this situation was harmless. Hal could feel trouble looming with the pressure of black storm clouds rolling in over the fields.

He stood looking down at her, every breath carrying her heady fragrance of rain-washed lilacs mixed with the freshly-turned earth clinging to her hem and the morning breeze trapped in her tumbling curls. She smelled like springtime, like the chaotic renewal of life and abundance as the land roused from its winter slumber.

A part of Hal seemed to come awake as he breathed her in. Something deep inside, a greed and possessiveness he’d never experienced and wouldn’t have believed himself capable of before lady Gemma Lively streaked into his life like a comet.

This woman was not for him. They were wrong for each other in every conceivable way.

But she was his. He knew it, the way he knew that this estate and the people of Little Kissington were his.

I know I won’t get to keep her , Hal mused as he watched her lift the corner of a drop cloth to peer at the ornately carved end table beneath it.

But I will have her.