Page 14 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 14

P ersephone woke the next morning with the kind of headache that one got from crying oneself to sleep in a self-pitying sort of way.

The ache behind her eyes made her immediately cross with her husband, as this was far preferable to being cross with herself.

It was his fault, she decided, for being so maddeningly mercurial. He had pushed her directly to the brink! No wonder she’d wept like some sort of piteous child.

Next, she felt an entirely different sort of ache in her low belly and between her legs, which reminded her of the dreams she’d been having. They’d been sensual and mysterious, pleasurable even as the details of her own pleasure had been shrouded by that kind of dream logic where things that could not be real made perfect sense while slumbering.

The only thing that had been utterly transparent to her had been the identity of the man who had been running his hands over her shoulders, her belly, her throat. She knew precisely who that mystery lover had been, the one who had crooned sweet nonsense in her ear, the specific words slipping away to leave only arousal behind.

This made her even crosser still.

He had to plague her during her sleep, too? And leave her feeling these parts of herself that she’d so long found easy to ignore?

A fie on men! She thought she’d finally met one that wasn’t nothing but trouble—not that her experience with gentlemen was particularly large, but they all seemed far more effort than they were worth—and then he had to go and make her feel things . Good things and bad things.

It was, in a word, outrageous.

She dressed in a righteous fury, planning to give Hugh a proper piece of her mind. He couldn’t behave like this, she seethed as she did up the laces of her gown, only belatedly remembering that she was now a duchess and was meant to summon a maid for help with such tasks.

She elected to blame Hugh for this, too. She wasn’t yet certain how this was his fault but felt confident she would figure it out.

He was, after all, apparently determined to be difficult.

By the time she stomped out of her bedchamber, she’d built up a good head of steam. She went to her husband’s door and rapped on the hard wood imperiously. She readied her speech, rehearsing in her head as she heard the sounds within that indicated he was approaching the door.

“Now listen here, if you think you can just treat— Oh my God, what happened to you?”

She drew up short as she saw his face. He had a black eye that was still swollen, as well as a scabbed over cut on his lip. The part that alarmed her the most, however, was the smear of blood along his forehead, still crimson and wet.

“I had to have words with some ne’er do wells at the club,” he said. She thought this might be Hugh’s version of reassurance. It wasn’t very good. “I’m fine.”

“When?” she demanded, scandalized. “You’re still bleeding!”

It was early, perhaps half nine in the morning. Who on earth gambled at half nine in the morning on a Tuesday?

“I am not—” Hugh reached first for his lip, then for his brow. He seemed surprised when his fingers came back bloodied. He glanced at his looking glass to see the blood still trickling from the cut on his eyebrow. Persephone trailed after him nervously, not even thinking about the rudeness of entering someone else’s bedchamber uninvited. “Oh. I am bleeding. No matter. I’m fine.”

Persephone was absolutely, positively at her wits’ end.

“You are not fine,” she told him. “For the love of everything, you are impossible . Come with me.”

She seized him by the arm and towed him toward the door that connected their bedchambers.

She had never before opened it—had not yet let herself think of opening it. Now, however, she did not spare it so much as a second thought as she pulled him. She was only seeking the most expedient route.

He followed easily enough, which was a relief; Persephone would have had no chance of forcing him to go anywhere he did not wish to go. She resolved not to ask questions about unexpected blessings as she pushed him down onto the corner of her bed before bustling over to her armoire to dig for her little makeshift medical kit.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, sounding a bit irritable. If Persephone had been in a better mood herself, she wouldn’t have blamed him. Half nine was probably intolerably early for a man who worked nearly until dawn and who had been pummeled, to boot.

But she was not in a better mood, and that was entirely Hugh’s fault, so if he wanted sympathy, he would just have to seek it somewhere else!

“I am going to tend your injuries, so hush,” she ordered, glancing back at him sternly.

She was only mildly mollified when she saw Hugh tear his eyes away from her bottom which was admittedly displayed rather prominently, given the way she was bent at the waist.

It appeared that irritation did not make her immune to flattery. Good to know that about herself.

“What do you mean ‘tend to my injuries?’” Hugh demanded.

Ah, there it was! She seized the little leather bag in which she kept all her bandages, sanitized linen, and various tinctures and decoctions.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she countered. “How hard did you hit your head that you don’t know what it means to tend an injury?”

She tucked one of the linen squares under her arms and opened a bottle. The strong scent of vinegar filled the air. Hugh jolted up from the bed like he thought she was going to try to set him on fire.

“What is that?” he demanded.

“Are you serious?” she asked as he skittered back. “It’s to clean your wound. Or would you prefer bleeding all over the place before succumbing to some sort of horrible infection? I don’t think you’ll look as good with your face half rotted, but what do I know?”

He gave her a narrow-eyed look, which would have been more effective if he didn’t wince as it pulled at his injured brow and then give up immediately.

“What you do and don’t know is precisely what I’m worried about,” he countered. “Why do you even have that in your room? What is even in that bottle?”

“It’s a tincture of vinegar and chamomile, and it—what do you even care? It will clean you. I know this, because I have used it on more cuts, scrapes, and other childhood injuries than you can count. Did you forget that I said I worked at a school?”

She’d hoped that he’d grow distracted while she spoke, but when she lunged for him, he evaded her easily.

This was idiotic. She’d seen seven-year-old boys less averse to a little nursing than this full-grown man. A duke! A husband! A de facto father of three!

“And these children—they all lived?”

Persephone decided this was more a taunt than an actual question and ignored it accordingly. Instead, she wondered if throwing the tincture bottle would land enough of the substance on his cut to adequately clean it.

When she decided her aim was not sufficiently reliable, she lunged for him again. Again, he evaded her.

She took a steadying breath. “Listen, if you’re going to be careless enough to get yourself battered, you need to at least get your injuries tended to.”

“It wasn’t carelessness,” he responded. “And, even if it was, I can’t see why you need to worry yourself about it.”

She paused, not immediately certain if she was wounded or annoyed by this.

“I worry about it,” she said, a touch of acid in her tone, “because you are my husband, no matter what else does or does not transpire between us. I care because I care about those little girls, and they will not be pleased if they find you bloody and battered. I care because you’re a human being who is hurt, and I am one who can help tend that hurt.”

It was the middle reason, she knew, that convinced him to stop avoiding her, even though he remained distinctly mulish about allowing her ministrations. She yanked him down into a chair and quickly swabbed at the cut before he could change his mind.

He winced when she swiped the vinegar pad on him. She narrowed her eyes. Don’t be a baby , she warned.

He glanced away, his own frown twice as stubborn as her own.

“It isn’t your job to care,” he muttered peevishly.

That stopped Persephone in her tracks.

He hadn’t said it sadly; that was the part that made her sadder than anything else. He had stated things rather as though they were mere fact, as if there was someone who held a job of caring for him, and that Persephone was not that person.

As if caring was some sort of duty to be placed on a hiring contract.

Or even a marriage contract.

“Hugh,” she said. Then, when he turned his face to look at her, a note of surprise in his expression, she grabbed his chin in the hand that wasn’t holding a blood and vinegar-soaked rag.

And then she kissed him directly on the mouth.

He made a muffled little sound of protest, and Persephone had a quick flash of all the ways that she would murder him if he pushed her away again, but he just shifted their position and then kissed her back with just the same passion that she gave him.

Ah, right. His lip.

When she ran out of breath, she pulled back, though she kept her tight grip on his chin.

“You,” she told him, “do not decide whether I care for you or not. I decide that. And if you don’t like it, well. Perhaps you should have written it into the marital contract, but you didn’t, and now it’s too late. So. You will let me tend to your injuries. You will let me care for you. You will not argue.”

She knew as soon as she said this last bit that she’d pushed her luck a bit too far.

“Watch it, Persephone,” he warned. “There is more at play here than you realize.”

Persephone had the sense that the more that was at play was more masculine stubbornness than anything else.

Well, she could be stubborn, too.

“Perhaps so,” she allowed. She took the opportunity to dab a bit more at the cut above his eye. It really wasn’t all that big, nor terribly deep, thank goodness. Heads just always bled far more than they ought. Still, she was satisfied.

She lowered the cloth.

“But you still do not control whether or not I care,” she informed him.

She was pushing him, taunting him. Already the mere act of doing so caused parts of her body to coil with tension.

This was probably a bad sign for Persephone’s sanity, peace of mind, and other things that generally meant that same thing, but…

But she wasn’t sorry.

“Persephone,” he said again, in that same low tone.

She turned her back on him, crossed to the ewer, and began washing her hands. She’d kept the messy parts of tending his wound to the linen, but she could not abide the scent of vinegar when it lingered.

Besides, she had this problem—it was a sickness, really—where she needed to see how far she could push him before he broke.

His hands came down on either side of the basin, bracketing where she finished washing the suds from her fingers. His body was hot against her back. She pretended she didn’t notice his approach, instead keeping her eyes carefully on her hands.

“Persephone.” This time it was a crooning, cajoling word. He rested his forehead against the nape of her neck. His breath was gentle as a butterfly’s wing against the half-moon of skin that was exposed above the neckline of her gown.

Her eyes fluttered closed. Her fingers stilled.

She felt him move with slow precision, though she didn’t open her eyes to see what he was doing. The soft flannel against her hands—drying them with a tenderness that made her eyes prickle beneath her closed lids.

“What are you doing?” she murmured.

His lips pressed against her neck. She could feel the curve of his smile.

“Caring for you,” he told her. “Someone recently told me that you’re not allowed to protest it.”

“I’m not sure that exactly what I?—”

She lost her words on a moan when Hugh’s gentle brush of lips became a hot, open-mouthed press against the delicate skin behind her ear.

“I might have hit my head, Persephone, but my hearing is undamaged,” he chided. “I’m quite certain that’s what you said.”

“I—” Persephone knew she had an argument lurking somewhere in the back of her mind, but she didn’t know how to access it at the moment. She was instead as pliable as unfired clay as he turned her in his arms until her hips were pressed into the ewer stand just enough that she arched her back a bit.

This had the extremely enjoyable result of pressing her breasts into Hugh’s chest. Yes, it scrambled her brain even further, made her feel as though she might never think clearly again. She wasn’t bothered.

“Persephone, Persephone,” he murmured, his mouth pressed under the line of her jaw. She was going to start a petition making it illegal for him to say her name like that. “The way you twist me up inside.”

Perhaps she was awful, but she found this to be extraordinarily thrilling.

“Do I?” she asked, the words coming out as slurred as if she’d been drinking.

He ran his hands up from her waist, skirting along the line of her ribs and around to her back. She felt the gentle tugging of her laces being undone and felt suddenly overwhelmingly grateful that she had neglected to call for her maid that morning. The laces would have been much tighter if done by someone else, rather than with Persephone awkwardly bending her arms backward, and would therefore have been that much harder to remove.

“You are trouble,” he told her. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

Her smile spread, slow as syrup. “No,” she said honestly.

He growled against her throat. The sound reverberated through her.

“No?” he repeated, that gentle mockery, the one that she felt like a jolt to her core, evident in his voice.

“No,” she repeated. “I think I might only be trouble for you.”

In truth, Persephone was too muddled to be certain that this even made proper sense. Sensical or no, however, it seemed to please her husband. He attacked her laces with renewed vigor, causing the gown to sag about her waist, then, after a few more deft movements, drop to the floor.

All the while, he never removed his mouth from her, laving kisses along her neck, jaw, collarbone.

He never once kissed her lips and, in a flash, this seemed to be the worst oversight in the entire world.

“Hugh,” she panted. “Kiss me. Please.”

Again, she could feel his smile. He steered her back toward her bed. She went, unresisting, letting him maneuver her as he wished before toppling her back onto the plush mattress.

Her only objection was that when he pushed her back, he didn’t follow her down.

She frowned, pouting up at him and not even embarrassed about it.

“What are you doing?” she complained. It was a rhetorical question; he wasn’t kissing her, and that was what mattered.

She didn’t precisely dislike the way he looked at her, however, his eyes dark with desire.

“Looking at you,” he said, voice rough. “I mean, Christ, look at you, Persephone.”

Some brazen spirit possessed her, leading Persephone to run a hand suggestively from her throat, down over the curve of her breasts, over the valley of her hip, toward?—

Hugh snatched up her hand, pulling it away from her body and pressing it to the mattress above her head.

“Don’t tempt me,” he said.

It was too late, though. The fiendish, compulsive feeling she’d felt when back in his office had consumed her again. There was nothing, nothing she wanted more than to tempt him.

She gave him a wide-eyed look. “But there’s so much more to see, my lord,” she said innocently.

His smile promised danger.

“Trouble,” he said, pressing her wrist harder into the blankets for a moment before releasing her, his command that she was not to move clear even without words. “You are trouble.”

His fingers moved to the laces of her stays, which had been tied with even less finesse than her gown. It had not been the most refined attire Persephone had ever sported, but she hadn’t donned her clothing thinking of refinement, she’d done it with a head full of rage.

God bless her hotheadedness, apparently.

“I’m not,” she protested, blinking. “Please, my lord, show mercy.”

She didn’t truly know whence these words came. He wasn’t being unmerciful, nor did she wish him to relent any part of what he was committing upon her person.

But Hugh’s nostrils flared as he blew out a heavy breath, and Persephone wondered that she seemed to have some innate sense for seduction that she’d never before tried to put into action.

Well, except for with him.

“You have the most innocent face, Persephone,” he said, tracing a finger alongside her jaw before returning to the lengthy project of undoing her laces. “And I think an innocent heart, too. A kind one, at the very least.”

Persephone didn’t know what to do with this unexpectedly sweet praise, and that uncertainty somehow made her even more squirmy and impatient and wanting.

“But you also,” he added, finally getting the stays loose and tugging them with astonishing gentleness from beneath her, “are the most wicked little temptress, sent here to try my patience.”

With these last three words, he pressed his knee to the bed firmly between her thighs and pressed up toward her core until she got the message and ground herself against him. Oh my, that was very nice indeed.

Persephone was clad only in her ancient shift at this point. She might as well have been naked, so thin was the material from countless launderings—including the inexpert launderings at Persephone’s own hands, when things had gotten really bad with her father.

Hugh ran his eyes over her hungrily, even as he left his knee planted where it was. The contrast between his intense scrutiny and his seeming dispassion about the place where she was using him to chase her pleasure intrigued and appealed to Persephone, and she wondered if she would reach that explosive place that he had showed her just by doing this.

And then, looking down at her almost as though this was a puzzle he planned to solve, he reached up to the neckline of her whisper-thin chemise?—

And tore it directly down the middle.

Persephone wasn’t certain what was most shocking, the act itself, the sudden rush of cool air against her heated skin, or the way Hugh’s hands immediately came to her breasts, cupping them, gently pinching the tips, exploring as though this were terrain he’d been dreaming of for ages.

When added together, though, the shock and sensation made her body tense and seize as she almost, almost reached her precipice.

“Do you like that, Persephone?” he asked, pinching and tugging until the little bite of pain made her gasp. “Do you like feeling me watch you? Do you like using me for your satisfaction?”

He pressed his knee in harder.

“Yes.” She could not deny it. For one thing, she didn’t have the breath to utter more than the single syllable.

“Isn’t it better to be a good girl for me, then?” he crooned, moving his attention to her other breast. The words inflamed her as much as did the caress. “Be my good girl and let me give you the pleasure you deserve, won’t you?”

Her eyes clenched shut as she rubbed herself harder against his leg, entirely without shame, seeking that feeling that was just out of her reach.

There was a tiny spark of that bothersome willfulness left, and she hesitated before answering. Fighting him was just so fun .

But giving in was better. It was as simple as that.

“Yes, my lord,” she gasped. “Yes, I’ll be good. Please, please. I promise.”

Her release was so close, she only just needed a little bit more and then she would reach it?—

Hugh’s hand came down on her bare thigh and her eyes flew open again. He pressed her legs wide, disrupting the appealing friction, now even more appealing now that it was her bare flesh against the wool of his trousers. She gave a piteous little whine.

He smirked down at her. Heaven above, he looked handsome when he smirked. Another thing that Persephone planned to criminalize, just as soon as she figured out how to make her brain work again.

“Come now, sweet,” he purred. “Let me help you.”

Using one hand to hold her open, he explored her, first with his eyes, then with his fingers. She panted, watching him as he watched her. She was splayed out like a sacrifice before him, arms thrown high, legs spread. He was still fully clothed, and yet she drank him in, too, marveling at the tiny flexes she could see even through his thick beard when he clenched his jaw, admiring the stern slope of his eyebrows as he looked down upon her with keen focus.

She gasped as he slipped two fingers inside her, his thumb coming to rub roughly against her sensitive nub. She was drawn so tight that it took only a minute, perhaps less, of this—his thrusting, rubbing, and looking down on her like she was the most precious work of art he’d ever seen—for her to detonate.

“God, Hugh!” she cried as her back arched, waves of pleasure coursing through her. He coaxed her through the little shocks her body sent after the first big explosion, wringing every last bit of pleasure out of her before gently withdrawing his hand.

Her eyes fluttered open to see her husband wiping his hand on his handkerchief, which he then stuck back in his pocket, a little bit of debauchery that made Persephone ache to rub her legs together again, for all that she’d taken her pleasure mere moments ago.

When he bent down to kiss her, it felt like a reward. His tongue probed and plundered. She was already melted into the bed beneath her; this kiss left her even more boneless, even more exhausted with her release.

He was still fully dressed; his clothing was barely even mussed. But the gleam in his eye told her he was the furthest thing from disinterested.

“I have things to attend to this morning,” he said. “No, believe me—nobody is more disappointed about this than I am,” he added when she made a protesting little whine. He dragged a single finger from the base of her throat, down the valley between her breasts, drawing a line all the way to her navel before he snatched his hand away like he feared he would not be able to resist if he went any further.

Resistance, Persephone thought, was stupid.

“But here is what I want from you,” he said. “I want you to spend the day thinking of me, of how I made you feel, of how you shuddered and shook beneath me.”

That, Persephone thought, would not be a problem. She’d have a hard enough time thinking about anything else.

“And I want you to think,” he continued, bending down so that he hovered over her, not touching, his hands planted on either side of her head, “of what I’m going to do to you when I get home this evening.”

“What is that?” she whispered, her mouth suddenly dry with anticipation.

He smirked that dreadful, arousing smirk.

“I’m going to take you to bed, sweet Persephone,” he promised. “I’m going to show you all the pleasures your body is capable of, and then I’m going to give them to you as much as you can handle. I’m going to show you why you should be good for me. Can you do that? Can you think of how you’ll be so sweet for me?”

While speaking, he had lowered himself until he was a hairsbreadth from her face. Persephone, under the full force of his dark eyes, could not do anything but nod. Anything to get him to close that distance and kiss her.

“Yes, my lord,” she breathed. “I can do that.”

“Good.” He pulled back abruptly—without her kiss—and moved toward the door.

Aghast, Persephone sat up, mouth agape. “But?—”

Hugh gave her a wicked grin. “A little anticipation is a good thing, my sweet. Helps you appreciate the final result all the more.” He ground the heel of his hand against the front of his trousers, just once, drawing her attention to the bulge there that spoke of his own unsatisfied arousal. It was a carnal gesture, a rude one.

In a flash, Persephone was as aroused as she’d ever been. What was wrong with her? Or, more likely, what sort of wretched power did this man hold over her?

She flopped back onto the bed. Hugh laughed.

“Think of me, Persephone,” he said. “And I promise you that I shall do the same.”