Page 7 of Duke of the Underworld (Regency Gods #2)

CHAPTER 7

“ C ongratulations, Your Grace. Welcome to the family.”

Persephone blinked as she realized that “Your Grace” now meant her .

Golly.

“Oh, um, thank you,” she said to the first member of the Blackwood family—no, she corrected herself, the larger clan used the great patriarch’s name; they called themselves the Lightholders—who had greeted her directly. She recognized some of the members of the family, but not the woman who stood before her, all lush curves, freckles (though not half as many as Persephone had herself), and an accent that sounded…possibly Scottish.

“Helen Lightholder, Duchess of Godwin,” the woman introduced kindly. “Please don’t worry about not having known,” she added when Persephone opened her mouth with a wince. “As the most recent person to marry into the family, I know how overwhelming it is to meet them all at once.”

“I appreciate that, Your Grace,” Persephone said, meaning it will all her heart. There were so very many of them. And some of them were famous . Ezra Swinton, who had stood at the duke’s side for the ceremony, was forever in the gossip pages. And Xander Lightholder, who stood behind his duchess, was…

Well, Persephone supposed his famed hauteur was more impressive when he wasn’t cooing at a small baby he held in his arms, looking at the child as though they had invented the very concept of babyhood.

“Oh,” the duchess wrinkled her nose. “I know I started it, but if we get to Your Grace -ing around here, we shall never be able to make heads nor tails of who is who. Please, call me Helen.”

“Persephone,” Persephone returned with some relief. She was…not yet ready to embrace her new title.

She was also marvelously grateful to have a friend, albeit an extremely new one, at her side during all this, though such fortune was not destined to last.

“Helen,” the Duke of Godwin called over to his wife, “come see what Cornelia is doing!”

Helen shot Persephone a wry glance. “It’s really a pity how he hasn’t taken to fatherhood in the least,” she commented dryly. “If you would excuse me—and congratulations again!”

And then she was gone into the throng of Persephone’s new kinsfolk. Rather than trying to swim the unfamiliar waters alone, Persephone waited where she stood until her new husband (an extraordinary thought, one that made her head spin) returned from where he too had been drawn into conversation with one relation or another.

He introduced Persephone to the Duke of Redcliff (who was terrifying), his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Nighthall (terrifying), and his young cousin Lady Ariadne (who, in a twist, seemed to be terrified herself).

There were names and faces and congratulations and just when Persephone felt that her mind might begin to leak out her ears from trying frantically to memorize all the names and faces, her new husband (still extraordinary to think it) took her by the arm and guided her steadily, blessedly, out of the church.

With her head spinning, Persephone took several moments before she realized that her new husband (surely it would seem reasonable soon enough?) was glowering.

“Ah…is everything all right?” she asked carefully.

He wasn’t glaring directly at her, per se, but he was sending malcontented airs in her overall direction.

“Who altered your dress?” he demanded.

Inanely, Persephone looked down at the dress, like she might find it different from the way she herself had painstakingly amended it to look.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, surprised.

“Your dress,” he repeated. “How did you come to have it changed? Who did the work? I will pay the bill.”

Persephone wasn’t entirely certain if she should be pleased or offended by this. It was nice to feel the yoke of insolvency being lifted from her shoulders, of course, but it seemed rather…mercenary to be quizzing her about possible seamstress’ bills within moments of their wedding.

But then again, she supposed this had been a rather mercenary engagement between them.

“There’s no need,” she said, hoping she sounded calm and reassuring. “I did the work myself.”

“You did?” he asked, tone dripping with incredulity.

Oh, fie on calm and reassuring. She was downright insulted.

“I did,” she said. “I am good with a needle and thread, so there was no reason to ask anyone else.”

“Hm,” said her husband.

Now she was annoyed and insulted.

“If you didn’t want me to change anything about it, you might have said so,” she told him. She sounded only a little cross, which was a testament to her vast reservoirs of patience, she felt.

“It’s fine that you changed it,” he said, now looking out the window. His figure was even more striking in profile somehow, those heavy brows and aquiline nose. He looked regal. He looked handsome. He looked important.

He did not look fine .

“I’m sorry if you don’t like it,” she said for the sake of martial harmony.

“I do,” he said brusquely. “They’re pretty.”

It sounded like he had maybe never uttered the word pretty before today.

Persephone decided to let the matter drop. Making friendly conversation had not been on his list of bridal requirements. Maybe he didn’t like chatting! Maybe he was one of those people who got queasy in carriages! She didn’t know and nobody was asking her to know. She was supposed to care for children and produce an heir (and she still was resolutely not thinking about the latter).

Therefore, she decided to let whatever her new husband (barely a flicker; she was acclimating) was brooding about pass her by. She would sit quietly and wait until she met the children.

Like all her good intentioned planning that day, this strategy did not last.

“Where are the children?” she asked when he handed her down from the carriage in front of Lethon House, the London townhouse that belonged to the Nighthall dukedom.

She asked half because she wanted to know, half to illustrate that she knew her role in this marriage, had agreed to the scheme he’d set out between them.

The duke shot her a surprised look.

“They’re not here,” he said, as though this should be obvious.

She wracked her brain, trying to recall if he’d mentioned something about the girls’ schedule that she ought to have retained. She came up with nothing.

“When will they return?” she asked pleasantly instead.

The surprised look remained in situ .

“Not until tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve sent them—and Daphne, as well—to stay with one of my cousins for the evening.” Maybe he could see the next query even as it formed in her mind, for he continued, “It is our wedding night, Persephone. We shall have some time alone together.”

Her face lit up in flames. She thought that the duke might have very nearly smiled at that.

“Come inside, Persephone,” he said, offering his arm. She hoped he didn’t feel the shiver that the sound of her name in that rasping voice kept sending through her. “Come meet the staff and become acquainted with your new home.”

Persephone’s new home was, to put things mildly, about as different from her old home as living in London was from living on the moon. The fact that Lethon House was in full possession of its furniture was only the start. Not only was the furnishings present , but it was all the finest money could buy, and in pristine condition—even the things that had obviously been part of the family’s collection for some time.

The staff, moreover, had the sort of cheerful efficiency that came from being adequately compensated, treated well, and not overworked. Persephone recognized these qualities due to her experience with their absence. As her father’s financial straits had gotten increasingly dire, the staff attached to the Fielton estate had grown increasingly drawn, hostile, and resentful that they were being paid less but pushed to work more.

Here, everyone moved with calm competence, except for Persephone’s new maid, a girl with a cherubic face named Lucie, who introduced herself with delighted competence.

“I shall do my very best for you, Your Grace,” she told Persephone earnestly. “I know being given this role is a great honor, and I shall endeavor to be worthy of it.”

To Persephone, who had pinned her own hair that morning, this was all rather overwhelming.

“I appreciate that, Lucie,” she said weakly.

Persephone found that these words were truer than she’d anticipated, as it was Lucie’s ebullience that got her through a tour of the house, which culminated in her new bedchamber. The trio of housemaids that had been tasked with putting away Persephone’s (comparatively shabby) possessions bobbed quick curtseys as they scurried away to their next tasks. Lucie, who could not have been older than eighteen herself, looked fondly at the others, as though she were a mother duck tending after her ducklings.

“I’m sure you’ve had a long day already, Your Grace,” Lucie said politely. “Would you prefer to rest this afternoon, or…?” She let the option to offer an alternative hang in the air.

But a rest did sound pleasant and, besides, Persephone found herself too mentally weary to come up with any other ideas.

Not to mention, that persistent little voice in the back of her mind reminded her, she would need to be rested for her wedding night.

“A rest, I think,” she told her new maid. (This thought, that she had a maid all her own, was also astonishing, but Persephone found that she was too full up on astonishing things to think on it overmuch.)

“Splendid,” Lucie said, and proceeded to bustle happily about, getting Persephone out of her beautiful wedding dress that her husband had possibly hated and into something more comfortable for her repose.

And then she left, and Persephone realized that she’d made a wretched mistake.

Because now she was alone. Alone, unable to rest for her churning thoughts, and without anything to distract her from said aloneness and thoughts.

At home--her old home, her parents’ home, which wouldn’t even belong to them for very much longer—there had been endless things to do, especially as the staff had dwindled into nothingness. Fires, it turned out, needed to be carefully built and tended, needed monitoring to make sure that they were neither burning too high nor too low. They’d had a woman come in a few times a week to cook for them still, thank goodness, for Persephone found the massive stove in the kitchens quite beyond her, but on days when the cook wasn’t in there had been cold meals to prepare and assemble. She’d had clothes to mend and clean, as they’d only sent things out when a full laundering was needed.

Being economical, she’d learned, took a lot of time.

But now, she was suddenly without immediate purpose. The children she was meant to be minding weren’t in residence, and as for the other thing…

As for that thing, the one she was trying not to think about, she could do little but wait for her husband, as his presence was unquestionably required. She knew that much.

So she waited.

And waited.

After a while, she stood up and explored the room. She found where the housemaids had stored her dresses, which looked particularly pitiful when hung next to her beautiful wedding gown. She found her hairbrushes and hairpins before realizing that she wouldn’t need to know their location, as she would no longer be tasked with minding her own hair. She found the shiny rock she’d found once in the woods as a child, which she often used to mark her page in a book.

When she was done exploring, she waited some more. Then a bit more.

Eventually, Lucie brought her dinner on a tray. Persephone didn’t dare ask why she wasn’t dining with her new husband. She ate the admittedly delicious meal alone, feeling increasingly contrary about the whole thing.

Where was her husband?

She waited a bit more. Contrariness turned to irritation which turned out outright anger.

He’d given her a role. He’d assigned her tasks. Now he was making it impossible for her to do them? And treating her as though, when she wasn’t doing as he’d bid, she was a doll to put on a shelf, ignored until its owner was ready to play?

Certainly not.

When Lucie came to retrieve the dinner tray, Persephone was clad in one of the elegant nightgowns from her trousseau, one of the few fine things that hadn’t been sold out from under her when her father’s debts came due. Atop it, she wore a dressing gown, but a lighter one than she might have otherwise sported, one designed to look pretty rather than to keep one snug and warm.

If Lucie was surprised by this, she kept it to herself.

“Do you know where His Grace is?” Persephone asked, trying her best to sound imperious, like she was perfectly within her rights to ask such a question—and she was she scolded that naysaying little voice inside her. She was .

“He is in his study, Your Grace.”

Persephone nodded sharply. “Yes. Good. I will—” She paused. Drat it all. “Lucie, will you please show me to His Grace’s study?”

It was hard to act authoritative and in control when one didn’t know the way around one’s own house, Persephone thought sourly.

“Of course, Your Grace,” her maid said easily, though Persephone thought she might have glimpsed the barest hint of a smile. “Right this way.”

Persephone made sure to memorize the route back to her bedchamber from the ducal study, feeling grateful that it was a simple journey down a corridor. Asking for directions to find her husband in their home was bad enough; asking for help getting back to her room if she were sent away was too humiliating to bear. She’d rather end up sleeping in the hallway, frankly.

When they reached the study, she thanked Lucie, threw back her shoulders, and then entered the study. She did knock first, which she supposed slightly undermined her determined march, but she only knocked very quickly . And she didn’t even wait until she was told to come in.

That would show her husband how she felt, certainly.

He did not look surprised to see her.

“Good evening, Persephone,” he said lightly. “How can I help you?”

It was his usual mien—politeness atop a forbidding air, and Persephone faltered briefly before regaining her composure.

He looked casual and slightly unkempt from the end of the day. His jacket was nowhere to be seen; he wore only shirtsleeves and his waistcoat, his cravat not gone, but far looser than it had been earlier in the day. His broad shoulders and strong arms looked even broader and stronger without their customary wool covering, and she got the stomach lurching feeling again when she spied the way his muscles curved against the lighter fabric. It was indecent is what it was. It should not be allowed to have arms such as those.

“Good evening,” she returned, then cursed herself. She was supposed to be angry, not polite! She lifted her chin higher. “How long do you intend to keep me waiting for you?”

There, that had been properly acidic!

And yet, the duke seemed untouched by her vitriol.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked in that same coolly even way.

But she would not be deterred. She would not!

“You told me earlier today that you sent the children away so that we could have some time alone together following our wedding,” she argued, pleased that she didn’t stumble over a single one of those words. “And yet I have not seen you at all this evening. The hour grows late. How long am I meant to wait?”

At her words, the duke grinned, and Lord help her, it was a heart stopping, devastating grin. It didn’t brighten him so much as it highlighted the contrast with his darkness, making a Baroque painting of him. Caravaggio would have made him Lucifer, beautiful and fallen.

He pushed carefully to his feet, and his height remained astonishing no matter how many times she stood near him.

“I thought,” he said, playfulness weaving through his voice, “that when you blushed as red as your hair at the reference that it signified that you were perhaps not yet ready for my…attention.”

“I—” she said. “But you?—”

This was a conversational trap, an unfair one. He grinned his wicked grin.

“You said you wanted an heir,” she eventually managed.

He tilted his head. “I do need an heir,” he allowed. “I must say, I appreciate your eagerness to secure the next generation. I hadn’t expected you to be in such a rush.”

“I’m not—” Persephone sputtered. “That is to say?—”

And then she paused and gave him a critical look.

“You mock me,” she said.

His grin flickered, became something softer. It caused that same mad clench in her lower belly that she experienced when he was speaking of heir making.

Perhaps it wasn’t an emotional reaction after all. Perhaps she had some horrible, heretofore undiscovered disease.

That would be just her luck.

“Not mockery,” he said, tone lilting and somewhere between teasing and soft. “But you cannot fault me for being surprised, just a bit. You are a study in contradictions, Persephone Blackwood.”

She startled at the sound of her new name. The duke, of course, caught it.

“Don’t you think today has had enough revelations, hm? Enough change? Won’t the rest keep?”

She changed her mind. He was definitely teasing. It put her dander up.

For all that her recent activity said otherwise, Persephone was not habitually impulsive. She was, during her regular life, a girl who liked to embroider, to help out with children, to take long walks. She was practically the little shepherdess out of countless pastoral poems!

She’d come to London first for her debut, found it not at all to her liking, and had gone quietly back to the country. She had only returned because her father had needed to come back to Town to sell their townhouse once they’d well and truly started drowning in debts. She’d come along half out of a thought to find a rich husband, half because they couldn’t afford to keep two residences, even if the only cost was coal and food.

But something about this man made her act like a madwoman.

She supposed she couldn’t blame him for her first visit to Underworld—she hadn’t met him yet. But the rest of it? Agreeing to the marriage proposal? Storming in here tonight? Goodness, even just embroidering the flowers on her dress had been foolishness. She’d had a perfectly good dress and yet she’d felt strangely compelled to make it feel like it matched her aesthetic sensibilities?

It was all bizarre, was not like her at all.

She recognized that. And she still was absolutely fit to be tied.

“I am not the contradictory one,” she insisted. “I was very clear about my motives. You assigned me tasks. I agreed to them! And now you are… You seem to want me to beg to do the things you want me to do!”

She felt this was a good accounting of her ire, and she felt temporarily very satisfied when his teasing expression vanished. He didn’t look upset, nor angry. He merely looked…intent. Serious.

“Persephone.” He came around his desk. With each step he took forward, she felt the air in the room decrease by half. “Are you trying to manage me?”

The answer to this was obvious enough. Men, particularly dukes, she assumed, did not like to be managed. And she wasn’t trying to manage him, per se. She just needed to know what to expect, drat it all.

“I’m not!” she said, refusing to be cowed. So what if he was tall and strong and handsome and ducal ? She was a duchess now, too—people kept telling her so! “But you cannot mean to just…”

“Just what, Persephone?” he asked. His voice was so low that she thought she could feel it more than hear it, a low rumble.

And drat, the feeling in her stomach was back. Somehow, every time she felt it, it felt increasingly good.

Perhaps the newfangled disease affected her mind, too.

“You cannot just leave me on a shelf until you’re ready for me!” she insisted, grasping for the words despite the manifold…sensations that insisted on attacking her.

Her husband took another step forward, and Persephone became, all at once, acutely aware of what she was wearing. She had to take a breath to grapple with her own audacity. She'd come here in a nightgown and some passing blush at a dressing gown. White cotton, lace, and silk—no heavy brocade or embellishments to hide the fact that, oh God, he was having an effect on her body.

An effect that was visible through the too thin layers that she’d chosen to wear here tonight.

With an inhaled breath so sharp it was halfway to a shriek, she drew her hands to her chest, preparing to cover herself.

She was too slow, however. Before she could cross her arms across her traitorous breasts, her husband stopped her movements.

It took him only three fingers against her rising hands, his index and middle finger on top, his thumb resting against the place where her pulse raced in her wrists. It took him only three fingers, because it wasn’t any force of strength that stopped her.

It was the force of him , of his gaze, of his presence .

It was more than enough to stop her moving. It was almost enough to stop her breath.

His touch lit through her like a spark. They’d never touched before, she realized, not directly. He’d held her arm, had taken her hand to guide her up into a carriage or back down again. But those fleeting points of contact had happened through layers of clothing, through gloves and sleeves and the fine wool of his jackets.

Now, she could feel him directly and with such acuity that she fancied that she would be able to sketch his fingerprints from memory.

“Persephone,” he murmured, and a humiliating little whimper sounded in the back of her throat. When she dared to look back up at him again, she found his eyes like depthless pits, black and eternal as they gazed back at her. It wasn’t a cold emptiness there, though. It was hot, like burning coal.

“I…my lord,” she said, which was wrong as well as foolish. She caught the way the corner of his mouth tipped up in a smile, however.

“You can call me your lord, Persephone,” he said, liquid and warm, and God, she truly needed him to stop saying her name like that. “But you must know, then, that I intended to be as such, yes?”

“But—”

In a flash, his fingers left her wrist, flying up to press gently against her lips, again using no force to stop her from speaking. Still, she could not have defied him if she tried.

“You can press me, but it won’t get you what you want.” He dragged his thumb across her lower lip. “Or—” He paused. “—you can say ‘yes, my lord,’ and take what it is that I intend to give you. What do you say, Persephone?”

A very small, very distant part of her thought that she should protest this high-handed nonsense. But, even as that part of her launched its token resistance, it followed with a much louder, more convincing question: Why bother ?

The deal he was offering her, one where she just gave in and let him deliver on the promises that made her squirm, it wasn’t truly a bad one, was it? She could fight—and she might, later, she wasn’t eliminating the possibility—and she suspected that he wouldn’t grow angry. He’d just do as he said. He’d give her nothing. She could return to her quiet room.

She didn’t want to do that at all .

So she gave in, just for now.

“Yes, please, my lord,” she said against his finger.

The please had been a good idea. She saw the way his nose flared when she said it.

That was the last thing she saw before his mouth pressed to hers.

If she’d thought his fingers had been warm, it was nothing like the inferno of his lips against hers, his tongue licking along the pattern that his thumb had so recently traced.

“I am beginning to learn something about you, Persephone,” he said in between kisses. “I think that you are more trouble than you let on.”

She was too scattered to do anything besides give a little whimper of protest. He took her meaning.

“Oh yes, more trouble indeed.” His chuckle rumbled through her. If she had worried that her chest had given away her bothered state before, now there was no hope for her. She pressed herself against him more as he peppered kisses along her jaw. It was the only way she could hope to hide the signs of what he was doing to her.

“Not trouble,” she insisted.

He pressed a long, open-mouthed kiss against the underside of her jaw.

“Not now,” he agreed. “Right now, you’re being my very good girl.”

There was no reason for it, no logical one, but these words made her knees practically collapse out from beneath her. The only thing that saved her from taking a tumble was the way he threw his arm securely around her waist.

“Hm, yes,” he said. He took advantage of the shift to press a thigh between her legs. This drove the front of her dressing gown apart, revealing more of her legs than anyone had ever seen before. The overlapping fabric in the front loosened, too.

So much for hiding the vicious points of her hardened nipples.

She should have protested more, but she didn’t want to, not one bit. Instead, some instinct urged her to press down on his leg, grinding her core against him. It felt…spectacularly good. She did it again, and it felt even better.

“Oh, not so good, after all, are you, little minx?” he crooned into her mouth. “Did I not tell you that you would take what you were given? Didn’t I warn you that pressing me for more would not end well for you?”

For all his tormenting, Persephone noted, he didn’t stop kissing her. Perhaps her luck was turning around, because she worried that she might have actually died if he stopped just now.

“Please,” she said. If she’d ever had dignity, it was gone, burnt away by the heat of his body against her. She clutched at his shoulders, her fingers digging into the fine lawn of his shirt.

“Please what?” he pressed, nibbling along her lower lip.

She was out of words, so she decided to take a cue from him. She dared a bite to his bottom lip, feeling the way his plush mouth yielded just a bit under the pressure of her teeth. His smile caressed hers…

And then he pulled away, leaving Persephone’s hands grasping at nothing, her fingers clenching at only empty air.

Leaving the burning fire in her belly un-doused.

“Wait,” she panted as he took another step back, paused to make sure she wouldn’t lose her balance when he drew his leg out from between hers, then retreated a bit more. “Wait, no. Where are you going?”

She sounded desperate, piteously so, and she did not care a whit.

He chuckled and took one of her reaching hands, pressing a long, slow kiss to the back of her knuckles. Even that felt far too good.

“Tonight is not our night, Persephone,” he said. “But our night? It will come. And it will be all the better for the waiting.”

Then he pressed one more hot, wet, shattering kiss to her hand.

And he left.

Persephone stood in the study for a long, long time, wondering how she had managed to find herself in this strange new world.