Page 34 of Duke with a Lie (Wicked Dukes Society #4)

But she did neither of those things.

“Why should you care whether I am happy or not?” she asked him instead.

“I want you to be happy, Rhiannon. Surely you know that.”

She clutched her towel to her. “Do you?”

He wrapped his own towel low on his hips, securing it. “Of course I do.”

She stared up at him, so much emotion inside her. Could he not see what would truly make her happy? That it was he? That she loved him more than words could possibly convey?

Did he feel nothing for her?

“Then who do you suggest I wed?” she asked, daring him to tell her another man.

To tell her himself.

“I hardly think such a tremendous decision must be made tonight,” he said, moving toward Rhiannon and sliding an arm around her waist to pull her into his chest. “Must it?”

Her rebellion went liquid inside her. She couldn’t resist him when he was looking at her thus, when he was holding her close.

She settled her hands on his shoulders, absorbing his casual strength. “Of course not,” she conceded.

“Tonight is just the two of us.” He lowered his head and kissed her softly, lingeringly.

All her inner resistance melted. She had no defenses against this man. Not any longer. She loved him, and that was all.

Rhiannon kissed him back, concentrating on the play of his lips over hers, the strength of his arms wrapped around her. And then she told herself that all would eventually turn out as it was meant to be. She just had to have faith in Aubrey. In herself.

In love .

Yes, it was as easy, and as impossible, as that.

One more night.

That was all he could allow himself with Rhiannon.

This, Aubrey promised himself as he led her from the bathroom to the bedroom they had been sharing in the cottage for the past two days. What she had left unsaid in the bathtub had been in her eyes, easy for him to read.

She didn’t want to marry Carnis, which filled him with a relief he had no right to feel. But she did want to marry him, and that could never happen. Because Aubrey had no intention of marrying anyone. Ever.

“Come and sit by the hearth, and I’ll brush your hair,” he told Rhiannon, taking up the hairbrush she had thrown at him a few days before.

It may as well have been a lifetime ago for how much had changed between them in the intervening time.

“I can brush my own hair,” she protested halfheartedly.

He knew by now that she enjoyed the pleasure of someone else running the bristles slowly through her hair, and shockingly, he had found that he liked taking care of her. The revelation had come as a surprise for a man who made a point of looking after only himself and his best interests.

“But you like when I brush it for you,” he countered softly, leading her to the armchair.

Obligingly, she sat by the crackling fire, stretching her legs and pointing her bare toes toward its warmth. “You would make an excellent lady’s maid.”

“I would make a dreadful lady’s maid. I’d want to spend all day in bed with you, naked, and you would never leave your chamber. Although I daresay that I would be better at keeping your room from looking as if it had been ransacked by thieves than you are.”

She chuckled. “You have a valet to keep your things in excellent order.”

“Yes, and he would call for my head on a pike if I were to dream of making such a mess in my dressing area,” Aubrey pointed out wryly.

It was better to think of his fastidious valet than to allow his mind to wander to places where it didn’t belong.

Brown was notoriously particular, and it was true that he never would have stood for Aubrey to fling his garments about the way Rhiannon did.

Her poor lady’s maid no doubt deserved an increase per annum.

“This house party has been a whirlwind,” she defended herself lightly. “In more ways than one.”

Aubrey knew what she was speaking of—not just the overwhelming nature of all the entertainments that had been planned. But what had happened between himself and Rhiannon as well. It had been unexpected. Explosive. Addictive.

Utterly fucking ruinous.

He was betraying his friend by being here. Every moment he had spent in her presence, touching her, bedding her, debauching her, had been one more blot against his already black soul. And yet, he had been unable to help himself.

He began passing the brush through Rhiannon’s wet hair, starting at the roots and moving it toward the ends.

In the low lamplight, her hair glistened with gold and hints of red.

One day soon, another man would have the right to touch her thus.

To bathe with her in a tub, to make love with her all night, to kiss her soft lips and lose himself inside her sweet heat.

The mere notion was akin to a blade between his ribs.

But he mustn’t think of that now. It was the way of things.

He had never kept a lover for long, and Rhiannon was no exception.

He couldn’t give her what she deserved. A parting of ways was desperately in order before she did something truly foolish like fall in love with him.

Their time together had always been finite.

He had shown her pleasure, helped her to embrace her innate sensuality.

And now another man would reap the rewards of his diligence.

It would be for the best, he reminded himself harshly. Rhiannon could never truly be his. He was no bloody good for her. Nor was she for him.

“Even whirlwinds must come to an end,” he said pragmatically.

“Must they?”

He finished running the brush through her long, beautiful hair. Some perverse part of him hoped she would cut it before she allowed another man to brush through those golden locks as he had. But that was a stupid desire born of a jealousy he didn’t deserve to possess.

“Of course they must. Else, we would be trapped here forever, and time would cease to pass.”

“That sounds rather like a dream to me. This cottage feels like a place where such magic could happen.” She sighed wistfully. “Oh, to be like Eos, the goddess of the dawn, granting her lover Tithonus eternal life so that they could pass each day together, never torn apart.”

“A pleasant-enough tale until one learns the end,” he quipped, setting the brush aside on a table.

Rhiannon turned to him. “Why should you find the ending of their tale sad? Eos and Tithonus were both granted what they wanted—to be together forever.”

“Ah, but do not forget that whilst the poor chap was granted immortality, he didn’t retain his youth.

So whilst Tithonus and Eos were indeed together for eternity, he was doomed to grow old and fade away until she was left with no recourse but to turn him into a grasshopper, of all creatures, just to relieve him of his misery.

” He offered her his hand. “I cannot speak for Tithonus, but I would sooner lose my immortality than spend the rest of my days as a bloody insect.”

Rhiannon settled her hand in his, allowing him to draw her to her feet and into his chest. She wrapped her arms loosely around his neck and stared up at him with that same expression she reserved for him alone—damsel in distress gazing with adoration up at her knight errant.

“You miss the point, I think. Eos’s gesture was romantic. She loved Tithonus so much that she couldn’t bear to be parted from him.”

“But even with immortality, she was still a goddess and he was but a man,” Aubrey countered smoothly. “He could never compare to Eos, nor was he ever truly a part of her world. They were too different, a goddess and a mere mortal.”

He hoped Rhiannon understood the meaning underscoring his words. In this story of theirs, she was the goddess and he was the mortal, all too flawed and imperfect.

“But Tithonus loved Eos so much that it didn’t matter that they were different,” Rhiannon argued. “And she also loved him in the same way. Their love brought them together.”

“Love is as much a myth as the story of Tithonus and Eos.”

“Surely you don’t believe that.”

“I do. Have you never noticed that in so many of the old legends, it is love that ultimately leads to death and unhappiness? One must fancy the Greeks and Romans were attempting to tell us something.”

She wanted to argue with him. Aubrey could read it in the mulish set of her jaw, in the fire sparkling in her eyes.

He had been like her once, filled with conviction and fire.

But he was thirty years old, and he had buried his mother and father, knowing the damage that supposed love could do.

He had neither the time nor the inclination for convictions, and the last of them had been thoroughly dashed into jaded cynicism.

He was a man of the moment, chasing whatever pleased him until it no longer did, and then he flitted elsewhere.

Which was what he would do tomorrow.

“I think the Greeks and Romans were telling us that love is always worth the risk and the cost,” Rhiannon told him firmly.

“ Yet hold me not for ever in thine East ,” he recited a verse from the Tennyson poem that had always struck him as being particularly meaningful. “ How can my nature longer mix with thine ?”

“If not forever, then perhaps just a few nights more,” she said, her gaze plumbing the depths of his, searching.

He wondered what she saw when she looked at him.

What she truly saw. He was aware of his looks; they had been all he had to recommend himself, aside from his title and reasonable wealth.

But what did she find behind the rakish polish he wore like a shield?

She must have fooled herself a great deal when it came to him.

He tried to summon a modicum of regret and could not.

More proof of his villainy.

He would not change a single moment of what had come to pass this last week. He would kiss her, know her passion, her body. He would take her, make her his again and again if given the chance. Because Lady Rhiannon Northwick was worth the hell of an eternity as a grasshopper or any fate worse.

But he wasn’t worthy of her.

Not worthy of so much as the water droplet clinging to the ends of her hair.