Page 20 of Hazardous to a Duke’s Heart (Lords of Hazard #1)

J on couldn’t resist moving. God, it felt so bloody good to be inside her that he could hardly hold himself back from taking her swiftly. Her warmth . . . her responsiveness up until now . . . he’d never felt the like.

But he could tell from the uncertainty in her eyes that this hadn’t yet become enjoyable for her. He wanted beyond anything to make it so. Since he’d already broken his own rule about seducing her, the least he could give her was pleasure.

Now, if only he could hold off long enough to do so.

“It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it?” he asked, even as he wanted to plunge into her over and over like a maddened bull.

“N-Not a bit,” she said.

“Liar,” he whispered, then brushed a kiss to her tangled hair. “But I’ll make it better for you, I promise.” He pulled her knee up on one side, then the other. That not only seated him further inside her, but made her eyes widen.

“Better?” he asked.

“Much,” she whispered against his shoulder.

“Hold on,” he said, and reached between them to finger her where they were joined. Only then did he thrust inside her again. “Ah, sweetheart, you feel like . . . warm velvet. I love . . . being inside you.”

Especially now that she was relaxing more by the minute. That was encouraging. He kissed or caressed everything he could reach—her amazing breasts, her swanlike neck, her slickening cleft . . .

“Jon!” she cried, grabbing his hips as if to pull him into her. “That is . . . oh, heavens . . .”

At last .

Only then did he let himself go, driving into her the way he truly wanted to, reveling in her moans and the way she shimmied beneath him and clutched him to her as if to gain every drop of the pleasure he could give her.

She was his now, damn it. His. The way he’d wanted her . . . from the time he’d first met her. “Tory . . .” Her name was a prayer on his lips as he thrust into her luscious body. “Tory . . . good God, Tory . . . my lovely angel . . . my sweetheart. Mine. Mine. Mine. ”

And as he felt her cry out and convulse around his cock, milking it, making it her own, he spent himself inside her hot, tight quim and collapsed on top of her.

It was only as he lay there, replete and satisfied and feeling her shake beneath him so wonderfully . . . that he remembered he’d intended to withdraw before spending.

Not that it mattered. They’d be marrying now. It was a tribute to how far gone he was that the thought of that made him glad beyond words. He shoved any thought of Morris and how the man might feel about that to the back of his mind. It didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was Tory.

He moved off to lie on his side next to her. She cast him such a beatific smile that he was tempted to take her all over again. But it was much too soon for that. For one thing, he could see from the smear of blood on her thighs that it was her first time, not that he’d doubted it. For another, he didn’t want to hurt her.

Instead, he gave her a long, warm kiss. When he drew back, he murmured, “You look like a woman well-satisfied.”

She stretched her arms over her head. “I feel like a woman well-satisfied. I suppose you learned how to be so good at this in France?”

“Actually, I had a rather misspent youth,” he said, an echo of the shame he’d felt years ago resonating deeply. “It’s why my father packed me off for a grand tour in the first place.” He waited for her condemnation.

“I see.” She ran her hand down his chest. “Then thank heavens for a misspent youth.”

Her reaction took him off guard, then made him glad that in this, as with many other things, she was so unconventional. “I had no idea, Miss Morris, that you were such a wanton in the making.”

Her eyes danced as she looked up at him. “I had no idea, either. It’s quite the surprise.” She sobered. “But I do appreciate your patience. I had no idea what I was doing.”

“I could be patient for days if that’s what it took to satisfy you,” he said sincerely.

“ Days , sir?” she quipped.

“Perhaps not days, but several hours, at the very least. I was rather quicker tonight than I would have liked, but it’s been a long time since I . . . did this.”

She leaned over to kiss him, then caressed his cheek before slipping off the bed. “Unfortunately, right now we don’t have hours,” she said as she found her nightdress and put it on. “Mrs. Gully comes rather early to make my breakfast, and she mustn’t find you here.” She gazed sadly at the sheets, now stained with her blood. “And I’ll have to get those hidden and put new ones on before she arrives. So, you’d best get dressed, sir, before I throw you out.”

“We still have plenty of time, sweetheart,” he grumbled, but left the bed to appease her and began to dress. “Thank God, for we have much to discuss.”

She faced him warily. “I’m not letting you send a footman home with me whenever I come here,” she said, “and that’s final.”

“That’s not what we’ll be discussing.” He walked up to draw her into his arms. “You do realize we have to marry.”

She blinked up at him. “What?”

Damn. He’d expected her to be more pleased at the prospect. “I took your innocence, dearling. We must marry.”

“I’m not marrying you.” Pulling away from him, she wandered to the window to gaze out into the dark forest.

Pain seared his throat. “Would it be so awful to be married to me?”

“Of course not.” Yet she still kept her back to him. “But you never once mentioned marrying me before. And I don’t wish you to wed me simply to assuage your guilty conscience. I seduced you. I absolve you of all responsibility for it.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, frustrated and unsure of himself. “I’m not marrying you to absolve anything. It’s as I told you the other night—I don’t deserve you, and I know it.”

“That’s ridiculous. You deserve someone far better than me. A princess or a duke’s daughter or someone closer to your rank.”

“I don’t want any of them. I want you, Tory.”

She whirled around to scowl at him. “For what ? For this?” She gestured to the bed they’d just been in. “You could pay any woman you like for that. Unless that’s why you want me. For my dowry.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he snapped, “I don’t want or need your bloody dowry. I need you .”

Her features softened, and she looked as if she were about to say something when the door opened, startling them both.

A boy of about ten or eleven wearing a nightshirt and clutching a worn blanket stood there staring at them through sleepy eyes. “Sissy? Where’s Mrs. Gully?”

Sissy?

Bloody hell. There was a child here. A child , for God’s sake. A million questions leapt into his mind as Jon examined the boy. Morris’s? It was possible. He looked eleven years old and was the spitting image of Morris.

Darting a nervous glance at Jon, Tory answered the lad. “This is Mrs. Gully’s night off, Cyril, remember? That’s why your Sissy is here.”

He rubbed his eyes the way a smaller child might, with his fists. Then he seemed to notice Jon there. “Who are you?” he asked in a guileless voice that no eleven-year-old who’d found a strange man in his sister’s bedroom would ever use.

Thank God Jon had finished dressing. “I’m—”

“This is Sissy’s friend.” She shot Jon a warning look. “Did you want something, my dear boy?”

He gave her a sweetly innocent smile. “I can’t find my little horsey. Do you know where it is? He gets scared alone at night.”

“He’s in the kitchen. Come with me, and we’ll fetch him. But then you have to go back to bed. Understood?”

He bobbed his head, then gave her his hand and went off with her, his blanket clutched close to his chest.

Judging from young Cyril’s childish tone and the way he was acting, he was either very sleepy or his mind wasn’t quite right. Emotions swamped Jon—pity and guilt and unutterable sadness. Morris couldn’t have known, or he surely would have said something about it.

The moment she came back in and closed the door behind her, he said, “I take it that Cyril was born after your father left?”

“Yes. Nine months almost to the day.”

“The boy is the reason you keep this cottage, isn’t he? I daresay Mrs. Gully stays here to care for him.”

A heavy sigh escaped her. “Yes.”

“And you don’t own a cat, I suppose.”

She glanced away. “No.”

He thought how to phrase his next question. “Is Cyril . . . all right? I mean, he behaves very . . . childishly for a boy of eleven.”

She nodded, then dragged in a deep breath. “I suppose you might as well know everything. Cyril is in good physical health, if that’s what you mean. But his mental state . . .”

“He was born that way?”

“Yes, but only because the umbilical cord got wrapped around his neck at birth. It took some doing for the midwife to get him loose. He seemed fine at first. But as he grew, it became evident that . . . that . . .”

“—his brain had suffered some damage.”

She bobbed her head.

“Did Morris even know your mother bore him?”

“Mama couldn’t bear to tell him in a letter, so she said nothing about him. And early on, when we didn’t realize Cyril was injured, we kept thinking Papa would be coming home soon. Then the war started again, and we didn’t know where Papa was for the longest time, and by then, Cyril was showing signs of . . . not being like other children. He was slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to speak.”

He nodded. “We had a similar situation in the camp with a little girl. Something happened at birth, and her mind never quite grew up. She was sweet, though.”

Tory turned a piercing look on him. “Were people kind to her? Or did they treat her like an imbecile, mocking her or ignoring her or calling her names? Because that’s what they do here in England.”

Unexpectedly, guilt swamped him. If Morris had not been in France, he could have looked after his wife and son, not to mention his daughter. But Morris had been forced to go to the aid of the foolish young duke’s son whose parents had shipped him off because he’d become a reckless risk to the family name.

Jon swallowed. “France wasn’t all that different from England in that respect, Tory.”

“How shocking,” she muttered, and crossed her arms over her chest.

He could see her withdrawing from him, and it cut him to his soul. “That’s why you don’t want to marry? Because of Cyril?”

Her eyes blazed into his. “Of course! No man wants a wife who comes with a child like my brother. Especially one who’s getting larger by the day, yet will never be able to care for himself, will always be treated cruelly by his friends and family, and will forever be a burden on the husband.”

“Tory, I can afford to take care of you both. As you may have noticed, I have a rather large house and more than enough servants to deal with him. Cyril could live with us—”

“Until you tire of dealing with him and . . . and send him off to one of those horrible places where they put people like him!” Tears trickled down her cheeks. “Even Mrs. Gully, who adores him, advises sending him to a farm in the country where he can . . . can work and live with strangers. Why wouldn’t you?”

Did she really have so little faith in him? That shook Jon a bit. Why had she thought she couldn’t tell him this? But, of course she thought it. He’d kept his darkest secrets from her, and she knew it, sensed it somehow in her usual perceptive Tory way. And honestly, his secrets were worse.

Still . . . “You forget, dearling, that I spent three years in a prison with your father. I would never put my brother-in-law—Morris’s son —in such a place, no matter how inconvenient his care.”

She swiped tears away, and he approached her to offer her his handkerchief. Taking it from him, she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

Then she stiffened. “Your mother might have something to say about that, you realize.”

“She doesn’t know about him?”

“No one knows except my neighbors. Not Chloe, not the duchess, not even your servants. Why do you think I resisted having anyone from your household accompanying me home?”

“Ah. Right.” He’d been wondering if they’d all known and had simply kept it secret from him. What a relief to hear that wasn’t the case.

“Hence my concern about your mother,” she said.

She had a point. Mother was unpredictable. “If Mother objects to Cyril living with us, then she can stay in town, and we’ll decamp to one of my many estates.” He dared to tug her into his arms. “We’d only see her on certain occasions.”

“You don’t want that,” she whispered. “You just got your family back. You would never leave them.”

That was the sticking point in his plan. He might have to choose her family over his. Could he do that?

Perhaps he wouldn’t have to. “That’s why she’ll accept Cyril. Because I would order her to or else watch me go away.”

“Jon . . . you wouldn’t—”

“Think about it, at least, will you? Let me deal with Mother.”

She gazed up at him with reddened eyes and nose, and he realized she had never looked dearer to him than at that moment.

A sigh escaped her. “Only if you think about it, too. I’m not sure you realize what you’re offering to take on.”

“Probably not. But it would be worth it to have you.”

“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it.”

“I do mean it.” He gripped her arms. “Give me a chance, Tory. Just think about it.”

She searched his face. “I will. But for now, you must go. If anyone in the neighborhood sees you leaving here in evening dress in the morning . . .”

“Of course. I don’t want to make things harder on you than they already are.”

“Thank you.”

She walked out into the hall, and he followed her. But before they could reach the back door, he caught her around the waist and pulled her close. Then he kissed her long and thoroughly, determined to make her see that her brother’s situation didn’t change anything as far as he was concerned.

When he drew back, she was very nearly smiling again. “ Now , Your Grace.” She pushed him toward the back door. “You must go! Lord knows I’ll have a hard enough time as it is convincing Cyril not to tell anyone he saw a man in my bedchamber in the middle of the night.”

God, he hadn’t even thought about that. And he was fairly certain a child like Cyril wouldn’t know how to keep a secret.

“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“Of course. Unless you’re planning on dismissing me.”

“Don’t be daft,” he said as he opened the back door. “You still owe me sculpting lessons.”

“And you owe me a come-out,” she quipped, her eyes gleaming at him. “Who knows? I might still have a chance to find someone better than a duke to marry. I’m holding out hope for a royal duke. Or, perhaps, Lord Knightdale.”

Despite everything, she made him laugh. “You can’t marry him,” Jon said as he sauntered out. “You’re marrying me .”

“We’ll see,” she said, then smiled softly before she shut the door.

Yes, they would see, indeed.