Page 25 of The Duke of Cups (The Highwaymen #3)

HIS PRICK DIDN’T burn this time. It just felt like a mixture of velvet and steel, like the largest of impossible invasions and the sweetest of perfect, pleasant completions.

She had the sensation again, as he settled all the way inside her, that he was the thing she’d been missing all along, that this made everything right, now that he was all the way back in, tucked deeply inside her.

He did it with her sitting on top of him, straddling him in the carriage, the tips of her sensitive breasts in his face.

He helped her rock against him, and then she found her own rhythm, taking him just as deeply as she liked, grinding down against him in ways she liked, sliding herself up and down on the slippery length of him.

He did it with her on her back, him perched between her thighs, holding her hips in place as he drove himself in and out of her. He put her legs together and held them against his ear, one arm banded around her knees as he pierced her all the way deep inside.

He rolled her over on her stomach and did it that way, his body against hers, his mouth against her ear lobe, whispering into her ear about what a good comtesse she was, how very adept she was at infidelity.

She liked that, and she told him he was plenty good at it, too. “Such a rake, aren’t you, Your Grace? Quite good at having other men’s wives with that perfectly thick prick of yours.”

“You like how thick it is?” he said.

“Yes, please, yes,” she said.

“You’re very good at taking this prick, though, love,” he gasped. “You take it so very, very well.”

“It’s mine,” she said, and she knew she’d regret saying it later, when she wasn’t drunk on his body and on this pleasure and whatever laudanum she’d had. “It belongs inside me.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You have a perfect little cunny, and my prick fits here exactly.”

“It fits in all the cunts you fuck,” she said.

“No, not like this, never like this,” he said. “Stop talking about other fucking women, Hyacinth, please. I only want to think about you in this moment.”

She hated him. She hated him so very much. “Please never stop doing this to me,” she said. “Never take it out of me. I want your cock inside me forever.”

“I can do that,” he assured her. “Forever and ever.”

“Please,” she moaned.

“Yours, love,” he said, kissing her jaw. “My prick, it’s yours. I am yours. I’m all yours.”

“Never take it out,” she gasped.

“But when I come—”

“Inside me.”

“I can’t get you with child,” he said.

No, because if she got herself with another man’s child, Champeraigne would destroy her. “Is that how it works?”

“You don’t know this?” He was chagrined. “Of course you don’t know this.”

“Please, don’t take it out,” she said. “Never take it out.”

“But Hyacinth—”

“Are you mine?”

“Yes,” he said roughly. And then he did it. He pushed all the way in, deeper than she thought he’d ever really been, and he stopped moving, and he stayed there, not moving, kissing her, pulling her tightly against him.

Later, when they were still connected, she could tell that he’d left the sticky warmth of it in her, his spend, whatever he’d called it, and she guessed that was what made babes.

She probably shouldn’t have let him do that, she thought.

But she was well-fucked and flush with laudanum and sleepy and warm-tinged, and she fell asleep like that, in his arms, his softening cock still tucked deeply inside her.

Good, she thought, as she drifted away. So good.

HYACINTH WOKE TO Dunrose tucking her breasts back into her stays. They were still in the carriage, and it was still moving.

“It’s going to be dawn soon,” he said to her, his voice affectionate.

“You took it out,” she said.

He caught her gaze, looking into her eyes, searching her. “Kill him. It’s the only way we can be together.”

She pushed him away, letting out a wild laugh. “You’re horrible.”

He flopped back into the carriage seat. “Am I? Why?”

“You’re just using me.”

“I’ll marry you if you want. Once he’s gone, I mean.”

She laughed again, bitter. “If I want.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. He turned to her, very serious. “I want to be married to you. I do. I spent in you, Hyacinth. If you are with child, I shan’t let you stay with him. I wouldn’t allow Champeraigne to claim my child.”

She looked away. “That was stupid of me, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” he said. “But it was both of us. It’s more my fault than yours. You didn’t know what you were even asking me.”

She didn’t say anything.

He pressed close. “Hyacinth, you know if you were mine, I would be connected to you every spare second. If you didn’t want me to take my prick out of your body, I wouldn’t. I’d—”

She pushed him away. “Stop it.” She remembered what he’d said about love, that he wasn’t capable of it. One had only to observe the man for three seconds to know it was true.

“Why did you do it?” He grimaced, looking like a man lost in the wreckage at sea. “Why did you marry him? Of anyone you wished to marry, it had to be him . He’s the one we get rid of, you know? And to have you tied to him? I can’t have you now, not unless he dies.”

“You don’t even want me,” she muttered.

“I do want you. More than anything on earth.”

She scoffed.

DUNROSE WANTED MORE laudanum, but it was too late for the apothecary to be open.

After he took Hyacinth home, he considered waiting outside an apothecary for dawn and for the shop to open, but he was cognizant that his driver was tired, having driven him through London all night, and that the horses were tired, too, so he went home.

Then, he went into his bedchamber. His valet was snoring in a chair. He’d fallen asleep while sitting up waiting for his master to come home. Dunrose tossed a blanket over the man and went out walking in the light of pre-dawn.

He walked and walked until he came to Rutchester’s house.

No one answered the door when he knocked, so he went around back to the servants’ entrance, where there was activity and movement, all the servants bustling about in readiness for the day.

They let him in, and he told them not to worry over him, that he did not need seeing to. He went up to Rutchester’s chamber.

Rutchester woke immediately when the door opened. He was out of bed in a moment, with a sword in his hand .

Dunrose found himself pinned to the wall, blade at his throat, Rutchester’s bared teeth in his face as the man panted his horrendous morning breath all over his cheeks.

“Oh, it’s you, Daniel,” said Rutchester, putting up the sword. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

“It’s morning,” said Dunrose. His heart was beating very fast, because he’d truly been frightened that Rutchester was going to cut his throat.

He put his hand to his neck, massaging himself there, feeling his pulse jump beneath his skin, glad of his life.

“I was going to go get more laudanum. I had some last night, and I want it.”

Rutchester sighed heavily. “If you’re here because you think I shall save you from yourself, you’ve got me confused with Arthford.”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” said Dunrose.

Rutchester ran a hand through his long hair. It was tangled and his hand got caught in the knots. He raked his hand through them, making pained faces. “Get laudanum or don’t. I do not care.”

“Champeraigne is in town. I know where he’s staying.”

“Oh?”

“Explain to me why we can’t simply kill him.”

“You know this. He’s too well guarded.”

“Could we not climb in a window while he sleeps or something of that nature?”

Rutchester looked him over. “You might fit through a window. How are your climbing skills? How are your window-opening skills?”

Dunrose sighed, too. “All right, I take your meaning.” He had very little skills, truly, not of the kind that would serve them. And Rutchester’s skills were only useful in certain situations. It could not be so easy.

It was quiet.

Dunrose spoke again. “It is only that she is married to him, Oliver. Married .”

“Yes, we spoke of this before.”

“I told her to do it, but I wasn’t thinking.

Arthford was helping me write some other sort of letter, and I sent my own missive, and it was exactly the wrong thing to send.

She hates me now.” Except he knew that wasn’t true either.

He knew exactly how she felt about him, because he’d felt the same feeling before, more than once before he learned to guard against it.

It was a feeling he was familiar with. She felt betrayed by someone who had toyed with her feelings.

She had been innocent and trusting, and he had been worldly and jaded. He’d taken advantage of her trust.

It used to be easy to tell himself that it was simply the outcome of such feelings, that everyone got betrayed sooner or later. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else.

“He knows that you wanted to use her against him,” said Rutchester. “He will be on guard from her. She is no good to us anymore.”

“No, I know that, too,” he said. “I think she may have chosen to marry him partly because it would hurt me. She wished to hurt me, since I hurt her.”

Rutchester nodded. “Yes, that’s the way of things between people.”

“Not between the four of us,” said Dunrose. “Four or one?”

“One,” said Rutchester with a nod. He shrugged. “If you wish to stay here, you may. I shall help you stay away from the laudanum, if you like. Say the word and I shall prevent you from leaving, if that’s what you wish.”

Dunrose considered, thinking of how badly he wished to leave now, to go and wait outside the apothecary. He wanted just a bit of it, really, just a small amount. If she hadn’t tossed that flask from the carriage, he’d have it, even now. “No, I’m all right,” he said. “I’m going to go now, actually.”

Rutchester shook his head. “Damn you to hell, Daniel. You’re not going anywhere.”