Page 8 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)
AFTER RUTCHESTER LEFT , Fateux did too, telling her to put herself together and go back to his room. She didn’t move for a time after they were both gone, but then, finally, as if in a daze, she did.
She found a towel near the water basin and she used the water and the towel to clean Rutchester’s spend off her body. Then she methodically dressed herself. Her legs were still shaking.
Her stays laced up the front. She’d brought those because she knew she would have no maid to help her dress, so that she could tighten them herself.
But she didn’t put them on, because she didn’t wish to sleep in them.
She didn’t put her dress on either. She went to the door, in her shift, and looked out, this way and that.
No one was out there, so she darted across the hallway and back into Fateux’s room.
There, she sat down on the floor and waited for him to come back.
He never did.
Eventually, she extinguished the light and curled up on the floor with a blanket. She lay awake for a while, thinking about how she could escape now, because she was alone.
She thought it through, many times. She would get up, put on her stays, tighten them, button her dress—she could do all the buttons in the back if she contorted this way and that—and then she would walk out of the inn, acting as if she was simply supposed to be doing that, and no one would stop her.
She would walk along the road and flag down a carriage, and she would say that she had been kidnapped and ravished and that she needed help and someone would help her.
She’d be taken to some local parish, perhaps, and the vicar there would care for her, and maybe she could live there, helping out with the church services, a foundling who would rely on Christian charity.
Yes, she would do exactly that.
She thought it through four times but she never moved.
Why am I not going anywhere? she asked herself.
She could not say. Perhaps it was because there was just as much likelihood of finding a carriage of men who would hurt her worse or being set upon by a pack of bandits or falling in some hole in a field and starving to death or—
Eventually, she fell asleep.
SHE WOKE AND it was still dark outside.
The door had just opened, but it wasn’t Fateux there. It was Rutchester. He staggered into the room in the darkness.
She sat up. “Your Grace?” she said.
He hauled her to her feet. His fingers traced the outline of her jaw, soft and yet urgent. He kissed her.
She was stunned, but the kiss was good. His tongue was urgent, too, warm and sweeping in to claim her, and she felt weak on her feet as she sagged into him.
He cupped the back of her head with one of his huge hands and groaned into her mouth.
Then he swept her off her feet and carried her, like that time he’d carried her before, and he deposited her on the bed. He was kissing her again, his hands on her through her shift, tracing the outline of her breasts, rubbing her nipples as they hardened eagerly against his ministrations.
He groaned again, pushing up her skirts.
He seized her hand and pushed it between her own thighs, and she started to rub herself like she had before, and the tight pleasantness came in crashing surges that splintered like hot gushes of red against her body, a churning ocean of crimson, waves breaking against her skin.
His fingers joined hers, rubbing her there as well. Oh, why was she so very, very slippery there now? She had never really done this—sort of, once, she’d tried, but it was wicked, so wicked, so she’d stopped, and now, now , it felt—
It was bliss.
His fingers curved and rubbed and teased and penetrated, and he was kissing her again and then his mouth was on her skin, wetting her through her shift, suckling the tips of her breasts, making her cry out as the churning waves within her began to grow more violent.
Something was coming for her, something intense, something that frightened her because of how overwhelming it promised to be. It built on itself, layers of it getting more and more as her fingers and his fingers toyed with her between her thighs.
She was panting. She was sobbing. She was—
Her pelvis twitched and she was flooded with the most intense feeling of sweetness that she could possibly conceive of.
She let out a sound like a wounded thing, digging her fingers into whatever part of him she could find, his arms, his face—
He stabbed her with his prick, not inside, but against her thigh, and she hadn’t even known his prick was freed from his clothes. There was another gush of wetness.
He grunted.
He climbed off her.
She let out trembling breaths, her whole body still twitching, the pleasure between her thighs ebbing out now, leaving a wake of deep satisfaction in its wake.
“Fuck,” he said, standing over her, a hulking shadow in the darkness.
She swallowed.
It was quiet.
He sniffed. “Fuck,” he said again, and then he went over and found the lamp by the bed and lit it.
The circle of light illuminated his face, and the first thing she saw was red. Smears of red, on his cheekbones and his forehead, as if he’d had red paint on his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.
She looked down at her body and realized there were smears of red on her thighs, on her—
She put a hand over herself between her legs, mewling.
Her shift was stained with it too.
blood
She sat up, tucking her knees into her shift and hugging them against her breasts, which were still wet from his mouth. She whimpered.
He ran a hand through his hair, smearing around more of that redness.
“Where’s Fateux?” she said.
He smiled.
She covered her mouth with both of her hands.
“Do you have other clothes?” he said in a low voice.
She was shaking.
“You don’t have to come with me, of course,” he said. “I can see why you wouldn’t wish that. I can leave coin for another night here for you, coin for a post coach to… I don’t know. Where do you wish to go?”
“I can come with you?” she said. Mad, I’ve gone mad, she thought.
“I plan to take you to my friends in London,” he said. “One of my friends’ duchesses will certainly sort you out. If you wish to go, though, we should leave now.”
She nodded. “I’ll get dressed.”
He nodded. He left the room.