Page 18 of The Duke’s Only Desire (The Dukes of Darkness #3)

S ophie sank deeper into the warm bedding and watched as Shay stirred the banked coals until a bright flame glowed warmly in the fireplace. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from him. The light played across the smooth planes of his naked body and glinted red highlights in his mussed blond hair, and when he returned the poker to its stand, the muscles in his back rippled and made her long to run her fingers over him. Again.

He glanced over his shoulder and caught her staring. A wry smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I think you’ve turned wanton.”

“Your fault.” She tucked the velvet-covered counterpane beneath her chin. “I was painfully proper less than an hour ago.”

He chuckled and walked back to the bed, to slide beneath the warm covers with her. He drew her against him, and she snuggled instinctively against his side. Where she belonged.

A long sigh escaped her. Being with him like this felt completely natural, as if she were a part of him, and she couldn’t help but smile as happiness blossomed inside her chest.

He nuzzled his mouth against her hair. “I’m going to have to keep a bottle of cognac in your room for convenience.”

Her heart leapt with hope at that small comment. “Planning on spending more time here, then?”

“If you let me.” He rolled over on top of her and gently swept her hair away from her cheek. All amusement left his expression. “Don’t leave, Sophie.” Vulnerability colored his voice, and his eyes squeezed shut. “If I ever lost you—”

She cupped his face between her hands and kissed him, to silence whatever terrible thing he’d been about to say.

“You won’t,” she promised against his lips. Then she gestured a hand at the mess of belongings scattered throughout the room that she had been in the middle of packing when she’d found him in his room. Clothes lay tossed over every chair in anticipation of being packed away into the half-filled trunks sitting scattered across the floor. “ If you help me put everything away.” She brushed her lips across his cheek to his ear. “And then I’ll let you keep an entire case of cognac in my undergarment drawer.”

“Lucky brandy.” With a growl, he placed a hard kiss to her mouth that promised many more intimacies to come. His apprehension eased away with a visible softening of his shoulders.

He dropped back onto the mattress beside her. Sophie rested her head on his shoulder, her hand playing idly across his chest. Her fingertips traced over the rough ridges of his scars, then the smooth skin that hadn’t been damaged. But a long scar sliced just above his left hip… She stilled. That scar wasn’t from the fire.

She sat up and stared down at him as she traced her fingertip along the crescent-shaped indention. “What happened here?”

He shrugged away her concern. “Knife cut.”

Her mouth fell open. “You were stabbed ?”

“It wasn’t serious.”

Well, that was a lie if ever she’d heard one. “When?”

“During the wars.” He took her hand and placed a kiss to her palm. With that kiss, she felt him draw away from her, even though he remained in bed with her.

“When you were a mercenary, you mean?”

“When I was a damned fool, yes,” he corrected with a grimace. “Being a mercenary was a mistake.”

“But you were a soldier.”

“I was a lad who didn’t know any better.” He slid his arm around her and drew her back down beside him. “I was brash and reckless, hot-headed and uncontrollable, desperate to prove myself to the world and, most of all, to my father.”

“So a typical eighteen-year-old then,” she commented dryly.

A soft chuckle rumbled beneath her ear. “Far worse than that. But I knew I was meant to be a soldier, even when I was training at Eton alongside Devlin, Lucien, and Chase.”

She nodded against his shoulder. She knew his friends—brothers, really—from his stories of them in the letters he’d sent. Now she realized why they had all been present at their wedding. Shay had needed their support at the moment when he had changed their lives forever, believing this joining of hearts would never happen.

“When the opportunity to join the Prussians arose, I took it. I was a second son and had no other path in life, and I certainly didn’t want to go into the Church or become a government official. So I joined my friends in becoming mercenaries. I thought that as long as I was fighting Bonaparte, there was no difference whose flag I served under. But by the time Chase and Devlin returned to England, I was ready to join the British and fight for my own crown and country. That was when I truly became a soldier.” His arms tightened around her. “But being a mercenary taught me the most important lesson of all.”

“How to be a leader?” she guessed.

He nuzzled her hair. “How to persevere, even when suffering.”

He didn’t mean against the French. Her lips were barely able to form the question whose damning truth could no longer be hidden. “What happened the night of the fire?”

Heaving out a harsh breath, he rolled onto his back and laid his forearm over his eyes. “You won’t like what I have to tell you.”

“I need to know.” She called upon all her restraint to keep from closing the distance between them, knowing she would only cause him to move further away. “It’s not about only you anymore. You’ve brought me into it, and I need to know what role I played that night.”

His arm fell away, and she was certain this time it wasn’t a breath that passed his lips but a muted curse.

She sat up and pulled the covers around her to stop her shivering, even though she knew it wasn’t from the cool air. “You’d stopped to visit me in London, that fortnight before,” she prompted, and every whispered word felt like a bomb ready to go off. “On your way home to Ravenscroft for the wedding.”

“Ravenscroft wasn’t my home,” he corrected, and she could sense the anger lingering beneath his surface, still smoldering even after all these years. “It hadn’t been for a very long time. But I was expected to be here and couldn’t beg off. I’d been charged by our father with making certain John didn’t cause any trouble before the wedding, and as his best man, I was the one who was supposed to have made certain he arrived at the church on time.” His jaw tightened so hard the vein in his neck throbbed. “Instead, I killed him.”

Sophie’s heart lurched into her throat, but somehow, she kept her face stoic.

“I did it because he had you,” he admitted, “and not because I wanted the dukedom, not even because I hated him, although I certainly did.” He turned his head on the pillow to boldly fix his gaze on hers. “He’d gone missing the night before your wedding. I went looking for him and found him tupping a barmaid in the barn.”

Her body turned numb.

“He didn’t care that I’d caught him with another woman the night before he was supposed to have married you, or that he was foxed to the gills and would be a sopping mess for the ceremony. A disgrace of a newlywed husband.” His hand fisted against the mattress. “Worse—the things he said about you…”

She somehow managed to find her voice enough to ask, “What did he say?”

He shook his head and looked up at the dark bed canopy overhead, and with that determined gesture, she knew he would never tell her.

“He was going to be cruel to you,” he said instead, “and there wouldn’t have been anything you could have done to stop him. No matter how awful he was, you could never leave him because your family didn’t have twenty thousand pounds to forfeit. You would have had to ruin your family to escape him, and you never would have done that. John knew it and was prepared to wield it against you, just because he hated the idea of marrying you.”

Sophie swallowed. Hard. She hadn’t known any of this.

“He was right about one thing—I was jealous of him. You were going to be his, and I would never have your love.”

“But you did have it,” she whispered, barely louder than a breath. And always would.

If he’d heard her, he ignored it. “He threw a punch at me, and I hit the bastard.” His voice came cold and distant. “He was so drunk that he could barely remain on his feet, but he kept on. So did I. Finally, I knocked him down hard enough that he didn’t get back up. That was when I knew I had to leave, or I would kill him right then. That’s how much I hated him.” He blew out a harsh breath. “I was halfway to the house before I turned back and saw the flames. We’d knocked over a lantern in the fight, and the barn was on fire.”

“But you rushed inside to try to save him.” She rested her hand on his chest, right over his heart. “You didn’t murder him.”

“I wanted him dead, and he died, as surely as if I’d killed him with my bare hands.”

She curled her fingers into his chest. “When you left him, he was still alive, and you—”

“No difference. In my heart, I wanted him dead so I could have you for myself, and he died that night from the punches I threw and the fire I helped start.”

A burning tightened her chest so painfully that she winced. “That’s why you think you earned those scars.”

“I know so. They say that when God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers.” He turned onto his side, fully facing her in the dark shadows. “I’ve wondered every moment since if that fire wasn’t my punishment for all the deeds I’d done in the wars…for all the men I’d killed, all the women and children whose homes I’d helped destroy.” He paused, and in that brief silence, Sophie felt the weight of the anguish and desolation he still carried. “For coveting what my brother had.”

“It wasn’t murder,” she assured him. “It was an accident.”

“My father didn’t think so. Neither did Malcolm. They both blamed me for John’s death, although for different reasons.” When she held her breath, fearing they had blamed her, he brought her hand to his lips and placed a kiss to her palm, as if reading her mind. “Malvern blamed me because I’d failed to deliver John safely into matrimony. The old man had somehow been convinced that John would be the savior of the dukedom, sire dozens of heirs, and keep his marriage together the way he had failed with his own wife.”

Which was why the late duke had taken such pains with the betrothal contract. He didn’t want John to be abandoned and humiliated by a fleeing wife the same way he had.

“Father had always been blind when it came to John’s character and thought I was the misguided son. But our mother knew better.” He lowered his gaze away from hers. “One of the last memories I have of Mother before she left was a comment she’d made about John that she didn’t think I’d overheard…that fate had made a cruel joke in letting her bear the better son second.”

Sophie could not disagree. “And why did Malcolm blame you?”

“He thought I did it to inherit the dukedom, most likely because that exact same thought had occurred to him several times when he’d been the heir apparent.”

Sophie bit her lip. Having met his uncle, she didn’t doubt it.

“I always suspected that Malcolm had something to do with my mother’s leaving, too,” he continued, “but I could never prove it.”

Her eyes widened. “Is that why you told me to never trust him?”

“A pretty coincidence that he’s suddenly interested in my marriage, don’t you think?”

Coldness swept over her, and she shivered as she pulled the covers tighter around herself.

He wrapped his arms around her and nestled her naked body along the length of his to warm her. “Becoming duke was the last thing I wanted,” he murmured as he tucked her head beneath his chin. “I would have gladly handed it to my uncle if I could have, but Parliament frowns on giving titles away. After all, it’s only a short step from giving to taking, and the majority of them are just corrupt and duplicitous enough to steal each other’s titles if given the chance.”

“Thank God you become the Duke of Malvern. I know you think it’s part of your punishment, but it’s not. It’s other people’s salvation.”

When he scoffed at that, she slid over on top of him. She pressed her hands into his shoulders to keep him pinned to the bed, and her gaze firmly locked with his.

“Don’t you see? Everyone your life as a duke touches is better off for it.” When he lifted a disbelieving brow, she pressed on, “The servants here at Ravenscroft would have hated working for John. He would have mistreated them and abused them, driven them off to find other employment, or refused to pension them if they didn’t leave. He would have made a mockery of the estate by wasting its profits and letting it fall to ruin. That is, the entailed properties he couldn’t sell for blunt for gambling and whoring. And if he’d stayed in London at Malvern House, he would have been plagued by scandal, debt, and dishonor of his own making that would have destroyed the family’s name and the dukedom’s reputation.”

Before he could counter that, she captured his mouth in a blistering kiss and sat up, straddling him.

“Just ask the villagers and tenants,” she continued. “You don’t have to do anything except send Mr. Enfield to collect their rents. But you’ve worked to improve their lives, their homes—even the village market and commons. You’ve given them the chance to be in a partnership with the estate, not simply subservient to it.”

Sophie could tell from his doubtful expression that it would take a good while before he believed that. But she would make him, and she had the rest of her life to do it.

First, though, she had a much more important point to make. So she leaned down and placed a soft kiss to his lips, then slid her mouth over his scarred cheek to his ear.

“And you saved me . You could never have done that if you hadn’t become Malvern. True, I didn’t like the way we married,” she admitted, “but there’s never been anyone I’ve ever wanted more for a husband than you.”

His eyes softened as he reached up to brush a stray lock from her face. “And now you have me,” he murmured, just as quietly as she had. “And I don’t deserve you.”

The desolate words pierced her, for one tragic moment seeming to stop her heart completely. But she would have the rest of her life to disprove him of that, too. Starting tonight.

“No,” she agreed with an exaggerated sigh. “You really don’t.”

With a growling laugh, he rolled over on top of her and tickled her beneath the covers until she fell into a fit of laughter.

The tension between them vanished, and she wrapped her arms around his neck as he kissed her so deliciously her body began to tingle in all kinds of wanton places. His lips trailed down to her throat, where he placed hot, openmouthed kisses against her spiking pulse, and the heat of his body seeped into hers, warming her all the way down to her toes.

She wiggled her hips temptingly against his in seductive invitation and whispered, the words barely louder than a breath, “Make love to me.”

He did exactly that, coaxing and cajoling her body with his hands and lips until she was ready for him, until he was able to slip inside her with a silken glide of his hips. This time, there was no burning, no discomfort—there was only the bliss of being filled by this wonderful man whom she loved beyond all boundaries, of moving perfectly together as one. And this time, they both found release not in fierce cries of pleasure but deep sighs of happiness.

With his weight still resting on her, her arms and legs wrapped possessively around him, she kissed his scarred cheek and whispered, “I love you.”

She held her breath for a long moment, waiting for him to say it back, but he didn’t. Instead, he placed a tender kiss to her temple.

Her heart pounded brutally against her ribs at his silence, but she knew better than to press. Not now. That, too, would come in time.

So she tightened her hold on him and refused to let go.