Page 16 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke (The Marlow Family Secrets #6)

‘And I have wanted you like this since I saw you swimming in the lake before you even went abroad.’ The words were obviously spoken without thought, and regretted the moment they were said. She turned pink.

My God, how beautiful.

But then he realised she was moving to rise, and his grip on her thighs firmed, holding her still as he digested her words. Had she just said she wanted him before he had left?

‘But you have probably had a hundred women like this anyway…’ A note of jealousy had crept into her voice.

What was this? Her revelation had somehow turned the steady ground beneath his feet to shifting sand.

He felt a bitter hard barrier of denial slip over him, covering the emotion which gripped in his stomach and his chest. He no longer knew how to feel – how to respond.

‘Are you fishing for compliments?’ His voice had turned cold.

He could not force warmth back into it. All his emotions were shuttered away, out of reach.

He could speak the truth though. ‘In fact the number of women I have probably had is more, but none like this, Katherine, and none like you.’

‘Flattery will win you nothing,’ she taunted, trying to cover her tracks and hide her vulnerability. She could not hide her emotion though.

‘It has won me this tryst with you.’

‘You did not win it!’ she replied, clearly hurt. ‘I am giving it to you.’

She tried moving again, but once more he stopped her. ‘Wait.’ She had wanted him when he was one and twenty, little Katherine Spencer.

‘You watched me swimming, in the lake?’

He felt as though his innards were tangled up somehow. He remembered that day. His grandfather had held a ball in his honour, before packing him off abroad. All his friends had come to stay for the house party. They had swum naked in the lake because it had been hot.

John had been preoccupied, engrossed in himself as he had tried to come to terms with the changes planned for his life.

If he was honest, he had not even noticed her in the day, and she had not been invited to the ball.

She had not yet come out, even though she had been of age.

Phillip had come though, with his parents, but not Katherine.

She was blushing harder.

‘I am flattered.’

‘Do not be, it was just a childish infatuation.’ Her gaze had dropped to his throat.

His fingers lifted her chin. ‘You do not convince me. Have you carried a torch for me ever since?’ He was suddenly desperate to know, though he knew his voice only implied the merest interest.

‘No!’

But the answer was yes, he was sure of it. Her voice lied but her body said it, soft and moulded to his, warm and wet between her thighs.

‘ I am giving it to you ’. That was why this innocent young woman had agreed to this immoral liaison.

She was right, she should not be here, but she was, and she was because she cared for him, because she had cared for him for all the years he had isolated himself.

For all the years he had kept people away because of their barrage of false affection.

All that time she had been here waiting for him.

Life was full of strange anomalies, forks in roads. Choices that could change lives forever.

‘I think you have. All this time. Am I the reason you have never married, Katherine?’ It was an arrogant thought, but somehow he knew it was true.

He remembered her blushes when she had seen him at the wake, particularly when he had spoken of a husband.

She had been standing there that day wanting him with a loyalty that had lasted years.

‘No!’ she said again, pulling away more aggressively. He let her go.

He felt lost as she climbed off his lap.

He had thought the ground beneath him hard as rock, he had thought his foundations as solid as granite, built upon the bitter, cold, isolated ground his grandfather had lain inside him. But now he stood on quick sand.

She collected her clothes and began dressing.

He rose, feeling like a fool, unsure what to say. ‘Well, that explains you making this choice of yours.’ That, of course, was the wrong thing to say.

She threw him a sideways look which called him a bastard for his mockery.

But he was not mocking, merely trying to adjust his head to this. He did not believe in romantic love but Katherine clearly did and she thought herself in love with him. What they had done, what they felt here was lust, he did not think there was anything romantic in lust.

But for her … it was more than lust, surely, if she had carried a torch of strong emotion for all these years.

Lust was short-lived. He wished suddenly that he understood what people called love between a man and a woman, and that he was capable of it.

He also wished he was worthy of receiving it.

But such tenderness had been forced out of him long ago.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He reached out a hand to her, but she knocked it away.

‘It does matter, when your choice to ask me here was made in a moment.’ Ah, so she knew the truth of his affection too then.

‘Well, you said I was bad.’ He laughed, not knowing what else to say or do.

‘I take it back. You are not bad, just spoilt.’ She was half-dressed already and she turned her back to him, wordlessly asking him to re-lace her corset.

‘Spoilt?’ He began pulling at the threads.

‘You have always had everything you want. You wish for it and you get it, John, including me.’

Her accusation stung, and he pulled her corset too tightly and felt her wince. ‘I have not always had everything I want.’

She picked up her dress.

He reached for his own clothing and began dressing too. He had not had a mother for the first ten years of his life. He was hardly spoilt.

He tucked his shirt into the waistband of his trousers, wrapped his cravat about the collar and tied it.

When he thought about it, though, others cared for him, his mother, Mary, his stepfather, Robbie…

The error was in himself. Because I do not believe in fanciful nonsense!

If ‘love’ was real, his mother would have been there for the first ten years of his life, she would not have been able to leave him.

He slid on his waistcoat. When he turned about, lifting his coat to put it on, he saw she was dressed and standing near the door, wearing the bonnet he had bought, looking beautiful and utterly bereft.

He had hurt her feelings.

‘I should not have come here,’ she said.

He could not breathe.

‘I am just amusement to you.’

‘You are not.’ He crossed the room in an instant and held her hands. ‘Truly, Katherine, I am touched by your commitment to me. I cannot say the same to you. You know it would be a lie if I did. I did not notice you before, but I have seen you now and you are here because I enjoy being with you.’

Her eyes held his, shining with questions she did not speak.

Did she want promises from him, declarations and vows he would never be able to speak? He wasn’t that person. He did not know how to love. But he was willing to let her try and prove to him that it was real for her, that she felt for him what the poets spoke of.

‘Will you meet me again tomorrow, Katherine, here, at the same hour?’

She nodded, but she looked as though she did not wish to.