Page 53 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke (The Marlow Family Secrets #6)

‘Goodnight,’ Mary called in the hallway.

Her mother answered, ‘Sleep well.’

The sound pulled Katherine out of sleep.

The duke’s and duchess’s suite of rooms extended to the left, and although there were guest rooms opposite, his family used those stretching from the landing to the right.

It was not Mary’s voice that had woken Katherine though. John had disturbed her. He was breathing heavily, as though he were running, and beneath her palm his skin was clammy and his chest muscles twitched.

She rose onto her elbow.

In the light from a stub of a candle, she could see his eyes moving rapidly beneath his eyelids. Then he gasped and his arm flailed, pushing her away as he sat up suddenly.

‘No!’ His cry echoed about the room.

He was fully awake then and one leg hung from the edge of the bed as he sat up, while the other curled before him and his fingers clawed into the covers as he fought to catch his breath.

‘What did you dream?’ She sat up too, holding the sheet to cover her breasts.

He glanced at her as though he had forgotten she was there and he looked as though he did not quite understand where he was.

Jenny had dreams like this as a child, disorientating nightmares. Sometimes she had shouted so loud she had woken everyone.

‘Nothing,’ he answered.

A clock chimed three times. It was three after midnight.

John got up and drew in a deep breath, then he crossed the room to a decanter and poured a glass of brandy, his back to her.

‘John?’ she said softly. ‘Tell me what you dreamed. It always made my sister feel better when she spoke of bad dreams.’

He turned. The light from the candle gilded the firm muscular contours of his chest and limbs. He sipped his brandy. ‘I am not a child. I told you, it was nothing.’

His ducal guard was up again, and his voice was disparaging. It was as though he slipped in and out of his suit of armour without realising.

She had a feeling he had dreamed of something which touched reality. He would hardly be scared of imagined monsters, not John.

His hand trembled when it swept back his fringe and he took another sip of brandy. ‘I am sorry I woke you.’ He smiled as he walked back to the bed. It was a false smile. ‘Honestly, it was nothing, just my head playing tricks.’

Her eyebrows rose in disbelief. But he just smiled more broadly.

‘If you wish to chase away my demons, make love to me again.’ He drained the glass and put it down on a table near the bed.

The bed dipped as he climbed beneath the sheets, but he made no move to touch her.

Instead he slotted the pillows behind him and sat upright against the headboard.

His mood had darkened behind his smile. He seemed more like the John of those hours in the tower. He was so hard to read.

‘Sit astride me.’

Yes, he was the John of the tower – all brooding sexual intensity.

His smile turned wicked as he beckoned her with his fingers. Ignoring his belligerence, she smiled back. She was going to save him from these dark elements of his character. She was going to set him free of his chains and help him to stop retreating into this person who denied human feeling.

Her fingers brushed back his hair as she straddled his slender, muscular hips, while the backs of his fingers brushed over her stomach.

She kissed him gently, as her breasts brushed against his chest.

After a while, though, impatience seemed to grasp him and he ended the kiss, his gaze boring into hers. ‘Make love to me. I need you to get the demon from my dream out of my head.’

She really thought he did need it. He looked as though he wanted to escape into her.

She would let him do so. She was here for him always now.

Had he been escaping something when they were in the tower room too?

He had said on the way home, he had lived alone in Egypt.

And at Pembroke Place he had said he felt alone among his family.

Had he turned to her in the summer for companionship?

He had pleaded for her company in London afterwards.

She lifted and impaled herself. His sharp outward breath brushed her cheek.

He did need her.

His hands on her hips helped her move, rocking her forward and up, and then down and back.

Her fingers braced the back of his neck, and her weight was on either shin beside his hips.

He was looking down, watching their joining, absorbed in it.

It felt wonderful to know she could distract him like this, that if he trusted no one else, he was beginning to trust her.

She quickened her movement and took the lead from his hands.

His hands fell to her thighs, letting her have control.

He was relaxing. He looked intoxicated as he lifted his head.

Then his hand was at the back of her head and he kissed her hard, before embracing one breast and bringing it to his mouth.

Her head fell back and she worked to please him, lifting and lowering, seeking to free him.

She still fell before him, and when she did his hands gripped her hips hard, his fingers pressing into her skin, and ended the encounter by lifting and dropping her body with hard aggressive movements until he shattered too.

When she returned to reality, they were panting and clinging to one another, warm and sweaty, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Katherine lifted her head and said in a quiet voice, ‘When Phillip came today he told me I do not value myself, that I think I am unlovable. He blamed it on his mother and mine, because they both let me down. But he said Richard had loved me, and you could too.’

‘I do, Katherine.’ John’s fingers brushed her hair back from her brow. ‘Why would you think your real mother did not love you?’

‘Because she took her own life rather than staying with me. She could not have felt love for me, could she?’ She heard the heartache in her voice, even after all these years.

How could you long for a person you had never known?

But she did. ‘When we did what we did in the tower, and your chamber, I imagined I knew her better, and I could feel a part of her, because I felt what she had felt.’

His eyes narrowed in a look of confusion, but she carried on, needing to get this out, knowing that if she spoke, the emotions would cease their hold on her, as if it were a nightmare like John’s. Perhaps, if she spoke, he would speak too.

‘When I watched you when I was younger and felt an urge to be close to you, I felt it then too. I rejoiced at the fact I had something of her in me. I did not care that Phillip’s mother always told me I would fall like my mother.

I wanted to be sinful.’ His fingers stroked through her hair.

‘Sins of the mothers are like sins of the fathers, she preached to me they will visit the children. I wanted to be like my mother.’

She sighed. ‘Then I fell with child just as she had and I did not understand her at all. How could she have left me alone to face life by myself with no mother or father and no one to love me? I would not have given my child up. I could never do what she did. She did not love me…’

‘She was probably desolate, Katherine,’ he said, ‘and terrified and not thinking clearly. She was probably in a deep black hole and did not know how to climb out of her self-pity. She probably thought you would be better off without her?—’

‘With no one to love me?’

‘With a family who could give you food and clothing and a roof. Things would have been very different for you if she had lived. She would have had to keep working and not many employers would welcome a woman with a naturally born child to keep. You and she would have probably ended up in the workhouse.’

Katherine climbed off him and moved to sit beside him.

His arm came about her and she curled into his side, her hand resting on his chest, while one leg slid over his.

She wished to climb into his security. But he was only secure in this room, tucked away from the servants and society.

She had become a part of his secret-self.

She had not really broken down any of his walls.

His fingers slipped through her hair. ‘There is nothing sinful about you, or your behaviour, Katherine, nothing. Everyone feels attractions, you were young and growing from a girl to a woman, of course you would feel something for boys?—’

‘Not boys,’ she corrected. ‘Just you.’

There was a slight sound of humour in his throat.

‘Then I am very flattered, and a very lucky man to have discovered such devotion, and you cannot think yourself sinful, only in love. I knew it in the summer and I took advantage of it. It was wrong of me. But you saw the world I came from last night and?—’

‘And you knew no better…’

‘I did know better, but I chose to grasp something which was precious. I should have done it honourably, Katherine, I should have courted you from the first?—’

‘A bastard, dairymaid’s daughter?—’

‘A beautiful woman, with a heart of gold who loved me, when I do not deserve to be loved. A woman who I knew was precious from the moment I saw her at my grandfather’s funeral, when I did not even recognise her…

Katherine?’ He realised she was crying. He kissed the crown of her head and wiped her tears away.

‘I love you. If I am honest I probably loved you instantly that day I met you in the road, or perhaps it was that first moment when I saw you at the funeral.’

‘I do believe you love me,’ Katherine said through her sobs, ‘but at the moment I believe it with my head not my heart, John. My heart is too used to being unloved, and insignificant.’

‘You are not insignificant now either, you are a duchess, and is that not a measure of how much I love you?’

She breathed deeply, wondering how he had ended up comforting her, when she had begun comforting him.

‘We are a pair, aren’t we?’ he whispered to the air.

‘Both hungry for love and unsure of it. I think we were meant to be together. I wish I had known it before I went abroad.’ She felt him looking up at the ceiling beyond the canopy of the bed and thought he wished to say something more, but he did not.

Instead his fingers tilted up her chin and then he was kissing her gently, and a moment later he pressed her back down onto the bed and came over her and made love to her once more.

A sense of complete devotion filled her as he did so. She forgot about everything beyond his bed and his room. Here, they were happy.