Page 57 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke (The Marlow Family Secrets #6)

John walked into the drawing room an hour later.

Edward had sent John’s brothers up to bed after a quarter-hour.

Once they had gone the conversation had turned to Wareham.

Then they lost track of time and stayed at the table longer than normal.

Meaning John felt as though he had let Katherine down a fifth time.

He was struck by a domestic tableau as he entered.

Katherine was sitting at his grandmother’s pianoforte. Her fingers running across the keys with significant ease. He had not known Kate could play.

John hated the damn thing. He had learned to play that instrument as a child.

He stopped just inside the room, motionless, unable to move as both Phillip and his father walked past. It was as though the sound flipped him back into the terror of his dreams. The wash of childhood insecurity swept through his veins, confusing his rational mind.

What the hell is happening to me? He forced himself to walk on.

I am not a snivelling child now. For God’s sake, stop this.

Forcing his bad memories away, he crossed the room and sat beside Katherine on the stool, his eyes following the movement of her fingers.

She had a very real skill. He hadn’t known she played so well. But even so, the pleasant sound grated on his nerves like fingernails running down a blackboard.

He looked up, searched for the notes she played on the sheet music, and then followed them across the lines. When he turned the page for her, his fingers were shaking.

He tried to force himself to like the music but it hinted at so many days he had been alone in this house with his grandparents, not understanding how he fitted into the family.

Katherine was absorbed in the music, reading it from the page and transporting it through her fingers into notes. Mary and his parents laughed at something Phillip had said. John felt his muscles contract.

He forced himself to keep breathing and turned the page again. But the tremor in his hands had increased. He was unravelling at the seams.

‘Why do you not you sing for us, John?’ Mary encouraged, as Katherine’s piece drew to its conclusion with a complex flourish she mastered easily.

His fingers fell away from the music to his thigh and he felt an inner panic swamp him.

He cursed violently in his head using every swear word he knew.

This was ridiculous. His rational thought knew that.

But the problem was there was this other part of him that was irrational and tied up with the damned dream from his childhood.

He had always thought once he knew where his mother was, the dream would pass on and these feelings of weakness, inability and unworthiness with it.

But no. Life was not to be as kind to him as that.

‘Yes, John,’ Katherine said, her fingers resting on his thigh.

He gritted his teeth and stood. ‘Forgive me. There are some papers I ought to review. Excuse me.’ His gaze reached to his parents and Mary. Then he glanced at Katherine and nodded, before looking at Phillip. ‘Phillip.’

Phillip nodded and John left the room, escaping into privacy where he could nurse his madness in secret.

Katherine felt bewildered as she watched John leave. He had looked upset.

The more time she spent with John it seemed the less she understood him.

She wondered whether to go after him.

‘I should be on my way,’ Phillip said.

He stood, and Mary and John’s parents rose in response.

Katherine stood to say goodnight too.

‘John is such a killjoy,’ Mary stated. ‘He will never sing, and his voice is the best of us all.’

‘Mary,’ John’s mother admonished, pressing her fingers to her daughter’s arm to silence her. There was something wrong. His mother knew it too.

Phillip came across to Katherine and took her hands, to say goodbye.

‘I will walk downstairs with you. I am glad you came,’ she said, as they left the room.

‘Thank John for inviting me.’

She nodded. Then as they walked along the hall she asked, ‘Why does John dislike singing so much?’

‘It is not my place to say. Ask John.’

‘But you know?’

‘Not really. I only know pieces of his past that would make it likely. I doubt Mary knows the history of it at all, she is so much younger than John.’

There was a clue in his words. John’s dislike must stem from his childhood.

She accompanied Phillip downstairs but said nothing else as her mind was too focused on how to open a conversation with John.

* * *

John sat at his desk in his private sitting room, his elbows on the solid wood and his head in his hands as he fought the monster of emotion roaring in his head. His head was spinning in a dark pit of pain.

He was not a child any more, and it should not matter. But it did. The memories and the ensuing pain were unbearable. It was as though he was ten years old again, driving away with his grandfather in that damn coach and leaving his mother and all happiness behind.

Pull yourself together .

He could not.

As a small boy, he remembered craving some sign, some slight signal of connection or approval, and gaining none.

The images in his head slipped to the horde of his younger brothers and sisters with whom he could achieve no mental or emotional connection.

What of his child?

A bitter lancing pain pierced his chest and he sat back in despair.

Katherine stood at the door to the room. He had thoughtlessly left the door open. She was watching him, wide-eyed and hesitant.

It was dark, no candles burned. But silver moonlight seeped through the curtains, bleaching the room to white and black. Shadow and light. That was himself and Katherine. She was the light.

She walked into the room. ‘What is it, John? What is wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ He would not humiliate himself by admitting to a pathetic childish weakness.

‘It is not nothing now, any more than it was nothing last night when you woke.’

His lips twisted in a distasteful expression yet the knot of anxiety was already easing within him. He shrugged. ‘Nothing important…’ I love this woman . The grace of her movements, the pitch of her voice and her understated beauty were all a balm to his battered, jaded soul.

‘No?’ Her eyes were dark in the lowlight.

She stopped before him, her hands braced his cheeks and she leaned and kissed him.

She had been angry earlier, he had realised that over dinner when she had barely looked his way. She had concealed it for some reason. But her anger was justified.

His hands held her hips and he met her gaze. ‘I am sorry about this morning.’

‘You are becoming very good at saying sorry, John, but you cannot really be sorry if you repeat what you have already apologised for.’ She was right of course but he was not ready to discuss the turbulence inside him, not with her nor anyone.

Her thumbs brushed across his cheekbones and his gaze fell to her stomach. He rested his cheek against where their child grew – another poor infant who would be hungry for love.

Her fingers slid through John’s hair and his breath fractured. He wished he could cry but of course such sentimentality had been physically beaten out of him a long time ago.

‘John?’

He shook his head, he did not want to speak. ‘Just love me, Katherine.’ His words were brisk and harsh.

Her fingers stroked through his hair as he kissed her stomach through the fabric of her gown and his hands slipped to her buttocks. He could smell her sex through the layers of cloth. She was aroused already. ‘Undo your dress,’ he whispered, looking up and meeting her gaze.

His hands had begun working up her skirt.

Between orders and assistance, he rapidly stripped her while he only removed his evening coat.

At the last he removed her shoes and stockings as her feet rested on his thighs and her hands held his shoulders.

When she was fully naked, he looked up and met her gaze again, smiling.

One bare foot still rested on his thigh.

His fingers ran upwards and over her knee then they slipped under her thigh and ran along the inner surface.

When he reached her juncture, his thumb pressed against her while his fingers entered and began teasing her senses.

She somehow knew he needed to play master, as he had in the tower, and she was letting him. He smiled, because if she allowed it, it meant she was mastering him, and not the other way about.

His fingers worked with more determination, claiming all of her attention. Her eyes closed and then her head fell back and she was panting. He watched her, lost in her as she was lost in what he did.

When her end came, he used his mouth and tasted her and once he was satisfied he stood and lifted her onto the desk, bid her undo his flap and took her like that, he dressed, she naked, driving into her as she sat on the hard desk and clung to him.

Katherine knew he was escaping into her again. She relished him turning to her for comfort, even in this form. It was a pattern she now recognised. It was a time to give – and receive.

His hands braced her hips and the force of his thrusts had her spinning into ecstasy, making her feel dizzy and disorientated.

Her fingers laced at his nape as the torrent of emotions washed over her, and she bit her lip, holding back the cries of pleasure and sighs which ached to be free of her throat, while he drove her senses mad. Pleasure, joy, sang, humming, through every nerve.

There was an aggressiveness to his claiming, as there had been in the tower room the second time. His love was violent and desperate, but it was love. She really did not doubt it, not at all any more.

She broke again and he fell with her, his muscle locking as his seed spilled into her. He kissed her hair, her brow. She stroked his head and neck.

He did not move but she heard his breath suddenly crack. Her hand braced his cheek and she felt the damp line of a tear. ‘John…’

Instantly he withdrew and turned away, securing his flap, and then his shirt sleeve swiped across his face.

When he turned back there was no sign of emotion. He had shut her out again and set up his armour between his feelings and her.

She sensed he wished to let her in, but did not know how.

She felt as though they were drifting alone in a small boat, on a desolate sea.

‘Shall we go to bed?’

She nodded, then found herself caught up in his arms, her clothing left strewn about the sitting room for the servants to find and pick up.

Once he’d set her on the bed he undressed in silence, intermittently glancing at her as she moved beneath the covers. He loves me , she thought, watching him. He does love me. Alone in his rooms everything felt right.

He slid beneath the covers, then reached for something on his side of the bed. ‘I thought we could look at this.’ It was his sketchbook. ‘I will explain my drawings to you. Perhaps one day I will take you there. But not via Europe, that continent holds too many ghosts for me.’

Had it been such ghosts haunting him last night and this evening? His grandfather had been a hurricane force in Ashford. She supposed growing up as his heir must have been difficult.

She moved closer, not asking any questions, but letting him speak.