Page 14 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Fourteen

Nathaniel had never experienced such torment. No opponent in the ring had ever brought him as close to the breaking point as this small woman and her relentless caring.

He’d promised himself he would let her go, he wouldn’t drag her deeper into the shadow world The Berserker existed in, but he was no match for the pure clarity of her desire.

For some unfathomable reason, she wanted the beast she’d seen unleashed in the fight. And, God forgive him, Nathaniel wanted her, too. Beyond measure, beyond reason.

Beyond honor.

When she touched him, when she looked at him with those warm whiskey eyes. When she smiled at him. What did his honor matter in the face of that?

Here, now, with his hands full of the soft roundness of Bess’s hips and his lungs full of the miracle of her scent, the taste of her secret flesh salty sweet on his tongue, Nathaniel knew he would willingly sacrifice his honor at the altar of her desire.

He nuzzled the crisp, damp curls that guarded her entrance. He kissed her there, the slick silk of her folds unfurling beneath the delicate, searching swipe of his tongue. Above him, all around him, she shuddered and gasped and quivered, and the feeling that had eluded him downstairs enveloped him in a heated embrace.

Lost in her, Nathaniel existed only in this moment. His body existed only to bring her pleasure—and to burn.

If he had a hand to spare, he would press it against his unruly cock. But he could not bring himself to let go of her.

Instead, he ignored his own hunger, the fire that had threatened to explode out of control when she’d gone to her knees before him and put her lovely lips around him—no. He couldn’t think of it. Even the memory was too much.

Bess cried out, her hands coming up to cradle his head and hold him against her. Nathaniel realized he’d become frenzied, that he’d buried his face in her softness and was using lips, teeth, tongue as though he would devour her.

But far from shrinking away in fear, Bess squirmed in the chair, unashamedly tilting her hips and pressing at his head to direct his efforts where it felt best for her.

Nathaniel groaned and felt his shoulders go loose and relaxed. He let her use him as she willed, reveling in it, in the way her fingers clenched in his hair and her thighs shook and began to rhythmically tense and release as she climbed to her peak.

He sucked and licked and stroked her through it as her cries took on a frantic edge and her heels drummed against his back. He kept going, sunk in it, drowning in her, as she crested and went stiff under him, her body locked in the rigid throes of release.

Immediately, Nathaniel lightened his touches, nuzzling her softly and bringing her down slowly. But still he kept his face pressed to her warm, fragrant flesh and tried not to think about the moment when she would be done with him.

The floorboards bit into his knees. His back cramped a bit from hunching over. Her skirts were bunched around his head; he could do nothing but breathe her in and pet at her sides and hips and buttocks, whatever he could reach.

He never wanted to move.

If he was gentle while she was over-sensitized, if he did not press her too hard, perhaps he could stay here for longer, or even make her come again—but no, she was stirring, sitting up.

Her hands stroked through his hair, catching a bit on the strings that tied his mask.

She urged him back, away from her, and Nathaniel reluctantly went. Lips buzzing, he licked them with a tongue that felt slightly swollen, catching the last honey-salt traces of her as he sat back on his heels.

His cock was an iron bar between his legs, heavy and aching. He spread his thighs to give it room but otherwise ignored it.

Moonlight slanted across her masked loveliness, turning her English rose beauty into something mysterious. Bess’s indolent sprawl in the chair spoke of intense satisfaction, a tipsy faerie queen surveying her most devoted subject. Her eyes were heavy-lidded; a smile curled up the corners of her lips.

“I have not felt anything like that in…so long,” she breathed, sliding bonelessly from the chair and into Nathaniel’s lap without warning. His caught her instinctively, an unbearably soft, warm armful of woman.

Her shapely buttocks made contact with his erection, sending a jolt of agonizing pleasure through him. He willed it down.

He’d seen a way to salvage a scrap of his good intentions.

If Nathaniel focused on giving her pleasure, while taking none for himself…yes, it would hurt, but that was only pain. He knew well how to withstand that.

He didn’t know if he had the strength to withstand the pleasure of being inside her.

And perhaps by leaving that one bridge uncrossed, he would be able to meet his own gaze in the looking glass tomorrow morning, knowing he’d taken nothing from Bess. That he’d gained nothing through trickery and obfuscation and the decadent rules of The Nemesis, other than his own self-inflicted torment.

With that in mind, Nathaniel gathered Bess close and stood, knees protesting. She laid her head on his shoulder and he carried her to the bed, marveling at the way she didn’t tense at all. As though her body trusted his on a deep, intuitive level.

As though she knew he would never let her fall.

Chest feeling too small to contain his pounding heart, Nathaniel placed her on the bed and stood staring down at her. Bess stretched against the pillows, a sinuous twist of her body that made a cold sweat break out along Nathaniel’s spine.

Could he do this, after all? Be with her, without taking her? Perhaps it would be best if he simply left now, while he still could.

But it was too late for that the moment Bess opened her eyes and smiled up at him. He stood stock still at the side of the mattress, limbs locked, and her lips pursed as she took him in.

“Are you coming to bed?” She smoothed the bedsheets beside her with a quick, nervous gesture.

“I should not.” Nathaniel hated the coarse rasp of his own voice, hated the way he loomed over her, casting his shadow across her face so he could no longer even pretend to guess at her thoughts.

He stepped back, away from the bed, and she sat up.

“Wait! Don’t leave.”

Nathaniel bit back a curse when his feet froze to the floor at her command, as though she truly possessed some sort of fae magic to bend him to her will.

Nothing so fanciful , an inner voice sneered. She only asks you to do what you already wish to, and you are too weak to fight both yourself and her.

“I only mean to say,” she bit her lip, worrying the plump flesh. “Go if you must. I would not prevent you, if you truly wish to leave. But I would rather you stay.”

Weak. He was so weak for her, in the face of her plainspoken sincerity.

“I don’t wish to leave,” he admitted, feeling as though he confessed to murder. He struggled to make sense of it, even to himself. “But even more, I don’t want you to regret anything that happens here tonight.”

“The only thing I could regret about tonight would be missing the chance to share everything that can be shared between a man and a woman. I told you I longed to be your prize. That means I want you to claim me in every way possible.”

Bess held out a hand. Her eyes were calm and clear. “Then I will claim you in return.”

* * *

He looked so torn, the poor man. Bess had no desire to torment him. She almost opened her mouth to release him from it, but she had felt the leashed ferocity of his hunger. She knew, beyond a doubt, that he wanted her.

All that remained was to convince him to take what he wanted.

Bess wondered how he usually went about his affairs, for there must have been affairs. The Duke of Ashbourn was no monk—though there was about him a certain ascetic tendency to deny himself.

She had noticed it before. He would escort Lucy to the confectioner’s for ices, but would not partake. He did not overindulge in wine or spirits. He did not play cards or race horses, and he danced only for the sake of propriety.

The one time she was sure she’d seen him enjoy himself had been at a musical evening thrown in honor of a violinist on tour from Italy. Amidst the soaring, throbbing notes of a Bach sonata, Bess had felt a wild and unnamed emotion grip her by the throat.

She’d glanced across Lucy and found Nathaniel listening with every part of his being. Extraordinary eyes closed, face tilted up, the sharp edges of his rigid features somehow softened by his attention to the musician.

But there again, while he so clearly loved music, he did not play.

He must have had women. He must have had affairs, or a mistress, as all men of his station did. Though Bess did not see when he would have the time.

All he did was work. Even his social engagements were work, in service of the goals he pursued in the House of Lords and his business concerns.

In fact, his only recreational activity appeared to be a brutal underground fight club that routinely left him battered and bruised.

Well, Bess refused to be another way for Nathaniel to deny himself.

To punish himself.

She couldn’t see the point of it. Life had taught her to seize enjoyment and happiness when offered, and to wring every drop of joy from them that she could. Everything from the contentment to be found in small, mundane things like the daily miracle of transforming flour, water, salt, and yeast into bread…to the life-altering, earth-shaking pleasure he’d given her in that chair earlier.

So she held out her hand to him, and where he hesitated, Bess did not.

Keeping one hand outstretched and her eyes on his, she lifted the other hand to the tie closure of her dress at the nape of her neck. One swift pull there and another at the back of her waist, and the bodice of her serviceable old gray dress loosened and drooped from her shoulders.

He closed his eyes for a moment as though the sight gave him pain, but when he opened his eyes again all she saw there was a determination that burned away any hesitancy. He strode the few steps back to her side and clasped her hand, drawing her to him even as he knelt beside her on the bed.

Flushed with success and the titillating brush of air across her bared shoulders, Bess tilted her head up for a kiss.

Deep and drugging, he gave her the taste of herself with every stroke of his tongue. Bess moaned into it and kept undressing, shoving at her gown and kicking it off the bed until she was in nothing but her chemise and drawers.

Nathaniel swept his hands from where they’d been cupping her jaw all the way down her sides, burning through the thin lawn of her underthings.

Grasping the fabric in great bunches, he pulled the crumpled lawn up and over her head, baring her from the waist up.

She gasped, hands fisting at her sides. Bess resisted a contrary urge to cover herself, to turn away from his heated gaze.

It had been a long time for this, too, but she wanted it. She wanted to be seen.

She wanted him to see her.

So she let him look his fill, lying back in the candlelight and feeling the peaks of her breasts tighten in the cool air as though pouting for his mouth.

Bess didn’t often think much about her body, or at least not about the way it looked. It was strong, honed with hard work and long hours in a kitchen. She wasn’t especially buxom. Her curves were not abundant.

But just as she was beginning to wonder if she ought to feel self-conscious, he rasped, “You are perfect.”

“Now you,” she urged, fingering the trailing hem of his voluminous white shirt. Bess peered up at him for permission. When he didn’t make a move to stop her, she got up to her knees and drew the shirt slowly over his head.

She loved the solid slabs of his pectoral muscles, the ridges of his abdomen, the lean line of his waist. He fair took her breath away.

“You’re like something out of a storybook,” she managed.

“I’m no hero.”

Bess had to concede the point. With his brown hair falling over the leather mask as they knelt up facing each other, he looked far more like a villain.

“Good,” she said. “I’m looking for someone to ravish me, and one of those courtly heroes from the old stories could never do the job properly. I don’t want a hero. I want you.”

Something flashed through his quicksilver eyes, but Bess forgot about it in the next moment because he finally—finally!—reached out and pulled her into his arms.

Miles of hot skin, bare and tempting, coarse hair rasping against her nipples and driving her out of her mind.

His arms were steel bands around her. She thought he would kiss her, and he did—but not her mouth. With a rough noise, he bent his head to the crook of her neck and sucked a hot, insistent kiss into the sensitive skin there.

Bess heard her own voice, high and thready, though she had no awareness of crying out. All she could feel was the rub of his thick thighs against hers, the brand of his erect manhood jabbing into the softness of her belly, the silk of his hair slipping through her fingers as she pressed his head to her throat and writhed into that endless kiss.

“You’re marking me,” she gasped, staring sightlessly up at the canopy draping the four-poster bed.

Nathaniel’s mouth left the throbbing, raw patch he’d created only to growl, “Claiming you.”

Then he sealed his lips at the juncture of her neck and shoulder once more.

It was as though a cord had been tied between that spot and the empty, wet core of her. Bess’s thighs clenched with every strong pull Nathaniel took. It felt wonderful and awful, overwhelming in the best of ways; she thought it would drive her mad.

Mindless, without thought or plan, Bess stretched her hand down between her own legs. She needed to focus the sensation, give all of the whimpering hunger he stirred up somewhere to go, and she nearly wept when he caught her wrist and stopped her before she could.

“Anything you need, I’ll give it to you.”

The casual possessiveness of the words undid her. Bess shuddered and buried her face in his chest, her hips hitching uncertainly.

“I need,” she breathed out. “I need…more.”

“Anything,” he promised darkly.

He let go of her wrist. Bess looked down to see two of those thick, rough fingers spear through the slit in her wet drawers to find her sex. She cried out, clutching at his sides, longing for his touch but unable to take any teasing when she felt like this.

As if he knew, as if they’d been lovers for years and knew each other’s bodies inside and out, Nathaniel immediately sank the two fingers inside her.

The stretch at her entrance sizzled and sparked, a delicious sting that he soothed with the pad of his thumb against the tiny bundle of nerves at the top of her cleft.

He pumped his fingers smoothly, gliding effortless and slick and hot, while his thumb rubbed delicate, glancing touches first to one side of her clitoris, then the other. All her bones went to liquid, her muscles to jelly. Bess swayed on her knees and clutched at his shoulders, but he was already lowering her down to the bed.

She felt his scratchy chin at her collarbone, then the tip of his aquiline nose, then the smooth edge of his leather mask as he laid a trail of kisses down her sternum and across the tops of her breasts.

One hand still working between her thighs, the other holding himself suspended over her so as not to crush her with his bulk, Nathaniel took her nipple between his lips with shocking delicacy. He rolled it on his tongue like a ripe raspberry.

When he began to suckle her there as though he was claiming this part of her too, while rubbing rhythmically at her swollen clitoris, Bess choked on a scream and came. Ripples of pleasure rolled through her, tossing her about like a twig caught in a rushing stream.

Before she could begin to sort herself out, even as she trembled with the aftershocks, Bess felt something large, thick, and blunt replace those devilish fingers at her opening.

She’d had the perfectly rounded head of his prick in her mouth for naught but a few moments, yet she recognized it at once. Her legs fell further apart in intuitive abandon.

“Yes,” she moaned in invitation, reaching up to him with both arms, aware in the back of her mind that Nathaniel had needed coaxing and assurances all along the way that she knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was him.

Fortunately, the masked duke appeared to have lost all hesitancy. In one smooth motion, he lifted her left leg onto his shoulder, mouthed a hot kiss through the lawn of her drawers because she was still wearing her bloody drawers , and surged up to make a single, firm, gliding push into her body.

Splayed open beneath him, filled and invaded and surrounded by him, Bess lost her vision. She lost her voice. She lost her breath.

There was no room for anything inside her but him.

Bess forced her eyes open to find him staring down at her with an intensity that made her shiver. Which tensed her muscles, which clenched around the hard, hot length of him and made her shiver again.

“You feel,” she tried to speak, shaking her head back and forth upon the pillow. “It’s so much.”

“You’re doing so well,” he rumbled, in a way he likely meant to be soothing. “There’s only a little more. Can you take it?”

“There’s more?” It would’ve been a shriek had she the lung capacity for it. To Bess’s dismay, his teeth bared and he started to draw out of her.

Dropping her leg to wrap around his waist, she locked her ankles at the small of his back and said, “Where are you going? I’ll have the rest, please.”

He groaned. With infinite care, Nathaniel leaned forward to catch her lips in a searing kiss as his hips thrust inexorably, immensely, deeper.

She felt him in her throat.

Bess might have clawed at his back a little bit; she really couldn’t say. Because then he began to move.

Hard little nudges of his hips that rubbed at a spot inside her that made stars burst across the backs of Bess’s eyelids. Short, rhythmic pulses of sensation that built and built, stirring her up inside and exhorting her to meet his body thrust for thrust until they moved in perfect harmony.

Fireworks sparked through her belly, her entire lower body seizing up as his thrusts grew longer and rougher. They broke the kiss, tearing their mouths away to gasp for breath, and Bess stared up at the knife edge of his jaw and the glitter of his ravenous eyes.

He twisted his hips savagely and she broke apart, an explosion of light in the dark that went on and on even after he pulled out and knelt up over her once more. He held the angry red rod of his cock in a punishing grip, shuddering with unspent need.

Winded and sated, Bess met his anguished gaze and tilted her chin up invitingly. “Anything I wanted, you said. Give it to me. Now.”

His mouth opened but no sound emerged as his hand stripped his cock once, twice, and then jet after jet of his spend covered her breasts and collarbone. Bess felt it almost as another aftershock, her soft, swollen core clenching on nothing but the satisfaction of having brought him to release.

Perhaps it was perverse, but she found she rather liked having the hot, sticky proof of it adorning her skin.

Bess smiled and closed her eyes, luxuriating in her body. She felt alive .

Expecting at any moment to feel him crashing to the bed beside her, instead she felt the straw ticking of the mattress shift as he climbed off it.

Before she could protest, he was back on the bed and using one of the dampened linen cloths to gently wipe the evidence of their passion from her chest.

Her heart swelled at the simple caretaking. Raising herself up on one elbow, she caught his wrist to keep him from leaving the bed again.

“Is the ‘anything’ rule still in effect?” she murmured, lowering her eyelashes in what felt like a parody of shyness after all they’d just done together. “Because I would like to be held.”

He went perfectly motionless, half turned toward her. He’d refastened his breeches but moonlight still limned the long line of his bare shoulders in silver.

Behind the mask, his expression was unreadable once more. A sliver of anxiety pierced the bubble of Bess’s satiated languor, but it didn’t have a chance to do serious damage because he came slowly back up the bed to lie stiffly against the pillows beside her.

Unsure whether to laugh or cry at this man’s seeming inability to cuddle, Bess patiently lifted the muscular arm closest to her and snugged under it to lay her head on his chest. Beneath her cheek, his rigid muscles slowly, slowly relaxed.

Bess smiled. It felt like another, much softer swell of satisfaction to get him to rest peacefully, even for a moment. Not wanting to disturb him, she stayed as still as she could and hoped that perhaps he had even dropped off to sleep.

She was not far from sleep herself, the steady drumbeat of his heart and the exhaustion in her limbs lulling her down.

What you came to London for , she mused drowsily. Finally got it. Found you a scoundrel and got ravished. Now what?

Now, nothing. What happened here tonight changed nothing in their real lives. This was only an interlude, a fantasy sprung to life, and like all dreams it would vanish in the bright light of day.

And if that made her heart squeeze tight in her chest? If the having of him for a night had only made her want more?

Well, Bess had been brought up to be practical. She, of all people, knew that despite the heated words of a passionate masked duke on a never-to-be-forgotten night…what she wanted did not matter at all.

In his arms, Bess fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.

She woke alone.

She got dressed by herself in the cold gray dawn and stole back to Ashbourn House to let herself in by the servants’ entrance before anyone but the chambermaids were up and about.

Bess knew she shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d left her in the night, but somehow, she was.

At least she’d had her night of passion, she reminded herself as she slipped into her room unobserved and climbed back into bed for another few hours of restless sleep.

One night to remember. That was all it could ever be, and more than most women got.

You will be grateful for this night , Bess told herself fiercely. And stop wanting more .