Page 16 of Where Have All the Scoundrels Gone (Dukes in Disguise #2)

Chapter Sixteen

She came back.

He’d planned to speak to her, to talk and to listen and to find out what she wanted from this, from him—but he was off the bed and halfway across the room to her before he could blink.

Bess moved just as quickly, all but crashing into his arms, and then her mouth was under his and her hands were on the back of his neck and sliding into his hair and Nathaniel forgot what he’d meant to say.

He forgot his own name. He forgot everything but her.

The taste of her lips, dark and sweet like tea and sugared shortbread. The velvet rub of her tongue. The breathy sounds she made when he clutched her greedily close and took her mouth the way he wanted to take all of her. Everything she was and everything she had.

Wound tight and sprung loose by days of longing, Nathaniel caressed down the smooth line of her back all the way to the perfect, round globes of her bottom, and lifted her up. Bess squeaked into his mouth, but she never stopped kissing him—if anything, she licked into his mouth with an increased fervor that made Nathaniel feel crazed with lust.

He staggered the few steps to press her back against the wall, letting it take enough of her weight to get one hand between them and fumble beneath her skirts.

An urgent, exploratory press of his fingers found her already slick with need, swollen and soft. Bess panted and cried out, turning her face to his cheek so that her hot, sweet breath washed over him like a benediction.

“Can I?” he choked out.

“If you don’t,” she gasped, “I think I’ll die.”

She wrapped her legs around his hips, trusting him to hold her up, and Nathaniel had his cock out and notched against her hot, melting core in an instant. He filled his hands with her arse, filled his lungs with her shattered, heaving breaths, and sank into her.

The position forced him deep, and they both threw their heads back and clung to one another in something like shock at the first moment of penetration.

It’s too much , Nathaniel thought, a thread of panic stitching through the bliss, but no—Bess’s internal muscles were tightening and releasing, massaging his length in a sensual rhythm that told him it felt as good to her as it did to him.

Clawing back his wits, Nathaniel steadied his stance and braced enough to lift her along the length of his cock until only the very tip remained inside her.

Then he let her slide back down, punching an ecstatic cry from her throat and prompting her to enfold him tightly in her arms.

He held still, the sensations threatening to overwhelm him. His stomach muscles burned; his thighs flexed. His arms felt imbued with the strength of Hercules, as though he could hold her to him forever and never tire of the perfect weight of her.

Her eyes fluttered and she dropped her chin so that they were practically nose to nose. Nathaniel knew the thick leather mask shadowed his damnably unusual eyes, muddying their color to an indistinct gray.

Still, part of him quailed to have her face so near, her searching gaze like a beacon.

He closed his eyes and turned his face away, almost without thought, but a slim-fingered hand at his cheek brought him round until they were nose to nose once more.

Bess stared directly into his eyes and whispered, “Don’t hold back.”

Then she leaned in and nipped his lower lip before kissing him like she needed his mouth to live.

And Nathaniel was gone. His hips shoved up, again and again, while the clasp of her legs around his waist brought her down over him, hard and deep and so good he thought he would lose whatever was left of his mind.

Bess plundered his mouth and scratched her short fingernails through his hair and across his shoulders, taking what she wanted without apology or restraint.

They struggled together, striving toward a peak that neither could reach alone. He worked her on his cock and she shook and sobbed and fell apart in his arms. Nathaniel steeled himself to pull out, but Bess lifted her head and gave him a heavy-lidded smile.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I have to,” he ground out. “I can’t risk it.”

A bittersweet twist pinched one corner of her smile, but Bess circled her hips luxuriously against the raging hardness she’d clamped inside her by tightening her legs around his hips.

Nathaniel swallowed a groan of divine agony.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve taken care of it. Stay right where you are, please, and finish.”

Nathaniel was immobile, frozen between the frenzied urge to do as she said and the absolute wall of denial he hit when he thought about ruining her life with an unplanned pregnancy.

No, he could not risk her, and he opened his mouth to tell her so, but Bess stopped him with a kiss.

“I’m a woman of the world,” she told him with a lofty air that couldn’t quite hide the glint of self-directed amusement in her eyes. “Or at least, I know a woman of the world, and between us, I promise you, I am taken care of. There will be no unwanted consequences of this night, or any other night we spend together.”

Any other night.

She meant to have him again.

Nathaniel broke. He pounded into her, the pleasure so huge and intense it felt like a separate entity outside his body.

Her eyes went wide. He shoved gracelessly deep, his entire body rigid as he emptied himself into her and felt the shivery spasms of her delight through the endless pulses of his climax.

When it was done, aside from the odd quake of an aftershock, Nathaniel’s legs gave out. Turning so his own back was to the wall, he slid to the floor, holding her close and safe until she was perched in his lap.

They hadn’t managed to remove even one article of clothing.

He was still inside her.

“That was…not what I expected,” she admitted on a breathless laugh.

Nathaniel dropped his forehead to her shoulder. He wanted to say something—something clever or romantic or…he didn’t even know. But no words came to him. The combination of the intensely technical fight and the powerfully explosive coupling had robbed him of any articulacy he normally possessed.

“Are you all right?” she asked. The caring in her low voice made Nathaniel’s hands clench in the fabric of her dress. “It looked like he barely touched you, but I confess I was somewhat…distracted, watching the fight.”

“I’m unhurt.” He hesitated, his throat clicking as he swallowed. “But you may check me over if you wish.”

Her hands stroked his hair, sending shivers down his spine. His prick, mindless beast that it was, had never softened completely. At her touch, and the gentle hum of her agreement, it began to firm and throb.

Her hips shifted when she felt it. Something very like shame tightened Nathaniel’s stomach.

He was too much, he ought to leave her be—but Bess, wonder that she was, pulled back far enough to peek up at him through her lashes.

“Really? Again?” she asked, surprised and pleased.

Nathaniel didn’t know how to tell her that he wanted her all the time, at every moment of the day and night, whether he’d had her days ago or mere seconds.

He let his body answer for him, curling his hips up to nudge into her. She sighed into it and moved with him, slow and sensual now after their first headlong rush to climax.

Their second coming together was easier but no less annihilating than the first.

When she shivered and cried out, the tight clasp of her muscles milking him and her hands clutching at his shoulders, Nathaniel let himself follow her with a groan that felt as though it turned him inside out.

They collapsed together, dazed and drained. Nathaniel honestly didn’t know if he had the strength to move them to the bed. She seemed in no hurry to go anywhere, curled in his lap like a contented kitten.

Perhaps they would simply stay there, on the floor of this shabby bedchamber above an illicit bareknuckle boxing ring. Forever.

It was a disconcertingly appealing thought.

“God, I needed that,” she sighed into his neck, then stiffened slightly.

Nathaniel wanted to hold her more tightly; instead, he loosened his grasp in case she wanted to disentangle herself from him.

But she made no move to stand up. “I suppose that sounds dreadful.”

“No.” He’d needed it, too.

“It’s been a long time for me, you see,” she explained. “A long time since I’ve been touched like that. And if I’m being honest, which I might as well be since if you can’t be honest with a masked stranger who’s still inside you, who can you be honest with? I’ve never been touched...quite like this.”

Oh no. Nathaniel liked hearing that far too much. He liked the coy flirt of her tone and the trusting, confiding weight of her against his chest. And he damned well loved the knowledge that he’d made her feel something new. Something more.

It was only fair. She’d made him feel far more than he wished, too.

“It’s exactly what I came to London, hoping to find,” she went on, blithely unaware that she was systematically dismantling Nathaniel’s defenses with every word. “And here you are.”

Nathaniel’s attention snagged. He’d asked her once why she’d come to London. She hadn’t wanted to answer him then. This was why?

“You came to London to take a lover.”

He couldn’t see her blush with the way she’d tucked her head into the crook of his neck, but he could practically feel its heat. “To have an adventure. To feel alive, to feel like a desirable woman, to be seen—yes, to take a lover.”

Nathaniel frowned. The word lover conjured up images of the romantic heroes of literature and poetry. Romeo, Abelard, Childe Harold. Men who spouted poetry about their feelings easily and often, wooing their beloveds with soft touches and softer words.

That was not Nathaniel.

But he had been silent too long. She pushed herself up, struggling to get her feet under her. Nathaniel lifted a hand to help her with a sinking sensation in his midsection.

“I daresay you’re shocked, that a woman would admit to having desires like those.” She would not look at him, instead busying herself with righting her disheveled clothing. “But I’m not ashamed. Women have bodies as well as hearts and minds. Why should we deny ourselves the pleasures of the body?”

“You shouldn’t,” he agreed, standing and tucking himself away. “You shouldn’t deny yourself, nor should you be ashamed.”

“What a very progressive attitude.” Her eyes were wide behind the mask when they met his at last. Then she gave a rueful laugh. “Though I suppose it would be awfully self-defeating, as well as hypocritical, of you to say otherwise at this moment.”

He shrugged, his shoulders twinging and reminding him he’d fought a worthy opponent downstairs not an hour ago.

“This enlightened response of yours is limited to me, I take it?” she asked, with a lightness he did not trust. He sensed a trap. “For my type of woman, at best. I daresay if you had a sister, you would not be encouraging her to throw shame to the winds.”

Nathaniel fought to show nothing, either in his masked expression or in the tensing of his body. “You’re right. For a young, untried innocent, I could not be as permissive.”

“But we all start out young and untried, don’t we? I wonder, when does it become all right to let go of shame and embrace our pleasures?”

Frustrated, he ran a hand through his hair. It was bait and he knew it, but he couldn’t see how to avoid it. “After marriage, I suppose.”

“Ah, but what if one has no inclination, or no opportunity to marry?” She smoothed her skirts and looked at him with an oddly defiant tilt to her chin. “Take me, for an example. I have never been married.”

Nathaniel felt as though he’d taken a hit to the head from one of Gentleman Percy’s fists. “You’re not…married? Or a widow?”

She shrugged. “There was a boy, once, when I was very young. He died before we could wed. And since then, I have been…very alone.”

Everything Nathaniel thought he knew about Bess Pickford was hastily rearranging itself in his head.

Not a widow, never married. But going by Mrs. Pickford as his sister’s chaperone—supposedly a distant relative of his stepmother’s? Or was that also false? Did Lucy know?

Who was Bess Pickford?

It did not escape him that she was only confessing this much because she had no idea who he was either. God, what a tangle.

She was watching him, and though she bit her lip, the line of her shoulders had loosened as though she’d set down a heavy burden.

A lie. A secret she hadn’t wanted to keep—and Nathaniel could understand why. He was honest enough to admit that if he’d known this about her that first day on the riverbank, he would have judged her harshly. He would never have listened to her appeal on Lucy’s behalf. He would never have welcomed Bess into his home.

The knowledge of what he would have missed sat cold and heavy as lead in his stomach.

He had to say something. Something that would not give away the fact that he knew her in any other context—that he was, in fact, the Duke of Ashbourn.

Nathaniel didn’t question why he was so determined to maintain his anonymity. All he was certain of was that he wasn’t ready to give this up. Not yet.

“You should not have to be alone,” he told her. It was the truest thing he knew.

“We’re all alone, in a way.” Her smile was sad. It tore at Nathaniel’s chest. “Except for these brief moments of connection.”

“Not you.” Nathaniel shook his head. He didn’t want that for her. “You should have everything you want.”

A home, a husband, a family, a life. Love.

It killed him that she didn’t already have those things; that he couldn’t be the one to give them to her.

Why was she so alone? What in God’s name was the matter with all the men in Wiltshire?

“Mmm. Everything I want. That was your promise to me, was it not?” Her smile brightened, her brown eyes glinting with the memory of the last time they’d been together in this room. “Anyway, I have all that I need. Perhaps you won’t believe it, as I have been so demanding with you, but outside of this room? My friends would all say I’m a very contented person.”

He watched her as she paced restlessly about the room, tidying as she went without seeming to realize she was doing it. Nathaniel thought about the way she continually put aside her own feelings to help Lucy.

He remembered the first time he’d seen Bess, on her knees in the mud holding a young stranger’s blood inside his body with her own hands.

She’d even cared for Nathaniel when he was wounded—and attempted to care for the man she knew as The Berserker when that same wound reopened.

“Just because you don’t ask for much,” he said slowly, “that doesn’t mean you’re happy. It only means no one is taking care of you.”

* * *

Bess felt winded. “How could you possibly know that? You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what I look like beneath this mask. You don’t even know my name.”

That was why she’d told him about her past, about her desires—and the relief of being honest was still flooding through her.

Even if it was a shabby, stilted, sideways sort of honesty, it still felt good.

But then he had to go and devastate her by seeing her far more clearly than she’d intended.

“Give me a name to call you, then,” he said roughly.

She set down the damp linen she’d been absently folding, aligning it beside the basin and pitcher. He’d washed before she came up, while she’d been learning how to use the sponge Madame Leda provided her. So that she could take all of him inside her, without fear or consequences.

Shivering, Bess spoke to the scarred wood of the table. “You could call me…Elizabeth.”

It was a very common name, she told herself, heart racing. It wouldn’t be enough to give her away.

“A regal name,” he said quietly. “Fit for a queen. It suits you.”

She snorted, reassured. “If you think so, then you truly don’t know me at all.”

Moving slowly, as though giving her time to retreat, he prowled close enough to knuckle under her chin and tilt her head up to meet his intent stare.

“Perhaps I don’t know you.” His voice was so deep, deeper than the ocean. “But I see you. Elizabeth.”

The sound of her full name on his lips made Bess sway toward him. Against all odds and all sense, she thought perhaps he did see her. It was as excruciating as it was exhilarating.

She hadn’t planned to pick a fight about a woman’s right to sexual freedom, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from poking and prodding the conversation to a point where she could confess at least a partial truth about her past.

Bess was not built for secrets and lies. She wanted, more than anything, to tell Nathaniel the truth. And here, now, wearing this mask, she could finally be honest with him in a way she’d never be able to if he knew her identity. The freedom of it was intoxicating.

So she said, “I want to stay here tonight. With you. Will you stay?”

Eyes blazing, he seized her unceremoniously and carried her to the bed. He laid her down and followed her to the mattress, stretching the length of their bodies to press together and tangling their legs. “Yes. I’ll stay.”

Bess, who had gripped his shirt tightly in surprise when he lifted her off her feet, used that grip now to pull the garment over his head. “And you’ll take off all your clothes this time.”

One corner of his mouth pulled up, irresistibly. “And yours.”

Proving himself a man of action, Nathaniel proceeded to efficiently evict every article of clothing from the bed, leaving them clad in nothing but moonlight and masks.

Though he’d seen her body before, Bess thought briefly again about being abashed or embarrassed—her breasts were no more than middling sized, her arms more muscular than any willowy lady’s. There was a sturdiness to Bess that served her well in life but was perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing in the current mode.

But the look in his eyes as they passed over the slight swell of her stomach. The aching reverence in his fingertips as he traced a circle around the taut, pink bud of her left nipple. The unmistakable, hot pressure of his prick thickening and lengthening against the outside of her thigh.

Bess couldn’t doubt that he saw her as she was and wanted her anyway.

“What should I call you? I can’t call you ‘Berserker,’” she said, allowing her hands to move as they wished, caressing his sides and those broad shoulders, the strong hollows of his throat. She felt it when he swallowed against the gentle stroke of her thumbs.

“Ridiculous name. I should never have agreed to it.”

“I don’t know.” Bess cupped his cheeks, letting her thumbs slide along the bottom edge of his mask where it molded to his aristocratic cheekbones. “There is something of the Norse raider about you. And the way you fight…”

His mouth turned down a little. “I know you don’t…like it. When I fight.”

“I don’t like it when you’re hurt,” she corrected, seeking the best way to put her feelings into words. “And I don’t like the way the rest of the crowd reacts, as if it’s pure spectacle and not two human beings in the ring. Their bloodlust robs you—and them—of humanity, I think.”

He shifted as though uncomfortable, and she let him go. Lying beside her, sharing a pillow and staring up at the canopy over the bed, he said, “I don’t feel entirely human in the ring. That’s what I like about it.”

And there he stopped. Bess fought the urge to turn on her side to search his face. From the way he reacted when she studied him closely, she could tell it made him uncomfortable.

He wears a mask , she told herself with a wry smile. What was your first hint that this man prefers not to be fully known?

“You don’t have to tell me,” she finally said, relenting. “If you don’t wish to. But I would like to understand.”

Beside her, his chest rose and fell with a deep breath. “Unlike you, no one in my life would ever describe me as contented. Not even when I was a child.”

Now she had to look at him. Bess turned her head on the pillow. Candlelight flickered over his profile, accentuating his hawkish nose and the strong lines of his jaw. The incongruously plush softness of his lower lip, the sharp Cupid’s bow curve of the upper.

“My nursemaid used to scold me that I wanted too much—ironic, considering the lofty heights she aspired to.”

Bess had to fight not to jolt at the mention of Henrietta, the nursemaid who had married his father and become a duchess. Before she could even flinch at the sharp contempt in his tone, he continued more softly.

“My mother said I felt too much. My father, when he noticed me at all, noted that I thought too much. It pains me to acknowledge it, but I believe he had the right of it. I find it very difficult to quiet my mind. I am always, always thinking.”

“That sounds tiring.” He’d spoken of his mother to her, and she’d been struck then by the depth of his regard for the late duchess—and the stark contrast of his contempt for the man who’d sired him.

“It is. Yet I don’t sleep. Not much. I’ve tried many things, many ways to lull my thoughts to stillness. Books. Music. They work for a time. But nothing has ever worked so well as fighting.”

Bess wanted to protest, but she didn’t want him to stop speaking. So she stretched her hand down to his and intertwined their fingers.

“When I fight, there is nothing but the present moment,” he said, still staring up at the canopy. “Nothing but the pain and the effort and the force of it. There’s no room for thoughts or feelings—all of them get pushed out of me and left behind in the ring. You say you don’t like to see me in pain, from the fight…but when I’m fighting, I promise you, all I feel is relief.”

Her heart squeezed, wrung out like a cloth over a bucket. She thought of the way he’d looked that first night she’d heard him in the hallway outside her door at Ashbourn House. Or the way he’d staggered into the kitchen that night she’d bound his wound. He hadn’t looked relieved of his burdens then.

But there was a time she could think of when sleep hadn’t been impossible for him. A week ago, in this very bed.

“I can see the appeal,” she said carefully. “But I do wonder if there might be better ways. You mentioned books and music, and the fighting. But there is one other activity we might perhaps try, to get you out of your head and into your body.”

Slowly, deliberately, she lifted the large, blunt-fingered hand she held to her lips.

She waited until he finally turned his head on the pillow to look at her, his gorgeous eyes shadowed and fathomless. Then she opened her mouth and took his index finger inside, hollowing her cheeks to suckle at it.

He tasted of salty skin, and beneath it, a heady, musky flavor that she realized was herself. Bess moaned around his finger.

His lips parted. He stared at her for a heartbeat in which Bess felt the throbbing pulse of desire begin to beat through her blood once more, deep and lush.

“You are determined to break me,” he grated, hauling her over him so that she covered him like a blanket. His renewed erection was a line of fire against her belly.

She released his finger with a wet pop that made him groan. “Most broken things can be mended. With enough care.”

They did their best to shatter each other for hours, caught up in a haze of mutual need and shared pleasure that left them both in pieces, too wrecked to do more than drag a coverlet over their sweat-covered bodies and wrap around each other in sticky, sated bliss.

Exhausted and spent in the darkness, the candle having long since sputtered out, Bess stared at the sprawl of Nathaniel’s huge, muscular form.

His shoulders were relaxed, his head nestled into the pillow. He breathed deeply and evenly.

He was asleep.

For the space of an instant, Bess allowed herself to fantasize about slipping off her mask and removing his. Waking in the morning in each other’s arms, as themselves, in the light of day.

With a bittersweet smile, she left their masks as they were and laid her head on Nathaniel’s chest.

She couldn’t have that, she reminded herself firmly. But they could have this. For as long as it lasted. And Bess would not trade this for the world.