She found her voice at last. ‘Such a flattering proposal.’
His eyes sparked silver fire in the lantern light. ‘Hardly that. If I am the prize bull, what does that make you, or any woman who marries me? There, I have spared you from saying it. But Iam sure we could enjoy ourselves more than a little, both of us, while we engaged in our… agricultural endeavours.’
She did not know whether to laugh or cry, and so did neither, nor did she speak. ‘Would a kiss help you make up your mind?’ he said softly. ‘I seem to recall I made you something in the nature of a promise earlier.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, as she had said once before. His words could not be described as flattering, but they were undeniably honest – had she not told herself she wanted honesty? – and she craved his touch, had been craving it all day. All week. All month.
‘Well, it seems “perhaps” is good enough for me this time.’ As he spoke he moved closer, and bent his lips to hers. He was not forceful, his mouth did not claim her ruthlessly, but the gentle pressure of his lips was irresistible to her, and she opened herself to him. He fixed his hands in her short hair and they melted together. It did not seem to matter what the circumstances were: when once they began kissing each other, the urgent impulses of their bodies would take over.
After a little while he withdrew from her slightly and said against her mouth, his voice less controlled than was usual for him, ‘I told you that kissing you was something that deserved a great deal of time and attention, did I not?’
‘Oh,’ she said breathlessly, confused, uncertain, a little disappointed by the brevity of his kiss. ‘Are you done, then?’
‘I have barely begun.’
He was lying on the bed with her now, her face held between his big hands, and very slowly he acquainted himself with the contours of it. He took his time. He kissed her eyelids and feathered his way across her cheeks. When he came to her soft pink earlobe, he sucked on it and bit it gently, and she gasped. He explored her mouth again, and then the line of her jaw, and then her throat, as much as was revealed by the high neck of her nightgown. There were buttons fastening it, and he undidone – just one – and pressed a hot, lingering kiss on the tender skin he had revealed, where her pulse beat hard in the hollow of her throat. Then he raised his head again, and returned to her mouth, and now he was more assertive, and his tongue found hers, and hers came to meet it eagerly. She wrapped her arms about him and pulled him close, closer, and his body covered hers; the weight was welcome, and she shut her eyes and surrendered to sensation, pushing away any thoughts of right or wrong, or of how practised he must be in the arts of seduction and how easily she succumbed to him.
Presently he said, between kisses, ‘Another button?’
‘Yes!’
An electric moment later, ‘Another?’
A while later, Georgie’s gown was undone to the waist, and the Duke’s lips were at her breast. He teased her with his tongue and with butterfly kisses for a long time, until she moaned in frustration, then finally he relented and drew one erect nipple into his mouth and sucked on it, while his clever fingers found the other, and tweaked it, gently and then a little harder. One of her hands was tangled fast in his silky hair, and the other clutched at the bedclothes. The sheets and blankets that had covered her had been pushed aside, and his body pressed hers to the mattress, a delicious pressure. She wondered in a sort of daze if he intended to continue his exploration; if he would kiss his slow, tantalising way down her belly and once more drive her to the edge of madness with his tongue and his lips in her most secret places. In that moment she hoped he would, it was all she wanted in the world, and she did not care what came after. Or, if she was honest, she knew what came after, and she wanted that too as she had never wanted it before.
He raised his head and smiled up at her, his eyes dark with desire. ‘Christ, Georgiana, I want you, and I know with every fibre of my being that you want me just as much,’ he said, hisbeautiful voice low, infinitely seductive, just a little ragged. The less controlled edge to it did not reduce the power it had over her: quite the opposite. ‘Even if you thought to deny our mutual desire in words, and I notice you do not, your body always gives you the lie. Say you will marry me as soon as it can be arranged, and there will be no reason in the world for us to stop. I can stay here with you all night if you want me to, and we can share such pleasure…’
There was triumph in his tone along with the hunger, and something about it made her feel suddenly cold, though her body still yearned for the fulfilment she knew only too well he could provide. She was aroused, but she was also afraid, not of him, she realised, but of herself. ‘No,’ she heard herself saying, and she let her hand drop from his head.
‘No?’ There was no indignation or anger in his tone, just a sort of bewilderment, and his possessive fingers, which had begun to make their tantalising way further down her body, to pull up the hem of her nightgown, stilled, withdrew.
‘I do not deny that I want you,’ she said unsteadily. ‘It would be foolish to do so and expect you to believe me.’ She saw that he was about to speak, and put her finger to his lips, trying not to make it a caress. ‘Perhaps what I mean to say will make no sense to you, but I need to say it none the less.’
He lifted his weight from her, and moved so that his body no longer touched hers. It made her want to whimper in instinctive protest, but she repressed the impulse, determined to continue. He lay at her side and looked at her, and she could no longer read his expression. ‘If I marry you, I see two ways my life might be,’ she said. ‘Indeed, I had thought about this before, when I did not know who you were and believed I would never see you again. I can imagine – no, I am sure – that we would give each other a great deal of pleasure, as you say, and perhaps there would be the child or children that you need, but after a while,when you tired of me, I begin to understand my own nature well enough to know that I would continue to want… this, and I am very much afraid that I would seek it elsewhere, as, of course, would you. I fear I would become like Lady Oxford, or Lady Jersey, or one of a dozen ladies in society.’
‘You would take lovers,’ he said, his voice entirely expressionless.
‘Are you saying I must not? Yetyouwould!’
‘I suppose I would. But please, madam – you said there were two ways your life might be. What is the other?’
‘I might fall in love with you,’ she said. ‘I’m sure a hundred women have before. And that terrifies me even more. I do not want to be that sophisticated, immoral woman – the duchess whose lover passes her husband on the stairs, and they greet each other with a smile, as though it is a sane and decent way to live when it is not. But much more than that, I do not want to be the woman who sits in this castle breaking her heart because the husband she loves has left her for another woman, or another dozen women. I do not want to lie alone in a cold bed missing you, or welcome you back, all the while hating myself because I need you so badly, even though you have come from someone else’s arms, and will go back to them directly.’ She fell silent, and he did not answer her. A long moment stretched between them, and at last she said desperately, ‘Can you understand me even a little? Does anything I say make sense to you at all?’
He let out a great gust of breath, and lay back on the bed beside her, gazing up at the canopy. His face in profile had the stark beauty of a knight on a Norman tomb, of the marble face of one of his distant ancestors. That hard man, she was sure, would have seen her words as madness, would have entirely refused to accept her rejection. Would have taken what he wanted, merely because he wanted it. But he was different, as she had reason to know.
‘You could use my body and its needs against me,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you know that. You have so much experience and you know exactly how to make me desire you. If you came back to me again now and put your hands on me, I do not think I would refuse you. I do not think I would refuse you anything at all, even knowing the danger I would be placing myself in if we risked conceiving a child. But it would not change anything. I still would not marry you.’
‘I wish…’ His cold voice dropped the words like poison into the quiet room. ‘I wish I had never laid eyes on you in that house. Or, seeing you, had left you there to your fate.’
‘I can’t agree,’ she said, and she wondered that she had the strength to speak. ‘I needed to realise this about myself, however painful it is. You said I was spoilt – well, I am. But it is past time I grew up. As my brother said to me once, people’s lives are not playthings. My own life is not, nor yours – we should take them seriously. Lust is not a good enough reason to marry. Or it should not be.’
He rose to his feet in one fluid movement and stood looking down at her, frowning, icily controlled. ‘I can only be delighted, Lady Georgiana, to have provided a lesson that you feel you have profited by.’
‘I know you are angry, and I cannot blame you, but thank you.’ She had not covered herself, but lay exposed to him still, naked to the waist. She was oddly calm, and saw the remnants of desire warring with other, less easily read emotions on his face. Reluctant amusement was one, she thought.
‘I do not think I want to know what you are thanking me for. I may be a rake, but I am still, I hope, a gentleman. Even as I wish profoundly that I had never met you, I must admire your resolution and your courage. You realise, do you not, that since you have refused me so very decisively, I must persist, and woo one of the other ladies? I know it is in poor taste to do so, butall my urgent reasons for marriage still remain. The people who depend on me, the estate. Leaky Sue, you may recall.’
‘I know they do. I had not forgotten Leaky Sue. We will go away straight after the ball and leave you to your wooing, even if I have to tell Louisa all in order to make her understand.’
