Spencer tore his mouth from hers, his breathing labored. Lady Boadicea was gratifyingly dazed, her lips swollen and berry-red from his kisses. “Did I maul you just now, my lady?”
She blinked. “Your Grace?”
He didn’t answer but kissed her again, taking his time. When had putting his lips to a woman ever been this divine, this intoxicating? He could lose himself inside her. Little wonder Harry had fallen beneath her spell.
Harry.
Damn it all. The reminder of his brother was enough to make him withdraw his lips from hers once more. Guilt settled heavily in his gut. How could he have forgotten that Harry had fallen for her, that she was too bold and unsuitable, that the last thing Spencer wanted, having narrowly survived his first marriage, was to undertake another?
Nothing made sense, not his reaction to her, not this burning desire within to make her his, not the way she could make him feel more than he’d felt in the last three years in just a moment of being within her presence. He wanted her, yet he didn’t, he longed to push her away, and yet to hold her forever to him. Regardless of the tumult within, he knew what he must do.
He stared at her, bemused but determined. “You’ll be my duchess.” It was a pronouncement rather than a question. Like it or not, she would wed him. He wouldn’t put his family through any further scandal.
She exhaled slowly, her hot breath colliding with his lips. “No.”
Spencer kept her where she was, in his arms, ripe body tucked to his. He touched their foreheads together. He didn’t understand this any more than she did, but life was an endless parade of false autonomy. Christ knew he’d never had a choice or a chance to live the life he’d once imagined for himself. Why stop now?
“Yes,” he insisted. “My honor demands it.”
“Your honor.” She frowned, attempting to shrug from his grasp.
He wouldn’t allow it, holding her fast. “Yours as well. Think of your sister. She and Thornton are not long off a scandal themselves, and he can ill afford even a breath of impropriety.”
He sensed her mind working, could read some of it in her flashing eyes. Her mouth went pensive, twin lines forming at either corner. Her beauty mark moved along with the frown. He watched, considered flicking his tongue against it in some nonsensical fantasy that he could lick it up and make it his.
Lady Boadicea unleashed an aggrieved sigh. “You are correct in one matter, if nothing else, Duke. The last thing I would wish is to cause harm to my dear sister and her husband. I love them both frightfully.”
A pang of jealousy beat to life within him. How embarrassing that he should know envy that the flighty creature before him loved her sister and her sister’s husband. It was only his baser nature at work. For love was an invention of man designed to allow him to believe himself better than a rude animal in the wild. It didn’t exist. It was a fancy, a chimera, nothing more.
In this instance, however, he could use that outlandish emotion to his benefit. “If you love them, then you know what must be done. Just as I care for my family and know the only course left to me. We must marry, Lady Boadicea. We owe it to those we could taint most by our indiscretion, if nothing else.”
Her rebellious and bold nature aside, he had no doubt that this argument appealed to her in a way that nothing else would. He looked upon her, drinking in her beauty. How odd that just yesterday, he had scorned her when in this moment, he couldn’t imagine her as any other man’s wife save his.
And then, before he did something inordinately foolish, like kiss her or take her up in his arms and carry her off to his chamber, he set her from him. He offered a hasty, mocking bow, and then he left her alone with her thoughts and the decision she must make.
funereal pall seemed to descendupon the entire assemblage at Boswell Manor. The gentlemen had come to enjoy the shoot, but a miserable, driving rain that afternoon rendered any such pursuits impossible. Instead, they settled for isolating themselves from their female counterparts and engaging in “indoor sport,” which Bo was sure was a euphemism for getting soused and fleecing each other at cards.
She and Cleo sat on the fringes of a massive drawing room decorated in gilt and an alarming amount of daffodil-yellow. Truly, it was akin to sitting within the sun itself, but it was where the ladies of the house party had assembled for nonsensical parlor games, and she had little choice but to suffer its brashness.
Cleo disagreed about the fleecing and the sousing,sotto voce. “Alex said they’d be playing at billiards or some such. A tournament, I believe he said.”
“Involving wagers and the consumption of an inordinate amount of whisky, one can be sure,” Bo grumbled back to her sister, for she was vexed and in a deleterious mood, and she had no patience for men and their double standards. Why couldn’t they be forced to witness Lady Abigail Featherhead pretending to be a chimpanzee during charades? It was hardly fair.
The last place she wanted to be at the moment was here, trapped amidst a throng of ladies who she could count more as foe than friend. The Marlow family, even after the scandal of Bainbridge’s duchess, was nearly royalty itself. Only a select group oftonfamilies were invited to join them for their annual house party, and none of those families included anyone Bo cared to know.
Chief among them, the Duchess of Cartwright, who had been eying her as if she were a smear of excrement befouling her hem all bloody day. The woman’s sour face was enough to make Bo quite cantankerous. But if she were honest, it was her meeting with the duke that had unsettled her the most. Her morning interview with Bainbridge had left her more confused and aggrieved than ever.
He had kissed her again. Aside from galloping through the countryside on her favorite mare, nothing else had ever given her such a rush of exhilaration. She’d left the salon feeling the same quivering in her stomach and leap in her pulse that she’d experienced the time she’d taken a dangerous jump with Deity that almost unseated her: dazed, yet also somehow euphoric.
This wouldn’t do. She had to put an end to the kissing. The man knew how to do it all too well.
“How would you know what gentlemen do when left to their own devices?” her sister asked then with a smug smile, interrupting her whirling thoughts.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s a great deal more entertaining than watching Abigail Featherhead make a cake of herself. And if Lady Lydia Trollop extols the virtues of Bainbridge one more time, I’m going to tear that silk rose cluster from her gown and stuff it in her mouth.”
Cleo compressed her lips together to stifle a smile, but then arranged her expression into one of proper, older-sister condescension. “You mustn’t poke fun at them so loudly. What shall you do if someone overhears you referring to the Duke of Buxton’s daughter as a trollop? You know very well that their surname is Trulle.”
“Near enough.” Bo sniffed, shifting in her uncomfortable chair. The Duchess of Bainbridge—whichever one had been responsible for this monstrosity masquerading as a drawing room—had deplorable taste.
