“I’ll admit to limited experience.” He smiled again, still slight, and this time with regret.
“Does this limited experience include the expectation that any woman you attend will just...” She could not say it aloud.
“You needn’t assume the worst. When I discovered the particulars of your situation, as a gentleman, I could not stand idly by while a lady assumed debts rightfully belonging to—.”
“Stop.” The room swayed. It was one thing for all of England to know your husband spent extravagant sums on someone else. It was quite another to have a stranger lay bare your pain.
“I mean to point out,” he said, “the debt never truly belonged to you, thus payment cannot make you beholden.”
She took a deep breath. The duke would never understand that he’d taken the only thing that had provided a sense of ascendency over her humiliation. Worse still, hehadleft her beholden to him, whether he had intended to or not.
“What is it you wish of me?”
“Do you prefer I be blunt?”
She nodded.
His eyes glittered. “I would like to bed you.”
She lost her voice. Instinctively, her hand flew to her throat. But other parts of her—parts that had been in long slumber, were suddenly awake. Awake and shamelessly attuned to the duke.
“But,” he continued, “I would like you to come to my bed of your own free will.”
Indecent images of sheets and pillows and tangled limbs filled her mind. An earthquake shook her boxed longing, releasing chaos that would have made Pandora blush.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. “You wantme...in a carnal sense?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
Yes. She made the mistake of challenging him with a direct gaze. His conversation may have been urbane, but his eyes were the eyes of a desperate man—a haunted man. She didn’t have that kind of power. Did she?
Feminine laughter haunted her memory. Laughter spilling from rooms with windows left wide to the moonlight, interspersed with cries ofyesandpleaseandmore.
“You’ve paid my late husband’s debts because you want me.”
“No,” he said. “I paid the debt out of respect. I used the subsequent opportunity to meet you.” He strung out the silence as if he were unraveling a knot. “And I wanted to meet you—” he leaned forward “—because I want you in my bed.”
Was this how dukes behaved? Plucking marks from crowds, luring them into dark spaces and then proposing wicked things?
Wicked things that inspired heaviness in her breasts and aching in her groin. Strange sensations that ought to have sent her running for the door.
But she was not running for the door, like she ought.
She was not calling for Marie, like she ought.
Heaven help her, she was concealing a watering mouth.
The duke exuded the promise of pleasure she had never known, but had always longed to experience. And, he was offering her that pleasure without ties.
Tempted did not begin to describe her state.
Because I want you in my bed. The words stung his throat.
He hadn’t meant to state his need in such crude terms. Hell, he hadn’t even slept in a bed since the fire. Sleep, when it came, was little more than a few quiet hours, leaning back in a soft chair. When he pictured Lady Stone, however, she was definitely in his bed. At Wisterley. A bed he’d never occupied with anyone else.
His words had caused her distress.
He was a terrible man. But he’d known that for some time. He wanted her anyway.
