“Do you really want to test me, girl?” he snarled. “Or would you like me to be rougher still with you? Because I can, and will, if you continue to defy my direct orders.” His tone and his grip on her wrists told her she should stop—muststop—before he hurt her more.
Only Charles could not seem to stop herself.
“I have no power at all, my lord.” Her voice hardened, though her heart galloped in her breast. “You’ve already shown yourself rough, sir—cruel, even. What difference should it make were I to beg, apologize, or accede to your demands? You may own my body at present, Lord Wellesley, but you will noteverown my soul.”
And rather than strike her, his lips crushed her in a ferocious, bruising kiss, his mouth traveling down her neck to suckle her skin almost painfully, teeth and tongue ravaging her flesh till she was shaking beneath his assault. It was as if he demanded full ownership of her, insisting some part of her acquiesce andfurious that she did not. His mouth traveled lower, nipping flesh until he splayed her legs and landed there between her thighs, his tongue far from tender, but far from brutal too. He was making her body relent, if not her soul, and Charles realized with damning claritythiswas how he’d make her pay for her insolence.
Every fiber of her being was aflame, every bodily nerve lit with a burn, a hunger, she did not know she possessed. He was feasting on her core, bringing her to a point of no return, and though she fought with all her might to resist this man’s effect she could not. He owned her entirely. He controlled her every physical response, the sounds emanating from her alien even to herself as she pleaded for mercy, yet he would not relent. He brought her steadily ever closer, yet never to release, and when at last she wept outright, begging for absolution, he merely pulled away to stare down at her reduced and ravished state, then took his body from her.
Charles had never felt so humiliated in her life.
***
Wells turned from his tortured mistress, leaving her precisely as he wished: desolate. Because a woman denied completion was a woman he could control.
He did not look at her again until he had fully dressed. And only when he saw the swollen tears streaming down her face did he tremble a little at what he had done, for she looked broken, all the fight in her gone. He’d wanted her surrender, and he’d achieved it. Whether she would hate him now forever was a possibility he’d not considered in his rage.
Wells paused as a voice in his head whispered he should remedy this quick, else find himself a different mistress quicker,because Cuthbert had been right: This woman would only give him hell.
He abruptly sat back down at the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands, muttering “Bollocks”under his breath, paralyzed by what to do or say next. He heard sheets rustle in response and imagined the ache she must feel in her loins, the searing hunger. No doubt she’d been unaware such a lurid act could even be done.
Shame overtook him. Her words did not help.
“I take it back, my lord,” she gulped, voice cracking. “You have proven your point, sir, for it is true I am no more sincere in apology than you.” Her breath stuttered. “My body deceives me, sir, it fails me yet again. It is a cruel trick God played on Eve, to make her the physically weaker sex. A bitter, awful trick.”
For the second time that morning Wells swept her into his arms and cradled her to him, kissing the top of her head as he loosed a string of curse words into her hair. She froze in his arms yet he did not let up, continuing to mumble passionate, incoherent nonsense into her scalp, the words sounding strange and strangled even to himself. She allowed his caresses without response, until at last he felt her soften in his arms.
His mouth left her scalp to murmur in her ear, “Your master is a fool and a fiend, Fox. Though he tries to improve, he fails again and again. But I wish to be better, do better. Truly it is my honest intent. It is why I came to Cumberland: to be a better man, to leave all that is ugly behind me in London. Only I see I have not. I bring London’s ugliness with me.”
She stilled in his arms, remaining stiff as a board, while inside his breast Wells’s heartbeat spiraled. He should let her go, only he didn’t want to. He wanted this woman’s fealty and respect. Shockingly, he wanted her affection and trust. He didn’t know why he desired that which he did not deserve, yet he did. Forever, it felt, he was inwant.
“Can you stand me yet, Fox? Can you learn to like me still, if but a little, after this?”
When she did not answer he comforted himself by inhaling the warm, earthy smell of her, burrowing his nose in her hair. “Stay, Fox, and I will try harder, I swear. Stay but longer and I shall make it up to you, Charles. Only stay . . .”
“I have no choice but to stay, my lord.” She spoke in a quiet, small voice. “I am your prisoner until such day as you release me.”
Her words rang oddly false, though she spoke raw truth. He gripped her more tightly to him and shockingly felt her hand touch his cheek, that brief tenderness nearly rending him in two.
He kissed her, swift and sweet. He kissed her nose, her cheeks, her forehead. He did not attack her with kisses as he had before. This time he was deliberate and determined to assuage her fears for good. He felt a shiver run through her as he laid himself beside her in the bed, spooning her gently beneath the covers as he shut his eyes tight.
Wells willed himself back to the night before, to another beginning and a very different end. He willed them both back to sleep.
***
Charles left his lordship snoring lightly in his bed to hurriedly dress. She needed distance from Lord Wellesley—from all that had just transpired. She needed time and space in which to think.
She also had a job to do.
She went about her duties in a fog, her mind a maze of contradictions, not to mention the fact that she was sore. Three times he’d had her, and she felt him still. She wanted a bath: along, hot soak to ease the ache between her legs and the greater ache in her middle. How this man couldbeso tender and terrible at once defied all reason. A man could not be both, could he? A man must choose his path, must he not? Yet her mind whisperedno, no man or woman was ever forged so simply. Each held light and dark within as each struggled to command the wayward impulse of the soul.
Charles winced at her own recent actions—she was no paragon of virtue herself—and recalled Lord Wellesley’s attempt at apology. She had scarce believed her ears, to hear him speak like mere mortal gadgie, no longer heir to a dukedom. It was the closest to sincere a lord like him might come, she thought, remembering how his lips had left an imprint at every place they’d landed, as if branding her flesh. Yet despite her mind having screamed at her to flee—run now, fast!—she’d simply stilled in his arms. Her heart had slowed, her gut had eased. And then, without thinking, she’d reached her hand to caress him.
What the devil waswrongwith her?
Charles renewed her scrubbing with vigor, polishing the surface of a particularly dull marble table in an attempt to clear her thoughts. She was still furious at Lord Wellesley but equally livid at herself for not keeping her mouth shut. Had she simply bitten her tongue, he’d never have reacted as he had. She was lucky he’d not beaten her again. And yet the punishment he had meted out—the searing intimacy of it, the manner in which she’d been so unequivocally reduced . . . Charles flushed to recall the act, knowing her response had been just as base and wanton as his.
Lord Wellesley had made her recognize how readily lust could control a body—anybody, herownbody—for she was no less guilty than he of caving to carnality.
