Page 16 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Now that,” he said softly, “is a very interesting question to put to a man in my present situation.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “As it happens, Duchess, I should far rather you made it up to me with something I actually want.”

Diana swallowed. “And what,” she managed, “is that?”

“A kiss.” He said it plainly, his eyes on her lips as he spoke. “I want a kiss. Freely given, this time.” A pause, and the smile deepened. “Call it the price of your pardon.”

He released her wrists. “May I?”

Her body answered before her lips formed words. She sat up and cupped his face. Their eyes met and she could hear her breath thicken as her body shivered. His lips curved and met hers, forcing it apart, and when his tongue drove into her mouth, a sound tore out of his chest. She felt it move through her like a struck chord. He caught her upper lip between his and sucked, deep and slow, no hesitation anywhere in him, tasting her as though she were already his to take apart, and her heart hammered so hard it hurt.

Diana moaned into the kiss before she knew she meant to. Her fingers fisted in the front of his shirt, clutching, because her knees had gone and there was nothing else to hold. His mouth was merciless. He drew her lip between his teeth and bit down, then dragged another hungry pull from her that sent fire pouring down through her body and settling, shamelessly, low.

His hand slid down the column of her throat and closed there and tilted her head back to the angle he wanted, holding her exactly where he chose to have her. The grip should have frightened her. Instead a scalding jolt went straight through her, down and down, to that hot unfamiliar ache blooming between her thighs that she still had no name for and no way to still. He took her deeper. His tongue claimed every part of her mouth in slow, driving strokes, and she was drowning in it, dizzy, her legs burning beneath her skirts, her whole body gone weak and molten and trembling against him, heat gathering where she had never before had cause to feel anything at all.

His other hand plunged into her hair and gripped, tightening in the dark strands until her scalp stung, dragging her face up harder to his, angling her precisely for his mouth. His tongue swept the seam of her lips and thrust back inside, deeper still, in rhythm that woke a heavy pulsing ache low in her and would not let it rest, an ache that clenched at nothing, that wanted, that left her hips shifting helplessly where she stood. The taste of him swallowed her whole: wine, and salt, and beneath it the heat of the man, hunger answering hunger.

Then he tore his mouth from hers.

They were both breathing hard, ragged, their chests heaving against each other. Diana stared up at him, lips swollen and parted, unable to make sense of the storm that had just broken through her, or of her own body, still throbbing with it, still straining toward him for more. His hand stayed locked at her throat, his thumb pressed to the frantic leap of her pulse, feeling what he had done to her. With one firm tug on her hair, he tipped her face up again and brought his mouth back to hers. It’s unbearably soft, a slow scatter of gentle kisses over her bitten lips, each tender brush so at odds with the savagery before it that her heart beat wild against her ribs like a bird flinging itself at the bars of its cage.

And she could feel all of it still, echoing through every inch of her, the edge of his teeth, the deep insistent stroke of his tongue, the possessive grip of his hand at her throat, and the shameless, aching, frightening want it had woken in her, throbbing now between her thighs, refusing to be quieted. Before she had recovered herself enough to sit upright, he had risen, stooped, and gathered her up off the settee, one arm sweeping beneath her knees and the other at her back, and lifted her against his chest as lightly as though she weighed nothing whatsoever. Diana gave a startled cry and clutched at his shoulder.

“Your Grace⁠—!”

“You have got the legs of a newborn colt beneath you. I shall see you to your room.”

She protested. He did not heed her by so much as a flicker. He carried her the length of the corridor and shouldered open the door of her chamber and crossed to the great curtained bed and laid her down upon it with a gentleness that sat strangely against everything else the man had shown her. Then he looked down at her a moment, reached out and drew the pad of his thumb slowly across her swollen lower lip, wiping away the last dampness of his kiss.

“I shall see you tomorrow, Duchess,” he said.

And he turned, and was gone, and the door fell shut softly behind him.

Diana lay exactly where he had left her, staring up into the shadows gathered in the canopy.

Her heart would not slow. Her lips were sore and tender, and she could taste him upon them yet, and under the last thinning fog of the drink her whole body thrummed with a want so new and so shameless that it terrified her to the marrow. She pressed her fingertips to her mouth. She shut her eyes tight against the dark. The truth of it rose all the same, and would not be hushed however she tried to hush it: that every wild and wanton inch of her wished, with a desperation she scarcely recognized as her own, that he had not stopped. That he had not gone. That whatever had just befallen her upon that settee might befall her again, and again, and never come to an end at all. Heaven help me, was her last clear thought before the wine pulled her down.

One night gone, and four yet to come, and I am already in a very great deal of trouble.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Duchess?”

Diana went perfectly still.

She had walked the length of that corridor eleven times, and was no braver at the end of it than at the start. Behind the study door was the Duke; she had watched him go in over an hour past. There were two matters to put to him, both of them perfectly reasonable. The household books, which Mrs. Fletcher said he wanted relief of. And Arabella, she wished to write to her father about her intention of her being brought to Rosewood in the future. She had every right in the world to knock.

And she could not make herself do it.

Because you are a coward, she told herself, pacing, and because you cannot look him in the face.

For that was the shameful truth of it. She had lain awake half the night with that dreadful, wicked heat still pulsing between her legs, an ache she had no name for and no notion how to quiet. And when at last she slept she had dreamt of his hands buried in her hair, of his mouth on hers, of the two of them together upon that very bed doing things her waking mind could not properly picture. She stopped before the door one final time, and lifted her hand, and lost her nerve, and turned to go.

And the latch opened behind her.

She felt the warmth and the bulk of his presence at her back.

“What might be the matter?” he asked again.

Diana swallowed, and shut her eyes for the space of a breath, and turned around.