“Somehow?”
“If I could explain it better than that, I would. I do not want you to misunderstand, however. I do not want you thinking that what you told me has changed anything. Except perhaps the seduction part.”
“I would say that is a fairly significant part.”
He hated having to say things for which there were no good words. “It isn’t that I don’t want you. I just don’t want to be seducing you to do something against your better judgment.”
She frowned. “This is a fine thing, Castleford. I finally allow you to catch me, and you decide to stop being bad today of all days. I do not know why everyone says
women
are the capricious ones.”
Damnation. It was a hell of a thing when a man had to defend acting with uncharacteristic decency, especially when all of his body and most of his mind argued to behave differently.
“I am more than willing to be bad, Daphne. I have a list of the ways I plan to be bad with you, the result of many hours of contemplating you and badness at the same time. But I’ll not be luring you into it, no matter how maddening this desire. I have wanted you since the first time I saw you. If you want me, my chamber is right next to yours tonight. You have only to open the door.”
He left her there at the bottom of the stairs to go above on her own. He went in search of some port. One glass only, however. He did not want her showing up in his chamber before he got there himself.
Chapter Twenty
W
hat annoying nobility the duke had shown.
Daphne found it hard to absorb that he had left her to decide how the night went. It did not seem fair that he now expected her to make the next move in the long game that he had started.
She barely noticed the pleasant if rustic chamber she had been given in the inn. It probably was one of the best, she noted, as her mind continued to accommodate the events of the last hour. Very clean and bright, with whitewashed walls that helped the lamp’s light spread, it offered comfort and a place to settle her emotions.
She sat on the edge of the bed between two falls of the bed’s blue drapes, trying to reclaim herself. She really could not.
She would never be quite the same woman again. She had learned too much this last week and shared too much and risked too much. After concluding years ago that it was necessary to leave the past behind, she had turned around and embraced it. At least now, hopefully, she might not have the same regrets in the years to come that she had carried in the ones just past.
Her conversation with Castleford still made her eyes mist when she thought of it. He had been so angry when she told him about Latham, but not for the reasons she thought he would be.
She had assumed, wrongly, that he would take Becksbridge’s view and see the fault as all hers, or at least equally so. If he had not caught Latham with Margaret, would he have been so sure of her own story? Few people would be, she knew to her regret. Not with any story about a man and woman, but certainly not the one she told regarding the heir to a ducal coronet.
He had sat at Margaret’s table knowing most of it. All day he had kept that inside himself until they took that walk. Now the intimacy of their conversation still filled her. Moved her. He had been very kind, even as he demanded explanations that were not his by right.
I am going to kill him
. That had not been a passionate outburst by a man enraged. He had said it too calmly. Too frankly. He hated Latham, and not only because of Margaret or even herself, she guessed. It was as if one fallen angel looked at another and, because of his own sins, saw the deeper wickedness that made for dangerous evil.
Calmer now, and more herself, she prepared to wash. She undressed to her chemise and poured the warm water into the basin. A fullness in her heart had not gone away, for all her deliberations.
It was not fear or indecision, she knew. Those existed as smaller concerns, shallow in comparison to this. Gratitude swelled her heart, and relief and an emotion so poignant that she did not know how to name it. A bit of regret stirred there too.
She dried herself and gazed in the looking glass. Should she open that door waiting for her tonight? It would be an ending even as it began something. It would be the first step to “afterwards.” And there would be an afterwards, of course. Not only because he was Castleford the man and Castleford the duke. Also because Mrs. Joyes had confided more than enough to him today, but not everything.
H
er hands trembled while she tied her brushed hair at her nape with a ribbon. She glanced down at the simple dress she had put on. Nervousness had owned her for the last fifteen minutes, after she made her decision.
There had been vague sounds through the wall, but nothing came to her now. What a joke if he had fallen asleep. Or become so foxed in the public room below that she abandoned her momentous choice as soon as she saw him.
That decision had been surprisingly easy once she admitted what it meant. If she were going to suffer the afterwards, and her heart’s fullness intimated she would suffer it badly now, she would like to experience the now while she could. Castleford saw these things in the simplest terms, in the way of men.
If you want me.
Yet, this once, that same simple question had been what swayed her.
Hoping that she appeared more confident than she felt, trusting she would not shake on the outside the way she did in her essence, she slipped out of her chamber and walked the few feet to the door of the one beside it. The latch moved down easily. She pushed the door ajar and slid through the opening.
The chamber appeared much like her own but awash in pale, golden light from several lamps. One sat on the small writing desk not far from the door and another on a table beneath the one window. The third flanked the bed.
She stepped into the room farther and saw him in that bed, sitting with his back against the headboard. He was naked above the sheet that covered him to his waist, and no doubt beneath the sheet as well.
He was all Castleford right now. All trouble, that was certain. Little of the kind and understanding man from the afternoon showed in his eyes. The devil’s fires flickered in them, as well as those of the duke who, finally, was going to have his way.
“Come closer,” he said. “Don’t lose your nerve now.”
She walked forward, until she stood at the foot of the bed. “Do you always sleep naked, or were you that sure of me?”
“I always sleep this way. I was only mostly sure of you. I counted on your concluding it was foolish to deny us both for no good purpose, and I have known from the start that you are not a fool.”
Nor was he. He had realized she had been running away so he might not delve into her past.
It had been disconcerting to be pursued by a man who seemed to have been ahead of her for so much of the race.
“You should remove that dress, unless you want it ruined.”
Probably so. It was not as if she had never been undressed with him before. Still, unfastening the dress and letting it drop was harder than she expected. Since she wore nothing under it, the result was she stood there as naked as he but without the benefits of that sheet.
His gaze deepened. Amusement left his expression. “You are exquisite, Daphne. That has always been the only word for your beauty.”
It touched her that he bothered with such praise now. She was not going to argue, but like most women she knew her own flaws too well. Too tall and far too pale. “Frosty” had been used to describe her appearance more than once, and she had not assumed it was a compliment.
He patted the side of the bed, all devil again. She walked around and sat on it.
“Close your eyes,” he said, sitting up.
She obeyed and wondered what erotic game might start this way.
He moved. She felt him by her side, kneeling. Then a cool weight encircled her neck, and his hands worked at her nape. She opened her eyes and looked down. A necklace of fine filigree, embedded with a king’s ransom in diamonds, flamed on her chest. The largest stone, in the center, surpassed the ear bobs in size by several times and rested right above her breasts.
“You mustn’t. I mustn’t,” she muttered, while she watched the white flames glisten and spark. She poked at it. “It is very beautiful, though.”
“Indulge me for now. Get your hands away from that clasp. You must wear it tonight. I have never ravished a woman covered in diamonds before.” He took her hand and drew her onto the bed. “Next time you will have to wear the earrings too.”
She glanced at the diamonds, then at him. He caught the look.
“There must be a next time, Daphne. Let us have a right understanding on that. Do not think to put me off after this. I will never get through that list of badness tonight. I also insist on seeing you in all the diamonds at once.” His fingertips skimmed the edge of the necklace, then lower. “You have no idea what you look like wearing them and nothing else. Beguiling. Devastating.”
He fell back on the pillows and pulled her to him, into his embrace and along his body. The sudden feel of his skin and warmth first stunned her. Then the sensations encompassed her senses and bound her physicality to his in a comforting, exciting intimacy.
She had made the right choice, she thought, as his deep kiss showed his serious, determined passion. He had been wise to make the decision hers too. She welcomed the pleasure with a new freedom, because misgivings had been left behind.
He flipped her on her back and propped on one arm while he looked at her. His palm brushed her hair from her face, then rested there, along her face’s edge.
“We will do this carefully this time, so you do not feel helpless and that old fear does not emerge.”
It astonished her that he had noticed that. She could only look up at him, surprised again on this day of so many surprises. “Not too careful, I hope. I am expecting you to live up to your fame.”
His head dipped so he could gently close his teeth on her nipple. “I thank you for that, darling. The truth is I have little experience with careful and none with innocents.”
She was not an innocent, but she was hopelessly ignorant, of course. He had noticed that too, along with her fear of vulnerability.
She did not feel very innocent or ignorant now, as she luxuriated in the erotic sensitivity of her breasts. He aroused one with an almost delicate caress that maddened her, while his tongue and mouth teased the other. She grasped his shoulders and flowed on the unbearable pleasure toward abandon.
He was careful. More careful than he had been on the barge or in that tent. The pleasure built sweetly, layer upon layer. He lured her in deeply with kisses down her body, revealing unexpected spots of intense excitement. His slow caresses on her breasts and stomach, her thighs and bottom moved her surely through such luscious pleasure to impatience and then to that focused desperation that cried for a finish and completion.
He lifted her shoulder and turned her. “Kneel there.”
She found herself facing the headboard, kneeling high, confused and frustrated. “I do not want to kneel like this. I want you to touch me the way that maddens me and—”
His face brushed hers as he set her hands on the headboard. “Are you scolding? Again?
Now?
” He laughed quietly, then moved one of her knees. “Heaven is but a few minutes away, I promise. It will be like the last time, only better.”
“I think that unlikely,” she said to the wall. “There is something to be said for staying with what is successful, especially if the results were so spectac—oh!” She looked down, shocked, to where his head now rested on the pillow between her knees.
She closed her eyes. This was too wicked. In the next moment a shock of intense pleasure shot through her, as he touched her finally. Then another and another until she had to cling to the headboard so she would not collapse from it. All of the intensity seemed to aim high and spread, then collect and sink until it centered again where he touched, making her even more sensitive.
Over and over it happened, until she could hardly breathe and almost wept. When she thought she would die, when she was close to begging him to stop, the sensation changed. No longer streaking through her but all there, all at the focus of that hot need. He was using his mouth, caressing with his tongue and playing the devil with her essence.
She did beg then, in her head and probably with her voice, she did not know. She could only relieve the relentless intensity with crying gasps until, finally, her body surrendered. That moment came, the finish she ached for. It split through her with a physical scream of joy.
Hands lifted her away from the headboard and laid her down. Hard strength covered her, and shoulders submitted to her grasping embrace. A slow fullness entered her where she still throbbed, and the scream echoed, stretching her until no void remained.
For a moment nothing moved. Not him and not her. She opened her eyes. He braced above her, his shoulders taut, his face severe. He looked, she knew, to make sure that odd little fear had not fluttered to life.