on his mouth. He stared down at her, his breathing suspended. Soon. She looked so beautiful. His body could not last another minute. Close. He felt the end approach, elude him. Another thrust. She whispered his name. Closer. Not inside her. He had spared her violation. Enough for now.
His body jerked. The force of his climax surprised him, a pulsing heat and energy that he could not control. He groaned. In blind instinct he brought his discarded cravat to her throat, then to her breasts and her hands, wiping away the evidence of his spent desire from her skin.
“Harriet.” Sanity returned one breath at a time. He sat beside her and stared into the dying fire. She rose to dress. He pulled her back, his hand tightening over hers. Even now his body could not be trusted. Even now he felt both a hunger and deep contentment in her company.
“Oh, duke,” she whispered in a wistful voice. “I never knew… well.”
From the corner of his eye he saw her tuck away a few tendrils of her hair and glance about the room, as if to reassure herself all was in order.
“What sort of wife,” he asked carefully, refastening his cuffs, “do you advise a man like me to marry?”
He dared not look up. He felt her temper flare halfway across the room.
“Perhaps one,” she replied, “who doesn’t mind your devilish moods or meeting your private needs while discussing the woman of your dreams.”
He smiled. “Go to bed, Harriet. Sleep well tonight. And”-he sighed-“thank you for keeping me company.”
For a time after she left, he stood in the firelight and reflected upon what he would have to do. As he turned toward his desk, he noticed the purse of coins Harriet had dropped on the carpet and the book that she had encouraged him to read. He picked up the well-worn volume and placed it on the bookshelf behind his desk. He wondered what in such a macabre story held fascination for Harriet. Perhaps if he studied it, he would learn why she was not afraid of him.
Chapter Twenty-four
Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The sunlight stung her eyes. She lifted her arm to her face and thought of Griffin, surprised she hadn’t dreamed of him again during the night. She rolled over, wondering how she would be able to look at him without thinking of what they had done. And where she had left the purse that had been so rudely given her last night.
An irate voice from outside the door blasted her right out of bed. “Are you still asleep, Harriet? I’ve been calling you for ages. We are supposed to spend the day shopping with Lady Dalrymple, and I cannot find my hat.”
“Coming,” she muttered. “Hold on to your garters, madam.”
She dressed and left her room at the precise moment the duke emerged from his. She nodded uncertainly, examining his elegant serge-lined cape and buff trousers with a suspicious eye. And just when he appeared to be on the verge of breaking the silence between them, a maidservant came clumping up the stairs with her ladyship’s morning tea.
“Good luck to you on your shopping expedition,” he murmured as he hastened to escape.
“And the same-” No. She would not wish him luck searching for a wife. “Will his grace be home in time for supper?” she called after him in a piqued voice.
He glanced back with a wry grin. “I think I might.”
She bit her lip. She shouldn’t give him any further encouragement. It was clear that he would break her heart. She ran impulsively to the top of the stairs, wanting to hail curses on whatever courtship he might enter in the course of the afternoon. But it wasn’t her place.
Lady Powlis, recognizing no such limitations, stuck her head out of her door. “Remind my nephew that he has promised to play noughts and crosses with me tonight.”
“Her ladyship-”
He paused at the front door, so indecently handsome that it grieved her to look at him. “I heard quite clearly.”
“Fine, then,” Harriet said, suddenly infuriated with herself. “We shall expect you home at-a decent hour.”
It rained for three days straight. The duke spent long hours in his library, and while Harriet sensed that he was up to something, she could not feel regret for the night he had tutored her in pleasure. She wondered what he’d been like before his brother’s death. From what Lady Powlis had revealed, he had not always been the man who fascinated and frustrated Harriet in equal measures. But she was pleased that he never mentioned another woman when he came home in the afternoon for tea or again at night when he sat with her and his aunt for the obligatory hour.
And then one evening over her nightly brandy, while Harriet was pretending to read, Lady Powlis said quite out of the blue, “You will never get married at this rate, Griffin. And I am longing to go home.”
He looked up unexpectedly at Harriet, with an intensity that gripped her in both horror and hope.
That night she was so restless that she left her bed and wandered about the house. In the old days she could steal like air through a room. She could see like a cat in the dark and sense when a person was about to wake up and wonder whether the servants had remembered to lock all the doors.
She’d once stuffed an entire silver service into her gown and walked from Grosvenor Square back to St. Giles like a knight in stolen armor. Fortunately she hadn’t been forced to run from the peelers or fend off a street predator with a knife or fork before she reached home.
She had depended on her instincts in those days. But life had been uncomplicated when only survival counted. She hadn’t cared what anyone thought of her. And she had never walked into a man’s library alone and stood before him in a thin muslin nightrail that offered no protection at all from the desire in his eyes.
“Is something the matter?” he asked, rising from his desk.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Then-”
“And I can’t eat.”
“Or read,” he said in resignation.
“Or pay attention to anything your aunt tells me.”
“Or to the hand of cards you are dealt at the club.”
“Furthermore,” she said, “you, if not the entire Boscastle family, are to blame. I don’t belong here at all. And-”
Her voice broke. He stepped around the desk, nodding as if anything she’d said made the least bit of sense.
“And furthermore,” she whispered, staring into his eyes, “I have decided that because of this I cannot serve another day in your house.”
Her lips parted. “I’m giving you notice, your grace. And I mean it.”
His gaze flickered over her. “In your nightwear?” He reached out to trace his finger down her throat to the knotted drawstring above her breasts. “And at this ungodly hour? I’m afraid I cannot allow it.”
“Well, you can’t stop me this time.”
“I understand.”
“Then-”
“The situation cannot go on this way,” he said gravely. “I will find another position for you before the end of the week.”
He led her across the room and drew her down onto the carpet. For several moments they knelt, sharing
