Read Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story Online

Authors: Sabrina Darby

Tags: #Historical romance

Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story (2 page)

BOOK: Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story
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“Let us go,” she urged. “As you said, the night is short.” And she wanted to know pleasure. To know it with him. Most of all, she wanted Sutbridge to transform the taking of a man between her thighs from an act of mere duty to one of transcendent beauty.

His thumb pushed down the finely embroidered edge of her glove, caressed the thin skin of her wrist.

“Ten years now, I’ve wanted you.” His voice was low, nearly hoarse, as if all that careful restraint had been ripped and what she heard now was the raw, ragged edge of desire.

A desire that was flooding her, filling her everywhere with liquid warmth, despite the frigidity of incipient winter. It was as if she were eighteen again, awake with discovery and delight. Only she was older. Wiser. And to hear him admit what she had only suspected, what she had suppressed in her own secret heart, was the most bittersweet torture, for nine of those ten years had been spent in another man’s bed. Worse, as much as Sutbridge’s words confirmed their mutual attraction, she knew that if he intended to take her, he would not be wasting time with speech.

“I’ve wanted you too,” she said quickly, hoping to forestall whatever it was that would end this interlude. “So let us have our moment. I won’t keep you from finding a woman to bear your heirs. I won’t be jealous of such.”

His hand tightened around her wrist. If she were a woman who bruised easily, there would be a mark there in the morning. Her heart locked far away, she had learned not to bruise. She could only dream of wearing his mark.

How different a sign of possession that would be than the label of wife.

As if he realized he was hurting her, he suddenly let her go. Only to take her face in his hands, to close her world down to the space between their warmth and the intensity of his gaze.

He was angry.

And then he kissed her.

• • •

He had kissed her only once before, in that inn on the London road. Fury had prompted him then as well. She had stood there, glowing with the flush of a soon-to-be new mother and jealousy had cut him to the core. Caro should have been his. With the storm isolating them from the rest of the world, he had taken that chance, broken the bonds of honor and decency, imposed himself upon her the way he had wished to so many times before. But the swell of her belly between them could not be denied.

It should have been his child inside her.

Now, with her lips open and yielding beneath his, with her body pressed close against him, there was nothing between them. Nothing but the years.

He was thirty and alone, courting young girls in their first season simply because a man with a title and lands must marry and procreate. But he wanted Caroline. He had always wanted her.

And here she was, asking him, at long last, to make love to her.

The instinct to take her there in the shadows of the balcony, in plain sight of anyone who decided to step out for a bit of air, surged within him. Yet even as he tasted the sweetness of her mouth, felt the delicate pulse of her life against his hands, he knew he wouldn’t.

The risk was negligible, for if discovered he would still win. A scandal could only propel her into his arms.

But that wasn’t what he wanted.

He broke away. The small space between their lips felt magnetic, the need to lower his head to hers once more near overpowering. She was reaching for him to do so, and the grasp of her hands on his coat was difficult to resist.

“This isn’t the place to talk.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

He heard the growl and only distantly recognized that the low sound had come from his own throat. Every inch of him was responding with primal instinct to her words. He spared a look over his shoulder. Beyond the open doors light, laughter and music spilled from the ballroom. He could see the shadow of movement but no one was near enough for concern.

He rested a hand over one of hers, closed his fingers around hers. Heard her quick intake of breath.

He led her down the stairs––and willingly she followed––into the darkness of the garden, where the scent of Christmas roses blanketed the air.

When he stopped and turned, she stumbled into him. Catching her warm body, he dragged her against him and bent his head to hers. His lips found her soft, rounded cheek first. He trailed kisses across her velvet skin, until he centered on her mouth, claimed it again. It was his.
She
was his. Just as she always should have been.

Despite the desire that hardened him, lengthened him, his chest ached with the old anguish. He’d never had a chance. They’d danced and flirted and then between a house party in June and the beginning of the Brighton season in August, she’d married another man. No word, no warning. Even Julia had been taken by surprise.

Caroline tasted so sweet. She responded to his touch as if she had been made for him. As if all those years apart had meant nothing. Perhaps they
had
meant nothing, for he knew very well the match with the late Lord Ballister had been arranged.

Just as any of those young girls inside the ballroom would submit to his embrace at the demand of a parent. Even if she cared only for his title and wealth, or for the approbation of society.

He didn’t want one of those insipid, exchangeable girls.

He wanted Caro.

Who was making a mess of his waistcoat as her hands ran over his chest.

Now he had her.

Heat, satisfaction, surged within him and he tore his lips from hers, lost himself in the bare expanse of skin at her neck. He wanted to devour her.

“John.” The whisper of his given name, which he heard so rarely, felt so right, so perfectly intimate that his satisfaction deepened. He lifted her in his arms, his hands cupping her bottom through the frustrating layers of fine cloth. She wrapped her arms around him and her legs around his hips so that he nestled between her yielding thighs, so close to her heat but so tantalizingly far. But there was nothing but wind-rustled greenery around them, nothing for purchase so that he could free a hand and move back the fabric that separated him from his desires.

Which was just as well. Because as pleasurable as this was, as much as he didn’t want to let her go, they needed to talk.

“John,” she said again, and then gasped as his tongue flicked across her earlobe. He grazed the soft flesh with his teeth, wanting to hear that sound again. “My…” She was struggling to speak over the pleasure. He shifted his hands slightly, so that his fingers could caress her, even as his palms carried her weight.

“I’ll take you home with me.”

She held him tighter, fitting hollows to curves as she pressed her body closer to him, and then she found his neck with her mouth the way he had only a moment ago teased hers.

“But,” he continued, terrified even as he did so, “I want more than a tumble in someone else’s garden. I don’t want this to be an affair.”

He paused, let himself hope, and then repeated, “I need a legitimate heir.”

Her eyes opened, and he watched her slowly awaken out of the drugged languor of desire. Awaken to understanding of what he truly wanted from her. She pushed back and reluctantly he let her down, his body cold from the absence of hers.

“You yourself said that I abhor marriage,” she whispered.

“Perhaps it was not marriage but the man,” he suggested, his hand lingering on her wrist, trying to entice her with that continued touch. He could not let her go.

“What makes you think that you are any different than he?”

It should have been obvious to her. He was nothing like Ballister, and what lay between him and Caro had weathered all this time.

How could she not see what was so clear?

Fear, embarrassing as it was, pummeled through him, but he fought against it, seized the challenge. “You sought me out.”

She pushed his hand away, stepped back slightly.

“Women have needs.”

“So do men,” he agreed with a startled laugh. “But above all I need an heir.”

“So that is it?” She looked hurt, and it made him feel less of a man. Ridiculous that wanting to do the honorable thing should make him feel a cad. “We are at a stalemate? I thought men only lived for pleasure. My husband...”

“He had a mistress?”

“Two that I know of. Don't you? Your sister says—”

“My sister knows nothing of my life. When I take my vows I'll be faithful.”

“What if you can't satisfy me? Now that I have my freedom, why should I enter into any contract without knowing what I am getting? I want to test the wares.”

He laughed. It was so ridiculous, so unlike anything he had ever heard Caroline say before. He could hardly countenance the words as truth, and yet she was adamant in her resistance. He wasn’t prepared, had never imagined… With a steadying breath, Sutbridge fell back on manners, on everything about the world he did know to be true. “We'd best get back inside, before someone realizes we are out here and you are compromised beyond repair.”

“So friends, then?” she said with a sad smile. The smile aggravated. It seemed to him as if she already grieved, as if she knew friendship were impossible now.

But he couldn’t push her. The tension between them had dissipated and all that was left was to pick up the pieces of what they had broken.

He nodded tightly. Could it be worse than it had been the previous ten years? The result was the same—as yet, he could not have her.

• • •

The ballroom felt stiflingly loud and crowded. Overwhelming with the heat of pressed bodies and the stench of those bodies’ exertion. She eyed the couples that still danced and flirted, blithely unaware that something pivotal and monumental had just occurred outside in the garden.

A world-rattling event.

Caroline wanted to go home, but with a darkness coiled deep in her breast, she navigated the maze of too-friendly acquaintances and sought out Julia.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Caroline demanded in a quiet hiss once she had found her friend sitting at a card table in the adjoining room designated for such things.

Julia fluttered her hands. A servant brought a chair over and, with only a brief observation that the fruit and bird brocade-covered wooden chair was dismayingly frayed on the seat, Caroline sat down. The other three players barely raised their eyebrows at the side conversation, but she knew everyone strained their ears to hear. Gossip was paramount.

“Knew that he wants you?” Julia asked, smiling, her own voice pitched perfectly to blend into the atmospheric noise of the ball. “Of course. I’m his sister.”

Caroline leaned even closer. She wanted to rip the cards out of her friend’s hands, scatter them upon the floor, but that would be the height of bad manners. A far larger scandal than if someone heard she had propositioned Sutbridge.

“You knew that he wouldn’t settle for an affair.”

“Ah, I suspected.”

“Why do that to me? Push me into a situation where I was destined to fail?”

“But are you?” Julia teased, clearly still pleased with her efforts. “In whose bed will you spend this night?”

“My own!” Caroline returned hotly.

Julia’s levity vanished. She actually turned her attention away from the game, studied Caroline’s expression. The intensity of her gaze was so similar to her brother’s. Caroline flushed.

But she lifted her chin even as a strange trepidation sent a chill down her spine.

“You rejected him?”

Mutely, Caroline nodded.

“He laid his heart out for you, and you turned it down?” Julia’s voice was cold and dangerous, the way she sounded when she had the deepest scorn for someone. Caroline had witnessed Julia deliver a half-dozen sharp set downs but never before had she heard that frozen rage focused on her.

Heat flooded her cheeks and sound came to her thickly, the tinkling of glass against glass, the trilling of laughter, the low rumble of masculine conversation, all pressed against her ears. She struggled to focus, to shake off her embarrassment. And then, remembering her own anger, she drew on that indignation.

“His heart,” Caroline scoffed.

“If you didn’t care for him it would be one thing, Caro.”

“Care for––”

“Don’t even deny it!” Julia interrupted, her voice rising, no longer in that careful register that kept foreign ears from listening in. Caroline winced at the sound, before the meaning of her friend’s words struck her. “All that bitterness you drip in conversation, as if it makes you more sophisticated, more witty. But you’ve been in love with my brother since our first season and don’t you deny it.”

The room was too hot and too small. Around them other people were attending to them now and as she glanced about, they averted their gazes all a moment too late.

“Love is a lie,” Caroline said shortly, between clenched teeth that struggled to hold the surging emotion back. She stood up, looked down at Julia, didn’t bother to quiet her next scolding words. “And you’d do well to tend to your own home rather than meddling in the lives of others.”

She left the house amid the whispers of rising gossip.
Lady Ballister, in love with Lord Sutbridge, has been for years.
Oh yes, it would be a nine days’ wonder, no one imagining that he might be the one in pursuit of her. No, it was yet another story about a sad, desperate woman.

Now denial would make her look even sadder.

Love aside, as she climbed into her lonely carriage, she was devastated. In one ridiculous evening, she’d lost her best friend. She’d lost, as well, the infatuation that had kept her going through all those years of miserable marriage. No longer could she enjoy the secret pleasure of watching Sutbridge, fantasizing about Sutbridge. No, she had given that all up.

He had gone from unattainable to unattainable for the completely opposite reason in the length of a breath.

Because she didn’t want what he wanted.

Caroline laughed, the bitter sound solitary and shocking in the confines of the carriage.

How ridiculous that he of all men would want something permanent when she was offering him what every other man desired most?

• • •

Under the brilliant blue sky of a rare December day, Sutbridge stepped out of his carriage and studied the innocuous façade of the modest town house before him. Somewhere behind that stone was Caroline. He’d given her up forever. Assumed she’d moved on from their brief flirtation all those years ago, from that one kiss he had imposed upon her. But his own admiration had never waned. Indeed, it had grown with the years, tortured as he was by her constant nearness, the way her friendship with Julia thrust her in his path at every turn. Those years had only refined her, sharpened the beauty of her features as well as her wit. No other woman in England could compare.

BOOK: Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story
8.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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