I've Got My Duke to Keep Me Warm (The Lords of Worth) (22 page)

“What was? The war against France? I hate to tell you this, Jamie, but you’re not so important as to incite a war between countries.”

Jamie scowled at her. “I never said I was. But I should have been able to do something.”

She sighed. “You can start doing something now by not carrying Michael’s death around on your shoulders.”

“And how do I do that? How do I convince myself that there was nothing else I could have done? That if I had been just a little faster, if I had stayed closer, if I had kept—”

“You cannot survive by wallowing in what-ifs.” Her face was all sympathy, but the words were firm. She pushed aside the fabric of her skirts, swung herself off the bench, and got to her feet. “You were in the middle of a terrible, bloody war. You think your brother was there solely because of you? You think him so childish and immature he couldn’t grasp what was going on around him? That he did not realize there was a chance he might die?”

Jamie gaped up at her. “But if—”

“Let’s play that game then, shall we?” She cut him off unrepentantly. “
If
your father had known your mother was pregnant, then maybe he wouldn’t have gone to London.
If
he hadn’t gone to London, you would have been born the rightful Duke of Reddyck, and you wouldn’t have become an officer.
If
you hadn’t become an officer,
then your brother wouldn’t have followed you. So by that rationale, this was all your father’s fault for not marrying his duchess fast enough. Or let’s blame your grandfather. He was the villain in all of this, wasn’t he? Or maybe we should blame your mother? She never revealed her pregnancy, and by the time she did, it was too late.” The blanket dropped from her shoulders and went unnoticed. “You can waste your entire life wondering
if
, Jamie, and it won’t change a damn thing. Bad things happen to good people, and the only thing you can do is to pick up the pieces and move on. I would strongly suggest you try it.”

Jamie struggled to his feet, staring down at her. He could feel his pulse pounding at his temples, and he tried to identify the maelstrom of emotion coursing through him at the moment. Fury. Guilt. Admiration. Wonder.

He went with fury, because it was the only one he wasn’t terrified to embrace. “You can’t begin to understand what it was like,” he snarled.

Her expression shifted then, and her features rearranged themselves into a grim mask. Without taking her eyes off him, she reached up and unpinned her rough dress and then released the laces of her chemise. Very deliberately she pulled apart the fabric and let the garments slide down her body to pool at her feet. The clouds parted suddenly as the wind gusted, and a pale beam of moonlight penetrated the room, bathing her bared skin in luminous light.

Jamie swallowed hard, the breath knocked clean from his lungs and his stomach clenching in agony. She was stunning, her body and its lines everything he had ever imagined. But what he hadn’t imagined was the scars.
Markings of torture starting beneath her breasts and continuing across her belly and along her legs and the insides of her thighs. Some of the marks curved in long arcs, the length of his palm. Others were simply slashes lacking deliberation, denoting only cruelty. Very slowly Jamie stepped forward, coming to stand directly before her. He reached out a hand, realized it was shaking, and paused. Gisele was still watching him, her chest rising and falling shallowly. He touched a ridge of scar tissue running alongside her hip, feeling the uneven flesh, cool in the night air.

With quiet steps he moved beside, then behind her, his fingers never leaving her skin. Her back was a horror of crisscrosses, and Jamie recognized them immediately for what they were. He’d seen more than one man flogged by an officer for offenses. He gathered her hair in his fist, pushing it to the side, his fingers tracing the evidence each lash had left. He could feel a tightness in his chest he had never before experienced, and his vision had blurred at the edges.

“Never where anyone could see,” she said in a voice so quiet he barely heard her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Oh, God, Gisele. I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry for me,” she replied. “I wanted you to see that I do understand what it was like.” She sighed heavily. “Sometimes bad things happen to good people.”

Jamie struggled to take a deep breath. He reached down and retrieved the fallen blanket, wrapping it around Gisele gently. He ran his hands down her arms, twined his fingers through hers, pressing himself against her back.
He bent his head, and rested his chin against the side of her neck. She leaned into him, squeezing his hands.

“I’ll kill him.”

Gisele twisted then, turning to face him. “You will not. You will not risk everything you have and everything you are for nothing. You get caught and your life isn’t worth the rope they’ll use to hang you.”

Jamie extricated one of his hands from hers and brushed the hair back from her face. “How did you do it, Gisele? How did you endure and survive and come out on the other side like this?”

She frowned. “Like what?”

“Beautiful. Strong. Gracious and good, and everything I’m not.”

She pressed her cheek into his hand. “I had help. I had people who loved me. I saw that people could love and respect each other, even on the days they didn’t much like each other. I grew up wanting that, understanding I might not ever get it, but knowing I did not deserve what Valence was doing.” She caught his hand again in her own. “What happened to your brother was not your fault, Jamie. You think Michael would want you to punish yourself for the choices he made? To do so would be an insult to the man he had become. What’s done is done, and no matter how much you wish it, you can’t change the past. You have to let it go if you ever want a chance at living again.”

Jamie squeezed his eyes shut, a suspicious lump in his throat. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her close, some unconscious part of him believing that if he held on tight enough, he could do what she asked.

“I’ll try,” he whispered raggedly in her ear.

“That’s all you can do,” she said, her head resting against his chest. “Even when it seems impossible.”

He buried his face in her hair. “How do you do it?”

“I don’t ever think of him. Of what he did to me.” She took a deep breath. “But being in that house tonight brought everything I had thought I’d buried back. Brought back the nightmares. Tonight is one of those times that letting go seems a little bit… impossible.” A mocking, mirthless laugh escaped, but it was devoid of self-pity.

Jamie couldn’t even begin to fathom how she had come by such strength—an inner strength he could not begin to claim for himself. He had looked elsewhere for consolation and clarity, mostly into the bottom of a bottle, and it had always remained elusive. Until now. Until Gisele.

The feel of Gisele’s body against his was a sweet torment, his heart’s compassion warring desperately with his body’s stirring desire. He wanted to make her forget. It was something he could do for her. Wanted desperately to do for her. But he made no move to touch her further, terrified he might betray the fragile links of trust newly forged.

“Thank you,” Jamie said quietly. He pulled the blanket a little tighter around her beautiful, scarred body. “For trusting me.”

She looked up at him for a brief moment before laying her head back on his chest. “Some secrets lose their power when they aren’t secrets anymore.”

Jamie knew she wasn’t just talking about herself.

“Are you thinking about Valence now?” he asked.

“Trying not to.”

He tipped her chin up with his fingers and kissed her with exquisite tenderness.

“How about now?”

Gisele smiled softly against his mouth. “Not as much,” she whispered.

Encouraged, he deepened his kiss, letting his fingers thread through her hair, cupping the back of her head. He felt her own fingers curl into his shirt.

“Now?”

Gisele shook her head, her arms twining around his neck. “Take me to bed, Jamie Montcrief,” she breathed.

He didn’t need to be told twice.

Jamie scooped her up in his arms and strode into the bedroom, letting her slide down the length of him as he came to a stop at the foot of the bed. He bent to kiss her again, a slow, gentle seduction of tongues, but it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to forget. She wanted to lose herself in Jamie so irrevocably that the past and all its dark imaginings could never again find her. She wanted Jamie as she had never wanted anyone else before in her life.

She pressed into him, her hands unwinding from his neck and dropping to his throat, delving into the open collar of his shirt until she could run her palms across the broad expanse of his shoulders. Beneath her fingers she could feel his heart pounding at a rate that matched that of the pulse roaring in her ears. She pulled his shirt over his head, letting it fall to the floor.

Jamie shuddered beneath her touch and any remaining gentleness began to dissolve into urgency. Gisele’s hands found the fall of his breeches and made short work of the buttons. He groaned as she knelt before him, shoving his breeches to the floor. She ran her hands up the backs of
his legs and around to the fronts of his thighs, before taking his throbbing erection in her palm.

“Not this time, my love,” Jamie whispered, pulling her up against him. “This time you’re coming with me.”

Jamie claimed her mouth again, demanding and relentless. He pulled the blanket away from her and lifted her up against him so that her legs locked around his hips and she could feel him hard and pulsing at the entrance to her core. She moaned softly, desperate to accommodate him, but he kept her trapped motionless against his body. With torturous deliberation, Jamie lowered her to the bed, coming to rest above her, his weight and his heat sharpening the anticipation.

His lips left hers, leaving a trail of fire down her neck, and then they moved to her breasts along with his hands, caressing and shaping their fullness. The entire time, Gisele could feel the head of his cock pressed just at her entrance, and she nearly screamed for want. She reached down between them, but he caught her hand, bringing it back up to his shoulder.

“Not yet,” he said, with a devilish gleam in his eye, and pressed an inch into her.

Gisele arched against him, feeling the edge of the abyss rushing at her. She was throbbing and aching and she needed Jamie. Needed him inside her, buried deep. Her legs tightened around his waist, increasing the pressure of his erection against her.

“Please, Jamie,” she whispered, knowing she was begging and not caring at all.

Jamie groaned then and drove into her, even as his mouth covered hers to capture her cry. He withdrew, just barely, before surging forward again, the muscles in his
back straining beneath her hands. Gisele’s hips rocked up to meet his, every nerve ending in her body igniting.

Her tremors started deep, pulsing and spiraling and tightening until the vortex combusted mercilessly. Her inner muscles spasmed, and she let herself fall, waves of pleasure crashing through her, and in an instant, Jamie grasped her hips ruthlessly and thrust into her once more, sending sparks scattering across her vision.

Gisele held on to him with every ounce of strength she possessed, riding the storm until they both lay spent, breathing hard, their skin damp. She let her head rest in the crook of his shoulder, trying to catch her breath. After a moment Jamie shifted his weight from her and reached down to pull the blankets over their entwined limbs. Drawing her up beside him, he encircled her in his arms, and Gisele wriggled into his warmth.

“Sleep now,” Jamie whispered. “You’re safe here with me.”

She nodded into his neck. Jamie tightened his embrace and placed a soft kiss at her temple and Gisele had never in her life felt as cherished and protected as she did at that moment.

Yet Gisele did not fall asleep immediately. She lay quietly in the darkness, listening as Jamie’s breathing eventually became steady and deep, a sense of peace and rightness settling over her limbs. With perfect clarity, Gisele understood that somewhere between here and a tavern south of Nottingham, she had gone and fallen in love with Jamie Montcrief.

Chapter 22

A
dam opened his eyes to sunlight streaming in through the curtains, an unwelcome awakening. His head was pounding, and his mouth felt dry and sour. He was still sprawled out on his bedroom floor, his opium tray and pipe near his side. He winced as he pushed himself to a sitting position, groaning as his muscles protested.

Adam did not feel rested at all. In fact, he felt even more listless than he had last night, which was odd. His dreams had not been the perfect euphoric bliss he usually experienced, but had been plagued by a darker undertone. Gisele had appeared to him, of course, but last night she hadn’t come to him when he called. She’d been in the arms of another man. Montcrief.

Adam shook his head in denial. Perhaps it had been the upsetting events of yesterday. Perhaps even the sudden reappearance of Sebastien had triggered that manifestation. But just thinking about Gisele in the arms of another man left him white and shaking with an irrepressible rage—a response that time and death had not dulled.

Adam forced himself to breathe deeply. It had been a dream. A disturbing dream, but a dream all the same. He hauled himself to his feet, trying to shake the lethargy still
clinging to his muscles. It was probably late already, and he should—Adam froze, his eyes fixated on his bed. A robe was draped over the end of it, soft silk embroidered with tiny roses. As if in a trance, he reached for it, feeling the coolness of the fabric slip through his fingers. He pressed it to his face, inhaling her scent. Gisele’s scent.

What manner of trickery is this?
he thought, anguish making his heart pound. What had happened last night? What sort of cruel bastard would use his dreams against him in such a manner? He staggered to the mirror, peering at himself in the glass as if his haggard reflection might provide the answer. Gisele had been wearing this robe last night. He had seen her, touched the edge of the silk as she had moved around him. He squeezed his eyes shut. But it hadn’t been real. It
couldn’t
have been real.

He opened his eyes again, slowly, trying to regain a foothold in reality. Whatever madness had taken hold of him these last days, it had to stop. Perhaps in his stupor he had fetched the robe and simply didn’t remember. Still facing the mirror, Adam eyed his abandoned pipe, visible in the reflection behind him, and for the first time ever, he regretted his loss of control.

A brilliant sparkle on his tray beside the pipe, where a shaft of sunlight fell across the floor, caught his eye. Adam turned, frowning fiercely. Slowly, as if approaching a viper, Adam crouched, the object glittering brightly in the sun. He reached for it and picked it up, his hands shaking.

He retched suddenly, caught unaware, his entire body convulsing and heaving. Sweat pricked at his scalp, and he collapsed back against the bed, his entire body numb and shivering. Very deliberately he forced his hand open, looking down at the object.

It was a large diamond, cut in a very unusual pear shape, unique in its slight gold color. When he’d bought the gem from a French count, it had been obscenely expensive, but at the time Adam hadn’t cared, for there was nothing he would deny Gisele. She’d been wearing it the night of the explosion. The night he had lost a staggering fortune in diamonds, this stone being the crowning showpiece of them all. The night he had thought he’d lost his wife.

But why? Why allow him to suffer for four years, believing she was dead? What was she trying to tell him? And where was she now?

Montcrief
. The name spewed into his consciousness like poison, and Adam almost retched again. That part of the night remained blurry, and Adam roared in frustration, kicking the tray away from him with a resounding clatter and the crash of broken glass. He thought he had seen the captain, but he couldn’t be certain now what had been real and what had been imagined.

Adam clenched his fist around the diamond still in his hand. This he had not imagined. What he held in his hand was hard, unremitting proof.

Proof the diamonds hadn’t been lost that night. Proof Gisele was still alive.

Proof she’d come back.