My American Duchess (31 page)

His arms tightened and he buried his face in her fragrant hair until finally, the duke and the duchess both slept.

M
erry was awakened the following morning by Trent’s hand stroking her leg, his fingers asking a question. Without thinking, she let her thighs fall apart, and a silent sigh came from her lips as he accepted her invitation.

She didn’t roll over and kiss him, though. She felt bruised inside her chest, as if she’d suffered a physical blow. She was being absurd. A duke lay in her bed, all his restless masculinity focused on her pleasure: what woman would have the right to complain?

Trent kissed his way down her body, slowly and sweetly, the first rays of morning sun making his skin glow like honey. She let her love pour over him as silently as rainwater, voiced only with kisses, touches, moans.

At last she came in a flurry of sparks that hummed through her blood, and returned to herself to the sound of panting—her own panting—in her ears.

Trent turned her over and pulled up her hips, his touch turning her body supple again, awake to every intimacy. He caressed her until she was whimpering, mindless, desire rushing through her body like a tide.

Only when she was trembling with anticipation did he finally thrust inside, their bodies brought into perfect alignment by the hands gripping her hips, his large body rhythmically surging over hers again and again.

They made love like that, in utter silence. Merry hung her head as tears slowly trickled over her cheekbones before disappearing, drop by drop, into her hair.

Yet at the same time, that delicious tension grew within her, winding tighter and tighter until she couldn’t feel anything but the imminent burn spreading through her limbs. She pushed back, desperate and hungry for more.

“That’s it,” Trent growled.

“Please,” she said, her voice coming on a sob. “Jack, please. Harder.”

He responded with a savage maleness, a wild strength that shocked her into the deepest pleasure. She had scarcely recovered before he put a hand between her legs.

His hips moved again, his body hunched over hers, on and on until she cried out again and convulsed, such violent heat sweeping her that she scarcely noted the deep groan that broke from his chest, or the way his fingers tightened on her hips as he gave a final thrust.

The next moment Merry slipped flat onto her stomach, boneless and enervated. Hair tumbled over her face but she didn’t move to brush it away, just lay still, dragging air into her lungs.

She could hear her husband’s harsh breathing behind her as he toppled to the side, onto his back.

She felt as tender and vulnerable as a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. Her love for him felt like a mark
branded on her skin that he could read, no matter how sophisticated she pretended to be. She lay quietly, and prayed that he would leave without speaking.

“Merry,” Trent said, after a time. Of course he wouldn’t leave without speaking. It would be ungentlemanly. Her husband was never ungentlemanly.

“Yes?” She tried to sound half asleep, but she sounded alert, even alarmed. “I’m very tired,” she added hurriedly.

“I’m sorry about our argument last night.”

“As am I,” she said.

“Could we simply put this all behind us?”

Put behind her the fact that her husband would never love her? What had made her weep for a full hour the day before was her fixed idea that out of everyone who knew her, Trent alone had known her inner heart.

She had believed he was the one person who didn’t find her fickle and shallow.

She was being stupid; she knew she was being stupid. But every one of her insecurities had rampaged through her mind in the night, reminding her of all the things that she was hopeless at, even the way that Lady Caroline looked at her.

Yet when they made love, as they just had . . . He might say that he didn’t love her, but the way he’d ravished her said otherwise. He was seductive, yes, but always tender.

The thought gave her backbone. That was the way to show him that he already loved her, because of the tender intimacy they shared. She sat up and looked him in the eye. “How would you characterize what we just did? Was that making love?”

Trent’s expression was perfectly blank. Then he said, “Making love is just a more palatable label for intercourse, Merry. Like ‘gooseberries,’ in fact, which is a word that is misleading in almost all aspects. So is ‘making love.’”

“What would you call what we did? How do you think of it?”

His reply was instant and didn’t spare her on the grounds of delicate sensibilities. She flinched when he said the word. She’d heard it a few times, but always charged with hostility. It didn’t correspond to what they did together.

She couldn’t bring herself to repeat it. “Is being with me precisely the same as it was with your mistresses, then?”

“I would prefer not to discuss it,” he said, with the kind of polite restraint that called attention to itself.

“Why not? Essentially, you are saying that making love to them is the same as making love to me. Although perhaps I am not as skilled as they.”

“There is no comparison between you and my . . . those women.” Finally, she saw an emotion in his eyes: distaste.

“But you’re saying that you don’t make love to me.” She got herself out of bed and grabbed her wrapper. “Presumably, you didn’t make love to
them
, either. If love plays no part in intimacy, there can be no difference between bedding me or them.”

If he refused to call it love, she would try to accept it. But it wasn’t friendship, either. One didn’t make love to a
friend
as her husband made love to her. It was the only ammunition she had, and by God, she was going to use it.

“That being the case, I’d like to know how I compare in the bed to your last mistress, the most recent one,” Merry said. “The one to whom you gave a ruby.”

Trent’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know that?”

“Cedric told me.”

Darkness swept up his face as if a storm had blown in from the sea. “I find it intolerable that you and my brother discussed the subject.”

“I am sympathetic,” she retorted. “Nor was I happy that you and Cedric chatted about my supposed erotic experi
ence. But I digress. You do not love me, and there is no such thing as ‘making love.’ Emotion other than lust plays no part in the matter. Therefore, you probably enjoyed it more with her, since she is presumably more experienced?”

“You are my
wife
, Merry. That changes everything.” His lips barely moved and every muscle was taut.

Merry felt as if she were outside her own body, observing herself prod a lion in its cage. Why was she pushing him? And yet her heart was beating with an anguished fury, raging at the idea that their couplings had been nothing more than what he had shared with his mistress.

“Why did you give her a ruby?” she demanded. “Cedric thought you wildly overpaid her.”

His eyes met hers directly, without emotion. “She announced that she was in love with me. She became distraught when I did not reciprocate.”

Just like that, the supposed comparison she had set up—between his mistress and herself—fell to pieces. She loved Trent. Just as his mistress had loved him, and he certainly hadn’t fallen in love with the poor woman as a result.

In truth, there was no difference between the acts. Neither she nor his mistress experienced it as Trent did.

“I married you for better or worse,” he said now, “and I will never break my vows. Our friendship means a great deal to me, Merry. I believe that we will have—we do already have—an excellent marriage. It’s all a matter of control. I shall control my temper, and you shall ignore this infatuation until it disappears.”

Merry didn’t trust her voice, so she just nodded. She was trapped. He didn’t believe in love, and her romantic history merely confirmed his skepticism. She had to accept what he was saying because she had no credibility.

There was no sense to demanding words that he couldn’t
or wouldn’t give. She took a deep breath. She could prove herself over time. They made love every night; she would just have to show him, without words.

Love him silently.

There was one part of all this that she couldn’t get out of her mind: Trent’s mistress, the woman dismissed with a ruby, the one who loved him.

Merry wanted Trent to think that bedding her—Merry—was the best experience he’d ever had. Later that night, after her bath, she slid into Trent’s bed with a plan in mind. She had decided to put into effect everything she’d learned about his body and drive him mindless with desire.

Damn it, if there was a competition between his mistress and herself—even if it was only in her own head—she was determined to win. She didn’t have to ever say again that she loved him, since he disliked hearing it. But she could
show
it. She could make love to him as no other woman ever had.

Yet within moments, she was putty in his hands, whimpering, her heart pounding a crazy, blissful rhythm. Trent had never said much in bed, other than growling appreciation of her body, or cursing as she caressed him, learning to please him. When she licked his shaft, for example . . .

But she had to make him speak to her. “Is there anything you’d like me to do differently?” she asked, pitching her voice to a silky, seductive murmur.

He frowned. “Pardon me?”

“I asked if there is anything you’d like me to do differently,” she whispered, peeping at him from under her lashes. At the same moment, she curled her fingers tightly around his “cock,” as he called it.

Maybe he would say that he had never had such a wonderful experience in bed. Ever.

She was just beginning to smile, her heart singing, when he nodded.

Nodded?

Well, spit.

Before she had time to think about it, Trent smoothly took on the role of a tutor, adjusting her body as if she were a wooden model. “I enjoy having my stones caressed,” he told her.

As if he was noting his preference for ale over lemonade.

All the time, he was caressing
her
, and damn it, the man had learned everything about her body. She was on fire, her hands shaking as she obeyed his instructions until he captured them and held them over her head, using his body and his teeth to make her writhe under him.

A dark voice said in her ear, “Beg me, Merry.”

“
Please
,” she gasped, without a second’s thought. Over the weeks of their marriage, she had turned the word into a hymn that reverberated in the air between them.

Tonight he made her say it over and over, expertly rearranging her body until her limbs ached with frustrated desire. She started to protest, but at that very moment he pulled her legs apart and thrust inside.

For the first time that evening, she thought he was on the verge of losing control. He looked mad with desire, a groan deep in his throat breaking free. Yet she soon realized that he was changing his rhythm every time the burn began to creep up her legs. By the time he allowed her to have an orgasm, she was sweating and panting.

Pleasure crashed over her with a kind of brutal, melting ferocity such as she had never before felt.

Trent hung over her, panting, and said, “There are other things we can try . . . maybe next time.”

That hadn’t been what she hoped for.

Not at all.

M
erry spent the day working in the garden with Mr. Boothby, but even the simple pleasure of transplanting lettuce seedlings that she herself had sown a month before didn’t lessen her heartache.

When the last seedling was in place, she wandered around the side of the house to the stone bench where she’d sat with Trent on her first day in the garden. Only the calls of swallows high above broke the song of the honeybees.

Trent had his own odd logic, and he had held firm from the beginning. He had warned her that he loathed excesses of emotion.

She felt both humiliated and foolish. How could she even dream that he would return the wild emotion that she was experiencing? How could she have thought that her meager skills in the bedchamber approached that of the undoubtedly exquisite woman who had been Trent’s mistress?

With all her heart, she wished that she’d never disclosed the stupid, stupid fact that she was in love with Trent. It hadn’t ruined everything . . . but it had changed things. Before, she had felt beautiful and desired.

She no longer felt that way. She couldn’t help thinking that if she were more beautiful, more talented, more amusing, better in bed . . . then he might have fallen in love with her. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.

No, that didn’t make sense, because he didn’t fall in love with his mistress.

All the same, she refused to give up. The idea brought to the forefront all the stubbornness that had driven her father to woo a young English lady who’d shuddered at the very thought of a penniless American.

If her father could do it,
she
could do it.

She had made a good start last night, asking how to make their bedding more enjoyable. In fact, she was ashamed to think that she had never asked him before. She had just taken and taken, so overwhelmed by his skills that she lost sight of everything but her own pleasure.

No more.

She would not be a selfish bed partner.

And outside the chamber?

Trent hadn’t come to her with a list in hand, but all the same, he desired something that was not so far off from what Cedric had wanted.

In his heart of hearts, Trent wanted her to be more English.

She had behaved like a child, running around kissing her husband in front of others, and calling him that childish name—Jack—which he disliked. She would hate it if he started chanting, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” And yet, Trent had never objected when she called him whatever
she
wanted.

From now on, he would be Trent to her, just as he requested.

She could tell that he disliked being kissed in public. She’d felt his body stiffen. She would stop.

Finally, she could not continue to besiege him with protestations of love, nor could she nourish the hope that learning better skills in the bedroom would win his love. She was only demanding something that he didn’t feel.

He had accepted her as she was. He might not like everything about her, but he was a true gentleman. Likewise, she had to accept him as he was—but it didn’t mean that she had to accept herself.

Over time, she could prove that her love wasn’t shallow. English gentlewomen didn’t fall in and out of love like jackrabbits. They didn’t kiss in public or call their husbands pet names.

Love meant you wanted the other person’s happiness more than your own. If you loved a person, you made yourself better.

Glancing down, she discovered that she’d been idly drawing with a stick in the dirt, outlining a plan for including raspberry bushes in Boothby’s expanded kitchen gardens. She scuffed it out with her toe.

That day and all the next, Merry adhered to every precept Miss Fairfax had drilled into her. She was affectionate but not extravagantly so with her husband. A few times, her hand trembled with the instinct to reach out and push back a stray lock of hair, but she refrained.

More than once, she fought an errant wish to weep, but she kept reminding herself that she wanted to make Trent happy. She loved him.

You make people you love happy.

Her aunt had once told her, when she was a little girl and missing her father, “Smile even if your heart is break
ing. The grief will still be there, but you are giving it permission to ease. And one day, it
will
ease and you’ll feel better.”

Merry had done her best then, and she did her best now.

The true challenge came when they were making love. Caught in passion, sweating and trembling, she had to bite her lip ferociously in order to stop herself from uttering love words Trent didn’t want to hear.

She was determined not to impose on him again.

Fortunately, most of the time she was busy making certain that she performed the caresses Trent taught her, in both the proper order and manner. If some spontaneity was missing, she was the only one who seemed to notice.

Married couples do settle into a pleasurable routine, of course.