The Haunting of a Duke (25 page)

He slid his hands into her hair, cupping her head as she used her mouth to drive him mad. When he could stand no more, he withdrew from her mouth completely, holding himself back from her. “If you continue—"

A small, pearlescent bead of moisture glistened. She gripped him and flicked her tongue over it, tasting the essence of him. “I have a fairly good idea of what will happen if I continue. I want to taste you."

She took him into her mouth again, and he was lost. Her hands slid over his thighs and then she gripped his shaft, her soft hand cupping his balls, massaging them as she sucked him deeply into her mouth. His legs trembled, his breath rasping from him as the pleasure built to a fever pitch, and then she scraped her teeth over the sensitive head of his cock, as her hand slid down the shaft, and his vision went dark. There was only the heat of her mouth and the pleasure that erupted through his body.

She licked and sucked, milking him, until he thought the pleasure would kill him. When the last of the shudders ceased to rack his body, he pulled her to her feet. He lifted her and carried her to the bed, where they both collapsed, sated and weak.

They lay there for some time, her head on his chest, as his hands stroked her now tangled hair and the silky line of her back.

It was Emme who broke the silence. “Will it always be like this?"

He paused. “I wish I could say yes, but this is not something I have ever experienced before. I've never felt this way with anyone."

Emme sighed and snuggled closer. It was not the admission she had wanted from him, but it would do for now. She had recognized that somewhere along the way she had fallen hopelessly in love with him. It was a precarious thing to fall in love with one's husband. If her feelings were not returned, if he did not come to love her, there would be no escape from it. What greater hell could there be, she wondered, than to love someone, to know that she stirred his blood, and to live with him, day after day, knowing that she would never stir his heart?

He stood in the darkness of the passageway and listened, watching through the peephole. He couldn't see everything, but he had seen enough. He'd heard their moans and cries. She was a whore, just like the other ones. He'd recognized it from the moment he'd first spied her. She would pay he thought. She would service him, just as she'd serviced the duke. It was his due after all.

As he thought of it, the fantasy began to grow in his mind. He could hear her crying out, but it wouldn't be cries of pleasure. No. She would cry out with agony and fear. She would plead with him to stop. She would beg him for mercy and when he had taken her in every way imaginable, when he had used her body and sated his every desire, then she would plead for her life.

He slid his hand into his pocket and felt the length of wide satin ribbon. He'd taken it from her dressing table days earlier. The black ribbon would look lovely as it tightened about her white neck. Her face would flush and her lips would part as she gasped for air, for a breath that would not come.

With his other hand, he clumsily freed the buttons of his breeches, popping one in his haste. It landed on the stone floor with a solid ping, but the sound did not carry to the couple on the bed, so engrossed were they in one another. He eyed the length of her legs as she stretched. He could see the swell of one breast. He took his engorged member into his hand and began to stroke, pulling roughly, almost violently. In his mind she was lying in that bed, naked as she was now, but the black ribbon was tightening about her delicate throat and her eyes were going wide and sightless as the breath left her body.

Two more quick jerks of his hand and his seed spilled into the waiting handkerchief. Soon, he thought, it would not be his hand bringing him pleasure, but her lithe, supple body in the throes of death.

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Several days had lapsed without incident and a hush had fallen over the household. Rhys had revisited Elise's journal again, hoping that perhaps he had missed something. He had forbidden Emme to search the tunnels beneath the house in spite of the fact that she felt sure something would be discovered there.

Emme was in the library when Lord Ellersleigh was announced. He had returned for the holidays. He looked, Emme thought, haggard. His color was slightly off and she could only imagine that he had drunk himself to near oblivion during his weeks in town. “Hello, Michael,” she said, kissing his cheek warmly as he entered the library. “I would ask you how you've been, but then you would tell me. I would be scandalized and my husband would undoubtedly be furious. Suffice to say, I'm glad you've come to Briarwood to recuperate from your excesses."

He chuckled in spite of the splitting headache that plagued him. “It happens from time to time. Excess."

Michael observed her for a moment, taking note of the healthy glow that illuminated her porcelain skin. He also noted that her bosom was significantly fuller, and that the new abundance was not the product of her artfully cut gown. “You're with child,” he said.

Emme's jaw dropped. “Don't be silly!"

Could she really not know, he wondered? “My dear, you have been married for six weeks. Not to be indelicate or to embarrass you, but have you missed your flow?"

Emme's face flamed at the mere mention. “How do you know about these things?"

Michael cursed. “While we were in the army, Emme, Rhys might have been a soldier but my duties were as a physician. There were numerous women in our camp."

The prostitutes and fallen women who followed the soldiers were no secret. Emme was aware of them. She didn't have to speak. The truth was written on her face as the startling realization assailed her.

"Then congratulations, my dear, for you are expecting the heir."

Emme couldn't speak. She couldn't do anything. As the implications of what Michael suggested fully began to sink in, the room spun dizzily around her.

Michael noted the sudden pallor of her face. Concerned, he stepped forward just as her knees buckled and she collapsed. He caught her, but only barely. He couldn't lift her, for what she had observed to be illness brought on by his excess drinking was in fact the result of having taken a ball to his shoulder.

Straining to hold her, her lush bosom pressed indecently to him, he looked down. He was a man after all, and it was a remarkably fine bosom. And that was how Rhys discovered them.

"I will shoot you, Ellersleigh. I will bloody well kill you."

"Someone already has shot me, Rhys, which is why I was unable to lift your lovely wife after she fainted. Would you be so kind?"

Rhys moved forward and lifted Emme effortlessly. Her head lolled against his shoulder and she stirred but did not awaken. “Emme doesn't faint."

Taking a little more joy in it than a good friend ought to, Michael said, “All pregnant women faint."

Rhys was halfway to the settee, his still unconscious wife in his arms, when the words fully penetrated the concerned fog of his brain. His steps slowed but did not falter. When he reached the settee, he laid her down gently and then slid to the floor in front of it. “She told you? She told you before even whispering a word of it to me?"

Had he been given to prayer, Michael would have uttered his thanks to the Lord for preserving him from the foolishness of love. Lust and like were as far as he ever wanted to be entangled with a woman, and truthfully, of the two, he would choose lust.

"You really are a damned idiot. No, she did not tell me. I guessed and when I said as much to her, it was apparently not a possibility she had been considering. She was quite overcome at the thought, hence the fainting."

Rhys stared at his friend incredulously. “You just walk around informing women that they may be increasing? With your usual lack of tact, no doubt. Is it any wonder she fainted? And how the hell did you guess?"

"Your lovely wife has quite a voluptuous figure, my friend, but have you not noted that certain areas have been more bountiful of late?"

He had noticed, but he wasn't going to say that to Michael. “That you've studied her form enough to note the difference doesn't endear you to me."

Michael chuckled. “Don't say anything to her yet. Let her tell you in her own time. Women like that."

Rhys would have demanded that Michael tell him how he could possibly know that, but was prevented by Emme stirring behind him.

Her eyelids fluttered for a moment before popping open and he noted that she looked positively terrified.

"Feeling better, love?"

Emme sat up and immediately wished she hadn't. Her head was still spinning. “I'm fine, just overtired, I suppose."

Rhys glared at Michael, as Michael smiled back at him, the cat who had gotten the cream. “Are you sure you're only tired, Emme?” he asked, his voice a model of solicitude.

Emme glared back at him. “One can never be entirely certain of anything, Lord Ellersleigh,” she said warningly.

He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Perhaps a footman can escort you to your room for a lie down? Whether one is ill or overtired, it is always a helpful remedy."

"Wisdom from an unlikely source,” Rhys said caustically.

"I think I will lie down for a bit. I will see you at dinner,” Emme said, and hurriedly left the room.

"Just leave it alone, Rhys. She will broach the subject with you soon enough."

"Why are you here, Michael?"

Michael folded himself into one of the chairs, “I am recuperating. Lady Whitmore did not take well to our parting."

Lady Whitmore was barely respectable. The woman had been involved in more notorious affairs then even Michael himself.

"When I asked you to look into Elise's friends I simply meant attend a few parties, talk to them. I did not intend for you to sacrifice yourself to an aging succubus. Why the bloody hell would you involve yourself with her?"

Michael retrieved a small leather-bound book from his pocket. “Because she and your late wife were fast friends, and her journal is a bit more revealing than Elise's has been."

Rhys took the book from Michael's outstretched hand. “She gave you her journal?"

Michael eyed him dubiously. “Perhaps gave is not entirely the proper word."

"You stole it?"

Michael smiled. “The lady said she would give me anything. It isn't my fault that she failed to add the caveat that ‘anything’ only included her charms and not her possessions."

"She shot you when she discovered you'd taken it?"

"I don't think she ever discovered that it was missing, Rhys. She shot me, as she put it, for being an arrogant prig."

"Well you are arrogant, but no one to my knowledge has ever considered you a prig."

Michael shrugged, then winced slightly. “I denied her request."

Rhys raised an eyebrow at that. “What did she request?"

"She wanted a liaison involving her, myself, and a ten-year-old child. We all have our limits, and as debauched as I may be, bedding children is not now, nor will it ever be, in my repertoire. Perhaps it wasn't simply my refusal. Perhaps she shot me because I had the audacity to tell her that if she ever went near a child again I would see her ruined, and if I could not ruin her, then I would see her dead."

Rhys poured two glasses of brandy and handed one to Michael, keeping the other for himself. “Always the savior, Michael? When do you feel that you will have atoned enough for not saving Melisande?"

Michael's expression darkened, and with a practiced motion he drained his glass. “I do not atone for failing to save Melisande, Rhys... I atone for everything I've done since."

Emme paced her bedchamber, calculating and recalculating. She hadn't had her courses since leaving her stepfather's home to come to Briarwood Park. She considered the fullness of her breasts, which she'd attributed to weight gain.

She'd discovered a fondness for the teacakes Cook made. She hadn't been ill. Well, she corrected, she hadn't been truly sick. There had been one or two mornings where her stomach had been slightly rebellious upon waking, but the feeling had passed quickly. “Dear heavens,” she said, as she sat down heavily at her dressing table.

Gussy entered the room a few minutes later and found her still sitting there, staring at nothing. “Finally occurred to you, has it?” she asked, putting away the freshly ironed chemises.

"What occurred to me, Gussy?” she asked, idly toying with the hair brush on the dressing table.

Gussy rolled her eyes heavenward and chuckled. “Your husband shares your bed every night, every morning, and sometimes again in the afternoon. I would be more surprised to learn that ye weren't increasing than to learn that ye were. Besides, I'm your maid. I take care of your clothing. I know when your flow comes almost as well as I know my own."

There were no secrets, Emme realized, none whatsoever. Had it been anyone other than Gussy speaking to her so, she would have died of shame. But Gussy was more friend than servant and had always been so. “I can't believe I never even considered it."

"To be fair, Your Grace, ye've had more than a bit on your mind. Solving old murders, nightly chats with ghostly visitors, and satisfying that mon of yours... It's little wonder ye didn't think of it."

"What should I say to him?"

Gussy rolled her eyes heavenward. “He's a grown mon, your husband. He knows how bairns are made. Just tell him you're with child."

Emme blushed furiously. “Gussy, I hate to, but you're the only person I can ask questions of... Is it—should I—can—"

Gussy took pity on her charge. “Ye can still lie with your husband, until close to time for the babe to come. Ye just go on about your life the same way ye were before. And soon enough, we'll have a wee one to tend to."

"Help me out of this gown, Gussy. I think I will lie down for a bit, after all."

Stripped to her chemise, Emme laid down upon the bed. She pressed her palms against her still flat stomach and tried to imagine the life growing inside her. It was a strange notion, but not an unpleasant one. What would their child look like? Would it be dark like Rhys, with his dusky skin and brown eyes? Or would it be pale like her, with her odd silver eyes? Another thought, far less present, crept into her mind. Would Rhys love their child even if it were like her or would he grow to resent her if their child wasn't
normal
?