Desperate Duchesses

  A few minutes later three footmen staggered in carrying a zinc bath and buckets of water, and Roberta was able to climb into the scented water with a sigh. Ellen helped her wash her hair, and then Roberta told her she could go to bed. “You must be exhausted.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t leave you in this state,” Ellen said, looking sleepy. “How will you prepare for bed?”

  “The same way I got myself into bed these last twenty years,” Roberta said. “My maid at home was quite old and couldn’t manage late nights, and so I always tucked myself in bed. In fact, I prefer it.”

  “Will you call a footman to remove the water?”

  “Of course I will. You go to bed.”

  Ellen curtsied and left. Then she stuck her head back around the door. “I forgot to say that everyone below stairs is that pleased that you will be a duchess?”

  Roberta smiled at her. “Thank you.”

  “And no one will think the less of you for anticipating the wedding night, my lady…I’ll ask Martin, the second footman, to fetch your clothing in an hour or so. He can stow it where no one can see.”

  Roberta’s smile was a little crooked this time. One had to hope that Damon would get himself out of that room without being seen by Martin or anyone else.

  The moment the door closed she leaned her head back against the edge of the bath with a sigh. She was half asleep by the time she pulled on a dressing gown and called a footman to remove the bath.

  The bath was gone, and she had just sat down on the bed, still in her dressing gown, and was thinking about where her nightgown might be when the door swung open.

  “Oh,” she said, blinking up at him. “It’s you.” And then, with a squeak as she woke up, “What are you doing in my bedchamber?”

  Chapter 31

  Villiers stood quietly in the doorway, one eyebrow raised.

  Jemma deliberately looked him over from head to toe: the sulky bottom lip, the dramatically streaked hair, the languid yet powerful stance. He was wearing a plum-colored coat embroidered with fire lilies; his hair ribbon matched. He wore one patch, high on his right cheek. He looked inexpressibly elegant even to her, who had lived for eight years in the shadow of the French court.

  There was something about Villiers…about his penchant for clothing embroidered with peacock brightness, about his patch and his colored hair ribbon, about the deep intelligence in his gamester’s eye, and the coiled power of his body.

  “Do come in,” she said, indicating the chess board. “A game, another side game, if you are not too tired?”

  His heavy silk coat sounded like a distant seashore as he walked. He closed the door behind him and then swept into a magnificent bow, as low as that one might give to a queen. “You do me too much honor, Your Grace.”

  “Jemma,” she said.

  His heavy-lidded eyes paused on her face for a moment. “Jemma.” Her name sounded odd on his lips, and Jemma suddenly remembered the first time she was unfaithful to Beaumont. It had been in Paris, of course, after she fled England in rage and tears. Two years after she moved to Paris, it finally became clear to her that Beaumont was not coming after her to beg her to come home—fool that she was, she had thought he would. In fact, he didn’t even pay her a visit for three years, and by then it was too late.

  She had fallen into bed with a merry French gentleman who taught her the pleasures of her own body and his. And yet that first night, her heart had been as heavy as it was now.

  Why should it be heavy? She had the right to do precisely as she wished. She watched him sit opposite her, tossing his coat-skirts behind him so they wouldn’t crease. “You may perhaps think that I do you more honor than I intend,” she said.

  “Dear lady,” Villiers said, “I will take whatever scraps you throw from your table.”

  More of his curfluffle. Perhaps she should just tell him that she disliked his practiced gallantry.

  “A game?” she asked. “I have given you the advantage, as you see.”

  He played a piece and so did she. Again, and again. The rhythm of the game soothed her, wrapped her in the sweet complexities of knights and rooks and the powerful queen. Slowly her rage and mortification ebbed as her focus on the game sharpened. Her bishop was menaced. She rushed to save him, only to find that her queen’s pawn was threatened. A troublesome move…she slowed to think. Paused, her fingers still on her rook, until she suddenly saw a path, took his rook.

  He fought back, but her bishop took his queen…four moves later it was over. She won.

  Then they parsed the game, playing it backwards.

  “When your rook took my pawn…that was a beautiful play,” Villiers muttered.

  “What if you had threatened my queen, so?”

  “No, because knight takes bishop…”

  It was almost more fun dissecting the game than playing it. Almost, but not quite. At the end, he leaned back and smiled at her. “Sometimes I think that chess is better than sex.”

  “I think so always,” she said, startling herself.

  “Someone should change your mind on that subject.”

  She reached out and turned his hand over. “Perhaps you could be the one to change my mind,” she said, tracing a path on his palm with her finger. “That is, I would be pleased, but you are Roberta’s fiancé, and the bonds between friends are stronger than those between lovers, in my opinion.”

  “I have few friends. The closest friend of my life was your husband, and that many years ago.”

  She glanced at him, but he was staring at her fingers on his hand. “I know that you were close once…”

  “In the way of boys and small animals. Without thought for the future nor our differing personalities. But still, I find I have a fragment of honor left in me. I am not the person to show Beaumont’s wife that the body is greater than the mind, and games of chess pale next to games in bed.” He took her hand and kissed it, and there was something so sad in his eyes that she didn’t even mind the fact she had been turned down.

  Though that had never happened before.

  “Why don’t you speak to him?” she asked impulsively. “Elijah needs friends. He needs someone to tell him to slow down, to drag him away from his work.”

  His smile was rueful. “He and I are centuries apart, in personality and taste. In all honesty, and without offense, I wouldn’t wish to be particular friends with the Duke of Beaumont now. If it were a matter of being fourteen again, and playing a game of chess by the river…that I do miss. But those days are gone.”

  “I have no wish to be fourteen again.”

  “Life was simpler. I do not let myself entertain regrets nor think about mistakes. My father always said, and he was right, that regret is a useless practice. But I find that in my thirties, regrets chase me down the street sometimes. It’s not so easy to shrug them away.”

  He was talking about Benjamin, perhaps. She thought about whether to mention his suicide too long, because Villiers asked her, “What do you regret, Oh Duchess?”

  That made her grin. “So many things!”

  “Such as?”

  “The absurd Italian hat I bought yesterday in Bond Street with Roberta.”

  “Ah, Roberta.”

  His eyelids dropped and she couldn’t see his expression. “Your fiancée,” she prompted.

  “A charming young lady.”

  “I gather,” she said wryly, “that the dew is off the rose, for you.”

  “Yet another regret.” He sighed. “They are like bad dreams; once you allow one, they come as thick and fast as leaves in autumn.”

  “She will make you an excellent wife.”

  “I did it to make you angry.” He raised her hand and put one kiss in her palm, and then replaced it on the table, all without looking at her. “I admit with some shame: You won our first game of chess.”

  She shook her head at him. “You asked someone to marry you out of pique?”

  “Are you suggesting that I take this game too seriously?”


  She found herself laughing, and then he joined in.

  “One never knows,” he said a moment later. “There’s many a slip between an engagement and the church.”

  “She loves you, you know.”

  “Or something of that nature,” he agreed.

  “It would take an act of God,” Jemma said. “But I think she will be the making of you, Villiers. Perhaps you will have the real marriage that I can only imagine.”

  “Unfortunately, I cannot imagine such a thing,” he said with some disdain. “I shall pray for an act of God.” He was at the door when he turned and said, “I have had many lovers, Jemma.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I am the more disconcerted to be left out of the legion, then.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’ve had many lovers…but few friends.”

  And he was gone, before she thought how to reply.

  Chapter 32

  “What happened to you? Where did you go?” Damon demanded.

  Roberta blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Why did you sneak off like a housemaid in the night and leave me in the sitting room?”

  She couldn’t help laughing a little. “Are you telling me that you wanted me to stay around and watch you snore? Perhaps until the footman came in to bank the fire? I took a bath, just as you apparently did,” she said, looking at his wet hair.

  “I didn’t get a chance to show you what making love can be like.”

  “Oh, yes you did,” she said hastily. “I thoroughly enjoyed it. Truly. I was simply—”

  He swallowed all her words, and her protests, and her sensible points, just by pulling off his shirt, and then his breeches. A protest died in her throat. Without a word he lowered his hard masculine length on top of her. It was unsettling. A sort of hunger settled deep in her stomach that made her feel uneasy.

  Then Damon started kissing her, and with a little moan, she opened her lips to him. She could taste his hunger, as if they passed it back and forth to each other. The uneasiness in her stomach was turning into something else, some sort of restlessness that brought her hands up to his powerful forearms. Her fingers trembled as she traced his muscles.

  The feeling alarmed her, and with a sudden twist she rolled out from under him and sprang away from the bed. “I’d prefer not to be intimate again,” she said, dismayed to realize that her breath was coming fast.

  Damon didn’t even seem to hear her. He started padding toward her, without a word, like a predator.

  Roberta backed up as far as she could go, against her little armchair. “Damon!” she cried, trying to make her voice sound commanding. “I prefer not—”

  But he was kissing her again, fierce in his possession, and all her flimsy words blew away because the mere touch of his hands had her shivering.

  “No,” she gasped, but it was like throwing kindling on a fire; he laughed, deep in his throat and kissed her again, kissed her until she was trembling, her mind swirling, her body rocking against his, her voice strangled with the need to beg him—

  She never begged.

  Never.

  But then he stopped touching her and suddenly her body raged with the memory of his large hands shaping her breasts, rubbing her. He was just kissing her. That’s all. As if—

  Of course, she wasn’t touching him either. They were standing together, and the only thing touching was their mouths and it wasn’t enough.

  “Damon,” she said, her voice husky.

  “I’ve never lost control like that.”

  “It had nothing to do with your control. I think I just didn’t enjoy that part of it very much. It’s—It’s so fast, isn’t it? And not—”

  He groaned. “Can we talk about aberrations?”

  “What?” she said, confused.

  But he was there, scooping her up. “This one’s for you, Buttercup,” he said, putting her back on the bed and sitting down next to her.

  Roberta was still trying to think what to say when he pulled open her dressing gown. Instinctively, she grabbed it back. “No!”

  “Yes.” His eyes were full of slumberous intent, but she hung on. “Roberta,” he said slowly, “if you don’t let go, I’m going to bite you.”

  “What!”

  He put a finger on her breast and it sizzled, straight through the silk of her dressing gown. “Here,” he said, his voice husky. “And perhaps”—his finger wandered down, leaving a trail of fire in its wake—“here.”

  “You’d bite my stomach?” Her voice squeaked, so she sounded as foolish as she felt.

  He laughed at her. “I thought you learned so much from your informative discussions with Selina?”

  “She never talked about biting. And I’d really rather not do that again,” she confessed, though her cheeks turned pink.

  He looked down at her, eyebrow raised, and there was such a flare of desire in his eyes that she instinctively moved her hips. But they encountered something hard and hot, and she shrank back. “I bathed,” she said. “Please, could we just not?”

  He groaned and his eyes shut. “I’m such an idiot.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said reassuringly. Her fingers trembled as they slipped down his arms onto his broad back. “I thought it was very interesting. Not at all as Selina described it, but—”

  “How did Selina describe it?”

  “Well,” she foundered, “I thought it—it—”

  “It would take longer,” he said grimly, his mouth a straight line.

  “No,” she said, frowning at the look on his face. “No, not at all. It was just as she described it, that way.”

  He groaned. “Wonderful. What else did Selina say?”

  “She said that a woman has to take her own pleasure,” Roberta said, “but I don’t think there was any pleasure for me to take that you didn’t give me, Damon.” She didn’t like that look on his face at all, so she arched up against his body to kiss him, her lips sliding over his lips to his cheek. “Truly,” she said anxiously.

  “You,” he said, “are an innocent.”

  “No, I’m not!” she said, flopping back down on the bed. “No one raised in my father’s household could call herself an innocent!”

  He suddenly grinned. “All right.” He pushed back on his forearms and rolled away to lie next to her on the bed.

  “What?” she asked, confused.

  “Take your pleasure.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you learned from Selina. And believe me, Roberta, you didn’t get a chance to do it downstairs. I took all the pleasure there was to be had.” His eyes had a shade of self-condemnation that she hated.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him, “but it was enormously pleasurable. Truly.”

  In response he just flung his arms above his head. “Go on,” he said. “Take your pleasure.”

  Roberta was confused. Selina had never been entirely clear about what she meant, but Roberta had (obviously mistakenly) formed the conclusion that a woman should demand that her partner kiss her…in an intimate spot. But that didn’t seem to be what Damon had in mind at all, as he had made no move to kiss her anywhere other than her breast and her lips, and now that she thought about it, that kind of kiss would be so tremendously embarrassing that she had to be wrong.

  She could feel the color creeping into her cheeks at the very thought. What if she had asked Damon to do such a thing? Not that she would have, but—

  “Roberta,” he said patiently, and her eyes flew open. “I’m waiting.”

  Roberta looked down at his hardened length. Just what was she supposed to do?

  As if he could hear her thought, he said, “Your pleasure, not mine.”

  Roberta was starting to feel a bit like a failure. How was she supposed to know what to do? “And we won’t do the rest of it again?” She really didn’t want to take another bath. It was too awful even to think of summoning her maid again.

  “We won’t do anything you don’t as
k me to do.”

  Satisfied, she moved a fraction of an inch closer to him. “But what do you expect me to do?” she said, a second later, unable to think of anything.

  “Think about pleasure,” he said to her, his eyes slumberous and dark. “What gives you, Roberta, pleasure about me? About my body? Is there anything? Because it’s yours. You can touch me however you wish. If you tell me to do something, I will. If you don’t tell me, I won’t raise a finger.”

  A shiver went through her. “Go on,” he said. “You’re not showing Selina’s tutelage to the best advantage.”

  Roberta bit her lip and put his teasing out of her mind. Her pleasure? And what did she particularly—well, like? She had been absolutely wrong about Selina’s advice, obviously, so what was Selina actually saying?

  She didn’t meet his eyes because she didn’t want to discover he was laughing at her naïveté, after she boasted of learning so much from Selina. So she looked at his arms instead. They were broad and muscled, as unlike her slender ones as possible. She reached out a hand and placed it on his arm, slid over the bunched muscle there to the strength of his shoulder, to the breadth of his chest.

  Suddenly she noticed something. He quivered under her hand. Perhaps…

  She tried it again, running her hand over his muscles. Her fingers brushed his armpit and touched his nipple. He did it again. He shook, just slightly, from her touch. She scooted over on her knees so that she was just beside him and could use both her hands to touch him.

  She flattened both hands on his chest, and then drew her fingers down his chest to his taut stomach. That was…pleasurable. The feeling of powerful muscle under her fingers, rippling slightly under her touch was pleasurable. The low sound that came from Damon’s chest was definitely pleasurable, though she didn’t look at his face. She was too busy swirling a finger around his nipple, and listening to his breathing grow short and hoarse. She was smiling now. This was what Selina meant! Selina meant that she should learn to take pleasure from her lover’s body, from making him react to her touch.

  His stomach was rock hard, not flat, because it was covered with organized bumps of muscle. She’d never seen anything like that. Her father, as far as she could tell, had a nice flat stomach for a man coming perilously close to the age of fifty. But she’d never dreamed that men had such very different stomachs from her own.