Romancing the Duke

“Yes.” He eased her breast from her stays and circled her nipple with his tongue. “I know what you need.”

He slid both hands to her hips. In one swift motion, he lifted her six inches off the ground, setting her backside on the next shelf up. Nudging her skirts to her waist, he moved between her legs.

“If you don’t want this, tell me.” His voice was hoarse. “You don’t have to scream. You don’t have to push me away. You’ve only to say it.”

Izzy didn’t know what to say. Her body wanted his. That much was certain. But was this going to be her first—and possibly only—experience of lovemaking? A furtive, angry tupping against a dusty shelf? He wouldn’t be making love to her. He’d be striking back at the very idea of love.

“I . . .” She worked for breath. “I’m not saying no.”

He moaned and lifted her, so that she straddled his hips.

“But I’m saying, not like this. I want emotion. I want tenderness. I think you want those things, too.”

His fingers dug into the flesh of her backside, and he ran his tongue across her chest. “Curse tenderness. To hell with emotion. I’m not the man to fulfill your heart’s desires, but I can give you everything—everything—your body’s craving.”

“Just because . . .”

He sucked her nipple into his mouth, and she lost her voice to another wave of bliss.

She wove her fingers in his hair and tried again. “Just because she ran away, it doesn’t mean a woman can’t love you. Ransom, I . . . I know there’s more to you than this.”

“There’s a great deal to me.” He rocked his pelvis against hers, and the hard ridge of his erection stroked her core. “You could have it all. Just as long and hard and deep as you need it.”

Oh. Oh, how she needed it.

He ground against her in a firm, delicious rhythm. The warmed, weathered buckskin teased over her thighs. Izzy whimpered and clung to the shelving, helpless to do anything but hang on for the ride.

With every roll of his hips, he was pushing her higher. Closer to release.

And he knew it.

“Come for me.” He slid his hand between their bodies, and his fingers filled her deep again. As he worked them in and out, the heel of his hand rubbed against her pearl. “I need to feel it. I need to hear it.”

A thin whimper of pleasure caught in her throat.

“My name.” He stroked deeper. “Say my name. I want you to know it’s me.”

“Ransom.” Her grip tightened on the shelf.

And then suddenly—

Something gave way.

With a creak and a whoosh, her whole world turned on its axis. Plunging them both into the dark.

“Wh-?” She panted for breath. “What happened?”

Damned if Ransom could say. One moment, he was in paradise. Izzy gasping his name, all that tightness and heat surrounding his fingers . . . Victory, right in the palm of his hand.

A moment later, they were in hell. The entire section of wall, bookshelves included, had swung on its axis, depositing them here.

Wherever “here” was.

He couldn’t tell. He just knew that everything in it was close. And dank. The air smelled of rot and the mustiness of centuries.

“Is it some kind of secret passage?” Izzy asked, still breathing hard.

He withdrew his hand from her quivering flesh and lowered her skirts as much as he dared. However, he held her pinned against the shelving with his hips, keeping her feet well off the floor. God only knew what muck or misadventures lay at his boots.

With his free hand, Ransom felt around the space. “More like a secret closet. If this was ever a corridor, it’s been closed off now.”

“It must have been a priest hole. A hiding place. They built them in the sixteenth century when Catholicism was made illegal. There should be a way out of here. A lever, or—”

“Let me.”

He scouted the shelves, pulling and pushing on each ledge. Nothing. He tried throwing his weight against one side of the panel in an attempt to make it rotate back the other direction. Nothing.

“Duncan and Miss Pelham are certain to come looking for us,” he said. “When we hear footsteps, we’ll shout for help.”

She caught his coat. Her breathing was a labored rasp. “Just don’t let go.”

“What is it? Are you hurt?”

He felt her head shake no. Her hands found his coat lapels and curled in fists. “It’s just . . . so dark, and I . . .”

“And you’re not fond of the dark. I recall.”

She ducked her head, burrowing into his shoulder.

Gods above. She hadn’t been exaggerating. This was not merely fear but terror. He could feel it in the tremors that raced beneath her skin. He could hear it in the quickness of her breath. The same woman who stood defiant in the face of bats, rats, ghosts, and dukes was utterly petrified . . .

Of the dark.

Ransom couldn’t bring himself to tease or gloat. All his angry lust had dissipated into the murky gloom. Sliding his arms around her back, he pulled her against his chest and clutched tight. Because he understood that fear, as well as he knew his own heart. He’d been that miserable soul, alone and terrified in the fresh hell of darkness.

“It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s dark, but you’re not alone. I’m here.”

Her quaking continued. “It’s s-so embarrassing and childish. It’s been this way since I was nine.”

“What happened when you were nine?”

That seemed rather late in life to develop an aversion to darkness. Maybe talking about it would banish the fear. At the least, it would fill the silence.

“I used to spend summers with my aunt in Essex. She had no daughters. Just a son, Martin. I might have mentioned him.”

“The one who tossed you in a pond?”

“Yes.” Her chest rose and fell with her accelerated breaths. Her story came in short bursts of words. “That’s the one. Miserable, horrid boy. He was jealous, hated me. He wanted me gone. Whenever he caught me alone, he would strike me and call me cruel names. When his casual tormenting didn’t work, he tried throwing me in the pond. And since that didn’t get rid of me either, he caught me in the garden one day, dragged me into the root cellar, and locked me there. It was some thirty paces from the house, and, naturally, underground. No one heard my screams. A full day and night passed before they found me. And Martin got his wish. I cried so hysterically, Aunt Lilith sent me home. I’ve hated the dark ever since.”

Things began to make sense to him. “That’s why the bedtime stories began. Because you were afraid of the dark.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you’re always downstairs when I wake in the morning. Because you’re still afraid of the dark.”

She exhaled slowly. “Yes.”

With a gruff curse, he ran his hands up and down her back. “That cousin of yours was a vile little bastard. I hope he got what he deserved.”

“Not at all. He’s a full-grown bastard now, and he reaped every reward for his vile behavior.”

“How so?”

“My father’s only will was older than I am, drawn up when he reached his majority. I never even knew it existed, and he never revised it. But it left everything to his closest male heir, so . . .”

“Your cousin inherited everything.”

She nodded. “When he came to claim the house and all our material possessions, I thought surely Martin would have matured over the years. Perhaps we might work out some arrangement. But no. He was still the same malicious, petty bully, and he only hated me more for my father’s success. He took everything from me, down to the last pen nib. And he did it gleefully.”

Ransom stayed completely still, not wanting to alarm her. Meanwhile, rage burned through him like a wildfire. He reconsidered the plan of waiting on Duncan and Miss Pelham to find them. He was angry enough to punch straight through the wall.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” she said.

He inhaled and exhaled, trying to moderate his emotions. “I’m engaged in a creative-thinking exercise. Would I rather throw your cousin to a pack of famished jackals? Or watch him be picked apart by a teeming school of piranha?”

“That’s a good one.” She laughed a little. “I’ll be sure to pose that question to Lord Peregrine.”

All was quiet for a few moments.

“How do you bear it?” she asked. “How do you bear this all the time? The darkness.”

“It wasn’t easy at first.” A grave understatement. “But with time, I’ve grown accustomed. The dark scares you because it seems boundless. But it isn’t as vast as it seems. You can explore it, learn the shape of it, take its measure—just as you can see a room with your eyes. You have your hands, nose, ears.”

“I have my mind,” she whispered. “That’s the worst part. It’s my mind that fills the darkness with horrid things. I have too much imagination.”

“Shut the door to it, then. No stories or wild tales. Concentrate only on the things you can sense. What’s in front of you?”

Her hands flattened on the linen of his shirt, light and chilled. “You are.”

“What’s to either side of you?”

“Your arms.”

“What’s behind you?”

She inhaled slowly. “Your hands. Your hands are on my back.”

He rubbed his hands up and down, warming her. “Then that’s all you need to know. I have you. If there are beasties in the dark, they have to get through me.”

After a few more moments, her trembling began to ease. Some knot of tension unraveled in his chest.

“You’re so big and strong,” she murmured.

He didn’t answer.

“And you smell so comforting.” Her forehead rested on his shoulder. “Like whisky and leather. And dog.”

The description startled a laugh from him. “You’re learning the way of it. There’s a great deal you can sense about people without seeing them at all. Scents, sounds, textures. It amazes me sometimes how little attention I paid such things before I was injured. If there’s a boon in all this, it’s that I notice things I would have overlooked.”

The woman in his arms, for instance.

If he’d crossed paths with Izzy Goodnight at Court a few years back, Ransom was certain of one thing. He would not have given her a second look. She was dark, slightly built, and modestly dressed. Innocent, uncertain of her attractions. In sum, not his sort. His eyes had typically wandered to vivacious, fair-haired types.

In this case, his eyes would have done him a disservice.

Because this woman . . . she was a revelation. Every time he took her in his arms, he was astonished anew by her warmth and softness. The fresh, green scent of her hair and the wild-honey sweetness of her voice. Her instinctive passion.

And her tenderness. Her hands skimmed downward, and she slid her arms around his waist to hug him close.

Then she pressed her face to his shirtfront.

Nuzzling.

Well, she was back to herself again.

“So if noticing things you might have overlooked is the best part of being blinded, what’s the worst?” she asked.

God. There were too many contenders for that honor. She could guess at many of them. Others, she could never fathom, and he would never share.

“Learning to hate surprise,” he said, surprising himself with the confession. “I’m a creature of routine now. I have a mental chart of every room in this place, every tabletop. I have to put everything back precisely where I found it, or I’m lost. Makes me feel like an old curmudgeon, growling at anything unexpected.”

“I was unexpected,” she said.