“Where is your brother now?”

His eye shuttered. “Paris, I believe.”

A knock sounded on the door.

“Ah,” he said. “Sustenance arrives.”

He brought the tray inside himself, not allowing the servant to enter, and he set it on the bed. She removed the silver lids.

“This is enough food for half-a-dozen people,” she exclaimed.

“Or one underfed governess.” His voice was quiet.

She looked up from the delicacies before her to his face and saw a mixture of satisfaction and vulnerability. The back of her throat tightened.

She ate, and she drank the wine he poured for her. He leaned back on the bolster with a silver plate of ripe purple figs balanced on his flat belly, the dressing gown falling in satin folds to either side, and Arabella lost her appetite for anything but watching him. She wanted to caress him with her mouth as he had done to her. He made her blood run hot and fast and he frightened her. With him, she could forget everything. She could forget even her need to know who she truly was. She had denied it for weeks, fought it and him, yet still she fell.

She pushed the tray to the bottom of the bed and crawled toward him. Afraid to touch him and renew the feelings from before, she only lay down on her side and watched him.

“Luc . . .” I love you.

He set the dish of fruit aside, bent over her and kissed her. “Call me by my name again, beauty, and I shall give you a dozen tiaras. A hundred.”

“You cannot purchase me.”

“I do not wish to purchase you,” he murmured against her neck. “I wish to make you happy.”

“Diamonds will not make me happy.” She held onto his shoulders as his kisses descended.

“What, then?”

“I want to know my family,” she whispered the truth finally that she had never spoken aloud to anyone.

“Your adoptive father, Reverend Caulfield, pastor of a poor parish in a tiny border hamlet,” he said. “Your elder sister, Eleanor, spinster scholar. Your younger sister, Ravenna, in service to—”

She pushed him off. “How do you know this? I never told it to you.”

His brow creased. “It was not difficult to discover, duch—”

She pressed her fingertips to his lips. “You mustn’t call me that.”

He kissed her fingers, then drew one into his mouth. The caress of his tongue on the sensitive pad echoed between her thighs and in her toes. She closed her eyes and let herself feel what he did to her. Just this. She must want only this now, not anything else of him. Now that she knew her weakness, she could guard against wishing for more. She could still save herself from being completely lost.

He set his lips to her palm, then to the tender inside of her wrist. “How then shall I bring you happiness, little governess?”

“Let me go.” She stretched her neck and he kissed her shoulder, pushing the coverlet aside then entirely off her.

“I cannot.” He traced a trail with his tongue between her breasts, then he circled the swell, and finally the hungry peaked nipple. “Everyone would think I was a terrible scoundrel for seducing the governess then discarding her. Would ruin the reputation of the family, you know.”

She arched to his kisses on her belly, breathless. “You tease but you do not understand.”

“I understand that when I am with you, inside you, there is nothing else.” His hands circled her hips.

“There is always something else.”

“What else is there but your speaking eyes, your glorious hair, your sharp tongue—”

“My mistrust of you.”

He urged her knees apart and placed his mouth upon the inner curve of her thigh. “Your scent of roses.”

My heart that can now be broken.

He bent to her and his tongue skimmed her most tender flesh and she gasped. “Your intoxicating flavor.” He licked again, slowly. Her back bowed.

“What—” She struggled for breath. “What are you doing?”

“Tasting you.” He dragged his tongue across her. “Intoxicating myself upon you.”

It was perfect pleasure, soft and wet, and she was drowning. “I am not brandy.”

“You are heaven. My heaven.” He sucked gently and she almost jumped off the bed. She clutched the bedclothes and held herself still and he sucked on her until she was blind with the pleasure and weak with yearning for more than this alone.

“This must be wrong.” She struggled for control beneath the caresses of his mouth, fighting her need.

“Trust me, Arabella,” he said and his hands held her securely.

She wanted it. She wanted to be his whole world as she feared he was now hers.

She let him do to her with his tongue what he wished, and she cried out when the pleasure came through her, rocking her body with such force that she could not withhold her cries. He came into her then, his thick shaft driving into her without tenderness or murmured encouragement this time, but urgently. He thrust hard, then harder. After the soft seduction of his mouth she welcomed it, and she imagined he needed her. She pulled him to her.

“My God, Arabella,” he growled. “You drive me mad.” His shoulders caped, and with a powerful moan he finished inside her.

He did not release her at once. Instead he wrapped his arms about her and held her beneath him, and dipped his brow to her shoulder. She ran her hands along his damp sides, memorizing the texture of his skin and the shape of him. When her fingers came to the wound, he sucked in a sharp breath. He pulled away but his gaze remained upon her.

“You should not have done that,” she said.

“I could not stop myself from doing that.”

“In that manner,” she clarified, touching a single fingertip to his side.

Moving carefully, he drew the coverlet over her. “I am undisciplined.”

Another lie. He was so thoroughly confident of the discipline he imposed on his crewmen and friends and servants that he could not even fathom deviation from his will.

She closed her eyes and turned her face into the bolster. He touched her brow, stroking back a lock of hair, his fingertips lingering on her cheek for a moment before he drew away.

“Why do you mistrust me, duchess,” he said quietly, “when I would give you everything?”

“Why do I mistrust you,” she whispered, “when you lied to me and continue to withhold the truth from me?”

She needed him to deny it, to assure her that there was nothing he was hiding about the reason for their wedding that had been done in such haste, and why his injury was kept such a secret.

He said nothing and she pressed her face into the linen that held the scent of him.

“Will you accept the diamonds as my wedding gift to you?” he said quite seriously.

“I cannot.”

He left her then. She had expected him to leave, but the bedchamber grew cold swiftly. She pulled the blanket around her, burrowed into the mattress, and waited for sleep.

Chapter 13

Lord of the Manor

“Are you in there, your grace?”

Luc cracked his eye open. His valet stood in the open doorway of the boathouse. The sunlight framing his compact silhouette suggested midday.

Luc leaned forward on the cushioned bench and rubbed his face in his hands, then through his hair, shaking himself awake.

“What is it?” After a night of making love to a beautiful, passionate woman, he ought to feel spectacular. But his side hurt like the devil and despite all she had remained intractable.

“A letter arrived this morning from Canterbury, your grace, and another from Mr. Parsons.” With military precision Miles proffered the correspondence. Luc scowled. His valet’s gesture reminded him too much of how Arabella had thrust that blasted tiara into his hands the night before.