A Duke in Disguise Page 15

  She was tight and hot around him, but the real miracle was that it was her, his Verity, and they were joined. He was inside her, she was around him, and their hearts were pounding against one another. Her hair had come unpinned and fell in soft waves that he buried his face in, her breasts were soft and warm against his chest. She circled her hips and the resulting surge of pleasure had his fingers clasping vise-like on her arse. “So good,” he groaned.

  She pulled back and he saw that her mouth was parted, her eyes shut. As he watched, she opened her eyes and brought a hand to where their bodies were joined, tracing the base of his cock and then dragging moisture up over her folds in a slow glide. “Look at you,” she said. “Inside me. Just like that.”

  “I want to watch you come with me buried inside you,” he said. “Just . . . please.”

  “Is that what you want?” she asked, circling her hips a bit.

  It was all he wanted. He was not certain he had ever wanted anything more, or even at all. The world of uncertain futures and lies of omission fell away, leaving only this. Warmth and softness. Her arms around his neck, her mouth on his, together.

  He dropped his hand to touch her entrance the way she had, feeling the way her body made room for him, welcomed him, drew him in. Then he touched her the way he had before, small and gentle circles that made her gasp and moan as she slid up and down his cock. He was perilously close to climax but he forced it away.

  As she came, she gripped his shoulders so tightly it was almost like she was holding him down, and that thought sent him rushing to the edge. “Now, Verity,” he gritted out. She lifted off him and took him in her hand, stroking and stroking as his orgasm washed over him. He came on her belly and in her hand, and she looked at him with a combination of unabashed triumph and sleepy content, as if she were exceptionally proud of herself and knew she had done something very clever indeed.

  “What are you laughing about?” she asked in mock severity.

  “Only that I adore you, Plum. With my entire heart, and I wish I knew what to do about it.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It seemed deeply unfair that they now had to get dressed and proceed with the rest of the day when the sensible thing would be to never again stir from under the quilt. Ash seemed to be much of the same mind, his hands lazily drifting up and down Verity’s back as she lay with her face in the pillow.

  “Why did you make an exception for me?” Verity asked.

  “Hmm?” he murmured.

  “You said you hadn’t had a lover because you wanted to avoid a child.”

  His hand momentarily stilled. “That wasn’t the only reason. Besides, with you, it’s different. Everything with you is different, Plum. Daft of you not to have figured that out.”

  She supposed that the reason it was different was that he thought she’d have to marry him if she got with child. That was about the last thing she wanted to think about when she was sated and happy. The idea seemed to take what they had—sweet and easy and good—and shove it into a shape that was familiar and wrong.

  “None of that,” he said, as if reading her thoughts, and wrapped his arm around her. She gladly nestled against his shoulder, wanting the warmth and solidity of his body to chase away her thoughts. He smelled good, too, his usual scent of ink and soap overlaid with sex. But now dread of the future crept into her mind and she was reminded of all the reasons why she and Ash hadn’t done this years ago. “Stop thinking,” he said into her hair. “Go to sleep.”

  “It’s not even five o’clock,” she protested. “The shopman tried to speak to me earlier. I have to see what he wants. And I need to make sure that the boys have the Ladies’ Register typeset.” And there were a dozen other small matters she had to attend to. She really could not spend all afternoon in bed, not even with Ash.

  “All right,” he said, sitting up and groping for his trousers. “I’ll check on the boys, you talk to the shopman?”

  “No, that’s kind of you, but it’s my responsibility.”

  “And you discharge all your responsibilities admirably, even though without Nate here I have no idea how you’re managing it. I’m offering to help—which, I’ll remind you, is not unprecedented—and it’s not because I’m trying to get you back into bed as fast as I can. Not that I’d object if you felt so inclined.” He sketched a polite little bow, which would have made her smile even if he hadn’t been in the process of pulling on his trousers.

  “It’s just—” She shook her head. She didn’t know how to make him understand. Her job was hers. She was proud that she ran the business on her own, that the men in the shop treated her little differently than they had treated her father and Nate, and she took pride in being a fair employer. But mainly she was so used to shouldering every burden on her own, that she feared accepting help would make her burdens feel heavier once the help was gone.

  “How about I go fetch us some supper and then undo whatever mischief the cat wrought in my studio this morning,” he suggested.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, relieved, and they went down the stairs together.

  Downstairs, though, it was not the shopman but Nan who stood in the shop waiting for her. “The lads said you’d want to see this,” said the older woman, handing Verity a newspaper.

  Verity scanned the small type on the first page. Ash, looking over her shoulder, must have seen it first, because she heard his sharply indrawn breath.

  Hone, the radical publisher who had been arrested for seditious libel, had been found not guilty. Nate needn’t have left after all. Verity had strong-armed her brother into going thousands of miles away for nothing. He had done it only for her, and now she bore the burden of her mistake. Every time she saw his empty chair at the table, she would be reminded of what happened when loved ones made sacrifices on her behalf—creeping knowledge of a debt that couldn’t be repaid, a burden that wouldn’t be lifted.

  “I’m happy for Mr. Hone, of course,” she managed. “And pleased to see the courts have yielded a just result.” That was true. Of course it was. She did not wish innocent men to be punished in order to justify her concern; that was madness. But she was not thinking entirely clearly.

  “Naturally,” Ash said. “But it was still prudent for Nate to go, especially since now Sidmouth will find other ways of cracking down on radicals.”

  Verity dismissed this kindness with a wave of her hand. She was a shrew and a harpy and utterly incapable of the basic give-and-take of human relationships. She had bungled things with Portia, with her brother, and would soon do so with Ash.

  She checked on the men in the workroom, answered her mail, tended the fire in her study, and only then did she notice a stack of papers on the small table by the window. She picked one up and saw that they were the first prints of the engravings Ash had made for A Princely Pretense. There was Perkin Warbeck beckoning to his bride, there was the pale and drawn Earl of Warwick awkward but laughing in his lover’s arms. Here were all the scenes, exactly as they would appear in the finished novel. And they were beautiful, each image a delicate arrangement of light and shadow. These were no crude woodcut images of naked women that a man could buy for tuppence. She felt a surge of fondness and admiration for Ash for having created this beauty, for having drawn these characters as people—there were no coy innocents here, but no villains either. He saw the best in people who the rest of the world dismissed, and Verity knew that included herself. He was good and kind, and he deserved better than her, but she was far too selfish to give him up now.

  It was not ideal timing.

  When Ash’s arm started to twitch, he just managed to pull the bell cord, so that was something. That it was Verity who appeared in the door of his workroom was regrettable; in a last moment of mad vanity before losing consciousness, he wished it had been Nan. But when he came to he had a pillow under his head and no obvious injuries. Verity assured him that it had been only a minute since he had lost consciousness. She didn’t fuss over him, thank God; she had, after all,
seen this happen a handful of times and the fact that they had gone to bed together the previous night shouldn’t change anything.

  “Nan will bring up tea in bit,” she said, smoothing a piece of hair off his forehead.

  His limbs felt heavy and unreliable, and it would be several minutes before he could hold a teacup, longer still before his skull felt like it contained a proper brain rather than bits of eggshell and cobweb rattling around. He couldn’t even make a guess as to what month it was and only Verity’s presence gave him the clue he needed to remember where he was.

  As a child, he had often woken terrified, bruised, utterly disoriented. Facts like his name and the names of people around him hovered frustratingly out of reach, and sometimes he would remain in that state of confusion for days, would be brought to a new house and new people and be called by a new name before the fog lifted. Each episode was like being reborn. Staring at the slanted ceiling of his workroom, he thought it was no wonder Lady Caroline hadn’t been able to find him. He had hardly been able to find himself. He hadn’t been abandoned so much as lost. He had thought he had found himself here, a name and a place and a life of his own, but he was going to be lost again.

  His eyes started to prickle with tears, easy emotion being another effect of his seizure.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to sit here staring at you,” Verity said, getting to her feet. “I’ll sit over here by the window pretending that your cat isn’t planning my death, and you enjoy yourself on the floor over there.”

  He made a sound that was the ghost of a laugh. Sure enough, the cat was perched on the edge of his worktable, shifting her baleful gaze between Ash and Verity.

  “She probably thinks you’ve poisoned me,” he croaked.

  “She’s onto me,” Verity intoned.

  He tentatively dragged himself up onto his elbows. To his surprise, the cat leaped off the table and came to his side. She made a sound that he hadn’t heard before.

  “Is that cat purring?” Verity asked, looking up from one of Ash’s art books.

  Ash held his hand out and the cat rubbed her whiskers against it. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Do you think she knows I’ve been unwell?”

  “I daresay demons in feline form are typically quite intelligent.”

  “The lady is slandering you,” Ash told the cat. This was evidently quite enough affection for one day, because she retreated to the top of the bookcase. Ash pushed himself up into a sitting position. His muscles felt both tense and unreliable. “Everyone agrees that being liked by animals is a sign of excellent character,” he observed complacently. “I notice I’m the only person in the room of excellent character.”

  Verity snorted and went back to her book. By the time Nan arrived with the tea tray, he had hoisted himself into a chair and felt like an approximation of his usual self. He was still a bit shaken, as he always was, and there was the vague sense of trauma that came with his body and his time being abruptly stolen away from him. Tomorrow he would wake with odd bruises and a headache. But for now he drank his tea, he watched Verity slather fresh butter on a slab of bread, and it was fine, as fine as these things ever were.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon together, Ash reading and dozing and Verity writing, while occasionally running downstairs to help in the shop or talk to the men in the workshop. He had a glimpse of what a life with her might look like, working side by side, each independent but turning to one another for comfort, warmth, companionship. He could see how everything, from his seizures to his cat, would fit into this life. Except for how it couldn’t happen, would never happen, and would all be revealed to be a lie.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Waking to the sound of church bells and the pleasant weight of one of Ash’s arms across her body, Verity knew a moment of undiluted happiness. If this sort of complacency was what happened after a few days of shared pleasure, foolish laughter, and the dreamlike prospect of building a life together, then it was no wonder people made such bad choices when they were in love.

  She rolled to face him. The half of his face that wasn’t pressed into his pillow was obscured by hair that had fallen onto his forehead. She loved this Ash, with his disheveled hair and stubbly jaw. Well, she loved all versions of Ash. She was dangerously fond of him, and had been for as long as she could remember. It had been safer when she had known how to ignore how she felt about him and pretend not to know how he felt about her. But time in his arms had razed her defenses, leaving her with nothing to do but capitulate.

  He opened an eye and she watched as he registered where he was and who he was with. A lazy smile spread across his handsome face. “Morning, Verity,” he said. “Do you think there’s any goose left?” Yesterday he had come home from the market with a goose over his shoulder, asked Nan to show him how to cook it, and then sent her home.

  He had called Verity by her Christian name several times now, almost as if by accident, as if that was how he thought of her, and she could not decide how she felt about it. Once he had even called her sweetheart, but it had sounded like a slip of the tongue rather than an endearment. She was decidedly not the type of woman anybody referred to as sweetheart.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “I sent each of the men home with some.” The shop was closed for Sunday and they would have the house to themselves for a full day. Verity did not intend to get out of bed more than strictly necessary.

  The sun shone brightly through the window of Ash’s room, or at least as brightly as it got in London at the beginning of December, so she could see his face clearly as he rolled on top of her, his weight a pleasant heaviness pressing her into the mattress.

  “One of the things I like most about you,” he said, speaking the words into her neck, “is your capacity for forethought.” He nipped her collarbone and then pressed a kiss over the place he had bitten. She slid her hands down his shoulders and back, feeling his muscles work as he settled over her, then she spread her legs invitingly and watched his face as he thrust inside her. He looked like he was holding himself back. He almost always did. Ash had a stronger set of defensive walls than she did. And that was fine. She didn’t want to be inside anyone’s walls. Defenses were good. They kept people safe. But she suspected it was more than that, that whatever had been bothering him about his newfound relations was preventing him from being entirely free with himself. She smoothed a hand down his back again, felt his muscles tense and shift as he groaned with the pleasure of burying himself inside her, still somehow holding himself in check.

  She wrapped her legs around him, taking him deep and savoring the stretch and fullness of him inside her. “Look at me,” she said.

  “As if I could look anywhere else,” he said, propping himself up on a forearm and taking her chin in his other hand.

  “Do you see my expression?” she asked, trying hard to keep a straight face. “Would you say it’s similar to the engraving of that woman in—” He shut her up with a kiss that turned clumsy because both of them were laughing, and the odd seriousness of a few moments earlier dissolved into silliness.

  “How about this?” She assumed a vapid smile.

  He responded by thrusting hard into her and she arched up against him.

  “Swear to God, Plum,” he said afterward, when they lay sated in the tangled sheets. “If I weren’t so hungry you couldn’t make me leave this bed.”

  “I think I could stay hungry for a few more hours,” she said. “But this bed has a sad lack of tea.”

  The room was cold when they weren’t in one another’s arms, so she washed and dressed hastily. When she went to the kitchen, she found Ash there, a kettle already on the fire and a crumpet toasting at the end of a fork. She greeted him by wrapping her arms around him, pressing her chest to his back.

  “Did you miss me?” he asked, turning his head just enough to meet her mouth for a kiss.

  It had been ten minutes since they were in bed together, but the truth was that she had indeed missed him. She wan
ted more nights like last night, more mornings like this one. And maybe she could have that. Maybe they could come to some sort of arrangement; maybe Ash could content himself with what Verity had to offer, and wouldn’t ask for more.

  They ate buttered crumpets and drank sweet tea while sharing the kind of glances that hinted at what they’d be doing after breakfast. But before Verity finished her last bite, there was a knock at the door.

  “That’s the shop door,” Ash said, puzzled. It was Sunday, which meant it couldn’t be a customer. Verity put down her cup of tea and shook out her skirts before heading to the door, Ash right behind her. When she unbolted the door, Verity saw a tall woman in a dark velvet cloak and the sort of bonnet that cast her face in shadows. Behind her, Ash sucked in a breath.

  “I beg your pardon,” the stranger said to Verity, and the words sounded like a genuine apology. “I’m here to see . . .” She looked over Verity’s shoulder.

  “Lady Caroline, this is Miss Plum,” Ash said in a voice that sounded like it came from very far away. “Verity, this is my . . . aunt.” He was standing right beside her, but he didn’t touch her arm, didn’t even bump against her with his shoulder, and instead of his warmth she felt only the cold air from the street.

  “I do beg your pardon,” Lady Caroline repeated, her gaze wavering between the two of them. “Oh dear.”

  “Please come in,” Verity said. “It’s bitterly cold.” They hadn’t laid a fire anywhere but Ash’s bedchamber and the kitchen, but the shop was warmer than the street.

  “No, no,” Lady Caroline protested. “I don’t mean to come in. I only wanted to see if—if Mr. Ashby is safe. And I see that he is, so I’ll be on my way.” The light shifted, revealing that the redness on one side of the lady’s face was not the flush of embarrassment but rather a fresh bruise. Verity stifled a gasp.