Page 50 of The Duchess Curse

“Oh,” she moaned because he wasn’t seeking any longer. In short order, he’d found that tight little bud she’d circled on frustrated nights when she craved a lover but wouldn’t take one.

Too loyal to her lying arse of a husband. All that lost pleasure.

“Your fault,” she said, tightening her hand in his hair.

He hissed in pain then nipped her inner thigh with his teeth. Then he set his thumb to work circling better than she ever could, and he was kissing her, tasting her, building a painful pleasure across every inch of her body.

Yes, his fault.

That why he owed her this moment. For everything he’d denied her. For every lie. He owed her for every lover she’d not taken.

She rolled her hips, encouraging more, and more he gave, knowing like magic exactly what she needed and when, as if the shadows collected around them read her mind and whispered in his ear.

He stroked and licked, dipping tongue and fingers into her, curling them as he pulled them out, leaving her quivering and speechless and so close to shattering.

Her hand in his hair became a lifeline, her only means of remaining upright, and it was not trust that pushed her into release, that fine, pure understanding that someone—the same person winding you tightly with such sweet and frantic tenderness—would catch you after falling.

It was sorrow.

She cried out with her climax. She cried. And she released his hair and felt the silken strands fall away as she fell backward to the mattress.

He whispered curses against her flesh as he rested his forehead on her inner thigh. His lips lingered there in a long and contrite kiss.

Then he left her in nothing but the cold shadows and her own warm breaths, her mind a wailing muddle.

She heard the water turn on in the bathing chamber, and then his footsteps, so she opened her eyes to see the heavy outline of him lumber her way across the room.

“Sit up,” he said, and she did, wiping tears from her cheeks and hugging herself, rebuilding her walls as he loosened the fastenings of her gown, her corset. All of it gone so quickly. When she wore only her shift, he lifted her and carried her like a child to the bathing chamber, set her into the tub and set a hand on its copper side until it glowed, until a light steam lifted off the water. She removed her shift and sat, pulling her knees up to her chest.

What now? What did they do now? She felt so empty.

He knelt by the side of the tub and grasped the remaining sliver of soap, dunked it, wetting his shirtsleeves in the process, and reached for her neck with his soapy hands.

She shied away from him, reality quickening into clearness as the memory of her climax faded. This, him—it was too much, too intimate, too everything for a lonely body craving touch.

“Leave. Now.” She sank lower in the tub.

He froze. Then, slowly, he pulled his hands from the water. His sleeves were sopping wet, and he dragged his shirt off as he stood, tossed it to a sodden bundle on the floor. “Let me know if you need anything.”

She wanted to look at the shadows playing across the muscled planes of his chest. She wanted to not feel aroused by the power of his back as he left the room.

Guin wanted lots of things. But those things she’d always wanted most—safety, companionship, love—she could never have.

11

LOVE POTION LOYALTY

Three days was not enough to earn atonement for sins the size of Bran’s. So Guin’s seventy-two-hour silence certainly did not signal forgiveness. It likely signaled scheming, retribution. And if Bran were not so familiar with unidentified sounds and moving shadows, he’d be terrified.

Guin would eventually walk off into the London streets without a single look back at him. She’d set up a new shop and never again think his name. But for now, while she was trapped, she’d make sure he felt her wrath.

Three days of silence was just the beginning. He was not naïve enough to think otherwise.

His office door creaked open, and Hesperus Grant strode in, closing the door behind him. Bran had propped his feet on top of his desk and folded his arms behind his head. His glamour was flashing in and out like he was a candle extinguished by the wind only to be lit again by some ill-fated housemaid whose Sisyphean task was to keep the flame going in a tornado.

“Still sparkling, I see,” Grant said, slipping with poker-stiff posture into the seat on the other side of the desk.

“Unfortunately.”