Page 89 of The Captive Duke
“Even arguing arouses you.”
“Everything about you arouses me.” And oh, he sounded so smug, so pleased. “Though sometimes to protectiveness or humor or admiration in addition to desire.”
“Lust, simple lust from too many months soldiering.”
“You are an intelligent woman,” he said, the smugness turning to perplexity. “Frightfully so, in fact. Why do you delude yourself with such patent tripe?”
“Stop.” He was about to launch into his I-care-for-you/Greendale-is-holding-your-future-hostage speech, one he’d come up with by their second night together. “None of your campaigning. It’s entirely possible I have brought danger to your household, and marrying me is the last thing you should do.”
He enfolded her in his arms, using his most devastating tactic, meeting her protestations and common sense with this endless, boundless,silentaffection. He was affectionate in and out of bed, as if all those months in France he’d been storing up a need to touch, to tease, to be tender, and now it poured out of him at the sight of her. His affection dizzied her and broke her heart and made untangling her wants from his best interests so much harder.
“You are not safe on your own,” he said. “Lucy needs you, and I need you. Recite your reasons and arguments, Gilly, but please don’t go. Before I’ll let you leave me, I will take myself off, though I will despise doing it. In my absence, the staff will watch your every move and taste everything you eat or drink before you touch it.”
“I am not banishing the Duke of Mercia from his own family seat.”
“Not yet,” he said, though his tone suggested he was willing to be banished if it would please her. “Now let us put aside this bickering you insist on. The morning is advanced, and Lucy will be wroth if we neglect her.”
Gilly conceded the point, because she did bicker,and the contention reassured her of her position for form’s sake, but it did nothing to put her resolve into action.
Each night, she grew closer to Christian; each night he asked for and won more of her trust until Gilly herself had to admit that her reservations were crumbling and her fate becoming inevitable—provided she had the courage to seize it.
They’d had their argument for the morning, which brought the total for the day to two, because they must also have an argument upon rising, sometimes even while Christian was making love to his Gilly.
Delicate and spicy business that, arguing with a woman while plundering her treasures. It left Christian off balance, and yet Gilly was passion itself in his arms.
Another tiff would ensue over tea, and the end of the day would include sleepy mutterings. And all the while, Gilly stole his heart, tied him in knots, and tossed his most tender sentiments aside so she could find her benighted embroidery hoop.
In some peculiar way, sparring with her and making love with her both honed the craving for revenge Christian nursed to more thriving health by the day. Odd, that loving a woman and pursuing violent resolution of the threats to a shared future with her should entwine thus.
“Your girth is repaired,” Christian said as he and his lady reached the second-floor landing. “We might go for another ride one of these fine summer days.”
“Autumn will soon be here. Will you go up to Town for the next session of the Lords?”
Ghastly thought, though his letters had finally yielded some interesting rumors regarding the whereabouts of one Robert Girard, weasel at large.
Half-English weasel, of all things, and successor to a baronial title, which was doomed, alas, to die out with him. Prinny would likely even shed a tear or two before seizing the weasel’s assets.
Did Girard have any vestiges of Englishness left that could regret the lapse of a title? Christian shied off the notion, for such sentiments would give him something in common with his tormentor—his soon-to-be late tormenter.
“Would you like me to take you and Lucy up to Town?” Not that he’d allow his womenfolk anywhere near Girard or his reported whereabouts.
Gilly marched up the stairs toward the third floor. “Lucy might enjoy such a visit, for she needs her papa, but you need not drag me up there.”
“You don’t think the Town staff as loyal as the Severn staff?” Christian asked as he followed. “You don’t think I will need a hostess in Town? You have to know anybody in my employ who disparages you will be turned off without a character.”
She paused at the top of the steps, her skirts swishingabout her half boots. “If somebody repeats the truth, they aren’t disparaging my character.”
“I weary of this topic, Gillian. You will either make an honest duke of me and accept my suit or content yourself with my affections on terms more acceptable to you. Those are your options, my lady.”
She fell silent, her eyes pained despite her serene expression. His next tactics were reconnaissance and subterfuge—the distasteful and ungentlemanly business of spying—to determine what, exactly, made marriage to him so repugnant to her.
He stopped her headlong march in the middle of the empty third-floor corridor.
“Do you fear I would treat you as Greendale did? Deny you the gardens, expect you to embroider my stockings, head bent by the hour?”
“You’re weary of the topic, if you’ll recall.” She fired off that retort, and he let her, because his question had been at least close to the mark. Gilly’s marriage had left her afraid, though of exactly whom and what, Christian could not fathom—yet.
He was loath to admit his instincts as an interrogator owed something to Girard’s example.
