Page 90 of The Duke
Three steps. She made it three measly steps before a large, frightening shadow blocked the glow of the lantern and cast the hall into darkness.
“It will do you no good to run.”
The dispassionate words froze Imogen to the marble floor. She didn’t have to turn around. She knew his face already. Had memorized every inch of him like a beloved poem. The meter counted by the figures used to measure his impossible height. The prose selected from the lyrical beauty of arrogant angles and brutal lines. The structure as sound as the thick bones and sinew that crafted him into something more epic than even Dante could devise.
Imogen used immeasurable, incremental movements to face him. Thinking absurdly that Dante had used the very words in hisInfernoto describe the duke in the doorway.
Savage, rough, and stern. The wrath emanating from him did, indeed, make her veins and pulses tremble.
He knew. He’d found the painting.
“Cole, I—”
He moved like a shadow, taking her in his clutches before she could pluck a thought from the miasma of panic and arrange it into a semblance of diction. His grip was punishing as he dragged her into the room and shoved her in front of the canvas.
“What the bloody hell is this?” He gestured wildly toward his own likeness. “Tell me who you are!”
With a numb sort of detachment, Imogen studied her own painting and thought about who shewasn’t. She’d never been a poet, for example. But she’d tried to convey in her rendering the emotion he’d elicited in her. The elegiac effect of his disappearance. The euphoria she’d experienced upon his return. The eager longing that overtook her body whenever she gave in to nostalgia. The multitude of perils the exposure of this very evidence posed to her entire existence.
His prosthetic harness pinched at her shoulder as he stood behind her, pressing his chest to her back, holding her almost aloft before a canvas nearly as tall as herself. She barely felt it. Instead her body attuned to the man. To the conflagration of his rage that served only to melt the icy daggers of his pain.
He shook her, not unlike a mechanical toy that refused to work. “Explain yourself.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, is it?” she replied to the painting in front of her. The Cole who looked at her like he had done in the past, with sensual invitation and gentle acceptance. Not the man of volatile fury he’d become.
He knew who she’d been. Who she wasno longer.
“Say. The. Name. Say it!”
Imogen came to understand that the lower his voice became, the more dangerous he was. And still she refused. “You won’t find her here, Cole. Only me.”
He was not merely a man who held her locked in his clutches, but something almost thus. Something both human and inhuman. Much like the Minotaur, a creature with the body of a man, but whose head was ruled by a beast. A dangerous one at that.
With frantic, jerking movements, he yanked up the skirts of her nightgown, and Imogen let him. She knew what he’d find. Why he became so utterly still. There, on her buttocks, was the birthmark. The one he’d kissed and teased her about over three long years ago.
“Ginny.”Though a whisper, the word was neither invocation nor benediction. But a lament. A dirge.
“I’m not her,” Imogen said with strength she’d not realized she possessed. “Not anymore.” Ginny had been a victim. A young and vulnerable ingénue. Untried, ignorant, and ruled by the machinations of selfish and negligent men.
She was that woman no longer.
Imogen stared up at the painting she’d finished in the first few months after she’d been married. When she’d known the broken Duke of Trenwyth was recovering in the hospital. When she had to remember all of the many reasons she couldn’t go to him. Her sister, her dying husband, his faulty memory, her charity and reputation. The fact that she’d truly been nothing more to him than a whore he’d fancied one desperate, grief-stricken night.
That all seemed meaningless now.
His breathing roughened behind her, and the small hook of his prosthetic dug into the flesh of her left hip. It reminded her that they’dbothbecome different people since that night she’d depicted in the crimson room.
She heard a rip. And felt the evening air kiss the small of her back as her nightgown became a casualty of his mounting rage. The atmosphere shifted, the whip of his fury lashing at her with velvet edges. She’d lied to him. For her crimes, a punishment was forthcoming, of that she could be certain.
Imogen knew that O’Mara and Rathbone still patrolled the premises in shifts. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a sob escaped. She squirmed in his unyielding grasp, and wondered why he did nothing but stand there. Holding her hostage.
The fingers of his right hand shook a little, his grip gentling from punishing to merely bruising.
Lord, he was so strong it sent little chills of fear stabbing at her, followed by thrills of heat. The muscles of his chest swelled against her back, and the buckles of a harness bit into her skin, so close were they pressed together. The sinew of his thighs beneath the soft linen of his trousers bunched against her exposed bottom. Nothing met the softness of her curves but an unending length of hard, angry male.
Lifting her arm in a panicked movement, she meant to strike at him, to poke or scratch at his eyes. Anything that would free her from his silent, terrifying grip. To attack someone behind her, she found, was nigh to impossible.
She encountered the lush hair behind his ear, threaded her fingers through it, and gave a desperate tug.
