Yours Sincerely,
Anne Jenkins
His breath left him in a short gust.
He dropped his forehead into his hand and thought: Jenkins. Did he remember Jenkins? He thought so, yes: an ensign when he was a lieutenant colonel in India. Blue eyes like wide, terrified circles when they’d first met. Quick learner. Ultimately a very good soldier. He’d been the boy’s first commander.
He could not recall when he’d last wept for one man at a time. He wasn’t certain he even could now. He’d needed to learn how to accommodate that kind of loss swiftly early on, and besides, the English were not weepers. Grief was part of his soul’s geography; it had formed a canyon of sorts, through which it ran, deeply and contained. It did not slow him. He did not hover on its banks and stare into its waters. But it was there, nevertheless. Always driving him on to his victories. It was one of the things that gave him gravity. It made him grateful for every bloody day he still walked the earth.
He knew what it had cost this mother for Billy to be a soldier. And that’s what he would write to her. Thank you for your sacrifice and for your son. His service was exemplary. And more. Whatever he wrote would never be enough, but it would mean the world to her.
He experienced a swift internal whipsaw between irritation, then guilt over the irritation. The pendulum always steadied itself at duty again. This adulation and gratitude formed the confines of his world. He was a blessed man. He was a trapped man.
He picked up the miniature of his son. Closed his hand around it as if he could protect that twenty-two-year-old from any harm. How bloody lucky he was that he still had his boy.
As he’d told Mariana, he had no awareness of being a hero as he apparently went about being heroic. Would it break this mother’s heart all over again to know that her son’s hero was something less, or something more, than everyone thought? Would it dishonor the memory of the son she’d given to the war, would she think him a hypocrite, if she knew that he’d willfully broken rules and violated the hospitality of The Grand Palace on the Thames to have vigorous sex again and again with the kind of woman who’d been to a gaming hell and had inspired a duel? A woman who would generally horrify a mother like her?
What on earth was he doing with Mariana? Was he mad?
Would Jenkins think he’d lived a lie if he’d discovered before he died that his hero had feet of clay?
How many Jenkinses were out there, even now?
He was in many ways perfectly ordinary. Last night he and Mariana had discussed Helga’s apple tarts, and he’d found it a very satisfying conversation. It seemed, in fact, that a conversation merely required her participation in order to be enjoyable. In fact, increasingly, moments merely required her presence in order to be enjoyable.
He was capable of being diverted by stories of a cobbler’s shop. He liked, but did not require, ceaselessly elevating conversation. He was learned, but he wasn’t Aristotle. The blood of his peasant ancestors still ran through his veins. She was dazzlingly clever and funny. But she was also, surprisingly, a source of peace.
He glanced down at his heavy, gleaming signet ring, the first one in his family’s history. The one he hoped to pass down for generations to come. The seal that had become synonymous with all that was good and right and brave. What he wanted for his family and for his legacy remained unchanged, and what he needed to do to ensure it remained unchanged, too.
Christ.
If they could only see the way Mariana looked at him at night. That welcoming, fiercely joyous, tender, almost too-open generosity. Take all you need, she seemed to say.
He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known what he’d needed. Or that he’d needed so much.
“What do you call this?” she murmured as she trailed her tongue along the cords of his neck.
“Neck. Collo.”
James was flat, naked on the bed, like a great, beautiful beast she’d slain.
She was going to devour him.
The thrilling, massive, hard, dangerous beauty of him. He looked built to conquer. The ditches between the rises of muscle. The dips between his belly and hips, where she could fit her hands and hold him fast when he was inside her. Thighs like furry cannons. Her head was light, too filled with lust and admiration.
“And this?” She traced the outline of the furred chest with a single finger tangling in the dark hair, a thread or two of silver in it.
“Chest,” he murmured. “Il petto.”
She did not know if the gully between those muscles had a name. He was sectioned in quadrants, like armor. She found scars.
She ventured there anyway, with tongue and fingertips, with teeth and breath. She loved feeling the ripple and tension of him as he hissed in a breath of pleasure.
She smoothed her hand across it, laid her cheek there. Applied her lips.
“This?” she murmured.
“Belly. Pancia.”
She felt his voice rumbling beneath her lips.
“And this.” She dipped her tongue.
“Ombelico.”
“And this?” she whispered. She closed her lips over his cock.
“Paradiso,” he sighed.
Heaven.
She laughed softly and pulled away. “I am getting quite an education.”
She closed her mouth over his cock again.
His low groan of pleasure was more inebriating than a pint of bolted liquor. More drugging than anything Mr. Delacorte might sell to an apothecary.
“Mariana . . .” He half laughed. “I beg of you . . . succhi . . .”
“Ti succhio adesso,” she whispered, and did just that.
It was quiet apart from the tiny sounds of the crackle of the fire, and of her lips, her fists, her tongue, her fingers moving over him in the rhythm and friction that she had learned, in a few short nights, drove him near to insanity. He twined his hands in her hair. There was a part of him that battled the pleasure, and she understood. To be so wholly owned by it, to abandon yourself to the mercy of desire, to another person’s mercy—it wasn’t in his nature to surrender. But the deep and molten seam of passion was in his nature. And the primal hunger was. And the gift he had for giving pleasure was. He understood pleasure the way he understood war.
Or maybe all of this was just the alchemy of the two of them, the duke and so-called harlot, together.
His low groans and soft oaths, his hips lifting from the bed.
“Dear God,” he rasped. “Please.”
And who was this person she became? She wantonly sought her own pleasure. She wanted to look down into his face consumed with his own lust. Watch the stunned wonder in his face at the sight of her body moving over his. The dark ferocity as he raced toward his release.
She lowered herself onto his cock.
And for a time she controlled it. Until she heard him growl, and he arced his hips upward as his release rocked him. Whipped from her body, she heard her own voice as if from a thousand miles away, frantically calling his name.
They collapsed side by side. He turned and wrapped his arms around her, pulled her against his body, and she burrowed in.
He felt ferociously protective of this small, lush, velvety, feral, gentle, generous person. How dangerous, in some ways, it felt to just hold her.
For four mad nights in a row, she had come to him.
Last night he had closed the door and had at once gently pinned her against it. He hadn’t said a word, but she’d read now in his face, and she had reached for the buttons on his trousers. He took her against that locked door, his hands scooped beneath her buttocks as he thrust, her legs wrapped around his waist, her breath in his ear, whispering oaths, begging him, urging him on.