Chapter 16

… I cannot believe I have married without you at my side. Tell me you forgive me.

—from Her Grace Selina Kent, Duchess of Stanhope, to her brother Will

It turned out that together they were something of a force of nature.

Not in the bedchamber. Peter wasn't thinking about the bedchamber. He certainly hadn't been spending at least nine-tenths of his waking hours imagining Selina naked in his bed. Recalling the sounds she'd made when she'd climaxed. Dreaming about the thick need in her voice as she'd asked for again , and please , and harder .

He'd taken matters into his own hand more than once, and yet he was pretty sure he'd had a cockstand for roughly seventy-two hours now. He'd never before thought that his cock might be worthy of a medical case study, but here he was.

So yes, damn it, inside the bedroom they might very well be a force of nature, but outside of it as well. When their two wills were set on the same goal, they seemed capable of making quite a lot of things happen. Which was why, three nights after they'd been caught in flagrante delicto by the Eldons, they were standing at the front door to the Stanhope residence, dressed in some outrageously expensive finery.

And married.

He'd managed the special license. Had secured what Lady Judith informed him was the second-nicest chapel in London and therefore acceptable for a ducal wedding.

Securing St. Margaret's had involved a shocking amount of bribery in the form of a promised installation of a commemorative stained-glass window and a consolation gift of a Continental honeymoon tour for the displaced bride and groom, but Lady Judith didn't ask for details.

Selina had arranged the guest list, and the wedding breakfast, and appropriate attire for not only the two of them, but for Freddie and Lu as well. Lu's resistance to wearing a formal frock had been forestalled by its color—a rather alarming carmine—and an introduction to Selina's former fencing master.

They'd both forgotten to buy rings, and had only realized their oversight when they arrived at the chapel within minutes of each other. Selina had vanished into an alcove at the church's entrance and reappeared a few moments later sans hairpiece and bearing two circlets twisted out of the brass wire that had formerly held a little crown of pearls atop her golden hair.

"Good enough," she said, and Peter felt something shift in his chest.

She was so clever—always fixing things—and he…

He had failed at enough things that at some point it had become safer not to try. Better, it somehow seemed, to deliberately flout convention than to try to please some impossible standard, stretching ever farther out of his reach.

Yet somehow now he found himself wanting to try. He wanted to give her better than good enough. He wanted to be more to her than a problem to be solved.

He shook himself and took the little brass circle, vowing to buy her something better—for God's sake, he'd bought two perfect strangers a wedding tour. And then, almost before he knew what had happened, they were married.

They'd breakfasted at Rowland House, and then they'd taken Freddie and Lu back to Great-great-aunt Rosamund's house in Bloomsbury. The children had been disturbingly civilized all morning. Peter felt a trifle concerned for their health.

And now here they were. Back at his house.

Which was now their house.

Which meant that his bed was now their bed. Which meant—

"Peter," said Selina. "Do you think we should… go inside?"

He looked dazedly at her and tried to pretend he hadn't been thinking about licking the curve of her inner thigh.

"Yes," he said. "Listen, Selina, perhaps I should warn you about the house."

Her brows drew together. "I've been in the house."

"Ye-es. It was dark, though."

She looked mildly alarmed. "Go on."

"Well, when I inherited, you know that the duke was in his late nineties."

"Yes, of course."

"And that he'd been living at the estate in Sussex for quite a while."

"So I understand."

"He hadn't been in London for some time."

"Peter, if you do not get on with this story and tell me what is on the other side of this door, I shall push it open and find out for myself."

He winced. "He hadn't been to London in many years. Many, many years. Decades. And he'd rented out the house for quite a while, until the last year or two before his death. So when he died and I took possession, it was a bit, er… empty."

She blinked. "Yes, I'd have assumed as much."

"Not of inhabitants. I mean, it was completely empty. I believe the last several families that rented it simply took the furniture with them when they left. The art too, and the curtains. The wall coverings, in some cases."

"I… see."

"I've been meaning to furnish it," he said, a little weakly. "But once I hired Humphrey and Fleming—that's the cook—things seemed to crack along all right. I did fix the plaster that was falling down. And of course there's… a place to eat. Er, and sleep."

She turned suspicious amber eyes from his face and opened the door with one slender-fingered hand.

"I sent my lady's maid ahead this morning, along with several footmen and most of my garments," she said. "I wonder where she's put them."

They didn't have long to wonder. A small woman in cinnamon-colored muslin stepped around the corner. She seemed to have been waiting to pounce.

"My lady," she said, ignoring Peter altogether. "That is, Your Grace. I am not sure we were… you were… entirely prepared. I'm not quite certain we've brought enough… er, anything."

Peter winced and looked around the house, recalling how it had appeared to him the first time he'd entered after inheriting.

The front hall featured two soaring columns. A rose-print paper covered the walls, but it was faded, with large dark rectangles suggesting the shape of the art that had once hung there. To one side lay the sitting room, looking traitorously free of places to sit. On the other side, an archway framed the dining room, its black-and-white marble tiles seeming to stretch on and on. The impression was rather exaggerated by the fact that Peter and Humphrey had been dining together at a square oaken dining table surrounded by exactly two chairs.

In truth, it looked quite substantially better than it had when he'd moved in. He'd spent some time removing strips of peeling fabric from the walls of the sitting room. And the mice—he and Humphrey had removed all the nests of mice.

He was pretty sure. Mostly all of them.

He had meant to furnish the house before the children came, but to do so before the guardianship hearing had seemed like hubris. It felt impossible to believe they would ever really be a family.

Selina was taking in her surroundings with astounding equanimity. "Peter?"

"Yes?"

"Do we… have any staff?"

"We have a full complement of grooms in the mews. There's a cook. And Humphrey."

Her maid let out a loud snort.

Selina arched a brow. "Yes, Emmie?"

"Humphrey," the woman said with a disdainful sniff. "Thinks he runs the house, does he? We'll see how he feels when you've brought in a butler. And a housekeeper. And perhaps a valet."

"Humphrey is my valet," protested Peter.

Emmie snorted again.

"He's very handy with an iron," Peter told Selina.

"He told me there is no bedchamber prepared for Her Grace." Emmie sounded appalled. "And no wardrobes for her clothing and no clothes-brush for me to use and no iron and no—"

If she continued to list things that the house didn't possess, Peter feared they might be there all afternoon and well into the evening. "I'm sure that tomorrow we can set up—"

"We'll share," said Selina crisply.

He couldn't have heard her correctly. Surely she would want her own bedchamber. Hell, he was not entirely certain she had wanted to marry in the first place—she had said no, after all, until the Eldons had discovered them together at Rowland House.

Emmie appeared to have the same reaction. "You'll… share?"

"Indeed. We will share a bedchamber. Tonight. Every night."

God above, his eyes nearly rolled back in his head at her words. The images they evoked contrasted with the business-like tone of her voice in a way that he found quite painfully arousing.

He was fairly certain that if a drop of water had landed on his skin at that exact moment, it would have sizzled.

"You may select a room near to our bedchamber to be my dressing room," Selina was saying. "Can you begin a list of the furnishings we'll need to acquire tomorrow?"

"Of course."

She turned to Peter then. "Perhaps we should speak to your cook about tea?"

Right. He had to think about something other than dragging her upstairs and sharing their bedchamber that very second. "Tea," he repeated. "Right."

The fires of lust could be extinguished quite quickly, it turned out, with the unexpected application of tears.

They'd dined, and then Selina and her maid had retired to the bedchamber to set about unpacking Selina's garments and making ready for a shopping expedition on the morrow. Peter had offered to help and had been shooed away, so he'd been reduced to wandering the house like a randy ghost, whistling and alternately thinking about furnishings and Selina.

Well, that was a flat-out lie. He'd thought of furnishings at least once, though. He was fairly certain.

He paced his study and then wandered back down to the first floor, where the stairwell obscured the entrance to one of the only rooms in the house left mostly untouched by former tenants. It was a portrait gallery—the wall coverings were a bloodthirsty shade of red, and generations of Stanhope dukes and duchesses and children loomed menacingly out of the shadowed portrait alcoves. He could see why the previous inhabitants had ignored the room. He preferred not to think of it himself, and the grim faces were his immediate relations.

This time when he approached the tucked-away room at the base of the stairs, his ears caught the sound of muffled sobs.

He was in the room before he could think the better of it. He had half a beat to hope—rather uncharitably—that it was Selina's maid crying her heart out and not his wife.

But, blinking against the dark red shadows of the room, he made out Selina's tall form. She was tucked half in one of the alcoves, her head buried in her arms. And she was weeping.

He felt a queer sharp stab in the vicinity of his heart. Twice—twice in three days he'd reduced this fearless, remarkable woman to tears.

He came up behind her, trying to make some sound as he walked so she wouldn't startle.

"Selina?"

She stood and turned, furiously swiping at her face. "Oh! Peter. I'm sorry. I didn't think you'd come in here."

She'd been hiding, then, down here in this dim, uncomfortable room. From him.

He swallowed against that bright sharp thing in his chest. "I heard you. I'm sorry, I—oh, the hell with it."

He reached out and yanked her into his arms. She stood stiffly for a moment and then, by degrees, she relaxed against his body. He tucked her head beneath his chin.

What had he to offer her? He was a duke—but she was the sister of a blasted duke, and marrying him gave her scarcely more social standing than she'd had before.

He had money, but so did she—from her family, from Belvoir's.

He had a big empty house, and a brother and sister he didn't know how to get or how to keep. He had himself, such as he was—selfish and reckless and heedless of all the things he was expected to care about in the beau monde .

He thought of her family at their wedding breakfast, their mutual love and respect never more obvious. It was nothing like what he had known back in New Orleans, with his mother and the crumbling old house, with Morgan's painful gasping breath in his ears.

He felt suddenly certain that she had realized what a dreadful bargain she had made with him. He was as emptied-out as the house—nothing more than a crisis that needed to be managed. He had nothing to offer her, and she had realized it, and she was drowning in regret.

"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was rough in his throat. "I know it's not what you wanted, Selina. But it won't be so bad. You'll see."

He scarcely believed himself. A lifetime of fixing her husband's disasters—that must be what coming into this townhouse had taught her to look forward to. Unless she had decided she'd had enough already. Perhaps she wanted to go back to Rowland House.

She pulled her head back to look at him, tilting her chin up to meet his eyes. She stayed in the circle of his arms, soft and yielding. "What on earth can you mean?"

"This house." He shrugged against her body. "Marriage. To me."

She stared up at him. "You thought you'd found me in here weeping over the lack of furnishings?"

"Yes?"

She tried to flail a hand around at the room, but he was still holding her, so she mostly smacked him in the side. "Peter. It's just a house. Just things."

He winced. "It's more than just things. It's what they represent." Perhaps if he made it plain for her, she would go now, before he started to hope for more. A future. A family, together, like the Ravenscrofts. "I know it must seem like you've done nothing but clean up after my errors, Selina, but I mean to put things right. With the house. With Freddie and Lu." With you , he thought, but managed not to say.

She turned her head and tucked her face back into his chest, and he inhaled the almost-spicy scent of her body. "I was crying because of the portraits."

He looked around the room. "Should I take them down? They are alarming."

"No." She laughed a little damply into his shirt. "No. I was looking at your family, and the truth is"—her voice wobbled, but she didn't weep again—"I miss Will. I never dreamed I would marry without him there, without Faiza and her husband. I was so angry when Will eloped and married Katherine without me. And now I've done the same to him, and I feel I've betrayed him. I feel like my life shouldn't keep going on when his seemed to stop two years ago. And I just wish he were here ."

Her voice had grown louder and higher with her final words, and she fisted her fingers in the back of Peter's shirt, her face still hidden against his chest.

God, he was an idiot and a selfish bastard besides. He hadn't thought at all about how much she must be missing her twin today.

Perhaps he did have something to offer her, though. He had these two arms, he supposed, and so he wrapped them tighter around her. He had this one body, to give her comfort and pleasure. He pressed a kiss to her honey-colored hair.

"Sweetheart. His life didn't stop. And neither should yours."

"I know," she said. "I do know. And I know that eventually he'll come home. I just miss him today."

If he could have, he would have switched places with her brother at that moment. To make her smile. He kissed her hair again, which was loose about her shoulders. It was so thick he could've spent hours tangling his fingers in all the gleaming strands.

She pulled back suddenly, looking up, and her nose nearly bumped his chin. "Peter?"

"Yes?"

"I'm glad to be here. I want to be here."

God, she was so beautiful it hurt. He wanted to touch her, and he was afraid to touch her at the same time. Touching her made him start to imagine a different kind of a marriage, not a patched-up affair in an empty house designed to save them both from scandal.

But he couldn't help himself. He rubbed his thumb across the sweep of her lower lip. "Good."

Her fingers suddenly unknotted from the fabric of his shirt and swept up his back. Without a coat, he could feel the soft warm brush of her hand. Her fingers stroked the back of his neck, and, without meaning to, he pressed his thumb harder against her lip.

He made himself pull his hand back from where he wanted—intently, desperately—to push into the wet heat of her mouth. Instead he nudged her hair back from her face.

"Are you glad I'm here?" Her voice was tentative.

God. "Yes," he said, his voice rasping again. "I'm very glad you're here, Selina."

"Good," she said, echoing him. Her tawny eyes, darker in the shadowed room, came to rest on his. Her fingers found the nape of his neck and brushed once, and then again. Softly. Her body was pressed against his, and he could feel the heat of her skin through the layers of fabric that separated them.

"Tell me again," she said. Almost a whisper, her face inches from his. And then, "Show me."

Gladly.

He brought his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I've dreamed of having you here. Anywhere."

She gasped and tilted her head to the side, exposing her neck. He kissed his way from her ear down the long tender line of her throat. He felt her pulse beating, quick and light, at her collarbone, so he kissed her there too. So like her, that pulse—bursting with strength and life. "I could spend an hour right here," he said into her skin. "Tasting just this part of you." He slid his fingers along her collarbone, and she breathed out a moan. "Touching you. You're so soft, did you know that?"

He closed his teeth gently along the delicate ridge. She arched her back, her breasts pressing into his chest.

His mind blurred at the sensation. Warmth and soft sweetness. He wanted—Christ, he wanted to bury himself inside her right there in the alcove. He wanted her arms locked around his neck and her heels digging into him as he drove deep into her body.

Instead he soothed the small bite with his lips, then traced the hollow of her throat with his tongue. He let his fingers play at the line of her bodice, not quite slipping beneath. "You are so lovely. So responsive. I think of nothing except having you."

Her breath came quickly, and her pulse throbbed harder under his mouth. "Peter," she whispered. "Show me. Show me everything."