Duke of Desire (Maiden Lane #12)(87)

“I can’t let you do that,” she said, exasperated. “You’re my husband. I’m your wife. I married you. Don’t try and wriggle out of it now.”

“I can’t stay here with you,” he said starkly. “You are too much temptation. You’ve proven it already.”

She held out her hand, the palm filling with rain. “Then give in to temptation.”

He looked away. “You make it sound so easy. But it’s not. You don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand,” she cried in desperation. “Why? Why can’t you be with me?”

“Because I am the evil,” he shouted. “It’s passed from father to son, on and on, ad infinitum. Would you wait, never knowing if I would attack a child of ours? When I might attack our child?”

“You wouldn’t attack a child,” Iris said, shocked. “Raphael, I know you wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” He held his hands up to the thundering sky. “Why not? I have the blood of monsters in my veins. He loved me.” He dropped his arms. “He loved me.”

He took a ragged breath.

“And I … I loved him.”

Her heart broke. Iris’s eyes filled with hot tears that spilled over to mingle with the cold rain on her cheeks.

She watched as Raphael sank to his knees on the muddy ground, his shoulders bowed, his hands lying open in the mud. “He was my father. I couldn’t kill him. Even after he did that. I couldn’t kill him.” He peered up at her through the strands of his sodden hair. “You can’t trust me, Iris. I am a beast. A demon. Send me back where I belong. Send me to hell.”

She sobbed and sank to her knees, facing him, wrapping him in her arms and laying her forehead against his. “You are not a demon or a beast. You are my beloved husband. I know you, and you are not your father. You are good and kind and valiant. You are stubborn and intelligent and sometimes very witty. You will never hurt a child of ours, I promise.”

His head was bowed against hers, rain running from his brow to her cheeks and dripping off both of their chins.

He loved her, he knew that now. That was what this longing, this never-ending want was.

How she believed in him—despite all that had happened, despite all that he was—he did not know, but he was grateful.

He angled his head, taking her sweet lips with his, drinking her succor, her faith in him. She was his light, his hope, guiding the way out of the depths of his Stygian despair.

“Iris,” he murmured against her wet lips, “my radiant wife, my love, my life. I promise I will try to live up to your belief in me. I do not think I can do otherwise, for I would repine and die were I to leave you. I would be blind and alone, howling in the darkness. I would go mad without you.”

He captured her mouth again, forcing her lips open, sliding his tongue into her, claiming her as his own.

Dark to light.

She tore herself from him, gasping, her cold wet fingers against his jaw, raindrops beaded on her eyelashes. “Will you believe me, Raphael? Can you accept our marriage and a family?” She stared at him with her storm-blue eyes, terrible in her certainty of him. “Will you be my husband in truth?”

“Yes,” he vowed, and swept her into his arms.





Chapter Twenty




The Rock King gave the man his torn soul, glowing white in a stone cage, and the man was beside himself with gratitude.

Ann watched the man leave and then asked her husband, “When will he return with the riches he owes you?”

The Rock King sighed. “He won’t. They never do.” She stared at him, gray and stern, save for the red of the blood on his arm. “Then why do you help them?”

His black eyes seemed a little less cold. “Because someone must.” …

—From The Rock King





Raphael carried Iris back through the garden door and up the staircase with all his forbidding ancestors watching.

She didn’t care.

She clung to his neck, staring at his face as he climbed, feeling as if this was their true wedding night. He carried her down the corridor and to their bedroom, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Then he stood her before him and took her sodden clothes from her body until she was naked and shivering.

He found cloths in the dressing room and dried her carefully and then insisted she climb into their bed under the covers.

She watched as he stripped off his clothes. He rubbed the cloth roughly over himself and then threw it aside. Nude he stalked to the bed, his penis heavy between his thighs.

She sat up, looking at that utterly male part of him and then in his eyes. “Let me.”

He paused at the side of the bed.

She reached out and took him in her palm, feeling the soft skin. The warmth. He was filling as she watched, lengthening between her hands, pulsing under her fingertips. She saw his foreskin stretch and the eye of his penis, red and wet, begin to show.

“Iris,” he growled above her.

But she ducked, looking closer as she encircled his girth and slowly stroked up his length. Under the skin the muscle was hard, so hard, and veins snaked along the shaft. She thumbed the head, feeling the wetness there, and, on an impulse, brought her thumb to her mouth and licked it.

She was suddenly on her back, Raphael above her, his crystal eyes staring into her own.