The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)(86)

“But there’s no worry of that,” she said. “You’re so massive, I don’t think you would fit.” She gave the head of his penis a squeeze as he spoke, and he let out a gasping laugh.

“God, Minnie. I can’t see straight.”

“It’s a good thing you have hold of your urges,” she said, more quietly, “because I’m so wet now, and it would be dreadfully embarrassing if you were to—”

He lifted her against the wall, wrapped her legs around him, and slid inside her. She was wet, so wet, and hot. The pleasure of her body, clasped around him, was so intense that it almost hurt. The light rhythmic sway of the car rocked him into her.

He braced them against the wall, his muscles straining.

“That’s right, Robert.” Her arms came around him. “That’s right. Just like that.”

He moved inside her, sliding, straining, until sweat popped out on his brow. He let his lust get the better of him, let his instinct take over until there was nothing but her, her around him, her br**sts beneath his hands, her pulse pounding in time with his thrusts.

She came around him, tightening in waves of pulsating heat around his cock. And he pounded into her, hard at first, and then even harder, until his own climax came. In the moment when he spilled his seed, he imagined them connected by far more than the scrape of his teeth against her jaw, the tangle of their hands, the clamp of her legs still wrapped around him. It was more than just the physical act of burying himself in her body.

In that moment, for the first time in his life, Robert believed that there was someone for him. Someone who would be there for him through the hardest times. More than a lover, a friend, an ally. A wife—for better or worse, richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. In laughter and in tears.

He stood, breathing heavily, humbled by the gift he’d been given. He could only touch her cheek in awe.

“Minerva, mine,” he whispered.

He felt as if he were discovering her anew. As if, amidst all the turmoil of the day, he’d finally been granted his heart’s desire. And now that he had her, he didn’t want to let her go.

She set her head against his shoulder. “That’s better,” she said.

It was so new, this thing he felt between them. New and unfamiliar, and so welcome that he was almost afraid to acknowledge it, lest it disappear. And yet if he said nothing…

“Somewhere,” he said, “someone is saying that I made a dreadful mistake in marrying you.”

She pulled her head from his shoulder and looked up at him, her eyes wide.

“They’re wrong.” He put his arms around her. “All of them, wherever they are. You are the best choice I have ever made.”

There was a light in her gray eyes when she looked at him, one that made him feel a thousand feet tall. He could have conquered an entire army with her at his side. Whatever it was that had gone wrong would come out right.

It was almost too much to believe.

And so instead, he dipped his head and kissed her again.

BY THE TIME ROBERT ARRIVED IN LEICESTER, he’d been traveling the better part of the day. His wedding night, the slow, timeless memory of waking next to Minnie the next morning, followed by days of languorously making love to her…all those things had been washed away by the harsh, rhythmic clack of express trains, the vibration of steamers.

He gave himself no time to eat or wash when their train finally arrived in Leicester in the late evening. It was dark, and the moon was already high overhead. He put Minnie in a carriage and proceeded immediately on foot to the center of town.

The evening was dark and windy, but not quite cold. Sebastian’s telegram had told him where Oliver was held—in the Guildhall itself, just beneath the library where he’d first met his wife, mere steps from the hearing room where they’d first been introduced.

And indeed, when he came up on the building in the dark of night, it seemed as if it might have been the evening that they met. Some sort of event was going on in the Great Hall. He knocked on the side door instead, waited, and then knocked louder still, until the man who passed for gaoler came.

“No visiting.” He frowned at Robert. “Not at this hour.”

Robert slipped the man a heavy coin. “I’m not a visitor.”

The man didn’t even blink. “Right this way, sir,” he said.

Paris and the croissants seemed very far away. The memory belonged to some other man, someone happily married, shyly delighted with the future that was slowly unveiling itself. All that happiness was taken over by a hollow feeling in his gut as he was led to the holding room. The gaoler unearthed a hooded lantern that showed grimy walls and wooden doors. He unlocked the main doors and then went up to one of the cells. Wood scraped against wood.

Robert aimed the light forward. The man hadn’t opened the door to the cell. Instead, he’d moved a panel, one that covered a fixed slot at eye level, a few inches high and maybe half a foot long.

The gaoler took a few steps back and motioned Robert forward.

Robert stepped close, lifting the lantern as he did. The rays didn’t reach into the pitch-black interior of the cell behind that slot.

“Oliver?” His voice was low.

“Robert?” He heard a rustle. “God, that’s bright. I can’t see a thing.”

The light from the lantern was anemic at best, not even enough to show the dimensions of the cell his brother was in. For Oliver to think it bright… he must have been sitting in darkness for hours. All the time Robert had spent in his first-class compartment, his brother had been in here. He shivered.