To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(29)

The muscles of her long, graceful neck worked and male satisfaction slammed into him at the hint of her desiring.

Marcus lowered his mouth to hers and claimed her lips, just as he’d longed to for years after she’d left. Her body went stiff in his arms and she pressed her palms against his chest, as though to push him away, but then she clenched and unclenched her fingers in the fabric of his coat, pulling him close.

What had begun as a kiss meant to taunt and torture became something more, something that sucked away his self-control and logic. With a groan, he deepened the kiss. Her lips quivered under his and she kissed him with the hesitancy of youth before parting her lips and allowing him entry.

Their tongues met in an explosion of long-suppressed passion. She tasted of sweetness and innocence and everything he’d thought to never again know. He dragged his mouth down the corner of her lips and then he gently explored the place where her pulse pounded hard at her throat. He sucked and nipped at the flesh.

She whimpered and twisted her fingers in his hair, anchoring him close.

“I have wanted you in this way since I first met you, Eleanor Elaine,” he rasped against the satiny softness of her skin.

“Oh, Marcus.” His name emerged as a breathless entreaty and sent lust spiraling. He continued his quest, passing his lips lower. With sure movements, he parted the fabric of her nightshift and her entire body jerked. On a small cry, she stumbled sideways, dislodging her spectacles.

Her skin flush from desire, Eleanor stood there, her chest moving in time to his. She readjusted the wire rims on her face and, with shaking fingers, she pulled the fabric of her nightshift closed. “I do not want you, Marcus.” In the absence of conviction, those words rang hollow.

He turned his lips upward in a slow, unsteady grin. “Oh?”

By the deepening blush on her cheeks, the lady knew as much. She set her mouth with a brittleness better reserved for a cynical spinster. “I-I am not looking to be another one of your conquests.”

He closed the distance between them and captured a loose golden curl between his thumb and forefinger and raised the strand to his nose. The scent of honeysuckle whispered about his senses blending with the natural garden scents, intoxicating as any potent aphrodisiac. “A pity,” he whispered against her ear and her eyelids fluttered. “Your body tells a different tale.” He lowered his head so their lips nearly brushed. Eleanor’s breath caught on an audible intake and another rush of desire coursed through him. “Tell me, what do you know of my conquests?” He should be thrilled with the evidence of her passion for him, and yet it was her words that held him enthralled. Why should she care who he’d carried on with over the years? Why, when she’d chosen another?

Eleanor blinked wildly and then hooded her eyes. “I know enough.”

Marcus folded his arms at his chest. “Have you been reading about me, love?”

She danced out of his reach. “No!” The denial burst from her with such ferocity it hinted at the lie there. “And cease calling me ‘love’.”

He stalked toward her. She boldly held her ground. “Ah, then how do you know about my…how did you phrase it? Conquests?” Marcus tweaked her nose. He’d always delighted in eliciting a reaction from the lady.

Eleanor glanced frantically about and then shocked him with the directness of the stare she trained on him. “Do you wish to know the truth, Marcus?”

He inclined his head.

“I may have lived in the country all these years, but even an unsophisticated widow from the country reads The Times. It did not take any searching to see the man you’ve become.”

The man I’ve become.

Fury lanced through him, blotting out all desire and warmth for the woman who’d betrayed him. “The man I’ve become,” he gritted out. “The man I’ve become was a product of your betrayal, madam. I gave my heart to you, confided,” the hell of Lionel’s murder when he’d let no one into the tortured hell of discovering his friend’s body gutted by his murderer’s hand, “everything and you simply vanished without a word.”

“I wrote a letter.” She tipped her chin up at a mutinous angle. “Did you not receive it?”

Her words fanned fury within him. He’d received her goddamn note; a missive he’d clung to for years, bringing it out when he wished to remind himself that he hated Eleanor Carlyle more than he’d ever loved her.

He narrowed his eyes and refused to allow her the satisfaction of knowing she still had the power to wound. “I received your blasted letter,” he bit out through clenched teeth. The words he’d longed to hurl at her for the past eight years tumbled to the tip of his tongue and only the years of deportment and propriety drilled into him from the nursery, onward, quelled the words. He tempered his tone. “You owed me an explanation.” After all, he’d given her the whole of his heart and she’d given him a vague, empty note about a faceless, nameless stranger who’d won her.

“Explanation?” her voice came out woodenly.

He fisted his hands. “Yes, an explanation. As in, answers as to,” How you could simply leave after all we’d shared and the manner in which I let you into my world. “What happened,” he finished lamely.

“You think you’re deserving of answers?” Eleanor looked at him as though he’d sprouted a second head. “More than I’ve already given you,” she said when he opened his mouth to speak.