The Reluctant Duke (8 page)

Dear Lord, she wanted this man.

Wanted Lucan. Wanted the pleasure she knew he was capable of giving her.

The pleasure he was giving her now as he pushed her sweater up to bare her breasts, before bending his head and drawing one aching nipple hungrily into the heat of his mouth.

Lexie arched her back in invitation, her hands becoming entangled in the dark thickness of Lucan’s hair as he suckled her harder, deeper, and his other hand curved possessively over her other breast, to roll the aching nipple between his thumb and finger in rhythmic caress as he suckled its twin.

Lexie felt as if she was on fire. Her skin was intensely sensitised. Hot. Damp. Nothing else mattered at this moment but Lucan and the pleasure—so much pleasure!— he gave her.

She needed to touch him, too. Needed the feel of his bare flesh beneath her hands.

‘Oh, God—yes…!’ Lucan released Lexie’s nipple to groan throatily as he felt her hands on the bareness of his back beneath his sweater. Those small, elegant, sensuous hands moved caressingly across the heat of his back, from the tensed muscles at his shoulders to the low dip of his spine, making him burn, throb, for her to touch him lower still. ‘Wrap your legs around me, Lexie!’ he instructed fiercely, even as his hands cupped beneath her bottom to lift her fully against his pulsing arousal, and his mouth once again captured hers as he began to thrust slowly, rhythmically, against her.

She was so tiny, so delicately beautiful, and she tasted of honey—warm, hot honey—as Lucan ran his tongue across the sensuous swell of her lips to seek, explore, the moist heat of her mouth.

Her arms were about his neck, her fingers becoming entangled in the hair at his nape as she met the fierce demand of that kiss and the hard demand of his thighs moving against and into hers.

Lucan knew he had never been so aroused. Never been this hard, this aching. Never been so aware of the need to possess, to claim as his own—

No!

Lexie groaned her hunger, her need, as Lucan wrenched his mouth away from hers, steadying her on her own feet before stepping back. That hunger faded, died, and Lexie felt her legs shaking as she looked up to see the angry glitter in the darkness of Lucan’s eyes as he glared down at her with fierce intensity.

No—not just fiercely, but almost as if he
hated
her…!

P
ERHAPS
he did hate her, Lexie realised painfully, as Lucan’s already bleak expression turned to one of total disgust, his eyes black and hard as onyx, his top lip curled back almost in a snarl.

Lexie drew in a ragged breath. ‘Lucan—’

‘You were right. Kissing you was a big mistake…!’ he rasped scathingly.

Lexie moistened stiff lips. ‘I believe what I actually said was that it wasn’t a good idea.’

Lucan’s mouth thinned. ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘Not at all,’ Lexie rallied, as her own anger, her discomfort with the intimacies she had allowed this man, came crashing down on her. He was Lucan St Claire, for God’s sake!
Lucan St Claire!
‘I only gave you a cautionary warning—but being told by the man who has just thoroughly kissed you that it was a “big mistake” is damned insulting!’

Lucan looked at Lexie and felt self-disgust begin to fade and irritated amusement take its place as he realised, by the angry sparkle in Lexie’s deep blue eyes, the flush to her cheeks and the antagonistic tilt of her stubbornly pointed chin, that she really was insulted by what he had just said.

She wasn’t angry because Lucan had kissed her. Or
embarrassed by the fact that her bared breast had been in the heat of his mouth. Nor was she outraged because he had worked his arousal against that swollen and sensitive place between her legs until she groaned and moved against him in her need for release.

Oh, no, it would be too much to expect the unusual, the unique Lexie Hamilton to feel any of those natural reactions to the intimacies they had just shared!

Whereas he—damn it—he was a man who was always in control. Who had always preferred the comfort of a bed when he made love to a woman.

Not with Lexie, apparently. Oh, no. With Lexie he had almost made love in the kitchen at Mulberry Hall. If he hadn’t stopped when he had then they would probably have finished making love on the table or the flagstone floor.

Lucan gave a slightly bemused shake of his head as he acknowledged that Lexie was like no other woman he had ever met. Like no woman he had ever
wanted
to meet!

Her long and beautiful black hair had come loose from its plait and now fell in curling and wild disorder about her slender shoulders, and her mouth—that gloriously delicious and sensual mouth—was slightly swollen, the skin beneath slightly reddened from the passion of his kiss.

Lucan’s expression darkened as he reached up to gently run the soft pad of his thumb across the mark of that abrasion on her ivory skin. ‘I think I need a shave,’ he murmured.

Lexie’s eyes widened indignantly. This man had just kissed her until she was almost senseless, then insulted her, and all he could say now was—‘Is that it? No apology? No “it won’t happen again”? Just “I think I need a shave”!’

He looked down his long, arrogant nose at her. ‘I don’t feel the need to apologise for something I know you enjoyed as much as I did.’ His expression darkened. ‘Neither
do I believe in making promises I’m not sure I can keep,’ he added softly.

Lexie stared at him incredulously for several long seconds before glaring up at him. ‘You over-confident, pompous, unmitigated—’ She broke off, too angry to be able to come up with a word bad enough to describe his attitude.
‘Ass!’
she finally concluded furiously as she stepped away from him.

‘Very original,’ Lucan drawled dryly.

Lexie’s eyes narrowed. ‘I doubt you would have appreciated the word I really wanted to use!’

He gave a shake of his head, his expression bleak. ‘It can’t be any worse than the things I’ve already called myself.’

She eyed him frustratedly. ‘Believe me, if there was some way I could leave here tonight then I would! As there isn’t… I’m going upstairs to bed instead.’ Lexie grabbed her shoulder-bag from the back of the chair. ‘Do you have any preference as to which bedroom I should use? Apart from the ducal suite, of course,’ she added scornfully.

‘Feel free to use any of them—including the ducal suite,’ he added harshly.

‘Just because we shared a few kisses, it doesn’t mean I’m willing to share your bed—’

‘I have no intention, tonight or any other night, of going anywhere near the ducal suite,’ he assured her harshly, a nerve pulsing in his tightly clenched jaw. ‘With or without you in it.’

Lexie became very still. ‘Why not?’

Lucan turned away, the muscles in his back tense. ‘Will you stop asking so many damned questions, Lexie, and just go to bed?’

It would be the wise thing to do—the sensible thing to do, when emotions were obviously running so high.
Unfortunately Lexie’s actions so far where this particular man was concerned had been neither wise nor sensible.

‘You don’t use your title. You obviously come here as little as possible. In fact, it’s been obvious since John Barton’s telephone call this morning that you didn’t really want to come here today, either.’

‘Is there some point to these observations?’ He turned sharply to look at her, those onyx eyes glittering warningly through narrowed lids.

Lexie shrugged. ‘It’s such a beautiful house—’

‘It’s a damned mausoleum! ‘ Lucan cut in forcefully.

‘Then change it.’

‘Changing the décor and the furniture won’t make Mulberry Hall somewhere I ever want to live again,’ he growled. ‘If I could I’d raze the damned place to the ground and grass over it!’

Lexie shook her head. ‘I don’t understand…’

‘You aren’t meant to,’ Lucan assured her harshly. ‘Sharing a few kisses doesn’t give you any rights where I’m concerned.’

Lucan never discussed his motives or emotions with anyone—not even with his two brothers. And he was closer to Gideon and Jordan than he was anyone. He certainly didn’t intend confiding in Lexie and then having to listen to a lot of amateur psychobabble concerning his lack of ability to deal with his feelings of abandonment after his father left his family for another woman.

‘Just go to bed, Lexie,’ he advised her dully. ‘I’ll clear away here.’

Lexie didn’t need to be told twice—knew by the bleakness of Lucan’s expression that she had already stepped way over the line by probing into things he obviously had no intention of discussing with her.

Which in no way lessened her curiosity concerning Lucan’s obvious aversion to Mulberry Hall and all it represented.

‘I wondered where you were…’

Lexie turned sharply—guiltily?—to look at Lucan as he strode forcefully down the west gallery to where she stood, looking at the last of the portraits adorning the long gallery wall. A portrait of Alexander St Claire. The fourteenth Duke of Stourbridge.

Lucan’s father. Her own beloved Grandpa Alex.

Looking from the portrait to the man who now stood at her side, Lexie could see just how much alike the two men, father and son, actually were.

The portrait of Alexander had obviously been painted when he was about the age Lucan was now. His hair was still black, rather than the iron-grey it had been during the years Lexie had known him, and the similarity of the aristocratic facial structure and dark eyes was unmistakable.

She forced a teasing smile to her lips. ‘Did you think I had decided to leave this morning, after all?’

That thought
had
crossed Lucan’s mind when he’d gone down to the kitchen and found there was fresh coffee keeping hot in the percolator, and signs of toast having been eaten, but no actual evidence of Lexie herself. It had been pure chance that he had come up to the west gallery, to take another look at the damage before the builder arrived.

Lexie had left her hair loose today, and it framed the delicate beauty of her face before cascading wildly over her shoulders to the middle of her back, appearing very black against the red sweater she wore with faded fitted denims. Denims that clung revealingly to the provocative swell of her bottom—

‘Your father?’

Lucan’s jaw clenched as he turned his gaze away from that delectable part of Lexie’s anatomy to frown up at the portrait of Alexander which Lexie had been studying when he entered the gallery. Unfortunately, it had escaped damage.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed tightly.

She nodded slowly. ‘You’re very alike.’

Lucan’s mouth thinned. ‘Only in looks, I assure you.’

Her head tilted questioningly. ‘You don’t sound as if you liked your father very much.’

Lucan’s eyes narrowed as he looked up again at the painting of Alexander, done forty years ago. It could almost—almost!—have been a portrait of himself.

‘I didn’t know him well enough to like or dislike him,’ he finally bit out coldly.

‘I—’

‘Lexie, can we talk about something else?’ Lucan deliberately turned his back on the portrait of his father and raised a mocking brow as he looked down at her. ‘Did you sleep well?’

As it happened, Lexie hadn’t slept well at all. Partly because she was so aware of how precarious her position here was. How, at any moment, someone she knew from the village—Cathy Barton, for example—might arrive at Mulberry Hall and recognise her for who and what she was.

But mostly she hadn’t been able to sleep because of that incident with Lucan.

Incident? It had been so much more than that.

She had never, ever responded to a man in the wild and wanton way she had to Lucan last night. Never been so aroused, so lost to reason, that nothing else mattered. Not who she was. Not who Lucan was. Certainly not who her grandmother was!

That had come later, as Lexie lay awake in her bed, reliving the sensations aroused by the touch of Lucan’s lips and hands. Sensations so soul-deep that she still ached. Still trembled with the memory of that dark head against the paleness of her skin as Lucan suckled and laved her breast with his lips and tongue, the warmth between her thighs. She’d almost felt again the hardness of Lucan’s arousal there as he surged rhythmically, pleasurably against her.

And she’d realised that she could no longer deny her attraction to Lucan, nor the desire she felt to make love with him!

She looked now at the way the darkness of his hair fell across his wide brow, at those rock-hewn features that were normally so coldly aristocratic but which she now knew could be flushed and tense with arousal, at the thin chocolate-brown cashmere sweater moulded to the hardness of his muscled chest, the faded blue denims doing the same to powerful thighs and long legs. All of those things made Lexie tremble with remembered desire.

Desire for a man who would hate the very air she breathed if he knew she was Sian Thomas’s granddaughter!

‘I never sleep well the first night in a strange bed,’ she dismissed abruptly.

‘That must make things a little awkward for you,’ he drawled mockingly.

‘Not really,’ she snapped, knowing exactly what Lucan was implying.

What would Lucan say, do, if she were to tell him that, apart from a few fumbling caresses with the men she had dated in the last couple of years, she had absolutely no physical experience. That the intimacies she had shared with Lucan last night had been completely unprecedented in her life.

‘I’m curious as to who these four are?’ She moved away to look at a painting on the wall opposite.

Lucan had been totally aware of the way Lexie had been looking at him a few seconds ago. Had seen the hunger in her eyes. The heat. Before she’d shut down both those emotions.

Sensibly.

Wisely.

Lucan accepted it was completely
un
wise on his part, and not in the least sensible, for him to be this physically attracted to Lexie Hamilton—a woman completely unlike the sophisticated women he usually bedded.

Lexie seemed to say the first thing that came into her head, uncaring whether or not it should be said. She probed and poked at emotional wounds Lucan normally discussed with no one. And her responses—those low, keening little cries of pleasure she’d given as Lucan had kissed and caressed her the previous evening—were too raw, too honest. Too addictive.