“Yes,” she admitted and closed her eyes, although he couldn’t have said whether in shame or pleasure. But she didn’t pull away and instead slipped her arms around his neck.

“And when I caress you?” He slowly stroked his hand down her elegant neck, to rest his thumb in the hollow at the base of her throat. Her pulse beat wildly there. “Do you enjoy that, too?”

She arched herself into him. “You know…I do…drat you.”

He laughed as he captured her mouth beneath his again, this time to ease her lips apart and slip his tongue inside to plunder all of her kiss. Her breath hitched when he slid his tongue over the length of hers. But he cajolingly teased until her hesitation fled, and she dared to stroke back in a silky soft glide that shivered heat straight through him.

He seized her mouth in a blistering kiss that left her panting and boneless in his arms. The kiss he’d wanted to give her the night of the masquerade but couldn’t for fear of being seen. The kiss he’d fantasized about since he first tasted her lips on his. But this was so much better than he’d imagined, with a sweetness beneath the arousal that left him slightly dazed and yearning for more.

Not releasing her, he slipped his arms around her and drew her up onto his lap. Then, behind her back, he tugged off his gloves and let them fall to the floor of the carriage. He wanted nothing between them when he caressed her.

“And this?” His hand rested on her side, his fingers tracing over each rib through her corset as he slowly worked his way upward. When she trembled, he had his answer. “If I dared to caress higher, would you let me?”

His thumb stroked teasingly against the side of her breast, daring her to accept the caress he so desperately wanted to give her.

“Say yes, and let me give you this pleasure, too.” This one and so many, many more that he wanted to share with her. Never before had he cared about giving a woman pleasure; intimacies had only been about his own needs. But with Cora, bringing her pleasure pleased him. Immensely.

“Yes,” she whispered against his lips, and her fingers curled into his hair at his collar, in a soft entreaty not to stop.

He caressed her breast against his palm and gently massaged her fullness. Her nipple drew up taut in eager response, but there were too many layers of material for her to truly feel how glorious a man’s touch on her breasts could be. So he gently tugged down at her dress and all the layers beneath, until he freed a single breast to the afternoon sunlight.

“Dear God, you’re beautiful,” he rasped out as he traced a fingertip over her dusky nipple. It drew up impossibly tighter, like a dark pink rosebud, and when he plucked at it with his fingers, a plaintive whimper fell from her. He kissed her reassuringly, to convey that he knew exactly what her body needed, and gave her a gentle pinch that shot pleasure into her with a gasp.

When she tore her mouth away from his, he thought she might have changed her mind and would stop him. Instead, she buried her face against his neck and shyly whispered, “Yes…Oh please, yes…”

His foolish cock flexed at the arousal in her, so intense that she shook from it. Sweet Lucifer, how much he wanted her! And he meant to have her, too.

But not yet. There were still too many barriers between them. Now, he’d have to settle for this small taste of her.

He lowered his head and took her nipple into his mouth. When he began to suckle lightly, she pressed herself harder against him, and her fingers clutched at his hair to keep his mouth tightly against her. He swirled the tip of his tongue over her, then lapped at her between greedy suckles, the combination of licks and sucks and nips of his teeth making her writhe on his lap. If she kept that up, she’d discover exactly what having his mouth on her did to him.

If fondling her breast brought her this much pleasure, then he could only imagine her reaction if he took a more intimate touch.

“I want to caress you,” he murmured against her hot flesh. “Right where you’re aching to be touched.”

She tensed with surprise, and when he looked up into her eyes, he saw her bewilderment that he could know what sensations bloomed inside her. But of course he knew. Through her letters and the night of the masquerade, he knew all of her desires. Just as he knew that no other man had ever touched her before.

He slipped his hand beneath her skirt and brushed it up her leg, pausing when he reached the top of her stocking. When she didn’t tell him to stop, he dared to let it drift higher, until he teased his fingers at the feminine curls guarding her sex. Each of her breaths came labored with nervous anticipation, and he could feel the damp heat of her just below his fingertips.

“Yes.” Her lips formed the silent word, but it was all the permission he needed. He stroked his hand over her feminine folds. Sweet heavens…she felt like liquid silk, so soft and smooth beneath his fingertips.

“John,” she whispered achingly.

He smiled against her shoulder. He loved to hear her say his name, when she knew exactly who the man was who was bringing her such pleasure. Almost. She didn’t know that the Duke of Monmouth and the John from her letters was the same man. Guilt pricked at him that he couldn’t tell her and reveal all, but it couldn’t be helped. Not just yet.

“Soon, my love,” he promised with a kiss to her temple, and meant every word. “I’ll make love to you soon.”

Her hand clamped down on his wrist, stilling his hand. “No.” Her eyes flared with a haunted look. “We cannot—I cannot…”

“Because we’re not married.” He knew why she would keep herself from him and respected her even more because of it, yet that didn’t stop the disappointment from pouring through him.

“No,” she whispered. “Because you want to destroy the mill.”

They stared at each other, silent and still except for the pounding of his pulse in his ears and her gradually steadying breaths. Both of them were flush with desire and arousal, both aching and yearning for more. But there was more than just layers of clothing between them, and those problems couldn’t be solved with a few loose buttons and lifted skirts.

“Because I’m still the man you think is your enemy,” he murmured.

At that blatant truth, she lowered her face away, but not before he saw the glistening in her eyes. His chest clenched as he slowly drew his hand away from her and smoothed down her skirts.

She slipped off his lap to return to her place beside him, putting even more distance between them than before. Except for lips swollen from kisses and cheeks flushed pink from desire, anyone looking at her would never realize how close he’d been to making love to her.

“If things were different between us, if I wasn’t the man who wanted to put through a canal and you weren’t the miller’s daughter”—He couldn’t resist reaching up to tuck a stray curl behind her ear—“would you let me love you?”

“But things aren’t different,” she dodged softly, her shoulders falling.

“Oh, I think things are very different now.” And if he had his way, they’d be even more different in the coming weeks.

“You’re a duke and I’m a villager. I could never be anything more to you than a mistress.”

No, you could be my entire world. “I’m just a man. One you know so much better than you think.”

She lifted her face, and her watery eyes held his, in silent challenge to his assertion. “Do you still want to put through your canal?”

“I want to bring jobs to the area, good jobs that will make certain that all families have enough food to eat and candles to chase away the darkness, rather than just those tenants who happen to have a kind lord of the manor. Why is that wrong?”

“At what cost to my family and to our village?” She shook her head in frustration. “What good is being able to buy grain if there’s no one who can grind it into flour for them?”

When a tear slipped free and fell down her cheek, he knew they were at an impasse. No amount of kisses or caresses—or letters pinned to trees—could soothe away her pain.

Silently, he pulled on his gloves, then reached for the ribbons to drive them back to the mill.




CHAPTER 6




THE BUTLER BOWED HIS HEAD. “His Grace will see—”

With a determined stride, Cora stormed out of the drawing room past him and through the house to the study. She clutched Monmouth’s latest proposal for the lock in her fist.

The nerve of that man! To send this proposal now—oh, he deserved the tongue lashing she planned on unleashing. His Most Noble Dukeness could go rot for all she cared!

Except that she did care, which was the worst part of it all.

Since their embrace, Monmouth had been exceptionally gracious to her and her father, who had an amused glint in his eyes every time the duke paid a visit to the mill. As if Papa didn’t recognize the man as the enemy. Monmouth had gone out of his way to seek her out…to invite her on drives through the countryside and walks through the village. To invite her to sit in his pew during Sunday service. To help him deliver the bags of flour he’d purchased to give to the orphanage in Spalding and to the vicarage in Little London, where he’d spent time in both places playing with the children. He’d even asked for her help in paying visits to three widows who had managed to stay on in their small cottages after their husbands had died, all of whom had gone on repeatedly about what a kind man he was.

Drat him! It was incredibly hard to hate a man whom children and widows adored.

Which made her wonder—was he doing all this simply to charm her into relinquishing her opposition to the lock and canal? Or was he hoping to get her back into his arms? The past few weeks felt as if he’d set a task for himself to convince her that he wasn’t the enemy after all.

But with this latest proposal for the mill, he’d proven himself to be nothing more than a wolf in duke’s clothing.

“You have gone too far,” she declared as she charged into his study. “What kind of scheme are you planning now, Your Grace?”

He rose slowly from behind his large desk, placing his hands flat on the desktop as he leaned toward her. “A grand one.” When he gestured toward the chair in front of the desk for her to sit, she obstinately remained on her feet. “You’ve read my solution, then.”

“How is this a solution?” In frustration, she slapped the letter onto the desk. “It’s simply another attempt to close my father’s mill!”

Which hurt more than she wanted to admit, because she’d hoped that in all the time they’d spent together that he would have realized she and her father had no intention of dropping their opposition to the lock. And that he wasn’t a heartless aristocrat who cared nothing about what happened to them.

“If I wanted to close your father’s mill, I would have already done so weeks ago and built the lock. There would have been nothing you could have done to stop me.”

His voice was slow and controlled, but she couldn’t deny the truth behind his words.

The river ran through Monmouth land. The only reason she’d been able to keep the lock from being built so far was because her father’s mill perched along the river on a freehold, and Parliament wasn’t ready to toss over private landowners for the sake of progress, not even the small ones like her father. But she wouldn’t be able to keep up the opposition for much longer. Samuel Newhouse had told her only days ago that a new act was going before Parliament that would allow the crown to do just that—seize whatever land it liked for canals, as long as the seizure benefited the general population. A new stretch of canals connecting growing factories to the existing network of waterways would do just that.

“Then why haven’t you?” she forced out through her growing frustration.

“Because I have no intention of shutting down your father’s mill. What I want to do is move it. Every last board and stone.”

Her heart jumped into her throat. Something about the way his eyes shined triggered a memory at the back of her mind, yet one that remained in the shadows…

“I’m proposing a compromise.”

“This isn’t a compromise.” She tapped an angry finger on the letter from his secretary. He hadn’t even had the decency to bother to write to her himself. “Our mill requires a fast current. There’s no where else along the river that provides that.”

“There is if we build a sluice for it, to channel the water so that it moves quickly beneath the mill. You’ll have more than enough power to grind flour day and night.”

“We can never afford that.”

“I can. Especially if I give you the new plot of land where it will sit.”