Royal Treatment (Royal Scandal Book 3) Read online

  “What is it, baby?” I asked her, raising my eyebrow.

  She just looked at me, searching. She knew I was upset, could probably tell instantly. “Everything okay?” she asked, searching, and I sighed in defeat. I knew this look. It meant she knew my look, and wasn’t going to let me just roll this away. “How was your meeting with Jack?”

  I rubbed my temples. I knew by the look on her face that it made her edgy, nervous.

  “It was fine, baby. He’s still going to try to make it work without me,” I said reassuringly. “They’re giving that option another month or so before going with the plan that involves me. So, there’s a chance all this will be for nothing.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and I took her hand and brought it to my mouth, kissing it. “It will be fine, baby.”

  I tilted my head from side to side, trying to remove a tightness in my neck, and Lydia caught me. That nervous expression gone, her curiosity back.

  “What else is wrong?” she asked. Christ, she missed nothing. I’d be fucked if my clients could read me this well.

  “Nothing, damsel. Everything’s fine.” I ran my nose along her collarbone, but she didn’t move. She was waiting. I’d promised her once I wouldn’t keep her in the dark, and my stubborn girl was going to hold me to it. “I talked to my mother tonight—she was just being her lovely self, I’m afraid. Typical rubbish.” I felt her shift in my arms as I took a deep breath. “It’s not worth talking about.”

  Would she let me get away with that? Please let her let me get away with that.

  She raised her eyebrows at me, indicating that there was no way in hell she was letting me get away with that.

  “Baby, it was just the usual.” I didn’t want to hurt her, and everything my mother said would hurt her. “She wants what my father wanted.” Marriage to a daughter of a member of the peerage, a devoted traditional ducal life, and fucking heirs.

  Lydia kept looking at me. Patient. Then she prompted, because she already knew, “For you to get married. Just not to me.”

  I paused, not being able to actually voice the confirmation she could see on my face.

  “It’s so odd.” She had a look of puzzlement on her face, like she was trying to work something out.

  “Which part?” I sighed again and wrapped my arms more tightly around her.

  “Well, most of the time I don’t think about it, but it’s odd that I’m going to fill her shoes. I mean, is your mom what a duchess is supposed to be like? Is that what all the duchesses are like? Because I can assure you, in case you need assuring, that even if you forget my American accent and propensity to swear, I will probably never fit in.”

  Of course she thought of this—I was such an idiotic prat. How could she not look at my mother and wonder if those were the expectations? “You could never be like my mother, baby, because with few exceptions, she and her lot are stiff and lifeless, and you, damsel, are rather stunning and vibrant.” I reached for her neck with my lips again but she pulled back.

  She half rolled her eyes at me, giving me her oh-please look. As though I’d let that slide.

  “Damsel,” I warned, my tone shifting to get her attention, the tone that pulled her out of herself. I took her chin, brought her eyes to mine. Her face went receptive and her body sank just a bit deeper—I wondered if she knew how her whole body responded when I took control. If she could feel how she melted into me. “I look at that life, the one my father chose to live with my mother, and I don’t want it. I never have. The only reason I can do this at all and not drown myself in whisky is that I am determined to be the Duke of Abingdon that the title deserves. And you, damsel, are a key ingredient to that. If I wanted one of those women, I’d have married bloody Amelia Reynolds a decade ago and spent my weekdays playing polo.”

  “You’d never.”

  “Precisely.” I shifted her so she was straddling me, her skirt riding up her legs and pooling between us. Her toned thighs gripped my own, and I held my hands clasped at her lower back, pulling her just a little closer. “You, damsel, are radiant. You’re already twice the duchess she ever was.”

  She wrapped her arm around me and held her lips against my neck.

  “You deserve so much more than my horrible family,” I said. I loved the feeling of her against me, loved the way I felt when she was there.

  “I deserve you.” Her voice had descended to a whisper.

  “Yes, well, it’s too late anyhow,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the base of her head, holding her where I could see her. “I won’t be letting you out of our engagement, even if you did despise my wretched life. The deal is rather binding, I’m afraid.” She laughed, and her laughing undid me every time, and my dick remembered what it had been wanting the entire goddamn day. I slipped my hand into her blouse, cupped her perfect tit, and kissed her exposed neck, hard.

  “You, damsel, are already my duchess,” I said, lifting her and moving us to the leather love seat in my office. Fucking hell she was so warm, so soft. I couldn’t help myself—my thumbs moved to the creases of her legs of their own accord. And in perfect time those darling goose pimples rose to the surface of her skin. I slid my hand further and found her bare, freshly waxed, with no knickers between us. Good girl.

  I heard my own breath hitch. Her smile was playful, relaxed.

  “Your mother will panic when she finds out I’m going to be her successor, won’t she?”

  I kissed the corner of her mouth. “Perhaps,” I whispered. “But I don’t care.” Her lips felt like velvet against my neck. “You know, baby, if you’d agree to wear my ring, she’d fall into line—there’s nothing she’d be able to do. No more ridiculous propositions about any woman other than you.” I practically grunted the words, weaving in and out of coherent thought. I was losing my mind, wanting to be inside her.

  “Not yet,” she breathed and shut her eyes, arching into my touch. “Soon.” Goddammit, she was going to be the end of me. There was a part of me that wanted to own her, tell her, rule her, insist she let me take her in the most public possible way and then build a fortress with her, against the world, the press, my mother, who-the-fuck-ever. But I’d be patient because I adored her, and because I bloody well needed to be. Christ, her slender arms wrapped around my neck, the pull of her, felt amazing.

  “Maybe she’ll finally stop bugging you about heirs when she finds out,” she whispered back, and I shifted my lips down her neck.

  “No heirs, damsel.” I mumbled my automatic response to the thought of children, then quickly returned to the task at hand. I kissed her mouth like I had nothing else to do, running my tongue along that sweet crease in her lips, prying them open, slipping inside. She demanded patience from me, and I would demand it of her, the little minx. Her warm tongue slid into my mouth, desperate, hungry. She tasted like oranges, vanilla, double cream. She put her fingers in my hair and pulled, trying to get me to move faster, harder, but I just kissed, holding her and everything else at bay.

  Chapter 5

  Lydia

  Oh god.

  That felt so good.

  When Dylan decided to slow us down, force me to just kiss, to receive him, to taste him, let him taste me, it reminded me what an alarmingly amazing kisser he was.

  When I tried to reach between us and move my hands to the bulge in his pants, he gripped my wrists firmly in his hands and held them against my lower back, pinning me in place. The position allowed him to pull away and dive into my mouth at his leisure, keep me from indulging completely in him, forcing me to submit to him, and it made me want.

  He was wiping away the stress that had clouded the room when I’d entered, and he was replacing it, kiss by kiss, with us.

  My breathing was hard and desperate against his mouth, as though my body couldn’t be bothered to understand this whole need-for-oxygen business while there were more important things happening, like how my legs were becoming twitchy and needy, wanting to close, wanting to be spread, to be gripped, to be held still while Dylan did wh
at I so badly wanted him to do.

  But all he let us do was kiss.

  “Damsel.” Dylan’s words were like crystal—hard and clear and unwavering. In a swift move he was standing above me, and I was fully on my back, the leather seat cool against my bare shoulders, my legs bent to accommodate the short seat, my knees closed in an attempt to calm the embers collecting at the apex of my thighs. Dylan shook his head in disapproval. “Now, now. Show me.”

  My eyes never left his as I pulled my skirt further and spread my legs, exposing myself to him, for him. “Pervert.”

  He laughed but still managed to keep the thread of dominance in his eyes. Dylan used one of his large hands to press my knee into the seat back and his other to move my other foot to the floor, spreading me further. “Beautiful.”

  It probably should have bothered me when he called me beautiful and was obviously just staring between my legs, but it didn’t. I knew he thought all of me was beautiful, and that adoration made me feel coveted, hot. It coaxed those embers into flames, and made me want to thrust that part of myself right up to meet him.

  “Darling, I’m going to fuck you right here. Because we can, because I want you, and you want me, and because, unlike that other wretched lot, we’ve got blood running through our veins.”

  I smiled and bit my lip as I watched him lower the zipper on his trousers. “So it’s a protest fuck then?” My heart was racing and that familiar need was spreading through my limbs. I had made a joke, but I knew what he meant. It wasn’t a protest anything. It was a reminder. He was shedding whatever conversation he’d had with his mother, leaving it behind like you would an ill-fitting garment.

  He just shook his head and then leaned down and bit my ear, inciting a throaty groan. I could hear the jangle of his belt unfastening, his zipper dropping, all while his mouth stayed fixed on mine.

  “And when I’m buried in you, you’ll squeeze around me, because it bloody ruins me when you do that.”

  I threw my head back as he entered me, and welcomed every tangy sensation, every tiny place where his thrust met my need. Holy hell this was good.

  I moaned, louder than I should have, and Dylan clamped his hand over my mouth. “I want you quiet, darling.” And he replaced his hand with his mouth, fiercely kissing me in time with his thrusts against my core.

  After that conversation, after thinking about just how off-kilter I was in his world, how at odds I was with the role I was supposed to fill, I needed this, to be reminded of us.

  He lifted my hips effortlessly, and suddenly he was hitting me directly in the neediest of places. The spasms around his hard cock were clingy, out of my control, and spiraled me into the orgasm that had me ignoring any demands to be quiet and screaming his name into the room. Calling him knighty, and Dylan, and wicked, crying I love you. Tiny fireworks ricocheted over my skin, bouncing from surface to surface and prompting me to pull Dylan against me to calm the riot of sensation.

  He stilled as his lips met mine and he came too, that last thrust sending him just a little deeper, wider, harder.

  “Fuck, baby. You know you’re bloody brilliant at that, don’t you?”

  I could barely catch my breath as I sank back into reality. “What? Letting you have sex with me anywhere you please?”

  Dylan’s lips curled into a smile that I could feel in my hair, and he kissed my cheek, holding back a laugh and whispering. “Making me lose my mind anytime I’m around you.”

  “It’s a special skill.” I rose onto my elbows as he rose to put himself back together.

  “Indeed. Now shall we go take a shower, and then you can get some revenge in our bed?”

  “Revenge for what?” I looked at him curiously—his attitude had shifted from regretful to mischievous in the past ten minutes.

  “Doesn’t matter. Make something up. I love the way you shag me when you’re trying to get back at me for something.”

  I laughed, shaking my head, as I straightened my skirt. “Well, you are a crazy bossy fiend who drives me crazy, so it all works out.”

  With that, Dylan landed a smack on my bare thigh and chased me to our room, where, within minutes, I was exacting my revenge.

  * * *

  An hour later I was staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t fall asleep. He lay there with his strong arm over my stomach, his fingers wrapped around my waist, pulling me into him, and I loved it, feeling his warmth against me. Feeling the reverberations of my orgasms making my skin tingle. Being home with him.

  But my mind was on our conversation in the study. Or one particular part of our conversation. No heirs, damsel. I wasn’t even sure if he knew he’d said it out loud. He’d said similar things before, and I knew it was a habitual response built over years of believing his own steadfast rules—he’d never get married, never have children. His own upbringing had made him feel that loving others was truly off the table—for nearly a decade he’d avoided love, the mess of it, the vulnerability. But then he let me in. He’d broken that rule. So I knew this rule, about becoming a father, might one day be broken too.

  But we had talked about children only once.

  It was Marriage 101. I knew that. You don’t agree to spend the rest of your life with someone without asking the big questions. What are your hopes and dreams? How do you envision handling finances? Do you expect me to stop working just because you’re a duke? (Okay, maybe that one was just me.) And, of course, do you want kids? And if so, how many?

  I had a pretty good sense of the answers to most of those. I knew we’d live in England forever—there was too much family history and life here for Dylan, and I loved it here too. I wasn’t worried about the financial aspect, partly because being married to Dylan meant not really having to worry, but mostly because I’d always been independent, and Dylan was way too proud of my accomplishments to ever ask me to stop working if I didn’t want to. I knew, with confidence, that in that area we were on the same page.

  And we were on the same page about kids too, only that page consisted of basically agreeing to table the conversation. The day we’d talked about it, we’d been sitting in the lounge on the first floor of the Belgravia house, a fire in the fireplace, reading side by side.

  “So, we should probably talk about children,” I’d said, and his eyes went a bit wide. “You know, before we get married.”

  “Right,” he said, closing his book. “Well, I have to be honest—”

  “I’m not ready,” I said, cutting him off. “And I might not be for a while. My whole life is about to change, and I’m only twenty-five. I just don’t think—”

  “I agree,” he said, cutting me off this time, and he pulled me closer to him on the couch. “Damsel,” he started, sighing and rubbing his forehead the way he did when he was stressed. “I didn’t have the best example of parenthood. I’ve never wanted children who will feel the pressures I felt growing up. But, since meeting you, I don’t know…perhaps?” I looked at him, hoping for more. “That’s probably the best I can give you right now.” The more I understood about Dylan’s childhood, about the way he was parented, the more I sympathized with his not wanting to repeat that. But when I looked at him and saw how much love he had to give, how he’d lay his life on the line for those he loved, how he wanted to open the world, not just for me, but for every person who walked into any building he designed or every person who set foot onto Humboldt Park, I was sad. Because he’d be an incredible father, as good as my own had been. And I wanted that for him.

  “Okay,” I’d said. And I went on to tell him how the last year had been a whirlwind, and how I’d spent the years before preoccupied with the very real decisions before my eyes, things about care for my father or balancing work and school. Because that was all true. And now that we were here, starting our life together, I wanted to indulge in each part of it, not rush through it. But it was more than that, more than me wanting time. The real issue, I’d told him, the thing I’d been studiously avoiding, was that even though I knew I wanted children,
and I wanted them with him, I was afraid.

  I’d never even had a mother. What the hell did I know about wanting or not wanting that? I’d seen Daphne with her mom, and could see how great it was, that I wanted that. But what if I couldn’t do it? What if I wanted to abandon my child the way my mother had abandoned me? What if I didn’t want him or her enough?

  When I’d said all of this to Dylan, in front of the fire that day, he’d hauled me onto his lap and held me there, just for a moment, kissing my forehead. “There’s nothing we can’t figure out together, damsel, and thankfully,” he’d said, “this isn’t something we have to decide today.” And I’d nodded into his shoulder, relieved that he wasn’t writing it off but noting that he wasn’t exactly rushing to reassure me we would make it happen either.

  This was the one area of our future that seemed like a question mark. Was I ever going to ask Dylan to make me a mother? Was his answer ever going to be yes? And yet, as I drifted off to sleep, I marveled at how at home I felt lying there next to him, how even when a huge question remained unanswered, I didn’t feel that sting of uncertainty. Instead I felt like no matter how we carved out our life, we’d do it together.

  Chapter 6

  Dylan

  The week was flying by—it was Thursday, and Lydia had been working her tight little arse off every night in preparation for her New York trip, a trip I didn’t even want to think about. A sodding month without her. Seemed inhumane if you asked me, but no one had.

  We were both busier than I wanted us to be. Apart from everything else, it seemed to be the season for parties, parties that I’d attend alone as long as my damsel wanted our relationship to be low profile. Parties my mother continued to see as opportunities to marry me off. Any other girl would jump at the chance to don a gown and waltz down the red carpet at these affairs—fuck, many of the girls I’d slept with in the past had hoped for just that. But as stunning as she looked in a gown, Lydia honestly seemed content to spend those evenings out with her own friends, having some kind of god-awful girls’ night with my sister or helping her co-worker Fiona.