‘Jane, you will cease “Your Gracing” me in that contemptuous tone.’
‘I most certainly will not!’ She was beyond reason, beyond caution, wanting only to hurt as she was being hurt.
‘Jane, you are playing with fire,’ the Duke warned harshly, his hands now clenched at his sides.
‘Fire, Your Grace?’ Jane echoed tauntingly. She was tired, so very tired. For the last twelve years she’d always been meek and submissive, never being allowed to have a mind or will of her own. ‘What would you know of fire? You, who are cold and haughty and look down your disdainful nose at everyone. What are you doing, Your Grace?’ She gasped incredulously as the Duke moved to grasp her arms and began to pull her forcefully towards him.
‘Hawk, Jane.’ His face was only inches away from hers now, his breath warm against her cheek, those haughty features hard and predatory in the moonlight. ‘My name is Hawk,’ he explained harshly.
She looked up at him questioningly.
Hawk?
The Duke of Stourbridge had been named for a bird of prey?
A dangerous bird of prey. Jane dazedly recalled her assessment of him earlier today even as she stared up at him in shocked fascination.
‘A fanciful notion of my mother’s.’ His tone was grim as he held Jane easily against the hard strength of his body.
Jane didn’t care at that moment how he had come by his unusual name. She was only concerned with the fact that the Duke of Stourbridge—the haughty and arrogantly aloof Duke of Stourbridge—was holding her tightly in his arms as he moulded the softness of her curves against his much harder ones and his gaze became fixated on her mouth.
In fact, everything about the high and mighty Duke of Stourbridge gave every indication that he was about to kiss her!
It was unthinkable.
Unimaginable…
And yet Jane found she could imagine it. Could already feel the hardness of those perfectly moulded lips on hers as his mouth plundered and claimed. Possessed. For surely any woman the Duke of Stourbridge chose to kiss would know the full force of the ardour he was normally at such pains to hide from his fellow beings, but which Jane could now see so clearly in the fierce glitter of his eyes? Just as clearly she could feel the tense hardness of his body as it pressed intimately against her own…
‘You should not have come here alone, Jane.’ The Duke’s gaze, that fiercely golden gaze, moved searchingly, hungrily, over the pallor of her face. ‘You should not, Jane!’ He began to lower his head towards hers.
Jane was held in motionless fascination for several long seconds as her lips parted instinctively to receive his.
A kiss.
One kiss.
Her first ever kiss.
Surely it was not too much to ask? To take for her own? After twelve long years of being denied the touch, the warmth, of another human being?
But a deeper, more knowledgeable instinct told her that Hawk St Claire, the powerful and forceful Duke of Stourbridge, would not stop at one kiss. His years and experience would demand he take more, much more. He was a man who would take and take again, while giving nothing of himself in return.
‘No!’ She turned her head away to avoid his kiss and at the same time pushed against his restraint, fighting to escape the steely band of his arms, but only succeeding in pressing herself more intimately against him. ‘No!’ Again she protested, fearing the desire that she could clearly see still held him in its grip. ‘You must not! Please, Hawk, you must not…!’
Her pleas pierced the fierce desire that raged through Hawk’s body, causing him to pause, to blink dazedly as he stared down at her in stunned disbelief.
This woman—this girl—was the ward of his host. The unmarried ward of his host.
He released her abruptly to step back, jaw tight, eyes gleaming a glittering, inflexible gold. ‘You should not have come here alone, Jane,’ he repeated harshly.
Her throat moved convulsively in the moonlight. ‘No, I should not. But I had not expected anyone to follow me—’
‘No, Jane?’ Hawk’s voice was hard, inflexible. ‘Are you sure that your present indignation is not due to the fact that it was the wrong man who responded to your invitation?’
She looked bewildered by his accusation. ‘The wrong man? I do not understand—’
‘Was it not James Tillton who was supposed to attend you here tonight rather than myself?’ Hawk had realised belatedly, as he remembered the flirtation he had witnessed during dinner, that this must be the case—that Jane’s dismay when he had joined her here had really been due to the fact that her lover—James Tillton?—had not arrived for their arranged tryst.
‘Lord Tillton?’ Jane gasped at his accusation. ‘I detest Lord Tillton! He behaved most disgracefully towards me during dinner—to such a degree that in the end I had to pierce his wrist with my fingernails in order to stop his pawing of me beneath the table. Besides which, he is a married man!’ she added frowningly.
Hawk’s mouth twisted scathingly. ‘Summer house parties like this one are notorious for the night-time assignations of people who are indeed married—but not to each other.’
‘Indeed, Your Grace?’ Her voice was icily cold. ‘And which female guest’s bed have you chosen to grace with your own illustrious presence tonight?’
Even now, in her pride and anger, Hawk could appreciate how beautiful, how tempting the inaptly named Miss Jane Smith truly was. Admittedly, her years spent under the guardianship of the forceful Lady Sulby seemed to have cowed the more spirited parts of her nature, but they were still there nonetheless—in the way that Jane challenged him, in the way that she never flinched from contradicting him. Two things that rarely, if ever, happened to the Duke of Stourbridge.
Jane Smith was unusual in that she did not seem to see him as just a duke. She saw past his title to the man beneath, and it was to that man that she spoke during her moments of rebellion. It was to that man that her beauty appealed. To such a degree that Hawk had briefly forgotten all the caution that had served him so well these last ten years.
It would not—it must not!—happen again.
‘I have no interest in bedding any of the ladies now residing at Markham Park,’ he said disdainfully, knowing by the way Jane stiffened that she had heard his intended rejection of her own charms in that carefully worded dismissal. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I believe I will make my excuses to the Sulbys before retiring to my bedchamber for the night.’ He bowed abruptly before turning to leave.
‘Not without first making me an apology,Your Grace!’
Hawk turned slowly back to her, his narrowed gaze taking in the taut lines of her body and the challenge in her defiantly raised chin.
‘For almost kissing you…?’
She gave him a contemptuous glare. ‘For wrongly accusing me of encouraging Lord Tillton!’
Was it possible Hawk had mistaken the events he had witnessed earlier at the dinner table? Had Jane not been encouraging Tillton after all, but rather, as she claimed, fighting off the other man’s unwanted attentions? Attention towards a young woman about whom it was obvious her guardians did not care, let alone offer protection to?
‘If I was mistaken—’
‘You were!’
‘If I was mistaken then I apologise.’ Hawk nodded abruptly. ‘But in future I would advise you not to come here alone. You might find yourself in much graver danger another time than you have this evening.’
‘Until now these dunes