Claiming the Courtesan

Thank the Lord he hadn’t.

Yes, one day, he’d tell her all of this.

Or maybe he no longer needed to. He had her understanding and forgiveness already. He felt it in her touch, in her soft voice as she whispered tender comfort over him.

And he had the privilege of loving her.

Chapter 21

Verity noticed the change in the duke immediately. Her ruthless lover didn’t exactly turn into an ordinary man, but his manner took on a new ease and lightness.

Nightmares no longer broke his sleep.

If the horrors of his childhood haunted her instead, that was the price of love. She should have immediately guessed monstrous deeds had occurred in this place, but she’d been too wrapped up in her own tribulations to notice the signs.

The bars on the windows, obviously installed years before her arrival. The duke’s noticeable skittishness and reluctance to spend time inside. The house’s air of long neglect and unspoken misery.

His dreams.

Oh, yes, his dreams should have alerted her. Even in London, she should have suspected anyone who maintained such inhuman control must hide suppurating wounds deep within.

She didn’t gull herself into believing those wounds were near to healed. But she prayed this new gentler, more open man had a chance to become whole at last.

The new Kylemore was inclined to play the slugabed. She didn’t mind. Reward enough to watch the exhaustion and tension fade from his fine-boned face. Every night, he slumbered with perfect trust in her arms while she wept over the agonies he’d born so bravely and in such isolation. Wept in heartbroken silence. If he caught her crying, those preternaturally perceptive eyes would divine her secret love.

A week after the duke’s devastating revelations about his childhood, Verity came downstairs one morning to discover him in the hallway. He balanced a stag head under each powerful arm.

“What are you doing?” she asked in astonishment.

“Making a pyre from our stern chaperons.” He dropped his burdens without ceremony and came over to take her in his embrace. “Unless you’d like to keep them,” he murmured into her hair.

“Heaven forbid.” He was in his shirtsleeves, and the long muscles of his back flexed under her stroking hands.

Andy tramped in from outside and grabbed a pine marten and a particularly lugubrious badger from a pile she now noticed near the door. He hardly glanced at the entwined couple. She supposed he, like everyone else in the valley, was inured to the sight of her in Kylemore’s arms.

Still, she blushed. It was absurd. She’d been a courtesan for thirteen years, yet during these last days, in spite of the wildest debaucheries of her life, part of her felt pure and reborn. Almost virgin.

A virgin with her first love.

Well, she thought with another concealed smile, while she was woefully far from a virgin, he was most definitely her first love.

“Can I help?” Ever since Kylemore’s confession, she’d itched to strip the wretched memories from the house. Perhaps then he’d find peace.

Reluctantly, she drew away from him to watch Andy sling his load into a handcart at the door. “Kylemore?” she prompted softly.

He’d asked her to use his Christian name, but she didn’t feel comfortable with the intimacy. It was nonsensical, when he treated her body as his private pleasure ground.

“You don’t have to work as my skivvy, mo leannan.”

“I’m sure if a duke of the realm can get his hands dirty, a peasant like me can too,” she said dryly.

Without waiting for his agreement, she went into the parlor and gasped at the chaos. Hamish and Angus stood on stools in front of adjoining walls, wrenching the parade of animal heads down with crowbars and brute strength. They greeted her, then went back to their task.

“Your grandfather clearly wanted his trophies to hang until the crack of doom,” she said and promptly sneezed as the large

st of the heads crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust.

“Here.” Kylemore passed her a handkerchief that cost more than she’d have earned in a year as a servant. “I wasn’t joking about the dirt.”