Claiming the Courtesan

Not for the first time Kylemore reflected that every Kinmurrie seemed to fall victim to some particular mania. By all reports, his grandfather had spent increasingly long periods here, slaughtering the local wildlife and avoiding his fiercely Calvinist duchess.

Unhappy marriages. Another Kinmurrie specialty. At Kylemore Castle, likenesses of people who had quite clearly loathed each other lined the portrait gallery.

The hunting box had undergone extensive renovation, of course, when his father had become a permanent resident. The estate’s isolatio

n had made it the perfect location for hiding the sixth duke’s unsuitable and dangerous proclivities.

Those renovations meant this was also the ideal place to imprison Soraya. Or Verity, as Kylemore increasingly thought of her.

Damn. He was thinking about his mistress again. He flung the rest of his meal aside with a disgruntled gesture.

Discontentedly, he considered the house. What was Verity doing now? Still lying in her bed like a wounded animal, the way he’d left her?

The thought settled like a cold stone in his gut. She’d looked so broken and lost this morning. The image pained him beyond endurance, which was stupid, as he’d carted her all this way to teach her a lesson.

But how he hated to see the great Soraya brought so low.

Except somehow she was no longer his disdainful, worldly mistress. And therein lay a large part of the problem.

The woman he kept against her will wasn’t the woman he’d used with such businesslike passion in London.

At first, he’d thought her recent reluctance just some trick to make him pity her, relax his guard, perhaps even let her go. But her distress last night and this morning had been real. He’d stake his dukedom on it.

Not that he’d particularly regret relinquishing that poisoned inheritance.

He realized that after all these years of studying Soraya, of hunting her as his grandfather had hunted the glen’s deer, he didn’t understand her at all. And until he knew what made her the way she was, he’d never completely possess her.

He had to possess her or he’d go mad.

If he wasn’t mad already.

Clearly, some split existed in her mind between Soraya and Verity. Which was absurd. She was the same person. The way he ached for her attested to that. This new, more complex version of his mistress still exercised the same inconvenient fascination over him—more strongly, if anything. Two unsatisfactory couplings only spurred him to demand a greater share of her. To demand everything.

And he’d make sure that was what she gave him before he was finished. Everything.

In a state of nervous determination, Verity sat on the window seat in her room and waited for the duke. He’d been away all day. Now it was evening and she knew in her bones he’d come to her.

During the endless dreary hours since she’d woken, her only companions had been the silent and ever-watchful giants and the little maids who had helped her dress and served her dinner in the parlor. As the day had limped on toward twilight with no sign of her arrogant lover, she’d stifled her unhappiness and instead summoned righteous anger.

He had no right to treat her as he did. She couldn’t allow this situation to continue. The duke wasn’t a heathen savage. Surely she could dredge some chivalry from his black soul and persuade him to release her.

She wore the least provocative of the gowns Kylemore had ordered, a dashing cobalt merino with black military-style frogging—not totally inappropriate, as she intended to fight.

She resented the loss of her widow’s weeds, although the dress had been ruined past repair on the rough journey to this godforsaken wilderness. At least it had been hers, paid for with her own labor, no matter if the money had originally been Kylemore’s. She abominated the way every moment in this valley leeched away a little more of her independence.

As she watched the light fade over the loch and the mountains, the magnificence of the landscape struck her as ominous, hostile to humanity. No wonder so few people lived in this oppressive emptiness. She shivered and drew her cream cashmere shawl closer around her, although the evening wasn’t cold and a fire burned in the grate.

Kylemore paused in the doorway, and she saw him take in the scene with one single, scowling glance.

“What is the meaning of this?” he snapped. “Take off that dress, let down your hair and get into bed now.”

Clearly her defiance hadn’t escaped him. She’d expected him to be annoyed; she’d even planned on it.

He moved across to lean against the dresser. She rose and linked her hands in front of her to control their trembling.

“I’m tired of being led like a lamb to the slaughter, Your Grace,” she said firmly. “Your claim on my body ceased at the end of our contract in London.”

“I told you what I want.” He folded his arms implacably over his half-open linen shirt.