Darian Hunter: Duke of Desire (Dangerous Dukes 3)

Sexual fantasies that still made the blood boil in her veins and her body ache for—for Darian.

Only for Darian.

She had never felt this attraction to any other man. Never felt this ache for a man’s touch. Never wanted, hungered for, a physical closeness with any man. Never burned for the promise of pleasure his lips and hands had evoked.

Until Darian.

She looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes once they were outside again in the crisp March air. ‘I apologise if my words of earlier led you to expect otherwise, Darian. But I simply could not bear the thought of us being together in such a place.’ She gave a shudder of revulsion. ‘It was—’

‘Unpleasant at best and thoroughly disgusting at worst?’ He nodded grimly. ‘I thought so, too.’

‘You did?’

‘I did,’ he rasped harshly. ‘You may rest assured, I shall be having words with Benson on the subject once we have returned to the house,’ he added grimly.

‘You are not disappointed?’

A frown appeared between his eyes. ‘Why should I be disappointed?’

‘I gave the impression earlier—I all but implied—that we, the two of us, might—’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘I am aware that a man does not take sexual disappointment well.’

‘From your husband?’

‘No!’ Mariah gasped in protest, only to quickly seek composure as she realised how telling her answer might have been. She strived to adopt a derisively dismissive smile. ‘No man needs suffer sexual disappointment in regard to his own wife, when the law allows him to do with her whatever, and as often as he wills it.’

Wolfingham’s eyes narrowed. ‘Were you happy in your marriage, Mariah?’

She eyed him coolly. ‘I believe I have already intimated to you, in a previous conversation, that I was not.’

‘Ever?’

Her mouth tightened. ‘No.’

Darian could read nothing from the stiffness of Mariah’s expression. Or perhaps that stiffness was telling in itself.

‘Was Carlisle cruel to you?’ He found himself tensing as he waited for her answer.

Her chin rose proudly. ‘Only if indifference can be called cruelty. And in the case of my husband, I did not consider it to be so.’

‘His indifference? He did not love you?’ Darian’s gaze sharpened on the paleness of her face.

‘No more than I loved him, no.’

‘Then why marry him at all?’ Darian frowned. ‘Your daughter’s age now intimates you yourself were barely out of the schoolroom when you married. That it was in all probability your first Season. Surely, as you informed me regarding your daughter, there was no hurry for you to accept the first offer of marriage made to you?’ His mouth twisted harshly. ‘Or perhaps you fancied yourself as being a countess?’

‘No!’ Her denial came out sharply this time, her eyes glittering as she looked up at him coldly. ‘Sometimes—sometimes we cannot do as we wish but as we must,’ she added tautly as Darian continued to look down at her beneath hooded lids.

‘And you must needs marry Carlisle?’

‘Yes!’ she hissed vehemently.

Darian’s gaze narrowed as he studied her intently, looking, searching for the answers he knew Mariah had not yet given him. That the closed expression on her face said she might never give him…

Part of Mariah’s mystery was her unwillingness to discuss the past with him. Her past. A past that he was now sure had made her the coolly detached woman she so often was today.

A past that had also led to her being here with him now, acting as an agent for the Crown?

‘Talk to me, Mariah. Help me to understand,’ he invited gently. ‘Explain why you felt you had to marry Carlisle when, as you have said, you did not love him, or he you, and you did not fancy yourself as becoming his countess. Was your family in financial difficulty? Did your father have debts owing to Carlisle directly? Help me to understand, Mariah,’ he repeated gruffly.