Duke of Desire by Elizabeth Hoyt

Author:Elizabeth Hoyt [HOYT, ELIZABETH]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-10-16T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The Rock King retreated into his tower, and when he came out again, he wore a strange sort of armor. It was entirely black and seemed to be made from a sort of thin rock. The armor lay on his body like jagged slabs, reflecting no light, and clinked like dry bones as he moved.

“You may stay in my tower while I am gone,” he said to Ann, and then turned to the north.…

—From The Rock King

The next night Raphael glanced out the carriage window as they jolted into the outskirts of London.

He cast a glance at Iris. Her face was delicate in profile, lit now and again by lanterns on the shops outside. She’d been quiet but seemingly happy for the ride today, spending some time reading from Polybius.

It baffled him still that the lady sitting across from him, so upright and prim, was the same woman who had taken his cock into her mouth last night.

When he’d woken this morning, her soft limbs entangled with his, he had spent long minutes simply gazing at her in wonder. Her lips were a dark pink and parted softly, and her eyelashes lay against her cheeks like moth wings. She was beautiful and she was determined and he hadn’t thought that marriage to her would result in this intimacy. He’d wanted her near, true, for he was a selfish, wicked man, and he didn’t particularly like the dark that he lived in. She was to be company—nothing more. But it seemed he’d deceived himself, both about the power of her lure and about his own savage desires.

The last thought made him uneasy.

Had he frightened her? Had his lovemaking over the last two nights been too … carnal? Too crude for her?

He grimaced, looking away from her. He hadn’t much experience with gentle ladies, truth be told. Not with a face like his.

Not with a past like his.

When his baser instincts could no longer be put off, he bought his relief.

But if he had shocked or repulsed Iris, perhaps that was for the best. She wouldn’t be so quick to seek him again, which should make his own resistance easier.

Except that even now he found himself leaning infinitesimally toward her as if his body, having once tasted of her fruit, now not only understood hunger, but could be satiated by her and her alone.

He closed his eyes.

He’d practiced self-denial before and he could do it again. Giving in to this lust was dangerous. Not only because she was dangerous to him and to what he knew about himself and about his blood, but because her allure interfered with his mission.

It was as if she’d spellbound him like a fairy-tale hero lulled asleep by some fay creature for a thousand years. He was in danger of forgetting the real world and all he owed it.

He couldn’t let that happen. He was in London to find out who Dockery’s friends had been. Who had ordered him to assassinate Raphael.

To discover and destroy the Dionysus.

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