Page 7 of Bred By the Duke

He brings my crumpled panties against his mouth and sucks, while I sit there, watching him and wondering what the fuck just happened.

Chapter Four

Lucas

I have spent four hours trying to build a version of last night in which I behaved decently, but there isn’t a single one.

I put my mouth on my sister's closest friend in my own library while the house slept above us. She came apart under my tongue with her head against the glass and her legs shaking around me, and she made a sound I will be hearing until the day I die. And then, rather than carrying her upstairs and making her mine, rather than saying any of the things stacked up behind my teeth, I got off my knees, told her she should go up to bed, and walked out.

I said it in the voice I use for tenants' meetings. You should go up. Then I left her sitting on the window seat with her nightdress bunched at her thighs and her panties stuffed in my pocket.

Twice now. The same room, the same woman, the same insatiable urge to consume her.

Her panties are in my trouser pocket, which are now slung over the back of my bedroom chair. I have thought about those panties roughly every ninety seconds since half past midnight, which tells me most of what I need to know about the state of myself. Whatever lives in me where restraint is supposed to live has gotten loose. It doesn't want to be reasoned with. It wants to go upstairs, put my hand around the back of her neck, and finish what my mouth started. It doesn’t care at all that there are eleven bedrooms of relatives arriving between now and Saturday.

By twenty to six I've given up on sleep and gone down to the estate office, where I read the same page of the woodland report four times without taking any of it in at all.

The kitchen at seven is warm and smells of eggs and bacon.

Rochelle is at the long table with the lever arch file open, hair damp, a pen behind her ear and another in her hand. She hears me come in. I know she does, because her shoulders change.

“Good morning, Your Grace.”

Two words. I have been called that by prime ministers and by children at village fetes and it has never felt like that, like a door slamming shut.

“Rochelle.”

She turns a page. “The chair company opens at eight. They have us down for a hundred and twenty, Cassia wants a hundred and sixty, and I've got the original email with the number on it. They'll move faster for you than for me because of the name, so if you'd call them at eight, I'd be grateful.” Another page. “The quartet had us confused with Halverton, which I've fixed. The florist is coming Friday at two, and she needs the north door propped while she empties her van and transfers the flowers to the house for overnight storage.”

“Rochelle.”

She sighs. “And your uncle's van is back in the courtyard.”

“Will you look at me?”

She does. She lifts her chin and looks at me with a face so pleasant and so professionally blank that I would rather she threw something straight at my head. There's flour on her cuff from wherever she's already been this morning, and she's got a smudge of it under one eye where she's rubbed her face without thinking.

“I'm working,” she says. “I'm very good at working. It's the one thing I've got going for me this week.”

“About last night.”

“There's nothing to say about last night that's going to make the correct number of chairs turn up.” She caps the pen. “You made your position clear. Twice, actually. I'd rather we didn't do the part where you explain it to me kindly. I don’t need your pity, but I would also be grateful if you left me out of whatever this weird game is that you’re into.”

Cassia arrives in the doorway before I can answer, in a coat over pajamas, keys in her hand, shouting that the fitting is at nine and Halvern is forty minutes away. That if Rochelle doesn't come now, she will drive there alone and cry in a changing room like an animal. Rochelle stands, closes the file, tucks it under her arm, and thanks Mrs. Ivers for the coffee by her first name.

No one ever calls Mrs. Ivers Gloria.

She doesn't say goodbye to me, just hands me a slip of paper and leaves. I stand in the dining room and listen to her fading voice as she reassures Cassia that everything is going to be fine.

***

My mother finds me standing there still wondering what the hell is happening a few minutes later.

“Ah, Lucas,” she says, reaching up onto her toes to drop a kiss on my cheek. “Good to see you up and about and helping with things.”

She lifts my hand and looks at the piece of paper with the chair details on it.

“Ah, yes. That Rochelle really knows how to light a fire under people.”