He made a dismissive gesture with one pale, elegant hand, as if wordlessly denying her capacity to affect him. "Where was I? Ah, yes. Sir Eldreth's will. I got hold of it and noted a large annuity to a Miss Verity Matilda Ashton. Inquiries on his estates and amongst his cronies revealed Miss Ashton was neither a relative nor a family retainer. In fact, nobody knew who she was. By the way, Matilda doesn't do you justice. It's hard enough seeing you as Verity-particularly given truth isn't exactly your strongpoint. But Matilda!"

"It was my mother's name," Verity said, trying not to let his needling scratch at her control.

"Ah." He released a derisive puff of breath. "I hope she was a worthier citizen than her daughter has turned out to be."

"She was."

Thank God that gentle, devout woman had died before she saw what Verity had become. Her mother believed everlasting hellfire awaited a harlot at the end of her path. Verity had no intention of confiding that morsel to the overbearing tyrant opposite her.

"It was then a minor matter to arrange for certain less scrupulous contacts to break into Sir Eldreth's solicitor's office and steal Miss Ashton's direction. You enjoy the delightful result of my enterprise."

How she hated his smooth, superior voice, with its hard consonants and clear vowels. The coward who skulked in her soul whispered she could never succeed against someone with a voice like that.

Courage, Verity,she told herself, fisting her bound hands in her lap.He hasn't won yet. Although he undoubtedly will if you convince yourself he's invincible .

"You'll soon tire of rape and compulsion." Baiting him was risky, but she had to establish some power of her own in this cruelly unequal contest.

"You mistake me, madam," he retorted smoothly. "My desire is for a partnership in the fullest sense of the word."

In spite of all her fear, she gave a scornful crack of laughter. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

His intense expression didn't lighten. "I think you'll find we're all beggars when it comes to desire."

At last, he offered her some advantage, and she was desperate enough to take it. "I was a whore, Your Grace. Whores tup for money, not for pleasure. You confuse me with some fine lady who chooses where she lies down. I spread my legs for men because they pay me to do it. In your case, they pay me a fortune."

Even in the poor light, she saw he whitened under her taunts. "More than that lay between us and you know it."

It was her turn to sound superior now. "I'm glad Your Grace thought so. I'd fear my skills failed if you hadn't."

Yes! This was what she must do. Fight him. Insult him. Make him scramble to keep up. Soon, he'd weary of her acid tongue and her obstinacy. He wanted exciting, compliant Soraya, not her pigheaded facsimile, Verity.

He must have guessed her intention. "Making me angry won't convince me to release you. Although it might make me less...careful."

Anger surged up, clean and powerful as the waves she'd watched on the seafront that afternoon. "I don't want your care! I don't want anything from you. I despise you."

Strangely, her outburst only made him calmer. "Have a thought for your safety, madam. Where we're going, I could do away with you and not one soul would utter a word of protest."

She shrugged sullenly. "So kill me. Kill me now and save yourself the inconvenience of a long journey. Threats won't change the way I feel."

As she should have expected, the challenge didn't dent his self-assurance. "Perhaps not. But I'd hate to end this particular drama just when it's getting interesting."

Balancing himself against the lurching with an ease she resented, he crossed the carriage to share her bench. Verity cringed into the corner before she could stop herself. The seat was narrow, and while he wasn't a heavyset man, he had plenty of lean strength to fill the available room. His legs lay alongside hers, and their heat seeped through her thick black skirts.

But she was a fighter. She'd had to be.

"So you've decided to murder me after all." She hoped her statement was mere bravado.

He turned his dark head and regarded her steadily. She suspected he understood how unnerving she found his brooding concentration upon her.

"No, not yet." His lips quirked with frosty amusement. "Although you might wish I had before I'm finished."

She inched further into the padded leather on the side of the coach, but it made no difference to how the duke dominated the space. The bumping carriage constantly moved him against her, creating suggestive friction. Each brush of his arm or his thigh seared her with unwelcome reminders of pleasure.

"What are you going to do?" she asked in a voice she struggled to keep steady. Curse him for tying her up. Her bound hands were helpless to push him further away.

"Don't you like surprises?" he asked softly. For all their talk of murder and his earlier attack on Ben, she sensed no violence in him now.

"No, I don't," she snapped, light-headed with a nauseating mixture of nerves and anger. Just what was he playing at?

"How sad," he murmured. "That is something we should remedy." He raised one long-fingered hand and trailed it down the side of her face to cup her chin.

Every second of that mocking caress burned. She tried and failed to wrench away. "I won't lift my skirts for you in a moving carriage."

His touch was gentle but inexorable. "You'll lift your skirts when and where I say. You gave up any right to command me when you ran off."

"I'll fight you." She prayed it was true.

"I count on it." He leaned forward to rub his cheek against her face. His shadow beard prickled faintly against her skin. His warm, musky scent, familiar from a hundred afternoons in Kensington, enveloped her.

She stiffened, rejecting the false tenderness as much as the threat of force. "Stop it!" she grated out.

Kylemore laughed softly. "Shh," he breathed into her ear as he nuzzled at her throat.

I can bear this, she swore to herself. I can bear this.

"Verity." He nibbled his way to her shoulder, brushing aside her dress's high neckline. "Verity, you're as delicious as Soraya ever was."

"I hope I make you choke." She was horrified to hear a husky edge to her defiance. He laughed again, the short huffs of breath warm across her collarbone.

"That's my girl." He turned her more fully toward him and concentrated on a sensitive nerve between her neck and her shoulder. Twelve months of intimacy had taught him that attention to that particular spot drove her insane with pleasure.

Because of course they both knew her insults were empty. She bit back a moan. The Duke of Kylemore was a skillful lover who had always drawn a response from her. A genuine response, not the tired ruses of a doxy placating her rich keeper. She'd enjoyed his lovemaking, had even found it exciting if she'd ever permitted herself that much feeling when they'd been together.

It was just a healthy young woman's natural response to a vigorous lover, she'd always told herself.

Her first vigorous lover.

With more effort than she wanted to acknowledge, she distanced herself from what he was doing to her now. In London, sex had taken place in a strange atmosphere of trust. Since her desertion, he no longer trusted her. And she certainly didn't trust the madman who'd snatched her from the public road and tried to kill her brother. The memory helped stifle any response to his touch.

Eventually, the duke sat back and studied her with an expression of displeasure on his spoiled, handsome face.

Good,she thought.

"You can't escape me, even in your mind. There's no point wishing yourself somewhere else," he said in a tone completely different from the seductive purr of a few seconds ago.

"Unfortunately, you make it impossible for me to go anywhere, Your Grace." She raised her tied hands in an ironic gesture. "I find myself less than enraptured with your hospitality."

His aristocratic annoyance melted as he gave a snort of laughter. "Do you, by God?"

"Untie me," she said, suddenly finding her bonds unbearable. "I can't jump from a moving carriage."

"You could scratch my eyes out."

"My ambitions relate to damaging other parts of you entirely," she said with relish, although she wasn't sure she was capable of doing him any real harm. In Whitby, she could have turned his coachman's pistol on him and shot without hesitation. But now this forced intimacy gnawed at her resolution to make him suffer for what he'd done.

Perhaps he knew that.

She straightened. What sort of mouse was she to let a few halfhearted caresses from a cast-off lover soften her? A cast-off lover determined to assert what he saw as his rights.

Well, she decided who had rights over her. And she denied the Duke of Kylemore the ownership he claimed.

"You're doing it again," he said softly.

She blinked. "What?"

"Letting your mind wander."

She shrugged with a forced show of indifference. "If only I could help it. But nothing here holds my attention."

Chapter 5.

The moment Verity spoke, she recognized her mistake.

She'd meant the challenge to slash and wound. Instead it had emerged as a sexual invitation. And of course, Kylemore didn't fling away in the offended sulk she'd set out to provoke.

A wolfishly delighted smile lit his face. "I'll just have to try a bit harder, then, won't I?"

She closed her eyes and tried not to hear the emphasis he placed on "harder." "Don't do this," she whispered. "Please."

He gave a soft laugh. "Begging for mercy already, Soraya? I thought you'd last longer against me than this."

"I'm not Soraya," she said, the little defiance all she could invoke.

Because he was right. She'd do anything, including sacrificing her pride, to avoid the slow seduction she knew he intended.

"Yes, you are." He curled his hand around her head, spearing his fingers through her decorous widow's braids and angling her face up toward his.

She braced herself for assault. But the duke was too subtle for that. With tantalizing slowness, he brushed his mouth across hers. It couldn't even be called a kiss. Not really. It was like an extension of his gentle nuzzling before. Except now he touched her lips. And he'd kissed her so rarely and never with quite this concentrated purpose.

She tried to pull away, but the hand on the back of her head was implacable. This time when he glanced his mouth across hers, he lingered a second longer, moved his lips into a ghost of a kiss, over before she knew it had begun.

She gave a whimper that held no desire, only fear. "Please stop."

He raised his other hand and smoothed a few tendrils of hair away from her forehead. "Why? I'm only kissing you. After everything we've done with each other, this can hardly signify, can it?"

But of course, he knew it did. She could see that knowledge in his gentian eyes. Knowledge and no real tenderness, although his touch lied and told a different story. He was set on dominating her, and luck or perception meant he'd lighted on the one strategy that would vanquish her.

She could fight force, but her life had been devoid of tenderness since she was fifteen. Even its false likeness had the power to open a rift in her heart.

Somewhere, though, she found the will to resist. "All right. Take me," she said flatly. She glanced sideways. "If you untie my legs and bring me onto your lap, we should manage something to take the edge off you. At least enough to stop you plaguing me for the moment." It was deliberately crude, but she was frantic to shatter the tremulous desire hovering between them.

He gave another of those soft laughs that made the hairs on her arms rise. "Perhaps later, madam. Right now I'm quite content with the innocent joys of kissing."

"But I don't like to be kissed," she said helplessly.

He stroked his fingers across her cheek until he held her head in both hands. "You kissed me when you left me, if you recall."

"A mistake," she said unsteadily.

She'd known that even at the time. How she wished she'd let him go on his way that afternoon. How she wished she'd followed her instincts and never taken the Duke of Kylemore as her lover at all.

Ever since she'd met him, a voice inside her had insisted he and only he could break through the protective shell that was Soraya. But calamitously, she'd ignored the shrill warning from her instincts. As his mistress, she'd endured a year armoring herself against the empathy she'd always felt for him. An empathy that was absurd. A Cyprian and a duke of the realm could have nothing in common.

Before her capitulation, he'd pursued, she'd resisted. Every lure he cast her way was a move in the game. Part of her had relished the contest. Even her final play was a challenge-she'd deliberately demanded an impossible fortune for her compliance, an amount no sane man would pay for a woman.

But no Kinmurrie was ever completely sane.

The duke had called her on her bid. She'd found herself unexpectedly having to pay her gambling debts. She'd assured herself she could survive a year, a little year, with him and emerge with her detachment intact. And she'd almost succeeded.

Almost.

And the disaster that little wordalmost promised sat beside her now, plotting to destroy her.

Well, she wasn't finished yet. The Duke of Kylemore needed to learn that. This time when his lips met hers, Verity remained as unrelenting as rock. She closed her eyes and deliberately enumerated all her reasons to hate this man.

His arrogance.

His selfishness.

The way he ripped her away from the life she'd planned for so long and had finally gained the chance to achieve.

The hands in her hair began to move in soothing circles, finding and loosening each knot of tension. And all the time, he kept nipping and nibbling and sucking at her lips.

She hated him.

Her captive hands clenched as she fought to remain unmoved.

He was unmistakably aroused, in spite of her lack of encouragement. Any moment, he'd fling up her skirts and force himself into her. She almost wished he would so she'd have no choice but to loathe him.

At least rape would end this torture that hovered so close to drugging pleasure. She tried to summon disgust. But in truth, he was heartbreakingly gentle.

He knew gentleness was his greatest weapon, damn him.