The Dragon Duke's Heir Contract novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Wedding Night
Married at dusk in a black stone chapel, she sits in his lap and comes on his hand, and he refuses to take more until she asks. He walks out to the balcony and burns the rail.
They were married at dusk, in a black stone chapel with nine candles and one priest.
Her new husband took Ysolene's hand at the altar, and the priest said the old words about faith and fire.
She said them the way a person reads a bill of sale.
"You may seal it," said the priest, and she thought he meant the register.
The duke bent his head and kissed her.
It was brief and dry and perfectly correct.
When he lifted his mouth, Ysolene realized she had gone up on her toes.
His grey eyes held hers, and a muscle moved in his jaw.
"Ysolene," he said, as though he were testing the weight of it.
Nobody had said her name that way in six years.
Fenna, the housekeeper, showed her to the duchess's bedchamber, because it was the only room in the keep that had been aired.
She was a broad grey woman who looked at Ysolene.
"He's hot-blooded," Fenna said. "Don't let him tell you he isn't."
Then she shut the door and left Ysolene with a fire, a vast bed and a white silk nightgown laid out on the quilt.
Ysolene put it on, because the contract said she would.
She sat on the edge of the mattress with her hands in her lap.
He came in without knocking, in his shirtsleeves, and shut the door with his back.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I am cold."
"The fire is the size of a cart."
"Then I'm being sensible. I read the clause, Your Grace. Every night. I'm not going to cry about it."
She was proud of how level it came out.
He crossed the room and took the armchair by the fire, and then he held out his hand.
"Come here."
She walked over, and he looked at her bare feet on the stones.
"Sit."
Ysolene sat on his lap, because there was nowhere else, and he put one arm around her waist.
He was hot straight through his shirt, and she felt it against her back.
"I'm going to touch you," he said against her ear. "Tell me where."
"That's rather the point of the contract."
"Mm. Where, Ysolene?"
She swallowed. "Anywhere."
His free hand lay over her knee.
It slid up her thigh under the silk, slowly, and every inch it covered went tight and bright.
No one had ever touched her there.
When his fingers reached the top of her thigh she made a noise she would have denied under oath.
"There it is," he murmured.
His mouth moved against her neck, and then his teeth, very lightly, and her head dropped back against his shoulder.
He parted her with two fingers.
She was already wet, humiliatingly so, and he made a low sound in his chest that she felt in her spine.
"Good," he said. "Look at you."
His thumb found the small hard place at the top and circled it, and her hips jerked.
"Your Grace..."
"Valerian, when you can manage it."
"I can't manage anything."
"Then don't."
He pressed in with one finger, slowly, and the stretch was strange and tight and startlingly good.
A second finger followed, and his thumb kept up its slow, patient circles, and she clutched at the arm of the chair.
She could feel him against her hip, thick and hard through his trousers, and he did not push it at her once.
"I want an heir out of this," she heard herself say, stupidly, as if it were an argument. "You should be doing something about that."
He laughed, a short warm breath against her ear.
"I intend to. When you ask."
"It's in the contract!"
"The contract says nightly. It doesn't say I have to rush you."
His fingers curled inside her and found something that made the room go white around the edges.
She rocked down on his hand without meaning to.
"That's it," he said. "Take what you need. I've got you."
"Don't talk."
"You like it when I talk. You tightened on me just now."
Ysolene could have killed him.
She came with his name in her mouth, hard and long, shaking in his lap.
His hand worked her through it, and his other arm held her so tight she could feel his heart.
When she finally went limp he drew his fingers out and wiped them, unhurriedly, on a handkerchief.
She saw that his hand was shaking.
"Now," she said, breathless and furious. "Finish it."
"No."
"I signed."
"A signature isn't a yes."
He set her on her feet, gently, and straightened the silk over her knees.
She looked at the front of his trousers, and then at his face.
His eyes had gone gold, slit, and his hands were not quite steady.
"I'll keep every clause in the contract but one," said the duke. "I won't take a night that's only signed for."
"When I take you, you'll say it with your mouth."
"That's absurd. Then we'll be here a year."
"I doubt it."
He was at the door before she found a reply.
She got into the bed alone, hot and ashamed and wide awake, and listened to him cross the hall.
Then a door opened somewhere above her, and she heard a long, hard crack.
Ysolene got up.
She followed the sound up a narrow stair to a balcony, in her bare feet.
She found him at the stone rail with his back to her.
Both his hands were flat on the parapet.
The rail beneath them was scorched black, and a thin line of smoke curled off it into the cold.
"Go back to bed, Ysolene," he said, without turning. "I'm trying to keep a promise."
His shoulders were rigid, and the moon lit the scales at his temple.
She looked at the ruined stone.
She looked at the man who had done it rather than push her, and something in her chest turned over.
"Then break it," she said.
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