Page 107 of A Baby for the Duke

He kissed her back the way he did everything, without hurrying and without asking, and Leonora discovered that after five weeks of being handed things at the table, she was not in the least interested in being patient.

She grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled, and he came, and somehow she ended up on her back on his coat, with her hair in the sawdust and a great many candles flickering overhead.

“Wait.”

He stopped instantly, and she nearly hit him for it.

“Not that sort of wait,” Leonora clarified. “Take that off.”

“Which—”

“The shirt, Colin. You have had my skirts round my waist twice in daylight and I have not seen so much as your forearms, and I have been extremely patient about it, and I am done being patient.”

He sat back on his heels and pulled his shirt over his head.

And Leonora, who had written eight hundred pages about men coming up out of the surf, propped herself up on her elbows in her black nightgown and looked at her husband properly for the first time.

He was built like the work he did.

She had known his shoulders were broad because she had had her hands on them through a shirt, and she had not understood the half of it. The muscle across his chest was flat and hard and moved when he breathed. There was more of it down his sides and across his stomach than a duke had any business owning, and his forearms were the forearms of a man who had spent fifteen years with a chisel in his hand and had never once asked anybody to hold the other end.

There were marks on him too. A white seam across one forearm and another on his side, the small ordinary damage of a man who had worked alone for fifteen years with nobody to be careful for.

“Well?” she prompted.

“Duchess—”

“You have been keeping that in a cupboard for five weeks.”

Colin let out a laugh he clearly had not authorized.

“Come here,” she demanded.

He came.

The black gauze went the way it had been made to go, off one shoulder and then the other and then out from under her entirely. Leonora lay back on his coat in the light of forty candles and let him look at her. She found, to her surprise, that she was not shy in the least.

“You are not saying anything,” she remarked.

“No.”

“You can say something.”

“I am doing arithmetic about how much of the next hour I intend to spend on each part of you, and it is not coming out, because there is not enough time.”

Then he set about it.

He was, as ever, unhurried, and this time the unhurriedness undid her almost at once, because now she knew exactly what it meant.

He started at her ankle, which made her laugh, and the laugh went out of her by degrees as he came up. Her calf. The hollow at the back of her knee, which he had found in this room a month ago and had plainly filed away, because his lips lingered on it until her leg had started quivering.

He slowly kissed his way up the inside of her thigh, both hands stroking her now, one spread flat to hold her still. Until he came to the soft juncture between her thigh and hip, where he nipped her lightly. Leonora let out a moan that echoed off the ceiling.

“You did that on purpose.”

“I did.”

“You have been saving that.”