Page 52 of A Baby for the Duke

“Say it again.”

He said it again, slower, and she shivered. Then he stopped talking altogether, and the world contracted to the size of a treehouse in a garden.

He began at her ankle. That was the part she never forgot afterward. A man the whole of England called a beast took his time kissing her ankle, her calf, the soft hollow behind her knee, pushing the butter-colored muslin up ahead of his hands an inch at a time and watching her face the whole way as though it were what he had come up here for.

“Put your hand on the beam.”

“Why?”

“Because in a moment, you’ll want something to hold onto, and I would rather it were not the doorframe. There’s a nail in it.”

She put her hand on the beam.

His palms slid up the outside of her thighs and around to the back of them and took her weight, which was as well, because her knees had weakened. His mouth followed his hands up her thigh, lightly nipping her halfway.

Leonora heard a sound come out of her mouth that she had never made in her life.

“That was you,” Colin said.

“It was not.”

Then he put her leg over his shoulder.

“Colin.”

“I have you. Hold the beam.”

“Colin, somebody will⁠—”

“Nobody comes into this garden,” he said, against the inside of her thigh, “and if they did, they would have to climb thirty feet of rope to reach us, and I should hear them at the second rung.”

“That is not a comfort.”

“It was not offered as one.”

And then he put his mouth on her, and after that it was not possible to think as a gently reared woman at all.

She had written eight hundred pages in a hidden drawer, and there was not a line in any of them that came near it.

He was thorough. That was the word she landed on afterward and could never improve. He worked out inside a minute what made her breath catch and went back to it and did it again, and when her hips came up off the boards he simply followed and did not stop. His free hand spread flat and warm against her belly, holding her still whenever she moved too much—which she did repeatedly, without permission from herself.

And there was his steadiness, which undid her worst of all. He stayed at it the way he stayed at a chisel line: unhurried, entirely absorbed, without one thought in his head of stopping until the job was finished. When she reached down and grabbed a fistful of his hair, he made a sound against her that she felt travel the whole length of her spine.

“Don’t stop.”

He did not stop.

The pleasure built the way weather built—from nothing and then out of proportion. Her thighs began to shake and could not be persuaded otherwise, and she was distantly appalled to hear herself begging, in a treehouse, at four in the afternoon, in a voice she had never used on any human being.

Somewhere in the middle, she stopped being frightened and began to reach for her peak.

“Colin!” she cried out as climax broke over her.

Afterward, there was sunlight on the floorboards and sawdust everywhere. Her legs were shaking, and his forehead rested against her hip while she came back into her body once inch at a time.

Then he stood up and straightened her skirts, unhurried, exactly as he did everything, before stepping back.

His face had shuttered.