Page 55 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Kenneth…”

“Don’t.” His hand came up, his fingers curling around her jaw, not rough but with a firmness that stopped the sentence in her throat. His thumb rested against her cheek, and she felt her pulse flutter against it. “I have watched you in my house, in the countryside, across dining tables, in a clearing with your eyes closed, trying not to cry, and I have told myself I did not see what I saw. I am finished with that.”

“What did you see?” she asked, her voice barely above a murmur.

“You.” The word arrived simply, stripped of everything except its meaning. “From the moment you stood in your father’s service yard with a travel bag in your hand. From the night I stood in a doorway and watched you in your nightgown in the firelight and nearly walked through it.” His thumb moved against her cheek, and her breath came a little faster. “In the drawing room, when you squared your shoulders and rearranged my furniture. In the nursery with my sons. At the village fair, with wet hair and an apple in your mouth.”

He paused, and when he continued, she could see that the restraint in his voice was costing him something.

“You asked me once what I saw when I opened the door on our wedding night. Not what I showed you, but what I saw. The answer is that I saw everything I had been telling myself not to want.”

Alice stared at him. The espaliered pear trees stood patient at the edges of her vision, and the muffled string quartet played on beyond the yew. Her heart was behaving with a predictability she found appalling.

“You said…” She stopped.

“I know what I said.” His thumb traced the curve of her jaw, slow and deliberate, and she felt it everywhere he was not touching. “I said it was a mistake because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I have been afraid of it since the parlor. Since the carriage.” His voice roughened. “Your body is not a thing to be endured, overlooked, or corrected, Alice. It is the thing that keeps me from concentrating on anything day after day.”

Heat climbed up her throat and settled in her face. She could not look away from him.

She had been carrying the words she’d heard earlier like stones in her chest, and here he stood taking each one and dismantling it with a precision that was not gentle but was absolutely certain.

“You could have told me,” she rasped.

“I should have.” His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her neck, warm and steady, and she felt the weight of it settle through her. “I am telling you now.”

He leaned in so close that she could taste the heat of him.

“I want to feel the flush on your skin under my mouth,” he murmured, his breath hot against her skin as he dipped his head lower, his words vibrating straight into her blood. “I want to hear the exact moment your breath catches and you give up trying to resist this. I want to trace every inch of you until you realize you belong to me.”

He slid his hands down to her waist and dragged her flush against him, leaving no space for doubt or air, only the heavy, demanding promise of his weight against hers.

“Tell me you feel it,” he growled, his mouth hovering above hers, tantalizingly close, dark and unyielding. “Tell me you want to be undone just as badly as I want to undo you.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “I… I do.”

“Good. Now give me your mouth, sweetheart, and let me burn every doubt right out of you.”

Then he kissed her.

There was no hesitation, no negotiation. He simply lowered his head, covered her mouth with his, and kissed her as though the decision had been made somewhere earlier in the afternoon, and this was only the execution of it.

She kissed him back. Her hands found his chest, his waistcoat warm under her palms, the linen beneath radiating the heat of his skin. The contact, even through the layers of silk and stays, sent something unspooling through her that had been wound tight since the carriage.

He walked her backward until the old stone wall met her shoulders, the trained branches framing them on either side. His mouth left hers and moved to the curve of her jaw, her throat, the soft skin below her ear. She tilted her head instinctively, the way a compass needle moved without deciding to point north. Her fingers curled into his lapels.

“Kenneth.” His name was barely a breath.

“Yes.” He pressed his mouth against her pulse. She felt the word against her skin more than heard it.

His hands held her against the wall, and then, without the slightest warning, he sank to his knees on the gravel.

Alice looked down at him. The expression on his face was the same she had never glimpsed before: unguarded, open, everything beneath the Duke brought to the surface and directed at her without apology.

“Lift your skirts,” he commanded.

She felt the vibrations of his deep voice in her sternum. She could hear the garden party beyond the yew. The string quartet. The distant voices of two hundred people.

“I…” Nerves shot through her, her eyes darting back in the direction of the event.