Page 57 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

The more that had no safe name for women in her position.

She wanted him entirely.

She had wanted him since the service yard, probably, and the wanting had only grown with each dinner table argument and each closed door and each moment he chose to be human when he believed no one was watching.

And she had no idea whether the man walking beside her, calm and composed and already retreating behind his walls, wanted the same.

They emerged from the yew path onto the main lawn. The garden party opened around them, silk and laughter and the smell of cut grass.

Across the lawn, the oak tree stood with three boys in its branches and Jonathan at its base, looking up with his hands in his pockets and the resigned amusement of a man who had been asked to monitor a minor catastrophe.

Freddie spotted them first.

“Papa! Alice! Uncle Jonathan says I’ve gone too high, but I can see the river from here, the actual river. It’s blue, and there’s a barge on it, which means I’m not too high. It means I’m exactly the right height for barge-observation…”

Alice looked up at the third branch of the oak tree, at Freddie’s delighted, muddy face above the summer leaves, and felt the laughter bubble up in her chest and take up residence there beside everything else.

She did not look at Kenneth. She did not need to. She could feel the precise moment when he exhaled beside her, slow and controlled, the sound of a man standing in a garden in May trying very hard not to smile.

“Come down, Frederick,” he ordered.

“But the barge…”

“Now.”

“You never let me see anything good.”

“The barge will still exist tomorrow. You have leaves in your hair.”

Alice pressed her fingers briefly to her lips.

The afternoon light fell warm across the lawn, past the yew hedge and the espaliered pear trees and the old stone wall.

And her body still remembered his hands.

Chapter Eighteen

The morning dawned quiet.

Alice had not slept poorly, which surprised her. She had expected to lie awake cataloging the afternoon in the remorseless way her mind had always managed its catastrophes: replaying the weight of his hands on her waist, the sound of the string quartet reduced to nothing, the particular set of his face when he straightened and smoothed his coat as though an ordinary thing had just occurred.

She had expected all of that. Instead, she had fallen asleep before the candle burned low and woken to the birds on the Grosvenor Square sycamores with something in her chest that she refused to name before breakfast.

She dressed without her maid. The navy morning gown required assistance at the back, and the buttons took three attempts before she conceded the point and pulled the bell cord. But dressing herself kept her hands busy, and she needed something to do with her hands before she went downstairs.

The breakfast room smelled of coffee and fresh bread.

Kenneth was already there. He was standing by the sideboard, his back to the door, his coat on and every line of him suggesting that he had been there long enough to arrange his expression before she arrived.

She knew, because she had done the same.

“Good morning,” she greeted.

“Good morning.”

He did not turn immediately. He moved the coffee pot to a different position on the tray, then turned and looked at her. The force of his attention moved through the room the way it always did, direct and close, as though the table between them were a detail rather than a fact.

“The boys are still in the nursery,” he said. “Miss Leyton will bring them down at nine.”