Page 73 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“You think I am resourceful?”

“I think you are a great many things,” he said, “and that you have a persistent and, frankly, bewildering habit of believing the least generous account of yourself.”

His thumb was still on her cheek, and she was very aware of the warmth of it, of the whole warmth of him, in the small attic room with the candle burning low and the night air drifting in through the window.

“You rearranged my household and made it run better in a fortnight. You handled your father in my drawing room without losing your composure. You managed Tidswell alone tonight, long enough to understand exactly what he was doing, before I arrived.”

The candle guttered. The city haze sat low over the rooftops beyond the window. Alice looked at his face, at the careful openness of it, and felt the full weight of what this room was. What it meant that he had brought her here, that she was still sitting in it at nearly one in the morning with his hand warm against her face.

The accumulated wreckage of the evening settled quietly in her chest like a tide going out.

“I also wanted to tell you that… that I have been afraid,” he said. “Of this. Of whatever this is, between us. Of the fact that I am not capable of—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. “I am not a man who finds this easy. The saying of things. You are aware of that.”

“I am.”

“What I am less aware of,” he continued, his voice dropping into the register she felt more than heard, “is whether I’m capable of continuing to behave as though I am indifferent to you. I find that I am not.” His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone, and the heat of it moved through her in the way she had stopped pretending it did not. “I am many things, but indifferent to you is not one of them.”

She was aware of the distance between them, which had become less a distance and more an intention. Above all, she was aware of the very urgent nature of what she wanted.

“Kenneth,” she said.

“Yes?”

He was not moving. He was waiting, with the patience of a man who had spent seven years learning to hold still and was finding it considerably more difficult than usual.

Alice lifted her chin and kissed him.

She found him before he found her, which was the second time it had happened, and she understood, as his hand moved from her cheek to the back of her neck and the blanket slid from her lap to the floor, that she was done being careful.

She had been careful for three Seasons and two households and four months of a marriage that had surprised her at every turn. She was, at half past midnight in an attic with the stars visible at the edges of the London sky, entirely done being careful.

And Kenneth kissed her back.

Chapter Twenty-Two

She had kissed him first, and the knowledge of it was still in her mouth when he pulled back to look at her. Not far. An inch, perhaps less, the space between them now a thing with weight and temperature and the specific quality of a held breath.

She could feel the effort it took him to collect himself even now, even here, at half past midnight in an attic with the candle nearly out and her hands still fisted in his lapels.

She had always been aware of his composure. She had never before been the thing it was failing against.

“Alice.” The word arrived rough at the edges in a way his voice rarely was.

“Do not say that we should stop.”

He looked at her for a long moment. His eyes moved over her face the way they always did when he was deciding something—with that careful, particular attention that was its own form of touch. Then he brought his hand to the back of her neck again, tilted her head, and kissed her with the full, unhurried intention of a man who had made his decision and had no further interest in pretending otherwise.

She made a sound against his mouth, and he swallowed it.

His hands moved to the fastenings at her back, his fingers finding the buttons easily. The silk loosened. His palms spread across her shoulder blades, warm through the fabric and then warmer when the fabric gave way, and she shivered.

“All right?” he said against her jaw.

“Yes,” she said. Very.

He peeled the silk from her shoulders, and she let it fall. The night air moved across her skin, and his gaze moved with it, deliberate, unhurried, beginning at her throat and following the candlelight down to her stays and then below.

She felt the familiar urge to cover herself, to apologize for her curves, but she also realized how little purchase that urge had found in the last thirty seconds.