Page 74 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

He was looking at her with something she had stopped calling impossible months ago and was only now beginning to call by its name.

“Stay still,” he said.

She obeyed. Or she tried to. Staying still proved more difficult than expected when he reached for the laces of her stays with the same unhurried precision and began to work them free, his knuckles brushing her spine at each loosened crossing, the brush deliberate enough that she understood it was not accidental.

He was taking his time because he intended to take his time, and when her stays gave and her breath came easier and the night air kissed the skin he had uncovered, he pressed his mouth to the top of her spine and held it there for a moment that had no purpose except to undo her.

“Kenneth.”

“I know,” he murmured against her skin.

The blanket was on the floor, where it had slid from her lap. He gathered it one-handed, without releasing her, and spread it across the boards between the two chairs.

He looked at her again with that calm, focused attention, and she understood what he was asking.

She sat. The boards were solid beneath the wool, and the ceiling sloped low above them. The star charts looked close in the dimness, Cassiopeia at her tilted shoulder. She looked up at him standing over her in his evening coat, the candlelight behind him catching the line of his jaw.

The thought arrived with the simplicity of something that had always been true: she had wanted him since the service yard and had only been lying to herself about when it had become inevitable.

He shrugged off his coat, then removed his waistcoat and set it aside, the white of his linen visible in the low light. He sat beside her on the blanket, turned toward her, and cupped her face in both hands.

“Alice. My Alice,” he murmured.

Then he kissed her again, slow and thorough. His hands moved from her face to her shoulders, to the curve of her waist, and to the swell of her hips, where he stopped.

He pulled back an inch. His thumb pressed a deliberate circle into the soft curve of her hip through the thin linen of her chemise, and he watched her face while he did it.

The combination of the pressure and the hunger in his eyes sent a wave of heat through her that concentrated in the center of her thighs.

“I have thought about this,” he said, low and unhurried. “Here.” His thumb moved again. “For months.”

She could not make her voice do anything useful.

“You should know,” he continued in the same even register, which was worse than it would have been if his voice had broken, “that the difficulty I have had keeping my hands off you has been considerable. And I have kept them off you.” His other hand moved to the hem of her chemise. “That is over.”

“Yes,” she said, because it was the only possible answer.

He laid her back, his hand supporting her back until she was flat against the blanket with the floorboards solid beneath and the sloped ceiling above and the star charts filling her peripheral vision. He pulled back to look at her from above, his shirt open at the collar, his expression stripped of everything that was not this.

The specific quality of that stripping open, the man beneath the Duke, visible and unhidden, was very nearly as intoxicating as anything his hands had done.

“You are…” he trailed off.

“I am what?” she prompted.

His eyes moved over her in the candlelight, slowly, without apology.

“Exquisite,” he replied. “Absolutely exquisite. And I’m ravenous for you, my wife.”

He kissed her throat. Her collarbone. The swell of her breasts above the chemise. She arched into him. His mouth was warm, and his beard left a slight drag across sensitive skin that she registered in her sternum and below.

When he drew the chemise from her shoulders and off her, she did not reach for it.

What he did then was not what he had done in the garden. In the garden, she had been standing, his mouth finding her through gathered silk, the world contracted to a single urgent point. This was the opposite of that.

He took his time with her, beginning at her shoulder and moving with a slow, purposeful attention, his hands and his mouth mapping out the curve of her waist, the weight of her breasts, and the soft place below her ribs that made her inhale sharply when his mouth reached it. He lingered on that place for a long time before moving further.

“Kenneth,” she moaned.