Page 96 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Alice crossed the room and stopped before him. He looked up at her, the angle unfamiliar, the tall broad fact of him compressed into something that required looking up.

She brought her hand to his face and felt the roughness of his jaw beneath her palm and the soot and the warmth of his skin and the fine tremor running through it, the body’s answer to the question the mouth had only just finished asking.

His eyes closed. The breath that left him carried nothing he had ever required of himself.

“Then begin,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-One

Kenneth did not move from his seat.

The steam rose between them in slow curls, and Alice stood with her robe held shut and the lavender scent of the bath filling the room and the sound of his breathing, still rough from the smoke, occupying the silence without apology.

“I am done managing this, Kenneth.” Her voice was steady, though the steadiness cost her something. “I have not the slightest interest in managing it for another hour.”

Kenneth’s hands pressed together between his knees. The tendons shifted along his wrists. Then he rose, crossed the distance between them in a single stride, and cupped her face in his hands.

His palms were rough against her jaw, calluses she had memorized without ever having touched pressing into the soft skin below her ears and along the curve of her throat. The touch was thorough, unhesitating, as though he intended to learn the geography of her face through his hands and had decided to begin immediately.

He kissed her. Unhurried, deep, his mouth on hers, done explaining and simply taking. Her palms found his chest. Beneath the soot-stiffened linen, his heart hammered, rapid and hard, betraying everything his steady hands did not.

He pulled back. His forehead rested against hers, and the breath between them was shared and warm and raw with smoke.

“The water,” he murmured. “Is it still warm?”

She turned her head. The copper tub sat in the corner, the steam diminished but still rising, the surface catching the firelight in a wavering line of gold. “Yes.”

He released her face. His hands went to his collar, and she watched him unfasten his waistcoat, precise as always, except that his fingers carried a faint tremor she had never seen in them before. It was the most honest thing about him.

His waistcoat came off, and he draped it over the chair without looking. Then his shirt, pulled over his head in a single motion.

The firelight found the breadth of his shoulders and the flat plane of his chest and the dark hair that narrowed below his ribs, soot streaked along the ridge of his collarbone like evidence of the corridor he had walked through to reach her.

He stepped toward her. His fingers found the collar of her robe, where her hand still held it shut, and he waited there, his knuckles resting against her throat, his eyes on hers.

She let go.

The robe opened under his hands. He slowly pulled it down her shoulders, and it pooled at her feet. The air kissed her skin, warm from the fire and the steam, and she stood before him without cotton or silk or any of the barriers she had spent a lifetime wearing between her body and the world’s opinion of it.

His gaze moved over her, slowly, and the heat of it settled against her skin like sunlight—everywhere at once, impossible to stand outside of.

He took her hand and led her to the tub.

After removing his clothes, he stepped in first. The water darkened where the soot met its surface, and he settled against the copper with a slow exhalation that carried the weight of the entire night. His hand drew her forward.

She stepped in. The water closed around her hips and waist and the curve of her stomach, warm and gentle.

Kenneth’s hands found her waist beneath the surface and drew her back against him. Her shoulders met his chest. His thighs bracketed hers, and she could feel the soft rise and fall of his chest on her back as he breathed.

He took the cloth from the edge of the tub and began to wash her, long strokes down her arm that removed the soot in pale trails. The attention was care, specific and deliberate, a first act of beginning. The tenderness of it settled beneath her ribs and expanded until she could not breathe around it.

His hands went down her collarbone, the back of her neck, where her hair clung in damp strands he lifted and smoothed aside. His mouth followed his hands there, warm against the skin below her ear.

The shift came as a gradient: the cloth’s warmth becoming his mouth’s warmth, his attention narrowing until each stroke carried an intention the cloth could not account for.

His hands moved to her breasts beneath the water. His palms, wide and warm, cupped the full weight of them, his thumbs drawing slow circles. The sensation built in her stomach in a low, steady pulse. His patient, deliberate hands were dismantling her composure, and she could feel him relishing it.

She turned her head. His mouth met hers over her shoulder, the angle uneven, neither of them caring, and the sound she made against his lips was low and raw.