Page 97 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

He stood up, water cascading down his body. Before she could account for the loss, he lifted her, one arm beneath her knees, the other at her back. She found herself cradled against his chest, wet and bare and trembling from the proximity of everything that had been building beneath the surface.

He set her on the bed. The sheets were cool against her damp skin, and the contrast drew a sound from her she did not try to muffle. He reached for the towel and began to dry her, starting at her ankles, his hands moving upward through the linen, except that his mouth followed the cloth’s path, pressing against her calf, the tender skin behind her knee, the soft curve of her inner thigh, each press leaving a warmth the linen could not account for.

“Kenneth,” she breathed.

“I know,” he murmured against the inside of her thigh, the words vibrating into her skin. “Let me.”

His hands nudged her thighs apart, gentle and deliberate and entirely without mercy, and his mouth found her. The pleasure built, carrying everything: the bath, the fire, the corridor, every closed door between them. Gathering and gathering until her hands found his hair and gripped, and her hips moved against him.

She climaxed.

He held her through it until the pleasure ebbed, leaving her trembling. The tremors had become something entirely new.

He rose above her. In the firelight, his face was open in a way she had never seen, and she recognized him there: the man who had rescued her and his sons out of a burning house and sat in a chair and told her that he wanted to begin.

His weight settled over her, his forearms braced beside her head, and the contact was so total that her breath left in a rush and did not return.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked.

His eyes were dark, the brown almost black, and the last wall behind them had given over to whatever had been building since a service yard and a travel bag and a boy’s voice asking why she was running away.

He entered her slowly. The sensation was acute and encompassing. She felt it everywhere—in her chest, her throat, the back of her eyelids, a fullness that occupied spaces she had not known were empty until this precise moment. Her back arched. His mouth found her throat, and the sound he made there was low and unstructured and lived somewhere before words.

He moved, slowly at first, restraint trembling in his arms, and she wrapped herself around him and felt the muscles shift beneath her palms. The warmth built in long waves, each gathering what the last had left.

His mouth found her ear. “Your waist.” His hands tightened, pulling her closer, his hips shifting deeper. “Your hips.” Rougher now, the words fraying.

His hand traced the full curve of her, from hip to thigh, pulling her leg higher around him, and the change in angle drew a sound from her she had no interest in stifling.

“Every curve I made myself look away from.” His forehead pressed against her temple, his breath unsteady against her skin. “I am done looking away, Alice.”

She could not answer. Her body answered, arching into him, matching him, pulling him closer, and yet the closeness was not enough.

“I love you.” The words left her lips without permission, between one breath and the next.

His rhythm broke.

His hand was in her hair and his mouth at her ear, the words stripped of every structure he had ever built in them. “I love you. God help me, Alice, I have loved you since you stood in a service yard and told me your conditions.”

Laughter collided with the heat in her chest and became something that was neither, a sound she buried against his neck. He pressed his forehead against hers and breathed out her name once, and the pace found itself again, urgent and close and heading somewhere neither of them could delay.

She felt it building in her spine and her thighs, each stroke winding it tighter. His voice at her ear was rough and low and constant. Her pulse fluttered against his ribs.

She came apart with his name in her mouth and her body drawing tight around him, and he followed a moment later, his breath leaving him in a single uncontrolled sound she felt in her chest.

The stillness settled over them both, total and warm.

He did not move away. His weight rested on her, heavy and solid and real, his face pressed into the crook of her neck, his breathing rough and slowing by degrees.

She held him there, her fingers tracing the line of his spine, and the room returned in pieces: the fire reduced to embers; the water cooling in the copper tub; the faint grey of dawn at the window where the curtains had not been drawn, because neither of them had been thinking about curtains.

He shifted beside her, one arm pulling her against him, and her head found his shoulder. The fit of it was something she recognized without having experienced, a shape that had been waiting.

“Stay,” she whispered, her eyes closed.

His heartbeat beneath her ear slowed to something steady and habitable, and his mouth found the crown of her head.