“Cressida.”
“One moment.” She dipped a finger in, unhurried, and drew it in a slow, deliberate line along his jaw.
He went very still. Not the stillness of the corridor, or the terrace, or any of the composed and guarded silences she had catalogued over the previous months. This was an entirely different stillness.
“You,” he rumbled, “are going to regret that.”
“I very much doubt it.”
He caught her wrist, turned it, and pressed his mouth to the inside of it slowly, with complete and undivided attention. She felt warmth travel up her arm and spread through her whole body, and she conceded privately that his counterproposal had considerable merit.
“That,” she said, once she had recovered something resembling composure, “was not the retaliation I anticipated.”
“I know.” He was watching her mouth. “This is.”
He kissed her with the honey still on his jaw, and she laughed against him. He made a sound low in his chest that she felt rather than heard, and his hands found her waist and drew her closer. Her laughter dissolved into a soft moan.
His mouth found the curve of her throat, and she tipped her head back.
“You have honey on your jaw,” she reminded him.
“I am aware.” He did not stop.
“It seems impractical.”
“Mm.”
“Also,” she said, and then stopped because his hands had moved, and practical objections ceased to be relevant.
Outside, the castle had begun its day in full. She could hear the bustle of the stable yard, a footman’s measured tread along the passage below, the distant clatter of the kitchen beginning its morning preparations.
The world of Ashmere Castle was proceeding with its customary efficiency, entirely indifferent to the fact that the Duke andDuchess were proceeding rather less efficiently in the ducal chambers and had no intention of amending this.
His mouth found her collarbone, the soft curve below it. She turned her face into his hair and pressed her lips against his temple and felt the low, involuntary sound he made against her skin, and she thought, as she had thought the night before,There he is.
“Theodore,” she said softly.
He lifted his head, the morning light across his face exactly as it was—ungoverned and entirely his. She reached up and touched his jaw, the rough growth there, the trace of honey still warm at the corner. He turned his face briefly into her palm before kissing her again, and the morning ceased to matter altogether.
After the last shivers of pleasures receded, he lay with one arm behind his head, and she lay with her cheek against his shoulder. His fingers found her hand against his ribs and rested there.
The ornamental lake threw its faint ripple of light across the ceiling, shifting and unhurried, and neither of them said anything for a long while. There was nothing in the silence that required filling.
After a time, Theodore moved to pour water from the carafe on the nightstand. He handed it to her without ceremony and waited while she drank, and there was something in the plainness of the gesture that she found she liked considerably.
Then he settled back, and his hand moved to her hair, working through a section of it with idle, careful fingers.
“Are you sore?” he asked. His voice was low, matter-of-fact, addressed to the ceiling.
She considered the question with the same seriousness he had given it. “A little,” she replied. “Not badly.”
“I think you will need to rest for a long while yet,” he said as his hand continued its slow work through her hair.
After a moment, he shifted, drawing the coverlet over her with one hand, arranging it without fuss.
“I am perfectly well,” she said, because she thought he might want to hear it plainly.
He looked at her. “Good,” he said, and went back to stroking her hair.
