Page 119 of A Virgin for the Sinful Duke

“You are going to be so loved,” he murmured. His lips brushed her skin with each word. “Your mother is the bravest person I have ever known, and she will teach you to argue with everything and to hold a bow and to jump into lakes. And I will teach you that it is all right to be afraid, so long as you do not let the fear decide what course your life will take.”

He pressed another kiss on the curve. Then another, lower, where her hip began. Then he trailed his mouth back up, across her ribs, between her breasts, along the line of her throat, and Lily arched beneath him. Her fingers tightened in his hair.

“Hugo.”

“Mm.”

“Stop talking to our unborn child and kiss me.”

He lifted his head. His amber eyes were bright and damp in the moonlight, and the grin that spread across his face held none of its old performance. It was open and boyish and wrecked with happiness.

“As my Duchess commands.”

He kissed her. Deep and slow and aching with tenderness. His hand still rested on her stomach, his body warm above hers.

She pulled him closer. Her legs wrapped around him. His mouth left hers and traced the curve of her jaw, her ear, the place on her neck that made her breath fracture.

“I love you,” he said against her skin. Each word was a kiss pressed into her pulse.

“I love you,” she answered.

Her fingers traced the muscles of his back, his shoulders, the knot of scar tissue above his left brow where his brother had once split the skin.

She kissed the scar. She had kissed it a hundred times. She would kiss it a hundred more, because every time she did, shefelt the tension beneath it ease, as though her mouth could reach the old wound underneath and soothe it.

He gathered her beneath him and cradled her face in his hands. Their foreheads touched, and the moonlight held them. The house was quiet, and the world was small and warm and theirs.

Slowly, carefully, Hugo guided himself into her. Lily moaned, feeling his length. His hips moved, and she clutched at his thighs.

She grew wetter as he slid deeper. Her nails curled into his skin as he rocked deeper. She met each of his thrusts with small cries of pleasure.

He drove deeper into her, and he whispered against her ear. “Am I hurting you?”

Lily’s answer was to grasp his hips and pull him deeper. His hips rolled with deep thrusts, and with a cry torn from her lips, Lily shattered.

Hugo groaned her name, his thrusts quickening before he buried himself deep and shuddered his own release.

Afterward, they lay tangled together in the silver light. Lily’s head rested on his chest. He draped his arm around her shoulders and the sheets twisted around them.

Hugo’s hand rested on her stomach. His thumb traced a slow, gentle circle against the place where their child was growing, and the gesture mirrored the circle he had traced on her palm at the altar, and at the opera, and in a hundred small, hidden moments since.

“I am going to teach our child to fence before they can walk.”

“You are not.”

“I am going to buy them a horse.”

“Hugo, they will be an infant.”

“A small horse. A pony. Dorado can mentor it.”

“Dorado has three legs.”

“And excellent character. Which is more than most mentors can claim.”

She pressed her face against his chest and laughed, and the vibration traveled through his ribs and settled in the place where his heart lived. Hugo held her tighter and closed his eyes and let the happiness sit without questioning it, without waiting for it to be taken away, without reaching for the armor that had kept him safe and lonely for so many years.

He was Hugo Beaumont. Duke of Thornwaite. Husband. Father. A man with a stammer and a three-legged horse and a wife who loved him not in spite of what he was, but because of it.

And for the first time in his life, that was enough.

It was more than enough.

It was everything.

The End?