She did not open her eyes. She did not need to. His voice arrived from the direction of the glass doors, low and close, and the sound of it went through her the same way the corridor had gone through her; a slow direct current that bypassed her mind entirely and spoke to her body in a language her body was apparently fluent in despite never having studied it.
“Women are not served the port, Your Grace. I was not aware I was required to wait for a beverage I would not receive.”
“You were not required to wait. I was merely noting that you left.” A pause. She heard him move closer, the soft sound of his boots on the stone floor, the faint rustle of his coat. “I followed you. I should probably apologise for that.”
“And will you?”
“No.”
She opened her eyes. He was standing three feet from her, between two orange trees, the lamplight catching the scar at the corner of his mouth and the pale silver of his eyes. He was not smiling, he was not performing, and the look on his face was the one she had seen in the corridor after she had pushed him against the wall: the bewildered one, the one that looked nothing like the Duke of Ravenhurst and everything like a man who had lost the script and was trying to find his way without it.
He kissed her without speaking first. He stepped forward, his hand coming up beneath her shawl to find the curve of her waist; his mouth found hers, and the kiss was different from the corridor. The corridor had been urgent, surprised and heated by its own unexpectedness. This was slow and deliberate. This was a man who had followed her into a conservatory knowing exactly what he intended to do when he got there, and the fact that he had chosen this and was not pretending otherwise made thekiss land differently. It was deeper, somewhere below the place where she kept her composure and above the place where the corridor still hummed.
His hand slid from her waist to her breast. Through the gown, through the shawl that had fallen to one side, his palm settling over her with a pressure that was firm and certain and made her entire body go still. Not frozen. Still. The kind of stillness that came from every nerve in her body paying attention to the same thing at the same time, the heat of his hand through the silk, the slight curl of his fingers, the way his thumb found the peak of her nipple through the fabric and pressed, gently, and the press sent a pulse through her that made her gasp against his mouth.
He stopped, and she opened her eyes. He was looking at her, his hand still on her breast, his breathing uneven, and she could see him struggling with something, a decision forming behind his eyes that she could not quite read.
He took her hand. Slowly. His gloved fingers closing around her bare ones, because she had removed her gloves in the conservatory to feel the orange leaves and had not put them back on. He lifted her hand and brought it down between them and pressed it, slowly, firmly, against the front of his trousers.
Her palm met him through the wool.
The shock of it was physical. Not the shock of surprise, because she had read enough to know what she would find, but the shock of reality, the vast unbridgeable distance between a word on a page and a man’s body under her hand. He was hard. The length of him pressing against her palm through the wool of his breeches, warm, straining and undeniably, impossibly real. Her breath stopped in her throat, her fingers curled involuntarily around the shape of him, and his breath left him in a sound that was almost a word but not quite.
She had imagined this. Lying in her narrow bed in the dark with one of her uncle’s books open on the pillow beside her, she had imagined what it would be like to touch a man this way. The imagining had been clinical, curious and entirely inadequate, because the books described hardness, heat and urgency in a language that made it sound like a medical condition, and this was not a medical condition. This was a man trembling against her hand. This was his hips shifting forward half an inch, involuntary, his body seeking the pressure of her palm before his mind could stop it. This was the sound of his breathing changing, going ragged and shallow, and the feel of his stomach muscles tightening beneath his waistcoat, and the knowledge, sudden, complete and devastating, that she had done this to him. That her presence, her proximity, her face, her hands and her body in a room full of orange trees had produced this response in a man who had spent eight years surrounded by the most beautiful women in London and had not, by all accounts, been moved by any of them.
“Feel what you do to me.” His voice was raw. Not performed. Not shaped. Raw, the words coming out rough-edged, as if they had been dragged from somewhere that had come unwillingly and had left marks on the way up. “Tell me if I have invented this, tell me if you do not feel it too. I will go away if you say it. I will go away tonight and not return.”
She should have said it. She should have told him to leave. Bethany’s voice echoed in her mind, along with everything she knew about the Hambridge family. The sensible instinct that had protected her for four seasons was warning her: a duke who pulled her close in a conservatory was not a duke who intended to marry her. The sensible voice was probably right, but it did not matter at all, because the truth in his voice was undeniable, and the honesty was the thing that broke her.
Not the desire. Not the heat of him against her palm. Not the gasping, the kissing or the hand on her breast. The honesty. The fact that he had asked her to tell him to leave. The fact that he had given her the exit and had meant it, and the meaning was the most intimate thing he had offered her. She did not pull her hand away. She held it there, against him, for one slow breath, feeling him pulse against her fingers, and feeling the slight involuntary shift of his hips as his body responded to the pressure of her hand. His forehead dropped to hers, and neither of them moved.
The conservatory was silent around them. She could feel his heartbeat through his waistcoat, fast and irregular, matching her own, and the matching was intimate in a way that went past the physical contact between them. Whatever this was, it was not something either of them had planned, and it was not something either of them could stop.
She released him and stepped back. His hand fell from her breast, and the air between them was suddenly cold, empty and wrong, as if removing her hand had broken something that had only just begun to form, and the breaking hurt in a way she had not anticipated.
She did not speak. She pulled her shawl back over her shoulders, tugged her gloves on with fingers that shook badly enough that the second glove took three attempts, and walked out of the conservatory without looking back. She walked quickly, her heels clicking on the stone, her breath still not steady, her body still thrumming with the ghost of him against her palm.
She passed the morning room and the parlor. A footman near the front door asked if she required assistance, but she refused, her voice coming out remarkably normal given that the rest of her was anything but. She walked out the front door and down the steps. The night air hit her face; she stopped, breathedand pressed her gloved hands against her cheeks and stood there for a long count of ten, trying to reassemble herself from the pieces the conservatory had scattered.
The carriage was not ready. Aunt Margery and Cassie were still inside. She stood on the Asquith gravel in the dark, her cheeks burning, the warmth between her legs insistent and steady, a pulse that matched her heartbeat and would not quiet. She waited, because waiting was what she did, but it was terrible, because waiting alone in the dark after what had just happened left her with nothing but her own thoughts, and her thoughts were full of him.
***
The carriage arrived. Aunt Margery and Cassie climbed in, full of the evening’s gossip, and Imogen pressed herself into the dark corner and watched the Asquith manor recede through the window without saying anything. She was thinking of what had happened in the conservatory and the memory of it was not fading, but she did not want it to fade, and that was the most frightening part of all.
She went to bed and lay in the dark with the quilt pulled up to her chin, her body still humming and her mind running over the same ground again and again: the conservatory, the orange trees, the lamplight, his voice. She pressed her thighs together beneath the quilt and tried to make the pulse stop but without any success. So, she lay there; hot, restless and awake, and thought about his hand on her breast, his forehead against hers and the slow breath he had taken when she held him.
***
Bethany arrived at the Goodall morning room the next morning before the breakfast chocolate had cooled, which meantshe had been watching the street from her upstairs window again.
“Tell me,” Bethany said, sitting down across the table and pouring herself chocolate without waiting to be offered any. She was in her morning gown, her dark hair pinned back severely, no jewelry, no adornment, the face of a woman who had got out of bed and crossed the garden before dressing properly because the matter was urgent and dressing could wait.
“There is nothing to tell,” Imogen said, and the lie was so transparent that Bethany did not bother to acknowledge it.
“Imogen.”
“We were in the conservatory. At the Asquiths.”
