She did not decide to do it. Her body and her hands decided, her fingers fisting in the lapels of his coat and pulling him forward. She put her mouth on his before the sensible voice inthe back of her mind could finish saying Hambridge. His lips parted against hers, his tongue touched the corner of her mouth, and a sound left her that she had not known she was capable of making, small and involuntary and more honest than anything about the last four seasons had been.
His hand slid from her jaw to her throat, his gloved thumb tracing the line of her pulse, and then lower, his fingers finding the edge of her short stays where they met the muslin of her bodice, and then beneath, his hand slipping under the boning and cupping her through the thin fabric. Her breast in his palm, the muslin between them, the heat of his hand through the cloth, and her breath caught against his mouth, went through her entire body like a note struck on a string she had not known she possessed.
She heard him make a sound. Low, unguarded, almost a word. His thumb shifted against her nipple through the muslin, and she arched into his hand without meaning to, her teeth catching his lower lip, and the small sharp pull of it made him inhale. The inhale was nothing like performance, nothing like eight seasons of practiced charm, nothing like anything she had read about in any book.
Because she had read about this. She had read about desire in French and English, and once, memorably, in a Latin text her uncle had failed to lock away properly. She had read detailed descriptions of what happened when a man put his hands on a woman in a dark corridor, and she had believed, confidently, as only a well-read virgin could, that she understood it. That reading was a form of preparation. That knowing the vocabulary was the same as knowing the language.
She had been wrong. Completely, devastatingly, bone-deep wrong. No book had prepared her for his thumb moving across her nipple and making her entire body contract toward it. No book had described the precise quality of the sound she madewhen his teeth grazed her jaw, or the warmth that pooled low in her stomach and spread downward until her legs did not entirely feel like her own. No book had mentioned that a man’s mouth at the corner of her neck could make her think, clearly and without embarrassment, about what his mouth would feel like lower, at the hollow of her throat, at the place where her stays ended and her skin began, at the places she had read about in books and never once imagined allowing anyone to touch.
She pulled back. His hand was still beneath her stays, warm and unmoving against her breast, and her hands were still fisted in his lapels, and neither of them let go for a count of three slow breaths.
Then she released his coat and stepped back. She straightened her bodice with fingers that trembled only slightly, because she had been composing her face for four seasons and she was not going to stop now, even if the composition was harder than it had ever been and the flush that she could feel climbing her throat was going to betray her regardless.
He was looking at her. His mouth was slightly open, his breathing visible, one glove creased where her grip had bent the leather, and there was something in his face she had not seen before. Not calculation. Not charm. Something closer to bewilderment, as if he had walked into the corridor expecting one thing and had found another entirely and was not yet certain what to do about it.
She said nothing. She just turned and walked back toward the music room with her gown half-righted, her eyes bright and the taste of him still on her lips, still on the corner of her mouth where his tongue had touched her, but she did not look back.
She heard him breathe once behind her, heavy and uneven, and then she was through the door and back in the music room. The soprano was finishing, the audience was beginning to applaud, Aunt Margery was blinking awake in the fourthrow and the world was reassembling itself around her as if the corridor had never happened, as if her bodice had never been disturbed, as if the humming between her thighs were not still there, persistent and warm and entirely unwelcome in a room full of gilt chairs and polite applause.
She sat down in an empty chair near the wall, folded her hands and breathed. The soprano took her bow. The room rustled with the particular sound of an audience that had been sitting too long and was ready for refreshment. Imogen was not ready for refreshment. Imogen was not ready for anything at all. She was sitting in a gilt chair with her hands folded, her bodice straightened and the taste of a duke still on her mouth. The taste was not going away, her body was not calming down, and the pulse between her legs, the one that had started when his thumb found her nipple, was still going, low and steady and humiliating in its persistence.
She pressed her knees together under her skirt and pressed her gloved hands flat against her thighs. She tried to think about anything at all that was not the memory of his hand beneath her stays and the sound he had made when she bit his lip.
It did not work. None of it worked. Her body had made a decision in that corridor that her mind had not been consulted about, and the decision was still echoing through her, warm, insistent and impossible to reason with. She sat in the gilt chair, breathed, composed her face and tried not to think about the fact that she had kissed the Duke of Ravenhurst in a dark corridor and had meant it, every second of it, every breath and every sound and every shameless arch of her body into his hand.
Three minutes later Ash returned to the music room through the same corridor door. His face was composed. His coat was straight. His gloved hand, the one that had been beneath her stays, was resting at his side as if it had never touched anything more interesting than a banister. But she waswatching him, and she saw what the rest of the room did not see: the slight tension in his jaw, his breathing still not entirely even, the almost imperceptible adjustment he made to the front of his coat as he crossed the threshold. He was not as composed as he appeared. The knowledge that he was affected, that his body was carrying the corridor the same way hers was, did something complicated and dangerous to the feeling between her legs, but she looked away before her face could betray her.
From across the room, a man she recognized but could not immediately name, one of Ash’s friends, fair-haired and smiling as if the smile were designed to be observed, leaned toward Ash and murmured something close to his ear. Ash’s face did not change. He said two words she could not hear, and the fair-haired man laughed, briefly and sharply, and something about the laugh made her stomach tighten. Not jealousy. Not suspicion. Something smaller and less identifiable, a cold thread pulling through the warmth the corridor had left behind, as if the laugh had a texture she could not quite read and did not trust.
Ash turned away from the fair-haired man and found Imogen’s eyes across the music room and held them for one long second before the crowd moved between them and the contact broke. In that second, she saw something in his face that looked, if she was reading it correctly, and she was no longer certain she was reading anything correctly, like apology. Or regret. Or the beginning of something he had not yet decided to feel.
She rode home with Aunt Margery dozing beside her and Cassie chattering about the soprano, the dinner and a Mr. Forsythe who had complimented her programme and who had, according to Cassie, very fine calves and an understanding of Handel that bordered on the spiritual. Imogen listened to none of it. She sat in the dark corner of the carriage with her gloves pulled high, her hands clasped in her lap and the place beneath her stays where his palm had rested still warm, still humming,still making itself known despite every effort she was making to ignore it.
She thought about what Bethany had said. Beautiful sons, broken hearts, and rakes. She thought about the flush that had climbed her throat during the morning call, the country dance and the corridor, and how each time the flush had gone deeper and lasted longer and become harder to hide. She thought about the sound she had made when his tongue touched the corner of her mouth, small and involuntary but honest, and how the honesty of it terrified her more than anything else. Because honesty was a thing she had been rationing for four seasons and she had just spent an entire reserve of it in a dim corridor with a man she was not sure she could trust.
The books had not prepared her. None of them had.
She was beginning to suspect that nothing could.
Chapter Five
“The cravat is not right, Your Grace.”
“The cravat is exactly right, Collins.”
Collins regarded him across the dressing room with an expression that suggested the valet was considering, after many years of loyal service, the possibility that the Duke of Ravenhurst had gone mad. The cravat in question was a simple mathematical, tied too loosely, the folds sitting at an angle that would have earned a gentleman of lesser rank a quiet word from his host’s butler. On a duke it would earn something worse. Conversation. And conversation, at the Hartwood ball, meant the matrons, and by Friday morning every drawing room in Mayfair would know that the Duke of Ravenhurst had arrived at the most important ball of the early season looking as if he had somewhere better to be and had not yet arrived there.
Ash did not care. He had spent twenty minutes in front of the glass doing the cravat badly on purpose, and the result was precisely what he wanted. He had been dressing to impress other people’s mothers for eight years. Tonight he was dressing to impress one person, and she had already told him, across a cup of middling tea, that she did not require impressing.
“Your coat is also unbuttoned, Your Grace.”
“Leave it.”
Collins drew breath to protest, reconsidered, and stepped back, dignified and silent, because he had been overruled by dukes before and intended to survive this one. He had also, Ash suspected, formed his own opinion about where the Duke of Ravenhurst was going this evening and why he had chosen to look, after eight seasons of impeccable tailoring, as if getting dressed were no longer the most important part of his evening. Collins was not a man who volunteered his opinions. But he wasa man whose opinions were visible in the angle of his chin and the particular care with which he held the door, and tonight both the chin and the door were communicating something that Ash chose not to translate.
Ash took his hat and his gloves and walked to the carriage without looking in the glass again. The watch was in his waistcoat pocket. His mother’s signet ring was turned inward against his palm. He buttoned the coat in the carriage because the evening was cooler than he had expected, and even reckless dukes caught cold. A cold, though, would keep him from calling on Imogen Goodall, and he was not yet prepared to examine how much that prospect bothered him.
The Hartwood ball was in its second hour by the time he arrived, the great house blazing with candles in every window, carriages queued along the crescent in a line that stretched past the church, around the corner and into the mews. Footmen in livery were stationed at ten-pace intervals along the steps. He walked past all of them without adjusting his coat or checking his cravat or doing any of the small self-conscious adjustments that other men performed on the threshold of a ballroom. The front hall was immaculate and had the particular smell of beeswax and hothouse flowers that every imposing London house shared in the season, as if they had all agreed to smell expensive in the same register. Beyond the hall the ballroom opened out in a blaze of candlelight, noise and heat.
