She took his hand and placed it over her breast.
He made a sound—low, guttural, almost pained—and his fingers closed over her, shaping themselves to the soft weight of her through the cotton. His thumb found the peak and circled, and she arched into his touch, her head falling back, a soft sound escaping her.
“Off,” she managed. “Take it off.”
He gathered the fabric in his hands and drew the nightgown over her head with a care that bordered on ceremony. It joined the shawl on the floor, and she stood before him in the firelight, bare but for her stockings, her skin painted in shades of amber and shadow.
Dominic stopped. Simply stopped—his hands hovering in the air, his breath suspended, his entire body arrested mid-motion as though the sight of her had arrested both thought and motion alike.
“You,” he said, and couldn’t finish. His eyes moved over her with an intensity that was almost tactile—a physical weight, a heat that she could feel everywhere his gaze touched. “You are—”
“If you saybeautiful, I will be very cross. Every man in every novel saysbeautiful, and I expect more from a Duke.”
The laugh that escaped him was startled, genuine. It transformed his face, and Lorraine felt her heart crack open at the sound of it.
“Not beautiful,” he said, crossing back to her, his hands finding her bare waist. “Devastating. You are utterly, entirely devastating—and I intend to spend the rest of the night proving it.”
He lifted her.
She gasped, wrapping her arms around his neck, and he carried her to the bed—not dramatically, not the sweeping gesture of a Gothic novel, but with the steady, deliberate strength of a former soldier who knew how to bear weight. Helaid her down on the coverlet and stood over her for a moment, looking at her spread across his bed with an expression that made her feel like something sacred.
Then he pulled his shirt over his head.
She had known he would be scarred. Had expected it—the marks of war, the evidence of violence endured. But knowing and seeing were different things, and the geography of his torso hit her with the force of a blow.
A long, puckered scar ran diagonally across his left side—shrapnel, she guessed, the same blast that had given him the scar through his eyebrow. Smaller scars peppered his ribs and shoulders, and across his back, when he turned to drape his shirt over a chair, she saw the faded remnants of a deeper wound—a bayonet, perhaps, or something worse.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, reading her face. “Don’t look at them like that. They’re old.”
“I am not looking at them with pity.” She sat up, reached for him, and drew him down beside her. “I am looking at them with fury. At whoever did this to you. At whatever sent you into that ravine.” She pressed her lips to the shrapnel scar and felt his breath shudder out of him. “You survived this. You came home. That is what they mean to me.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they shone—not quite with tears, but with something held taut just beneath the surface.
“Lorraine Weston,” he murmured. “What did I do to deserve you?”
“You showed up,” she said simply. “Again and again, even when it hurt. That is all I ever wanted.”
He kissed her then—deep, slow, unhurried—his weight settling over her in a way that might have overwhelmed, but instead felt like shelter. Like safety. Like coming home.
His mouth moved down her throat. Across her collarbone. Lower, tracing the swell of her breast with lips and tongue until he reached the peak and drew it into his mouth.
Lorraine’s back arched off the bed. The sensation was sharp and consuming—heat, pressure, the deliberate stroke of his tongue—and she cried out, her fingers tangling in his hair, urging him closer.
He lavished attention on one breast, then the other, his hands stroking her sides, her thighs, the sensitive hollows of her hips. He mapped her body with the focused precision of a military cartographer—learning the terrain, identifying the points that made her gasp, the ones that made her writhe, the ones that drew his name from her lips in broken whispers.
When his mouth moved lower—across her ribs, her stomach, the soft skin below her navel—she tensed.
He stopped immediately. Looked up at her from between her thighs, his eyes dark and questioning.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No. I only—” She bit her lip. “I do not know what to expect.”
“Then let me show you.” He pressed a kiss to her hip. “And you tell me if it is too much.”
It was too much.
It was not nearly enough.
