Page 63 of How Not to Marry a Duke

She caught his hands before he could lower them.

Her fingers were cold—she was barefoot, he realised, and wearing only a thin dress, and the tower was freezing—but her touch was gentle as she turned his palms upward, examining the damage. He watched her face as she traced the wounds, watched her grey eyes follow each cut, each scrape, each place where the thorns had found him.

"You could have died." Her voice held wonder. Horror. An emotion he was afraid to name. "Climbing in the rain, in the dark⁠—"

"The door was locked." He did not pull his hands away. Could not have pulled them away if the tower had been burning down around them. "I was not going to stand on the other side of a door when I could reach you through the window. I have spent eighteen months standing on the other side of doors that honour demanded I not walk through. I am done with doors, Florinda. I am done with honour that requires me to want you in silence. I am done with counting gold threads and pretending it is enough."

She lifted her eyes to his. They were wet—with rain or tears, he could not tell. "Nine years," she breathed. "You have wanted me for nine years?"

"Nine years since you knocked me flat on my back in that stable." He turned his hands in hers, lacing their fingers together despite the blood, despite the pain. "Nine years since you ruined me for anyone else. I have tried, Florinda. I tried to want Penelope. I tried to be the dutiful Duke who married where he ought and felt what he should. But I cannot stop counting you. Fourteen gold threads. Seven freckles. Twenty-nine letters. Eighteen months of wanting you in silence." His voice cracked. "Nine years of wanting what I could not have. And now I am free, and you are here, and I am asking you⁠—"

He stopped. Dropped to his knees on the dusty floor, heedless of the rain, heedless of the blood, heedless of everything but the woman standing before him with her golden hair loose and her grey eyes blazing.

"Will you let me stay?"

* * *

She should say no.

She should be sensible. Should insist on proof, on waiting, on all the things a proper lady would demand before allowing a man to stay in her tower—her tower, God help her, this was becoming a fairy tale whether she wished it or not.

Frederick was kneeling before her, soaked and bleeding and wild-eyed, and he was free, and he had climbed a wall of thorns to reach her, and she had spent nine years wanting him too—had spent the last eighteen months trying to convince herself she could want someone else—had locked herself in this tower because she could not face a world in which he belonged to another woman.

She did not say no.

She dropped to her knees in front of him, seized his face in both hands, and kissed him.

It was not gentle. Was not the soft, tentative press of lips she had imagined in her weaker moments, when she had allowed herself to dream of what she could not have. It was claiming. Demanding. Her fingers dug into his jaw, his hair, pulling him closer as her mouth opened against his and nine years of wanting poured out of her like water through a broken dam.

He made a sound against her lips—half groan, half prayer—and his bloodied hands came up to cup her face, to thread through her hair, to pull her closer until she could feel the pounding of his heart through his soaked coat.

"Florinda." Her name emerged ragged, wrecked. "I should—we should—there are proprieties⁠—"

"Damn propriety." She kissed him again, harder. "If you climb back down that trellis, I shall push you off it myself."

He laughed against her mouth—a real laugh, startled and delighted—and she felt it vibrate through her, felt it crack open a space in her heart that had been locked for longer than she could remember.

They rose together, mouths still tangled, hands still seeking. He was walking her backward toward the settee, and she was letting him, her fingers working at the buttons of his ruined coat.

"Your hands." She pulled back, breathless. "You are bleeding⁠—"

"I do not care."

"Frederick—"

"I have spent eighteen months not touching you." His voice was rough, stripped of all the careful control she had heard in it before. "I have carried you up and down fourteen stairs and not let myself feel what I wanted to feel. I have written twenty-nine letters describing in excruciating detail everything I wished I could do to you. I am bleeding, yes. And I do not care. I would bleed a great deal more for the privilege of touching you properly."

Oh.

Oh.

* * *

The coat fell first.

Then the waistcoat, the cravat, the lawn shirt that clung to his skin with rain and sweat. Florinda's fingers were clumsy with urgency, with cold, with the trembling that had overtaken her body the moment she had stopped being able to pretend she did not want this.

Frederick's hands were gentler—or perhaps more controlled—as they found the fastenings of her dress. She felt the fabric loosen, felt the cool air of the tower room against her bare shoulders as the muslin slipped down.