Page 108 of A Baby for the Duke

“For five weeks.”

He put his mouth where he had put it in June. She was ready for it this time, but it made no difference whatsoever. Her hand went into his hair and curled. She fisted the other in his coat and pulled it half out from under her shoulder. Colin stopped long enough to murmur something against her hip that she did not catch, and then did not stop again for a long while.

She could feel the boards under the coat and the sawdust in her hair and the candlelight going red through her closed eyelids as her pleasure built, and he knew it. He drove her right up to the peak and then pulled away.

“Colin.”

“Not yet.”

“I will never forgive you.”

“You will,” he said, and moved up her body.

He trailed his palm over her hip and waist, reading her like grain. His fingers traced her ribs one at a time, before brushing the underside of her breasts. He lowered his mouth to her breast and closed it over her nipple, and her back bowed off the boards.

“Oh.”

He did it again.

“Oh.”

“That is something I have thought about at four in the morning for five weeks,” Colin purred against her, “and I should like it noted.”

He lingered a long while at the hollow of her throat, where he had discovered on a table in front of a fire it could reduce her to a moaning mess. He put his hand between her legs while he was doing it, and she was so far gone by then that she said something out loud that she would remember for the rest of her life.

Then he was over her, and she pressed both hands flat against his chest and pushed him back four inches.

“My turn.”

“Duchess.”

“You have had five weeks of thinking about it at four in the morning,” Leonora said, getting a hand flat on his chest and pushing until he sat back on his heels and then went down on his elbows on the coat, “and I have had five weeks of a shut door, and you are going to stay exactly where you are for one minute.”

He lay still for one minute.

She put her hands on him properly for the first time: his shoulders; his muscular chest; the silvery scar on his forearm, which she stopped at and pressed her lips to. Down over his ribs and the scar on his side. She had no notion what she was doing and did it anyway, and discovered with enormous satisfaction exactly what happened to a man’s breath when she did it right.

“Leonora.”

“Mm.”

“That is a minute.”

“It is not.”

“It is a minute,” Colin insisted, his voice rough. “I am a man of thirty who has waited fifteen years and five weeks, and I am asking you very politely.”

“Colin.”

“Mm.”

“I have wanted this since our wedding night.”

“I know.”

“You do not know. I have wanted it since our wedding night, and I said no, and I have thought about that every single night since, up and down, both ways. I still think I was right, and I have hated being right the entire time.”

“You were right,” he said against her collarbone.