Page 31 of A Baby for the Duke

“You may ask me anything, but I may not answer it.”

“Why didn’t you kiss me?”

He went still.

“At the altar.” She lifted her chin, because she had started it and she was not going to be the one to stop. “The vicar said you may kiss the bride, and you cupped my neck, leaned in so slowly that I could feel your breath, and kissed my cheek. I have been thinking about it all day. I have thought about it throughout the wedding breakfast, and I could not tell you what I ate.”

“Neither could I,” he admitted.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Forty people were watching you,” Colin said. “Your mother was watching. Your father was watching, and he already dislikes me—he is quite right to. Half the guests came to Thorton to find out whether the Beast had backed a lady of one-and-twenty into a corner, and they were going to write about it either way.”

“So you kissed my cheek.”

“So I kissed your cheek.”

“For my sake.”

“Yes.”

“And now?” Leonora prompted.

“Now there’s nobody in this room but you and me, and I’m done being extremely well behaved for one day.”

“Then you had better⁠—”

She did not finish.

He crossed the hearthrug in two strides, and his hand slid into the hair at the nape of her neck exactly as it had at the altar, warm and unhurried and absolutely certain.

This time, his head did not turn. Instead, his mouth crashed down onto hers.

Leonora made a sound she had never made in her life. Her hands came up between them and curled into his shirt, meaning to push. They did not push. They pulled him closer instead.

The entire day went out of her at once. The chapel, the newspapers, the nineteen minutes on the stairs—all of it gone.

He kissed her the way he did everything else, without hurrying and without asking, and she found that she was kissing him back. She had no memory of deciding to.

His other arm slid around her waist and took her weight. Her wrapper slid off one shoulder and down her arm, and neither of them did anything about it. She felt his hand trail down her back, and he made a low sound against her mouth that she was going to hear again in the dark for a very long time.

Her heart was pounding so hard that she thought he must be able to feel it through his shirt. Then she realized that he could, that he had stopped breathing evenly a while ago, and that the Duke of Thorton, who had never once in four meetings looked as though anything at all had happened to him, was shaking.

He drew back an inch.

“Duchess,” he murmured against her mouth.

“Don’t,” Leonora said. “Don’t stop and be sensible. Everybody in my life has been sensible since Thursday.”

And then she pulled him back down by the front of his shirt.

CHAPTER 11

Colin lifted her without a warning.

One arm went around her, and the world tilted. Then she was sitting on the edge of the writing desk by the window, with the inkstand rattling behind her and her feet hanging above the floor. He stepped between her knees as though the whole arrangement had been agreed upon months ago.

Her hands were still in his shirt. She had not let go. She was not certain she could.