Page 100 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

She stayed in his lap, her forehead pressed against his, her breathing rough and slowing, her hands still gripping his shoulders.

The fire shifted in the grate. The room settled around them, warm and quiet and entirely theirs.

Her hand moved from his shoulder to his chest. She pressed her palm flat against his breastbone, over his heart, the way she had done on the night of the fire, with the same weight and precision, and a new quality of attention he could feel in the deliberateness of her fingers.

“Kenneth.”

“Yes?”

She took his hand from her hip and brought it to her stomach.

“Are you certain?” he asked softly. His voice was rough, and the roughness carried things he could not trust to cleaner speech.

“Since February.” Her thumb traced a slow line across his knuckles. “I wanted to be sure. And I wanted,” she said, her voice shifting into the register that cost her, the one with nothing between it and the meaning, “to tell you in a room where you could hear it, not through a wall.”

His forehead pressed against hers, and he breathed in the scent of her, the warmth of her, the steady, staggering fact of her.

“Then I hear you,” he rasped.

His hand spread wide across her stomach, his fingers spanning the place where the future had already begun, and she covered his hand with both of hers.

The End?