Page 56 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

He inched closer. “Lift your skirts.”

She gathered the silk in her hands and lifted it.

His mouth found the inside of her knee first, warm and deliberate, and the sound that left her was involuntary and small. He moved upward without hurry. His hands held her thighs steady when she swayed, his thumbs stroking circles across the soft flesh. She gripped the stone wall at her back as her knees grew weaker.

“Wait,” she murmured.

He stopped, and she looked down at him. Heat rose to her cheeks.

“What are you… I don’t know…” she stuttered, her heart racing.

“I want to make you feel good. Let me, wife.”

She bit her lip, the heat radiating from her core begging for satisfaction. And some deep, secret part of her knew that only he could give that to her.

She pressed a hand to her racing heart as his lips resumed their journey.

When he reached the juncture of her thighs, she made an involuntary sound, and his hands tightened in response. Her nerves dissipated as a pleasure unlike any other filled her entire being.

The world contracted to the clearing, to the bite of stone at her back and the weight of silk in her fists and the exquisite, unhurried attention of his mouth. The afternoon light fell through the pear tree branches in dappled patterns.

Her head fell back against the wall, and she closed her eyes. She felt the heat build inside her in long, accumulating waves, each one gathering what the last had left behind.

His hands held her when the heat became unbearable and she could not hold still.

“That’s it, sweetheart. Let go for me. Give me your pleasure,” he growled between licks.

He continued lapping at her until she broke apart against him, pressing her hand to her mouth to muffle her moans. Her whole body convulsed once, twice, and then went still.

A very long moment passed. She was aware of the wall behind her, the silk gathered in her hands, the sound of the garden party, its indifferent noise beyond the hedge.

Kenneth rose. He straightened his coat calmly, with a small yet triumphant smirk. He reached up and brushed a strand of copper hair from her face, tucking it back behind her ear. The tenderness of the gesture, so small against everything else, was what finally sent the heat from her chest to her eyes.

She looked at him. He was looking at her, his expression still open in that way it seldom was, and she understood that he had meant every word he’d said.

She did not know what this was. She did not know what name to give it, or what it would become, or whether he would call it some variant of mistake in the morning. Her body was still humming with the aftermath. Her mind had not caught up, and she suspected it would not catch up for a while.

“We should go back,” he murmured.

“Yes.” Her voice was remarkably level, all things considered.

“Before the boys climb high enough to require rescue.”

“Freddie in particular.”

He half-smiled. “Of course.”

Alice smoothed her skirts. She pressed her palms to her cheeks and felt the heat lingering there, before turning to face the gap in the yew hedge.

The party hum reached her as it had before: the violin, the guests, the ordinary machinery of a summer afternoon. Only the world had shifted on its axis by several degrees, and she was the only one who knew it.

She moved toward the gap. Kenneth fell into step beside her. She could feel him at her shoulder, the warmth of him in the cooler air of the sheltered path.

I am in trouble.

She had told Lucy so not an hour ago and understood it dimly, the way one understood a danger that had not yet fully arrived.

Now, she understood it in her bones, in the specific and humiliating clarity of a woman who had just had a duke kneel before her in a garden and understood that this was not sufficient. That she wanted more. Not the physical more—though that was present, a warm and particular ache—but the other more.