Page 75 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Yes,” he said against her stomach.

When he reached her thighs, she was already shaking. He looked up at her. She was looking down at him with her lip between her teeth and her hands fisted in the blanket.

His expression sharpened into something that might have frightened her at any other moment.

“Ask me,” he prompted.

“Please,” she said, without hesitation.

Just the word, and him, and the candlelight burning its last inch at the window.

His mouth found her. He was thorough in the way he was thorough about everything: systematic, unhurried, and in complete possession of himself even now, when she was manifestly not.

His hands were on her hips, holding her, and his mouth moved with a precise and patient attention that wound the heat through her in long gathering coils, each coil borrowing from the last.

When she tried to grind her hips against him, he held her in place until she cried out his name.

“I have you,” he said against her.

She came apart.

She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. Her hips moved, helpless, and he held her through it, patient and inexorable, until the shaking stopped and the coils released all at once.

She lay still on the blanket, with the star charts above her and the sounds of London muted below. Her entire body did nothing more complex than existing.

He came up beside her. He lay on the blanket, looking at the ceiling and saying nothing.

Alice noticed, through the warm confusion of the aftermath, that his breathing was not entirely steady.

She turned her head.

He was on his back, his shirt open, one arm above his head, staring at the sloped ceiling, his entire body tense. She looked at the line of his throat, the shadow of his jaw, the set of his shoulders.

“Kenneth.” Her voice had gone quiet in a way it had not before.

He turned his head, and his eyes found hers.

“I want to pleasure you,” she said simply. “Show me.”

Something moved across his face.

“Alice,” he rasped.

“Show me,” she said again. “Please.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took her hand.

After taking off his trousers, he guided her slowly, his hand over hers, and the sound that left him when she found the hardness between his legs was low and involuntary, unlike anything she had heard from him before.

He did not keep his composure. He was unmanaged and ungoverned, his head thrown back and his breathing ragged. His hand remained over hers, guiding and then gripping, and then simply gripping.

She watched his face and understood for the first time that the control she had always read as distance was, in fact, the thing preventing her from seeing this, the version of him that had no walls around it.

His free hand found her hip and gripped it.

“Alice,” he groaned.

She did not stop until he came undone, his seed spilling over her hand and her name tearing past his lips again.