Page 99 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Peltbury looked down at the infant, and his face came apart in a way that was terrible and necessary, and which Kenneth permitted himself to witness from across the table without comment.

Charlie leaned against his side, and Kenneth put an arm around him.

The afternoon settled around them.

They arrived at Bearmoor House in the last of the evening light, the April dusk stretching long across the hills in shades of amber and violet that the boys, asleep against Alice’s shoulders in the carriage, did not see.

Kenneth carried them upstairs, one in each arm, their weights familiar, the warm slack heaviness of children who had burned through a day of cousin-meeting and pond-investigating and grandfather-assessing and had nothing left to give the waking world. Alice walked beside him.

She pulled back the coverlets, and he lowered each boy into his bed.

Freddie’s eyes cracked open. “Is Sebastian going to visit us?” he mumbled.

“When he’s older,” Alice said.

“I’ll teach him about the pond.”

“You do not have a pond, Frederick,” Kenneth said.

“I will,” Freddie said, then his eyes closed.

Alice smoothed Charlie’s hair, listened to his breathing, and then they left the room and closed the door behind them.

The corridor was quiet.

Six months ago, Kenneth had stood in a corridor much like this one and listened to her through a wall and believed listening was enough.

He turned to his wife. She was already looking at him.

“Come to bed,” she said.

The bedroom door closed behind them. The fire had been laid by a maid and burned low in the grate, casting the room in the warm half-light he had come to associate with the hours that belonged only to them, after the household and the boys and the world had been set aside.

Alice turned to him at the foot of the bed, and his hands found the fastenings at the back of her gown before the thought had fully formed, his fingers working the buttons deftly.

She reached for him. Her hands found his cravat, pulling the knot free, then his shirt, drawing it over his head. Her palms pressed against his chest, the heat of them seeping through his skin to settle behind his ribs.

He lowered his mouth to the crook of her neck, tasting salt and verbena and the warm scent beneath both that was uniquely her. The sound she made against his ear was low and knowing, stripped of everything tentative, and he felt it at the base of his spine.

He lifted her. Her legs wrapped around his waist, her arms circling his neck, and he turned and sat on the edge of the bed with her in his lap. The position settled her weight against him without adjustment, her thighs braced on either side of his hips, the heat between them immediate and encompassing.

His hands settled on her waist, his thumbs tracing the curve she had spent years concealing beneath high-necked gowns and careful fabrics. The fullness of her under his hands, the softness and the weight and the devastating warmth of her skin, undid him so thoroughly that he could no longer recall the shape of the man who had existed before.

His mouth found her collarbone, and she arched into the contact, her fingers tightening in his hair. When he lowered his lips to the swell of her breasts, where the firelight pooled gold on her skin, her breath caught and her hips moved against him with a purpose he answered without thought.

She braced her hands on his shoulders and sank onto him, slow and deliberate. The sound that left his mouth carried nothing of language. It was the sound of a man losing the last shred of control and discovering, in the loss, that control was never what he wanted.

She moved, and his hands tightened on her hips. The firelight danced across her skin in shades of gold and amber.

He watched her, watched the fall of her hair across her shoulders and the tilt of her head as the pleasure built, watched her neck flush. He pressed his mouth there and felt her pulse against his lips, and the rhythm between them deepened into something that made every thought in his mind melt away.

“Look at me,” she said.

He looked. Her eyes were open, hazel and gold in the low light. She held his gaze and moved against him, and the want on her face was not the want of the woman in the garden or the attic or the bath.

He gripped her hips and pulled her closer, and her breath fractured. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, and the rhythm between them accelerated, building in long waves that wound tighter with each stroke.

When she arched against him and his name broke from her mouth across two syllables, he followed her with his face pressed into her throat and his arms locked around her back. The pleasure crested through both of them with a force of a grand wave.