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He set her away from him and bent to retrieve her pelisse. Draping it across her shoulders, he assisted her into the garment.
Mari retied her bonnet. He smoothed his cravat and adjusted his trousers.
“We kissed, Your Grace. And the Lord did not smite us. Hell did not open up to swallow us.”
“Not this time. And there will never be a next time.”
Besieged by the devilish duke? Ha! More like mauled by the lascivious lady.
As they walked back through the foundry to the courtyard, the men cast sidelong glances.
Was she marked somehow? Lips swollen. Cheeks flushed.
A dampness between her thighs.
The memory of his kiss like heated metal branded across her mind.
Luckily, they didn’t encounter Mr. Grafton again, for then she would have been forced to speak and be polite, and she wasn’t sure her social graces had yet returned.
She hadn’t thought about it properly through. She hadn’t thought about what happened after the kiss.
How awkward it might be to see Banksford at the breakfast table the next day, now that she knew what it felt like to have his tongue stroking inside her mouth, and his hand covering her breast.
He’d said never again, as if he were ashamed of the kiss.
Back in the courtyard, Edgar lifted her into the curricle and waved to a groom. “Please take Miss Perkins to my residence.”
The groom nodded. “Very good, Your Grace.”
So that was it? No talking about what had happened. Bundle her into the carriage and send her away.
“Don’t you think we should talk, Your Grace?” she asked.
“About what, Miss Perkins?” His face was deliberately devoid of emotion.
About what? About that kiss. About the dozens of new emotions jumbled in her heart. “You don’t think there’s anything to say?”
Moving away, he motioned to the groom and the carriage began to move.
She had been dismissed.
Had it meant nothing to him?
She’d begun thinking of him as somehow, not less than a duke, but perhaps as a man instead of a duke. But here was a very blunt reminder that she mustn’t think of him as anything but his rank and his position in society.
He was her employer and her social superior.
She was a plain, ordinary middle C in a city full of aristocratic grace notes.
He waved politely, dismissively, as the carriage left the foundry yard, as if they hadn’t just shared a kiss that had burned with the light of a thousand signal flares lit on a mountaintop, warning of an impending battle.
Or perhaps, to the duke, the kiss had been merely ordinary? A spark from the hearth, easily stamped out before it burned a hole in the carpet. Nothing immense, or important, or even meaningful in any serious way.
Whereas for Mari, the kiss had been filled with meaning. It marked a division in her life.
Before the kiss, she’d only read about and imagined such daring acts. After the kiss, she knew that leaping into the fire was not only possible... but pleasurable.
All of the secret desires she’d suppressed her whole life had suddenly surfaced, all at once.
