Page 50 of Better Than a Duke
“Let’s say ten o’clock. I have Parliament in the afternoon, followed by what I hope is a quiet evening at home.” He glanced at her again, caught by the moonlight dancing in her eyes. “You should join us for dinner.”
“You just finished saying you wanted a quiet evening at home, Beckett.”
“I can have a quiet evening with you and Edmund over.”
Laughing, she jabbed a finger at his chest. “No, you can’t. We’re quite noisy.”
“Yes, but it’s tolerable noisiness. Not pointless noisiness for the sake of showing off.”
“I recall you enjoying parties and dinners a decade ago,” she commented, sending him a sideways glance. “Is it so different now?”
“Are you asking me, or for yourself?” he countered. “My life feels nothing like it did then. I’m certainly not the overly confident idiot who believed in love at first sight and that his life would proceed exactly as he envisioned it.”
“And the man you are now prefers quiet evenings at home and having tea parties with his daughter?”
“Yes, he does. Are there things I miss about that foolish man’s life? Yes. Mostly, the sex. God, I miss that sometimes.”
“Oh, so do I. Two people who know what they’re doing, just wanting a moment of intimacy and release.” She handed him backthe bottle. “But without the trouble of finding someone else who wants precisely the same thing.”
“Just a moment of being an adult rather than a parent. A living, breathing human.”
“God’s sake, yes.”
That had been emphatic. Perhaps it wasn’t just him addled by the brandy and the moonlight this evening. With a breath Beckett set the bottle onto the top of the wall and faced her. “Yes?”
With a short sigh Iris stepped into his arms and planted her palms against his chest to kiss him. Not just kiss him. Devour him. Beckett wrapped his arms around her, twisting to put her against the wall, and kissed her back. Feelings, skitterings, desire, went tumbling through him as he pushed the wrap off her shoulders and slipped his hands over her breasts. She nibbled at his lower lip, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
Connection, closeness, arousal, intimacy—all those things that he’d done without for better than nine years, all leapt about vying to be first in line as he dipped, taking the hem of her gown and running his hand back up her leg to her thigh with the material in tow. He’d never really had a female friend before he’d met Iris Silbern, but thank Christ he had one now. Who would have thought there would be benefits in addition to her wit and sense of humor and ferocity?
Her hands unfastened his trousers and yanked his shirt free. Iris slid her palms up his stomach to his chest as he shifted to lick the base of her throat. They could go back to their worlds later. Who the devil would care that he and she had shared an interlude in the Grove House garden, then gotten engaged to other people and never mentioned tonight again?
“Wait,” she groaned, grabbing his shoulders and pushing at him.
Beckett kissed her mouth again, then straightened. “What?”
“This is not a good idea.”
“It’s a fine idea. I want you, you want me, and neither of us has any expectation of anything more.” He leaned in again.
Iris moaned. “Beckett. Lady Pauline is in your house, expecting a marriage proposal at any moment. Because you need an heir in order to protect Becks. And a lady who can teach her how to be proper. Not how to punch people and be so, so very angry and barely tolerated by her peers.”
All the blood in his brain had already begun traveling south. Taking a hard breath, he straightened. “That has nothing to do with this.”
“What would happen if Lady Pauline wandered out here looking for you, or if the duke hobbled out here looking for me? Do you think they would understand our… unique relationship?”
Beckett blew a raspberry. “We do have a unique relationship, don’t we?” he murmured, kissing her once more, savoring the taste and feel of her mouth—so soft compared to how sharply she defended herself and her life. “Damnation.”
She tugged down on his shirt, straightening it beneath the coat and waistcoat he still wore, though her fingers grazing his skin did nothing for his composure. “We’ve thought about life, and we’ve decided what we needed,” she murmured, her hands pausing at his hips. “Ruining it for an ill-conceived, possibly public interlude now would be a mistake.”
“There’s always the stable.”
“Yes,” she said immediately, skimming his cheek with her mouth. “No. We can’t ruin what it’s taken us each years to decide. And while in another life,” she said, sighing as she kissed him featherlight on the corner of his mouth, “I could perhaps see us together, I don’t bring any of the qualities you want to a marriage. I’m certainly not qualified to instruct any young lady about how to think or behave. I’m the widow of a gambler. I’monly accepted by the ton because of one titled grandfather, and I’m evidently willing to bargain myself away in exchange for a better life for my son.”
It annoyed him that she painted herself as being so unworthy, as if it was her fault that she was one more punch away from being a pariah in Society. “You don’t want love, and you don’t want more children.Thatis what stands between us, Iris.”
“You don’t want love, either. It’s messy. It’s painful. And you said yourself, you made an abysmal choice with Lydia. That’s why you let someone else choose for you this time, isn’t it? If you turn away Lady Pauline, especially for me, then you’re just making the same mistake over again. And I don’t want to be ruined by your… confusing a friendship for something more than it is.”
He cursed. “We should have finished the bottle before we considered doing something naughty,” he grumbled, retrieving the brandy from the wall and taking another drink. “Another ten minutes, and we’d be on the ground, naked, and this conversation would be moot.”
