Page 67 of Caught By the Ruthless Duke
Cressida reached down and took his hand, because she knew just how much it must have taken him to say those words.
He watched her fingers close around his against the cool stone of the railing, and his expression crumbled into a limbo of emotions stuck between surprise and relief.
“You can trust me,” she said softly. “I know we started out badly. I know the circumstances were not what either of us would have chosen, and I know I am not always easy, and that this arrangement was forced on us by people who had their own ideas about what we needed.” She held his gaze when he finally looked back up at her. “But I have not deceived you. Not once.And I’d like to make this marriage work.” She gently squeezed his fingers. “Not because I must, but because I want to.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The quality of his silence had changed—not the practiced blankness she had learned to read as withholding, but something more unsteady, as though he was accounting for something at speed and finding the arithmetic unexpectedly difficult.
“About… about the scandal sheets,” he rasped. “I was wrong.” His gaze dropped back to their joined hands. “I accused you repeatedly, and without sufficient evidence, of something you did not do.” He looked up again. “I owe you an apology. I am truly sorry, Cressida. I should have never even implied, or even considered, you might be involved.”
She had imagined, in various idle moments over the past weeks, what it might feel like to hear him say those words. She had assumed it would elicit satisfaction, or vindication, or some satisfying resolution of the long, grinding frustration of not being believed. What it actually elicited was something quieter and more unexpected: a loosening in her chest, as though something she had been bracing against without realizing it had simply been removed.
“Thank you for saying that,” she said.
“You should never thank me for giving you something that is your right, Duchess, especially when I have been such a cad about it.” He said it simply and with naked honesty.
Cressida’s cheeks lifted into a smile she could barely hold back. She squeezed his hand again. “I have not deceived you. I want you to know that it is not going to change.”
“I know.” He said it with a touch of shame. “I know that now.”
He looked at her with that same intense attention and turned toward her incrementally, as though he was uncertain of her reaction. His free hand rose to her face and stopped, hovering close, close enough that she could feel the warmth of it.
He looked at her, and she understood quite clearly what he was not quite doing. So she closed the remaining distance, rose on her tiptoes, and pressed her mouth to his.
The kiss was brief, slightly off-center, and not at all elegant, and she felt him freeze. Heart slamming in her chest from panic, she pulled back an inch and found him staring at her.
“You—” he started, but lost steam, obviously not sure how to voice his pleasant shock.
“You were taking rather a long time,” she said, her cheeks heating.
A breath escaped him, low and involuntary, and the corner of his mouth twitched. Cressida felt her own laugh rise before she could suppress it.
For a moment, they stood on the dark terrace in a state of undignified helplessness that she would, she suspected, remember for the rest of her life.
Then he cupped her face in both hands and kissed her properly, with a thoroughness and a certainty that had nothing tentative in it, that made the previous moment’s hesitation feel like a door being held carefully open.
She gripped his shirt and kissed him back, and the cool night air and the dark garden and the whole accumulated difficulty of the evening receded somewhere behind them.
“Come inside,” he said against her mouth.
The roughness of his voice made her shudder.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He did not put her down.
That was the first thing—the simple, surprising fact of it. He pulled back from the kiss, looked at her for one decisive second, then wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off the flagstones with the unceremonious efficiency of a man who had made a decision and saw no reason to delay its execution.
She made an undignified sound. “What are you?—”
“I’m taking you inside,” he said.
He carried her through the terrace doors, across the threshold, and into the corridor. There, Cressida became acutely, mortifyingly aware that it was not yet late enough for the servants to have retired.
Thomas the footman, posted at the end of the corridor, turned at the sound of their entrance and went through approximately four distinct expressions in the space of a second before settling with admirable professionalism on a point somewhere above their heads.
“Good evening, Your Grace,” he said to the ceiling.
Theodore did not slow down. “Thomas,” he said, by way of acknowledgment, and rounded the corner into the main staircase.
