Page 68 of Caught By the Ruthless Duke
Cressida pressed her face against his shoulder. She could feel the laugh building in her chest.
“He saw us,” she said, her voice muffled.
“Yes.”
“And you do not care.”
“No.”
That much was true, if the sheer flatness of his reply was anything to go by.
She felt the first stair, the second—he was carrying her at a pace that suggested he found the entire staircase a personal inconvenience—and from below, she heard the unmistakable sound of the kitchen door opening and at least two sets of footsteps coming to an abrupt halt. She could literallyfeelthe pause.
Then, in a low, delighted whisper she was almost certain she was not meant to hear:“I told you.”
That was Mrs. Agnes, her tone triumphant.
That was the end of her composure. The laugh escaped against Theodore’s neck, helpless and completely un-duchesslike, and she felt the answering rumble in his chest.
“Your entire household is watching.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My entire household,” Theodore said, arriving at the top of the staircase without a hitch in his steps, “is about to find itself with considerably revised terms of employment if they do not find some other places to be.”
“Theodore.” She lifted her head. Her face was, she was perfectly certain, the approximate color of the dining hall curtains. “Put me down. I can walk.”
He did not put her down. Instead, he shouldered open the door to his bedchamber and carried her through it. He set her on her feet only when the door had closed behind them, at which point the corridor, the staff, Mrs. Agnes and her vindicated whisper, and the entire socially catastrophic spectacle of the previous two minutes ceased to matter.
He was watching her with careful, unguarded attention, his dark eyes smoldering. The night’s tension lingered in the line of his shoulders, but beneath it, there was desire barely leashed.
She reached up and took hold of his cravat.
He stood still while she worked the knot loose, which took some effort because her fingers were not entirely steady. She drew the linen free, and he watched her do it, not moving, not helping, which she suspected was its own form of control.
The collar of his shirt fell open. She pressed her palm flat against the exposed base of his throat and felt his pulse against her hand. It was fast. Considerably faster than he was permitting anything else about him to suggest.
“You’re nervous,” she said, and he hummed, his eyes shining. “You’re allowed to be, you know. Nervous.”
He looked at her for a moment, then lifted her hand from his throat and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist just once. The gesture was so unhurried that she briefly forgot how to speak.
“Turn around,” he said against her wrist.
She did not see the need to disobey. She turned.
He worked the buttons of her gown from the nape of her neck downward, one by one. His fingers were warm on her spine, and he did not rush.
She found herself unexpectedly grateful for the absence of haste, grateful that he was treating this as something worth attending to rather than a destination to be reached efficiently.
Her gown loosened around her shoulders, and he pulled it off her arms. It pooled in a heap at her feet.
He exhaled, slow and controlled, but she heard it, and it raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
“Cressida.” Her name on his lips, stripped of every title and social buffer, just the syllables of it, full of awe and entirely his.
She turned back to face him and found his expression had changed. Heart pounding, she reached for the buttons of his waistcoat.
He shrugged out of his coat while she worked, and between the two of them, they managed his waistcoat and his shirt with considerably less elegance than either of them would have brought to the task. At some point, she laughed at the logistics of it—his sleeve catching, her elbow in the wrong place—and he made a sound low in his chest that was close enough to amusement that she counted it.
