Page 69 of Caught By the Ruthless Duke
When he was bare to the waist, however, she stopped laughing.
She was aware she was staring; she had no incentive to stop. He was broad across the shoulders and narrower at the waist, and the firelight threw the lines of him into relief with an unhelpfulness that was quite spectacular. A scar ran beneath his left ribs, old and faded, and she reached out without thinking and pressed two fingers against it.
He went very still.
“How?” she asked.
“Riding accident when I was fourteen.” He paused, and there was that sense of shame again. “I was showing off.”
She looked up at him, her eyes twinkling. “Were you? I can’t picture it.”
“I was fourteen,” he repeated, clearing his throat. “I have since revised my approach.”
She smiled, and he looked at her mouth when she did it. It was a thing he had done before, but at this proximity, it registered differently. He was not hiding it.
She stepped closer and kissed him.
This time, he responded immediately, his hands finding her waist and then her back, the warmth of his palms against her skin distinctive and specific and unlike anything else.
He backed her toward the bed with enough deliberateness that she understood she was being moved rather than swept, that he waschoosingeach step, giving her his absolute undivided attention, and the knowledge of that made her breath come shorter than the walking warranted.
The back of her knees found the edge of the mattress. She sat down and looked up at him, and the expression on his face, at that particular angle in that particular light, was the most vulnerable she had ever seen from him—want, unvarnished, with nothing arranged over the top of it to make it more manageable for either of them.
And then his patience snapped.
She had known he was not a man of half-measures. Had observed it across dinner tables, during arguments, in the way he read and listened and moved through the world with the complete, undivided attention of someone who had decided long ago that anything worth doing was worth doing entirely.
She had simply failed to account for what that quality would feel like directed at her, with nothing between them and no remaining reason for either of them to pretend otherwise.
His mouth found her throat, and she tipped her head back against the pillow and felt him work his way down with the focused, unhurried thoroughness of a man who considered this a subject worthy of serious study.
His hands moved over her with the same quality. Not groping or urgent, but attentive, registering every response, cataloguing what elicited which reaction. She was simultaneously grateful for and undone by the fact that he was as methodical in this as in everything else.
“Theodore…” His name came out unsteady.
He lifted his head then, and the look he gave her in the low firelight was dark and very direct. A question without words.
She felt heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment climb up her throat.
She had not known precisely what to expect. She had known the theory of it. Her grandmother had been bracingly practical on the subject the week before her wedding, in a manner that had left her simultaneously better informed and considerably more alarmed.
And she had known, from the corridor at Lady Seymore’s and the locked room after the second dance, something of what he was capable of. But there was a considerable distance between knowing and this, between anticipation and the disorienting reality of Theodore Yeats, the Duke of Ashmere, with his restraint finally completely gone.
He took his time, and that was the first surprise. Well, not that he was gentle exactly, because gentleness was not quite the right word for it, but that he wasdeliberate. His hands mapped her as though committing her to memory—the curve of her waist, theplane of her stomach, the inside of her knee. She found she could only take in shallow, unsteady breaths.
When he finally settled between her thighs and looked at her, close enough that she could see the firelight reflected in his eyes, his weight braced on his forearms, and a lock of dark hair fallen loose over his forehead, she understood that he waswaiting. He refused to proceed without confirmation that she was entirely with him.
She reached up and touched his jaw. “Yes,” she said quietly, a permission and plea rolled into one word.
He exhaled, then hemoved, and the breath left her body in a rush as her hands found his shoulders and gripped.
The initial discomfort was brief and less than she had braced for. He stilled immediately, his forehead dropping to hers, his breath warm against her mouth.
“All right?” His voice was low, the question stripped of everything except genuine concern.
“Yes,” she said again, because she truly was.
Oh, but she felt more than the discomfort now.
