Page 73 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
She held his gaze. It was the hardest thing she had ever done and the most intimate. Harder than letting him touch her. Harder than being bare beneath him. Looking into his eyes while his fingers brought her to the edge, and watching him watch her come apart. Seeing herself reflected in his gaze. Not the Duchess. Not the widow. Not the woman who had survived. Just Valeria. Just a woman being seen by a man who thought she was worth looking at.
The wave broke.
She climaxed with his name on her lips and his eyes on hers. Her orgasm pulsed through her thighs, her belly, her chest. Her walls clenched around his fingers, and he held her through it, forehead pressed against hers, hand slowing but not stopping, easing her down.
She lay on his bed, breathing raggedly. His hand was still between her thighs, petting her. He kissed her temple. Her cheek.
She could hear her own heartbeat, loud and gradually slowing. The room smelled of woodsmoke, sweat, and something warm that was uniquely them. She felt boneless, as though three years of tension had been wrung out and left her soft and open.
I want this for the rest of my life.Not just the pleasure, but the trust. The vulnerability. The act of letting someone close enough to break you and finding that they hold you together instead.
“Stay,” she breathed.
He slowly withdrew his hand and brought his fingers to his mouth. He tasted her while holding her gaze.
“Ye taste like a promise I intend to keep, Duchess,” he said, his Scottish accent thick.
She laughed, bright and surprised.
He stared at her with an expression of such naked wonder that her laughter turned into something warmer.
“That sound,” he said. “That is the sound I want to hear for the rest of my life.”
He stared at her. She was lying in his bed with the blanket pooled around her waist and her hair spread across his pillow, and she was laughing. The sound filled the room the way the music had filled the ballroom, warm and bright and entirely uncontrolled.
He had made her laugh. Not with a joke or a story or a clever turn of phrase. But with his mouth and hands and the raw, unpolished truth of what he felt for her. That was what made her laugh. The honesty of it. The surprise of finding honesty in a man who had spent twelve years lying for the Crown.
She stopped laughing. He stopped breathing. The words sat between them, heavier than any vow. He had not meant to say them, she could see that. They had come out of him the way her laughter had come out of her—unbidden, uncontrolled, the truth escaping through a crack in the wall.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t take it back.”
He looked at her. The wall stayed down. Just barely. Just enough.
“I won’t,” he assured.
He pulled the blanket up. Tucked it around her shoulders. She caught his hand and pressed a kiss to his scarred knuckles.
“I am not finished with you,” she murmured against his skin.
“Aye, I know.”
But he did not get into bed. Rather, he pulled the chair to the bed, sat, and took her hand.
“We’re getting married tomorrow.”
“Aye.”
“Promise me you will not run.”
“I promise.”
“Promise me you will not shut me out again.”
A pause. His thumb brushed her knuckles.
“I will try,” he said. “That is the most honest answer I can give ye.”
She looked at his hand holding hers and thought about knots. The ones that held ships to docks. The ones that held climbers to mountains. The ones that held people to each other, invisible and strong and impossible to cut with anything less than a blade.
