Page 38 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
The warmth of his hands through the thin drape of her costume; how they had spread at her waist before she had formed a single thought about it, deliberate and unhurried, as though he had known exactly where he was going to put them. The sound he had made when she stopped holding herself at a distance: low, rough, entirelyunmanaged.
The way he had said her name, not her title, as though there were no other version of her worth speaking to. She had not meant to hold onto any of it. It had stayed anyway, and it came back now with the faithfulness of things her memory had decided were worth keeping against her better judgment.
Half past eleven. The morning had progressed entirely without Dominic’s participation.
He had done what he should not have done.
There was no arrangement of the facts that improved the conclusion. Annabelle had come onto the balcony, and he had put his hands on her waist before she had finished speaking, and she had leaned in by half an inch that she could not have intended to give him…
And he had kissed her.
That was the complete record.
He was thirty-two years old, with a rule he had kept for the better part of a decade for reasons that had not ceased to be valid overnight: unmarried women of good family were not for men of his sort.
She was Lucien’s sister, and her brother was at Fairmont under the complete confidence that nothing of this nature was occurring, because nothing of this nature was supposed to occur.
He was not going to sit here losing the thread over Lucien Stanton’s younger sister.
She had pulled away. She had produced the sense he had apparently mislaid, and had ended it herself, and the correct response to that was to behave as a rational man: civil, unremarkable, brief.
He had James drop off at her house at one. He would deliver the boy, keep it short, and return to work, as usual.
What had cracked it, if he was going to be honest, and he generally was, at least with himself, was not the costume or the cold or the proximity, though the proximity had not helped. It was that she had come after him. Not to make a scene, not to demand explanations, not to show concern. She had come out onto a cold balcony alone because his face had been wrong, and she had said so, and she had not looked away from any of it.
Men who wanted to be left alone were generally left alone. He had cultivated that expectation for years. She had not found it applicable.
And so, he called for his hat.
Annabelle was not reading.
The book was open in her lap and had been on the same page since Helena had left her after lunch, and the paragraph had been released without retention three times over. She set it aside when the footman appeared in the doorway.
“His Grace the Duke of Silverford, my lady. With Lord James.”
She smoothed her skirts and went into the hall.
Dominic was standing near the door. He had his hat in his hand and had not moved to give it to the footman, which required nointerpretation. James stood at his side, holding the strap of his leather case in both fists, chin angled toward the floor.
Lady Rosenhall appeared at the top of the stairs at that moment, took in the scene below with one comprehensive look, and descended with the unhurried dignity of a woman making a point without needing to make it aloud. She greeted the duke with a nod that was polite in the way a closed door is polite: perfectly correct and offering nothing further. Dominic returned it with equal correctness.
“Lady Annabelle.” He inclined his head. The words were correct and entirely empty of everything beyond their surface.
“Your Grace.” She looked at him, then at James. “Good afternoon.”
James looked up from the floor. He glanced at the staircase behind her, then at her face. “Can we do the F today?”
“We can.”
He nodded once and shifted his case to the other hand, satisfied that the essential point had been settled.
“He has his things,” Dominic said. His voice was even, the sound of a man moving through his list in order. “Miss Hartley has packed a change of clothes. He has a tendency to find?—”
“I know,” she said.
He looked at the wall beyond her shoulder.
“I’ll send for him at four.”
