Page 114 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“He already is.”
“He told me earlier that he intends to teach the child to play cards. He said it as though this were a virtue.”
“Miles’s virtues are his own.”
“They are.” A pause while he worked the last hook free. “I think he means well.”
“He does,” Dominic said. “He always has.”
The gown came past her shoulders. She stood to let it fall, then turned to face him. The fire in the grate was low and steady, and the room was mostly amber, and he stood in front of her and looked—not rationed, not carefully apportioned—the full thing.
She reached for his cravat.
She had his cravat loose and his coat off in three minutes, with the efficiency of someone who had learned the geography and found pleasure in the knowing. He stood under her hands.
He lay her down, and her arms came around his shoulders, and the room narrowed to the two of them and the fire behind the grate and her breathing at his neck.
She was different from how she had been months ago; he was different. Four months of knowing each other in this room, and the knowledge ran in both directions now. He knew where she held her breath. She knew where to press her hand to undo him entirely. The half-withheld part he had not been fully aware of doing—the fear of arriving somewhere and having it taken from him before he had finished arriving—was gone.
He had woken beside her every morning for four months now. He would wake beside her tomorrow.
He moved, and she made the sound she made when the angle was right—low and immediate—and pulled him closer with both hands. He stayed where she wanted. He had learned her this way, with full attention and no hurry, and the learning had arrived at a place where neither of them had to find it anymore: it was simply already there.
“Don’t stop,” she said against his jaw.
“I wasn’t going to,” he said.
He held the moment back until her breathing had gone ragged and her fingers tightened in his hair. She came with his name in her mouth and her body pulling against him, and he followed her in the way he had followed her in everything that mattered: all the way, without hesitation.
He lay on his back, and she came with him, her head at his chest, her hand spreading flat over his ribs. The fire moved behind the grate.
“March or April,” she said, to the ceiling.
“March or April,” he confirmed.
She was quiet. Outside, London settled into its small hours: a night cart, the sound of wheels diminishing toward the park.
“James will be extraordinarily thorough about it,” she said. “He’ll want to know every stage.”
“He’ll have read the available literature before the week is out,” Dominic said.
She laughed into his chest.
The fire went lower. The room cooled in slow degrees. Her hand on his ribs, his hand in her hair, not doing anything.
Just there.
He had spent a long time not believing this was possible. Not because he hadn’t wanted it, but because wanting it had always come with the knowledge that he would eventually break it: that a man built the way he had been built would eventually reproduce the only architecture he had ever been given. He had been wrong. He had been wrong in the way the young are wrong about the absolute verdict of their own histories—that what shaped you must, in the end, consume you.
His mother’s music room had held forty people tonight. It had held music in it. James had played.
He pressed his mouth to Annabelle’s hair.
She made a small sound.
“Go to sleep,” he said.
“I’m not asleep,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
