Page 35 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
Her back did arch, very slightly, involuntarily, and it took all of her strength not to gasp.
“And leave your mouth thoroughly, utterly kissed?” His voice had dropped to something that lived only in the space between them. “Trust me, Annabelle. You would not care about the ballroom, or the piano, or anything at all. You would only want me to take you somewhere darker.”
Did she?
Annabelle found that she… that she wanted him to.
The realization made her pulse race, a fierce, tight coil of tension seizing her entire body. A heavy, aching wetness bloomed low in her belly, a sudden, demanding heat in a place she’d rarely considered before, leaving her breathless.
“I…” she murmured, devoid of any reason to form words, and as though pulled by some invisible string, she leaned in.
Just half an inch.Less, even. But she leaned in, and he saw it, and his hands tightened at her waist, and…
He kissed her.
His hands tightened at her waist, and his mouth found hers, and the first thing she registered was warmth radiating from his hands through her costume and spreading upward before she had formed a single coherent thought about it.
His mouth was warm and insistent, and there was nothing managed in it, no distance, and the sheer unguarded fact of it undid her.
Her hand found the lapel of his coat, but then her fingers closed in the fabric. She felt the solidity of him beneath the wool, the slight roughness of his jaw, and his breath warm against her cold cheek. And everything… everything faded away.
Dominic made a sound low in his throat, and it went through her like a struck chord. His hands shifted at her waist, drawing her fractionally closer, and she let herself be drawn, the rail suddenly at her back.
He tore his mouth from hers just an inch, his breathing ragged, his dark eyes glittering with a wolfish intensity that made her knees weak.
“You are so sweet,” he growled against her lips, his voice thick with desire. “So sweet, and you are trembling for me…”
Before she could answer, he recaptured her lips, deeper this time, his tongue slick and commanding as it parted her mouth. He nipped fiercely at her bottom lip, drawing a soft whimper from her, before tracing a line of burning kisses down the sensitive curve of her jaw to the exposed skin of her throat.
For a long, reckless moment, she did not care about anything beyond him.
Then it all came back.
The iron under her palms. The chill of the stone through her slippers. The low murmur of two hundred people in the ballroom inside.
And the hands at her waist, the lips on her neck…
Followed by the very specific and inescapable fact ofwhosethey were.
She pulled back.
Dominic let her go at once. His hands lifted, and he stepped back, and the summer breeze rushed into the space between them. Now, they stood an arm’s length apart in the cold.
Annabelle pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth and looked at him.
What have I done?
“Annabelle—”
She turned and ran through the door.
Chapter Eleven
“If you let go of that leash,” Helena said, “he will be in the Serpentine.”
Newton’s leash was wrapped twice around Annabelle’s wrist and pulling hard enough that she had to lean back against it, which she was entirely aware looked ridiculous to anyone watching.
Newton had spotted something in the willows across the path: a squirrel, a pigeon, a very large leaf, and committed to reaching it with the absolute conviction of a creature who had never encountered a deterrent that worked.
