Page 60 of Caught by the Forbidden Duke
“Look at me,” he commanded softly, his voice thick with a reverence that made her chest ache. “Don’t hide from me. Let me see what I do to you.”
When his mouth found her sensitive center, the sound she made was immediate and unguarded and formed of pure breath.
He was not hurried. He had none of the urgency she might have expected from a man who had been performing restraint for two months. He worked with the same attention he had given her neck, her jaw, patient and utterly present. When she whimpered, a fractured, desperate sound that threatened to echo across the lawn, he paused just long enough to press a kiss to the soft flesh of her inner thigh.
“Beautiful,” he breathed against her, the word a ragged praise. “Cry out for me. Let them hear how much you belong to me right now.”
He resumed, responding instantly to the change in her breathing, the tightening of her fingers in his hair. Her spine curved away from the stone. Her legs were no longer reliable, liquefying beneath her. He used one hand while his mouth did the rest, holding her steady, guiding her weight. He understood, without her telling him, exactly where to press and when to ease off and when to go back.
As the tension coiled unbearably tight within her, his thumb found her hip, digging in just enough to keep her grounded.
“That’s it,” he whispered, a dark, encouraging promise against her skin as he drove her higher. “Take it. Give it all to me.”
She had her fist against her mouth and her eyes clenched shut, and the violin behind the glass went on and on?—
“Dominic!” She came apart quietly against the garden wall, his hands firm at her hips.
The late roses went on smelling of nothing but themselves, and the cool night air came in off the beds, and none of it touched the heat of her skin.
He pressed one long, unhurried kiss to the inside of her thigh. “My Annabelle, I want to taste you more…”
“Oh,” Her hands went loose in his hair as her hips jerked, shaking through the aftershocks.
Dominic was on his feet and had Annabelle’s skirts smoothed to her ankles before the second set of footsteps found the gravel.
His hand came back to her jaw once more, fast, and he kissed her again.
Gravel shifted on the garden path behind them?—
Footsteps, and they were more than one set approaching.
Chapter Seventeen
“—only stepped out for air, I am sure she has only stepped out for air, Mama, truly?—”
Helena’s voice arrived a half-second before Helena did, already mid-sentence.
Dominic’s hand left Annabelle’s face as though he had touched a hot coal and only just realized it.
“Annabelle?” The gasp detonated like a cannonball.
Dominic stepped back.
Annabelle put a hand to the wall behind her and found it stone cold. Colder than it had been when his mouth was on her thigh, and the world had narrowed to the size of his hands. Her legs had not yet remembered how to hold her without assistance; she locked her knees and willed them steady. Her hairpins had come loose at some point; she felt one slide and stop above her ear.
She reached up without thinking and pressed it back into place, as though that single pin might undo what was standing in the doorway watching her do it.
Somewhere behind her ribs, her heart was still going at the pace it had kept since his mouth had first found her in the dark, and it would not slow now, no matter how plainly the evening had turned.
“Annabelle!” Lady Rosenhall stood a few feet away.
Helena was half a step behind her, one arm lifted and useless, as though she had been reaching for her mother’s sleeve and missed it by an inch.
Lady Rosenhall looked at Annabelle: hair coming down on one side, color high in her face that owed nothing to the night air, her bodice not quite settled where it should be.
Then she looked at Dominic, who had retreated only as far as decency demanded, his coat still open at the throat, his cravat in worse order than it had any business being.
The dowager’s hand pressed flat against her own collarbone.
