Page 58 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

It was not tentative, but hot and seeking. It was all the things she didn’t allow herself to dream of. His mouth was warm, soft, yet certain.

Her hands came up to his chest and gripped the front of his shirt. She kissed him back with everything that had been accumulating since a morning when she had stood in his entrance hall in a wedding dress with mud on the hem and decided she trusted him because she had no other option.

Now, she knew that she had been right.

He slipped his tongue inside of her mouth, and she moaned, eager for him.

His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her head, and the other came to her waist, and she was pulled closer, and she went. She went entirely. Her hands moved up to his broad shoulders, and he made a sound low in his throat that she felt more than heard.

“You are delectable,” he growled.

He kissed her again, different now, deeper, the careful surface of him comprehensively gone. What was under it was warm, present and utterly Frederick, more Frederick than she had known was there, and she took a leg to wrap him close when?—

He stopped.

He did not stop gradually. He pulled back with the same decisiveness that had brought him across the room, and he put two feet of space between them in a single movement.

The Duke was back, and he stood with his hands at his sides and his breathing not quite steady. She looked at him, her eyes searching for a reason.

“I—” He stopped. He looked at the window, not at her. “I am sorry,” he said. His voice was low and very even and cost him something to make it so. “You… you have had a difficult day, and you are leaving, and I am not…” He stopped again. “It is not fair to you.”

Anna sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. She understood what he was doing. She even, in the part of her that thought clearly and had always thought clearly, understood why.

He was being, in his way, careful of her.

He was doing the thing he always did, protecting her from any version of the situation that could go wrong.

“Goodnight, Frederick,” she said, too tired to fight it, too overwhelmed to think straight.

He looked at her for one moment. The thing she had seen in his face before he pulled back was still there, not quite gone, not yet.

And then, he was in the corridor, and the door was pulled gently closed.

She sat in the quiet, and Percy walked up the bed and settled beside her hip. She put her hand on his back and began to stroke.

Percy purred steadily, and she sat in the lamplight for a very long time.

CHAPTER 22

Anna had not expected packing to feel like anything. Mrs. Henderson had most of it in hand, the dresses that Rachel had given her, the small things from the dressing table wrapped in cloth and placed in the case. Anna sat in the chair by the window and assisted where she was useful and tried to be sensible about it.

“Wiltshire,” Rachel said as she appeared in the doorway and saw the trunk. She walked in and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Wiltshire,” Anna agreed.

“It will be very quiet.”

“I expect so.” Anna looked at the maid, folding the blue dress, and then at her hands. “I think I could use ‘very quiet ’ for a while.”

“I understand,” she replied. “I will not try to take it personally.”

“Birchall’s solicitor confirmed this morning,” Anna said. “The manor is called Ludlow House. It is modest, but the grounds are good. And there is an allowance, which is more than I could have—” She stopped.

It was still strange, the thought of being free. Having things that were hers. A house with her name on it, and money that belonged to her. She had not had those things in a very long time, and before Birchall she had not fully understood how much a life could shrink without them. It was all an impossible blur.

“It is yours,” Rachel said.

“It is.” She looked at the window, the November London morning, grey as it always was. “It is entirely mine.”