Page 70 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

Frederick was running before he’d consciously decided to, gravel spitting beneath his best boots, his heart slamming against his ribs.

He found them in a small clearing beyond the hedge, moonlight falling cold and clear across the scene. Anna was pressed back against the trunk of an old elm, one hand braced against Lord Pemberton’s chest.

She was shoving with all her strength while his other hand was fisted in the silk of her skirt and his mouth descended towardhers despite her efforts. Despite the clear, desperatenoshe was trying to force past his encroaching weight.

Frederick did not remember crossing the clearing. He remembered only his hand closing on the back of Pemberton’s coat, hauling him backward with enough force to stagger them both. His fist connected with Pemberton’s jaw with a crack that felt like the single most satisfying thing he had ever done.

Pemberton went down hard into the grass, sputtering unintelligibly, one hand flying to his jaw.

“Touch her again, you scoundrel,” Frederick said, his voice low and entirely without mercy, “and I will not stop at your jaw. Get up. Get out of this garden, and if I hear so much as your name spoken in her hearing again, you will answer for it in a manner considerably less pleasant than this. Do you understand me?”

Pemberton scrambled upright and glanced once at Anna. She was standing rigid against the tree, breathing hard, her hand still pressed to her bodice where his grip had wrinkled it. Then, he fled without a word back toward the lights of the house.

Frederick turned to Anna and found her staring at him. Her face was filled with something between shock and a kind of dawning, uncertain wonder, as though she were looking at a stranger wearing a familiar face.

“Anna.” He reached for her, then stopped himself, unsure if she could bear to be touched just now by anyone at all. “Are you hurt?”

“No. No, I…” She pressed a shaking hand to her hair, attempting to impose some order it did not currently possess. “He was perfectly civil, at first. I thought… Well, I supposed I didn’t think…” She stopped, swallowed, and when she looked up at him again, her eyes were too bright. “I should like to go home, I think.”

“Of course.” He shrugged out of his coat and settled it about her shoulders before she could protest and did not allow himself to examine too closely why the sight of her in it made something in his chest ease. “Come. I’ll see you to your carriage.”

Anna did not argue when he handed her up into the carriage, though she opened her mouth to try but could not find the words.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Frederick,” she stammered. “I am fine… You needn’t—your own carriage?—”

“Will manage perfectly well without me for one evening, left behind for Rachel. I’ll take a hackney back to the ball once you’re safely home to meet her.”

He climbed in after her and rapped on the roof before she could mount any further objection. The carriage lurched into motion,leaving the lights of the ball behind as the hooves echoed down the cobblestone street.

“Thank you,” she said as she sat, his coat still wrapped about her shoulders and her hands folded tight in her lap, staring at nothing in particular, and tried to feel ordinary.

It did not work. The coat smelled like him, pine and soap, just as she remembered. She had no business remembering that so vividly, or being so taken by now. Her hands were still not entirely steady, though she could not now have said with any certainty how much of that belonged to Lord Pemberton and how much to the man sitting across from her in the dark.

“It was nothing,” he said finally.

She knew well that the gesture was certainlynotnothing. In her wildest dreams, which she had over the last year, she never fathomed the composed Duke was capable of such fury.

He was careful, dry, composed to the point of occasional maddening.

She had known him capable of warmth, though he rationed it as though warmth were a finite resource he didn’t wish to exhaust. She had not known him capable of whatever she had witnessed in that garden, the absolute, white-hot economy of it.

The way he had crossed the clearing without a word and hauled Pemberton off her as though the man weighed nothing, the way he had spoken afterward in that low, stripped voice.

Touch her again…

She was still turning it over when his face appeared in a flash of lamplight through the window, and she looked quickly back at her hands.

“How did you know where to find me?” she asked, because she needed something to say, and because she had been wondering it since the moment he appeared.

“What do you mean?”

“In the garden. No one saw me…”

He was quiet for a beat too long. In the intermittent light she could see his jaw set tight. She knew he was choosing his words with more care than usual.

“I noticed you’d gone,” he said at last, and the words came out rougher than she expected.