Page 67 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Sleep, when it came, offered no improvement. He dreamed of geraniums, and the outline of her lips.

With morning came their next meet-up. They were in the library at Ashford House, the room he had told her about in Wiltshire.

She had traveled quietly, with him having sent a carriage to pick her up in the shadow of dusk.

For Oliver, it had become comforting to have her there, even in silence. This, he knew, was not part of the arrangement. The meetings were clandestine, and his loyal servants, as expected, kept their eyes averted.

She stood by the window with a volume of Cowper she had pulled from the shelf. He sat at the desk, pretending to review estate correspondence while watching her read in the afternoon light. She turned pages slowly. Her lips moved over certain lines. Twice she smiled at passages she did not share.

“Oliver.”

He looked up at the sound of his name on her lips.

“Yes.”

“I need to ask you for a favor, and I need you to hear the whole of it before you answer.”

He set down his pen.

She closed the book. Her fingers stayed pressed against the cover, holding the pages shut as one holds a door against weather.

“If Frederick proposes, he will kiss me. It may happen at the proposal itself, or shortly after, and I will not be prepared.” She looked at him. “I would like to know what it feels like. Beforehand. So that when the moment comes, I am not standing there like a woman who has never been touched.”

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. Beyond the window, a gardener raked the gravel path in steady, rhythmic strokes, a sound belonging to a world where people did ordinary things without consequence.

“No,” Oliver said immediately, his heart starting to race.

“You have not heard the whole of it.”

“I have heard enough. No.”

“I am asking you as a friend.”

“And I am refusing you as one.” He stood. The chair scraped against the floorboards. “You are asking me to kiss you so that you are better prepared to kiss another man. Do you hear how that sounds?”

“I hear how it sounds. I also hear that it is practical, and sensible, and that you are the only person in my life I would trust enough to ask.”

He walked to the window. The gardener had moved on to the far border. A blackbird sang from the copper beech, its voice absurdly sweet against the tension filling the room.

“Louisa.” He turned. She stood by the bookshelf with Cowper pressed against her ribs, her chin lifted, her gaze level. “If I do this, it changes things. You cannot undo a kiss. You cannot put it back in the box and pretend the lid was never opened.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because I am telling you now that you may regret asking. When you are standing in front of Frederick, and the memory of this sits between you, and whatever he offers, you may wish you had left the question unasked.”

She did not look away. “I trust you.”

He stood at the window. She stood at the bookshelf. The library floor stretched between them, lined with the books he had filled these shelves with, the rebellion bound in leather that he had built against his father’s memory.

“Then come here,” he whispered.

She set the book on the shelf and crossed the room. Her steps were steady, but he could see the pulse at her throat, rapid, visible above the lace of her collar. She stopped in front of him, close enough that the lavender water she wore reached him, faint and clean, a scent he had memorized without intending to.

He lifted his hand, and his fingers found her jaw. Her skin was warm, impossibly soft, and the contact sent a tremor through his wrist that he could not disguise. He tilted her face upward. Her eyes were wide.

“Slowly,” he said, and was not certain whether he was instructing her or himself.

He kissed her softly, barely more than the press of his mouth against hers. A question, not a declaration. Her lips were warm and still beneath his, and for one suspended second the kiss was exactly what she had asked for: a lesson, a rehearsal, a careful, measured thing offered between friends.