Page 68 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Then she leaned into him.

Her hand rose to his chest. Her fingers curled into the linen of his shirt, and her mouth softened, opened, and the careful measure of it shattered. His hand moved from her jaw to the back of her neck, drawing her closer.

The clock stopped ticking, or he stopped hearing it. The gardener’s rake, the blackbird, the distant clatter of the household all fell away. What remained was her mouth against his, her fingers twisted in his shirt, the warmth of her body close enough that he could feel her breathing quicken and catch.

When they separated, the distance came slowly. His forehead rested against hers. Their breath mingled in the narrow space between them. Her fingers were still in his shirt, gripping the linen as though letting go required a decision she had not yet made.

He opened his eyes. Hers were closed, her lashes casting faint shadows on her cheekbones.

She opened them. They looked at each other from a distance of two inches, and Oliver at once understood, with the cold, absolute clarity that he was in love with her. That he had been in love with her for weeks. And that the arrangement they had built to protect them both had just become the most dangerous structure in London.

“Oliver,” she whispered.

He stepped back. His hand left her neck. The air between them filled the space his body had occupied, cool and insufficient.

“Now you know,” he said. His voice held, though it cost him everything in his possession to keep it steady. “What a kiss feels like.”

She stared at him. Her hand drifted from his chest and hung at her side. The library was silent. The clock resumed. The blackbird sang on.

She collected Cowper from the shelf and walked to the door. She paused with her fingers on the handle, her back to him, and for three seconds neither of them breathed.

Then she left, and the door closed behind her with a sound so quiet it should not have been able to break anything at all.

Oliver stood at the window. The south lawn stretched below him, green and endless, and beyond it the copper beech held its branches against a sky turning pale with approaching evening. He pressed his fingers against his mouth. Her warmth was still there, fading.

He loved her. The knowledge sat in his chest, undeniable, immovable, as permanent and as useless as the portrait hanging in his entrance hall.

He loved her, and she was going to marry someone else, and the kiss that proved it was the same kiss he had given her so that she could.

CHAPTER 20

“Blue certainly is your color.”

Louisa set down her embroidery when the voice drifted toward her. She had been expecting this call. He came on Tuesdays and Fridays, and today was Friday, and the clock on the mantelpiece had struck three only minutes before his card arrived on the salver.

“I wear blue often,” she muttered. “You have never remarked upon it before.”

“I suppose I have not.” He stepped inside. He did not sit down. He stood near the fireplace and turned his hat by the brim, rotating it in slow quarter-turns as though testing the stitching. “How have you been?”

“Well. And you?”

“Quite well.”

The clock ticked. Outside, a cart rattled past in the street, and a boy shouted after it. Louisa picked up the embroidery again. She set it down. She picked it up once more and held the needle without stitching.

“The weather has been warm,” she offered.

“Very warm. Unusually so for June.”

“I noticed.”

“As did I.”

Silence followed his words. Oliver turned his hat another quarter. His gaze moved from the mantelpiece to the curtains to the painting above the sideboard and back to the mantelpiece, landing everywhere except on her.

She looked at him silently. He had kissed her.

She had walked home afterward. She had sat on the edge of her bed. She had pressed her fingers against her lips and felt the impression of his mouth still there, stubborn as a bruise, and for twenty minutes she had not moved.