Chapter 18
A dam stood among the men and listened to them speak about things he could not bring himself to care about if he tried.
The gentlemen had gathered in the long afternoon room with its card tables, decanters, and open doors toward the chamber beyond.
Their voices rose and fell in easy patterns as they talked about sport, politics, and gossip fit to pass for wit, and the thousand small topics men used to keep one another from silence.
Adam stood with a glass in one hand and Dominic Bolt on one side, and another duke he had come to know as Jasper on the other. Surrounded by men and occupied by ordinary routine, he might yet manage the afternoon without behaving like a fool.
The thought collapsed at once.
He already knew where Emily was. He had known from the moment he entered the room.
Not because he had seen her immediately, though he had.
But because some part of him now tracked her against his will, measuring distance, laughter, who stood nearest, whether she was seated or moving, whether other men were looking too long, and whether she noticed it.
He was not calm. He had not been calm since she came down the stairs at Huxley Manor. The house party had only made the problem look different in brighter fabrics and multiplied the witnesses.
Dominic was watching him with the sort of amusement only a brother could sharpen into a blade.
“Well?” he prompted. “Is my sister giving you a hard time?”
Adam should have answered with something dry, forgettable, and masculine enough to kill the question where it stood. Instead, he heard himself respond in a calm voice, “She’s… much more than I could have hoped for.”
The silence that followed lasted only a second. It was enough.
Jasper looked at Dominic. Dominic looked at Jasper, and both of them came within an inch of laughing in his face.
Adam realized too late exactly how the line had sounded.
Dominic lifted his glass. “That bad, is it?”
Adam’s mouth hardened. “I said nothing of the sort.”
“No,” Jasper said. “You said something much more useful.”
Adam gave him a flat look. Jasper remained entirely untroubled by it.
Dominic’s amusement deepened. “Much more than you hoped for. You are either a deeply miserable man or a much luckier one than you expected.”
Adam drank because it was better than answering.
Jasper, perhaps out of pity and perhaps because he preferred sport to prolonged torture, clapped a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Cards, Huxley. Before you start glaring holes into the wallpaper.”
Adam allowed himself to be led toward the nearest table, as refusing would only give them more to enjoy. He sat and watched as the cards were dealt. Jasper named the stake, and another gentleman joined them, then another.
Soon, Adam found himself surrounded by men.
He looked at his hand and saw none of it. He answered one question too late and another not at all. Jasper had to repeat the state of the game twice before Adam understood it. Dominic, seated opposite, watched the whole performance with increasing relish.
“You have missed two tricks you would not normally miss,” he observed.
Adam set a card down. “Then perhaps I am tired of your company.”
“Perhaps you are not looking at the cards.”
The problem with Dominic was that he often chose honesty precisely where it hurt most. Adam had noticed it first at the fountain that day and at the wedding. He would not expect anything else from an elder brother anyway.
Soon, they finished the game, and Adam abandoned the table the moment he could.
Jasper, whom he could not be more grateful to no matter how hard he tried, led him into the other game room, and a cue was put into his hand.
Adam took his place. He lined up the first shot with all the outward signs of concentration and sent the ball wide enough to draw open laughter from Jasper and a mild cough from one of the older men at the far end.
“That, Duke,” Jasper said, “was an act of sabotage against geometry.”
Adam handed him the cue. “Then you may restore order yourself.”
He should have stayed. He should have made himself endure the room until he could relax properly. Instead, he crossed back toward the main reception space. Thankfully, no diversion held him for more than a minute before his attention went elsewhere.
To her .
Always her.
Emily stood near the windows with her friends, and he watched as they spoke to a fair-haired man he vaguely recognized from breakfast.
The fact that she was simply alive among company made him uncomfortable.
He should be the one making her feel that way.
So why couldn’t he? All he could see was the men and the way they came near to either congratulate her on her marriage or seek advice on things he could not fully hear from where she stood.
He could see every one of them, though.
He could not call any of it an offense. No hand lingered where it should not, and from what he could see, no line had been crossed. Emily had given no encouragement beyond being exactly what she was—beautiful, lively, impossible to overlook.
His jealousy had nowhere decent to stand.
That made it worse.
At last, the pressure of the room, the men, the cards, the games, the laughter, Dominic’s knowing face—all of it drove him toward temporary solitude. He found a private washroom off the rear corridor and shut the door behind him with more force than the lock required.
The room was small and clean and mercifully empty.
Adam crossed to the basin and bent over it, splashing water on his face with both hands. The cold struck him sharply like a reprimand, and he welcomed every second of it.
It did not work.
He straightened and looked at himself in the glass above the basin. Water ran along his jaw and dripped from his chin onto the porcelain. His expression gave nothing away, and for some reason, his reflection looked like a man who had everything properly in hand.
Well, that was wrong.
He pressed both hands flat against the basin’s edge and dropped his head. He had left the room because he needed air, but the main reason was that he could not get Emily out of his head. He had not been able to since she had come down those damned stairs.
She had chosen that gown with full knowledge of what it would do to him, and she had worn it without mercy. The blue had done something unreasonable to her complexion, and he had looked at her and felt the desire rise in him so fast and so viciously that it had taken great effort not to show it.
He had been hard before she had reached the bottom step, and he had been in varying degrees of the same condition for most of the morning since.
He crossed to the narrow chair beside the door and sat. Then he put his elbows on his knees, fixed his gaze on the floor, and made a sincere attempt to think about something else.Anything.
The roads, perhaps. Or the plants outside that had been judged.
Anything.
However, no matter how hard he tried, thoughts of Emily came back, specific and relentless.
The way her dress had moved when she descended.
The way she held his arm in company with such ease that no one watching would have known how thoroughly he had failed her in every private moment.
The carriage. The glance she had turned on him when he started to say her name and could not finish, cool at the surface and entirely alive underneath, carrying the full weight of what she knew she did to him.
He exhaled, and, unable to find any other reprieve, his hand moved. He pressed his palm flat against the front of his trousers and felt his length through the fabric.
He was harder than was in any sense reasonable for a man seated alone in a washroom at a house party in the middle of the afternoon. The pressure of his own hand made his breath catch, and his teeth clenched hard against the sound that tried to follow.
He could not go back out there.Not like this, with a staggering ache between his legs.
Before he could think twice about it, he undid the fastening at his waistband with two sharp motions and wrapped his hand around himself. The low growl he let out was quiet and involuntary.
He started slowly and worked himself at a pace that built ever so slowly. His free hand gripped the armrest, and he kept his head level and his eyes on the middle distance and thought of Emily.
He thought of her gown first. The way it wrapped around her figure, tracking every curve without apology.
He thought of what it concealed and what it suggested and what it would feel like to take it off her.
He thought of the weight of her in the ballroom when she had been flush against him, her hand on his shoulder, her mouth too near his ear when she spoke.
His grip tightened, and the pace quickened.
“Emily .” Her name left him on a breath so low it barely cleared his teeth. He did not try to stop it.
He thought of her voice saying his name the way she only said it when he had closed the careful distance between them. Not Your Grace , but Adam .
He thought of the sound she made when he touched her. The way she leaned toward him despite herself. The way her hands moved when she had stopped pretending she did not want him.
His hand moved faster, and he felt the pleasure build. He thought of her figure, the warmth of her skin, the one time he had let himself feel it properly, the way she had looked at him in the carriage with full knowledge of exactly what she was doing.
“Emily .” Her name again, rougher this time, dragged out of him against his better judgment.
His hips pushed into his own hand, and his head dropped back against the back of the chair.
He was close.
Too close.
Then, three sharp knocks sounded at the door, and he went completely still.
A footman’s voice came through the wood, carefully neutral. “Your Grace, the Duke of Salbury requests your presence in the garden. He says the matter is brief.”
Adam sat motionless for a minute, then he exhaled through his teeth, slow and controlled, and made himself move.