Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My entire household,” Theodore said, arriving at the top of the staircase without a hitch in his steps, “is about to find itself with considerably revised terms of employment if they do not find some other places to be.”
“Theodore.” She lifted her head. Her face was, she was perfectly certain, the approximate color of the dining hall curtains. “Put me down. I can walk.”
He did not put her down. Instead, he shouldered open the door to his bedchamber and carried her through it.
He set her on her feet only when the door had closed behind them, at which point the corridor, the staff, Mrs. Agnes and her vindicated whisper, and the entire socially catastrophic spectacle of the previous two minutes ceased to matter.
He was watching her with careful, unguarded attention, his dark eyes smoldering. The night’s tension lingered in the line of his shoulders, but beneath it, there was desire barely leashed.
She reached up and took hold of his cravat.
He stood still while she worked the knot loose, which took some effort because her fingers were not entirely steady. She drew the linen free, and he watched her do it, not moving, not helping, which she suspected was its own form of control.
The collar of his shirt fell open. She pressed her palm flat against the exposed base of his throat and felt his pulse against her hand. It was fast. Considerably faster than he was permitting anything else about him to suggest.
“You’re nervous,” she said, and he hummed, his eyes shining. “You’re allowed to be, you know. Nervous.”
He looked at her for a moment, then lifted her hand from his throat and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist just once. The gesture was so unhurried that she briefly forgot how to speak.
“Turn around,” he said against her wrist.
She did not see the need to disobey. She turned.
He worked the buttons of her gown from the nape of her neck downward, one by one. His fingers were warm on her spine, and he did not rush.
She found herself unexpectedly grateful for the absence of haste, grateful that he was treating this as something worth attending to rather than a destination to be reached efficiently.
Her gown loosened around her shoulders, and he pulled it off her arms. It pooled in a heap at her feet.
He exhaled, slow and controlled, but she heard it, and it raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
“Cressida.” Her name on his lips, stripped of every title and social buffer, just the syllables of it, full of awe and entirely his.
She turned back to face him and found his expression had changed. Heart pounding, she reached for the buttons of his waistcoat.
He shrugged out of his coat while she worked, and between the two of them, they managed his waistcoat and his shirt with considerably less elegance than either of them would have brought to the task.
At some point, she laughed at the logistics of it—his sleeve catching, her elbow in the wrong place—and he made a sound low in his chest that was close enough to amusement that she counted it.
When he was bare to the waist, however, she stopped laughing.
She was aware she was staring; she had no incentive to stop.
He was broad across the shoulders and narrower at the waist, and the firelight threw the lines of him into relief with an unhelpfulness that was quite spectacular.
A scar ran beneath his left ribs, old and faded, and she reached out without thinking and pressed two fingers against it.
He went very still.
“How?” she asked.
“Riding accident when I was fourteen.” He paused, and there was that sense of shame again. “I was showing off.”
She looked up at him, her eyes twinkling. “Were you? I can’t picture it.”
“I was fourteen,” he repeated, clearing his throat. “I have since revised my approach.”
She smiled, and he looked at her mouth when she did it. It was a thing he had done before, but at this proximity, it registered differently. He was not hiding it.
She stepped closer and kissed him.
This time, he responded immediately, his hands finding her waist and then her back, the warmth of his palms against her skin distinctive and specific and unlike anything else.
He backed her toward the bed with enough deliberateness that she understood she was being moved rather than swept, that he was choosing each step, giving her his absolute undivided attention, and the knowledge of that made her breath come shorter than the walking warranted.
The back of her knees found the edge of the mattress.
She sat down and looked up at him, and the expression on his face, at that particular angle in that particular light, was the most vulnerable she had ever seen from him—want, unvarnished, with nothing arranged over the top of it to make it more manageable for either of them.
And then his patience snapped.
She had known he was not a man of half-measures. Had observed it across dinner tables, during arguments, in the way he read and listened and moved through the world with the complete, undivided attention of someone who had decided long ago that anything worth doing was worth doing entirely.
She had simply failed to account for what that quality would feel like directed at her, with nothing between them and no remaining reason for either of them to pretend otherwise.
His mouth found her throat, and she tipped her head back against the pillow and felt him work his way down with the focused, unhurried thoroughness of a man who considered this a subject worthy of serious study.
His hands moved over her with the same quality. Not groping or urgent, but attentive, registering every response, cataloguing what elicited which reaction. She was simultaneously grateful for and undone by the fact that he was as methodical in this as in everything else.
“Theodore…” His name came out unsteady.
He lifted his head then, and the look he gave her in the low firelight was dark and very direct. A question without words.
She felt heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment climb up her throat.
She had not known precisely what to expect. She had known the theory of it. Her grandmother had been bracingly practical on the subject the week before her wedding, in a manner that had left her simultaneously better informed and considerably more alarmed.
And she had known, from the corridor at Lady Seymore’s and the locked room after the second dance, something of what he was capable of.
But there was a considerable distance between knowing and this, between anticipation and the disorienting reality of Theodore Yeats, the Duke of Ashmere, with his restraint finally completely gone.
He took his time, and that was the first surprise.
Well, not that he was gentle exactly, because gentleness was not quite the right word for it, but that he was deliberate.
His hands mapped her as though committing her to memory—the curve of her waist, the plane of her stomach, the inside of her knee.
She found she could only take in shallow, unsteady breaths.
When he finally settled between her thighs and looked at her, close enough that she could see the firelight reflected in his eyes, his weight braced on his forearms, and a lock of dark hair fallen loose over his forehead, she understood that he was waiting.
He refused to proceed without confirmation that she was entirely with him.
She reached up and touched his jaw. “Yes,” she said quietly, a permission and plea rolled into one word.
He exhaled, then he moved, and the breath left her body in a rush as her hands found his shoulders and gripped.
The initial discomfort was brief and less than she had braced for. He stilled immediately, his forehead dropping to hers, his breath warm against her mouth.
“All right?” His voice was low, the question stripped of everything except genuine concern.
“Yes,” she said again, because she truly was.
Oh, but she felt more than the discomfort now.
He moved again, slowly at first, and she shifted to accommodate him and felt the discomfort dissolve into something else entirely: a warmth that began where they were joined and spread outward through her whole body, unhurried and building and nothing at all like anything she’d had adequate language for before now.
She heard herself make a sound, and he made one in return, lower, less voluntary, pressed against her throat.
There, she thought, with the small part of her mind still capable of thought. There he is.
Because this was him. The version of him that existed beneath the title and the composure and the seventeen years of meticulous self-governance.
She could feel it in the increasing urgency of his movements, in the way his breath had abandoned all pretense of steadiness, in the involuntary press of his lips against her shoulder, her throat, her jaw.
Not kisses so much as contact, the need to be closer still, even at the maximum possible proximity.
His mouth found her ear.
“God,” he said roughly, helplessly, the word arriving without apparent permission. And then, quieter, in a tone she had never heard from him: “You have no idea—”
He didn’t finish, but she didn’t need him to.
She arched against him, and he responded with a sound low in his chest that she felt as much as heard. His rhythm changed, becoming deeper, less managed, the last vestige of governance dissolving. And she wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer.
The pleasure built in waves that grew less distinguishable from each other as they came faster, her nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks she would no doubt see tomorrow, and his voice in her ear saying her name—just her name, again and again, in that rough, stripped register that she was now certain she would hear in memory for the rest of her life.
When she came apart, it was without warning and without dignity, a sound escaping her that she would never have permitted in any other context, her whole body clenching around him and then releasing all at once like a string cut clean.
He stilled for a moment, and then his control broke entirely. She felt it, the full, unmanaged weight of his want, finally unhoused from seventeen years of careful custody, moving through him in long, shuddering waves.
His face pressed hard against her neck. His arms gathered her in with a completeness that left no question about whether she was held.
“Cressida.” Her name, one final time, wrecked and quiet. It made her heart ache and swell all at once.
She pressed her lips to his temple and held on until he went still. Eventually, his hand moved to her hair. He worked his fingers through it with a slow, idle focus.
“Theodore,” she said softly.
He made a sound of acknowledgment.
“Thank you.” She paused. “For coming inside, I mean. Rather than standing on the terrace until morning.”
A low exhale that might have been a laugh, coming from another man. “I was not going to stand there until morning.”
“You were absolutely going to stand there until morning and brood like a poet haunted by his ghosts.”
He grunted, and it took a short while for her to realize he had been laughing. “I had not decided that.”
She tilted her head up to look at him. In the low light, with his hair mussed and composure entirely gone from his face, he looked younger.
Not the Duke of Ashmere, with all the weight of that title and history arranged about him, but simply a man who had wanted this for longer than he had allowed himself to admit.
“We are going to argue about this, aren’t we?” she snorted. “Even now.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I imagine we’re going to argue about a great many things.” He said it without heat, almost an admission. “That has been the prevailing pattern.”
“It has.” She rested her head against his chest. “I find I don’t mind it.”
He was quiet for a moment, his fingers still moving through her hair. “Nor do I,” he said finally.
Cressida closed her eyes, and from somewhere in the castle came the faint sound of the clock in the front hall marking midnight and then, a minute later, the muffled creak of a floorboard in the corridor outside, entirely too deliberate to be accidental, and the unmistakable rustle of what sounded very much like at least two sets of footsteps retreating from the vicinity of the door.
She opened her eyes, her gaze snapping to the door. Then she looked back at Theodore, who had also clearly heard the sound.
His expression was caught between several things at once.
She watched the conflict play out across his face: the instinctive irritation of a man whose privacy had apparently been a subject of interest to his servants, and the recognition that his servants had been invested in this outcome long before either of them had been paying attention.
“Mrs. Agnes,” she said carefully.
“It would appear so,” he agreed.
A long silence settled over the room, warm and slightly absurd.
“The ghost,” Cressida said. “Agnes. You told me there was a ghost named Agnes who disapproves of changes to the household routine.”
He looked at the ceiling. “I did say that.”
“And your housekeeper’s name is also Agnes.”
Another pause.
“There is,” he said with immense control, “a perfectly rational explanation for all of this that I intend to pursue in the morning.”
“Of course,” she murmured.
“I will be speaking to every servant individually.”
“Naturally.”
“And then I will be revising the terms of every contract of employ—”
“Theodore.” She put her hand flat on his chest, and he stopped as if pulled by a string. She gave him her very best grave look, held it as long as she could, and then found she could not maintain it after all.
The laugh escaped before she could prevent it, her face pressing into his shoulder, and she felt the sound move through him, a low exhale that shook his chest briefly against her cheek.
“They were rooting for us,” she said, when she had recovered some composure.
“They were conspiring,” he countered, but there was nothing in his voice that could honestly be called outrage.
His arm tightened slightly around her.
“Sleep,” he said, and she settled against him, not an argument to be heard.
She knew she would wake in his arms tomorrow morning.