Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Annabelle watched him leave.
Now, she stood at the edge of the room, waiting…
For what, she did not know.
Lady Rosenhall was engaged in conversation with Mrs. Preston. Helena was talking to someone in a shepherd’s costume near the supper room doors.
Annabelle waited long enough that her absence would not draw immediate notice, and then walked toward the far corridor and went through the doors he had used.
The passage beyond was empty and dim, the sounds of the ballroom muffled behind her.
She followed it to the end and found a door that opened onto a narrow balcony running along the side of the house, away from the lit gardens at the front.
The air was brisk and carried the smell of freshly cut grass, and the sky above the rooftops was filled with stars.
Annabelle found Dominic at the rail. Both hands on the iron, his back to her, his shoulders moving with the effort of controlled breathing.
“Are you all right?” she said.
She saw him stiffen before he turned at last. “Yes,” he said. “Perfectly.” He moved slightly, an inclination of direction toward the door. “You ought to go back in.”
“In a moment.” She said, still watching him.
It was clear he did not know what to do with the brand of attention she was showing him. “The next set will be starting.”
“I’ll miss it.” She stayed where she was, in the doorway, the cold finding its way through the thin drape of her costume. “It’s the piano, isn’t it?”
“The room was warm,” he said. “A trifling—”
“You left as soon as it began.”
He said nothing.
“I’ve watched you leave before.” She came one step further onto the balcony. “I didn’t connect it at first, but tonight… I realized. You leave each time a piano begins.” She kept her tone even; she wasn’t accusing him, only observing. “You don’t need to lie to me, Your Grace.”
“Lady Annabelle—”
“You have grief,” she said.
He looked at her.
“That is what it looks like. I’m not guessing. That is grief. Old grief. And I think it has been there a great deal longer than anyone has been permitted to notice.”
“You don’t know what you’re—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. “You know nothing about it.”
“I came because you left and your face was—” She stopped herself on the edge of the word she’d been going to use, chose a more honest one. “Wrong. Your face was wrong, and you were alone.”
“I required a moment of air,” he said, and the words came out clipped, pointed, aimed at ending the conversation. “Nothing more. And you should not be out here. It is not—”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
He went still.
“Whatever this is.” She gestured briefly, indicating the set of his shoulders, the controlled quiet of his voice, all of it.
“The dangerous duke. The man to be kept at a distance. I have spent the better part of a month in regular company with a six-year-old who notices your inconsistencies without blinking. I think I can manage the full version.”
He took a step toward her, and the space between them narrowed.
“You are supposed to be afraid of me,” he said, low, and there was nothing practiced in it.
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
“It isn’t,” she said, and held his gaze. “A man worth fearing doesn’t count every dance on a woman’s card. Doesn’t threaten men quietly so they won’t frighten her. Doesn’t—”
She stopped, because she was getting further into the sentence than she had intended when she started it.
He was very close now. She had not moved. The rail was at her back.
“James wants honesty from you,” she said, and she did not know entirely why she reached for it here, except that it was true and true things were what she had.
“He wants you to be present with him. Not managing him, not maintaining distance from him…he just wants you present. And you give him everything except that, and it is the only thing he wants.” She looked up at him.
“And you are doing it now too. You are standing two feet away from me and you are already somewhere else.”
Dominic looked at her for a long moment. The vine leaves had shifted slightly in the night air. His mask sat below the level of his eyes, and his eyes gave her nothing prepared.
“Curious little bird,” he said, and his voice had come down into a register she felt rather than heard.
“Always looking for the place where the wall begins.” His gaze moved across her face without hurry, and she found she could not look away from it, which she noted and could do nothing about.
“Tell me.” He tilted his head fractionally.
“Did you come out here to check on me?” He let a beat pass. “Or did you want to be alone with me?”
Her face burned suddenly. “I… I came because you—”
“Out here,” he said. “Empty balcony. Cold. Two hundred people on the other side of that door, your chaperone among them.” He watched her. “And you followed.”
“I was…” She trailed off because the word she had reached for was concerned, and it was accurate, but it’d taken on a quality she hadn’t assigned it, standing here, and she was not entirely willing to defend it.
His hands settled at her waist, and a gasp escaped her lips. She had not seen him move. The warmth of his hands went through the thin drape of her costume, and she forgot what she had been going to say.
“What if I were to put my hands right here,” he said, even though they were already there, “and feel your back arch against the cold railing?”
Her back did arch, very slightly, involuntarily, and it took all of her strength not to gasp.
“And leave your mouth thoroughly, utterly kissed?” His voice had dropped to something that lived only in the space between them. “Trust me, Annabelle. You would not care about the ballroom, or the piano, or anything at all. You would only want me to take you somewhere darker.”
Did she?
Annabelle found that she… that she wanted him to.
The realization made her pulse race, a fierce, tight coil of tension seizing her entire body. A heavy, aching wetness bloomed low in her belly, a sudden, demanding heat in a place she’d rarely considered before, leaving her breathless.
“I…” she murmured, devoid of any reason to form words, and as though pulled by some invisible string, she leaned in.
Just half an inch. Less, even. But she leaned in, and he saw it, and his hands tightened at her waist, and…
He kissed her.
His hands tightened at her waist, and his mouth found hers, and the first thing she registered was warmth radiating from his hands through her costume and spreading upward before she had formed a single coherent thought about it.
His mouth was warm and insistent, and there was nothing managed in it, no distance, and the sheer unguarded fact of it undid her.
Her hand found the lapel of his coat, but then her fingers closed in the fabric. She felt the solidity of him beneath the wool, the slight roughness of his jaw, and his breath warm against her cold cheek. And everything… everything faded away.
Dominic made a sound low in his throat, and it went through her like a struck chord. His hands shifted at her waist, drawing her fractionally closer, and she let herself be drawn, the rail suddenly at her back.
He tore his mouth from hers just an inch, his breathing ragged, his dark eyes glittering with a wolfish intensity that made her knees weak.
“You are so sweet,” he growled against her lips, his voice thick with desire. “So sweet, and you are trembling for me…”
Before she could answer, he recaptured her lips, deeper this time, his tongue slick and commanding as it parted her mouth.
He nipped fiercely at her bottom lip, drawing a soft whimper from her, before tracing a line of burning kisses down the sensitive curve of her jaw to the exposed skin of her throat.
For a long, reckless moment, she did not care about anything beyond him.
Then it all came back.
The iron under her palms. The chill of the stone through her slippers. The low murmur of two hundred people in the ballroom inside.
And the hands at her waist, the lips on her neck…
Followed by the very specific and inescapable fact of whose they were.
She pulled back.
Dominic let her go at once. His hands lifted, and he stepped back, and the summer breeze rushed into the space between them. Now, they stood an arm’s length apart in the cold.
Annabelle pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth and looked at him.
What have I done?
“Annabelle—”
She turned and ran through the door.