Chapter Fifteen
“Thomas, hold the brush at an angle—yes, like that. Lovely.”
Lorraine guided Thomas’s small hand across the paper, watching as a slightly lopsided kestrel took shape beneath his brush.
They had been painting all morning—his latest enthusiasm, inspired by a book of illustrated birds that she had discovered in the library and supplemented with their own observations from the garden.
The boy possessed a steadier hand than one might expect of six years, and a remarkable instinct for colour.
“His wing is wrong,” Thomas said, frowning. “It should curve more.”
“Then curve it more. Art is not about perfection—it is about seeing.”
He bent again to his work, tongue caught at the corner of his mouth in concentration, his fair hair falling forward in a way that would soon require attention. He pushed it back with paint-stained fingers.
He looked happy.
Truly happy, in a way that would have been unimaginable mere weeks ago.
The wary child she had first encountered remained—perhaps always would—but he had been joined by this brighter version of himself.
The one who laughed at breakfast and asked questions without fear, and carried the wooden horse the Duke had given him everywhere, as though it were a talisman against the world.
The thought of Dominic sent a flush through her that she resolutely ignored.
Soon.
The word had become a quiet, relentless pulse within her. Days since the almost-kiss. Days of exquisite restraint. Days of watching him across rooms and feeling the space between them like something physical—tangible, aching.
They had not been alone together since.
By silent agreement, the library had been avoided after dark. A mutual understanding, perhaps, that the next time they found themselves there—firelight, shadows, and no witnesses—there would be no restraint left to claim.
The question was not whether. It was when.
And the waiting was becoming unbearable.
“Miss Weston?” Thomas looked up from his kestrel. “May I paint in the garden this afternoon? The light is better outside.”
Lorraine glanced through the window. November had relented for the day, offering a sky of pale, watery blue and a sun that held no warmth but at least possessed the decency to appear.
The garden—still bedraggled with autumn, its beds stripped bare and its borders worn to dull browns—gleamed with frost that was already beginning to melt.
“I think that is an excellent idea. Finish your kestrel, and we shall set up outside after luncheon.”
***
The garden was cold but beautiful in the thin November light.
Lorraine had claimed a stone bench near the south wall, where a climbing rose—dormant now, its branches bare and ropy—formed a sheltered alcove against the wind.
Thomas sat cross-legged upon a blanket nearby, his watercolours spread around him, painting with fierce concentration while Jenny hovered at the edge of the lawn, mending stockings and stealing glances at the under-gardener.
Lorraine was not painting. She was pretending to read, though in truth she was watching the house—specifically, the window of the Duke’s study, where a tall figure had appeared and disappeared several times during the past hour.
He is watching me, she thought, and the knowledge sent a warmth through her chest that had nothing to do with the weak November sun. He is standing at his window, watching me sit in his garden, and he can no more attend to his work than I can attend to this book.
It was absurd. They were behaving like figures in one of the novels she kept hidden in her bedside drawer—the kind in which the heroine spent entire chapters pining by windows while the hero brooded magnificently in his study.
She was a sensible woman. A governess. A woman who had learned, through bitter experience, that yearning was a luxury she could ill afford.
And yet she yearned.
“Miss Weston, I am going to fetch more water for my paints.” Thomas scrambled to his feet, clutching his jar. “Jenny, will you come? I need someone to hold the door whilst I fill it.”
Jenny looked up from her mending with the slightly dazed expression of a girl whose thoughts had been elsewhere—specifically, Lorraine suspected, upon the under-gardener’s forearms. “Of course, love. Lead the way.”
They disappeared toward the kitchen entrance, Thomas chattering about the precise shade of brown he required for the kestrel’s breast feathers. Lorraine watched them go, then turned back to her book.
She heard him before she saw him.
Footsteps on the gravel path. Measured. Deliberate. The stride of a man who had made a decision and was walking toward it before he could change his mind.
Lorraine looked up.
Dominic stood at the entrance to the alcove, framed by the bare rose canes and the pale sky.
He was in his shirtsleeves—no coat, no waistcoat—as though he had left the house in such haste he had forgotten both.
The cold did not seem to touch him. His gaze was fixed on her with an intensity that made the breath falter in her lungs.
“Thomas and Jenny have gone inside,” she heard herself say. “They will be back shortly.”
“I know.” He stepped into the alcove. “I watched them go.”
The admission hung between them—plain, unapologetic. He had been watching. Waiting. Calculating the precise moment she would be alone.
“Dominic—”
“I have tried to stay away from you.” His voice was raw, stripped clean of all careful control.
“I have tried for days. I have told myself every reason I should keep my distance—duty, propriety, the thousand ways this might destroy you. I have paced my study until I have worn a path in the carpet. I have drunk enough whisky to float a frigate, and woken every morning swearing I should be stronger.”
“And?” The word emerged as little more than a whisper.
“And I am not stronger. I am not noble. I am standing in my garden in my shirtsleeves because I watched you from my window and I could not—” He broke off, his jaw working, his hands clenching at his sides.
“I am here because soon is no longer enough. I am here because I am going mad, Lorraine. You have driven me completely, irretrievably mad.”
She rose. The book slipped from her lap to the frozen ground. She did not notice.
“I have tried as well.” Her voice shook, and she let it.
Let him see the cracks in her composure, the need she had hidden behind competence and poise and the careful performance of a woman who wanted nothing.
“I have tried to remember my place. Tried to remember what I stand to lose. Tried to remind myself that wanting you is the most dangerous thing I have ever done—and I have done some remarkably dangerous things.”
“Perhaps I will ruin you.” He said it like a warning. Like a confession. Like a man offering her one final chance to run.
“Perhaps I will ruin you first.”
Something detonated behind his eyes. She saw the exact moment it happened—the instant four years of ice met the heat that had been building between them for weeks and shattered entirely.
He moved. Two strides closed the distance between them, and then his mouth was on hers.
The kiss was not gentle. It was not tentative, or careful, or any of the things she had imagined in her quieter, more sensible fantasies.
It was desperate—fierce, consuming, overwhelming—the kiss of a man who had been starving for years and had at last been given leave to eat.
His hands came up to frame her face, tilting her head back, and his mouth slanted over hers with a hunger that made her knees buckle.
Lorraine caught at the front of his shirt and held fast.
He tasted of coffee and something darker beneath it—the lingering trace of whisky.
His lips were firm, demanding, coaxing hers apart with a skill that suggested he knew very well what he was doing, even as the rest of him trembled with barely leashed need.
When his tongue brushed hers, she made a low, helpless sound, and felt his whole body shudder in answer.
He backed her against the garden wall. The stone was cold through her dress; his body, blazing against her, made the contrast almost unbearable. She gasped. He swallowed the sound, deepening the kiss, one hand sliding from her face to the curve of her neck, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw.
“Lorraine.” He tore his mouth from hers, breathing hard, his forehead resting against hers. “I have wanted—for weeks—I could not—”
“Do not stop.” She dragged him back by the front of his shirt and kissed him with all the hunger she had been suppressing for weeks.
Months. Years. Every lonely night in borrowed beds, every morning spent pretending she did not long to be touched, every carefully buried desire—everything rose at once and poured into the press of her mouth against his.
He groaned—a deep, rough sound she felt through her bones—and what remained of his restraint gave way by another measure.
His hands slid down her sides, learning the line of her waist, her hips, the flare of her body beneath the modest fabric of her dress.
His touch was reverent and desperate at once, as though he could not decide whether to worship her or devour her.
“Tell me to stop,” he rasped against her throat, his lips trailing heat along the line of her neck. “Tell me to stop, and I will.”
“Don’t you dare.”
His laugh was broken, breathless, barely a sound at all. His hands found the fabric of her skirts and gathered it, slowly, deliberately, his eyes locked on hers—giving her time to refuse, to push him away, to come to her senses.
She didn’t.
His fingers brushed against the bare skin above her stocking, and Lorraine’s world reduced to a single point of contact.
His touch was featherlight—almost reverent—tracing the soft skin of her inner thigh with a gentleness that contradicted the fire in his eyes.
She shivered, and he caught the tremor, his gaze sharpening.
“Tell me what you want.” The same words he had spoken in the library. But here, pressed against a garden wall with his hand beneath her skirts, they meant something entirely different.
“Touch me.” Her voice was steady, certain—a woman who had denied herself too long and was done, utterly done, with restraint. “Please, Dominic. Touch me.”
He did.
His fingers found her—found the place that ached and burned, that had been aching for him since the night in the library when he had whispered her name in the dark.
She gasped, sharp and involuntary, and his mouth covered hers at once, swallowing the sound, his kiss gentler now where it had been fierce before.
He moved with devastating precision. Slow, deliberate strokes that built and receded like a tide—advancing, retreating, advancing again, each pass more certain than the last. His thumb circled, pressed, circled again, learning her as he learned everything: with intense, focused attention.
With the concentration of a man who had been numb too long and was now determined to feel—to give—everything.
Lorraine clung to him, her face buried in his shoulder, her breath breaking into uneven, helpless gasps. The sensation rose in waves—each one stronger, more consuming—until she trembled against him, her fingers tightening on his arms, holding fast.
“Look at me.” His voice was rough, commanding—but beneath it, something unguarded. A need. “I want to see you. Lorraine. Look at me.”
She lifted her head.
Met his eyes—darkened, intent. He held her gaze as his hand moved with greater urgency, and she saw the change in him as he watched her—the hunger, the awe, the fierce, unsteady tenderness that softened every line of his face.
The wave broke.
Lorraine came apart against the cold stone, his name falling from her lips in a fractured whisper—breathless, reverent, drawn from somewhere deep within her.
Her body arched into his, and he held her through it, his arm tight about her waist, his forehead pressed to hers, his breathing as unsteady as her own.
Afterward, they remained as they were—entwined, trembling in the cold November air.
Dominic’s hand withdrew slowly, almost reluctantly. He smoothed her skirts back into place with a care that made her throat tighten. Then he lifted her face once more and kissed her—softly this time, with a slow, aching tenderness that felt almost like reverence.
“Tonight,” he murmured against her lips. “Come to me tonight. My chambers.”
“Dominic—”
“Let me do this properly. Not against a wall—not in stolen moments before they return.” His voice faltered. “You deserve more than this. You deserve everything. Let me give you everything. Tonight.”
She looked at him—at the fire in his eyes, at the hands that still framed her face, at the man who had been ice and was now flame, who had lived in shadow and now stood before her, wholly alive.
“Yes,” she said. “Tonight.”
He kissed her once more—brief, intense, sealing the promise—then stepped back. The loss of him was immediate, a cold absence where warmth had been.
“Thomas will be back soon,” she said, smoothing her hair, her dress—restoring the outward order that concealed the upheaval beneath. Her hands trembled. Her legs felt uncertain, as though she had been remade in some subtle, irreversible way.
“Yes.” He watched her openly now—no restraint, no distance. Only want. “Tonight, Lorraine.”
“Tonight.”
He turned and walked back toward the house, and she watched him go—the breadth of his shoulders, the measured control of his stride, the tension still visible in every movement.
She sank onto the stone bench and pressed her hands to her flushed cheeks.
What have I done? she thought—and then, almost at once: What am I about to do?
And beneath both questions, the truth that swept everything else aside:
I do not care. I want this. I want him. And tonight, for the first time in my life, I shall take what I want.
Thomas and Jenny reappeared from the kitchen entrance, Thomas clutching his jar of water in triumph.
“Miss Weston! I found the perfect brown. Cook mixed it for me from—Miss Weston, are you unwell? Your face is very red.”
“The cold air.” She smiled—a real smile, unsteady and bright and likely far too revealing. “Tell me about your brown, sweetheart.”
Thomas launched into an eager explanation of tea and walnut ink and the precise shade required for a kestrel’s breast. Lorraine listened, nodded, asked the proper questions—and all the while, her body still thrummed with the memory of Dominic’s touch, and the promise of what the night would bring.
Tonight.
The word burned in her like a flame.
She could scarcely wait for the dark.