Chapter Sixteen
“You do not have to do this.”
Lorraine stood before the mirror in her small room, addressing her reflection as though it were a separate person—a wiser, more cautious version of herself who might yet be persuaded to see reason.
Her reflection stared back, flushed and bright-eyed, and offered no argument whatsoever.
She had bathed. Washed her hair and left it loose, rather than pinning it into its usual order.
Changed into her nightgown—the good one, white cotton lawn, finer than anything a governess ought to possess, purchased three years ago for a trousseau she would never need and kept since as a quiet relic of a life denied.
She looked, she thought, like a woman walking toward something irreversible.
Which, of course, she was.
The house had settled into its nighttime hush.
Thomas was asleep—she had checked twice, pressing her ear to his door, listening for the steady rhythm of undisturbed rest. Jenny had long since retired.
Mrs Potter’s quarters lay dark. The corridors of Rovewood Hall stretched empty and lamplit, leading in every direction, offering every possible path.
She intended to take only one.
You could stay, whispered the cautious voice. You could climb into bed and pull the covers over your head and pretend that this afternoon never happened. You could be sensible. You could be safe.
She could.
She had spent six-and-twenty years being sensible and safe, and it had earned her a ruined reputation, a dead father, a sister who had never truly thanked her in any way that mattered, and a succession of borrowed rooms in other people’s houses.
Tonight, she would be reckless.
She drew her grey shawl about her—the practical one, the governess’s one—over the decidedly impractical nightgown. Slipped her feet into soft shoes. Opened her door and stepped into the corridor.
The walk to the ducal chambers took less than two minutes.
It felt like hours.
***
Dominic heard the knock and forgot how to breathe.
He had been pacing—had worn nearly the same path in the carpet he had confessed to Lorraine that afternoon.
He had bathed, changed into a clean shirt and trousers, poured and abandoned three separate glasses of whisky.
He had opened the window to let in the cold November air, then shut it again when he realised his hands were shaking—and not from the cold.
He had not expected her to come.
Had told himself, with the stubborn pessimism of a man long acquainted with disappointment, that she would reconsider.
That reason would reassert itself—that the gulf between duke and governess would prove too wide to cross, and she would remain safely in her room, and they would return to their careful, agonising orbit.
He had been wrong.
The knock came again. Soft. Certain.
He crossed the room and opened the door.
She stood there—in a white nightgown and grey shawl, her auburn hair loose about her shoulders, her chin lifted in that small, defiant gesture that had undone him from the first.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“You came,” he said, and immediately wished for a more intelligent remark.
“I came.” Her smile trembled—luminous, uncertain, brave. “Are you going to invite me in, or shall I remain here until Graves discovers me and expires of shock?”
He stepped aside at once.
She entered. The door closed behind her with a click that sounded, to both of them, like the turning of a key in a lock—not trapping them, but sealing them in. Together.
His chambers were warm—fire lit, lamps low, the great four-poster bed commanding the room with quiet inevitability. Lorraine had never been there before. The space bore his presence unmistakably—sandalwood, cedar, leather, and the faint trace of whisky.
She turned to face him.
He was watching her with an expression stripped bare of all defence. His eyes were dark in the low light, his jaw set, his hands clenched as though holding himself in check by force alone.
“I need you to know something,” he said. His voice was rough, uneven—nothing of the composed instrument he wore in public. “Before we—before anything happens. I need you to understand.”
“Tell me.”
“I have not—” He broke off, dragged a hand through his hair, tried again. “There have been women. Before Spain. Brief, contained encounters. The sort that leave nothing behind.”
He met her eyes, unflinching.
“Since Spain—no one. Four years. I have not wanted to—have not been able to—” He swallowed.
“You are the first person I have wanted to touch in four years. The first person I have wanted to let touch me. And I am…” His voice faltered.
“I am afraid I will do this badly. That I will hurt you. That I will—”
“Dominic.”
She crossed to him and laid her hands flat against his chest. His heart thundered beneath her palms.
“I must tell you something as well.”
He went very still.
“The scandal,” she said carefully. “The one that ended my life in society. You must have heard some version of it. The truth is—” She drew a breath.
“I took the blame for my sister. Nothing happened to me. Lydia was the one who was compromised, and I claimed it as my own to save her engagement. But I was never… I have never…”
Understanding dawned slowly across his face. His hands rose, covering hers.
“You are telling me you have never been with a man.”
“I am telling you that whatever happens tonight will be my first time.” She held his gaze.
“And I am not afraid. I am not here out of obligation, or gratitude, or ignorance. I am here because I want you. Because I have wanted you for weeks. Because I am tired—so very tired—of being the woman who gives everything and takes nothing in return.”
Her chin lifted, her eyes blazing.
“Tonight, I take something. I take you. And I need you to let me.”
Something shifted in him—deep, fundamental. The fear remained, but it was joined now by something else: awe. Gratitude. Something almost reverent.
“Then we go slowly,” he said, his voice dropping, roughened. “As slowly as you require. And you tell me if anything—anything at all—”
“I will.” She rose on her toes, brushing her lips just beneath his ear. “But, Dominic—I do not want slow.”
The kiss began gently.
His mouth found hers with a tenderness that was nothing like the garden—no desperation, no urgency, just the careful, reverent press of lips against lips.
He kissed her as though memorising her, cataloguing each sensation: the softness of her mouth, the way her breath caught when he deepened the angle, the small sound she made when his tongue traced the seam of her lips.
Then she opened for him, and gentle became something else entirely.
Her fingers curled into his shirt and pulled him closer, and the last thread of his restraint snapped.
His hands found her waist, her hips, the small of her back, pulling her flush against him—and she felt him, the hard length of him pressing against her belly through the thin barrier of cotton and linen, and the knowledge of what that meant, what was coming, sent a bolt of liquid heat straight through her core.
“The shawl,” she gasped against his mouth. “Help me with the shawl.”
He drew it from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor.
The nightgown beneath was thin, nearly transparent in the firelight, and his gaze travelled down her body with an expression that made her feel simultaneously exposed and powerful.
He could see the shape of her through the fabric: the curve of her breasts, the dip of her waist, the shadowed suggestion of her form between her thighs.
“Lorraine—” His voice broke on her name.
She took his hand and placed it over her breast.
He made a sound—low, guttural, almost pained—and his fingers closed over her, shaping themselves to the soft weight of her through the cotton. His thumb found the peak and circled, and she arched into his touch, her head falling back, a soft sound escaping her.
“Off,” she managed. “Take it off.”
He gathered the fabric in his hands and drew the nightgown over her head with a care that bordered on ceremony. It joined the shawl on the floor, and she stood before him in the firelight, bare but for her stockings, her skin painted in shades of amber and shadow.
Dominic stopped. Simply stopped—his hands hovering in the air, his breath suspended, his entire body arrested mid-motion as though the sight of her had arrested both thought and motion alike.
“You,” he said, and couldn’t finish. His eyes moved over her with an intensity that was almost tactile—a physical weight, a heat that she could feel everywhere his gaze touched. “You are—”
“If you say beautiful, I will be very cross. Every man in every novel says beautiful, and I expect more from a Duke.”
The laugh that escaped him was startled, genuine. It transformed his face, and Lorraine felt her heart crack open at the sound of it.
“Not beautiful,” he said, crossing back to her, his hands finding her bare waist. “Devastating. You are utterly, entirely devastating—and I intend to spend the rest of the night proving it.”
He lifted her.
She gasped, wrapping her arms around his neck, and he carried her to the bed—not dramatically, not the sweeping gesture of a Gothic novel, but with the steady, deliberate strength of a former soldier who knew how to bear weight.
He laid her down on the coverlet and stood over her for a moment, looking at her spread across his bed with an expression that made her feel like something sacred.
Then he pulled his shirt over his head.
She had known he would be scarred. Had expected it—the marks of war, the evidence of violence endured. But knowing and seeing were different things, and the geography of his torso hit her with the force of a blow.