Chapter Nineteen
“You’re staring at me.”
“I am not staring. I am observing. There is a distinction.”
“Is there?” Dominic’s mouth curved against the rim of his teacup—a small, private smile Lorraine had long since catalogued under dangerous. “And what, precisely, are you observing?”
“The way you hold your cup.” She kept her expression serenely composed—governess discipline, long practised and now employed for purposes distinctly ungenteel. “You use both hands. Like a child with a bowl of broth.”
“It is December. The cup is warm.”
“The cup is an excuse. You hold it so that your hands are otherwise occupied.”
His smile deepened. “And what would you have me do with them?”
The question struck low and immediate. Lorraine took a measured sip of tea, grateful for the momentary concealment, for her thoughts had leapt somewhere entirely unsuitable for the breakfast table.
“More toast, Miss Weston?”
Graves. Impeccable. Unerring. Unavoidable.
“Thank you, Graves.”
Across the table, Dominic’s eyes held a glint he made no effort to disguise. He knew. Of course he knew. He set down his cup—deliberately, both hands—and reached for the marmalade with exaggerated composure.
“Thomas is expecting you in the nursery at nine,” he said conversationally. “Something to do with kestrels.”
“He intends to paint the female this time. He says the male receives too much admiration.”
“A sound judgment. The female is the better hunter.”
“I shall tell him you said so.”
“Tell him I will come after luncheon.”
Lorraine’s chest tightened with something unfamiliar.
It had been happening with increasing frequency—this strange, unsteady warmth, this quiet, perilous expansion that felt less like falling and more like becoming, as though her very bones were reshaping themselves to accommodate a life she had never imagined.
He comes to the nursery now. Every day. He watches Thomas paint, asks after feather patterns, corrects his grip upon the brush. He is becoming a father—and does not yet know it.
And I am becoming something for which I have no name. Not a wife, not a mistress, not a mother—but some impossible thing that touches upon all three and belongs wholly to none.
And I want him so much it aches.
She excused herself before Graves could return with more toast and more judgment.
***
The day unfolded in an easy rhythm—lessons with Thomas, a walk about the grounds, and the quiet companionship of the library in the later hours, where Dominic attended to his correspondence and affected not to observe her across the room.
The pretence had become a private amusement between them. He would glance; she would catch him; he would withdraw at once with an air of exaggerated dignity that bordered upon the absurd; she would lower her gaze to her book and fail, entirely, to read a single word.
He has seen me entirely without clothing, she thought during one of these exchanges, and yet a glance across a library still unsettles me like a schoolgirl’s first infatuation.
This is absurd. I am a rational woman of six-and-twenty.
I have read Wollstonecraft. I ought not to be undone by a man looking at me over a letter concerning grain yields.
And yet she was undone. Thoroughly, comprehensively, disastrously undone.
And tonight, she meant to act upon it.
The notion had been gathering for days—a slow, insistent heat that owed nothing to the fires Dominic kept banked in every room and everything to the way he came apart beneath her hands.
She had learned him as she learned all things: with care, with patience, with quiet determination.
The scar at his ribs that made him flinch if touched too suddenly; the hollow at his throat where his pulse beat strongest; the sound he made—low, fractured—when her fingers traced the length of his spine.
She had mapped him.
And she wanted something very particular.
She wanted, for once, to take the lead—to see him yield, to discover what lay beyond the careful control he so rarely relinquished.
The thought alone sent heat rushing to her face. Governess Lorraine Weston, daughter of a country man, disgraced woman of no fortune, did not think such thoughts.
Except that she did.
She thought them constantly—at breakfast, during geography lessons, while helping Thomas mix paint, while reading perfectly respectable novels in perfectly respectable chairs.
She thought about the weight of him in her hand, the way his breath caught when she touched him, the way he said her name as though it were the only word he knew.
This is what he has done to me, she thought, without an ounce of regret.
He has made me greedy.
***
She came to his chambers at half past ten—late enough for Thomas to be deeply asleep, early enough that the house had not yet settled into the total silence that made every footstep sound like cannon fire.
Dominic was standing by the window, his coat and cravat already removed, his shirt loose at the throat.
The firelight caught the planes of his face, the shadow of stubble along his jaw, the pale eyes that tracked her from the door to the centre of the room with an intensity that made her skin prickle.
“You are early,” he said.
“I am impatient.” She closed the door behind her. “There is a distinction.”
Lorraine crossed the room without haste. She had learned the value of it—the slow approach, the way his breath altered, the subtle tightening of his hands at his sides. She stopped just short of touching him.
“I wish to try something,” she said. “And I require your cooperation.”
A flicker of wariness—and something darker—passed through his gaze. “Lorraine—”
“You are to remain precisely where you are.” She set her hand against his chest, over the rapid beat of his heart. “And you are not to take control.”
“That is a severe restriction.”
“It is a necessary one.”
A breath of laughter escaped him, strained at the edges. “What is it you intend?”
She met his eyes.
“I want to see what becomes of you,” she said quietly, “when you are not the one directing everything.”
The words settled between them.
He did not move.
“Yes,” he said at last, his voice low. “Very well.”
She kissed him first. Slowly, carefully, her hands framing his face—thumbs tracing his cheekbones, fingers threading into the dark hair at his temples.
He trembled. The Duke of Ravenswood, the Glacier, the man who had faced cannon fire at Badajoz, trembled under her hands like a leaf in a gale, and the power of it flooded through her like warm wine.
She undid his shirt with steady fingers—steadier than she felt—and pressed her lips to his collarbone.
His breath stuttered. She kissed lower, tasting salt and warmth, following the trail of dark hair down his chest, across the flat plane of his stomach.
She felt the muscles contract beneath her mouth, heard his breathing turn shallow and ragged.
“Lorraine.” His voice was wrecked. “You’re—I can’t—”
“You can.” She sank to her knees before him. Looked up. “Watch me.”
He watched. His hands found her hair—not guiding, only holding, his fingers threading through the loose waves she had unbound before coming to him. And when she took him into her mouth—slowly, carefully, learning him—the sound he made broke the silence of the room like something fragile giving way.
She was clumsy. She knew it—knew she lacked experience, technique, anything beyond instinct. But his response—the broken gasps, the tremor in his thighs, the repeated fall of her name from his lips—told her that perfection was beside the point.
Surrender was the point.
And Dominic Vane, who had spent four years refusing surrender in any form—grief, love, hope, healing—was surrendering now, utterly, her name on his lips, her hands steady at his hips, every defence he had ever built falling away.
“Stop,” he gasped. “Lorraine—stop, or I’ll—”
She stopped. Looked up at him, lips parted, eyes bright. “Was that—”
He pulled her to her feet and kissed her with a force that stole her breath, her balance, and what remained of her composure. “You impossible woman,” he said against her mouth, half-laughing, half-undone. “You magnificent, impossible—”
“I shall take that as approval.”
“Come to bed. Now. I need—let me—” He was already at the ties of her nightgown, his hands unsteady, his usual precision abandoned. “Let me show you.”
And he did.
He laid her down and attended to her with a thoroughness that was, she thought through the gathering haze, almost vengeful—as though her boldness had stirred something competitive in him, as though he could not bear to be outdone even in this.
He kissed her throat, her breasts, the soft skin below her navel.
He settled between her thighs with a patience that bordered on cruelty, and when his mouth found her, she arched from the bed with a cry she scarcely managed to muffle against his pillow.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice rough, his breath warm against her skin. “Do not be quiet. I would hear you.”
“The servants—”
“Are asleep.” He shifted, and the sensation that followed scattered her thoughts entirely. “Let me hear you, Lorraine.”
She stopped being quiet.
Afterward—a long, shuddering, boneless afterward—he drew her against his chest, pulled the counterpane over them, and pressed his lips to the crown of her head.
She lay in the warm dark, her cheek against the steady beat of his heart, her body humming with a satisfaction so complete it was almost painful in its depth.
This is the danger of happiness, she thought. It teaches you what you stand to lose.
“You are thinking rather loudly,” Dominic murmured into her hair.
“How can you tell?”
“Your breathing alters. It goes shallow when you are troubled.” His arm tightened about her. “Tell me.”
She was silent for a moment, tracing the scar along his ribs with one finger. “Do you ever think about what comes after?”
“After?”
“After the Hardings arrive. After Thomas goes to India. After—” She swallowed. “After this… arrangement reaches its natural conclusion.”
The word was chosen with care. Not love. Not anything that presumed permanence or equality or a future the world would deny them.
Dominic was silent long enough that she felt the warmth between them begin to cool at the edges.
“I think of it constantly,” he said at last, his voice stripped of its usual control. “When I wake and find you gone. When I watch you with Thomas. When I sit at my desk pretending to read correspondence while calculating how many hours remain before I may see you again.”
Her chest tightened. “Dominic—”
“I have no answers, Lorraine. I do not know how to make this possible. I do not know how to keep you without destroying what remains of your reputation,” he added gently, without pity. “I do not know how to keep Thomas. I do not know how to be the man either of you deserves.”
“You already are.”
“I am not. But I am trying.” He lifted her chin and kissed her—slow, unhurried, the gesture carrying more tenderness than heat. “I do not want an arrangement, Lorraine. I want—” He broke off, then tried again. “I want mornings. Every morning. I want—”
He couldn’t finish.
She saw the words there nonetheless, waiting—vast, terrifying, inevitable.
He drew her closer. She pressed her face against his throat, breathing him in—sandalwood and woodsmoke and the warmth that was simply him.
“Stay,” he said. “Do not return to your room tonight.”
“I never do.”
“Stay longer. Stay until—” He exhaled, unsteady. “Just stay.”
She did.
Outside, the December wind pressed against the windows of Rovewood Hall, and within, a duke held a governess in the dark and gathered the courage to name what was growing between them—vast, ungovernable, and impossible to deny.
He was very nearly there.