Chapter 17 #2
She bit her lip, the heat radiating from her core begging for satisfaction. And some deep, secret part of her knew that only he could give that to her.
She pressed a hand to her racing heart as his lips resumed their journey.
When he reached the juncture of her thighs, she made an involuntary sound, and his hands tightened in response. Her nerves dissipated as a pleasure unlike any other filled her entire being.
The world contracted to the clearing, to the bite of stone at her back and the weight of silk in her fists and the exquisite, unhurried attention of his mouth. The afternoon light fell through the pear tree branches in dappled patterns.
Her head fell back against the wall, and she closed her eyes. She felt the heat build inside her in long, accumulating waves, each one gathering what the last had left behind.
His hands held her when the heat became unbearable and she could not hold still.
“That’s it, sweetheart. Let go for me. Give me your pleasure,” he growled between licks.
He continued lapping at her until she broke apart against him, pressing her hand to her mouth to muffle her moans. Her whole body convulsed once, twice, and then went still.
A very long moment passed. She was aware of the wall behind her, the silk gathered in her hands, the sound of the garden party, its indifferent noise beyond the hedge.
Kenneth rose. He straightened his coat calmly, with a small yet triumphant smirk.
He reached up and brushed a strand of copper hair from her face, tucking it back behind her ear.
The tenderness of the gesture, so small against everything else, was what finally sent the heat from her chest to her eyes.
She looked at him. He was looking at her, his expression still open in that way it seldom was, and she understood that he had meant every word he’d said.
She did not know what this was. She did not know what name to give it, or what it would become, or whether he would call it some variant of mistake in the morning. Her body was still humming with the aftermath. Her mind had not caught up, and she suspected it would not catch up for a while.
“We should go back,” he murmured.
“Yes.” Her voice was remarkably level, all things considered.
“Before the boys climb high enough to require rescue.”
“Freddie in particular.”
He half-smiled. “Of course.”
Alice smoothed her skirts. She pressed her palms to her cheeks and felt the heat lingering there, before turning to face the gap in the yew hedge.
The party hum reached her as it had before: the violin, the guests, the ordinary machinery of a summer afternoon. Only the world had shifted on its axis by several degrees, and she was the only one who knew it.
She moved toward the gap. Kenneth fell into step beside her. She could feel him at her shoulder, the warmth of him in the cooler air of the sheltered path.
I am in trouble.
She had told Lucy so not an hour ago and understood it dimly, the way one understood a danger that had not yet fully arrived.
Now, she understood it in her bones, in the specific and humiliating clarity of a woman who had just had a duke kneel before her in a garden and understood that this was not sufficient.
That she wanted more. Not the physical more—though that was present, a warm and particular ache—but the other more.
The more that had no safe name for women in her position.
She wanted him entirely.
She had wanted him since the service yard, probably, and the wanting had only grown with each dinner table argument and each closed door and each moment he chose to be human when he believed no one was watching.
And she had no idea whether the man walking beside her, calm and composed and already retreating behind his walls, wanted the same.
They emerged from the yew path onto the main lawn. The garden party opened around them, silk and laughter and the smell of cut grass.
Across the lawn, the oak tree stood with three boys in its branches and Jonathan at its base, looking up with his hands in his pockets and the resigned amusement of a man who had been asked to monitor a minor catastrophe.
Freddie spotted them first.
“Papa! Alice! Uncle Jonathan says I’ve gone too high, but I can see the river from here, the actual river. It’s blue, and there’s a barge on it, which means I’m not too high. It means I’m exactly the right height for barge-observation…”
Alice looked up at the third branch of the oak tree, at Freddie’s delighted, muddy face above the summer leaves, and felt the laughter bubble up in her chest and take up residence there beside everything else.
She did not look at Kenneth. She did not need to. She could feel the precise moment when he exhaled beside her, slow and controlled, the sound of a man standing in a garden in May trying very hard not to smile.
“Come down, Frederick,” he ordered.
“But the barge…”
“Now.”
“You never let me see anything good.”
“The barge will still exist tomorrow. You have leaves in your hair.”
Alice pressed her fingers briefly to her lips.
The afternoon light fell warm across the lawn, past the yew hedge and the espaliered pear trees and the old stone wall.
And her body still remembered his hands.