Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
She had kissed him first, and the knowledge of it was still in her mouth when he pulled back to look at her. Not far. An inch, perhaps less, the space between them now a thing with weight and temperature and the specific quality of a held breath.
She could feel the effort it took him to collect himself even now, even here, at half past midnight in an attic with the candle nearly out and her hands still fisted in his lapels.
She had always been aware of his composure. She had never before been the thing it was failing against.
“Alice.” The word arrived rough at the edges in a way his voice rarely was.
“Do not say that we should stop.”
He looked at her for a long moment. His eyes moved over her face the way they always did when he was deciding something—with that careful, particular attention that was its own form of touch.
Then he brought his hand to the back of her neck again, tilted her head, and kissed her with the full, unhurried intention of a man who had made his decision and had no further interest in pretending otherwise.
She made a sound against his mouth, and he swallowed it.
His hands moved to the fastenings at her back, his fingers finding the buttons easily. The silk loosened. His palms spread across her shoulder blades, warm through the fabric and then warmer when the fabric gave way, and she shivered.
“All right?” he said against her jaw.
“Yes,” she said. Very.
He peeled the silk from her shoulders, and she let it fall. The night air moved across her skin, and his gaze moved with it, deliberate, unhurried, beginning at her throat and following the candlelight down to her stays and then below.
She felt the familiar urge to cover herself, to apologize for her curves, but she also realized how little purchase that urge had found in the last thirty seconds.
He was looking at her with something she had stopped calling impossible months ago and was only now beginning to call by its name.
“Stay still,” he said.
She obeyed. Or she tried to. Staying still proved more difficult than expected when he reached for the laces of her stays with the same unhurried precision and began to work them free, his knuckles brushing her spine at each loosened crossing, the brush deliberate enough that she understood it was not accidental.
He was taking his time because he intended to take his time, and when her stays gave and her breath came easier and the night air kissed the skin he had uncovered, he pressed his mouth to the top of her spine and held it there for a moment that had no purpose except to undo her.
“Kenneth.”
“I know,” he murmured against her skin.
The blanket was on the floor, where it had slid from her lap. He gathered it one-handed, without releasing her, and spread it across the boards between the two chairs.
He looked at her again with that calm, focused attention, and she understood what he was asking.
She sat. The boards were solid beneath the wool, and the ceiling sloped low above them. The star charts looked close in the dimness, Cassiopeia at her tilted shoulder. She looked up at him standing over her in his evening coat, the candlelight behind him catching the line of his jaw.
The thought arrived with the simplicity of something that had always been true: she had wanted him since the service yard and had only been lying to herself about when it had become inevitable.
He shrugged off his coat, then removed his waistcoat and set it aside, the white of his linen visible in the low light. He sat beside her on the blanket, turned toward her, and cupped her face in both hands.
“Alice. My Alice,” he murmured.
Then he kissed her again, slow and thorough. His hands moved from her face to her shoulders, to the curve of her waist, and to the swell of her hips, where he stopped.
He pulled back an inch. His thumb pressed a deliberate circle into the soft curve of her hip through the thin linen of her chemise, and he watched her face while he did it.
The combination of the pressure and the hunger in his eyes sent a wave of heat through her that concentrated in the center of her thighs.
“I have thought about this,” he said, low and unhurried. “Here.” His thumb moved again. “For months.”
She could not make her voice do anything useful.
“You should know,” he continued in the same even register, which was worse than it would have been if his voice had broken, “that the difficulty I have had keeping my hands off you has been considerable. And I have kept them off you.” His other hand moved to the hem of her chemise. “That is over.”
“Yes,” she said, because it was the only possible answer.
He laid her back, his hand supporting her back until she was flat against the blanket with the floorboards solid beneath and the sloped ceiling above and the star charts filling her peripheral vision.
He pulled back to look at her from above, his shirt open at the collar, his expression stripped of everything that was not this.
The specific quality of that stripping open, the man beneath the Duke, visible and unhidden, was very nearly as intoxicating as anything his hands had done.
“You are…” he trailed off.
“I am what?” she prompted.
His eyes moved over her in the candlelight, slowly, without apology.
“Exquisite,” he replied. “Absolutely exquisite. And I’m ravenous for you, my wife.”
He kissed her throat. Her collarbone. The swell of her breasts above the chemise. She arched into him. His mouth was warm, and his beard left a slight drag across sensitive skin that she registered in her sternum and below.
When he drew the chemise from her shoulders and off her, she did not reach for it.
What he did then was not what he had done in the garden. In the garden, she had been standing, his mouth finding her through gathered silk, the world contracted to a single urgent point. This was the opposite of that.
He took his time with her, beginning at her shoulder and moving with a slow, purposeful attention, his hands and his mouth mapping out the curve of her waist, the weight of her breasts, and the soft place below her ribs that made her inhale sharply when his mouth reached it.
He lingered on that place for a long time before moving further.
“Kenneth,” she moaned.
“Yes,” he said against her stomach.
When he reached her thighs, she was already shaking. He looked up at her. She was looking down at him with her lip between her teeth and her hands fisted in the blanket.
His expression sharpened into something that might have frightened her at any other moment.
“Ask me,” he prompted.
“Please,” she said, without hesitation.
Just the word, and him, and the candlelight burning its last inch at the window.
His mouth found her. He was thorough in the way he was thorough about everything: systematic, unhurried, and in complete possession of himself even now, when she was manifestly not.
His hands were on her hips, holding her, and his mouth moved with a precise and patient attention that wound the heat through her in long gathering coils, each coil borrowing from the last.
When she tried to grind her hips against him, he held her in place until she cried out his name.
“I have you,” he said against her.
She came apart.
She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. Her hips moved, helpless, and he held her through it, patient and inexorable, until the shaking stopped and the coils released all at once.
She lay still on the blanket, with the star charts above her and the sounds of London muted below. Her entire body did nothing more complex than existing.
He came up beside her. He lay on the blanket, looking at the ceiling and saying nothing.
Alice noticed, through the warm confusion of the aftermath, that his breathing was not entirely steady.
She turned her head.
He was on his back, his shirt open, one arm above his head, staring at the sloped ceiling, his entire body tense. She looked at the line of his throat, the shadow of his jaw, the set of his shoulders.
“Kenneth.” Her voice had gone quiet in a way it had not before.
He turned his head, and his eyes found hers.
“I want to pleasure you,” she said simply. “Show me.”
Something moved across his face.
“Alice,” he rasped.
“Show me,” she said again. “Please.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took her hand.
After taking off his trousers, he guided her slowly, his hand over hers, and the sound that left him when she found the hardness between his legs was low and involuntary, unlike anything she had heard from him before.
He did not keep his composure. He was unmanaged and ungoverned, his head thrown back and his breathing ragged. His hand remained over hers, guiding and then gripping, and then simply gripping.
She watched his face and understood for the first time that the control she had always read as distance was, in fact, the thing preventing her from seeing this, the version of him that had no walls around it.
His free hand found her hip and gripped it.
“Alice,” he groaned.
She did not stop until he came undone, his seed spilling over her hand and her name tearing past his lips again.
He was very still for a moment, and then he released a long, steady breath. He took his waistcoat, cleaned up the mess on her hand, and tossed the garment away. Then he pulled her close and looked at her with an expression she had no word for and was not going to attempt to name.
The candle went out.
They lay in the dark with the stars at the window and the city’s low orange haze above the rooftops.
She was aware of the warmth of him at her side, the wool beneath them and his breathing slowly evening out.
This is what I wanted.
Not the garden, though she had not known it then. Not the ballroom, or the dinner table, or any of the hundreds of moments she had spent telling herself she was fine with whatever this was. But this. Him, undone, in the dark, with her the reason for it.
She did not say so. She closed her eyes instead.
The next thing she knew, she was moving.
She felt her body press against something warm, and she understood, without fully waking, that she was being carried.
She turned her face into the warmth, which smelled of cedar and linen and something uniquely him, and his arms tightened fractionally around her.
She did not open her eyes. She did not need to.
Through the warm confusion of near-sleep, she thought that she ought to say something. Thank you, or I am capable of walking, or some other reasonable thing.
She could not find the words. She found, at the bottom of the thought, that she did not particularly want to.
She let herself be carried.
Alice woke to birdsong and grey light and the familiar ceiling of her room.
For a moment, she lay still. Then, she blinked once, twice, and sat up.
The birds on the Grosvenor Square sycamores.
The quality of early light, pre-breakfast, pre-household, the quiet hour she had come to recognize as the gap between the night and the day before either had fully committed.
The warmth of her own bed.
The weight of the previous evening settled over her in a long wave. She let it settle and did not reach for any part of it to contain or correct. She lay still and let it be what it was.
On the bedside table, where her book usually sat and a candle stub and nothing else, there was a small brass instrument she had not put there.
She reached for it. It was heavier than it looked. A pocket orrery, perhaps three inches across, the planets arranged on concentric rings around a small, enameled sun at its center, the workmanship fine enough to have belonged to someone who cared about accuracy rather than ornament.
She turned it in her hands. The rings moved, the planets rotating on their tracks with a faint, precise click at each interval, Mercury to Venus to Earth to the red nick of Mars, each in its correct relation to the others.
She held it for a long time.
Through the wall, she could already hear the sounds of the household beginning its day.
The distant clatter of the kitchen. The soft footfall of the first housemaid on the back stairs.
The ordinary morning noise of a household that had no idea what had happened in the attic at one o’ clock, in the dark, between two people who had arrived there by a chain of events beginning with a seven-year-old and a travel bag in a service yard.
She looked at the orrery. At Mercury, smallest and fastest, closest to the sun.
She carefully set it on the table, where she could see it from the bed. Then she lay back and looked at the ceiling and allowed herself, for the length of exactly one breath, to be entirely happy.