Chapter Six
“You look flushed, my dear. Perhaps the claret.”
Aunt Margery said it innocently, genuinely convinced that claret was responsible for the color in her niece’s cheeks, and Imogen let her believe it, because the alternative explanation involved a duke who was seated four places down the Asquith dinner table and who had spent the past hour and a half looking at Imogen with an attention that the claret could not possibly account for.
“Perhaps,” Imogen said. “I think I will step out for air.”
She rose from the table carefully, composing herself, aware of her own body in a manner she very much wished she were not.
The dining room was too warm. Forty people in a room designed for thirty, the candles on the table and the claret were adding to the warmth.
The Duke of Ravenhurst, four places down and on the opposite side, was making it even worse, even though his contribution was less thermal and more persistent.
She excused herself to Aunt Margery, who nodded vaguely and returned to a conversation about the price of muslin with the woman on her left.
She excused herself to Cassie, who was deep in discussion with Miss Drayton about a bonnet they had both seen in a shop window on Bond Street and which one of them had a better claim to.
Nobody noticed Imogen leave the table, because nobody ever noticed Imogen.
Tonight the invisibility was a gift, because tonight she needed to be alone with the heat in her body, the memory of the corridor and the growing, terrifying suspicion that she was not going to be able to stop wanting the Duke of Ravenhurst no matter how many sensible voices told her to try.
She had been trying not to look at him. She had been trying since the first course, when she had made the mistake of glancing down the table and had found his pale eyes already on her, steady and unhurried.
The look had lasted three full seconds before she had broken the contact and returned her attention to her turbot with a concentration that the turbot did not deserve.
But the eyes kept coming back. Every time she raised her own gaze from the plate, he was there, watching her from between the candelabra with an expression that was not exactly desire and not exactly amusement but was, if she was reading it accurately, something closer to patience, the particular patience of a man who knew where the evening was going and was content to wait for it to arrive.
The Asquith manor was a sprawling country house on the western edge of London, the sort of property that wealthy families kept for entertaining when the season became too hot, too crowded and too expensive to manage within the city proper.
The dinner had been forty people in a room designed for thirty, the candles too many, the courses too rich, and the conversation pitched at the particular frequency that polite society adopted when everyone in the room had something to say.
Imogen had eaten very little. She had drunk two glasses of claret, which was one more than her usual; the second glass had been a mistake, because the second glass had made her brave enough to look back at Ash across the table, and looking back at him had made her aware, again, of everything she had been trying not to be aware of since the corridor at the Montford.
She could remember the fact that she had bitten his lip, which continued to astonish her three days later, because Imogen Goodall did not bite men’s lips in dark corridors, or at least she had not done so before last Tuesday.
The version of herself who had done it was a version she was still getting acquainted with and was not entirely certain she trusted.
She slipped away from the table while the dessert was being cleared and the gentlemen were beginning to arrange themselves for the port.
The corridor beyond the dining room led past the morning room and the small parlor and through a set of glass-panelled doors into the conservatory.
The conservatory was where she went, because it was the only room in the Asquith manor that did not contain people, and people were the thing she needed a respite from, particularly one person.
The person whose attention had been sitting on her skin all evening like a hand she could feel but could not see.
The conservatory was warm. Wet warm air, heavy with the scent of orange blossom and damp earth, the kind of heat that arrived through the glass roof during the day and lingered through the evening, trapped, thick and faintly tropical.
The orange trees were arranged in pots along both walls, their leaves dark and glossy, their fruit small, unripe and fragrant.
The lamplight was low, a single oil lamp on a table near the door and another at the far end beside a potting bench, and the space between them was all shadow, green and the soft drip of water from the pipes that fed the misting system along the glass.
Imogen stood among the orange trees and breathed. She closed her eyes and let the quiet settle around her and tried, very deliberately, to stop thinking about the Duke of Ravenhurst.
She did not succeed. She had not succeeded in three days, and she was not going to succeed now, standing alone in an orange-tree conservatory with the taste of claret on her lips and the memory of his thumb on her nipple still lodged in her body like a splinter she could not reach.
The memory was physical. That was the problem.
It was not a thought she could dismiss or an idea she could argue with.
It was a sensation, specific, located and persistent, and it lived in the place beneath her stays where his hand had been and in the warmth between her legs where the corridor had left its mark.
The claret had only made it worse, and she was beginning to understand, with a clarity she did not welcome, that the books had been right about one thing at least. Desire, once started, did not stop on request.
“You left before the port.”
She did not open her eyes. She did not need to.
His voice arrived from the direction of the glass doors, low and close, and the sound of it went through her the same way the corridor had gone through her; a slow direct current that bypassed her mind entirely and spoke to her body in a language her body was apparently fluent in despite never having studied it.
“Women are not served the port, Your Grace. I was not aware I was required to wait for a beverage I would not receive.”
“You were not required to wait. I was merely noting that you left.” A pause. She heard him move closer, the soft sound of his boots on the stone floor, the faint rustle of his coat. “I followed you. I should probably apologise for that.”
“And will you?”
“No.”
She opened her eyes. He was standing three feet from her, between two orange trees, the lamplight catching the scar at the corner of his mouth and the pale silver of his eyes.
He was not smiling, he was not performing, and the look on his face was the one she had seen in the corridor after she had pushed him against the wall: the bewildered one, the one that looked nothing like the Duke of Ravenhurst and everything like a man who had lost the script and was trying to find his way without it.
He kissed her without speaking first. He stepped forward, his hand coming up beneath her shawl to find the curve of her waist; his mouth found hers, and the kiss was different from the corridor.
The corridor had been urgent, surprised and heated by its own unexpectedness.
This was slow and deliberate. This was a man who had followed her into a conservatory knowing exactly what he intended to do when he got there, and the fact that he had chosen this and was not pretending otherwise made the kiss land differently.
It was deeper, somewhere below the place where she kept her composure and above the place where the corridor still hummed.
His hand slid from her waist to her breast. Through the gown, through the shawl that had fallen to one side, his palm settling over her with a pressure that was firm and certain and made her entire body go still.
Not frozen. Still. The kind of stillness that came from every nerve in her body paying attention to the same thing at the same time, the heat of his hand through the silk, the slight curl of his fingers, the way his thumb found the peak of her nipple through the fabric and pressed, gently, and the press sent a pulse through her that made her gasp against his mouth.
He stopped, and she opened her eyes. He was looking at her, his hand still on her breast, his breathing uneven, and she could see him struggling with something, a decision forming behind his eyes that she could not quite read.
He took her hand. Slowly. His gloved fingers closing around her bare ones, because she had removed her gloves in the conservatory to feel the orange leaves and had not put them back on.
He lifted her hand and brought it down between them and pressed it, slowly, firmly, against the front of his trousers.
Her palm met him through the wool.
The shock of it was physical. Not the shock of surprise, because she had read enough to know what she would find, but the shock of reality, the vast unbridgeable distance between a word on a page and a man’s body under her hand.
He was hard. The length of him pressing against her palm through the wool of his breeches, warm, straining and undeniably, impossibly real.
Her breath stopped in her throat, her fingers curled involuntarily around the shape of him, and his breath left him in a sound that was almost a word but not quite.