“Oh,” was all she could manage. Breathless and silly. She was nothing but a quivering mass of longing. All his.
Always his.
His breath was a hot curtain falling over her ear, her throat. “I fear we won’t make it to the rose garden, nor back to the house. If I am not inside you in the next minute, I swear I shall die.”
She knew the feeling.
She also knew a place that might do.
A grassy patch not far down the path, but in clear view of certain windows in the west wing of Coddington Hall. In that moment, she did not care. Let the world watch if they wished. She was with the man she loved, she was happier than she had ever been, and the day was warm and redolent with promise.
“Come with me,” she said. “I have just the spot.”
* * *
She ledhim to a patch of thick, verdant grass just beyond the maze they had been winding through. The view was astounding, pitched on the hill overlooking the lake and the fountain that spouted from its center. The massive house dominated the landscape, and they were in clear view of at least the nearest wing of the house and its gold-bedecked windows.
He ought to care. Ought to worry that if he was too bold, as he had been warned against by Longleigh, that he would not receive the king’s ransom he had been promised. But everything had changed when Adrian had realized his heart was no longer cold and hollow as it had been before Tilly.
And now, everything he had wanted was within his reach. He shucked his coat and laid it out to keep her fine silk from bearing a stain. Together, they descended to the earth. Adrian felt like a man reborn as they laid together in the soft, sweet-scented grass. His sealed his lips over hers. Kissed her deeply as his hand fisted in her skirts, lifting them.
It seemed fitting that he should make love to Tilly in the shadow of Coddington Hall. Adrian hoped all the previous dukes were turning over in their graves at a by-blow of the current duke about to sink between the creamy, beckoning thighs of the duchess. He knew it was wrong of him to savor the wickedness, this taste of the forbidden. But it—and Tilly—tasted like vengeance and love mixed together in one delicious, potent concoction.
And he wanted this.
He wantedher.
His days with Tilly had passed as if in a dream. He was a guest, at long last, in the home of the father who had denied him. He was living the life of a proxy duke. He had the house, the servants, the thousands of acres, the ceilings painted centuries ago by an Italian master, the fountains, the gardens, the most exquisite food he had ever consumed.
But most importantly, and surpassing those marvels, he had the duchess herself.
The marvel he would take above all the rest.
The only marvel he wanted to take with him when he inevitably left Coddington Hall.
A strange thought, a strange rush, a strangeneedblossomed.
One that had to do less with his rampant cockstand than it had to do with the emotions which had been coursing through him from the moment he had first met Tilly. Falling in love with her had never been part of the plan. But now that he had, how could he end this? How could he leave her?
There seemed only one answer.
He would not.
He broke the kiss, staring down at her, struck by her loveliness, the lush invitation of her curves beneath his body. “I don’t want this to end, Tilly. A month with you is not going to be enough.”
No amount of time would be.
He knew it instinctively. Whatever it was between them, it was a force. It had seized him unexpectedly and violently, like a summer thunderstorm bowling through the landscape.
“I feel the same,” she murmured, her gaze rivaling the vibrance of the grass as she stared back at him, her mouth swollen with his kisses.
He wanted her to wear his brand every day. He wanted her to be his. The bitter irony of finding love again when he had never expected to do so, only to find it with someone so thoroughly forbidden to him, lingered beneath the surface of the moment.
He was not going to accept the money. He was not going to leave for America. He was staying here. He was going to fight for her.
“Nothing could have prepared me for you. But now that I have you, I never want to let you go.” A truer confession had never come from his lips.
“I feel as if I have been waiting all my life for you,” she told him, cupping his cheek in a tender touch he felt in his heart and his groin both.
