She wanted him to lie her down and open her up again and teach her what pleasure could be. He knew, she knew he did.
But he paused, moving back to look at her. His mouth turned down slightly, and there was a frown in his eyes.
Instantly, she knew he would not agree to everything.
Shame washed over her, made all the worse for the contrast between it and the boneless pleasure she had just experienced.
As though he felt her emotions as strongly as she did, he reached up to gently cup her face, stroking her cheekbone with his thumb. “You know why we can’t.”
“Because it would be improper?”
“If I am ever to have you in that way, Thalia, it will not be here, where anyone might walk in on us, and where there is a ticking clock counting down the minutes until we must leave.”
Ah. Yes. If they were to get back to London without being discovered, they would have to leave soon.
This was not reality. She had stepped into a different world for a second, but she would have to return soon. And when she did, it would be easier if she had not given herself to him here.
“I understand,” she said, and rose, letting her skirts fall over her legs.
He had not removed her stockings, and so to outside eyes, she looked perfectly respectable. And if it had not been for the stickiness between her thighs and the door he had opened in her mind, she might have felt the same, too.
The Duke stood slowly. Then, he placed one finger under her chin and raised her face to meet his. “I will not forget this,” he told her, fiercely, and kissed her again. The forceful slide of his tongue assured her, indeed, that he would not.
She would not. In this, they would be equal.
Then he broke away, and she knew it was over.
“Come,” he said, his hand finding hers. “Let me take you home.”
CHAPTER 14
Maxwell was bored. Ballrooms had never been his favorite kind of place, and even less so when he found himself escorting Lydia without trying to impinge on her life too much.
Thalia gave good advice; he had to admit. But every time he thought about her, he remembered the things he had done to her, and then his mind went in an entirely different direction.
The inevitable had happened: she was beginning to intrude on his everyday reality.
When he saw a painting on the wall, he thought of her. In his carriage, he still fancied he could smell her perfume. Now, with dancing couples before him, he found himself seeking her out. Always, she was escorted by her father, who thrust her at available gentlemen.
Always, she never seemed to look at him.
“Excuse me,” he said to the young, curvaceous lady he was conversing with.
She stood beside her husband, the Duke of Kirkford, Maxwell’s senior by a decade, but the older gentleman had evidently been hanging on to every word his wife said.
Unlike Maxwell.
No, instead, he had been consumed with a lady who stood at the other side of the ballroom, about to partner with yet another gentleman who had queued up to fill her dance card.
He shouldn’t care. They had made each other no promises; he had stopped himself from lying with her when he knew it would do her no good.
So why did it feel like a dagger was being shoved in his chest every time she smiled at another man?
“It’s all right,” the Duchess of Kirkford said, her hazel eyes glimmering with amusement as she leaned against her husband’s arm. “I remember how it felt.”
“How did it feel?” The Duke of Kirkford raised a brow. “Are you implying it no longer feels like that, Madeline?”
She laughed, tipping her head back with such a look of adoration, Maxwell’s heart gave another lurch in his chest.
