“You are insufferable.” Her voice shook, but her hips shifted toward him, betraying every word. “It is entirely your fault.”
He smiled. “Good. I intend it to be.”
The stem traced the top of her thigh, barely touching, a tease that promised everything and delivered only the ache of waiting. Elinor’s hips shifted, and the small, involuntary movement sent a surge of heat through him that nearly shattered his control.
He set the jasmine aside.
His mouth replaced it.
He pressed his lips to the inside of her knee, where the skin was soft and warm, and Elinor’s hand flew from the grass to his hair. He kissed higher. Slow. Deliberate. Following the path the jasmine had traced, his mouth warm against her skin, and she made a sound that was no longer a gasp or a laugh but something deeper, something that vibrated through her body and into his.
His lips moved higher still, along the inside of her thigh, and Elinor’s fingers tightened in his hair, her breathing ragged, her body taut beneath him like a bowstring drawn to its limit.
When his mouth found her pearl nestled between her curls, he caressed it with his tongue. When he heard her strangled gasp, he increased his ministrations. He suckled her pearl and gently slid a finger into her slick entrance. His tongue and finger worked in unison. Sliding in and out. Flicking again and again. His rhythm increased as her muffled cries increased.
When he felt her tunnel clench and her hips buck, he gave one last flick of the tongue as she partially collapsed against him, her body quivering and breaths coming in short pants.
Afterward, he held her against him while her breathing steadied, her forehead pressed to his shoulder, her fingers still clutched in his waistcoat. The jasmine moved above them in a breeze that carried laughter from the terrace, distant and irrelevant.
Elinor lifted her head. Her spectacles were still crooked, and he straightened them for her, the gesture so tender it startled him.She watched his face as he did it, and he could see the question forming behind her eyes.
What are we doing?
He did not have an answer. Or rather, he had one, and it terrified him so completely that his mind did what it had always done when something threatened to breach his defenses: it retreated.
“We should return to the party,” he said. “Before we are missed.”
Something flickered across Elinor’s face. Not hurt, not yet, but the careful, watchful expression of a woman who had learned to read the distance in other people’s voices.
“Of course,” she said.
She smoothed her skirts and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and walked ahead of him back toward the lantern light, and Lucien watched her go with the sick, familiar understanding that he was already doing what he had sworn he would not: pulling away from the one person who made him want to stay.
He followed her at a careful distance. The quartet had resumed. Guests were settling into their seats for the next reading.
Dominic caught his eye from the terrace and lifted a brow that said more than any words could.
Lucien looked away.
That night, in his study at Fairmont House, he poured himself a brandy and spread the duchy’s ledgers across his desk. There were accounts to reconcile, tenants to correspond with, appointments to arrange with his solicitor regarding the last of his uncle’s debts. Enough work to fill every waking hour for a week, if he let it.
He let it.
This is what you know,he told himself, turning the first page.Business. Duty. The clean, predictable architecture of numbers and obligations. This is what keeps you safe.
But the brandy tasted like nothing, and the numbers blurred, and when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the press of her fingers in his waistcoat and hear the broken way she had said his name in the dark.
Chapter Seventeen
“Perhaps he has found someone more suited to his tastes,” Belinda delivered the observation over breakfast the way she delivered all her cruelties: wrapped in silk and aimed at the softest place she could find.
Five days had passed since Lord Ashbury’s garden party, and the Duke of Fairmont had not called, had not written, had not appeared at a single event.
Elinor stirred her tea and said nothing.
“I did warn you,” her stepmother said from the head of the table, not looking up from her correspondence. “If you have done something to displease him, Elinor, I expect you to mend it. I will not have this engagement collapse and make fools of us all.”
“He is busy with his duties to the duchy,” Elinor answered. Her voice came out flatter than she intended. “That is all.”
