He moved again, slowly at first, and she shifted to accommodate him and felt the discomfort dissolve into something else entirely: a warmth that began where they were joined andspread outward through her whole body, unhurried and building and nothing at all like anything she’d had adequate language for before now.
She heard herself make a sound, and he made one in return, lower, less voluntary, pressed against her throat.
There, she thought, with the small part of her mind still capable of thought.There he is.
Because this was him. The version of him that existed beneath the title and the composure and the seventeen years of meticulous self-governance. She could feel it in the increasing urgency of his movements, in the way his breath had abandoned all pretense of steadiness, in the involuntary press of his lips against her shoulder, her throat, her jaw. Not kisses so much as contact, the need to be closer still, even at the maximum possible proximity.
His mouth found her ear.
“God,” he said roughly, helplessly, the word arriving without apparent permission. And then, quieter, in a tone she had never heard from him: “You have no idea?—”
He didn’t finish, but she didn’t need him to.
She arched against him, and he responded with a sound low in his chest that she felt as much as heard. His rhythm changed, becoming deeper, less managed, the last vestige of governancedissolving. And she wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer.
The pleasure built in waves that grew less distinguishable from each other as they came faster, her nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks she would no doubt see tomorrow, and his voice in her ear saying her name—just her name, again and again, in that rough, stripped register that she was now certain she would hear in memory for the rest of her life.
When she came apart, it was without warning and without dignity, a sound escaping her that she would never have permitted in any other context, her whole body clenching around him and then releasing all at once like a string cut clean.
He stilled for a moment, and then his control broke entirely. She felt it, the full, unmanaged weight of his want, finally unhoused from seventeen years of careful custody, moving through him in long, shuddering waves.
His face pressed hard against her neck. His arms gathered her in with a completeness that left no question about whether she was held.
“Cressida.” Her name, one final time, wrecked and quiet. It made her heart ache and swell all at once.
She pressed her lips to his temple and held on until he went still. Eventually, his hand moved to her hair. He worked his fingers through it with a slow, idle focus.
“Theodore,” she said softly.
He made a sound of acknowledgment.
“Thank you.” She paused. “For coming inside, I mean. Rather than standing on the terrace until morning.”
A low exhale that might have been a laugh, coming from another man. “I was not going to stand there until morning.”
“You were absolutely going to stand there until morning and brood like a poet haunted by his ghosts.”
He grunted, and it took a short while for her to realize he had been laughing. “I had not decided that.”
She tilted her head up to look at him. In the low light, with his hair mussed and composure entirely gone from his face, he looked younger. Not the Duke of Ashmere, with all the weight of that title and history arranged about him, but simply a man who had wanted this for longer than he had allowed himself to admit.
“We are going to argue about this, aren’t we?” she snorted. “Even now.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I imagine we’re going to argue about a great many things.” He said it without heat, almost an admission. “That has been the prevailing pattern.”
“It has.” She rested her head against his chest. “I find I don’t mind it.”
He was quiet for a moment, his fingers still moving through her hair. “Nor do I,” he said finally.
Cressida closed her eyes, and from somewhere in the castle came the faint sound of the clock in the front hall marking midnight and then, a minute later, the muffled creak of a floorboard in the corridor outside, entirely too deliberate to be accidental, and the unmistakable rustle of what sounded very much like at least two sets of footsteps retreating from the vicinity of the door.
She opened her eyes, her gaze snapping to the door. Then she looked back at Theodore, who had also clearly heard the sound.
His expression was caught between several things at once. She watched the conflict play out across his face: the instinctive irritation of a man whose privacy had apparently been a subject of interest to his servants, and the recognition that his servants had been invested in this outcome long before either of them had been paying attention.
“Mrs. Agnes,” she said carefully.
“It would appear so,” he agreed.
