On the other side of the door, something hitched—half breath, half groan.
“Celine,” he warned.
“And you?” she breathed. “What doyoudream of?”
He leaned closer; she felt the heat of him even through the wood.
“I dream,” he said, voice breaking around the edges, “of your hair spread out over my pillow, your thighs around my hips, your nails in my back.” A pause, then lower: “I dream of the sounds you will make when I’m so deep inside you, you forget your own name.”
She inhaled sharply, thighs instinctively pressing together.
“Go on.”
“Celine…”
“No, don’t stop. Tell me. What else?”
His voice was rough now, unravelling. “I dream of you begging. Not because you’re scared—because you’re so desperate for it you can scarcely breathe. I want to see you fall apart. I want to hear you sob my name when you’re already undone and I still refuse to let you go.”
Her breath hitched, but she didn’t flinch.
“I dream about your control snapping,” she said, her voice unsteady now. “About seeing what you look like when you lose that rigid, perfect self-control you cling to like armour.”
A flicker of something dark passed through his gaze. “That might not be safe.”
“I’m not asking for safe.” She leaned in, “I’m asking for real.”
Another long silence, then the sound of him moving away from the door.
“Nineteen days,” he said, voice fading. “Nineteen more days.”
But as Celine lay there, staring at the ceiling, she wondered whether they were counting down to a beginning, or an undoing.
And which one she feared more.
Chapter Twelve
One Week Later
“You’re staring.”
Celine’s voice drifted through the quiet morning air of the breakfast room, amused and knowing. She did not look up from her correspondence, but she could feel the weight of the Duke’s gaze as surely as a touch.
“I’m observing,” he corrected, though he made no attempt to deny it.
“And what, precisely, are you observing?”
“The way you bite your lower lip when you concentrate. The faint furrow between your brows when a letter displeases you. The pattern your fingers tap upon the table—it matches your breathing.”
She did look up then, finding his grey eyes already fixed on her, intense and unblinking. “That is rather invasive.”
“That is marriage.”
He lifted his coffee, still watching her over the rim. “We leave for London in two hours. Go pack.”
She left the breakfast room on unsteady legs, her skin still burning where he’d touched her. Two hours to prepare for threehours of exquisite torture in a carriage with a man whose control was visibly fracturing.
She couldn’t wait.
