No, he didn’t go there, or no, it wasn’t beautiful? Mara wanted him to elaborate, but it was clear by the pulse of a muscle high in his jaw that the estate was a topic he did not care to discuss, similar to his parents. When she’d asked him about them before, he’d bristled like a bear. A bear with very sharp, very dangerous teeth. Not wanting to feel the chomp of a bite, she’d let the matter drop. But how was she supposed to know if they were compatible enough for marriage if she didn’t know him?
“Your Grace,” she began, raising her skirts as they stepped onto a small bridge. “What do you—”
“Lilacs,” he interrupted.
Mara frowned. “Pardon?”
“Every person has an individual scent.” He stopped in the middle of the bridge and suddenly she found herself pressed against the railing, his arms trapping her on either side as his mouth hovered in the space where passion and possibility collided. “Yours is a bloom of lilacs on the first day of spring. When the ground is still frozen, and the air is sharp, but the lilacs...” Lowering his head, he nuzzled her neck. “The lilacs are sweet.”
Who knew, she thought dazedly, that the Duke of Southwick was such a poet? A poetanda pianist, his lips flitting across her flushed skin like fingers on keys. He played her expertly, drawing forth notes and chords that she hadn’t even realized were trapped inside of her. Notes and chords that created a beautiful, haunting melody of wanting and desire.
Whilst the birds sang, and the brook babbled, and the roses bloomed, Ambrose kissed her with an almost lazy intensity, as if they were on the first movement of a classical symphony with three more to go. His tongue languished in her mouth, stroking and then retreating, thrusting and then parrying, before he sank his teeth into her bottom lip, eliciting a moan of pure pleasure.
It was a fanciful imagining, but Mara couldn’t help but wonder if this was how a flower felt when it yielded its nectar to a bee. Drinking up the sun one moment, surrendering itself to a fierce adversary the next. Except the bee wasn’ttrulyan adversary, because along with the nectar, it was also taking pollen, that magical yellow dust that allowed flowers to spread, and grow, and thrive.
Was that what Ambrose was doing for her?
Doingtoher?
Clasping her hips, he turned her around so that she was overlooking the water while he kissed the side of her throat and his hands teased their way up her waist to cup her breasts, touching her where she’d touched herself in the dim and the darkness.
“Do you like that?” he whispered—the voice of the devil purring in her ear—and she nodded helplessly, her head lolling onto his shoulder as the music built. Taking her arm by the wrist, he drew it down, down, down to the v-shaped garden below her hips where he took precious care to align her fingers over the damp curls hidden beneath layers of thin cotton and muslin. “Are you slick with wanting, Lady Marabelle? Are you pulsing with it?”
A shy pause, a galloping heart, and then she nodded again... transforming from a pianoforte to a flower, then to a marionette as he guided her hand, using it as if it were an object solely designed for his pleasure instead of an appendage of her own body.
Using it as if it belonged to him.
As ifshebelonged to him.
And heaven help her immortal soul, but in that moment... in that moment, she wanted to. In that moment, she would have given anything—she would have giveneverything—to be his.
Manipulated by her own fingers (which, in the duke’s grasp, were far more deft at delivering sexual gratification than when she was in sole control of them), Mara began to rock her hips back and forth, unconsciously rubbing the curve of her bottom along the rigid shaft contained within Ambrose’s trousers.
Groaning into her hair, he centered her in the middle of his body and continued to guide her wrist in increasingly rapid undulations so that she was pleasuring herself in the front and him behind, all while the day continued on around them with gardeners gardening and chaperones sleeping and the busy world beyond completely oblivious to what passions were occurring on an unassuming little wooden bridge in the middle of Kensington Gardens between a mighty duke and a wide-eyed wallflower.
When the crescendo began to build for the fourth movement, Mara stiffened, her willowy frame going taut as a violin string. On a gasping cry that a bird enthusiast on the far end of the park confused for the call of a brown thrasher, she came at her own hand. A breath later and the duke followed suit, yanking her tight against him while he thrusted his loins forward, pinning her to the railing. She clutched the wood, bending over it as the symphony reached its final climax. There was a desperate rising swell of music, a song caught on the trembling edge of a heartbeat, and then absolute silence... silence save for the duke’s ragged exhale in her ear.
He released his grasp on her arm, leaving a wrinkled glove in his wake. A glove that she would go on later that night to fold carefully away in the cedar trunk under her bed, where she kept her most precious belongings, never to be worn again.
She turned around just as he was running a hand across his face, leaving his expression temporarily unguarded. In his gaze she saw a flicker of disbelief, almost awe, and below that... below that was such an earnestyearningthat she found herself battling back a rush of tears.
Mara knew what it was like to want something. To want something with a fierceness that consumed all that you were.
For her, it was freedom. Freedom from her tyrant of a father. Freedom from the nightmares of her past. Freedom to become more than she was born to be.
And while she had no idea what adukecould want that he didn’t already have, like recognized like. Pain recognized pain. Hurt recognized hurt.
Reaching for his hand, she gently linked their fingers and his countenance immediately shuttered.
“Lady Marabelle, I must apologize—”
“I’ll do it,” she said, her eyes wide with a mixture of uncertainty and hope.
“You’ll do what?” he said warily.
“I’ll marry you. That is why you’ve been courting me, isn’t it?” When the uncertainty began to overshadow the hope, she snatched her hand away and wondered if the water under the bridge was deep enough to drown herself in. “I... I’m sorry. Never mind. I was being terribly presumptuous, and I... I... I don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispered haltingly.
The corners of Ambrose’s lips gave the tiniest of twitches. “That much is obvious. But you’re right. Ihavebeen courting you with the intention of proposing. You merely beat me to it, and we can’t have that, can we?”
