Page 27

“Juliet… You stand here with your lips parted like that…” he breathed. “Heavens, I’m lost already.”

Finally, he closed the little distance between them.

And he kissed her.

He’d tried his darnedest to stay away from this woman, keep his lust and his want for her behind walls of indifference, but it had brought him nothing but sheer suffering. She might never know the Herculean amount of restraint it had taken him to keep from kissing her on their wedding day.

But now, he could not hold himself back any longer. He kissed her the way he’d been not kissing her for three days, his hand moving from her arm to her jaw and his thumb below her cheekbone, consuming the lips that had taunted him so intensely.

He felt her exhale against his mouth, slowly and deliberately. Then both her hands came up to his chest, her fingers curling into his lapels.

He slanted his mouth over hers and kissed her properly, the way the dim candlelight, and the wine, and three days of watching her move through his house had been building toward, and she made a low sound against his lips that went through him like a current. Her grip on his lapels tightened, and she tilted her face and kissed him back with a thoroughness that unmade any ideas he’d had about keeping a respectable distance.

He walked her back one step, and her shoulders met the paneling beside the door, but she didn’t pull away. She kissed him with an intensity that made his lower half jerk, and he could feel her pulse in the side of her throat where his other hand had gone. His mouth came back to her lips and kissed her again, and she rose slightly on her heels. Her hands pulled his collar open, just slightly, and that specific detail undid something he’d been carefully maintaining.

He kissed her once more, long and slow. She let him, and he felt the tension in her shoulders leave her by degrees.

“Your Grace?”

Thomas’s voice came from the doorway.

Adam froze, his breath fanning hot against her mouth. Juliet’s forehead dropped against his chin for one moment, just one, before she stepped back and released his collar. He looked at her. Her lips were darker, her eyes had gone wide, and she was looking at his chest rather than his face, her breath unsteady.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

He turned to glare at Thomas. “What is it?”

The footman was absorbed in the floor, which had suddenly become the source of much fascination.

“Forgive me, Your Grace,” Thomas said, still addressing the ground beneath his feet with conviction. “But Lady Eloise has gone outside, and the staff cannot find her.”

All at once, reality seemed to rush back at him, his mind zeroing in on only one thing: his daughter.

“Which direction?” he said, already walking towards the exit.

“East, Your Grace. The groundskeeper saw her heading that way some minutes ago.”

Adam pressed his eyes shut briefly, then opened them. East. He knew exactly where she was. He always knew where she went.

“I know where she is,” he said, already moving past Thomas into the corridor. “Have two footmen with lamps meet me at the side door.”

“I’m coming with you,” Juliet said from behind him, her voice sounding panicked as well.

He thought about telling her to wait behind…but it was probably a better idea to let her know where to go so she could find Eloise if this ever happened again.

“Then come,” he said, and turned back toward the hall.

The ground was wet from the afternoon’s rain, and the gravel rang hollow underfoot. He walked fast, a footman ahead with a lamp.

Juliet kept pace beside him without a word of complaint despite the uneven ground and the fact that she was wearing evening slippers.

He noticed this and said nothing.

The cold was sharp, and the sky above the tree line was black, and none of it did anything to clear his head.

The stable block appeared out of the dark, its main doors slightly open, a thin bar of lantern light showing through. He pushed them wide.

The warmth and smell of horses settled around them at once. One of the ponies shifted in its stall. He saw her immediately. Eloise was on the ground in the far corner, her back against the wooden partition beside Sable’s stall, her knees pulled up to her chest. The pony had its nose stretched over the railing toward her.