Page 568 of From Rakes to Riches

The kiss was over—too soon.

She pulled away only enough to hold his gaze. “Does anyone else know this about you?” she found herself asking.

His eyebrows crinkled together in puzzlement. “What about me?”

She shook her head, already regretting the question, choosing to keep the observation to herself.

Reality had begun to crowd in. This man—thisduke—didn’t want to be called tender.

In silence, they dressed.

Once fully clothed, Gemma watched him knot his cravat and realized she could say something else to him. Something he needed to hear. And if she didn’t speak it now, the opportunity might never arise again… “You deserve better than you’re allowing yourself.”

His fingers froze, and surprised eyes lifted. “I’m a duke. I deny myself nothing.”

She wasn’t put off. “But don’t you?”

This belief of his needed to be challenged, for it wasn’t true.

He propped a shoulder against a stone archway and crossed his arms over his chest, waiting for her to continue, all dukely tolerance.

“The marriage you described with the Duchess of Acaster won’t make you unhappy,” she ventured.

Still, he waited. But she noticed his jaw had gone tight.

Now for the part he needed to hear… “But it won’t make you happy, either.”

Her words sank, leaden, into the air between them.

“And have you any ideas about the sort of marriage thatwouldmake me happy?” he asked.

The question was an instinctive riposte, but also a challenge, and strange answers occurred to her. Ones she wouldn’t give voice to.

Even to herself.

Perhaps a braver Gemma would speak them.

“That’s for you to decide.”

She wasn’t a braver Gemma.

Opaque emotion flashed behind his eyes and was gone the next instant, so elusive it could’ve been a trick of the light.

And that was the end of it, as within minutes, they were mounted and riding back to Somerton.

Still, Gemma’s mind raced.

What was she thinking by carrying on with Rake—The Duke of Rakesley, she reminded herself—in this manner?

She wasn’t at Somerton to concern herself with the state of his happiness—or unhappiness.

She was here to spy on a duke’s horseracing operation.

A certainty crept in—one she’d been denying to herself but couldn’t any longer. If Rake discovered she was a spy, he would come to hate her. He would compare her betrayal to Felicity’s, and he wouldn’t be half wrong—except it was worse. He would believe she was using her body—and his—to gain access to his secrets.

Guilt grabbed her stomach and twisted it into knots. His hatred and anger she could bear, but it was the hurt she would cause that was more difficult to face.

No.

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