Page 70 of The Truth About Love and Dukes

He started to speak, but she leaned over the desk, putting her fingers to his mouth to stop him. “If that kiss in the library didn’t make it plain enough, surely that carriage ride did.”

At any other time, he might have found it very gratifying indeed to hear her make such an admission aloud, and the touch of her fingers was sending dangerous impulses through him, but at this moment, his conscience could not be allowed to savor either of those. He grasped her wrist, pulled her hand down, and let her go. “And after last night, you feel overwhelmed. I understand that, and it is completely my fault—”

She laughed, much to his consternation. “Why? You are wholly to blame because in the face of your attentions, I’m helpless to resist you? I shall have to purchase some sol volatile, I can see, or I shall faint dead away the next time you kiss me.”

“Please, Irene, do not tease me, I beg you. Not now.”

She sobered at once. “I’m not overwhelmed, Henry. I know just what I’m proposing, and I’m making that proposition freely, that I promise you.”

He turned away, walking to the tiny window of her office and staring out at the brick wall of the solidly middle class house next door, appreciating all the ramifications as he knew she could not. “But what I’m trying to explain to you is that it is not an informed choice. Not for you. It can’t be.”

He forced himself to turn and meet her eyes, to face in her gaze the same yearning he felt inside himself and turn it down. “You can’t even begin to know what losing your innocence feels like, Irene. No one can, until it happens. And once it’s done, there’s no going back, regardless of the consequences. You have no idea what giving up your innocence to a man really means.”

“That’s true, Henry. But,” she added softly, “you are the only man I have ever met that I have imagined losing my innocence to. If it isn’t you, I doubt it would ever be anyone. I don’t want that.”

With those words, so simple and so sweet, he’d lost, and he knew it. From the very beginning, even before that kiss in the library and that hot, sweet carriage ride, even when all this had been nothing but his own erotic imaginings, he’d wanted this very thing from her, and despite the fact that it went against everything he’d been raised to believe about right and wrong, he knew his answer was inevitable. Perhaps he’d always known that.

“Very well,” he said. “I will make the arrangements.”

He turned abruptly away before either of them could change their minds, but he did pause at the door for one more thing. “You’ll need that god-awful hat,” he said without looking at her, then he opened the door and walked out.

Chapter 17

As Irene watched the door swing shut behind Henry, she felt so dizzy, she had to sit down. Suggesting an illicit affair, after all, wasn’t the sort of thing a girl did every day.

Still, her bold suggestion wasn’t the only thing that was making her wobbly at the knees. The knowledge that he had wanted a girl with such passion that he had defied all the dictates of society in order to have her was every bit as stunning. Irene thought of that day two weeks ago when he’d come storming in here, when she’d thought him so cold, and she wanted to laugh at the idea. Henry, she was now discovering, was as cold as wildfire. Who’d ever have thought it?

She knew the course they were about to embark upon was a reckless one, mad, foolhardy, even. And yet, she did not care. She was so exhilarated by the thought of it that she could barely breathe. She was willing to take any risk, pay any price. For to not be with him seemed unthinkable now.

By the end of the day, she had moved back into the house in Belford Row, after assuring Clara that of course she must go to Hampshire on Friday with the duke’s family, and happily refusing all the entreaties from her sister to journey down with them to Ravenwood.

She also ignored her father’s disappointment and disapproval at her decision to return home. Papa, as fond as she was of him, had long ago ceased to be someone whose approval she required. In the past, that fact had always made her feel both sad and a bit guilty, but now, in light of the course she was about to embark upon, she was glad of the emotional distance that had long existed between them, for it made what she intended to do infinitely easier.

The wait was the hardest part. All day Sunday, she could think of nothing but Henry and what it would be like to have his hands on her. Even during church services, God help her, she had thought only of him.

On Monday, she received a letter from him with instructions, and that evening, she packed a small valise and informed her father that she missed Clara so much she was going back to spend the remaining nights before the other girl’s departure at Upper Brook Street. She then slipped a long, dark cloak over her clothes, donned what Henry had called her “god-awful hat” with its concealing veil, and took a taxi to a small hotel in an obscure street of St. John’s Wood. There, she presented herself at the front desk as Mrs. Jones. Mr. Jones, the expressionless concierge informed her, had already arrived and was in his own rooms—rooms that adjoined her own. He hoped Mrs. Jones found that an acceptable arrangement?

“Of course,” she said, trying to sound wholly natural when she felt as if hundreds of butterflies were fluttering around in her stomach.

Her case was taken by the bellman, who led her up to the second floor, and down a short, dimly lit corridor to a pair of doors at the end. He unlocked the door to the right, opened it, and stepped aside for her to enter. When she did, he followed her, setting her suitcase beside a closed door that she could only conclude led to the room next door.

“Shall you be needing a maid, madam? If so, I can have one sent up.”

She tore her gaze from the closed door. “No, I shan’t require a maid, thank you,” she said, looking around as he began to draw the curtains closed. It wasn’t a large room, but it was unexpectedly pretty, with walls of robin’s egg blue and darker blue draperies. There were gilded wall sconces, walnut furnishings, and a sizable brass bed.

Irene’s heart thumped hard in her chest.

Behind her, the bellman gave a delicate cough. “Will there be anything else, madam?”

She turned, realizing he had moved toward the door and was waiting, his white-gloved hand poised by his side in a discreet fashion. At once, she opened her handbag. “No, thank you,” she answered, pulling a shilling from her coin purse and placing it in his palm. “You may go.”

“Very good, madam. If you require anything, the bell pull is beside the bed.”

He departed, closing the door behind him. Irene removed her cloak and hat, but she’d barely tossed them onto a chair before a knock sounded from the adjoining room. She crossed over to the door, and with a deep, steadying breath, she opened it to find Henry on the other side, and the sight of him in his shirtsleeves gave her a jolt of such surprise, she laughed.

His mouth curved up a bit. “Nervous?”

“Terribly, but—” She paused, studying him for a moment. “I just realized,” she said, still smiling a little, “that this is the first time I’ve ever seen you without a jacket.”

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