Page 58 of The Captive
“No, it may not,” he said, a little of the duke infusing his voice. “You bestow favors where you will, with discretion, but you shall not be taken advantage of.”
“We are at an impasse,” she said, trying to fathom what he wasn’t saying. Some issue or insight lurked in this ducal posturing, something he was talking around. “I would have us kiss again. You are telling me you enjoyed what just passed between us, but will deny me in future out of concern for what or whom? Me?”
She thumped down on his sofa, sure in her bones the Almighty had put men on earth to drive women barmy. “I can assure you I’d consider it the greater regard did you indulge my foolish impulses, Your Grace.”
Admitting that caused a blush to rise and made her determined to keep her yammering mouth shut, lest she lose her self-control entirely and beg him for more kisses, more caresses.
He sat beside her and took her left hand in his right.
She wanted to snatch her hand away, but also to climb into his lap and resume kissing him. He traced her knuckles with his left hand while she felt him marshaling arguments, preparing to ease her down gently again.
“I can barely tie back my own hair,” he said. “After several clumsy attempts, I manage something like a queue, but it’s tedious, and inclines me to go about like a half-groomed barbarian instead.”
“Most unmarried men of any station have a valet—”
He shook his head. “I cannot abide to have another man tend me.” He wasn’t proud of that; the humiliation was in his voice.
“You allow me to tend you.”
“I could toss you across the room with my bad hand. And you are not a man.”
Yes, he could toss her across the room with one hand. He was both taller and, at least recently, more fit than Greendale had ever been, and Gilly had never been bothered by that, which was…interesting.
“You did notice my gender. I’m encouraged, Your Grace.”
“You don’t want to hear my explanations and apologies. I can only apologize for that as well.”
“Your excuses.”
“You are asking me, in essence, to compromise you.” He did not sound angry, so much as amused—drat and blast him. “Whether with ill-timed kisses, or indiscretions of a more passionate nature. You would regret it, you would hate me, and while I do not deny you’d find pleasure in it—I would insist on pleasure for you—your eventual distaste I could not abide. Not all of my scars have been revealed to you, my lady.”
He stared straight ahead, as if puzzling out the honor of it for himself.
And Gilly puzzled out a few things too, holding his hand as the late-afternoon sun cast the room in a mellow light.
He needed her to think well of him.
He held her reputation in significant regard.
He thought her attraction to him was a function of grief or abstinence, not unique to him, not something out of the ordinary for her.
And he desired her. In his touch, in what he said, in what he did not say, the Duke of Mercia desired her.
And most important of all, something Gilly had no doubt divined on an intuitive level but had needed to hear, too: he’d promised her that if they were intimate, she would find the experience pleasurable.
He’d said he’d insist on that, and she believed him.
***
“Oh, aye, it were a bad, bad moment.”
John Coachman banged his tankard in a signal for a refill, which the gentleman sharing the snug with him would no doubt pay for. The gentleman was buying, said his uncle had been a coachman, and the gent always stood a coachman to a drink when traveling from Town.
John was ever fond of good English ale, and the Lion and Cock served some of the best summer ale in Surrey. The day had been long and hot, mostly spent loading up Lady Greendale’s things from the old earl’s place and piling them high on the wagon. The return trip to Severn would be a thirsty undertaking, indeed.
“We’d been making good time from Town,” John said, “for her ladyship were keen to get back to Severn.”
“Fancies running the duke’s household, does she?”
