Page 63 of The Duke's Auctioned Virgin
Edward’s hands were nothing like Gordon’s. He held her as though she might vanish if he let go, and he was not willing to risk it.
The waltz was ending. She could feel it in the shift of the music, the way the melody rose and thinned and prepared to release them.
But she did not want to be released. She wanted to stay in this waltz, with his hand on her waist, his body warm against hers, and the ballroom turning around them like a music box.
She wanted to freeze the moment. Keep it in glass. Hold it up to the light and examine it from every angle so she could understand how a man who punched people in her ballroomand caught threats out of the air could also hold her with such devastating gentleness that she forgot how to breathe.
She thought about the note.His true self. She had spent three years living with a man whose true self was cruelty dressed in silk. She had learned to read the difference between the surface and the thing beneath it, the way a sailor read the difference between calm water and a riptide.
Edward’s surface was hard. Stone and silence and the flat, watchful eyes of a man who had been trained to show nothing. But beneath it, in the drawing room, on the carpet, in the gazebo, in the moments when he forgot to be the Hound, there was something so tender it made her teeth ache.
A man who built towers out of blocks with orphan boys. A man who painted flowers on the face of the man who had hurt her. A man who put bread on her plate before he served himself because the idea of her going hungry was intolerable to him.
That was his true self. Not the fists. Not the violence. But the bread. The flowers. The paint on his jaw and the look in his eyes when he said her name.
The note did not know that. Could not know it. Because one had to stand close enough to see it, and George Turner had never stood close enough to anyone to see anything except what he could use.
The waltz ended. Edward stepped back and held out his arm.
“I will take ye to yer room.”
They walked up the stairs. The corridor was quiet. At her door, she stopped.
“Join me,” she demanded. “Please.”
He looked at her. She could see him considering. The spy who counted exits.
“I need to ask you something,” she added, “and I need you to answer me honestly.”
“Ask.”
“Why did you just disappear? Four days. How could you vanish? If you regret–”
He kissed her. Quick. Hard. His hand sliding up her neck. Two seconds that burned through her chest. Then he let go.
“I don’t understand you, Duke,” she whispered.
He stroked her cheek. His thumb traced the line of her jaw, slow and gentle, and the tenderness after the violence of the evening made her eyes sting.
“Don’t try to,” he said. “Go to bed, Duchess.”
She did not want to go to bed. She wanted to stand in this corridor, with his hand on her face and his eyes on hers, until the candles burned down and the sun came up and the world made sense again.
She wanted to ask him about the note and the punch and George and the four days he had spent in London doing things he would not tell her about. She wanted to ask him why he had kissed her and then pulled away, why he had touched her and then disappeared, why he kept coming close and then retreating like the tide.
But she had learned that pushing a man who was not ready to speak only made him quieter. The questions could wait. She would ask them tomorrow. Or the day after. Or on their wedding day, standing at the altar, if that was what it took.
“You can tell me things without worrying that I will use them against you,” she said quietly.
Something crossed his face fast. Gone before she could name it.
“I know I can,” he sighed. “That is the problem.”
“How is that a problem?”
“Because I have spent twelve years not caring what anyone thought of me. It made my work easier. It made everything easier.” He paused. “But I care whatyethink. And that is terrifying.”
She stared at him. He looked away. The wall came back up, but slower this time. Reluctant.
