Page 57 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“There he is,” he said quietly. “I came to find him.”

“He came to find me,” she said.

He stood in the doorway, and she sat on the edge of the bed with Percy warm against her chest, and neither of them moved. The room was dark except for the small lamp she had lit on the nightstand, and in the lamp’s light his face was unguarded as it was sometimes late at night, when the controlled surface was tired.

“How are you?” he said.

“I am not certain,” she said. Which was the truth, and she was tired of anything else. “I thought I would feel differently.”

“How did you think you would feel?”

“Simply glad.” She looked at Percy, at the slow movement of his breathing. “And I am glad. I am.” She pressed her hand gently along the cat’s back. “But it is strange. It is like waiting for a storm for so long, that when it passes you don’t know what to do with the quiet.”

He came into the room, but not far. He sat in the chair by the window, which put him across the room from her. She registered this, the deliberateness of the distance, and the fact that he had sat rather than going.

“Now that it’s all over, I’ll go.” She looked at him. “As we agreed.”

He said nothing.

“Barnes says the country property is in Wiltshire. Small, apparently. Two miles from the nearest village.” She turned Percy’s ear gently between her fingers, which he permitted. “I have been trying to decide whether Wiltshire is good.”

“It’s decent land,” he said. “Good air.”

“You sound like an estate report.”

Something shifted in his face. “I know.” He looked at his hands, which were resting on his knees. “I am trying to… be useful.”

“You have been useful,” she said. “For weeks. You have been, absolutely. But, oh, Frederick, you have—” She stopped.

The lamp was warm, the room was quiet, and Percy was like a steady warm weight against her chest. She was tired; that was the problem. She was tired, and the storm had passed, and she was sitting in the quiet of it with this man across the room who would not look at her quite directly.

If not now, when?

“I am going to miss… this house,” she said.

It was not quite what she meant, but it was a true thing. He looked up.

“I am going to miss this place.” She stopped. “I am going to miss Rachel. And Percy.”

“I’m certain Rachel and Percy will miss you too,” he replied.

She held his gaze. “And… I will miss you, as well.”

The silence that followed was the kind that asked something of both people in it. The Duke stood and crossed the room, and she had thought he was going to stop. She prayed he would stop. But then, he was at the doorway again, at the edge of things, where he always was…

Then she blinked, and realized he came to where she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked up at him, and stopped breathing as she took in his warm, amber eyes, his sandy brown hair.

He reached out and took Percy, very gently, from her arms. Percy made a sound of mild protest and then subsided. Frederick set him at the foot of the bed, where Percy sat and regarded them with the focused attention of a small grey witness.

“Don’t do that,” he murmured. His throat moved as he swallowed. “Don’t ask me things when you know I am hanging on by a thread. You ask as if I’ve had a single proper thought since you arrived,” he rasped, staring down at her. “I sit across from you night after night, trying to be useful, trying to be a gentleman… while every line of you makes my control strain to the point of snapping.”

She stopped breathing, her skin prickling with sudden heat.

“Will I miss you, Anna?” he asked, his voice rougher than before as he glanced down at her lips. “I… I miss you constantly, Anna. Even when you’re standing right before me. I stand across from you day after day, suffocating on it, this endless, aching need totouch you. To drag you into my arms and taste you until I can't think straight. It’s consuming me, Anna. I haven't had a single quiet breath since you got here, because all I want, all I’ve craved until I’m nearly out of my mind, is this.”

And then Frederick’s hand came back, and it settled against her jaw, and he tilted her face up.

He kissed her.