Page 74 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

It felt cosmic, raw, primal. As much a part of his own breathing.

Anna’s breath came unsteady against his chest, her hand curled into the front of his shirt, and for one suspended moment Frederick allowed himself to simply rest his forehead against hers and breathe.

Then the carriage gave a particular lurch and slowed, and through the window Frederick caught the familiar shape of her townhouse steps emerging out of the dark, and the spell, whatever it had been, began very quietly to unravel.

“We are here,” he said flatly.

Anna drew back first, back into her seat, properly. She straightened with a small, indrawn breath, and her hands went immediately to her own disordered appearance. While her skirts were back down, one glove was half off, a curl loose from its pin and falling against her throat. His coat was slipping from her shoulder where she’d forgotten she was wearing it at all.

“Here.” Frederick’s voice came out lower than he intended. He reached out to settle the coat properly back into place, his knuckles brushing the bare skin of her shoulder as he did, and felt her go very still beneath the touch. “Your—” He gestured vaguely at the loose curl, not quite trusting his hand to be steady enough to fix it himself.

Despite all that he had just shown her, and the throbbing hardness of him, he felt nervous now.

She tucked it back with a small, distracted motion, not quite meeting his eyes, and the carriage rolled to a final stop outside her door.

The silence stretched, filled only with the stamp and shift of the horses outside and the distant clatter of the city beyond, and Frederick watched Anna’s face in the dim lamplight. He watched something working behind her eyes that he could not read and was suddenly, urgently afraid of.

“Frederick.” She said his name quietly, and there was something careful in it, something that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago when she’d all but screamed it to the Heavens. “What you told me. Last year. That you didn’t wish to marry.” She paused, andhe watched her gather the courage for the rest of it, watched her chin lift the way it always did when she was bracing herself for something. “Does that…”

“Does that what?”

I know what she means to ask.

“Does that still stand?”

He had known the question was coming. He had known it from the moment the carriage began to slow, had felt it gathering in the air between them like weather, and still it landed hard on his chest.

He looked at her, really looked at the beautiful creature in front of him. She was trying so hard not to let it show on her face and failing entirely to hide, at the curl she had only just tucked back beginning to slip loose again, at everything in her that had leaned into him not ten minutes ago as though he were the only safe harbor in the whole of London.

And yet, he felt something in himself go to a place where he always had: he would always be Rachel’s protector. A man like him, with his father’s blood running through his veins, was never meant to marry anyone. Even though he’d made it his life’s work to be nothing like him.

“Yes,” he said. “It still stands.”

The words landed between them and seemed to take up all the air in the carriage. Anna’s face did not crumple, did not do any of the things he half expected and would almost have preferred, because at least those things would have given him somewhere to direct his own wretchedness.

Instead, it went very still, very careful, the particular stillness of a person working hard to arrange their features into something presentable before the alternative could escape. She was so strong; she could do better than him. And she would. No woman like her could remain unwed for long.

“I see,” she said, and that was that.

“Anna…” He stammered as he reached for her hand without entirely meaning to, and she did not pull away, but she did not curl her fingers into his either, and the lack of it was its own small, terrible answer. “I should not have done this. Tonight, I let myself… It was unfair of me to allow it, unfair to you most of all, and I am sorry. Profoundly sorry. After all you have been through, after your… friendship. It will not happen again.”

“Won’t it?” Her voice was very even.

“I have no intention of marrying, Anna. I never have. You know this about me. You have known it longer than almost anyone.” He was talking too fast now; he could hear himself doing it and could not seem to stop, the words tumbling out ahead of whatever sense might have governed them. “You deserve a man who can offer you everything you’re looking for. A husband. A family. I am not that man.”

Anna was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice had gone soft in a way that frightened him considerably more than anger would have. He hated the idea that he was the source of her pain.

“You needn’t explain so thoroughly, Frederick.”

“Anna, please?—”

“No, truly.” A small, humorless laugh escaped her, directed entirely at herself. “I am only annoyed with my own foolishness. I knew what you’d told me. I have known it for a year.”

“It is not so simple?—”

“I let myself hope anyway, like an utter fool, that perhaps you’d changed your mind. That perhapsIhad changed it for you.”

“Anna, please?—”