“I’ll Show You How Nobles Make Babies,” the Duke Whispered to His Innocent Bride on Their Wedding Night — Then One Kiss Began a Lesson That Would Shatter His Legendary Composure.

PART 1 

The marriage settlement ran to eleven pages, and Genevieve Marlo had read every one of them twice.

She knew the acreage that would pass to any son she bore. She knew the dower rights that would protect her should the Duke of West Haven die before her, and the precise sum settled upon her should the marriage scandalously dissolve. She knew which Pemberton properties were entailed and which were not, which cousins stood to inherit should there be no direct heir, and how many months her mother-in-law expected to wait before announcing the first grandchild to the ton.

What no one had thought to explain, in four months of solicitors and revisions, was what would happen in the space between the wedding breakfast and the arrival of that grandchild.

She stood now in the middle of the ducal bedchamber at West Haven House, in a nightgown so fine it felt like wearing nothing at all, and understood with sudden, humiliating clarity that she had prepared for marriage the way one prepared for a legal proceeding — and not at all for a wedding night.

The fire had been built high. Someone had scattered dried lavender across the sheets and left a single candle burning low on the mantel, as though the room itself expected something of her she did not know how to give.

She heard the dressing-room door open.

Lucian Pemberton, Duke of West Haven, entered without his coat, his cravat loosened, his shirt open at the throat in a manner that would have scandalized any drawing room in London — and made Genevieve’s mouth go entirely dry.

He was, as she had always privately admitted, an unfairly beautiful man. Tall enough that she had to tip her head back to hold his gaze. He had courted her with the effortless, faintly amused confidence of a man who had never once doubted his welcome in any room he entered. She had expected that man to walk through the door.

Instead he stopped a few feet from the bed and studied her the way one might study a horse suspected of lameness — carefully, with a frown he was visibly trying to smooth away.

“You look,” he said, “as though you are preparing to be interrogated.”

“I am simply considering the evening.”

“Are you?” He came no closer. “Considering it how?”

Genevieve lifted her chin. If there was one skill her governess had drilled into her more thoroughly than French or watercolor, it was speaking with composure regardless of what was happening beneath her ribs.

“I have been wondering when you intend to announce an expectation to the family. Whether there is a customary interval one waits. How many children you consider necessary, given the succession.”

Something moved behind Lucian’s eyes — not offense, closer to disbelief, warring with an amusement he was clearly fighting to suppress.

“Genevieve.”

“I only wish to understand my duties clearly, Your Grace,” she pressed on, “so that I may fulfill them properly.”

“Your duties.” He repeated the word slowly, as though tasting something unexpectedly bitter. “Is that what you believe tonight is?”

“Is it not?”

He crossed the remaining distance in two unhurried strides, and Genevieve discovered that a man could move in complete silence and still make the air in a room feel thinner. He stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him, could see the faint shadow of stubble he hadn’t troubled to shave a second time before evening, could smell bergamot and something warmer beneath it — something that was simply him.

“Tell me something,” he said, low. “Do you know how children are made?”

Her face went instantly, furiously hot.

“Explain it to me, then.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her mind — which had produced flawless answers about dower rights and entailments for a full hour before their solicitors that very morning — produced absolutely nothing.

The silence answered for her.

Lucian’s mouth curved, slow and wicked and far too pleased with itself. He lifted one hand — not to seize her, not the way she had braced herself to be seized, but slowly, giving her every opportunity to step back, which she found, humiliatingly, that she did not want to do — and settled it at her waist. His palm was warm even through the thin silk.

“No one told you,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“I am not a child, Your Grace. I understand the general principle.”

“The general principle.” He was laughing at her now, quietly, without cruelty, which somehow made it both worse and better at once. He bent his head until his mouth was near her ear, until she could feel his breath stir the loose curl at her neck.

“I’ll show you how nobles make babies.”

It was not what she had expected. She did not know precisely what she had expected — only that it involved rather less conversation and rather more urgency than what followed, which was this:

Lucian tipped her chin up with one finger and kissed her.

It was not the brief, correct kiss he had pressed to her hand at the church that morning. It was slow, searching, and it undid something in her chest she had not known was tied so tightly. Her fingers found the front of his shirt without her quite deciding to reach for it. The marriage settlement, the dower rights, the entire careful architecture of her dutiful understanding of what this night was meant to be — all of it dissolved somewhere in the space of that kiss.

And then he stopped.

She opened her eyes to find him watching her, his own breathing not entirely steady, one hand still curved at her waist.

“Did you like that?”

The question was so plainly, disarmingly sincere that she could not summon the composure to lie.

“Yes.”

“Then we shall begin there.”

“Begin?” She stared at him.

“That is all for tonight.” His thumb moved once, absently, against the silk at her hip, and she felt it everywhere at once. “You came into this marriage believing yourself an obligation to be discharged as efficiently as possible. I find I have no interest in a wife who merely tolerates my company because an heir must eventually be produced. I would very much prefer a wife who wants me. And if I—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and Genevieve realized with something close to astonishment that the Duke of West Haven had, for one unguarded instant, lost the thread of his own sentence.

“You will,” he said instead, recovering, with the same maddening confidence he brought to every room he entered. “Because I intend to be very thorough in my instruction.”

He pressed one more kiss, brief and warm, to her temple, and stepped back.

Genevieve stood in the middle of her marriage bed, thoroughly kissed and still entirely unruined, and understood that the Duke of West Haven had just declared war on her composure.

He had won the first skirmish decisively — and did not even trouble to gloat.

None of it told her that the war would take a year to fight. That it would nearly cost her the one thing she had never expected to want from a marriage built on solicitors’ clauses. Or that somewhere in London, an old woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue was already watching her, waiting for the first sign of failure.

She lay awake long after the candle guttered out, listening to her own heartbeat, with no reason yet to be afraid of anything at all.