“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 2 

She did not see him again until breakfast, and by then she had rebuilt every wall she’d let fall the night before.

It did not survive past the first cup of tea.

Lucian arrived already dressed for the day, his dark hair combed into something like order, and took the seat across from her with the unhurried ease of a man wholly at peace with the world. He said nothing about the previous night. He did not need to. It sat between them like a third guest at the table — present in the way his eyes lingered on her mouth when she spoke, in the private curve of his smile whenever their fingers brushed over the teapot.

“You slept well, I trust,” he said, buttering his toast with maddening composure.

“Perfectly,” she lied.

“How fortunate. I confess I did not sleep at all.”

She looked up despite herself. “Why ever not?”

“I was occupied,” he said, “considering all the things I have not yet taught you.”

She choked on her tea.

It set the pattern for the weeks that followed — dinner conversations that began with tenant farms and drifted by the second course into something she felt in her spine rather than heard in her ears. He asked after her opinions with genuine interest, listened as though her answer actually mattered, and then, having secured her full attention, said something so quietly outrageous she had to school her face to blankness before the footman noticed her blush.

“You are impossible,” she told him one evening, when he had spent the length of the fish course describing, in perfectly neutral language, precisely how he intended to remove the pins from her hair later that night.

“I am thorough,” he corrected. “There is a difference.”

But it was on a rain-soaked evening some weeks later, in his study, among the ledgers he thought he’d been alone with, that Genevieve first discovered something far more useful than any lesson he had given her.

She had gone to ask about a household matter. She stayed to lean over his shoulder, set her palm flat against his chest — and felt, beneath her hand, his pen stop moving altogether. Felt the sudden unevenness of his breath. Watched the famously unshakable Duke of West Haven lose, for the very first time, an entire column of figures.

“You seem to have lost your place,” she said sweetly.

“I have lost considerably more than my place.”

He had not touched her. He had not needed to. And in that single unguarded moment, staring at a man visibly fighting to remember his own name, Genevieve understood something that changed everything about the game they were playing.

His composure was not infinite.

She had simply never had the nerve, until now, to find its edges — and something told her that the moment she did, neither of them would ever be the same.