“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 3

The discovery emboldened her in ways she had not anticipated.

She began finding reasons to adjust his cravat before receptions, standing close enough that her knuckles brushed his throat, watching with private delight as his jaw tightened and his hands found her waist as though he could not quite help himself. She learned that resting her palm against his chest while discussing something as unremarkable as a bonnet in a shop window made his replies come slower, shorter, as though he were having genuine difficulty attending to the actual content of the conversation.

She learned, above all, that turning the tables on him was considerably more satisfying than being taught anything had ever felt.

One evening, entering the library to find him still working over correspondence long after the household had retired, she did not bother with pretenses at all. She had already changed for bed, her nightgown covered by a robe she had not troubled to tie particularly securely, her hair loose down her back the way she now knew, with the calm certainty of a woman who had learned her own weapons, would undo him within moments.

“Do you intend to work all night?” she asked from the doorway.

Lucian looked up. Whatever he had meant to say did not arrive. His eyes moved once, unhurried, from her face to her loosened hair to the robe slipped slightly from one shoulder, and he set down whatever letter he’d been reading with the particular care of a man buying himself a moment to recover.

“You are becoming dangerous.”

“I learned from my husband.”

“I begin to regret my own instruction.” But he was already rising, already crossing the room with the same unhurried, inevitable confidence he brought to everything, and Genevieve — who had come fully intending to provoke exactly this reaction — found her triumph rather quickly overtaken by something warmer and considerably less composed as his hands found her waist and drew her against him.

He kissed her slow and thorough, one hand cradling the back of her head, and for a long moment neither of them thought of ledgers, or letters, or anything beyond the fire and the closeness of each other.

“You have ruined me for accounting,” he murmured against her mouth.

“Good,” said Genevieve, and meant it entirely.

The change, when she looked back on it later, had not come from any single dramatic moment. It came from a hundred small ones, accumulated so gradually she scarcely noticed until it was already complete.

It came from the afternoon a tenant’s cottage roof failed in a storm, and Genevieve — rather than deferring to the steward — rode out herself to see the family properly housed before nightfall. She returned to find Lucian waiting in the entrance hall with an expression she had never seen on him before. Something like awe.

“You might have sent word,” he said. “I would have come with you.”

“You were occupied with the magistrate.”

He had taken her muddied hands in his, careless of the mess it made of his gloves, and studied her face for a long moment. “Not every duchess would have gone at all.”

“Not every duchess grew up watching her own mother manage a smaller household with rather less help than this one,” she said. “I was not raised to leave people cold because it was inconvenient to my afternoon.”

Something in his expression softened, then, in a way that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with something considerably more dangerous to a woman determined not to lose her heart to a bargain struck by solicitors. He kissed her muddied knuckles with a gentleness that undid her far more thoroughly than any of his practiced seductions ever had.

It came, too, from the evenings she caught him reading long past necessity simply to remain in the same room as her. From the way he began asking her opinion on estate matters he had once, she suspected, settled alone, without her — the choice of a new tenant, the wisdom of expanding the orchard — and listened to her answers with a seriousness that had nothing to do with courtship and everything to do with genuine respect.

It came, finally, from the morning the Dowager Duchess remarked over breakfast, with the delicate cruelty of a woman who had never once had to apologize for her opinions, that it had now been some months since the wedding, and surely a young, healthy couple ought to have news to share with the family by now.

Genevieve felt the color drain from her face. Lucian went very still.

“My wife’s condition,” he said, with a quiet coldness Genevieve had not heard from him before, “is not a subject for the breakfast table.”

“I only mean to encourage—”

“I am aware of what you mean to do.” He had not raised his voice. He had not needed to. “You will not do it again.”

The dowager subsided, visibly startled, and the conversation moved with careful haste to the weather. But Genevieve had felt the weight of the exchange settle over her for the rest of the day — a small, cold stone lodged somewhere beneath her ribs — and noticed that evening that Lucian sought her out with a tenderness that felt almost like an apology for a wound he had not caused and could not fully protect her from.

She pushed the feeling aside. There would be time enough, she told herself, for that particular worry.

Tonight there was only the delicious, dangerous game they had built together out of glances and stolen touches — and the growing, unfamiliar certainty that whatever this marriage had begun as, it was no longer only that.

How soon that certainty would be tested, she had no way of knowing — nor how much harder the dowager’s arithmetic would grow before either of them found a way to silence it for good.