“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 4

It was at the Ashworth ball, some weeks later, that Genevieve first understood the particular danger of making a man like Lucian jealous.

She had not intended it. She had simply accepted a dance from young Lord Callender — pleasant, harmless, recently returned from the Continent — and thought nothing further of it until she caught sight of her husband across the room, standing with a glass of claret he had not touched in some time, his jaw set in a way she had not seen since their wedding night.

She danced a second set with Lord Callender, partly because it would have been rude to refuse, and partly, she admitted to herself with private amusement, because she wished to see precisely how long her husband’s famous composure could withstand the sight of another man’s hand at her waist.

It did not withstand it long.

She watched him set down his untouched claret on a passing footman’s tray with rather more force than the gesture required. Watched him decline, with unusual curtness, an invitation to join a group of gentlemen near the card room. Watched his eyes track her and Lord Callender around the floor with an intensity that made her own pulse quicken despite her best efforts to appear wholly unaware of him.

“Your husband,” Lord Callender observed at last, following her gaze, “appears to be watching us with some interest.”

“Does he?” Genevieve said, with what she considered admirable innocence.

“I begin to suspect I ought to return you to him before the set concludes, lest I find myself called out at dawn.”

“The Duke does not duel over dances, my lord.”

“The Duke,” Lord Callender said dryly, “looks very much as though he is reconsidering that policy.”

When the set ended, Lucian had crossed half the ballroom to meet her before Lord Callender had even finished his bow, steering her toward the refreshment table with a hand at the small of her back that felt, for the first time since the wedding, less like a courtesy and considerably more like a claim.

“You seemed to be enjoying yourself,” he said, pitched too low for anyone but her.

“I was. Lord Callender has traveled a great deal. His conversation is quite diverting.”

“I am certain it is.”

“You sound displeased, Your Grace.”

“I am entirely composed,” he said, in a tone that suggested precisely the opposite, and Genevieve had to bite back a smile at the sight of the unshakable Duke of West Haven so plainly, delightfully rattled by a single innocent dance.

She excused herself a few minutes later and made her way instead toward the gallery adjoining the ballroom, fully expecting — and rather hoping — that he would follow.

He did not disappoint her. She found him standing alone before a portrait of some long-dead Pemberton ancestor, his expression unreadable in the candlelight.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked without turning.

“Very much.”

“I noticed.”

She came to stand beside him, close enough to feel the tension radiating from him like heat from a stove. “Are you jealous, Your Grace?”

“Dukes do not feel jealousy.”

“No?” She tilted her head to look up at him and found his eyes had gone dark in a way that sent a thrill straight through her. “Then how do noblemen demonstrate it?”

His hand found her waist — not gently this time, but with a restrained urgency that made her breath catch. He drew her closer until there was scarcely any distance left between them at all, and bent his head until his mouth hovered just beside her ear.

“Perhaps,” he said, low and rough, “that shall be your next lesson.”

For one long, suspended moment, Genevieve considered simply letting him teach it to her right there, with only a dead ancestor for witness. Then some spark of her old mischief reasserted itself, and she stepped back before he could close the last distance between them, leaving him standing with his hand curved around empty air.

“I believe,” she said, already retreating toward the ballroom with a smile she did not bother to hide, “that lessons are best conducted at home, Your Grace.”

It was, she decided, watching him follow her back into the ballroom with a look of such open, hungry promise that she nearly regretted her own retreat, the single most satisfying moment of her marriage thus far.

That night, when he finally caught her alone in the corridor outside her own chamber, he did not bother with restraint at all. He backed her gently against the wall, his hands framing her face, and kissed her with none of the careful, teasing patience of their early days together.

“I believe,” he said against her mouth, “the lesson has already begun.”

Later, much later, with the candles burned low and the house gone quiet around them, she lay with her head against his chest, his fingers moving idly through her hair, and found herself thinking again of the dowager’s comment at breakfast — of the small, cold stone that had not fully dissolved despite the evening’s triumphs.

“You are thinking of something,” Lucian said quietly.

She hesitated, then decided, as she had begun to decide about a great many things where he was concerned, to simply tell him the truth.

“Your mother’s comment. I have not been able to put it fully from my mind.”

His hand stilled in her hair. “I know you do not share her impatience.”

“I only mean—” She traced an idle pattern against his chest, unable quite to look at him. “I understand what this marriage was meant to accomplish. I have understood it since before I knew your face. I do not wish for that understanding to sit between us.”

He was quiet long enough that she lifted her head to look at him, and found his expression graver than she had expected.

“Nothing sits between us that I have not already decided does not matter.” He drew her back against him, pressing a kiss to her hair. “Whatever my mother believes this marriage was meant to produce, I know rather better what I have found in it. Do not let her arithmetic become yours.”

It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her since the wedding — and the first time she allowed herself to admit, in the private quiet of her own heart, that what she felt for her husband had grown into something dangerously close to love.

What lay ahead — how much that love would be tested, how close the dowager’s arithmetic would come to breaking what neither of them yet knew how to protect — she could not have guessed, curled as she was in the safety of his arms.