“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 5

By late autumn, Genevieve had stopped counting the days since her wedding and started instead counting something far more private — the moments when she caught herself no longer caring what this marriage had been designed to accomplish.

She decided, on a rain-soaked evening in November, that she was finished waiting for him to decide she was ready.

She found him in his study again — it seemed, she thought, that all the most important conversations of her marriage happened in this particular room. He looked up as she entered, and something in her expression must have told him this was not one of her usual provocations, because he set down his pen immediately and rose.

“Genevieve. Is something wrong?”

“No.” She crossed the room and did not stop at her usual careful arm’s length. She came instead close enough that she had to tip her head back to hold his gaze, and reached up to rest both hands against his lapels. “Nothing is wrong. I only find I’m no longer willing to wait for the next lesson.”

His hands came up to cover hers, though he did not pull her closer — held himself very still, in fact, with the particular stillness of a man who wanted very badly to move and was forcing himself not to.

“I need you to understand something first,” he said. “Whatever happens tonight, I do not want it to happen because you believe it is finally time. Because some invisible clock we have never discussed has run out. Do you understand me?”

“I am not thinking of clocks.”

“Then tell me why you came.”

She held his gaze and found, for the first time since her wedding night, that being honest with him cost her nothing at all. “I’m not thinking of heirs, Your Grace. I’m not thinking of settlements or successions or anything your mother might say over breakfast. I came here because I want you. Because I have wanted you for weeks, and I am tired of being the only one of us pretending otherwise.”

Whatever remained of his restraint did not survive that.

He kissed her without the careful patience of their early lessons, without the deliberate withdrawal that had defined so much of their courtship. His hands framed her face, slid to her waist, drew her fully against him, and Genevieve felt, for the first time, the full weight of what it meant to be wanted by a man who had spent months holding himself back.

“Say it again,” he murmured against her mouth.

“I want you.”

He lifted her properly then, both arms beneath her, carrying her toward the private stair that led to their chamber. They did not make it up without stopping twice.

Inside, with the fire banked low and the rain murmuring against the windows, he undressed her slowly, reverently, each button given the same careful attention he had once given her earliest, uncertain lessons in desire. When he paused to look at her, fully bared before him in the firelight, his expression held something she had never seen on the famously composed Duke of West Haven.

It looked, she thought, remarkably like nervousness.

“You are trembling,” she said softly.

“I have wanted this — wanted you — for longer than I have permitted myself to admit.” His voice had gone rough, stripped of its usual confidence. “I did not think it would frighten me.”

“Frighten you?”

“I have never once been afraid of a woman’s opinion of me. Not until this one.” He caught her hand, pressed it flat against his own chest, where she could feel his heart beating hard and unsteady beneath her palm. “You are not merely my wife, Genevieve. Somewhere between the wedding night and tonight, you have become considerably more than that. And I find I have a great deal to lose.”

The confession undid her more thoroughly than any touch had. She drew him down, closing the last distance between them, and whispered against his mouth that she felt exactly the same.

What followed belonged, from that point forward, entirely to the two of them alone.

Morning arrived with pale gray light and the particular quiet of a house that had not yet begun its usual business. Genevieve woke curled against her husband’s chest, and could not, when she came down to breakfast some hours later, quite keep her countenance. Lucian noticed immediately.

“You seem,” he said, watching her over the rim of his coffee cup, “remarkably pleased with yourself this morning.”

“I am simply enjoying my tea, Your Grace.”

“I begin to suspect you are enjoying something rather more specific than your tea.”

She flushed scarlet and reached for the nearest spoon with clear intent. He caught her wrist, laughing outright.

“Duchesses do not throw cutlery at their husbands.”

“Who established that particular rule?”

“I believe I did, roughly one minute ago, in self-defense.”

The weeks that followed only deepened what had begun that rainy November night. But even as the passion between them grew into something neither of them troubled to hide, a quieter danger had begun to take root beneath the surface of their happiness — one that neither of them yet fully understood was gathering, patient and persistent, in the watchful eyes of the Dowager Duchess and the increasingly pointed comments of the wider Pemberton family.

It began with small remarks. A great-aunt inquiring, with studied casualness, whether Genevieve had been feeling quite well of late. A cousin’s wife mentioning, quite unprompted, the excellent physician who had helped her own sister conceive after a difficult first year.

The Dowager Duchess herself, growing bolder with each month that passed without an announcement, began raising the subject with a regularity that no longer troubled to disguise itself as idle conversation — and Genevieve had no sense yet of how close that gathering storm was to breaking over her.