The Inconvenient Duchess

brother.’
    His tone was dry. ‘Very well. You do not prefer my brother to the workhouse. And where do I stand? My brother thinks I’ve spent ten years in the fleshpots of Europe without learning to appreciate a beautiful woman when I find one under my own roof.’
    ‘Beautiful?’ The word echoed in her mind.
    ‘Miranda.’ He smiled and touched her lip. ‘There is a statue in a Paris museum, of a Greek goddess. I visited her often, since the sight of her made me want to climb the plinth and lick the marble. And when you stand in the doorway with the light illuminating your body, I detect a startling resemblance.’
    ‘Oh.’ She squirmed under his weight.
    ‘Am I making you uncomfortable?’
    ‘No,’ she murmured.
    He released her wrists and slid off her body to lie beside her, his hand resting on her hip so that she could feel the warmth of it through the fabric.
    ‘Of course, you have many other qualities that I find admirable.’
    ‘Really?’ She suspected that he was teasing, but was at a loss as to why.
    ‘You have a quick wit and a keen mind. A firm hand with the servants. You understand what it takes to manage a great household and do it better than my mother ever did. You donot respond in fits of tears when I bully you, but have a fine temper of your own.
    ‘If it weren’t for an annoying tendency on your part to keep secrets from me for my own good, and always put your wants and needs last, I would say you were near perfection in what I would seek for in a wife.’
    ‘Oh.’
    He ran a thumb along the bow of her lip. ‘And you say you find my kisses distracting?’
    She could feel her skin going red with heat. ‘I was unable to think of anything else.’
    He leaned forward and brushed her lips with his. ‘But surely they are common if you can confuse my brother’s kisses with mine.’
    She bowed her head. ‘I had so few of your kisses with which to compare.’
    He leaned forward again and this time he lingered, and she parted her lips to him. The kiss seeped into her like water into the soil. He tasted her lips and her tongue, and she sighed into his mouth and reached out to him, pulling herself close to his chest to feel his heart beating close beside hers.
    ‘Better?’ He breathed into her ear.
    ‘Yes. But…’ How could she say it without hurting him? She stopped.
    ‘No more secrets, wife. Say what you are thinking.’
    ‘But not the same as yesterday.’ She stopped again. ‘And you did not kiss me at all, when we—’
    ‘I could not kiss you then. I did not dare. I wanted you beyond reason. With a word, you could have ripped the heart from my body and left me dying. I looked at your body and knew I could not help my reaction to it, but I wasafraid to share my soul with you. As I do now.’ And his lips came down upon hers and swept away all thought, and she clung to him as he took the sweetness from her mouth and left her hungry for things she didn’t know or understand.
    And the kiss moved down her throat to her shoulders and the swell of her breasts, and she struggled against the fabric of her nightdress until he pushed it out of the way and covered her nipple with his mouth and stroked with his hands and his tongue until she moaned.
    He pulled away to kiss her temple, and she whispered, ‘Yes. That is you. That is what I want.’
    ‘And is that all?’ He was laughing at her again, but she didn’t care. ‘If there is more than that?’
    There is , her body urged. There is.
    ‘Then I want you to give it to me.’
    He framed her face in his hands, and smiled again. ‘I was a fool to leave you alone, even for a moment.’ He stroked her body through the nightdress and down the side of her leg. His smile faded, but the glint in his eyes was pure devilment. ‘And my brother touched only your ankle?’
    ‘Through the stocking,’ she responded. ‘I fell. And he said he was checking for injury.’
    ‘Of course. I’d say some fustian like that myself to get a hand under your skirt.’
    ‘Under my skirt?’
    But he’d slid to the bottom of the bed and held her ankle between the palms of his hands. ‘And which would it be, this injured ankle. The left or the right?’
    ‘I don’t remember.’
    ‘Both, then.’ And he was kissing her insteps and her arches, swirling a tongue over the little knobs of bone. Running hands up the length of her legs to grasp her behind her knees and spread her legs to straddle his face.
    And his kisses had reached her knee caps,