her hand over the one he held to her cheek, the softness of her gloved fingertips snagging over his coarse knuckles.
Beneath her, his shoulder lifted and fell with quickening breaths, and the warmth of his exhales brushed her skin, lightly scented of dessert flavored by port.
The staff wasn’t supposed to nip at the food, but she’d always supposed they did, and she was glad he’d had a taste.
He deserved every pleasure.
Suddenly she wanted to know more about him. “How did you know about the Marquess of Blandbury?”
“Doctor Alcott,” he said simply.
“You must see him often if you know such intimate things about his patients and swap books from his library.”
He shifted a little, as if talking about himself made him uncomfortable. “I work for him four evenings a week and every other Saturday.”
“On top of your duties here?”
He nodded.
What a keen mind he must have. She rather appreciated that. “I think it’s lovely of you to lend them to Felicity.” A smile worked its way through her prior distress, at the thought of her sister’s eyes, made unnaturally large by her spectacles, as she stared adoringly up at Titus. “I think she rather fancies you.”
He made a sound in his chest that landed somewhere between amusement and embarrassment, but he made no reply.
She laced her fingers in between his as if she needed to hold onto something in order to make her next confession. “Sometimes I have vague wisps of dreams, or maybe memories, of those days I spent with the fever.”
He tensed, and she had the impression that if her hand hadn’t held his to her cheek, he would have retracted it.
“I think you were feeding me, singing me lullabies…” Unsure of what was prompting her to behave this way, she turned her face against his skin until her lips grazed the meat of his palm. “Bathing me.”
He drew away then, his breath sawing in and out of him with true effort as he turned his back to her. “Don’t remember,” he rasped.
She couldn’t tell if he meant he didn’t remember, or if he was ordering her not to recall. But she did. Bits and pieces. She wondered sometimes, how much of it had been real. If he’d taken cooling sponges to her bare skin. If he’d lowered her naked body into baths and then tenderly arranged soft nightgowns over her.
She couldn’t help but allow her thoughts to linger on the intimacy of that.
“I didn’t ever thank you properly,” she said, pressing her hand to his shoulder. “They whisked me off so quickly to that health clinic in Switzerland, and then to finishing school after that. But… I’ve thought of you often.”
So very often.
He said nothing. Did nothing. Just breathed, or at least fought to do so.
Had he thought of her? She wanted to ask. Did she linger in his mind as he did in hers, like the sweet furloughs of the past? A reassuring memory through a miasma of distress and expectation?
“Titus,” she breathed, her own heartbeat gaining strength, pressing against her ribs. “Titus, look at me.”
His chin touched his shoulder, and she reached out to encourage him to swivel his entire body to face her on the bench.
“I want to thank you,” she said, bracketing his tense jaw with both her silk-gloved hands, searching his uniquely handsome face and finding what she hoped for.
Hope and hunger.
“Thank you for everything,” she whispered. “For then. For tonight. And…for this.” Following a reckless, unrelenting longing, she pulled his head lower so her lips could press to his.
She found his mouth harder than she’d expected.
Sweeter, too.
They sat like that for a moment, their lips locked and still, as if waiting for the night to catch its breath, because neither of them seemed to be able to.
Then, his mouth became pliant over hers, before he nudged gently forward.
Moving his lips in subtle, whispering sweeps, he took control of the kiss without even seeming to know he’d done it, drugging her with motions that were as languid as they were astonished.
As certain as they were untried.
His hands drew up her arms, but instead of taking liberties, they settled at the band of skin where the hem of her gloves ended above her elbow but below her sleeve. His thumb stroked lightly there, testing the softness, and eliciting more erotic sensation than she’d thought existed.
She’d somehow known it would be like this. That he would be like this. Something inside of her had sensed his need, not strictly by the way he looked at