The Duke is Wicked (League of Lords #3) - Tracy Sumner Page 0,52
Striding to his horse, he took the reins in one hand and awkwardly mounted, tucking her safely before him across his lap. Kicking into a light trot, he recalled his unit’s medic advising that those with a head injury keep talking. “Your mare’s name is Metis?” he asked, folding his hand over hers and capturing it against his chest.
A moist puff of laughter hit his neck. “First wife, Zeus. Goddess. Deep thought.”
“She had an attic, too, did she?”
She sing-songed a reply.
Sebastian swallowed his unease and shifted her in his arms, securing the fit as they trotted over a gentle slope, closing in on his castle. “I’m sorry, you know.”
She hummed, the vibration swimming from her chest and into his.
“For putting you in the position of having to answer such personal questions in front of the League.” He squeezed the reins until his knuckles popped. “Why didn’t you tell me what that bastard did to you?”
“Because you’re…already at war.”
Helpless, he pressed his lips to the crown of her head. “I’m done fighting, Temple.” He questioned about what, exactly. But this wasn’t the time to figure out what he wasn’t ready to figure out.
“Our kiss…” Her sweetly scented breath slipped inside his collar to warm his skin.
His body was reacting to her closeness, and thinking of that kiss wouldn’t help. He prayed she hadn’t noticed his unavoidable embarrassment beneath her pert bottom. “What about it?” he asked cautiously, making it worse for both of them by running his thumb inside her glove, in sluggish circles over her wrist.
“Like now.” She wiggled against his burgeoning erection.
“Maybe that’s my pistol you’re feeling.”
She shook her head. “Not a pistol.”
“Let’s just say, I took care of it last time. As a gentleman, I won’t say how, though I’m guessing at the first opportunity, you’ll look it up in a naughty book in your attic.” His arm tightened around her as his gaslit castle, light a dull glaze spilling across the lawn, thankfully popped into view over the rise. “There weren’t a thousand women, you know. What you’ve read, what they say about me. Grossly exaggerated. Like what they say about you.”
“Ah…not a thousand.” Another breath blew across his neck, his heart reaching to catch it. “Only five hundred.”
Smiling, despite the situation they found themselves in, troubling from numerous razor-sharp angles, he tucked her close, fading sunlight painting a golden tinge across their path, summer twilight upon them. His shoulders relaxed when he noticed an uninjured Metis grazing beneath an elm tree by the side garden.
Since Delaney wouldn’t remember what he said, he admitted something he’d never admitted to a living soul. “The numbers don’t matter, Temple. Intimacy is what’s missing. The act, you’ll find out someday, is merely that, an act, without the other. Because of the fires, I’ve never spent a night with a woman, woken to find her in my arms. I can’t risk it, unless they know about me. And even then, I’m not sure I can risk it.”
“Society,” she whispered.
“Society only seeks the idea of me. The duke. Sebastian is not in the equation. There hasn’t been anyone in my life I thought to…” His words drained away because he was close to stumbling across a truth his mind—and heart—weren’t ready to discover.
If by some slim chance, Delaney recalled this conversation, he’d find the nearest medieval sword in his crumbling castle and fall on it.
The studded oak door Delaney loved so much opened when he galloped up the gravel drive, servants spilling from the house and across the lawn. They must have seen Delaney’s riderless mount return and become alarmed.
Sebastian handed her down to two footmen and her maid, Minnie, who whisked her up the stairs and inside the abode with murmured words of solace.
“Call the physician,” he directed his majordomo, and dismounted, tossing the reins to a pink-cheeked groom who’d raced from the stables. “And retrieve Miss Temple’s mare from the garden and check for injury.”
His staff snapped to attention much as his army regiment had. People were scrambling to do his bidding because of a title he’d been given that, as Delaney once told him in her democratic way, he’d done nothing to earn. Not one thing, aside from living through a war in India while his brothers died of cholera without ever leaving England. He rubbed his father’s signet ring against the ache in his chest, wishing for things he’d no right to wish for.
To be the third son, to marry someone he loved. To be normal.