Tall, Duke, and Dangerous (Hazards of Dukes #2) - Megan Frampton Page 0,90

her if she tried to stand up.

That was incredible. She wanted to do it all immediately again, only she wasn’t certain she could remain upright.

“Let me take care of that,” Nash said, gesturing to the bench. He picked his cravat up from the floor, then began to wipe up, stroking her thighs to clean them of his spill.

She knew what he had done, of course, and why he had done it; she hadn’t even thought to ask about preventing childbirth, idiot that she was, and she was grateful he had. Because there was no way she wanted to bear his child, not in their current circumstances.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, glancing up at him.

He arched an eyebrow. “For—?”

She felt her cheeks heat and was grateful for the relative dark. “For all of it. For this, and for making sure we don’t—”

“Of course,” he said. Did he sound disappointed?

But he was the one who was insisting there be nothing permanent between them.

Even though they’d just done all of this.

It was all very confusing. She was very confused.

She wanted him, more than ever, but she also knew that to take him now would be a compromise, and she was done with compromises.

“What are you thinking about? Don’t think it was a mistake,” he said, his tone urgent.

“No, no, of course not,” she replied, reaching for him.

But he was out of reach, since he was standing, and she was still on the bench, the skirts of her gown hiked up nearly around her ears, entirely exposed to him.

The distance felt as though it meant something, even though he had only moved away because she had asked him to.

Wasn’t she supposed to feel exhilarated after such an experience?

She still felt the remnants of the pleasure he’d brought her, but she also felt mournful, as though this was the start of their inevitable end.

“If you don’t think it was a mistake, is there something you want to tell me?”

She snorted in response. “Oh, that’s rich, coming from you. The one who never says how he feels.”

Instead of returning to his usual nonverbal arrogant stance—standing proudly inarticulate, arms folded over his chest—he stood in a very un-Nash-like stance, his hands hanging at his sides, his expression concerned, his gaze on hers.

“I don’t choose not to speak.”

His words were halting.

“I—I don’t always know how.”

She ached for him, for his closing himself off so thoroughly. This felt even more momentous than the time only a few minutes before, when she’d engaged in the most passionate experience of her life. Was he about to finally open up to her? Tell her everything that was in his heart?

“Tell me,” she said, patting the bench beside her.

He nodded, then came to sit on the bench, his hands loosely clasped between his knees.

She adjusted her skirts so they fell back toward the gown and shifted a bit to the side so she could see him.

“It’s hard to explain. Obviously,” he added ruefully.

“What would you say if you could say it?”

He gazed forward, clearly lost in thought. A few long moments of silence passed between them.

She was conscious of the noises from the party wafting toward them—people chattering, music playing, the occasional clink of glassware.

People living their lives a short distance away, completely unaware of what had happened here.

Thank goodness, of course. Because if they knew, there would be no choice but for them to marry. Or risk her disgrace forever.

Would she remain true enough to her own values to choose the latter?

“I tried to talk at first.”

She waited.

“But there were no words for how I felt.”

More silence.

“How you felt about what?” she prompted.

“My mother. The duke.” She noticed he didn’t say his father. “I was about ten years old when she left, and she didn’t say why. She didn’t even say goodbye. She couldn’t, I know that now, but I didn’t know that back then.”

Her chest felt tight with the ache for him. To be that young, to have your mother leave you—of course her mother had died when she had been just months old, but she wasn’t aware of any of that at the time.

“I knew not to ask him”—him clearly meaning his father—“but I asked anybody else. They all just gave me this frightened look, a look I’d seen on her face.” He shrugged. “Then it just became easier to demonstrate how I felt by showing people, not telling them.”

Had he just shown her how he felt about her?

But no. She had asked him for this; he was merely acceding