Page 52 of Duke of Pride

Victoria’s breath caught. She heard what he didn’t say, what the low gravel of his voice conveyed—that this moment was as fragile as it was inevitable. Her fingers tightened around his. The music ended.

Stephen held her a moment more, her body and her gaze and her soul. Just one moment more. Then, his arms dropped, feeling empty already.

He bowed slightly and left the drawing room.

* * *

The party had ended hours ago, and the manor quieted. And yet he was sitting on the armchair in his study, before the fireplace. In his hand, the silver hairpin glinted in the firelight as he turned it between his fingers. Its weight was negligible, a mere slip of metal, yet it felt as heavy as sin in his palm.

Euclid placed his head on his thigh, silently asking to be petted. Stephen scratched the dog behind his ear.

“You, too, are a traitor. You like her best,” he said.

Euclid licked his hand.

“I do not blame you.” Stephen chuckled bitterly.

The mutt shook his body and made himself

Stephen’s eyes strayed to the half-opened door to the dressing room. His body stiffened at the memory of that first night back home. The feel of her skin against his, her curves against his body, the way she melted into him in the drawing room during their first kiss, how good he felt wrapped in her arms in the carriage.

“Damn it.”

She was everywhere, even here in his wretched room. The dog was hers, for crying out loud.

He knew he was not going to get any sleep in this state. So he put on his boots, and in just his shirt, he went out and ventured alone in the gardens.

It was so quiet, now that everyone was asleep. The night was pleasant, but still, the cold night air bit through his thin shirt. He welcomed it all—the sharp sting in his skin, the way his breath fogged in the dark. Anything to distract from the fever in his blood.

He took the gravel path away from the house. He didn’t want anyone to see him from the windows looking like a forlorn gothic hero. He’d rather do that in private.

He took the path to the neglected greenhouse.

Growing up, this had been his favorite place in the estate. He would hide here from his tutors and his father’s stern looks, from the weight of the title that he would inherit one day, from his strict upbringing, from the constant reminder of rules and propriety.

Once more, he was hiding, only this time it was from things far more complex.

He saw his reflection in the glass of the greenhouse. Disheveled, his hair a mess from the hundred times he had run his fingers through it, his shirt unbuttoned, his eyes sad and frantic.

“Hell, Victoria.”

CHAPTER15

Lemon Tree

Not that she had been sleeping soundly ever since the Duke of Colborne decided to come back to his ancestral home and uproot her logic. But that night, Victoria felt like she couldn’t breathe. She tried to drink something warm and read as she did every night. She even sat on the small desk and solved the most complex of mathematical equations. Nothing worked.

Numbers could do a lot of things; they explained the way the world worked, but they were useless in explaining the way she felt. Everywhere Stephen had touched her during their dance thrummed like live wires. She could still feel the possessive grip at her waist, the searing brush of his thigh.

She pressed trembling hands to her flushed cheeks.

“This is insanity!” she whispered to herself.

The bedchamber walls seemed to shrink with every breath. The open window did nothing to ease the heat pooling low in her belly. A heat that had nothing to do with the summer night and everything to do with the memory of hard muscles beneath her palms as she’d steadied herself against him during a turn in the dance.

“Listen, Victoria,” she muttered to herself. “Just forget about him, for all that is sacred.”

She had danced with the Duke of Blackwell, too. He, too, was a striking man who moved with the effortless grace of a natural rake. His wit was sharp enough to make her laugh—trulylaugh. There’d been a boyish twinkle in his eyes that promised mischief, a charm that set other ladies’ fans fluttering like startled butterflies.

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