Page 22 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
Henry had never been a rake.
He’d been accused of it often enough before his marriage to Martha. Whispers of scandals and affairs that he had never taken part in. He had been a flirt, to be sure. He had enjoyed, as any young man might, female attentions and the thrill of making a lady blush.
There had been women here and there before Martha. A girl from the local village before she had moved off, an opera singer in France during his holiday there. Not many, to be sure, but enough for a man of his age at the time.
After Martha though?
There was only ever Martha.
He had lived and breathed her presence, her soul attaching to his and making all other women cease to exist.
He’d been approached several times over the course of their marriage by the more morally bankrupt of the ladies ofthe ton. They’d flirted and laughed and proposed all manner of indecent things to him, verbally and otherwise.
Not once had he ever even been slightly tempted.
It was like the physical reaction to such things had been stripped from him and given solely to his wife and her attributes.
And after her death?
Henry’s knuckles gripped the back of the chair he stood behind, the skin blanching white from the force he put behind it.
There had been offers.
Most notably that first misguided affair with Catherine in the wake of her grief.
Then the others had come in a trickle, offers and suggestions posed to him over the course of that first six months after Martha’s funeral. Enough that he had finally fully disappeared from society altogether to avoid them.
Not that he could avoid seeing a woman ever.
There were still certain events he couldn’t cry off of. Parties and balls that he was required to put in an appearance atwhere ambitious mamas and their willing offspring were toted before him like some prize to claim.
And still he hadn’t been stirred. Not even by the most accomplished or most beautiful of them. Through no amount of flirting.
And yet Josephine St Vincent had only looked up at him, her freckles standing out against that tell-tale blush that coloured her fair-olive skin. She had only looked at him, and he had felt something within himself, his chest tightening as his trousers followed suit.
It took only a second, and he was suddenly acutely aware of every detail about her. The soft skin of her palm and the warmth of her fingers in his. The way that her pulse raced at her wrist, so small that he could have easily encircled it within his fingers. The flecks of green and grey that danced in her shining blue gaze.
He groaned, dropping his head as he tried to banish such thoughts from his mind. As he tried to scrub the mental imagery from behind his tightly closed lids.
He could smell her even then, the faint scent of vanilla and clove tickling his nose just like it had when they’d stood paused there in front of the loveseat. Sweet and spicy as if she were daring to tempt him even further.
Except there had been no artifice in anything she did. No intention behind her movements, and that had made it all the worse. Because it was so innocent. Innocent enough that he had wanted to sink his teeth into her then and there.
It was all too easy to imagine what might have happened had her parents, Lisbet and Simon not been just a yard or less away.
All too easy to imagine taking her hand and yanking her to him until he could feel the softness of her curves pressed against him. To imagine how it would feel to reach up and allow his hands to run up the exposed skin of her neck and back until his fingers could tangle in her auburn hair and pull it down from that elaborate updo her mother had no doubt spent hours pinning in place.
And he could see her in his mind’s eye – those auburn waves tumbling down her shoulders and the ends of them covering her blue-lace-covered breasts.
For someone as slim as she was, her dress had clung to her in all-too-telling of ways, ensuring him that supple curves lay beneath.
Things he wouldn’t have noticed.
Things he shouldn’t have noticed.
His jaw clenched as he felt that stirring within him once more, his brain supplying all the imagery he needed for his body to react.
God, she’d been so beautiful.
