“Who’s there?” he demanded, mortified to know someone stood witness to the intimate conversation.
“Forgive me.” A woman stepped closer, her whisper a familiar caress to his starved soul. She left the shadows behind. Her face fell into the lamp’s glow.
“Fallon.” He breathed her name, his chest squeezing tight.
“I did not mean to eavesdrop.” Her words flew in an agitated rush, her hands twisting together before her. “You entered the room, and I just panicked.” She gestured to the screen. “Then you started talking—” She stopped abruptly. Even in the gloom of the room he detected the flood of color to her cheeks. She stared at him a long moment, her gaze searching. “My apologies.” She fled the room, wide skirts swishing at her ankles.Apricot-colored skirts, he thought in stunned silence. Had he ever seen her garbed in color?
He uttered her name again, staring at the open door through which she had fled. Questions whirred through his head. What was she doing here? In this house? With his grandfather?
The rasp of his grandfather’s voice penetrated his thoughts. “You’re the one, then.”
He turned and looked down at the bed, staring into eyes so like his own. Without even thinking, he nodded. “Yes.”
“I should have guessed.”
His spine stiffened. “Why is that?”
“The girl’s been nursing a broken heart. She said you didn’t love her. That youcouldn’t love.”
“I can,” he spit out fiercely, feeling challenged, denied, and not liking it one damn bit. Especially since he had realized almost from the moment he let Fallon walk out of his life that he had to have her back. At the harshness of his voice, he swallowed, amending his tone. “Ido .”
“Go then.” His grandfather’s voice gained volume as he added. “You haven’t run out of time with her.”
The words struck him with force in the chest, winding him. Nodding again, he started from the room. First at a walk, then a run.
Fallon halted at the bottom of the steps, cursing her poor luck to find the Reverend Simmon’s smiling face beaming up at her.
“Miss O’Rourke! Splendid meeting you here. Are you visiting with our unfortunate Mr. Collins?” His pleased features fell then, adopting an appropriate look of concern as he clucked his tongue.
Fallon nodded, stepping down into the foyer, her heart racing too quickly to form coherent speech.Dominic . She dragged a hand down the side of her face, loathing how it trembled.
What was he doing here? This was the last place he should ever appear given his relationship with his grandfather. She had thought herself perfectly safe at Wayfield—the last place he wished to be. And yet here he was. Upstairs. With the man he most hated…and showing himkindness , saying things she never thought to hear him say.
“And how is the gentleman?”
She shook her head at the young vicar, doing her best to give him her attention. “Not well. He struggles.”
“Ah, but he is blessed with a hearty constitution.” His fair head bobbed. “He has been strong for so long now.” He took her elbow and leaned forward as if to confide some great secret. “I suspect your arrival into his life has renewed him.” His brown eyes warmed as they crawled over her face. His fingers moved a small circle over the inside of her arm. “Many an expiring soul would feel heartened in your company and find the will to live again.”
“God’s teeth, woman.”
Fallon closed her eyes in one pained blink, recognizing the deep voice at once and wincing at his choice of words. Before the local vicar, no less.
“Every time I turn around, some man is pawing at you. Can you not try to project proper modesty?”
She turned and glared at Dominic, all remorse for overhearing his very private and long-awaited words with his grandfather fleeing in the face of his rude words.
“A lecture on propriety fromyou ?”
His gray eyes glinted with what almost looked like…delight? “We’re not discussing me.”
“Have you no shame,” she hissed, hot mortification sweeping her face.
“Whomever you are, sir, I can assure I was not pawing Miss O’Rourke.” Even so, Mr. Simmon’s dropped his hand from her arm as though burned. He pulled his narrow shoulders up and back, stretching to his full height, which brought his eyes level only with her chin.
“Miss O’Rourke—” he paused to glare at Dominic, “Fallon. Who is this person?”
“You were correct the first time. It’s Miss O’Rourke to you.” Dominic flicked the man the barest glance before looking back to Fallon and taking her hand. His warm fingers wrapped around hers, firm and unyielding as a vise. Facing each other, they fell utterly still. Mr. Simmons and the world disappeared for a long moment as their eyes locked, and clung. The blood rushed in her ears, a roaring buzz as she lost herself in the murky gray depths, the line of blue circling the iris especially dark. Then he blinked. The moment ended as quickly as it arrived.
Before she could tug her hand free, he hauled her from the foyer without a word. She shot a quick glance behind her. The sight of the reverend’s pale, stunned face almost looked comical. Almost. She could have cracked a smile, if not for the very real feel of Dominic’s hand on hers, or the small thrill of heat that sizzled through her at the contact, bringing back in a flash all they had shared. All that she had tried to put behind her.
He pulled her behind him into a drawing room she had never seen before. Not so surprising. In her limited exposure to Wayfield Park, she had yet to see all of its vast grounds or countless rooms. Mr. Collins was hardly up to giving a tour.
The room was lovely. All yellow and creams with faint accents of blue. White and ivory-striped drapes were pulled back to allow the afternoon sun inside. She would have taken more time to admire the sunny room if not for the duke backing her up until she bumped into the pianoforte, his body a very large wall of heat at her front.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, eyes drilling relentlessly into her.
“Lord Hunt provided me his old nanny’s cottage. Near the old mill east of Little Saums. It has been vacated these last—”
“You’re living here?” He made a stabbing motion at the floor. “He sent you to livehere ?”
“Well, not here.” She motioned to the room lamely. “Nearby.”
Dominic smiled suddenly then, and she felt as though someone had thrust her from a very dark room into the warm sunshine again. “I don’t know whether I should thank him or trounce him the next time I see him.”
Her stomach flipped at that smile. He had smiled so few times without mockery or wicked purpose since she knew him, it was like seeing a stranger. With that smile he was a greater threat than ever before. Enticing, charming…dangerous. More dangerous than the wicked duke she had first thought him to be.
“Fallon,” he whispered, his hand lifting, brushing back a lock of hair from her forehead. She resisted the impulse to lean into his touch. It would be so easy to fall if she let herself, to give in to all that she had resisted by running away.
Running away. She shook her head, her intemperate self disliking the notion. She had not run. She merely moved on with her life. A life thatstill did not include him. Nor the pitiable role of mistress he had offered her, scarcely a spot at all in his world. No matter how she loved him, she could not surrender herself to him.
But what if he had changed?a small voice whispered, nudging at the hope buried in her heart.
Her gaze crawled over his face, throat thickening, recalling the brief exchange she had overheard between him and his grandfather. Further evidence that a stranger stood before her. Not the duke she knew at all.
He had come. When he said he would not, he had come.
“Fallon,” he repeated her name, the tender emotion in his gaze wildly at odds with all those cool looks and wicked, empty smiles he’d given her in the past. She felt something unsafe unravel inside her.Hope . Dangerous indeed for one who had no business feeling it.
“Don’t,” she murmured, afraid this time she could not walk away from him. Not again. Not when he looked at her with softness in his eyes. Not when, only moments ago, he had shown compassion she would never credit to him.
“I’m glad you came to see your grandfather. Truly I am.” She tried to slip between him and the pianoforte. “I should leave you to your visit—”
His arms came up, caging her in and stopping her. “You’re not running away again.”
“Dominic, you need time with your grandfather right now. I will just be in the—”
“I did not just come here for me, damn it.”
Fallon stopped breathing.
“I came here for you. Forus . I need,” he said thickly, “you.”
She breathed again, perhaps for the first time in her life since her father died. She breathed,lived , drawing air deeply into her lungs.
He smiled, the grin loose, easy, even as a glimmer of anxiety flashed in his eyes. “Even my grandfather agrees with that.” His chest brushed the front of her gown and her nipples peaked, hardened against the fabric. Hot mortification washed over her. “I need you, Fallon.”
She wet her lips. “I can’t do this. I won’t be your mistress—”
He smothered the rest of her words with his lips.
She whimpered, her hands pushing and pulling at the same time on his jacket. Everything flooded back with his kiss. His taste, his heat. The magic. Her tongue tangled with his as he bowed her over the pianoforte. She clutched his shoulders, fingers curling in his jacket, yearning, desperate, ready to climbon him,inside him.
She didn’t care at the hard wood digging into her spine. She cared only for him, for his mouth fused to hers. Hot tears seeped between the closed lids of her eyes, and she knew in that moment, it was over. Done. She was past fighting. She loved him. Would have him, however he wanted her.
He came up briefly, lips moving against her mouth as he said, “Be my wife.”
She jerked free of his lips, her gasp a sharp rip of air in the stillness, hands flattening on his broad chest. “What?”
He smiled that smile again and this time only hot need glimmered in his eyes. Her toes curled. “I don’t want to lose you. I want to spend every day for the rest of my life with you. When I thought I might never see you again…I felt more than I thought I ever could.” His hands tightened where he held her. “I felt pain, Fallon. I hurt…” He stopped, blinking slowly. “It’s simple. Without you, I ache. With you—” He shook his head and dove in for another kiss.
She dodged his mouth. “Butmarriage ? You’re a duke.”
His lips twisted. “I know. I hope you’re not going to hold that against me.”
She snorted a rough laugh and a slow smile spread across her face. She always had before, she realized. Disliked him and every other peer, on principle alone.
“Yes, but I’m…” her voice faded, unsure what she was anymore. Not a servant. No longer a shadow walking the halls of Penwich waiting for a glimpse of sunlight, yearning for a place to call home.
“The woman I love,” he finished. She felt her eyes widen as he continued. “Nothing else matters.”
“And you’re the man I love.”
He cupped her cheek in his hand, the calloused pads a familiar rasp on her skin. “That matters.”
She laughed, the sound strangely freeing,lifting .
“You’ve always wanted a home of your own, Fallon. I’ll give you that. A house wherever you want. I bloody well don’t care as long as I have you.” He waved a hand about the room. “Here. In London. At your cottage. Or I’ll build you the house of your dreams. Anywhere.” He gave her a gentle shake. “Just say yes.”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
She placed both hands on each side of his face, holding him as though he were the dearest thing in the world to her. And amazingly, he was. All that shenever dared dream of. A blue blood. A rake.A demon duke.
“A house isn’t a home.” She had learned that lesson in the last few weeks. “You are.I love you. I can live in a stable, a shack, as long as I have you next to me.”
He grinned. “A stable, eh? You don’t ask for much.”
She brushed her lips to his, smiling with wicked promise. “Don’t fool yourself. I ask for a great deal—everything.You .”
“I’m yours, but I’m afraid you’re going to learn that isn’t much compared to what I’m getting.” His hands grasped her, but it was a hold she doubted would ever feel too tight.
“No, Dominic. You’re everything. And you’re mine.”
“There you are.” Fallon stopped and propped her hands on her hips, looking down at her husband sprawled beneath a large oak tree, the day’s fading light casting him in seductive shadow. “What are you doing here? I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Dominic smiled at her—the wicked smile thatstill made her knees go weak. He reached up and tugged her down beside him. Sprawled beside him, his gaze traveled a warm trail over her. He dipped one finger inside the bodice of her dress, scraping a blunt nail across her flesh. “You look beautiful.”
Her breath caught and she slapped lightly at his hand. “We’re going to be late.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay here?” He patted the soft grass. “It’s a beautiful night.”