Page 76 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

All this time, her body had been capable of such bliss. All she’d needed was a man tender and skilled enough to find it.

He played with her still, gliding through slick flesh until he circled the tender opening with his fingertip, emitting another savage growl. “God, you’re…” His finger paused, tested, and probed with increasing urgency. “You’re so…” He breached her, only slightly, then further.

Alexandra gasped. Froze. Expecting it to hurt, expecting any number of terrible things.

Instead a gentle, aching pleasure goaded her intimate flesh to make way for him, until he’d sunk in to the knuckle.

She spent a moment wallowing in relief until she heard his low curse. Felt the strange sensation of his finger inside her.

“Fucking hell,” he bit out.

And then he was gone. Not just his hand, but all of him, leaving her alone on the bed.

CHAPTERTHIRTEEN

Piers didn’t dare speak as he blindly riffled about in his trunks at the foot of the bed.

“W-what’s wrong?”

He ignored her question. Disregarding the soft note of uncertainty laced beneath the lingering throaty tones of a passionate afterglow.

Where in the fuck had his valet packed his…?—Oh, there it was, thank God.

He seized the box containing his cheroot and grappled it open. Cursing his unsteady fingers, he lit it and dragged in a burning breath.

He caught the outline of her beyond the glowing bead at the end of his smoke.

She’d risen to her elbow, dragging the coverlet over her, as though she needed modesty in a nearly black room.

Christ, but she was flawless. She really was.

As he took his next smoke, he inhaled the intimate scent of her lingering on his fingers.

His mouth flooded with moisture.

His veins flooded with murder.

Piers did his best to keep the tumultuous heat from his voice when he could finally unclench his jaw enough to say, “I’ve been tricked a few times in my day. By some of the best in the world. But you.Youput every double-crossing con man and swindler to absolute shame.”

Her silent astonishment became a tangible thing reaching out to him in the dark.

Even now, he ached to soothe her. To ease her distress. The protective instinct she’d aroused within him was so powerful that even the surge of his fury couldn’t fully contain it.

“I—I don’t understand.” Her voice wavered with perceptible confusion.

“You claimed you’d never even been kissed?” he exploded.

“I haven’t!” she insisted. “Hadn’t.Not until—”

“Well, you’ve certainly been fucked,” he snarled. He stalked to the doorway, needing more distance from her body, which called to him still. “It’s hard to imagine how you’d manage one without the other.”

He waited. Her silence screaming across the darkness, creating a cavern between them where only a few paces truly existed.

Where were her maidenly protestations? Couldn’t she atleastdeny it?

His mother always had.

Every time she’d been caught in a compromising position in a darkened corner with one of his father’s so-calledfriendsat a soiree. Every time she’d abandoned them for weeks on end, galivanting with a younger man, a more handsome one, giving only the most imperceptible of concessions to decorum.