Page 35 of I Never Forget a Duke (The Night Fire Club #1)

P erhaps the greatest challenge to Hugh in the lead up to his wedding was going to sleep at night knowing Adele was in the adjacent room.

His London home was compact in a way Swynford House was not. He had a sense of that, at least. He lay awake one night a little over a week after Adele had moved in and tried to picture his home in Kent but could not.

It didn’t quite work as a distraction. Adele was tantalizingly close.

He kept picturing the expression on her face when she’d come apart in his arms that one night they’d spent together.

He pictured the long lines and curves of her body, the rise of her breasts, the roundness of her hips, her beautifully formed legs.

Having her in his home made him want to touch her nearly constantly, and he’d been sneaking in touches, but women wore a great deal of clothing, and Adele seemed to have put a wall between herself and Hugh.

Why was an important question. Did she not want him?

Well, he would have her on their wedding night without shame or fear of his mother’s reprisal. Because Adele must know by now that she had nothing to fear from him, but she was likely quite intimidated by the dowager.

He lay in bed, unable to sleep, painfully hard.

He grunted and got out of bed. He walked to the library thinking he’d find a book that might distract him enough to make him sleepy, but when he arrived, he saw the row of books on one of the shelves, ten volumes bound in yellow leather describing the history of the Dukes of Swynford. That gave him an idea.

Perhaps something here could help jog his memory.

The ten-volume history of the Swynfords was likely just the sort of dull reading that would put him to sleep, but a large volume that said “Swynford House” on the spine caught his eye.

He slid it off the shelf and sat at the table in the middle of the room.

The book turned out to be the family’s records regarding construction and renovations at the Swynford ancestral home.

He could not remember what it looked like, but he had a sense of its size.

He flipped through the book’s pages and found drawings and diagrams of the house.

It started to come back to him.

According to the book, the house had been built in the fifteenth century by one of Hugh’s Baxter ancestors.

The first Duchess of Swynford was primarily responsible for a large renovation in the 1670s that reinforced and expanded the house.

Dukes of Swynford throughout the eighteenth century had renovated and modernized the house.

Then there were a series of notes in Hugh’s own hand indicating that, in the time since his father’s death, Hugh had been working on his own improvements.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the house.

A lot of it was still hidden behind the curtain, but then he had a sudden memory of approaching the house in a carriage and was overwhelmed by the feeling of coming home.

He could see now the long row of manicured shrubbery on the path to the front door, the house’s blond brick facade, the columns that framed the door.

The house itself was four stories tall and quite imposing as one approached it.

He looked at a diagram of the floor plan. The house had an H shape, which made Hugh recall referring to the vertical parts of the H as the east and west wings.

According to the floor plans, there was a grand suite of rooms on the third floor that included bedrooms for the master and mistress of the house, connected by his and hers dressing rooms and a grand tiled room with a bathtub.

A separate room for bathing had been one of Hugh’s own improvements the previous year, according to the notes in his handwriting, intended to keep mold from getting into the floor.

There was a nursery on that floor as well; some previous Duchess of Swynford had wanted to care for her children rather than just handing them off to nannies and governesses, so the nursery was close to the duke’s quarters.

Hugh’s mother had been that way; he’d had a nanny and a governess and a tutor who taught him basic business, but spent most of his time before leaving for Eton with his mother.

Portraits of her as a younger woman had brought those memories back to him.

She’d doted on him, spoken with him often, and snuck him sweets when his father wasn’t looking.

It was why he felt so guilty for defying her now; he knew she loved him.

She never said the words, but he knew it somewhere deep in his soul.

But her insistence on the integrity of the Swynford name over all other things was…

well, maybe something else was going on here, now that he thought about it.

He made a mental note to follow up on that later.

He was still looking at diagrams and floor plans when he heard a small sound behind him. He turned and saw Adele standing in the doorway to the library, wearing only a flimsy dressing gown over her nightgown.

“I didn’t expect anyone to be here,” she said.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Nor could I. I thought to come to the library and find something to read. Daisy mentioned that the duchess has been collecting Sir Walter Scott’s novels, so I thought to try one of those.”

“I had a similar thought and then fell into reading the Swynford House records. I’m trying to remember the house, but there are parts of it I cannot picture in my mind.”

“Have you spent much time there?”

“Yes, I believe so. Most of my childhood. According to the book, I made a number of improvements just last year and bought some new furniture as well. But I can’t picture a single piece of that furniture. It’s all still hidden behind the veil of my broken memory.”

“We’ll see it soon enough, won’t we?”

“Yes. It is my intention to return to Swynford House shortly after the wedding. We’ll be more comfortable there when the weather turns warm. And, given that my assailant is still at large, it may be smart to get out of London. I just wish I could picture my home.”

“Are you still worried about being attacked again?”

“I just wish I knew what happened. Until I know, I can’t shake the feeling that danger still lurks about.”

“You’ve got a guard outside.”

“And he may be successfully deterring whoever means me harm. Getting out of London would, I think, ease my mind.”

Adele held up a candle and walked along the row of books opposite where Hugh sat at the table. The way she held the candle allowed him to see the outline of her body through her flimsy nightclothes. He tried not to stare.

As if she sensed what was happening in his body, she asked. “Why could you not sleep? Are you worried about danger?”

He sighed, but then smiled at her. “Well, no, actually. If you must know, a beautiful woman sleeping so close to my room was a distraction.”

She nodded. “I will admit, I suffered from something of the same affliction. I can’t help but remember that night that we… but then I think about how I would feel if your mother caught us. She already detests me.”

“She does not detest you.”

“Well, she is not fond of me, and I do not want to give her more reasons not to like me.”

Hugh closed the book and stood up. He replaced it on the shelf and turned to look at Adele. The room was dim, the only light coming from the candles they’d each brought with them. Adele set hers on the mantle over the fireplace, as if she knew she was about to need both hands.

Hugh went to her. She was hard to see in the low light, but the way the thin fabric of her nightgown skimmed right over her skin was tantalizing.

She wore no corset now, no drawers or petticoats or other undergarments.

Hugh himself wore only an old dressing gown.

Very little separated them, something that became immediately apparent when he kissed her and she pressed her chest against his.

He wanted her. He wanted to rip off the flimsy nightgown and have her right on this table. The lust he’d been banking since she’d moved into his house was suddenly begging to be let loose.

She pressed her hands to his chest and pushed him away slightly. “Can you wait until our wedding night?”

“No.”

He moved to kiss her again, but she stopped him. “I was not jesting. What happens if your mother catches us, well, in flagrante .”

“We’re about to be married, Adele. What does it matter?”

“It matters, Hugh. We are not husband and wife yet.”

With a sigh, Hugh stepped back. “Fine, fine. Mother sleeps like the dead, by the way, and her room is at the far end of the hall.”

“You have less than two weeks to wait. Is that really so difficult?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “Well, we definitely cannot… take liberties in the library. Someone will hear us.”

Hugh sighed. She was, of course, right, but that didn’t stop him from putting his hands on her waist and dipping his head to kiss her shoulder. “But on our wedding night, I can take liberties?”

She picked up his face and met his gaze. She actually smirked at him, a seductive look in her eyes. “You can take all the liberties you want then.”

He laughed. “I adore you, you know.”

“And I you. But we must behave ourselves for, what, nine more days?”

“If I make it that long.”

“You have untold stores of strength, Your Grace. I have faith in you.”

She patted his shoulder, grabbed a book from the shelf, and went back down the hall. He watched the sway of her hips as she walked and realized that neither had resolved the issue that was keeping them awake.

Well, he’d respect her wishes. But she’d as much as told him that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, and he had some doubts about her ability to hold out until after the wedding.

But he was not an animal; he could bide his time.

She’d either succumb to her own lust and spend a night with him again, or their wedding night would be all the sweeter.

*

Hugh walked into the club with a smile like the cat who got the cream. Lark found it unsettling.