“I would,” he murmured, “were I your duke.”
And he kissed her.
T’was a sweet kiss, at first. A promise, even if she couldn’t know it.
He tasted the salt on her lips and something roared within him. Max pulled her to him and wrapped her in his arms—instinctively wishing to protect her from anything, everything, that would make her cry.
He should stop this kiss now, tell her who he was, reassure her that all would be well.
But then her tongue touched his in a tentative foray. A hesitant invitation.
One he could not resist.
He rewarded her courage with a bold, sensual stroke of his own. A groan tore from his throat as he fought for restraint. If her parents had guarded her so closely, this could very well be her first kiss. Just the idea that he might be the first to taste her lips sent fire blazing through his veins. Thinking of all the other firsts to come practically turned him to cinder.
But he reined himself in…he had to go slowly.
She wouldn’t let him hold back. His fierce warrior queen threw her arms over his shoulders and pulled herself more tightly against him. His nerves singed at the feel of her sliding over him, of her curves settling into the plains and valleys of his body, fitting herself to him.
She matched his kisses and caresses with abandon, at first mimicking his movements, but then experimenting with moves of her own.
He barely even noticed when Duke, who’d run up ahead of them, came barreling back past them as if he were the one on fire. Max’s entire world had narrowed to this one place, this one moment, this one woman.
The only thing he cared about was making her burn as he did.
Until a shockingly familiar voice doused everything.
“Unhand my daughter.”
CHAPTER 6
EMMALINE JERKED at the sound of her father’s angry command.
Her father!
Every bit of exhilaration that had been coursing through her body turned sharp and stinging, driving fear through her instead. She tried to pull away from her knight but he refused, using his body to shield her from her sire.
He gentled their embrace, however, and tried to soothe her with long strokes down her back and arms. She looked up at him then, her heart rabbiting in her chest, but his hazel eyes remained steady on her—as if trying to convey that everything would be all right.
He was wrong, of course. Her father would kill him! Might even get away with it, given his power and influence. What a fool she’d been to come here, to think she could have this moment out of time for herself before she was married off.
But she would not allow her knight to pay for her sins.
Emmaline ducked out of his arms and neatly side-stepped him, putting herself firmly between the two men as she faced her father squarely.
Her throat went dry.
It wasn’t rage she saw on her father’s face, but cold fury, the awful tic in his jaw a dead giveaway to his thoughts.
He was definitely plotting her knight’s demise.
“Father,” she began. She had to defuse the situation before it got out of hand. She willed her knight to stay out of it, to let her handle this.
But he turned to face her father as well.
“Montgomery,” he said.
Emmaline started, certain she’d misheard. How did he—?
But her father’s widening eyes confirmed that the two men knew each other already.
“Granville?”
Granville. Granville. Where had she heard that name?
A snippet of gossip flitted through her memory. “Granville, I think. Some distant second cousin or some such. Imagine, one of the oldest dukedoms in England going to a country barrister.”
Which meant—
Emmaline’s skin turned to ice.
Her knight was also her father’s duke?
The maybe-duke.
Your duke, he’d said.
Oh, my Lord! Had he known all along who she was?
She flushed hot with humiliation, remembering all the things she’d said. With shame, as well, for making assumptions about him. But drat it all, he shouldn’t have let her labor under such misapprehensions! She turned to demand answers from him, but he appeared as shocked to see her father as the other man was to see him.
Emmaline shifted her gaze between the two of them, reeling. For a long moment, silence reigned. It seemed they were all trying to find their equilibrium.
Her father recovered first, his brows dipping as his lips turned up in a satisfied grimace, which was as close as her father came to a smile.
“So it is Granville you’ve been meeting all these mornings,” he said. “Not quite how I intended for you to bring the man up to scratch, but I applaud your ingenuity, daughter. Well done.”
She went cold once again. Ignoring her father, she whirled to face her—Granville. Surely he wouldn’t believe she’d be so dishonorable.
But his face had turned inscrutable, a marble bust once again—cold, beautiful, unapproachable.
“I would never,” she whispered, but he gave no indication he’d heard.
“I expect you will do the honorable thing,” her father demanded.
Granville didn’t look at her, only dipped his chin in a sharp nod. “Of course.”
“I shall expect you in my study at one of the clock, then.”
“Just so,” Granville agreed.
And he turned and walked away.
Half past four
Montgomery House, Mayfair
THEY’D BEEN CLOSETED in her father’s study for an age.
Emmaline had been pacing outside for just as long.
“You’ll make yourself ill,” her sister warned.
No more than she already was. She stopped in front of the door once more and plastered her ear against the wood, even as she knew the futility of it. That door was a least an inch and a half of solid English oak, as she could attest. When she’d been a young girl, she’d nearly lost her pinky finger when the heavy door closed on it during a game of hide-and-seek with Amelia. The bone hadn’t healed properly, and it still ached sometimes.
As was her habit when she was nervous, she ran her thumb up and down the inside of that finger, caressing the misshapen knuckle. A small, barely noticeable imperfection, but her mother had acted like it was the end of the world. “Who will marry a girl with a mangled hand?” she’d cried dramatically, and poor Amelia had been punished for allowing it to happen.
Joke’s on you, Mother, Emmaline thought. Apparently, a duke would be marrying her, mangled hand and all. Perhaps against his will.
Lord, she still couldn’t get her mind around it all. Her knight was the duke’s heir presumptive.
And he may very well believe that she’d set out to trap him from the first.
“Come, sit with me,” Amelia cajoled, patting the blue-and-cream-striped settee next to her. “That door is not going to open any sooner, no matter how many times you try to eavesdrop or how many holes you wear in the rug.”
Emmaline turned to her sister, who smiled reassuringly in that calm way she had about her. She sighed and joined Amelia, and just as she’d done when they were children, Emmaline leaned against her sister and rested her head upon her shoulder.
Of course, given that Emmaline was nearly a head taller than her diminutive sibling now, it wasn’t quite as easy as it once was. She’d likely end up with a crick in her neck. But it still soothed her soul as it always had.
“Now,” Amelia said, “tell me what’s happened.”
And she did, from the day she and Granville had rescued Duke, all the days in between, and ending with Father catching her in Granville’s arms. She left out the most personal moments, and the majority of what she’d shared with him about Amelia. Her sister had her pride, after all, and while she wasn’t sensitive about much, Amelia had flatly refused to discuss her engagement with anyone, even Emmaline.