“I wish that a worthy man would regard me, the true me, as the fulfillment of some of his dreams, Your Grace. Not all, of course, just as I wouldn’t expect him to be the sum total of my life either. I was raised to expect that I’d find a partner though, and I’m not ashamed to long for it. I wish that man would find me, and kiss me as if all the love in his heart had finally found a home, and as if all the love in my heart was his dearest treasure. Just once, I’d like to experience such a kiss.”
The admission surprised her, but also came as something of a relief. Twenty-six was not ancient, and longing for somebody to love was purely human.
“You are very brave,” Clonmere said, rising. “Very fierce.”
He offered his hand—not his arm—and Iris rose. She’d confided much more than she’d intended, but the recitation had given her courage. She would not slink off to Surrey, she would not consign herself to the company of dyspeptic cats and literary spinsters.
“Where are we going?” she asked, for the duke was not taking her in the direction of the ballroom.
“Someplace private.”
This was not a strictly proper idea, though Clonmere would soon become family to Iris—an idea that struck her as increasingly improper.
“Your Grace, we were to dance the supper waltz.” In public, where Iris had a prayer of not betraying her feelings to him.
“What matters one more waltz, when I can make a lady’s wish come true?” He came to a halt toward the back of the garden. The sound of the ballroom faded to a distant roar, moonlight glinted on a trickle of water splashing from a fountain sculpted into the shape of a blooming rose.
“I must make my own dreams come true,” Iris said.
Clonmere shifted his grip on Iris’s hand, linking their fingers. “On Saturday, I will choose which of Falmouth’s daughters to court. From that day forward, I will be devoted to her and only to her, if she’ll have me. I must make my choice in a manner that offers none of your sisters insult, or the woman I choose for my duchess will forever regret that she caused her siblings to suffer. Jealousy among siblings is the very devil, and I won’t be the cause of it in my wife’s family.”
He was trying to make some point, but Iris grasped only the first part of his declaration. “You have not yet made your choice. You aren’t devoted to anybody yet.”
“Precisely.” He took off his gloves, a curious thing to do when the supper was still a set of dances away. “I am free to behave as I please, and I please to make your one, honest wish come true—if I may?”
A peculiar sensation welled from Iris’s middle, part glee, part terror. “You’d like to kiss me?”
“That was your wish.”
Her wish had involved a particular kind of kiss, which Clonmere couldn’t possibly deliver.
She nodded.
He framed her face in the warmth of his hands. “Then… as you wish, my lady.”
Iris braced her hands on his shoulders and braced her heart to be swept into a maelstrom of sensation, but the buffeting never came. Clonmere touched his mouth to hers, another request for permission.
She stepped nearer, letting him have her weight. “Again, please.”
He smiled against her mouth, and as the violins began a lilting introduction in the distance, Iris embarked on the kiss of her dreams. For a big man, Clonmere was delicate about his intimacies. He stroked Iris’s face, feature by feature, then kissed the terrain his fingers had explored. He teased, he flirted, he bit her earlobe and made her laugh.
And then he grew serious, wrapping Iris close and letting her feel every masculine, muscular, aroused inch of him.
Some inconvenient voice was trying to warn Iris that she’d regret this. The kiss wasn’t wrong—Clonmere was not spoken for, Iris wasn’t either—but it was stolen against all the years when such a kiss would be impossible. Long, lonely years, made more difficult by this intimacy.
As Iris tasted Clonmere’s mouth, explored lips and teeth and tongue with him, she found a thread of peace with her future: In the coming years, she could keep a distance from Clonmere, and being a gentleman, he’d understand and allow that.
But at least she’d have this kiss. This wonderful, perfect, cherishing, happy kiss, and for that she would never, ever be sorry.
IF A WOMAN COULD SAY, “Yes, please court me!” in a kiss, Lady Iris was saying that very thing. She had a grip on Clonmere’s hair at the nape of his neck that spoke of possession and passion. She pressed close to him, breast to chest, hips to happiness.
Had not somebody tittered, loudly, from the direction of the terrace, Clonmere might have borne the lady away to his coach, there to follow kisses with even greater intimacies.
Lady Iris broke the kiss but remained in his embrace and kept her arms about him.
“What are you thinking?” Clonmere asked, stroking her hair.
“I cannot think. I cannot even think about thinking.”
