Lady Siddington smiled at him as she crossed the room. “Oh no. There are still a few hours before we feel its fury. Something to do with our hills and valleys, I’m told. It’s always been that way.” She inclined her head. “I’ll see you all at dinner.”
Ivy walked out with Colly. “I trust your room will be acceptable,” she worried. “A castle isn’t the same as a manor.”
“I should hope not.” His answer was determinedly cheerful. “How disappointing it would be to find oneself in a mundane room similar to one’s own, when inside a magnificent edifice like this.” He looked up at the high coffered ceiling, criss crossed with beams of dark wood and interspersed with panels that had aged to a rich ivory cream.
The wind howled, a mournful sound that always made Ivy shiver. “I used to think that was the cry of the Siddington ghost,” she chuckled.
“You have a ghost?” He stopped dead.
She couldn’t help her giggle. “No. Of course not. But one of my cousins thought it amusing to scare me when I was little. I am no longer scared of ghosts, but there’s something about that particular sound.”
He nodded and took her hand in his, a casually affectionate gesture that sent a completely different kind of shiver over her skin.
“Children can be cruel,” he commented as they strolled on. “But as you say, time passes. We become adults and leave such things behind.”
She wondered at that comment, but before she could pursue it, they arrived at his door. “Here you are, Colly.” Carved double doors heralded his chamber. “Not quite like Hartsmere House, would you say?”
She threw open the doors with dramatic flair, revealing a truly magnificent room. The walls were hung with tapestries, the bed a massive four poster complete with curtains, and a huge embrasure containing a chair, a desk and a couple of armchairs.
The Duke’s jaw dropped as he gasped. Then he turned to her, his eyes alight. “It’s…it’s perfect.”
“You wouldn’t say that in January, but I believe you’ll do well for a night or two.” She dropped him a little curtsey. “My room is down the corridor on the left. I doubt you’ll need anything, but if you do…”
“This will be ideal,” he smiled down at her. “Thank you. It’s everything I could have hoped to find in a castle.”
Thunder rumbled again, a sound that reminded Ivy she was quite alone with a man in his bedchamber. “I must change. I’ll see you at dinner, your Grace.” She nodded and turned, only to find his hand gripping her arm.
“Ivy.” He pulled her close and before she knew it his lips found hers.
There it was, that shock of sweetness and that savage dart of want streaking through her body from her eyebrows to her toes.
She barely managed to restrain the urge to throw her arms around his neck and climb him as if he were a tree. Slowly, she peeled her mouth from his.
“G-good Lord,” she stuttered. “I must go.”
Free of his arms, she spun around and fled to her room, afraid to look back in case his expression might betray something akin to the lust she was currently experiencing. Should they both fall prey to this eagerness, this temptation…well, that would push matters beyond what they should be.
Sighing, she leaned against her closed bedroom doors. Everything was getting complicated the more she thought about it.
Only one thing remained simple.
The joy she felt when she kissed the Duke, and he kissed her back.
*~~*~~*
Had anyone thought to inform the Duke of Maidenbrooke that he would have been thrown into a state of stunned shock and lust at the mere touch of a young woman’s lips, he’d have scoffed and immediately walked away.
The notion was, on the surface, absurd.
And yet here he was, in a chamber that would have made any of the early royal Henrys quite happy, in the middle of a fully-fledged thunderstorm, staring from his window and thinking wildly inappropriate thoughts about said young lady.
Dinner had been excellent, though simple, and Lady Siddington had kept to her promise of retiring early. He’d been aware, every moment, of Ivy as she sat next to him in the lovely old dining room, a distraction that astonished him. For the first time in his life, he struggled with the urge to just seize a woman and crush her against his body.
What had this world come to, when he could be so thrown off balance like this?
He flinched at a massive lightning bolt, which cracked loudly outside. He nearly jumped back for fear it would singe his toes. This was, as promised, a rough storm indeed.
But the fury around the castle merely echoed the confusion he felt inside. He’d asked Ivy to marry him on impulse; saving them both from an extremely embarrassing and scandalous moment. But he was honest enough to admit that he had developed a regard and a respect for her prior to that fateful evening.
And now he was here, the taste of her lingering on his tongue, wishing for more. Would she feel the same way, he wondered? She’d not seemed reticent when it came to kisses, he knew. But he wasn’t convinced that she viewed their announced nuptials as an actual event. More like a lucky evasion of scandal for them both.
The thunder continued its barrage, rattling the old mullioned windows with its ferocity. So it must have been centuries ago when storms like this hit…rough and wild and probably frightening to earlier occupants who had little understanding of the battle taking place in the sky.
There would have been skins over the windows perhaps; or if Siddington was lucky, some very early glassmaker had put a pane or two here and there.
His mind
