Free Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story by Sabrina Darby Page A

if her impoverished parents are dependent upon that union for their income.
    “A wonderful choice,” Julia agreed, sounding like the cat that got the cream. Caroline glanced at her and found confirmation in the small smile that played on her friend’s lips. “I hear my brother is exceptional in bed.”
    Of course, Caroline had heard that too. Over the years, the gossip had plagued her. Perhaps if she had never seen him again after her marriage…but instead, it was as if fate conspired to continually throw them together. There were the usual social events that thrust them into each other’s company. Then there were the more private moments: a month at Julia’s country estate, winters in Bath, a season in Brighton, a week at a travelers’ inn during a storm.
    The last had been only a year after her marriage, when she had been thickening with child and leaving town for the country. She couldn’t remember why Sutbridge had been there, miles from London. This season in Bath, too, seemed destined to throw them together.
    Sutbridge, she thought, his very name a sigh in her chest.
    “I know I’m prejudiced in his favor,” Julia continued, her voice a familiar and teasing hum over the other sounds of the ball. “But just look at him.”
    With his great height, Sutbridge nearly dwarfed the room. He was of an age with her but time had favored him. The few lines on his face only made him look more of a man and she had found that manliness excited her pulse far more than his earlier youthful beauty.
    “And, Caro, he is a duke, which even you admit adds to a man’s charms.”
    The room was not large––only two long carpets were necessary to cover the distance during less active functions––and the numbers at the dance not as many as the hostess would likely have preferred. Of course, this was Bath and most gatherings were at the assembly rooms, not in these private, cramped homes.
    Caroline watched his progress across the floor. It was utterly wrong, but there had been nights when her husband moved his clammy body over hers that she had imagined what such intimacy would be like with Sutbridge instead of Oliver.
    So why not? Why not pursue the promise of their youth with the freedom her widowhood had bought?
    She followed instinct, and in the lull between dance sets left Julia to her own devices. She brushed against her quarry purposefully. In that instant he was familiar and strange all at once, and the giddiness of early attraction blossomed as heat in her cheeks.
    “The garden,” she whispered without pleasantries, aware that he knew exactly who stood to his right.
    “This dance is promised.” She didn’t look at him and chance betraying that giddiness, but she found the familiar warmth and languor of his voice delicious. How odd that simply the idea of him as a lover could make a simple interchange so charged.
    “Then the next,” she said softly, and, feeling daring, added, “I need you."
    She didn’t return to Julia’s side, where she would have to fend off inquiries, jests and smirking glances. Instead, Caroline spent the next twenty minutes flitting through the crowd, chattering on about nothing and everything, and out of the corner of her eye admiring Sutbridge as he moved through the dance with yet another plump, youthful beauty.
    Of course, she had no reason for jealousy. Until marriage, those flowers of young womanhood were off-limits for all but the most innocent of kisses, stolen under sprigs of mistletoe.
    Was any kiss truly innocent? She pondered that briefly, the wayward thought leading further and further into uncharted territory only to end abruptly at the last strains of the orchestra’s efforts.
    Then she watched Sutbridge escort the girl back to her simpering mother. He excused himself, meandered his way to the barrier of thin draperies that separated the drawing room from the balcony above the rear garden. Caroline waited a moment before following.
    She brushed the diaphanous curtain