Chapter 2
Chapter two
In Which the Times Fly, the Duke Bends, and the Wallflower Stares
The spa's atrium was marble, mist, and murmured money.
Columns arched toward a domed ceiling painted with cherubs of questionable virtue.
The air smelled faintly of thyme, eucalyptus, and generational wealth.
Wanton took it all in with the air of a woman who had absolutely earned her place here, even if she'd arrived in a cart with a goat and poultry-based emotional support.
She spotted a vacant chair. It was long and elegant, flanked by potted citrus trees and draped in a pristine white towel. A small silver plaque sat on the armrest. She did not read it.
"It's practically beckoning," she said, and sank into it with a sigh that came from her spine.
From her satchel, she pulled a slim leather-bound volume entitled The Lady’s Guide to Not Getting Ravished, organized by order of peril. She flipped to the first page.
Thorne Vangloot, His Grace the Duke of Arsbury
Also known as "The Sovereign of Steam Rooms." Famous for his silence, his glower, and his reputation as the most skilled spanker in the continental elite. One courtesan reportedly burst into tears of gratitude after a single brow raise and a firm hand.
Wanton raised both her own brows, her stomach fluttering. "That feels... performative."
His posterior is widely considered a sculptural marvel. Canova himself is rumored to have modeled his backside at the request of a former mistress.
She frowned at the page. "Really now. A posterior can't be famous. It's anatomy. Muscle groups and gluteal positioning. A matter of structure and gravity."
She turned the page with scholarly skepticism.
Caution: Never, under any circumstance, take his chair.
"Oh please," she muttered. "That sounds a bit extreme! Even for a man who believes in monogrammed towels and corporal flattery."
She settled in like a cat replete with warm milk and opened her journal to jot a few notes on exaggerated masculine lore.
While she was about to write a claim about overcompensation in Regency patriarchy, a shadow fell across her lap.
She looked up.
And up.
The man looming above her was tall enough to cast shade with his presence alone. Not metaphorical shade—actual shade. Wanton had to tilt her head to properly glare up at him, and even then, she suspected she was being out-glared by at least three inches of disdain.
His robe hung with scandalous laziness at the waist, revealing a chest dusted with just enough hair to imply sin without shouting it. Steam clung to him like a lover, curling along his damp collarbones and trailing down the tantalizing V that absolutely did not belong in a spa brochure.
And the hair.
Oh, hell's boudoir, the hair.
Dark-brown and slightly damp. One insolent curl had dared to fall across his forehead like a rogue banner in a campaign for Moral Superiority.
And those eyes. Ice-blue and hooded, like they’d seen war, voted against merriment, and routinely canceled Christmas. When they swept over her, it felt less like a glance and more like a cold-blooded cross-examination.
His mouth was unsmiling and aggressively symmetrical. A mouth that said, I disapprove of your existence, but would probably still kiss like a scandal waiting to happen.
Wanton had read about men like this.
Lords forged in battle, tempered by scandal, utterly impossible to flirt with unless one had a death wish and a backup corset.
He said nothing.
Which was frankly rude.
So she said, breezily, “Excuse me?”
“What are you doing here?” His voice could have etched stone.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The spa is not a place for a country girl. Not even a pretty one.”
Her mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again, this time around a gasp and a flicker of indignation.
“I am not a country girl,” she said, wounded pride straightening her spine.
“No?” His gaze drifted lower with professional suspicion. “Then why did you arrive in a goat cart with only a chicken for protection?”
Her jaw dropped. “How—how do you know that?”
“You have hay in your skirts. Feathers in your hair. And rosemary tucked on your ear.”
Wanton sniffed and pocketed the herb. “Botanical emergency. And for your information, I am not here to be interrogated by a man who moisturizes with moral superiority. I am a female explorer.”
“And does this explorer have a name?”
She folded her arms. “Wallflower. Wanton Wallflower.”
The air changed. Just slightly. Enough to make her consider backing away—but then again, she had never been wise about personal safety.
“Where is your chaperone, Miss Wallflower?” He raised a single, terrifyingly judgmental finger. “And a chicken does not count as a chaperone.”
“Really, sir, are you quite done? Because I came here to relax, not to be disapproved at by a steam-drenched aristocrat with tragic trust issues.”
He blinked once. Slowly. Like a glacier considering murder.
"I believe," he said, voice velvet wrapped around gravel, "you're in my chair."
Wanton lifted her chin with the courage of a woman who had once stared down a medieval tribunal armed only with a bonnet pin and a strong opinion. "Is that so? I didn't see your name on it."
He gestured to the plaque on the armrest.
She leaned forward and read it aloud. "His Grace, the Duke of Arsbury."
This could not be the same Duke from The Lady’s Guide to Not Getting Ravished. That Duke had been described as statuesque, with the backside of a Greek god and the moral flexibility of a toasted crumpet.
This one?
This one clearly exercised for judgmentalism. His glutes had to be tragically… raisinous. Flattened by propriety. Dehydrated by duty. Shriveled by a life spent clenching in disapproval.
“How unfortunate, Your Grace. I’ve already warmed it. You’ll have to sit on the floor.”
Silence.
His expression froze. The frost was so intense, she felt the tip of her nose congeal. A hush fell over the steam, the tile, the very molecules in the room—each one holding its breath in anticipation.
Then, he lifted his left eyebrow.
She knew, intellectually, that it was merely a strip of keratinized filament raised by the frontalis muscle, a primitive reflex intended—according to paleoanthropological consensus—for early hominids to convey dominance across savannahs and poorly ventilated caves.
But this was no Neanderthal twitch.
This was a ducal elevation. The arch was refined. Lethal. It crept up his forehead like a very posh condemnation.
Wanton blinked. She’d read about expressions like this in Miss Primrose’s Illustrated Guide to Men Who Should Be Fled Immediately.
It was the sort of brow that could halt a duel mid-draw.
That made governesses drop teacups. That, according to the guide, had caused a visiting duchess to spontaneously confess her affair with a stableboy and the duke’s tailor.
Wanton had just never expected to encounter one so… arched. So geometrically unkind.
A ghostly twinge echoed through her backside—the exact spot still recovering from a medieval misadventure involving a joust, a misfired theory about saddle physics, and a knight named Sir Baldwin the Obvious.
She resisted the flight-or-pretend-dead impulse. No man had the right to wield eyebrow authority like that. Certainly not one who smelled faintly of bergamot, ancient bloodlines, and personal disappointment.
Still, her stubborn glute clenched in something perilously close to obedience. Somewhere between her pride and her petticoats, a command had been issued. And her body, that treacherous collection of frilled rebellion, wanted to obey...
And then—oh no—the eyebrow climbed higher. Just a notch.
It was too much. Her body responded before her brain could object.
She shot to her feet like a scandal launched from a catapult.
THUMP.
Unfortunately, she stood so abruptly that the top of her head made aggressive acquaintance with the Duke’s chest. There was a grunt—his. Possibly hers. Possibly Henrietta’s, rustling in her basket like a feathered alarm bell.
The Duke’s neatly pressed copy of The Times took flight—pages scattering through the steam like startled, center-right pigeons clutching monocles and muttering about the decline of empire.
Wanton pretended nothing had happened and glanced at the ceiling with the scholarly interest of someone desperately pretending not to have headbutted a nobleman’s sternum.
The Duke bent with military precision and the sort of crisp economy of motion that wins battles and folds linen without creases. After a heavy exhale, he started to retrieve the newspaper with the impetus of a man executing a minor military coup.
And that’s when she saw something suspiciously curvy.
Oh, blessed saints of sculptural symmetry. The terry robe was short (had she mentioned how short it was?) but now, it moved.
Just a shift. A betrayal of cotton.
And there it was. A sliver of thigh. Bronzed and muscled.
A whisper of taut flesh above the knee. A glimpse of a curve so refined, so poetically impossible, it nearly brought tears to her academically inclined eyes.
No wonder Napoleon hated England so much.
If their generals had glutes like that, it was a miracle the French didn't simply surrender out of admiration.
She stared. For research. Strictly for science.
It would’ve been unpatriotic not to. God save the glutes!
Field Note #27: Subject bent. Observed with academic interest and light perspiration.
Findings: Patriotism is an excellent justification for gluteal admiration.
Hypothesis: England may never fall, provided its dukes continue squatting with precision.
If only the towel would shift just one inch.
One heroic inch.
She waited for a gust of wind to help the cause (of England of course), but alas, the air, traitor that it was, remained still. Not even a whisper of breeze to nudge the terry higher.
So she did what any responsible glute scholar would do.
She blew.
Phss. Phss.
Lightly. Hopefully. With the optimism of a woman who’d once trusted a mule to cross a Napoleonic battlefield.
The Duke turned sharply. “What are you doing?”
Her heart shot to her throat. Think fast, Wallflower. Think fast.
She stepped forward, lips pursed. Phss. Phss.
“Blowing the steam from your eyes, of course. For clarity,” she announced, as if steam-blindness were a common malady cured with light exhalation.
"Here, let me…" Phss. Phss.
As she leaned in, the marble betrayed her. Or perhaps it was her arches, weakened by lust and improper footwear.
She pitched forward, and her lips collided with the orbicularis oculi of His Grace’s left eye.
In plain terms: she kissed his eyelid, and while she was at it, his lashes brushed her mouth in a scandalously feathery sweep.
Wanton froze. Her lips were on his globe ocular! Tactile data was being collected at an alarming rate.
Abort, abort!
Before she could flee—or combust—he caught her by the forearms. His hands wrapped around her limbs like velvet manacles of judgment and latent heat.
Great glutes of the Western Front! She came here for relaxation, not for an impromptu ocular entanglement with a duke’s left eyelid!
Her breath caught.
Oh dear.
And his robe—heavens help her sanity—his robe. Had she mentioned how short it was? She had? Well, forgive the repetition, but in her defense, her nervous system had filed for early retirement.
Wanton blinked up.
She had just pressed her lips to the ocular region of Thorne Vangloot, Duke of Arsbury.
The man whose glutes were rumored to have inspired sonnets, sculptures, and at least one international incident.
He straightened her with a jerk, his face unreadable but for the slight twitch of an eyebrow attempting its own coup d’état.
“Miss Wallflower, are you attempting to blind me?”
“No, Your Grace,” she said crisply. “Though I must admit—” she tilted her head, lashes fluttering with deceptive innocence, “—my own eyes have been rather dramatically opened.”
She curtsied with academic dignity, as though she were concluding a lecture entitled On the Unexpected Intimacy of Eyelid Contact in Steam-Filled Environments.
“Enjoy your chair.”
Wanton turned smartly—before she could melt from eyebrow exposure alone—and glanced down at the guidebook still clutched in her trembling hands.
Canova, it seemed, had not been exaggerating. That glimpse—brief, angled, partially obstructed by the tyranny of terry cloth—had confirmed the theory: His Grace’s glutes might very well be the most striking in Europe.
She swallowed. Now she had a hypothesis. One that demanded confirmation. Peer review. Possibly sketching.
Easy, Wanton! First things first—visual evidence.
She must see them. Unobstructed. Unadorned. Un-terried. Not for pleasure, obviously. Certainly not for lust. No, this was pure research. For history. For science. For the greater good of posterior scholarship.
She squared her shoulders, spine straight with purpose. A self-respecting academic never ignored a hypothesis once… presented.
And she would not rest until she had observed the Arsbury Phenomenon in its natural habitat. Preferably under ideal lighting.