Chapter 7
Chapter seven
In Which Wanton is Kissed, Knocks Over a Screen, and Unearths a Mystery
They stepped inside Monsieur M's room. Silver light filtered through gauze curtains, catching on the black silk sheets that rippled across the bed like they remembered a dozen secrets.
The Duke stopped in the doorway behind her, the moonlight licking across his face, highlighting the sharp line of his jaw.
His robe was loosened, his chest partially exposed, and his breath rose and fell steadily.
His eyes were locked on her with the focus of a man who had fought battles, commanded armies, and now seemed vexed by a woman with too many questions and not enough buttons.
Was it her perfume? Granted, she had changed her cologne, but this seemed extreme even for Madam Hortense's Blend No. 7: Essence of Intellectual Despair with undertones of scandal and pear.
"Shouldn't we be investigating?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
"I am," he said. "Investigating."
He stepped forward.
Wanton, who had endured cannon fire, flirted with time travel, and once diplomatically escaped a Midsummer Bacchic Festival, suddenly couldn't remember how legs worked.
There was a pull between them. Something unsettling that made her skin hum and her stomach twist and her thoughts scatter like startled geese.
What was it? It made her sweat, not knowing. Could she measure it? Weigh it? Classify it under Newtonian physics or erotic metaphysics? Was it hormonal combustion or something more catastrophic?
She needed a graph. A peer-reviewed chart. Possibly a chaperone.
Still, he advanced with the slow, certain grace of a man who'd made up his mind and had no intention of hearing objections. And all she had was a heart trying to break through her corset .
She darted behind a decorative screen, heart hammering. "I meant the statue," she said, breathless. "Not my virtue."
His voice slid around the screen like warm smoke. "At this point, I would crush the damn statue if it proved an obstacle to get to this."
"To where? The spa's bathing oils?" she asked, playing for time. Or mercy.
"Your lips," he said softly.
Oh no. She liked the way his jaw clenched when she teased him. The way his brows formed accusatory art. The way his voice dipped low when she pushed too far. She liked it so much that her stomach did somersaults, and her brain fled to the back of the room to take notes.
She was developing feelings. For a stern duke. This was bad. This was the kind of situation Miss Primrose's Guide to Ladyhood had entire warning chapters about.
What would the Flowery Spinsters say?
She could already hear them:
"Darling, emotional entanglement is the leading cause of lost field journals."
"Romantic attachment? That's how Edith ended up married to a Viscount with a book allergy."
"First, you admire his glutes, and the next thing you know, you're baking biscuits for him and sighing at sunsets!"
She took a deep breath for emotional balance.
Too late.
Her heart was already misbehaving.
"I came to look at marble glutes," she managed. "I'm very academic."
His eyes darkened. "Then allow me to offer… a practical demonstration."
He was in front of her now.
Close. So close.
She clutched a rolled-up parchment. "This might be a clue! It says 'Rear Entry'—oh. Opera seating chart. Never mind."
He took the parchment from her fingers. Dropped it.
"Miss Wallflower," he murmured, voice dipping low, "I'm going to have to ruin you if you insist on playing the innocent."
She exhaled sharply. Ruin sounded very promising.
"Of what crime, Your Grace?" she whispered.
His lips brushed her ear.
"Of seducing a duke with nothing but vocabulary and bare ankles."
Then he kissed her.
One moment, she was standing. The next, she was wrapped in approximately six feet of furious Duke, his mouth finding hers with the precision of a well-aimed thesis.
Her brain promptly dropped its quill and ran screaming for the hills.
Her body, however, filed the appropriate forms and lunged enthusiastically into sensation.
His arm banded around her waist, like he fully intended to become her new corset.
The other hand tangled in her hair, tilting her head just so.
Her moan escaped before she could classify it—but he caught it with his mouth and filed it, perhaps alphabetically (assuming he knew his way around archives, of course).
His lips were warm and focused and entirely too competent.
He kissed like a man who had been denied dessert for years and had just discovered she was made of sugar and rebellion.
There was no haste. No fumble. Just... intent.
Like she was the final experiment in a lifelong study of feminine combustion.
And judging by the fireworks between her thighs, she was proving highly flammable.
Field Note: Hypothesis confirmed. Oral contact with Duke highly inadvisable. Repeating immediately.
She gripped his collar and slid her hand into his hair. The texture of it—thick and damp from steam—sent a scientific tremor straight to her underpinnings. Her fingers brushed the nape of his neck. He shuddered.
The Duke shuddered.
Everything else—logic, time travel theory, the looming presence of a rather precarious decorative screen—disintegrated.
CRASH.
Her elbow hit the aforementioned screen. Silk and wood exploded in a heap, toppling like the last of her good intentions.
And there, lit by moonlight, surrounded by strewn lavender petals, framed like a devotional scandal in a poet's fever dream...
The statue.
Nude. Majestic. Very, very familiar.
Wanton blinked. "Ah. So that's where it went."