Page 48 of Claimed By Her Forbidden Duke
Whirling around, she knew her eyes were too wide to feign composure, knew her face was likely too flushed and her hair had fallen loose from its impeccable knot.
“Lady Penelope, all you all right?”
Her lungs tight, she answered, “Please leave me alone.”
I cannot endure you right now—not with your gazes across auditoriums, and your knowing amusement, and your gifts, and your words.
Not when she already teetered on a precarious edge of unraveling in several ways.
“You are not all right,” he noted.
She turned back, dismissing him.
But he caught her wrist, exactly as she had imagined he had in the dressmaker’s, and spun her back to face him.
She stumbled back, her tailbone hitting the rail. To her surprise, the Duke was there, not quite caging her in, but as close as he had been to her the night they met.
Once again, cornered with nowhere to go.
So why did she not feel as panicked anymore?
“I am fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “I was powdering my nose.”
Wrong lie.
“The bathrooms are further down the corridor,” he told her, smirking. “And forgive me, but I do not believe there is a powder thick enough to cover your flushed cheeks. Are you warm, Lady Penelope?”
“I am quite fine,” she insisted. “It is none of your business.”
“How differently you speak in private to when we were around your very outspoken friend,” he murmured, his eyes roaming over her face.
A lock of dark blonde hair fell into her eyes, and she did not even bother to push it back. She’d asked to be alone; it was no longer her fault if he watched her slowly come undone.
“If a lady cannot catch her breath in peace, Your Grace, then I fear I do not know what she can do,” Penelope muttered, averting her gaze from him—from the darkness in his eyes that had met hers across the theater, from that all-seeing way he regarded her, as if all he had to do was wait and she would spill everything he wanted to know.
“She can,” he told her. “But when a woman looks troubled, it is only polite to inquire about her well-being.”
Penelope couldn’t hold back her scoff quickly enough. “You did not ask such things the night we met.”
“I did, in a way. I told you that you did not belong outside Julian Gray’s house.”
“No,” she answered. “But you suggested I go to you, so do you think I belong outside your townhouse? Waiting on your doorstep for a night of pleasure?”
“If it will make you as flushed as this infernal dress of yours does, then yes.”
The boldness of his statement made the hazy aura surrounding her grow hotter, and she fought the urge to fan herself.
“My dress is not the?—”
“Of course, it is the problem,” he snapped. “It is clearly causing you discomfort.”
“Oh, should I wear the dress you so improperly bought for me, then, Your Grace? Tell me, where exactly did you envision me wearing it? To a beautiful dinner at your estate? Dined perfectly, only to be taken to your sheets and stripped of the dress?”
The words spilled out of her, emboldened by her frazzled panic from earlier.
Before he could say anything, Penelope continued, stepping into his personal space. “Youare the problem, Your Grace. Always there, always watching in that manner?—”
“What manner?”
