Page 10 of Duke of Wickedness
Oh, Lord help him. He let his head drop forward a little, marking how her eyes went to his mouth. She thought he was going to kiss her. Shewantedhim to kiss her.
And bloody hell, he wanted that, too, but he couldn’t. People might think him an amoral louse, a despoiler, a man who followed no compass but his own pleasure—but hedidhave a sense of honor. It just wasn’t the one that Society recommended.
And kissing Ariadne Lightholder here and now? It would violate that sense of honor.
Christ, though, it would beso easy. She was right there, and God knew she was willing, given the way she was looking at his mouth like she ached for it. She would be so soft, so sweet. That delicious curiosity of hers would make her so eager.
Healmostgave in. He almost let himself take what he wanted, consequences be damned. After all, wasn’t that what everyone knew the Duke of Wilds to be?
When he stopped himself, however, it wasn’t because of what anyone else thought about him. It was about what he thought about himself.
“Maybe,” he said. “But this? This is not the place for you to start.”
And then he made himself pull away, made himself drop his arm from around her, made himself retreat a step, then another. It took Lady Ariadne a moment to catch up, her eyes losing their lust-blown look and narrowing into a glare.
“You’re not—” She cut herself off. She was proud as well as curious, it seemed. Two qualities that he generally found irresistible.
He would resist, however.
“I am not,” he said in response to her half-asked question. “As I said, this is not for you.” And then, to keep this rejection light, he offered her a wink. “After all, you don’t even have a mask.”
Her brow furrowed in adorable bafflement. “A mask?”
He slipped his own mask from his pocket, placing it on his face and tying the ribbons behind his head with the expertise thatcame from practice. She gaped at him, so clearly intrigued that it challenged his resolve to step away from her. His struggle worsened when, as he opened the door and let noise and light spill out, the little minx tried to peer around him, her curiosity evident in every step she took.
“Fly home, little bird,” he advised her.
And then, before he could learn whether Lady Ariadne’s allure was stronger than his honor, he slipped inside, hoping—praying—that he would find something or someone to distract him from that hungry look in those blue, blue eyes.
CHAPTER 3
“What the hell were you thinking, Ariadne Lightholder?”
“What was that, sweetheart?”
Ariadne jerked as her sister- by marriage, Helen, spoke up in response to Ariadne’s muttered self-castigation. Goodness. She’d been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she’d practically forgotten that Helen was even there.
“Oh, nothing,” Ariadne said, shaking herself out of her surprise. “Just reminding the heroine in my novel to use a single ounce of good sense.”
She raised the book in her hand, which was more prop than pastime. Ariadne had ostensibly been reading for three quarters of an hour now, but she’d only made it about three pages in—and she frankly wasn’t even certain what had happened on those three pages.
All because her head was filled with the Duke of Wilds and the incomprehensible, staggeringidiocyof her actions the night before.
What had she beenthinking?
Except that was the problem—she hadn’t been thinking, not really. She’d been reacting, letting the duke’s curious little hints about unsavory matters drive her to distraction, until she let herself be played for an utter fool.
“Oh, they never do,” Helen said with a laugh, poking a bit listlessly at her embroidery. She was about as productive as Ariadne that morning; apparently, Cornelia had been up half the night and had positively refused to be comforted by anyone other than her mother. “Those poor girls are always doing the stupidest things. But I suppose that’s what makes reading about it fun, isn’t it?”
Ariadne looked at the frontispiece of the book, where the heroine—whose name was Purity, just in case readers dared misunderstand her role in the text—was fleeing a castle, which managed to look foreboding even drawn in simple black and white lines.
Ariadne tried not to draw comparisons between Purity’s flight and her own abashed retreat from Bacchus House the night before.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she murmured to Helen.
Part of the problem was that it was all too easy to compare the Duke of Wilds to one of the seductive, alluring hero-cum-villains of a gothic novel. He was the kind of man who drew you in, even when you knew you ought to stay far, far away.
She had very nearly let him kiss her last night.
