Page 45 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

A spider. “Yes!” she said. No better excuse for hysterics. “Yes, I—think it was a spider.”

“Well, show it me. If I can save you from two grown gunmen, surely I can vanquish an eight-legged interloper.”

“I—I’d rather not get close.” She backed farther away, unable to compel her body to cease until a wisp of a curtain caressed the backs of her arms. “Might we tarry outside to the veranda?” At least there, someone could hear her scream.

“Certainly. I prefer the outdoors to a stuffy room filled with books.” He examined the doorway for errant arachnids. “And to drink?” he asked idly. “Wine? Sherry? Brandy? Port?”

“Noport,” she announced, rather more insistently than she’d meant to.

At this, he produced an imaginary notebook from his pocket and equally invisible pencil, which he moistened on his tongue. “Emphatic dislike of port,” he pretended to note. “Fear of spiders, studies, and stablemasters, but not snakes, stallions, or scandalously unclad felines.” He looked up as though to consult her. “Anything else?”

Something about the dramatic patient expectancy behind his demon mask struck her as absurdly comical and threatened to disarm the clamor of the bells inside her head.

“We’ve not the time, nor you the imaginary lead to dictate the alphabet of my neuroses,” she lamented wryly.

“Very well then.” He flipped his invented notebook closed and repocketed it. “Whisky or wine?”

“Whisky, if you please,” she decided, and hoped for a large, medicinal dose.

“A gentleman’s drink. I should have known.” Careful to avoid any hiding spiders, he disappeared into the study, leaving the door ajar.

“You’ve dropped your pencil,” she called after him, unable to help herself. He’d not returned that imaginary object to his pocket.

“Let the servants try to find it,” he volleyed back, his voice warm and beguiling. “It’ll give them something to do.”

Despite herself, she indulged in the nervous laugh he elicited.

He returned with two generous pours of whisky in elegant glasses and didn’t hand one to her until they’d drifted past the curtains onto the balcony.

Alexandra took a brooding sip, chagrined that they could still see most of the hallway through the uncommonly large windows.

She brought the whisky to her lips, drinking deeply. A part of her wondered if the flavor of caramel and salt caressing her tongue was part of the whisky, or the man who’d handed it to her.

“You are worrying about your friend, I think… what with her being coerced into marriage to a brute like me.”

Alexandra paused mid-sip. She’d not been worried about that at all, she’d been thinking that it felt rather strange and intimate to put her mouth where his fingers had just been.

“I would… be a liar, Your Grace, if I said I did not fear for Francesca’s future happiness.”

He watched her with undue interest as she savored the velvet burn of the blend as it slid down her throat and trailed a path of light and fire all the way to her belly.

“Such a careful, clever woman, you are,” he murmured, turning to consult the moon hanging close as a lantern on such a clear summer’s night. “You are a school friend of Francesca’s?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about school. De Chardonne, was it?”

It was the last thing she ever wanted to discuss. “Not much to tell, really. Between a lady’s useless curriculum and regimen, we mostly romped about the lake and read books we weren’t supposed to, thinking it made us proper heathens.”

And buried the odd murder victim.

“I’m familiar with the place,” he remarked. “A mill for eligible young noblewomen to launch into the marriagemarket. How extraordinary, that none of you wedded until now.”

“We promised not to.”

“Why?”

She detected no censure in his voice. Only curiosity.