Page 16 of The Duke is Wicked
Sebastian’s boots slapped the floor as he strolled the space. She turned to see him tucking his violin case and bow behind the desk he’d placed in a dungeon. “It’s a wreck. A way for me to squander vast sums of money and get little in return. Only 70 rooms, you see. With all else on my shoulders, the duchy and the League, I must’ve been mad to acquire it. A feverishly low point of vulnerability.”
Delaney traced another age-old stone crevice, liking him more, blast it, every minute. Because the Duke of Ashcroft was, quite deliberately, letting her in. A dignified, delightfully modest invitation into his world. “You love it.”
“Love is a strong word, Temple.”
It was.
“Are you ready to tell me?” he asked after a long pause, his voice worn, fatigued. “About being caught in Julian’s house, just down the lane from here, a few months back? Wearing a horrid bonnet and using one of your assortment of rather threadbare English accents to gain entry into the room housing the chronology. Ten minutes. Not enough time to do any damage, one would imagine, so we didn’t worry, a thousand-page tome too much to take in that quickly. But now someone is contacting you about the Soul Catcher.” His dark brow rose, just the one, a neat trick. “Are those events related? Seems coincidental to me, but what do I know? I worry you’ve got that entire book in your head.”
He wasn’t far from figuring it out. She felt panicked, pressed into a tight corner. One of the headaches she’d started getting of late began to thump in her temple. “Are you ready to tell me about Finn’s wife, Victoria? Why she walks into a room, and your blazes extinguish?”
“Nothing to hide. Not anymore.” Sebastian perched his hip on the desk and withdrew the Soul Catcher from his trouser pocket. Prisms dotted the wall as he spun the gem in his hands, his long body shifting for better purchase. “Victoria’s a blocker. Just as it sounds, she obstructs when she’s within a hundred feet of someone with a supernatural gift. Finn can’t read minds, and he’s never been able to readhers. My fingertips cool. Julian receives no visions when he touches an object. Simon, who sees ghosts if you didn’t know, sees fewer. Or, rather, they keep their distance in a way they don’t when she’s not around. She’s like a balm for the tortured mystical soul.” He stared into the stone’s facets for a long moment, then at her. “Did you go into your attic when she was around? Did you try?”
Delaney thought back to those harried hours when the duke was floating in and out of consciousness, and his friends had been anxiously attending him. “I don’t know.”
He clicked his tongue against his teeth and calmly polished the Soul Catcher against his trousered thigh. “Will be interesting to see if you can.”
“Interesting to whom?”
The duke laughed at that, not clueing her in on what he found amusing. Placing the stone on the desk, he closed the distance between them, extended his hand and pulled her to her feet. Crowding her with the peppery scent of his skin and the heat rolling off his body. “Since we’re experiencing trust issues, or you are, I propose a wager to move our relationship forward. You seem like the competitive type, billiards to win a horse and all that.”
She frowned—relationship? Without any warning, he lifted his hand to buff the mark between her brows. A neat tuck her brother said meant her temper was distilled and ready to taste.
“What are the terms?” she asked, hating the slight quiver threading her words. Hating that she was so competitive she couldn’t tell him, in his vernacular, to sod off. She was bewildered, speech a challenge. His touch had sent summer sunlight washing through her body where it was now collecting, quite inappropriately, between her thighs. She wasn’t experienced with men, but she wasn’t stupid, either, and she knew whatthatmeant.
Sebastian pressed his carved-from-marble lips together to hide what looked like approval that she’d swallowed the hook, dropping his hand to his hip and letting air reenter her lungs. “A simple race. I have acres of woodlands perfect for riding. There’s this nifty path through the forest, two jumps, maybe three-quarters of a mile in total. The winner gets two questions.”
“Why should I gamble when you’ve already told me everything?”
His expression froze before it collapsed in mirth. “Really. Have I?”
“I could ask anything?” she challenged, starting to get ticked because he seemed so delighted with himself. The English were sosmug. “Any old thing? Not about this chronology you think I stole or the League you talk about constantly when I have no idea what that evenis. And no fire talk. You start them, they burn.Next. I could ask…” She tried to recall the stories she’d read in the gossip rags, forcibly keeping her eyes open and her attic closed. “About the opera singer.” She snapped her fingers. “Angelina? And you’d tell me?”
“Angelica,” he murmured, his cheeks tinting just enough to be utterly endearing. “You’d have nailed her name if you went into your little room first, am I right? Yourattic.”
“I couldn’t possibly wager on this idiocy.” When, obviously, she could. Delaney tucked a twist of hair that had slipped from her cheerless chignon behind her ear. That Sebastian followed the motion with his keen gaze, his pupils expanding enough for her to notice, didn’t make her feel better. Not with this uncertain heat spiraling around them. What in theworldwas happening? “In any case, I don’t have my horse. I would need her to win. I don’t enter races I can’t win.”
“Oh, didn’t I mention? She arrived an hour after we did. My groom said she was a delight. Fast as a whip, calm but with a nice kick. For future reference, too much temper ruins the ride.”
Delaney stepped in, stabbing his chest with her finger. If he didn’t smell better than a slice of her grandmother’s pecan pie, the chest she poked as wonderfully hard as the ancient slabs she stood upon, she’d tell him she was never speaking to him again and try to mean it. “You hadmyhorse sent toyourcastle?”
“Your brother thought it a fine idea. To give you a pursuit, keep you out of trouble.”
“Oh,oh, you cur, you beast,” she whispered, flustered and furious with every man she’d ever known. She was out of the dungeon and halfway up the stairs when his voice, a smirk lingering beneath it, caught her.
“Is it a deal? Tomorrow, after breakfast, we ride?”
Delaney looked down to find that devil of a duke standing at the bottom of the staircase, his long body braced against the aged gray stone, gaslight burnishing the tips of his hair, shadowing his cheeks, his nose, his lips. A portrait of a lord in repose. “Why are you doing this? Being charitable when I’ve crossed you. Even if I didn’t mean to, even if I have a good reason, you know I have.”
He paused, genuinely seeming to consider her question. “I think I’m starting to like you, Temple. And maybe, just maybe, I understand what’s driving you, though I’m reasonably sure you don’t see it.”
Delaney swallowed hard and pressed her hand against the chilled stone, the history of this mythical,mysticalplace vibrating beneath her palm, wrapping around her heart. She had a choice. Continue jousting with this intriguing man, which was turning out to be more enjoyable than thrashing an earl at billiards.
Or run.
She took the stairs to her bedroom two at a time, a duke’s laughter following her up.
Chapter 6