Page 25 of The Duke is Wicked
He exhaled hoarsely, his shoulders sliding low.
“I’m correct, aren’t I?” Julian smiled. Sebastian didn’t have to see the mocking lip curl to know it was there. “It’s never the ones you want to like, by the way. Two types of women, easily separated, before you fall. Once you do, you want everything, and I do mean everything, from the one. Ah, Fireball, haven’t you figured that out yet?”
As he stood there deliberating, Delaney cleared a fence with the poise of someone who’d been riding since they couldwalk. He’d rarely seen a woman astride unless she was atop him. Helpless to halt his reaction with that image spinning through his mind, his cock did an uneasy dance beneath buckskin. “Maybe you should take Miss Temple back to Harbingdon. Fifteen minutes by carriage. We can meet in your study tomorrow morning to determine—”
“Oh, no. I have to deal with Lady Nuisance. I’m not adding that hellion to my roster.” Julian nodded to the woman galloping into the distance. “Anyway, she’s well-chaperoned. Her brother and a host of servants, the guards you have posted. Finn and Victoria. Minnie. If you’re worried, just don’t find yourself alone with her. That’s what did me in with Piper.”
“Do I look worried?” he asked in an imperious tone that fooled no one, least of all the astute viscount, his oft partner in crime.
Julian waited too long to answer. “You’re going to be fine.”
When they both knew he wasn’t.
Chapter 8
The house was silent. Servants retired for the night. Guests tucked in their chambers. It was Sebastian’s favorite time, so peaceful his fingertips rarely felt the need to sizzle.
Dinner had been an uneventful affair. Half-of-the-Terrible-Two-missing uneventful. Case had apologized for his sister—ankle sprain from her ride, dining in her bedchamber—then proceeded to philander his way through the meal, a tittering, slightly foxed Kitty Hazelton attached like a barnacle to the pearly, adolescent underside of his conch.
He’d observed the couple flirting without a glimmer of emotion, thinking how young and possibly perfect they were for each other, except for the staggering discrepancy in social standing. And the fact that the lady randomly disappeared. While the lad was what they all wanted to be.
Normal.
As for Sebastian, he was, though he was loath to admit it, on the hunt. Restless, in the only of his six properties that comforted him, the only where he felt himself. Crossing through slivers of moonlight laid out in a patchwork design across the gallery’s floor, the shift and creak of a castle he was a little in love with—Delaney was correct—settling for the night around him. The walls were lined with portraits that had come with the house, no one he knew or cared for. A forlorn bunch he appreciated for the lack of knowledge, their histories his to assemble as he pleased. Appreciated as much as the studded oak door he’d pointed out to Julian and Piper upon their departure—much like Delaney had enthusiastically pointed it out to him. They’d packed a giggling Kitty into their carriage as he’d described it, right down to that rusty hinge, the couple staring at him with matching expressions of bewilderment.
Certainly, they believed he was losing his mind.
Perhaps he was.
He wasn’t gifted with sight or the ability to read thoughts, but he’d known where to locate Delaney this eve, Julian’s advice a slow pulse through his mind—justdon’t find yourself alone with her.
Which is precisely what he planned to do.
For a judicious soldier, a man who valued discipline and restraint, the urge to disregard the sensible plan was potently resilient. The girl, a lure yanking him in an ill-advised direction.
With nothing so straightforward as an opera singer at the end of the line.
The muffled laughter alerted him before the splash of light falling through the open doorway. Halting, he peered into the gaming room, pinpointing the couple in the dimly-lit corner at once. Simon and Delaney sat on opposite sides of a chessboard, in the midst of an intense match. Her elbow was propped on the table, her chin caught in her fist. She was clutching her knight with a contemplative scowl, debating her move, her riding boots, ones she never seemed to take off, in restless movement beneath the table. Simon was taunting her with a cheeky grin, and from Sebastian’s quick review of the placement of the pieces, he appeared to be winning.
“You said you were a beginner,” she grumbled, and made a move with her knight that Sebastian could’ve told her wasn’t a good one.
Simon sneered and inched his rook into place before her king with his pinkie. “And you said you were a gracious loser.”
“About as gracious a loser as you are a reformed thief.”
Simon snickered and opened his hand. Gaslight streaked off the coin on his palm. “Just for fun, to see if you’d notice. With Julian watching over me, turning me into a little prince, I have to get my fun somewhere.”
She closed his fingers around the silver and squeezed his hand. “Keep it. For good luck. A piece of America from me to you.”
Simon pocketed the coin with a spinning rotation a magician would be hard-pressed to replicate. “To new friends,” he said and raised a glass. “And I don’t mean the three deceased blokes currently occupying the space with us.”
She smiled shyly, as if an overture of this magnitude didn’t often occur. “Friends,” she echoed, and raised her glass, tapping it lightly against his, her gaze doing a hasty search in the shadows for Simon’s haunts.
She has no one,Julian had said to him earlier today. Sebastian suddenly,ardently,wanted to be her someone.
“The Terrible One isn’t angry anymore about your shabby behavior after the pyrotechnic display,” Simon called in a sing-song voice, a thin slice of cockney filtering into his speech. “You can quit skulking in the doorway, Your Grace.”
Delaney gasped and swiveled around on her bottom, clutching her glass to her chest. An ample chest for such a petite sprite, he thought with a grimace. In return, she gave a lopsided smile.Ah, she and the princely thief had dived in a bottle and come out sozzled.