Page 6 of The Duke is Wicked

And the cleverest woman in London was found moments later with her lips pressed to his.

Chapter 3

He was even more handsome up close.

The brief look she’d gotten from beneath that silly bonnet while sneaking into the viscount’s Oxfordshire home hadn’t done the man justice. Now she knew better. Shadowed slashes where the moon shone through the windowpane cut across a body they’d struggled to fit into what was her most enormous bed. Long legs...endlessly long. A lean yet powerful body stretched out, to her mind, hardly looking English. His men had loosened the collar of his fine cambric shirt, exposing a mix of muscle, golden skin and scars. A warrior’s physique. Delaney noticed details, sometimes obsessively. He had neatly-trimmed nails, calluses on his fingertips, forgot to cut his hair, and cared (but not significantly) about his clothing. His sun-kissed skin indicated he worked outdoors without a hat. He wore a signet ring on his pinkie, a crest of a lion with snapping teeth that did not match his decorous bearing.

The Duke of Ashcroft blinked once and released a soft moan, still lost to the insect’s venom. His eyes were as astounding as described in those pointless society pages, a strange mix of amber and gold, like whiskey or the soft clay of Georgia. When most of the tales bandied about in the broadsheets were pure garbage.

Or, as they called it here,rubbish.

But his hair was his crowning glory. Dark, with a tantalizing hint of copper, so long the curls had long-ago settled into gentle waves now hiding part of his face. When she’d turned to find him standing behind her in the park, she’d wanted, insanely, to plunge her fingers into the silken strands to see if they were as soft as they looked.

Delaney sighed and slipped into the armchair tucked close to his bedside. When was the last time she’d had an opinion about a man,anyopinion, much less wanted totouchone?

She now recognized she’d created an enormous problem by placing her mouth over his and breathing life back into his lungs before all of polite society.

The English were fussy about such things.

Heavens, she huffed and propped her chin on her fist. They were fussy abouteverything.

She’d tried to tell the horde circling them as the duke’s men had loaded him into her brand spanking new cabriolet and carried him off, one a stick-figure countess with a vile reputation for gossip, that she’d only been doing what she could tosavethe man. A rudimentary and unproven way to resuscitate, noted in medieval texts but not, as yet, taken seriously in the medical community. They believed she’d done it because she wanted to be a duchess. The goal of every woman she encountered in this country, to be someone’swife. Delaney pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until she saw stars.

If society only understood.

That was the last thing she’d ever,everwant.

With a squeak of the hinge, one of the duke’s men peeked through the doorway, and seeing their champion slept, closed it gently behind him. They guarded the entrance like sentries securing a castle gate. Moments ago, Delaney had had to muscle her way through them to gain entrance to the bedroom, displaying the herbal poultice as if to say, I’m not planning to poison him, but instead, draw the poisonout.

She didn’t understand why a duke would need this type of protection. Another English quirk? Whispering his middle name when she’d come out of her attic, after going in to take a quick look atDebrett’s, had been a gross error. It was not like her to be careless with her talent.

The man confused her, an elemental imbalance. She chewed on her lip, gazing at the horrendous crimson wallpaper lining the walls, bemused, and not in a good way. Glancing at the counterpane’s scorched edge, the fire no one had started blazing in the hearth, the knife from his boot, the pistol from his coat pocket, she realized there were mysteries about the Duke of Ashcroft to solve.

Which shewouldsolve. Because it appeared he was part of the world her blackmailer wanted her to investigate.

Animated conversation in the hallway sounded moments before the bedroom door flew open and bounced off the wall. Delaney recognized them instantly. Finn Alexander, the Greek god of London, and his visibly-pregnant wife, Victoria, an earl’s daughter, briefly engaged to the man who lay pale and shivering on the bed. The princely young man who’d accompanied the duke earlier in the day trailing just behind, hovering in the doorway. Delaney rose and stepped aside as the group put a plan they’d apparently discussed on the carriage ride over into motion.

“He’s had a sleeping tonic,” she murmured as the blaze in the hearth inexplicably dulled to ash. “And a poultice I researched as being beneficial for bee stings. He has a nasty rash on his neck and chest, and there was some vomiting initially. I replaced fluids as best I could. He wouldn’t let me summon his doctor.”

“Simon.” Finn gestured to the weapons. The young man crossed the room, slipped the knife and pistol beneath his coat in an impossibly elegant transfer. There one moment, gone the next.

Victoria drew a velvet satchel the color of a bluebell from her reticule and shook a small, glittering gem into her hand. Moving close to the bed, she placed it in the duke’s palm and wrapped his long, slim fingers around it. His fist clenched, his arm shifting, shooting vibrant rose prisms across the floor and ceiling.

Closing her eyes, Delaney sketched a mental picture, then entered her attic to thumb through the occult digest. What they called the chronology. She searched for fluorite. Stone. Page 683.Soul Catcher.Thought to alleviate the power of a mystical gift.A newer notation, the ink still dark:especially powerful for a firestarter.When she looked back to the bed, she found Finn Alexander’s brilliantly famous gaze fixed on her, his expression thunderstruck, as if they’d shared every line of text she’d read.

“How many fires?” he asked and placed his hand on the duke’s brow. His wife gasped at the question, like he’d gone entirely off-script by allowing a stranger into the discussion, into their world.

Delaney swallowed and steadied herself on the escritoire, the beveled edge biting into her skin. “Just the one.” She nodded to the burnt counterpane. “And the hearth, I suppose, as I didn’t have a servant set it.” She stepped forward, feeling a sense of distress from an undefined source. “You can’t move him. His breathing is shallow, his respiration weak. He needs to regain his strength.”

Finn, Victoria and Simon looked to each other, then to her. They were a team, a unit, a family. With a melancholy pang, she wished for her brother, who was off carousing, proving with inspired vigor that he was, indeed, part of the Terrible Two.

“He’s safe here,” she added, because he was.

Until she was forced to tell her blackmailer everything she knew to save herself.

Simon’s gaze touched her before he looked away. “She kissed him in front of the whole group of chattering ninnies. On the lips. Everyone in the city knows by now.”

Victoria covered her cough with her fist while Finn stared, his frown growing, doing absolutely nothing to ruin his raw beauty.