Any Duchess Will Do (Spindle Cove #4)(26)

“So are you,” he noted.

“Fair enough.” She gave him a smile so shyly sweet, it seemed to belong to some other girl. “Your reflexes are most impressive.”

What a gift of a remark. Here was where he would normally reply with a suggestive, You have no idea, or Years of practice, sweeting. But he couldn’t quite muster the tired rakish innuendo. An absurd idea visited him—that his entire misspent life of sport and leisure, whiling away the days fencing or boxing when he might have been building a legacy, had prepared him for this one moment.

For this one girl, who needed him to break her fall.

“I just couldn’t watch you get hurt,” he said, not understanding it.

“I thought you didn’t have noble impulses.”

“Believe me.” He stared into her eyes and spoke the words without lewdness or irony. “I don’t.”

If he possessed a single grain of decency, he would have set her down long moments ago. Wicked as it made him, he loved the way she was clinging to his neck. As though the world around them were a vast, frozen waste and sharing the heat of his body was her only chance to survive. It was so easy to believe, for this moment, that she needed him. Needed his touch, his mouth, his heated breath. His bared, feverish skin all over hers.

Amazing, what acrobatic contortions the lusting male mind could achieve. He’d almost convinced himself that kissing her lush, sweet lips was the noble thing to do.

Almost. But not quite.

“I’ll put you down now,” he said.

She nodded.

And then she pressed her lips to his.

Praise and curses be heaped. The girl kissed him.

The kiss crashed over him in a turbulent wave. His senses opened like floodgates. Her lips were so soft. They tasted ripe as berries. She smelled of linen dried in the sun. Her skin was a lush blur of creamy pink in his stunned, still-wide-open eyes.

Even when the kiss ended, the sweet shock of it resounded in his every nerve. Primal urges echoed back.

More. Again. Now.

Lust was his old, familiar acquaintance. The rapid beat of his pulse, the taste of her on his tongue, the sudden tightening in his groin . . . he knew all these sensations quite well.

But there was something else in this storm of feeling. A deep, steady thrum in the region of his heart.

Her, it whispered. I’ll take her.

That part was new. And terrifying.

He abruptly set her on her feet. Then he turned away, rubbing his mouth. “What the devil was that?”

“I would expect your grace to have more experience on the subject . . . but I thought it was a kiss.”

He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

“No, no. It was . . . it was good.”

He swung to face her. “You call that good?”

“No. Not good. Fortunate, more like.” She swallowed. “You can’t deny there’s been a certain tension building between us. I thought the kiss might help.”

He stared at her in disbelief. “Help.”

“Well, now it’s done, you see.” She turned away with a self-conscious shrug. “It’s over. And obviously it wasn’t anything special. We won’t have to worry about an attraction.”

It wasn’t anything special? Not worry about an attraction?

Remarkable, how this girl could slash at his pride. Perhaps he should hand her a letter opener and invite her to complete the evisceration.

She reached to retrieve the book she’d dropped and gathered it close to her chest, preparing to leave. “Good night, your grace.”

Let it go, he told himself. Let her go.

“You can’t judge on that kiss.” He took a step forward—blustering on past logic and common sense, tripping straight into pigheaded foolishness.

“I can’t?” she asked.

“No. That wasn’t a proper kiss. It was a mere collision of lips. If I kissed you and meant it, you’d have cause to worry, Simms.”

“I would?”

He approached her slowly, made his voice low and cool. “You would. A true kiss would stir you in your deepest places. It would keep you lying awake in your bed all night long. Restless, and beset by . . .” He paused, grasping for the female equivalent of an aching cockstand. “ . . . flutterings.”

Her brow lifted in amusement, and a sly dimple formed in her cheek. “Flutterings?”

“Yes,” he pronounced in a definitive tone. “Flutterings.”

She smothered a laugh.

Good Lord. This wasn’t happening. He could not be having this conversation. Flutterings? Stupid, asinine word, but he was committed now. He couldn’t back down. He was the duke in this room, he reminded himself. And she was just a serving girl. It was time they both remembered it.

Except she wasn’t just a serving girl. She was a serving girl with aspirations, keen business sense, shockingly good taste in poetry . . . and slight, enticing curves his hands ached to explore.

She was delectable. Ripe as berries.

Her, the whisper came again.

Leave off, he told it.

“Flutterings,” she mused aloud.

He nodded. He didn’t even mind that she was mocking him. He wanted her to say that word again and again, because each repetition came with an erotic flash of her tongue. It stoked a wildness in him.