No Good Duke Goes Unpunished (The Rules of Scoundrels #3)(67)

Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

Except she did. Quite desperately.

When he did not reply, she added, “I only ask because I am curious as to why her visit would move you to lock me in a hazard room for an indefinite amount of time.”

He looked up. “It was not indefinite.”

She came to stand on the opposite side of the desk. “No thanks to you.”

“How did you find the passageway?”

“You would be surprised by what irritation does to aid one’s commitment to a cause.”

One side of his mouth twitched. “I assume you refer to your imprisonment?”

“And to your cheating,” she added.

His gaze flickered to the dice she had placed on the edge of the desk. “Those are the winning dice.”

“You think I care if the dishonesty was for win or loss? It’s still cheating.”

He laughed, the sound humorless. “Of course you don’t care. It was for your own good.”

“And the sevens?”

“Also weighted.”

She nodded. “The nine I rolled on that first afternoon? The wager that sent me home, vowing not to approach any more men?”

He poured himself a glass of scotch. “Those, too.”

She nodded once. “I told you I do not care for liars, Mr. Cross.”

“And I told you, scoundrels lie. It was time you learned.”

The man was frustrating. “If all lies are as easily recognized as your silly weighted dice, I think I shall be just fine in the world.”

“I am surprised you noticed.”

“Perhaps your other ladies would not have noticed an epidemic of sixes and threes,” Pippa said, unable to keep the ire from the words, “but I am a scientist. I understand the laws of probability.”

“My other ladies?” he pressed.

“Miss Sasser . . . Lady Dunblade . . . any others you have lying about,” she said, pausing at the visual her words brought about and not particularly enjoying it. “At any rate, I am unlike them.”

“You are unlike any woman I have ever known.”

The words stung. “What does that mean?”

“Only that most women do not frustrate me quite so much.”

“How interesting, as I have never met a man who exasperates me quite so much.” She pointed to the painting. “You should not have locked me inside that room.”

He drank deep and returned the tumbler to its place on the sideboard. “I assure you, you were quite safe there.”

She hadn’t felt unsafe, but that wasn’t the point. “What if I were phobic?”

His head snapped up, his gaze instantly meeting hers. “Are you?”

“No. But I could have been.” She hesitated. “What if there had been a fire?”

His gaze did not waver. “I would have fetched you.”

His certainty set her back for a moment. When she recovered, she asked, “Through your miracle passageway?”

“Yes.”

“And if the fire had already destroyed it?”

“I would have found a way to get to you.”

“I am to believe that?”

“Yes.” He sounded so certain, as though nothing would stop him.

“Why?”

“Because it is true.” The words were ever so quiet in the small, enclosed space, and Pippa realized two things in that moment. First, that they had both leaned in, across the great slab of ebony—an emblem of power as strong as Charlemagne’s army—until they were mere inches apart.

And second, that she believed him.

He would have come for her.

She let out a long breath, and said, “I came for you, instead.”

One side of his mouth twitched into a half smile. “You didn’t know where the passage would lead.”

Everything about him, his eyes, his voice, the sandalwood scent of him tempted her, and she hovered on the edge of closing her eyes and leaning into the moment, into him. When she spoke, the words were barely above a whisper. “I was hopeful that it would lead to excitement.”

That it would lead to you.

He pulled back sharply, as though she’d spoken the words aloud, jerking her from the moment. “In that case, I am sorry that it brought you here.”

She straightened as well, turning her attention to the painting through which she had come—the painting she’d barely noticed the first two times she’d been inside this room and that now seemed to swallow the space, dwarfing one wall of the office, five feet wide and twice as tall, at once grotesque and beautiful and deeply compelling.

At the center of the oil, a woman wrapped in white linens slept on her back in a state of utter abandon, arms above her head, blond curls tumbling to the floor, loose and free. Her skin was pale and perfect, and the only source of light in the piece, so bright that it took a moment to see what lurked in the shadows of her bedchamber.

To one side, through a red velvet curtain peeked a great, black horse, with terrifying, wild eyes and a wide-open mouth filled with enormous white teeth. The beast seemed to leer at the sleeping figure, as though he could sense her dreams and was merely biding his time before he struck.

But the stallion would have to wait his turn, for seated on the woman’s long torso, in the shadowy stretch between breast and thigh, was a small, ugly figure, part beast, part man. The creature seemed to stare straight out of the painting, meeting the eyes of anyone who dared look. The expression on the goblin’s face was at once patient and possessive, as though he would wait for an eternity for the lady to awaken—and fight to the death to keep her.