Her Reformed Rake (Wicked Husbands #3)(36)

Mad it was, then.

The descent had begun.





Daisy barely tasted the potage aux choux. The soup course was savory yet sweet, unutterably delicious even though she didn’t take more than five full spoons to her lips before nodding to one of the footmen in attendance to whisk it away. Her eyes were only for the man seated opposite her.

Sebastian. Duke. Husband.

He was all of those things and yet he remained, more than any of those descriptors, an enigma. A man she could not quite understand, but one to whom she was drawn with the madness of a child staring into the sun. Such folly could only lead to a bad end. Blindness? A headache? Worse?

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t hungry for soup.

She was hungry for him.

For his hands on her, for the way he held her, as if she was as necessary to him as air. Such gentle strength in that touch. Not an ounce of anger, not even when he waged a silent battle within his mind. He couldn’t hide himself from her as well as he imagined he could.

Silence stretched, awkward and interminable, as the next course was laid before them. Salmon à la Chantilly—a fine piece of fish smothered in decadent sauce. Daisy forked a bite but didn’t bring it to her lips. For most of the meal thus far, Sebastian had studiously avoided her gaze.

Conversely, she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes from him. Strange how she had never before noted how tempting the cords of his neck were. An errant impulse to set her lips to him there, absorb his pulse, to taste his skin, struck her. He glanced up from his dinner at that moment and their stares clashed. Awareness sizzled between them even as she flushed at being caught gawping at him as if she’d never before seen a man in the flesh.

“Are my manners remiss?” he asked in a teasing tone, his earlier ice melted.

Her cheeks flamed hotter. She longed to press her palms to them. “Forgive me. I’ve never been adept at silence.”

That much, at least, was true, though she’d been ogling him merely for the pleasure it gave her. No need to tell him that, however. She’d already made a fool of herself.

A half smile curved his lips. She felt its sensual effects in a swell of desire that flooded her as sudden as sunshine filling a darkened room. “How reassuring. I thought perhaps I had béchamel on my chin.”

Daisy pressed her lips together, suppressing a smile of her own. How enjoyable it was to banter with him. This relaxed, charismatic side of him—a side he seemed to reserve and reveal only sparingly—made her feel as if all the wine she’d sipped had gone to her head.

What had he said again? Ah, yes. Now she recalled. She quirked a brow at him. “I’m sure you must know that the sauce on the fish course isn’t béchamel at all, Your Grace.”

He flashed her a devastating, full-blown grin. “I’ve never been adept at French cuisine. I daresay that makes us even, buttercup.”

Buttercup.

She liked when he called her that. “My tardiness for dinner and your sauce confusion?”

His gaze searched hers before settling on her lips. “Just so. A fair exchange, no? I’ll forgive you for making me wait for my dinner, and you’ll forgive me for being an ignorant clod.”

“I can think of many ways to describe you, but ‘ignorant clod’ would never be one of them,” she confessed before she could think better of her admission. It wouldn’t do, after all, to allow him too much power. To let him know how easily he affected her.

“Oh?” His stare slid from her mouth, snapping back to her eyes with so much heat that her nipples tightened right there at the table with servants standing sentry and a table of china and cutlery and fine food between them. “Would you care to enlighten me?”

Gorgeous. Alluring. Arrogant. Mysterious. Sensual. Dangerous.

She forced her mind to stop unleashing the torrent of possibilities upon her, none of which she would speak aloud. So many adjectives in the English language could be applied to the singular man before her. If her cheeks had been hot before, they were positively aflame now. The way he looked at her—such frank hunger and barely leashed civility—took her breath.

She settled for a few with less damning connotations. “Distracting and occasionally vexing.”

He laughed then, and it was pleasant and deep. His laughter filled her belly with warmth. She hadn’t heard it before, and she couldn’t shake the impression that he didn’t laugh often. Perhaps she could bring more levity into his world. His eyes crinkled, a heretofore unseen dimple making an appearance in his right cheek. Only the right. She wanted to kiss it.

How silly, and yet her lips longed to learn that groove as much as her heart yearned to make him laugh again. To make him laugh often. Her life had been one of much misery and loneliness, forever trapped beneath someone else’s rule, forever forced to accede to the expectations of her father.

Now, she was free, and she felt that newfound liberation in truth for the first time as she sat there with her uneaten salmon and the man she’d married in a whirlwind laughing across from her. Hope was a delicate, airy thing rising inside her like a hot air balloon.

“I object to vexing,” he said at last, still grinning at her even after his mirth had subsided. A hint of that precious dimple lingered, bracketing his supple lips. “Distracting, however, I will happily own.”

His tone was intimate and sincere. She swallowed, thinking it would be most unwise to fall in love with her husband on the second day of their marriage. “I suppose it depends on one’s definition of the term,” she said tartly to distract herself from how handsome he was and how easily he could woo her when he was charming. “Hangnails are also distracting. As are splinters and headaches.”