The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(42)

“What makes you assume I’m going to break you?” He asked the question casually, not looking up from the document he’d lifted from the desk.

“What?” Had she misheard?

“You told Veronica, every time you’re broken, you get back up and limp along.”

She had said that, hadn’t she? They’d said that to each other on multiple occasions.

“You truly believe that becoming my lover would break you?” He was looking at her now, expectant curiosity hanging quizzically on his formidable brow.

Lorelai couldn’t form an answer. She felt very brittle. It wouldn’t take much. And Veronica wasn’t wrong about one thing, the Rook was enormous.

He could very, very easily crush a strong and sturdy man.

And she … she had proven herself to be someone easily broken.

He didn’t have much patience for her silence, and slammed the lid of the secretary closed. “No matter.” His voice sounded darker as he approached her, and Lorelai was only slightly aware that she instinctively moved to place a lounge chair and end table between them.

“You said you’d do anything to save your sister-in-law.” His lids lowered to half-mast, wicked suggestion gleaming from their dark depths. “Are you a woman of your word? Will you truly do … anything?”

Lorelai gulped, and thought of Veronica. “I am.” She’d meant to sound more certain. “I will.”

Suddenly terrified, she squeezed her eyes shut and balled her fists at her sides, waiting for him to strike. Willing the instinct to fight or flee to abate. She’d just lie still. She’d close her eyes, and pretend her lover was Ash.

Just as she’d imagined more times than she cared to admit.

The Rook possessed Ash’s demeanor, just not his soul.

“Here.” His voice didn’t sound much closer.

Lorelai peeked out of one eye, and then stared down in abject astonishment at the paper and quill he’d set before her on the side table.

The marriage certificate from last night. Somehow this frightened her more than the prospect of his ravishment had. “I—I thought you said you didn’t need my signature.”

“I don’t need it. But I want it. And you said anything.”

Her brows pinched together against a distinct feeling that she was Alice fallen down the rabbit hole. “I thought I was negotiating for … for sex.”

“Oh well. Have it your way.” He stepped around the chair and reached for her.

“No!” She snatched up the pen and held it out as though it would ward him off. “No, I’ll sign.” Bending over the table, she carefully scrawled her name with slow, methodical flourishes.

Thankfully, this seemed to appease him, and he sauntered to a screen beneath the far right window and folded it aside.

“What are you doing?” She instantly realized the question had been needless, as the screen revealed a deep copper washtub.

“I’m drawing a bath.” He turned two curious knobs and steaming water flowed out of a curved copper faucet like magic.

“How?” she marveled. It was a silly question under the circumstances, but Lorelai had wondered several times at the unfamiliar technology he’d amassed for the Devil’s Dirge.

The Rook understood her question immediately. “Prodigy inventors and enterprising engineers always need financial backing, and what better way to spend my ill-gotten gains than a few creature comforts?” He tested the water flowing from the spigot with a few clever fingers. “A Mr. Juengling in Germany installed water-heating barrels in my engine room. The same heat which produces steam can, at smaller, further intervals, also be used to boil for the kitchen and the bath. I understand none of the particulars but then I pay others for that.”

Had Lorelai not been terrified for her virginity, she’d have marveled at the mechanism and asked a million questions. As it stood, she could only focus on the fact that he meant to get her naked and into that contraption. “A bath—it’s really not necessary. It hasn’t even been a day since last I bathed. And I washed hours ago in the basin.”

“I’m not drawing it for you.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder, and Lorelai caught her breath. Partly at the thought of being forced to watch this lean, masculine predator bathe. And partly because she glimpsed a part of the impish boy she’d once known in his wicked look.

“Ash?” she breathed.

The familiarity disappeared as he straightened to his full and terrible height, glowering onyx shards at her. “I told you not to call me that.”

“Then who are you?” She gestured at him in frustration.

“I am none other than the Rook,” he insisted.

“That is your title,” she argued, holding up the paper she’d just signed with his part left curiously blank. “What is your name?”

“I still have no idea.” He shrugged as though this had little consequence.

“Then how do people address you? What do they call you when they speak to you?”

“They call me the Rook, obviously. Lorelai, this is getting tedious.”

Stymied, she made a sound of frustration in her throat. “But one can’t address another with a the before their name.” She mimicked a benign conversation. “What do you think of these hors d’oeuvres, the Rook? When should we set sail, the Rook? Aren’t you being ridiculous, the Rook? It’s not only impractical, it’s impossible.”