“Aha. Here’s one I’ll take to bed with me.” She plucked a book from the shelf. “Methods of Accounting and Bookkeeping.”
“Now that should put you right to sleep.” He chuckled. “But it’s a good idea. Keep excellent written records, even if you do have a good memory. Don’t accept credit. If you lend, always require a deposit. Few can match the aristocracy when it comes to shirking financial obligations.”
She sent him a wary glance. “You don’t shirk your debts, do you?”
“Last I heard, I’m the fourth-richest man in England. I never have a need to.”
“Oh. Good.” She clutched the bookkeeping tutorial to her chest and bent her head, inhaling deep. When she noticed his stare, she looked sheepish. “I like the way books smell. Is that odd?”
“Yes. A little.”
But he found it oddly endearing, too. This had gone beyond a midnight chat in the library and progressed to something bordering on flirtation. Perhaps even a strange sort of friendship—on his side, edged with fierce, carnal attraction.
Whatever it was between them . . . it ended here, and it ended now.
He set aside the dismantled clockwork and rose from his chair, trusting the shadows to hide his arousal. “Upstairs with you, Simms. It’s late, and I’m sure my mother has a full schedule of exercises in futile ambition planned for the morrow.”
“Don’t worry. I’m prepared to be a catastrophe.”
“Very good.”
She extinguished the lamp and descended two risers of the ladder. “Just to prove it, I shan’t even curtsy when I leave this room.”
“An excellent start. If you wanted to be truly shocking, you could start calling me Griff.”
She looked to him. “Truly?”
He winced. A miscalculation on his part. He’d suggested it as a stroke of impropriety, but her flattered expression reminded him—familiarity of that sort could prove dangerous.
Speaking of danger . . .
“Take care,” he warned. “The last rung is rather—”
She gasped and faltered. “Oh, bollocks.”
Chapter Six
Time slowed. A fraction of a second showed Griff just how the accident would occur. Her toes would miss the last rung. She’d drop the book. She would make a desperate swipe with her hand, perhaps graze the ladder rail with her fingertips—but it wouldn’t be a proper grasp. Her momentum would carry her forward.
And then she would fall to the ground, face first.
Granted, the fall was a matter of only a few feet, and she’d no doubt survive it whole and unharmed. But by the time his mind had reached the end of the scenario, his body was already in motion.
Putting one hand to the sofa back, he vaulted the thing in one swift motion. That obstacle cleared, he hurdled a leather ottoman in a single leap. Flinging his arms wide, he came to a skidding halt directly in front of the ladder.
Just in time to break her fall.
She fell heavy against his chest. He caught her in his arms.
And then—even when all was safe—he couldn’t seem to put her down.
“Oh my,” she breathed, looking at the room he’d just traversed. “That was quite an athletic feat.”
“It was nothing.”
The only manly reply, naturally. In truth, he suspected he’d pulled a muscle somewhere between vaulting the sofa and playing Jack Be Nimble with the ottoman . . . but he’d worry about the pain later. Other sensations demanded his attention now.
Good God. Just seeing her form had been a delight, but it was a pale shadow compared to the thrill of feeling her. Her nipples were every bit as assertive as her personality, jabbing at him through the frail, tissue-thin fabric of her night rail. They demanded his notice. More than mere notice—they wanted respect.
Hell, he would have offered them worship.
“It didn’t seem like nothing.” Her arms laced about his neck. “You’re breathless.”
“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.
She pushed her bottom lip forward, considering. “I don’t know that I’ve ever suffered flutterings, your grace. Perhaps they’re unique to ladies of the higher classes. I don’t possess that sort of delicate feminine nature.”
He slid his hand to the back of her head, plunging his fingers through the raw silk of her hair. “Now that’s bollocks.”
And then he pulled her into a kiss.
Ah. So these were flutterings.
And this, Pauline gathered, was his idea of a proper kiss. An embrace with heat and purpose, and one that remained entirely in his command. He controlled the angle of her neck and the closeness of their bodies—and the slow, maddening rhythm of his tongue, sweeping between her lips again and again.
He kissed her forcefully, relentlessly, as though he were meting out some punishment she deserved. Twenty lashings with a strong, wicked tongue. Little could he suppose it was exactly what she wanted. What she craved, with every bone and sinew in her small, slender frame.
Yes. Thank you. May I have another.
Those few moments after she’d kissed him had been among the most miserable of her life. He’d acted so horrified and disturbed. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking to try it. Only that she was so grateful to him for opening this vast, invaluable library to her, a common serving girl. For listening to her most secret dreams without mocking them—and what’s more, perfecting them by giving her that brilliant, naughty idea.
He couldn’t know. He couldn’t know how much it meant.
And then he’d performed that dashing, heroic maneuver to break her fall.
When she saw him up close, a flash in his eyes gave her the strangest notion. That this was scarcely the first night he’d spent haunting the corridors, staying up much too late and far too alone. That he wasn’t nearly so put out by the interruption as he would have her believe.
That he might need a kiss—and a little rescuing, too.
Of course he’d walk a bed of nails barefoot rather than admit such a thing. She ought to have guessed how he’d react. All men had their pride, and dukes worst of all. “Admitting weaknesses” must rank with “tickle fights” and “slug hunting” in his list of least-favored activities.
So he’d struck back at her with this. A kiss that was controlled, masterful, possessive. And Pauline couldn’t say she minded in the least.
He held her to him so tightly, twisting one hand in the linen of her shift and making a snarl of her hair with the other. Later, she’d be brushing it until her arm ached, but it would be worth every last stroke. The sensations racing over her scalp danced on that delicious edge between pleasure and pain.