Alaina nodded, though she could not smile.
“Night, Ally.” Caroline smiled and left, closing the door behind her.
Alaina wanted to feel relieved now that she was alone, but she felt nothing of the kind. She was restless, jealous, and angered at what the Duke of Peddleton’s reaction might be when he discovered their deception.
With sleep now the furthest thing from her mind, Alaina swept back the covers and stood. She picked up one of Caroline’s fine dressing gowns, embroidered with red and gold, then put her feet in slippers and left the room, carrying a candle with her. What she needed now was a distraction – a distraction from thoughts of Caroline and the duke.
She traipsed all the way to the library and opened the door, stepping inside to find that a yellow light was already encompassing the room.
A figure sat forward suddenly on the armchair.
Alaina froze. The duke was there wearing a shirt, trousers, and a loose banyan over his shoulders.
Oh no. This was not part of my plan to stop thinking about him.
Chapter 7
Marcus froze as he sat forward in his armchair. The paper on which he had written his poem was loose in his grasp as he stared at Callie in the doorway. For a minute, he thought it was a dream, that he had fallen asleep again in this chair and conjured her in his mind, but he continued to blink, trying to dispel her image, and it would not go. She was still there, staring at him in equal surprise, the candle in her grasp.
Abruptly, she stepped back. She clearly wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing; her leg kinked, and the hem of the gown ended up beneath her. She tripped on the edge of her dressing gown and fell backward, the candle toppling out of her grasp.
“Callie!” Marcus leapt to his feet. He dropped the poem and the quill, running across the room towards her.
The fall had snuffed out the candle, and as she got to her knees, he saw that her dressing gown had fallen open, revealing the thin material of her nightgown beneath.
Oh no.
A pleasant feeling stirred in him at the sight of those curves. He tamped down on them, reaching for her hands.
“I’m so sorry,” she said in a rush. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just came for a book. I’m sorry. I – I’ll go back to bed.” She pulled her hands back out of his grasp far too fast and turned, clearly ready to run to escape him.
“Wait,” he called after her, still standing awkwardly in the library doorway. “Please, you are welcome to take anything you like.” He gestured back to the room as she hesitated in the corridor, turning back to face him. “Please, don’t run away from me like that too. You’ll make me think I am a monster.”
“You’re no monster,” she whispered.
From what he could see of the candlelight filtering out of the library, she smiled a little at him.
He opened the door wider and picked up the dropped candle, gesturing inside. Slowly, tortuously so, she walked back towards the door. She even hesitated beside him, making that scent of bergamot waft over him again. All too aware of how close she was, he felt his length twitch in his trousers.
Stay down.
He followed her into the room and discarded the candle on a table nearby, then he returned to his chair, not wanting her to be frightened of his presence. He carefully sat down, gripping hard to the arms of his seat as he watched her explore.
She was clearly all too aware of him, repeatedly glancing his way. Her black hair, loose about her shoulders, covered half her face as she looked at him. He had a wild imagining of pushing back that hair as she laid on the hearth-rug before him, of kissing down her neck as those full lips parted, and she gasped in passion.
His length twitched once again.
“I didn’t expect to have to fight to get a book this late,” she said hurriedly, clearly trying to make conversation and shift this tense air between them. “Do you often stay up?”
“Sometimes.” He reached for a glass of brandy he had poured himself earlier in the night and lifted it to his lips, watching her over the rim of his glass. He thought about offering her one, then feared it would be seen as trying to make her stay when it was inappropriate.
Nothing about this is appropriate. We are both in a state of undress, unchaperoned, in the depths of the night.
“What do you like to read, Callie?” he asked, pushing the conversation on. He shifted himself in the seat, trying his best not to rise to her when he watched her hands trail over the spines of some of the books on the shelves.
“Poetry,” she said simply. “I … I have not had much time for reading longer books, but poetry is something I can read easily, even if I can only snatch a minute or so alone.”
“You keep yourself busy then?”
