It was like poking a rock.
One of Ashbourn’s large hands came up to encircle her wrist, the fine kid leather of his gloves finding the sliver of bare skin between Bess’s glove and her sleeve.
She shivered, a shock rolling through her that loosened her tongue and made her reckless enough to stare into his implacable face and whisper, “Your father was content to be a laughingstock. Are you?”
His long fingers tightened for a moment around her wrist, almost to the point of pain, but before Bess could even wince, he had loosened his grasp.
He did not let go, however. Instead, he used that grip to pull her toward him, overbalancing her and hauling her into his lap as though her heavy, sodden skirts weighed nothing.
She was pressed to his wide chest, suddenly, like being pressed against a wall, but a wall made of heat and sinew that coiled and flexed against the softness of her breasts beneath the loose support of her stays. Her heart galloped in her chest, thundering against her ribs so heavily that surely he could feel it from the other side.
The Duke of Ashbourn looked down his autocratic nose at the bar wench he held unknowingly in his arms, and said, “You go too far.”
Bess knew she should scream or at least demand that he unhand her, but the problem was, she didn’t want to.
She was in London looking for a scoundrel. Maybe she’d found him.
“I’ve come a long way to get here, and I’ll keep going as far as I like,” she said, breathless and daring. “I’d go a lot further than this for Lucy, Henrietta, and Gemma, believe me.”
His piercing eyes searched her face. “I believe you. All of this to secure an invitation to stay in my home?”
“You need not include me in the invitation, if you don’t wish to.”
If Henrietta and Lucy went to Ashbourn House, Bess realized, she would be free to explore London as she wished, unfettered by the rules and constraints imposed on highborn ladies. She could finally have her adventure.
He bent his head for a moment, breathing in. The tip of his patrician nose trailed along the side of her neck, the small patch of bare skin above the high neck of her pelisse, with his inhalation. Wanton desire pooled low in Bess’s belly.
His voice was so deep. “I would have to be a lunatic who enjoys torture to wish to see you across the breakfast table every morning.”
Her heart didn’t know whether to skip or sink. “I promise if you begin to make amends with Lucy, I will cease to be an irritant.”
Ashbourn’s eyes truly defied easy description. This close, she was struck by the dark smoky rim that encircled the pale iris. Were they blue? Gray? A translucent green?
“I don’t wish to be irritated by any of you. I value my solitude, madame.”
“In nature, there is nothing solitary, not really. As Mr. Goethe says, everything exists in connection with something else, which is before it, beside it, under it, or…over it.”
Just as she was over him, still perched in his lap. His pupils widened, swallowing up the pale iris until only the dark rim remained. Nervous excitement spangled through her veins like sparks flying from a stoked fire.
“I spent a long time trying to think of something in nature that is isolated,” Bess babbled, “when I first read that bit. Eggs are very self-contained. Or maybe an oyster?”
She needed to pull herself together. This entire conversation and the way he was holding her, his touch feeding the hunger under her skin, it was all playing merry havoc with her head.
He arched a brow. “If I’m an oyster, what does that make you? The grain of sand caught in my craw?”
A grain of sand, small and inconsequential, Bess thought. She was not unaware of the insult. But…
“When a grain of sand irritates an oyster,” she pointed out, “it turns into a pearl. And do you know, I’ve always thought the oyster must enjoy the process a bit, as well. Just as most wealthy gentlemen I’ve met could stand a little more irritation in their smooth lives.”
He frowned, but his clasp tightened for an instant. Bess was very conscious of the fact that her bottom was against something hard and thick in his lap. It made her want to squirm.
“I must be going mad,” Ashbourn muttered.
He was going to say yes. Bess’s pulse raced. The heat in his predatory gaze thrilled her.
She’d known love in her early youth, the sweet, innocent love of a good, kind, decent boy—but she’d never been wanted by a man of the world, a man who knew himself…a man with the experience to show her what she’d come to London to see and feel.
Mouth dry with nervous anticipation, Bess licked her lips and watched the way Ashbourn’s gaze dropped to follow the movement. A bird of prey swooping to snatch up a soft little creature and devour it whole.
