She took a deep breath for emotional balance.
Too late.
Her heart was already misbehaving.
"I came to look at marble glutes," she managed. "I'm very academic."
His eyes darkened. "Then allow me to offer… a practical demonstration."
He was in front of her now.
Close. So close.
She clutched a rolled-up parchment. "This might be a clue! It says 'Rear Entry'—oh. Opera seating chart. Never mind."
He took the parchment from her fingers. Dropped it.
"Miss Wallflower," he murmured, voice dipping low, "I'm going to have to ruin you if you insist on playing the innocent."
She exhaled sharply. Ruin sounded very promising.
"Of what crime, Your Grace?" she whispered.
His lips brushed her ear.
"Of seducing a duke with nothing but vocabulary and bare ankles."
Then he kissed her.
One moment, she was standing. The next, she was wrapped in approximately six feet of furious Duke, his mouth finding hers with the precision of a well-aimed thesis. Her brain promptly dropped its quill and ran screaming for the hills. Her body,however, filed the appropriate forms and lunged enthusiastically into sensation.
His arm banded around her waist, like he fully intended to become her new corset. The other hand tangled in her hair, tilting her head just so. Her moan escaped before she could classify it—but he caught it with his mouth and filed it, perhaps alphabetically (assuming he knew his way around archives, of course).
His lips were warm and focused and entirely too competent. He kissed like a man who had been denied dessert for years and had just discovered she was made of sugar and rebellion. There was no haste. No fumble. Just... intent. Like she was the final experiment in a lifelong study of feminine combustion. And judging by the fireworks between her thighs, she was proving highly flammable.
Field Note: Hypothesis confirmed. Oral contact with Duke highly inadvisable. Repeating immediately.
She gripped his collar and slid her hand into his hair. The texture of it—thick and damp from steam—sent a scientific tremor straight to her underpinnings. Her fingers brushed the nape of his neck. He shuddered.
The Duke shuddered.
Everything else—logic, time travel theory, the looming presence of a rather precarious decorative screen—disintegrated.
CRASH.
Her elbow hit the aforementioned screen. Silk and wood exploded in a heap, toppling like the last of her good intentions.
And there, lit by moonlight, surrounded by strewn lavender petals, framed like a devotional scandal in a poet's fever dream...
The statue.
Nude. Majestic. Very, very familiar.
Wanton blinked. "Ah. So that's where it went."
Chapter eight
In Which Wanton Solves a Crime, Exposes Several Glutes, and Is Threatened With a Spanking (Professionally)
