No one had ever seen it.
Until now.
Wanton's breath faltered.
It wasn’t just the scale of it—the heroic proportions, the sinuous detail, the frankly indecent precision with which Canova had captured every taut contour. No, it was the life of it. The subtle twist of the torso, the impossible tension in the muscle, the quiet suggestion that at any moment… it might flex.
“Saints and Sensibility,” she whispered. “This should be illegal in polite society.”
Wanton, when did you become the type who gaped at indecent figures? Well, she had toured Europe for months now, hadn’t she?
A little appreciation for sculptural excellence was expected—cultured, even. Besides, she’d loosened a bit of her English restraint along the way. She had been raised on Shakespeare, duty, and a firm belief in petticoats.
But lately?
She had become… the sort of woman who stared. Who evaluated a man’s glutes with the cold, academic eye of someone who had read The Iliad and the footnotes. She told herself she was not scandalous. She wascontinental.
Wanton reached out, fingers trembling with a cocktail of artistic reverence and unscientific lust. The statue stood before her—glorious, gleaming, and bare. A marble masterpiece of glutes so impeccably sculpted, she felt mildly faint. Was it the lighting? The symmetry? The taut anatomical accuracy? She didn’t know. She didn’t care. Her fingertips hovered inches from the divine curve of one alabaster buttock.
Just a little closer. Just a graze. For textural analysis. For... posterity.
That was when she heard it.
A click. Then a soft creak of hinges.
She froze.
Voices filtered down the hallway—low and masculine. It had to be the Duke. Returning from whatever sinful treatment he had treated himself to. Naked bar a terry robe, or worse, clad in nothing more than his sternness.
Her blood turned to ice. Her soul launched itself directly into a panic spiral.
She could not be found here. Not in his private quarters. Not standing in front of a marble backside with a blush up to her scalp and a preserve-stained maid somewhere outside acting suspiciously fruity.
He would have her dismissed. Or worse. He would frown at her.
And Wanton, truth be told, feared the Duke’s disapproval far more than any social ruin. He was carved from restraint. Built to rebuke. There was no softness in him—save for that one sinful place that had inspired scandalous thoughts and a truly inappropriate sketch in her journal. If rumors were true, and those type always were (they had to be!), the duke had a predilection to chastise his opponents…
If he found her here, her glutes would not survive. They were not made for the kind of punishment those hands could wield.
Without another thought, she hiked her terry robe, darted across the chamber, and hurled herself toward the window with all the optimism of a long-limbed English thoroughbred clearing Becher’s Brook.
In her head, it would be elegant. Heroic. A silent arc through steam-scented dawn, hair billowing, robe fluttering, destiny cinched at the waist.
In reality, her flight was less thoroughbred and more Henrietta—wobbly, flapping, and entirely unreliable. Mid-trajectory, she clipped the sill with both shins, let out a strangled oath, and toppled to the other side like a sack of overripe potatoes in embroidered slippers.
She hit the ground with a thud that startled a nearby pigeon into early retirement.
“By my quivering petticoats,” she gasped, flinging lemon balm and something that smelled distressingly like foot salve off her chest, “this is not what Miss Primrose’s Guide to Ladyhood prepared me for!”
Groaning, she rolled to her knees, clutching her bruised dignity and what was left of her self-respect.
"Bloody Newton," she muttered, limping into the shrubbery. "Gravity is obviously a patriarchal construct."
With her chin high and her robe trailing twigs like a botanical crime scene, she marched toward the bathhouse, flickingaromatic detritus from her person as she went. A stalk of rosemary clung stubbornly to her hem like judgment incarnate. A rogue sage leaf fluttered from her neckline. She paused only once—to pluck a crushed mulberry from her scalp and inspect it.
“Still ripe,” she muttered, before popping it into her mouth with an air of scholarly detachment.
It was important to reclaim dignity through antioxidants.
