“Oh, Bevel, boy, you gave me such a fright.” Kittredge shucked off his boots and lay down on the bed next to the mastiff. “Missed me, eh? How’d you get in? You naughty, naughty boy.” Still stroking the mastiff’s ears, Kittredge fell asleep.
Mmmph.All night long, her new friend had been such a wonderfully warm, furry source of heat. And now there was a hard, hot thing wrapped around her, pressing on her, holding her, not letting her move, and it felt so scrumptious. Even the paw or something poking at her bottom didn’t bother her. If only she could dream just a little bit more. About the feral man in the stage coach who wanted to know her name and the stern duke in the picture who gave her a meat pie and didn’t laugh at her jokes. How peculiar they were the same person.
Peculiar. But true.
Her eyes flew open to a bit of sunlight peeking around closed drapes.
No.
The man in the portrait was the man on the coach but several years younger. And absent the beard and the dirty clothes.
No.
Impossible.
But if it were possible, it meant the duke was in London because he had gotten off the coach with her. And this was his house. And she was inhisbed. With a dog.
She lurched to get out of the bed.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, grunting with effort, straining her stomach in an effort to sit up.
She looked down. Two human arms banded around her middle and held her against the hard, warm thing that must be the human body attached to the arms.
She screamed. The arms released her immediately, and she was off the bed in a flash. The body shot off the bed too, on the other side, between her and the door. There was no sign of the dog.
The body was tall with mussed brown hair. The body belonged to the duke, of course, wearing the coat of the man on the stage coach. But he was shaven, so he looked more like the duke than the man on the stage coach. But they were the same person. She knew that.
“I’m sorry I screamed, Your Grace. You gave me a fright.”
He blinked. “This is the most realistic dream I’ve ever had.”
“It’s not a dream.”
“Yes, it is. I went to sleep with Bevel and woke up with you.” Then the smallest upward curving of the beautiful lips that had been hidden by his beard. And were those dimples?
“Withyou, Franny.”
“Yes, you did. But it’s still not a dream. Who’s Bevel?”
“My dog.”
Oh, that explained a whole host of things. She stooped and picked up her boots and grabbed her shawl and started edging her way toward the door.
“You see, Your Grace, I’m a guest, that is, I was going to be a guest of Mrs. Tumney but her husband, ill, and I’m supposed to be meeting my brother for Christmas, and then the dog and it was raining and cold and the dog scatampered up here and I tried—” She was almost at the door. But the duke-man had moved with her and was next to her. If she could just slide out the door and run down the stairs and get her satchel and then what?
A warm hand on her cheek. Those commanding fingers.
“Franny?”
She looked up. Yes, dimples. And such a straight nose. And those hungry gray-blue eyes.
“I like you,” he said.
“Yes, well, thank you, you’re very kind—“
The dimples disappeared. “No.”
