Warburton was still a mystery. A glowering presence she sensed more than saw. When he was in the house, the servants walked more softly, held their breath, not wanting to disturb him. Everything in the household revolved around his wants and needs. The cook spent hours every morning creating a menu to tempt him to eat.
She refused to make him the center of her existence. She tried not to think about him or remember their encounters and conversations in great detail. Tried and failed. He was larger than life, his pronouncements made enigmatic and meaningful by their brevity. He certainly wasn’t giving her more than a passing thought. He’d fulfilled his duty, or at least he believed himself to be on the right track. He’d given her shelter, a chaperone, and she’d even been to a modiste for fittings for an extravagant new wardrobe.
Thoughts of the duke were a distraction from the urgent task at hand. She must write as if her life depended upon it. She didn’t have the luxury of self-doubt or any time to revise. This first draft must force Mr. Norwood to fall in love with her prose. This was her one chance to prove she was worthy of publication. If valiant princesses and talking dragons wouldn’t sell, she’d pour her heart into writing a comedy of manners worthy of Lady Claridge’s pen.
One hour later she sat, sharpened quill in hand, watching the well-dressed people of Mayfair bustling about their business like industrious ants on an anthill. She only had two paragraphs to show for the hour.
Not good enough. She must write faster. Or perhaps she should reorganize the contents of her linen drawer? She’d already rearranged the books on her shelves by color, braided and re-braided her hair, and developed a sudden passion for the writing of the obscure English Renaissance author, poet, and playwright Lady Mary Wroth, whose work she encountered in a historical tome she’d found in the duke’s library.
In short, she was doing anything but writing.
The trouble was that she’d come to the point in the novel when Lady Claridge’s outline read the following:After a lively parlor game, the dissolute Sir Archer Falconer steals an illicit kiss from Adora as forfeit. Adora swoons and is in grave peril until Lord Fortescue rescues her from the ruffian.
She’d written the part about Adora stabbing Sir Archer with a sharp pencil. But that happenedafterthe kiss, and it was the kiss that was giving her problems.
She’d never been kissed. What did it feel like? Lady Claridge always described kisses as producing fluttering sensations. Her heroines sometimes swooned directly after the act, as thoughthe meeting of lips upon lips was something so overwhelming and momentous it might render one unconscious. Ana had always felt that her mentor’s descriptions of the feelings associated with love were somewhat hyperbolic. She didn’t want to merely copy the superlatives Lady Claridge had used. She wanted to describe the sensations afresh and therein lay the conundrum. How could she describe something she’d never felt?
She closed her eyes, imagining that she was Adora and the Adonis-like Lord Fortescue was rescuing her from ruin. The image that coalesced in the darkness behind her eyelids was Warburton with fists raised, towering over those ruffians in the alleyway.I am the goddamned Duke of Warburton.
And then he was holding her up against the brick wall, holding both of her wrists in one of his giant hands behind her back.
Warburton leaning forward in the dark carriage, wrapping the soft blanket around her shoulders, his fingers brushing her cheek.
Nothing bad will ever happen to you again. Not on my watch.
The moment when she’d landed in his arms in the forbidden room. How he’d unwrapped her from the dustcloth and it had become something else, something... shivery and new. Was that what Lady Claridge was describing? That breathless feeling of danger, like she was only two steps from the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. A drop in the pit of her stomach. A desire to touch his scars, feel the ridged skin beneath her fingers. Every line a testimony of the battles he’d fought, the internal war that still raged within him.
That moment in his study when he’d stepped closer and she’d thought... she’d thought he might be about to kiss her. No, of course he hadn’t been, but her overactive imagination had painted it.
What would it be like to be kissed by Warburton?
It wouldn’t be like any kiss described in Lady Claridge’s books, she knew that instinctively. It wouldn’t be a chaste peck on the cheek, or a worshipful brush of his lips against hers. His kiss would overwhelm her, send her senses into an uproar, like storm waters breaking through a levee.
But what, exactly, would he do? While his lips were on hers, where would his hands be?
Inside her bodice. His large hands covering her breasts. The scandalous thought made her pulse race. She certainly couldn’t write that in the book. Mr. Norwood would never publish such lusty details.
She could imply certain things, though, and the reader would fill in the rest. She dipped her quill in ink.Warburton kissed the way he hunted—with precise aim and single-minded focus. Adora was his prey. Her lips his prize.
No, that was too dramatic. And... goodness! She’d writtenWarburton.
She was becoming confused. Both her hero and her villain kept transforming into an ill-tempered, forbidding man who lived his life as if constantly negotiating for territory on a battlefield.
She’d even written a scene where Fortescue, the supposed hero, glowered and frowned and said things like “I shall bundle you back up into that dustcloth and forcibly carry you out of here!”
No reader would cheer for such a domineering, unfeeling hero.
She crossed the lines out and began again.
The door to Miss Crewe’s room was cracked open and Dex could hear her pen scratching across the paper. He knocked but there was no answer. He pushed the door wider. She sat at herdesk, afternoon sun gilding her skin and running riot in her curls. She was luminous, all gold and copper, concentrating so fiercely on her work that she had no awareness of his presence at all.
Her quill sped across the paper. She paused, staring out the window, and then bent to her work again. She filled every inch of the room with bright, crackling energy, like a fire blazing away on a hearth, warming and illuminating everything around her.
He cleared his throat. She jumped, and turned, quill in the air. “Oh, Your Grace, I didn’t hear you enter the room.”
A fiery blush spread across her cheekbones. She hastily covered the page she’d been working on with another sheet of paper.
“I knocked but you didn’t hear. Intent on finishing your novel?”