Any Duchess Will Do (Spindle Cove #4)

She found the eighth—and only living—Duke of Halford, haunting his own house.

He held a lamp in one hand. With the other he yanked a door closed. She heard the scrape of a key in the lock.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, pocketing the key.

His angry tone surprised her. “Good evening to you, too, your grace. My journey to London was fine, thank you.”

He was having none of it. “Why are you snooping around my private rooms?”

“I didn’t realize they were your private rooms. I wasn’t snooping. I took a wrong turning, that’s all. I’ll go back the other way.” She turned to leave.

He caught her by the arm, swiveling her back to face him.

“Did my mother put you up to this?”

Pauline didn’t even know how to answer. Put her up to what? Sleeplessness? Wrong turnings in a vast, darkened house?

“Are you looking to pilfer something? Answer me with one word.”

“No.” She drew up her spine.

“Then explain yourself. You’re out of bed when you should be sleeping, in a corridor you have no reason to visit.” He held the lamp high and examined her. “And you have a guilty look on your face.”

“Well, you have an arrogant, wrong-headed look on yours.”

That was a bit of a lie. The lamplight bleached the stark planes of his face and splashed weary shadows under his eyes. The rich brown of his irises was overwhelmed by cold, empty black. He didn’t look especially arrogant, not right now.

Whatever he’d been doing in that locked room, it was private. She’d interrupted him in an unguarded moment. And because a big, strong man like him couldn’t possibly admit to having an unguarded moment, he was going to make her twist and squirm.

She sighed. “Dukes and their problems.”

“I don’t appreciate your impertinence, Simms.”

“Well, that’s bollocks.”

He drew her closer, and her heart began to race. Her bare foot grazed his. The shock of it traveled all through her.

“My impertinence is the reason I’m here, remember? It’s why you chose me from a room of well-bred ladies. Because I’m perfectly wrong. Everything you’d never want in a woman.”

He raked a gaze down her body. “I wouldn’t say that.”

The hard bob of his Adam’s apple caught her gaze, dragged it downward. Her attention settled in the dark, chiseled notch at the base of his throat.

Her lungs chose that moment to go out on labor strike. She held her breath so long, she went a bit dizzy.

“Send me home tomorrow, if you like. But you’ll find nothing’s vanished with me. I wasn’t stealing. Even if I were considering it—and I’m not—I’d know better than to try it my first night here. I’ve met your housekeeper. I’ve no doubt she keeps a list of every last drawer pull in every last closet and takes inventory on the regular. If I meant to steal, I’d wait for the last moment. So if you won’t give me credit for honesty, at least give me credit for cleverness.”

“I’ll give you credit for nothing until I hear the truth.”

“I’ve told you the truth.” She pulled the counterpane tight about her shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d go down to the libr—”

“To the library,” he finished for her. Sarcasm dried his words to brittle husks. “Really, that’s what you mean to tell me. You were looking for the library.”

Why did he sound so incredulous?

“Yes,” she answered. But at this point all she wanted was to return to her bedchamber without further interrogation. Her sleeplessness would surely be cured. This man was exhausting.

“Very well.” His grip tightened on her arm as he led her down the corridor. “If it’s the library you’re searching out, I’ll take you there myself.”

This wasn’t working how Griff had planned. He thought he’d girded himself against temptation.

He hadn’t counted on temptation herself materializing in a darkened corridor just outside his rooms, well after the hour of midnight. Her hair unbound yet again. Cloaked in her bedclothes, like a woman freshly tumbled. Skulking around his private chambers and looking even more fetching by lamplight than she had in afternoon sun.

Surely it was a trick of the shadows. Her eyelashes could not measure the length of his thumbnail. It was an impossibility.

Perhaps they grew longer with every lie she told.

Really. The library.

Of all the trite, clichéd excuses to pull out of her ear.

He marched her counterpane-swaddled self down the corridor, then down the staircase and around a bend. When they reached the correct set of doors, he flung them both open wide for effect.

“There you are. The library.” He handed her the lamp.

Blinking, she moved forward into the room, using the light to lead the way.