One Dance with a Duke (Stud Club #1)

“Yes.”


The surprise in her expression suggested she’d been expecting him to protest, but really … Amelia was a clever woman. She had it pegged. He hadn’t anything else to say.

“Yes,” he repeated. “Yes, I put your brother in insurmountable debt just to buy my old, crotchety horse a consort. Make of it what you will.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you what I make of it.” She closed the distance between them, step by slow, deliberate step. “Spencer … Philip … St. Alban … Dumarque. You”—she jabbed a finger in the center of his chest—“are a romantic.”

The air left his lungs. Damned inconvenient, that—because bloody hell, if ever there was an accusation he needed the breath to refute …

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You are. I’ve seen your bookshelves, and all those stormy paintings. First Waverley, now this …”

“It’s not romanticism, for God’s sake. It’s … it’s simple gratitude.”

“Gratitude?”

“This horse saved me, as much as I saved her. I was nineteen, and my father had died. I’d spent my youth bashing about the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly I was here, preparing to inherit a dukedom. I was angry and unfocused and out of my element, and so was this horse, and … and we tamed one another, somehow. I owe her a debt for that.”

“You’re only making it worse, you know.” She smiled. “Keep talking, and I might just deem you a sentimental fool.”

He was about to object, but then her hand flattened and crept inside his coat. The bronze fringe of her eyelashes fluttered as she leaned forward. Her br**sts pressed against his chest, soft velvet on the surface and softer still beneath. Perhaps he should rethink his disavowals. Really, he had no objection to this.

He put a finger under her chin and tilted her face to his. And then, because it suddenly seemed he should have had a reason to do that, he asked her, “You know all my names?”

“Yes, of course. From the parish register.”

He froze, recalling the image of her poised over that register, quill in hand, peering down at it for long, agonizing moments. He’d thought she was having misgivings, and she’d merely been memorizing his name. Some emotion ballooned inside him, hot and dizzying and much too vast for his chest to contain it. And for a moment, Spencer wondered if he just might be a sentimental fool after all.

“It was just …” Her voice broke as he slid his hand along the smooth, delicate flesh of her neck. “You already knew my middle name.”

“Claire,” he murmured.

Her pulse leapt against his palm.

Smiling a little, he lowered his lips to hers. “It’s Claire. Amelia Claire.”

Ah, the sweetness of this kiss. The softness, the warmth. The soul-shaking beauty of it. He took her mouth tenderly, and her arms slid around his chest under his coat, and … and oh, God. This was so, so different from any of their kisses since they’d wed. They hadn’t kissed standing up since they’d shared that first incendiary embrace in her brother’s study, and deuce if he knew why not. When they kissed like this, it emphasized how small she was against him. He had to bend his head to reach her lips, shore her up with his arms so his kiss wouldn’t send her stumbling back on her heels. When he held her this way, she felt delicate and breakable in his arms. And he knew Amelia was anything but fragile, but for some loutish, deeply male reason he liked pretending she was. Cradling her tight against him, giving her the heat of his body, inclining his head to cherish her lips with the softest, most tender of kisses … as though her mouth were a delicate blossom and those dewy pink petals would scatter if he dared breathe too hard. As though he needed to be very, very careful.

Because then it became an easy thing to imagine she trusted him. Not only trusted him, but needed him. Relied upon him. He liked imagining that, because he was beginning to worry, in some rogue corner of his mind, that the truth was quite the other way around.

Then something changed. She stiffened in his arms, breaking the kiss.

“On second thought”—her gaze focused—“perhaps you are merely a fool. Has it occurred to you, that instead of bankrupting my brother in pursuit of this stallion, not to mention enduring suspicions of murder, you might simply be honest with Lord Ashworth and Mr. Bellamy?”

“I tried,” he said. “I offered to stop pursuing the remaining tokens if they would let me stable Osiris here. They refused.”

“Did you tell them your true reasons for wanting him?”

He snorted. Oh, yes. Because it was his life’s ambition to hear Bellamy and Ashworth deem him a romantic, sentimental fool. “They won’t give a damn. Why should they do a thing for me, much less an old, maltreated mare?”

“Because they’re your friends.”