The Duke is Wicked (League of Lords #3) - Tracy Sumner Page 0,8

lawn of Hyde Park.

And the cleverest woman in London was found moments later with her lips pressed to his.

Chapter 3

He was even more handsome up close.

The brief look she’d gotten from beneath that silly bonnet while sneaking into the viscount’s Oxfordshire home hadn’t done the man justice. Now she knew better. Shadowed slashes where the moon shone through the windowpane cut across a body they’d struggled to fit into what was her most enormous bed. Long legs...endlessly long. A lean yet powerful body stretched out, to her mind, hardly looking English. His men had loosened the collar of his fine cambric shirt, exposing a mix of muscle, golden skin and scars. A warrior’s physique. Delaney noticed details, sometimes obsessively. He had neatly-trimmed nails, calluses on his fingertips, forgot to cut his hair, and cared (but not significantly) about his clothing. His sun-kissed skin indicated he worked outdoors without a hat. He wore a signet ring on his pinkie, a crest of a lion with snapping teeth that did not match his decorous bearing.

The Duke of Ashcroft blinked once and released a soft moan, still lost to the insect’s venom. His eyes were as astounding as described in those pointless society pages, a strange mix of amber and gold, like whiskey or the soft clay of Georgia. When most of the tales bandied about in the broadsheets were pure garbage.

Or, as they called it here, rubbish.

But his hair was his crowning glory. Dark, with a tantalizing hint of copper, so long the curls had long-ago settled into gentle waves now hiding part of his face. When she’d turned to find him standing behind her in the park, she’d wanted, insanely, to plunge her fingers into the silken strands to see if they were as soft as they looked.

Delaney sighed and slipped into the armchair tucked close to his bedside. When was the last time she’d had an opinion about a man, any opinion, much less wanted to touch one?

She now recognized she’d created an enormous problem by placing her mouth over his and breathing life back into his lungs before all of polite society.

The English were fussy about such things.

Heavens, she huffed and propped her chin on her fist. They were fussy about everything.

She’d tried to tell the horde circling them as the duke’s men had loaded him into her brand spanking new cabriolet and carried him off, one a stick-figure countess with a vile reputation for gossip, that she’d only been doing what she could to save the man. A rudimentary and unproven way to resuscitate, noted in medieval texts but not, as yet, taken seriously in the medical community. They believed she’d done it because she wanted to be a duchess. The goal of every woman she encountered in this country, to be someone’s wife. Delaney pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until she saw stars.

If society only understood.

That was the last thing she’d ever, ever want.

With a squeak of the hinge, one of the duke’s men peeked through the doorway, and seeing their champion slept, closed it gently behind him. They guarded the entrance like sentries securing a castle gate. Moments ago, Delaney had had to muscle her way through them to gain entrance to the bedroom, displaying the herbal poultice as if to say, I’m not planning to poison him, but instead, draw the poison out.

She didn’t understand why a duke would need this type of protection. Another English quirk? Whispering his middle name when she’d come out of her attic, after going in to take a quick look at Debrett’s, had been a gross error. It was not like her to be careless with her talent.

The man confused her, an elemental imbalance. She chewed on her lip, gazing at the horrendous crimson wallpaper lining the walls, bemused, and not in a good way. Glancing at the counterpane’s scorched edge, the fire no one had started blazing in the hearth, the knife from his boot, the pistol from his coat pocket, she realized there were mysteries about the Duke of Ashcroft to solve.

Which she would solve. Because it appeared he was part of the world her blackmailer wanted her to investigate.

Animated conversation in the hallway sounded moments before the bedroom door flew open and bounced off the wall. Delaney recognized them instantly. Finn Alexander, the Greek god of London, and his visibly-pregnant wife, Victoria, an earl’s daughter, briefly engaged to the man who lay pale and shivering on the bed. The princely young man